red from all insult while under my
roof by my plighted honor!

PANCRATIUS. Plighted honor and knightly faith have, ere this, swung from
a gallows! You unfurl a tattered banner whose faded rags seem strangely
out of place among the brilliant flags and joyous symbols of universal
humanitarian progress. Oh, I know you, and protest against your course!
Full of life and generous vigor, you bind to your heart a putrefying
corpse! You court your own destruction, clinging to a vain belief in
privileged orders, in worn-out relics, in the bones of dead men, in
mouldering escutcheons and forgotten coats of arms--and yet in your
inmost heart you are forced to acknowledge that your brother nobles have
deserved their punishment, that forgetfulness were mercy for them!

THE MAN. You, Pancratius, and your followers, what do you deserve?

PANCRATIUS. Victory and life! I acknowledge but one right, I bow to but
one law, the law of perpetual progress, and this law is your death
warrant. It cries to you through my lips: 'Worm-eaten, mouldering
aristocracy! full of rottenness, crammed with meat and wine, satiated
with luxury--give place to the young, the strong, the hungry!'

But I will save you, and you alone!

THE MAN. Cease! I will not brook your arrogant pity!

I know you, and your new world; I have visited your camp at night, and
looked upon the restless swarms upon whose necks you ride to power! I
saw all: I detected the _old_ crimes peering through the thin veils of
_new_ draperies, shining under new shams, whirling to new tunes,
circling in new dances--but the end was ever the same which it has been
for centuries, which it will forever be: adultery, license, theft, gold,
blood!

But I saw you not there; you were not with your guilty children; you
know you despise them in the depths of your soul; and if you do not go
mad yourself in the mad dances of the blood-thirsty and blood-drunken
people, you will soon scorn and despise yourself!

Torture me no more!

He rises, moves hurriedly to and fro, then seats himself under his
escutcheon.

PANCRATIUS. It is true my world is in its infancy, unformed and
undeveloped; it requires food, ease, material gratifications; but
it is growing, and the time will come--(_He rises from his chair,
approaches the count, and leans against the pillar supporting the
escutcheons_)--the time will come when my world will arrive at maturity,
will attain the consciousness of its own strengt