get pushed to a point where
the balance of things is in danger of being disturbed, a Reformer
appears and utters his stentorian protest. This man is always ridiculed,
hooted, reviled, mobbed, and very happy indeed is his fate if he is
hanged, crucified or made to drink of the deadly hemlock; for then his
place in the affection of men is made secure, sealed with blood, and we
proclaim him liberator or savior. The Piazza Signora is sacred soil
because there it was that Savonarola died; John Brown's body lies
a-moldering in the grave, but his soul goes marching on; J. Wilkes Booth
linked his own name with that of Judas Iscariot and made his victim
known to the Ages as the Emancipator of Men.

These strong men, sent at the pivotal points in history, are born out
of a sore need--they are sent from God. Yet strong men always exist, but
it is the needs of the hour that develop and bring them to our
attention. Not always have the Reformers been fortunate in their takings
off--many have lingered out lengthening, living deaths in walled-up
cells. The Bastile, Chillon, London Tower, that prison joined to a
palace by the Bridge of Sighs, and all other such plague-spots of blood
are haunted by the ghosts of infamy. Before the memory of all those who
wrote immortal books behind grated bars we stand uncovered.

Exile has been the lot of many who tried to live for sanity, justice and
truth when mad riot raged. Dante, Victor Hugo, Prince Kropotkin and
Wagner are types to which we turn. Then there is an attenuated form of
persecution known as ostracism, which consists in being exiled at home,
but of this it is not worth while to speak.

Wagner was a strong, honest man who simply desired to express his better
self. The elements of caution and expediency were singularly lacking in
his character. These qualities of independence and self-reliance brought
him into speedy collision with those who stood in the front rank of the
artistic world of his day, and he became a marked man. His offense was
that he expressed his honest self.

In Eighteen Hundred Forty-three, when he appeared upon the scene in
Dresden as Hofkapellmeister of the Royal Theater, matters musical were
just about where the stage now is in America. In this Year of Grace,
Nineteen Hundred One, the great Shakespeare has been elbowed from the
stage by the author of "A Texas Steer"; and where once the haughty
Richard trod the boards, the skirt-dance assumes the center of the sta