f you will, but Universal Suffrage must be first."

"Naturally. It will be the instrument to force the second."

"It will be the instrument to force you to the front. Bismarck will
appear the mere tool of your will. Who knows but that the King himself
may be a pawn on your board!"

Lassalle seized her hands. "There I recognize my soul's mate."

"And I recognize the voice of the von Bulows," she said, with a
half-sob in her laughter, as she drew back.

The lunch was brilliant, blending the delicate perfume of aristocracy
with free-and-easy Bohemianism, and enhanced by the artistic
background of pictures, bric-a-brac, and marble facsimiles of the
masterpieces of statuary, including the Venus of Milo and the Apollo
Belvedere.

The Countess stayed only long enough to smoke a couple of cigarettes,
but the other guests were much longer in shaking off the fascination
of Lassalle's boyish spirits and delightful encyclopaedic monologues.
When the last guest was gone, Lassalle betook himself to the best
florist in Berlin, composing a birthday poem on the way. At the shop
he wrote it down, and, signing it "F.L.," placed it in the most
beautiful basket of flowers he could find. The direction was Fraeulein
Helene von Doenniges.

VII

The "Open Reply Letter" did not thrill the world like a Lutheran
thesis, but it made the Progressists very angry. What! they had not
the People behind them! They were only exploiting, not representing
the People! And while the Court organs chuckled over this flank
attack on their bragging foes, the Liberal organs denounced Lassalle
as the catspaw of reaction. The whilom "friends of the working-man,"
in their haste to overturn Lassalle's position, tumbled into their own
pits. Schulze-Delitzsch himself, founder of co-operative working-men's
societies, denouncer of the middleman, now found himself--in the face
of Lassalle's uncompromising analysis--praising the Law of
Competition, while that Iron Law of Wages, their tendency to fall to
the minimum of subsistence (which was in the canon of all orthodox
economists), was denied the moment it was looked at resentfully from
the wage-earner's standpoint. Herculean labors now fell upon
Lassalle--a great speech of four hours at Frankfort-on-the-Main, the
founding of the General German Working-Men's Union, with himself as
dictator for five years, the delivery of inflammatory speeches in town
after town, the publishing of pamphlets against the Progressis