afterwards a general illumination of unprecedented
splendour, inviting throngs, in which, by
neglect of due precautions on the part of those
who mismanage the obsolete small section of
town known as the City, eight persons were
crushed or trampled to death. The swarms who
ought to represent the London mob were packed
in a dense mass together. Thousands upon
thousands were to be seen, ragged and rough, sallow
and careworn; but what order of their own
making was struck out of the worst disorder of
each day! The mob, as it was understood in
the last century, or even thirty years ago, has
vanished; as far as regards current English
history, the very word for it may drop out
of the language.

In old days, when the wealth of the land was
parted among a body of nobles, and the great
multitude of the people was ill fed, ill clothed,
untaught, except by the influence their lords
exerted over them, each for his own selfish ends,
there was a wide-spread hunger sharpening the
sense of visible injustice in a mobile people
whom nobody trained to be good logicians, and
who, if they had been the best logicians in the
world, would not have found it easy to get at
facts from which to draw sound conclusions. It
was a multitude brought just so much in contact
with civilisation as to be humanised into the
rough sense of social justice, and desire of social
right; a mass of men suffering many a hard
pinch from no fault of their own, and, at the
same time, held in open scorn, or, at times,
mocked with contemptuous flatteries, by the
more prosperous. The hard battle ot life
strengthened the energies of all these men, but
through their untrained minds the repressed
vigour had no sufficient outlet. They were
energetic in rough sport, energetic in complaint,
often energetic in turbulent effort to readjust
their uneasy position in the state. "There
shall be in England seven halfpenny loaves sold
for a penny," says Jack Cade. "The three-
hooped pot shall have ten hoops, and I will
make it felony to drink small beer." But with
all its errors and excesses, in its worst days,
there has been usually a rough sense of right
and justice in the English mob. Mob law has
been at all times the sign of defect in
established law, of injustice in the law, or of failure
in the law's administration.

It is only of late years, as many can witness
who saw the destruction of machinery by mobs
who thus asserted their notion of the rights of
human labour, that the last vestige of mob law
has died out of England. We may go a long
way back for illustration of it, and read in
Hollinshed how, in William the Conqueror's day,
justice was done by the people upon Walker,
Bishop of Durham, and some persons of his
household, for the murder of Liulfus. Liulfus
was a Saxon gentleman, retired to Durham, who
became so intimate with the bishop, and was
entrusted so constantly with the management of
his affairs, that Gilbert, the bishop's appointed
steward, murdered him one night in his own
manor-house. Liulfus being much loved by the
people, the bishop declared that he would purge
himself, according to the order of the canon law,
of all complicity in the murder, and that he had
banished from Northumberland, Gilbert and his
accomplices. But it was known that he was
sheltering the murderers in his own house. The
kinsmen of Liulfus then appointed a day for a
conference with the bishop, at Gateshead. The
bishop went to Gateshead, but, when there, was
afraid to trust himself out of the church, sending
messengers to commune with the other side.
"But," says the chronicler, "when the people
that were there gathered in great numbers had
signified in plain words that he should either
come forth and show himself among them, or
else that they should fire the place where he sat,
he caused Gilbert to go forth to them, whom
they slew, and his partakers also, that issued
out of the church with him for his defence. But
when the people's fury was not so quenched, the
bishop himself, casting the skirts of his gown
over his face, came likewise forth, and was
immediately slain by the people. After this,
they set the church on fire, because Leofwine,
the bishop's chaplain, and others, were yet within,
and refused to come forth; howbeit in the end,
being compelled by the rage of the fire to come
out, the said Leofwine was also slain and hacked
in pieces (as he had well deserved), being the
ringleader of all the mischief. Thus,"adds
Hollinshed, "may we see what followed of the
neglecting of justice in the bishop: for if he
had either banished Gilbert and other of his
complices (according as he pretended to do), or
otherwise had seen due punishment executed
against them, the people's rage had never
proceeded so far as it did." As it was in the reign
of William the Conqueror, so it was in reign
after reign of the succeeding kings; mobs were
provoked by manifest injustice to such rude
efforts as they could conceive towards doing
public right.

Coming home from the reign of William
the Conqueror, we will look to the reign
of George the Third, and the year seventeen
hundred and sixty-three. The Annual Register
tells us that on the king's birthday, June the
fourth, a hundred years ago, there was so great
a crowd of people through the postern on
Tower-hill, to see some fireworks, that the railings
about a well, thirty feet deep, gave way,
and the well was filled with the bodies of those
falling in. Six were taken up dead, fourteen or
fifteen dangerously mangled. During the
consternation caused by the accident, a sailor had
his pocket picked by a Jew, who was caught and
ducked. Hopping out of the water with a
pretence that his leg was broken, he was carried off
by some of his friends; but the sailor, suspecting
the trick, gave chase, and pursued him to
Duke's-place, "where, at first, they were beaten
off by the inhabitants; but presently returning
with a fresh reinforcement, they attacked the
place, entered three houses, threw everything
out of the windows, broke the glasses, tore the
beds, and ripped up the wainscot, leaving the
houses in the most ruinous condition. With the