THE COMING TERROR
CHAPTER I.
THE ATTACK ON THE BANK.
Crash! Crash!! Crash!!! went the falling timbers of the Austral Bank, while a furious and ferocious mob, drunken with wine and victory, shrieked, fought, and swore in front of the burning edifice. The features of the men and women who composed this mob, rendered savage by want, suffering, and oppression, were distorted by hate, the desire for vengeance and lust for destruction, while they were lit up by the huge fierce flames which issued from the rapidly perishing but once magnificent building.
A golden shower of sovereigns fell upon the heads of the raging crowd. A safe containing sovereigns had been thrown from a window, and opening as it fell, scattered its contents in all directions. A brutal, frantic struggle then took place; women and children were trampled to death, and men were disabled by kicks and blows from their rivals, while a perfect Babel of yells and curses from the injured and injuring rent the air.
Who were these people who for the time had apparently ceased to be human, and had become as wild beasts? They were "les miserables" of Sydney; the exploited, the destitute, the unemployed. The Great Problem of how to provide with suitable occupations those who, though perfectly willing to labor, were by unjust social conditions precluded from earning bread for themselves and those dependent on them, had reached the acute phase where the proverbial worm is said to turn—and it had turned with a vengeance! The men who previously had been distinguished by their spiritless, cowed demeanor, had become desperate demons, whose fierce bloodthirstiness and ruthless destructiveness had filled the rich with terror and panic, and handed over the control of the city to King Mob. A Sydney mob were now doing in Australia what a Parisian mob had done in France in 1789. Just as the French mob had demolished the Bastille, which they considered the type and corner-stone of their oppression, so an Australian mob was now inaugurating a vast social rebellion by the demolition of the great and famous Austral Bank, which for generations reigned supreme over the financial institutions of Australia, and had gathered within its octopus-like grip half the great industries of the country.
