o power, when the lower classes discover there never was any real
union of interests!"

"Well, that's just your chance!" cried the Countess. "Here is a new
party waiting to be called out of chaos, nay, calling to you. An
unformed party is just what you want. You give it the impress of your
own personality. Remember your own motto: _Si superos nequeo movere
Acheronta movebo._"

Lassalle shook his head doubtfully. He had from the first practically
resolved on developing the vague ideas of the Deputation, but he liked
to hear his own reasons in the mouth of the Countess.

"The headship of a party not even in existence," he murmured. "That
doesn't seem a very short cut to the German Republic."

"Do you doubt yourself? Think of what you were when you took up my
cause--a mere unknown boy. Think how you fought it from court to
court, picking up your Law on the way, a Demosthenes, a Cicero, till
all the world wondered and deemed you a demigod. You did that because
I stood for Injustice. You were the Quixote to right all wrong. You
saw the universal in the individual. My case was but a prefiguration
of your real mission. Now it is the universal that calls to you. See
in your triumph for me your triumph for that suffering humanity, with
which you have taught me to sympathize."

"My noble Countess!"

"What does your own Franz von Sickingen say of history?

"'And still its Form remains for ever Force.'

The Force of the modern world is the working-man. And as you yourself
have taught me that there are no real revolutions except those that
formally express what is already a fact, there wants then only the
formal expression of the working-man's Force. To this Force you will
now give Form."

"What an apt pupil!" He stooped and kissed her lips. Then, walking
about agitatedly: "Yes," he cried; "I will weld the workers of
Germany--to gain their ends they must fuse all their wills into
one--none of these acrid, petty, mutually-destructive individualities
of the _bourgeois_--one gigantic hammer, and I will be the Thor who
wields it." His veins swelled, he seemed indeed a Teutonic god. "And
therefore I must have Dictator's rights," he went on. "I will not
accept the Presidency to be the mere puppet of possible factions."

"There speaks Ferdinand Lassalle! And now, _mon cher enfant_, you
deserve to hear my secret."

She smiled brilliantly.

His heart beat a little quicker as he bent his ear to her customary
whisper. Her s