of military tactics, and the use of explosives, which was very surprising when one considers the small amount of leisure left them by the nature of their daily avocations; and eventually this remarkable conspiracy became still more potent and terrible by the fact that Bourdin, a French chemist who was one of the members of the Brotherhood's Directing Council, had discovered a very powerful destructive agent. It was called Panmort, and was in the form of a gas, which, when liberated from the strong glass envelope in which it was inclosed, completely and terrifically destroyed everything with which it came in contact. Panmort balls, which were a little larger than ordinary revolver bullets, were used as ammunition for small ingeniously constructed air-guns, which would throw the balls to a considerable distance, where they would spread death and destruction all around.
Among the most deep-seated causes of the outbreak, although not its actual occasion, was the annihilation of the small-property-owning middle class by the operations of the Sydney financial rings. The middle class had been a decided safeguard against revolution, and a powerful conservative force. To members of that class, "everything that was, was right," so long as it did not interfere with their possession, or possible possession, of small 'properties'. They had served as a sort of buffer between the hungry proletarian poor and the surfeited, sybaritical rich. But the financiers, finding their opportunities for the greater acquisition of wealth and consequent power immensely increased by the additional facilities secured to them by their creatures, the members of the Federal parliament, hastened to extend their operations and ramifications throughout the length and breath of Australia, until so irresistible became their unfair competition, so gigantic their operations, and so immense their monopolies, that there scarcely remained a squatter, farmer, manufacturer, "small business man," or "thrifty" workman, who was not hopelessly and helplessly in the hands of the usurers.
Such was the condition of things, when a great and terrible drought, which, being unlooked for, had also been unprepared for, played huge havoc with the securities of the banks and other financial institutions. The most terrible financial crisis ever experienced in Australia immediately followed. Millions of sovereigns were rapidly withdrawn from the banks by "those in the know" and lodged for safety in the Sydney Money Stronghold, and the immediate and complete collapse of all the banks was only prevented by the action of the Federal Government in legislatively compelling the acceptance of the Banks' notes as a "legal tender." For a time the Government's action succeeded in "restoring confidence," but when it became quite apparent that the banks were unable to liquidate their liabilities in anything but their own discredited paper "promises to pay," the notes rapidly depreciated, and finally were treated as mere waste paper. A fierce cry then went up from the note holders, depositors, and shareholders who, it now became clear, had been remorselessly swindled and utterly ruined
