The mourners were therefore forbidden to
pass that way, and the police forces were drawn up in the Piazza Gesu,
before the Jesuit church, with a strong detachment of troops to support
them. Their wisdom in all this was very questionable after what
followed, for the mourners insisted on their rights and would go no way
but through the Piazza di Venezia. When the dispute was at its height
two wagons laden with bricks appeared on the scene. The mourners swarmed
upon them, broke the bricks into bats, and hurled them at the police.
They had apparently the simple-hearted expectation that the police would
stand this indefinitely, but the brickbats hurt, and in their paroxysms
of pain the sufferers began firing their revolvers at the mourners. Four
persons were killed, with the usual proportion of innocent spectators.
At night the labor unions met, and the _sciopero_ was proclaimed as an
expression of the popular indignation; but the police had been left with
the victory. Whether it was not in some sort a defeat I do not know, but
a retired English officer, whom I had no reason to think a radical, said
to me that he thought it a great mistake to have let the police oppose
the people with firearms.
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