ecrets were always interesting, sometimes sensational,
and there was always a pleasure in the sense of superiority that
knowledge conferred, and in the feeling of touching, through his
Princess-Countess, the inmost circles of European diplomacy. He was of
the gods, and should know whatever was on the knees of his
fellow-gods.

"Bismarck is thinking of granting Universal Suffrage!"

"Universal Suffrage!" he shouted.

"Hush, hush! Walls have ears."

"Then I must have inspired him."

"No; but you will have."

"How do you mean? Is it not my idea?"

"Implicitly, perhaps, but you have never really pressed for it
specifically. Your only contribution to practical politics is a futile
suggestion that the Diet should refuse to sit, and so cut off
supplies. Now of course Universal Suffrage is the first item of the
programme of your Working-Men's Union."

"Sophie!"

She smiled and nodded. "Why should Bismarck have the credit," she
whispered, "for what is practically your idea? You will seem to exact
it from him by the force of your new party, which will peg away at
that one point like the Anti-Corn-Law people in England."

"Yes; but I'll have no Manchester state-concepts."

"I know, I know. Now even if Bismarck hesitates,"--she made her
whisper still lower--"there are foreign complications looming that
will make it impossible for him to ignore the masses. Now I understand
that what the Leipzig working-men suggest is that you shall write them
an Open Letter."

"Yes. In it I shall counsel the creation of the Fourth Party, I shall
declare that the Progressists do not represent the People at all, that
their pretensions are as impertinent as their threats are hollow, that
there is no People behind them. It will be a thunderbolt! Like
Luther's nailing his theses to the church-door at Wittenberg. And to
the real masses themselves I shall declare: 'You are the rock on which
the Church of the Present is to be built. Steep yourselves in the
thought of this, your mission. The vices of the oppressed, the idle
indifference of the thoughtless, and even the harmless frivolity of
the unimportant no longer become you.' And I shall teach them how to
exact from the State the capital for co-operative associations that
will oust the capitalist."

"And make them capitalists themselves?"

"That is what Rodbertus and Marx object. But you must give the
working-man something definite, you must educate him gradually."

"Put that second i