neconomical man I ever met."

He smiled.

"A volcano is not an ant-heap. But I know you are right. For Lassalle
the Fighter the world holds no wife. If I could only be sure that the
victory will come in my day."

"Remember what your own Heraclitus said: 'The best follow after
fame.'"

"Yes, Fame is the Being of Man in Non-Being. It is the immortality of
man made real," he quoted himself. "But--"

She hastened to continue his quotation. "'Hence it has always so
mightily stirred the greatest souls and lifted them beyond all petty
and narrow ends.'"

"The ends are great--but the means, how petty! The Presidency of a
Working-Men's Union, one not even to be founded in Berlin."

"But yet a General German Working-Men's Union. Who knows what it may
grow to! The capture of Berlin will be a matter of days."

"I had rather capture it with the sword. Bismarck is right. The German
question can only be solved by blood and iron."

"Is it worth while going over that ground again? Did we not agree last
year in Caprera when Garibaldi would not see his way to invading
Austria for us, that we must put our trust in peaceful methods. You
have as yet no real following at all. The Progressists will never make
a Revolution, for all their festivals and fanfaronades. This National
League of theirs is only a stage-threat."

"Yes, Bismarck knows our weak-kneed, white-livered _bourgeois_ too
well to be taken in by it. The League talks and Bismarck is silent.
Oh, if I had a majority in the Chamber, as they have, I'd leave _him_
to do the talking."

"But even if their rant was serious, they would allow _you_ no
leadership in their revolution. Have they not already rejected your
overtures? Therefore this deputation to you of the Leipzig working-men
(whom they practically rejected by offering them honorary membership)
is simply providential. The conception of a new and real Progressive
Party that is seething in their minds under the stimulus of their
contact with socialism in London--you did write that they had been in
London?"

"Yes; they went over to see the Exhibition. But they also represent, I
take it, the old communistic and revolutionary traditions, that have
never been wholly lulled to sleep by our pseudo-Liberalism. But that
is how history repeats itself. When the middle classes oppose the
upper classes, they always have the air of fighting for the whole
majority. But the day soon comes, especially if the middle classes get
int