be no next; the play is over; the grand climax is reached; the
possibilities are exhausted; ring down the curtain.

Not yet. That distant door opens again. And now we see what history will
be talking of five centuries hence: a uniformed and helmeted battalion
of bronzed and stalwart men marching in double file down the floor of
the House--a free parliament profaned by an invasion of brute force!

It was an odious spectacle--odious and awful. For one moment it was
an unbelievable thing--a thing beyond all credibility; it must be a
delusion, a dream, a nightmare. But no, it was real--pitifully real,
shamefully real, hideously real. These sixty policemen had been
soldiers, and they went at their work with the cold unsentimentality of
their trade. They ascended the steps of the tribune, laid their hands
upon the inviolable persons of the representatives of a nation, and
dragged and tugged and hauled them down the steps and out at the
door; then ranged themselves in stately military array in front of the
ministerial estrade, and so stood.

It was a tremendous episode. The memory of it will outlast all the
thrones that exist to-day. In the whole history of free parliaments the
like of it had been seen but three times before. It takes its imposing
place among the world's unforgettable things. It think that in my
lifetime I have not twice seen abiding history made before my eyes, but
I know that I have seen it once.

Some of the results of this wild freak followed instantly. The Badeni
government came down with a crash; there was a popular outbreak or two
in Vienna; there were three or four days of furious rioting in Prague,
followed by the establishing there of martial law; the Jews and Germans
were harried and plundered, and their houses destroyed; in other
Bohemian towns there was rioting--in some cases the Germans being the
rioters, in others the Czechs--and in all cases the Jew had to roast, no
matter which side he was on. We are well along in December now;(3) the
next new Minister-President has not been able to patch up a peace among
the warring factions of the parliament, therefore there is no use in
calling it together again for the present; public opinion believes that
parliamentary government and the Constitution are actually threatened
with extinction, and that the permanency of the monarchy itself is a not
absolutely certain thing!

Yes, the Lex Falkenhayn was a great invention, and did what was claimed
for it-