ed with characters
unintelligible to all but him for whose eye they were designed, he
touched a spring, and a row of ivory keys resembling those of a
piano-forte was revealed. Then rapidly touching them with the fingers of
one hand, while he held up before him the endless slip of paper in the
other as it was evolved, he transferred its cabalistic contents,
character by character, to their distant destination.

And when the day dawned on Paris, Berlin, Vienna and Madrid, the
intelligence thus concentrated, and thus distributed in that solitary
chamber, was laid by the press before a hundred thousand eyes, in a
language which each could comprehend, for in every capital of Europe
unbounded wealth had established a press which groaned in unceasing
parturition for human rights, causing princes to tremble and ministers
to wonder and grow pale; over each press, thus set in motion as if
literally by an electric touch a thousand miles away, presided men of
the greatest powers and most varied attainments which philanthropy or
covetousness could enlist, while the result of their labors was sown
broadcast among the poorest and humblest, without price or compensation,
pouring light upon their darkened understandings and giving them
knowledge of their rights.

Nor was the newspaper press alone active. The feuilleton press was also
at work; and magazines, reviews, pamphlets, whole libraries of volumes,
were flung like Sibylline leaves on the four winds of heaven. Fiction,
the drama, religion, art, literature, moral and mechanical science--all
departments of intellect--silently, unseen, yet surely exerted their
omnipotent influence for the attainment of one single glorious end--the
happiness, rights, freedom of man; all this was under the guidance of
one powerful mind and benevolent heart, wielding the resistless
necromancy of countless and exhaustless treasure! Not a point in all
Europe whence influence could radiate and be distributed was there at
which this man, in one brief year, had not set in motion the press and
the telegraph, those tremendous levers of the age to move the world, and
all the more powerfully to move it because oft unseen. Not a court was
there of emperor or prince, czar or kaiser, king, duke or potentate in
which dwelt not his emissary, who suspected, least of all, knew
everything that occurred, and, on the lightning's wing, dispatched it to
its destination, so that the most important decrees of the
cabinet-cou