The whole performance turned out on investigation to have been so feeble and amateurish that suspicion rapidly descended from the more experienced practitioners of anarchy, imported from other countries, to home-products of later growth--strikers made desperate and savage by the recent sentences upon their leaders, or, as some would have it, the Women Chartists, hoping by an attack upon royalty to bring a neglectful ministry to its senses. As there were no real clues except those which industriously led nowhere and which the police seemed delightedly to follow, everybody was free to lay the charge against any agitating section of the community which they happened to regard with special disfavor; and for that reason the Women Chartists did, in fact, get most of the blame.
But in the process they also reaped a certain advantage; the mere suspicion, though malice directed it, was good for them. Had it been possible to convict them, their cause would have gone down for another generation; but there was really nothing to catch hold of, and the power of any organization to commit such an outrage without being detected--to break the glass of the King's coach and make the eight piebald ponies rise up on end in horror--was a power which raised them greatly in the eyes of all law-abiding people; it suggested an unknown potency for mischief far more ominous than had discovery and conviction followed. And so, while squibs and crackers were being thrown at them and sham bombs hurled into their meetings to show how greatly the law-abiding people of Jingalo disapproved of them for incurring such suspicion--politically, the unjustly suspected ones moved a little nearer to their goal.
As for the King and Queen, they were simply inundated with telegrams and letters of congratulation. In many instances the loyalty shown was extraordinarily touching: one instance will suffice. Every schoolboy in every public school in Jingalo contributed a penny from his pocket money to a congratulatory telegram sent in the name of the school; and when, as sometimes happened, the school numbered over six hundred boys the telegram had necessarily to be lengthy, and proved a severe tax upon the literary ability of its senders.