ful plants.

"Truth and justice!" repeated Friedland angrily. "Fiddlesticks! A
crazy desire for notoriety. That's the truth. And as for
justice--well, that was what was meted out to you."

"Prussian justice!" Lassalle's hand rose dramatically heavenwards. His
brow grew black and his voice had the vibration of the great orator or
the great actor. "When I think of this daily judicial murder of ten
long years that I passed through, then waves of blood seem to tremble
before my eyes, and it seems as if a sea of blood would choke me.
Galley-slaves appear to me very honorable persons compared with our
judges. As for our so-called Liberal press, it is a harlot
masquerading as the goddess of liberty."

"And what are you masquerading as?" retorted Friedland. "If you were
really in earnest, you would share all your fine things with dirty
working-men, and become one of them, instead of going down to their
meetings in patent-leather boots."

"No, my dear man, it is precisely to show the dirty working-man what
he has missed that I exhibit to him my patent-leather boots. Humility,
contentment, may be a Christian virtue, but in economics 'tis a deadly
sin. What is the greatest misfortune for a people? To have no wants,
to be lazzaroni sprawling in the sun. But to have the greatest number
of needs, and to satisfy them honestly, is the virtue of to-day, of
the era of political economy. I have always been careful about my
clothes, because it is our duty to give pleasure to other people. If I
went down to my working-men in a dirty shirt, they would be the first
to cry out against my contempt for them. And as for becoming a
working-man, I choose to be a working-man in that sphere in which I
can do most good, and I keep my income in order to do it. At least it
was honorably earned."

"Honorably earned!" sneered Friedland. "That is the first time I have
heard it described thus." And he looked meaningly at the beautiful
portrait.

"I am quite aware you have not the privilege of conversing with my
friends," retorted Lassalle, losing his temper for the first time. "I
know I am kept by my mistress, the Countess Hatzfeldt; that all the
long years, all the best years of my life, I chivalrously devoted to
championing an oppressed woman count for nothing, and that it is
dishonorable for me to accept a small commission on the enormous
estates I won back for her from her brutal husband! Why, my mere fees
as lawyer would have come to double. Bu