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10613	----	THE THEORY OF SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS BY BROOKS ADAMS 1913 PREFATORY NOTE The first chapter of the following book was published, in substantially its present form, in the _Atlantic Monthly_ for April, 1913. I have to thank the editor for his courtesy in assenting to my wish to reprint. The other chapters have not appeared before. I desire also to express my obligations to my learned friend, Dr. M.M. Bigelow, who, most kindly, at my request, read chapters two and three, which deal with the constitutional law, and gave me the benefit of his most valuable criticism. Further than this I have but one word to add. I have written in support of no political movement, nor for any ephemeral purpose. I have written only to express a deep conviction which is the result of more than twenty years of study, and reflection upon this subject. BROOKS ADAMS. QUINCY, MASSACHUSETTS, May 17, 1913. CONTENTS I. THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISTIC GOVERNMENT II. THE LIMITATIONS OF THE JUDICIAL FUNCTION III. AMERICAN COURTS AS LEGISLATIVE CHAMBERS IV. THE SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM V. POLITICAL COURTS VI. INFERENCES INDEX [not included in this etext] THE THEORY OF SOCIAL REVOLUTIONS CHAPTER I THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISTIC GOVERNMENT Civilization, I apprehend, is nearly synonymous with order. However much we may differ touching such matters as the distribution of property, the domestic relations, the law of inheritance and the like, most of us, I should suppose, would agree that without order civilization, as we understand it, cannot exist. Now, although the optimist contends that, since man cannot foresee the future, worry about the future is futile, and that everything, in the best possible of worlds, is inevitably for the best, I think it clear that within recent years an uneasy suspicion has come into being that the principle of authority has been dangerously impaired, and that the social system, if it is to cohere, must be reorganized. So far as my observation has extended, such intuitions are usually not without an adequate cause, and if there be reason for anxiety anywhere, it surely should be in the United States, with its unwieldy bulk, its heterogeneous population, and its complex government. Therefore, I submit, that an hour may not be quite wasted which is passed in considering some of the recent phenomena which have appeared about us, in order to ascertain if they can be grouped together in any comprehensible relation. About a century ago, after, the American and French Revolutions and the Napoleonic wars, the present industrial era opened, and brought with it a new governing class, as every considerable change in human environment must bring with it a governing class to give it expression. Perhaps, for lack of a recognized name, I may describe this class as the industrial capitalistic class, composed in the main of administrators and bankers. As nothing in the universe is stationary, ruling classes have their rise, culmination, and decline, and I conjecture that this class attained to its acme of popularity and power, at least in America, toward the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century. I draw this inference from the fact that in the next quarter resistance to capitalistic methods began to take shape in such legislation as the Interstate Commerce Law and the Sherman Act, and almost at the opening of the present century a progressively rigorous opposition found for its mouthpiece the President of the Union himself. History may not be a very practical study, but it teaches some useful lessons, one of which is that nothing is accidental, and that if men move in a given direction, they do so in obedience to an impulsion as automatic as is the impulsion of gravitation. Therefore, if Mr. Roosevelt became, what his adversaries are pleased to call, an agitator, his agitation had a cause which is as deserving of study as is the path of a cyclone. This problem has long interested me, and I harbor no doubt not only that the equilibrium of society is very rapidly shifting, but that Mr. Roosevelt has, half-automatically, been stimulated by the instability about him to seek for a new centre of social gravity. In plain English, I infer that he has concluded that industrialism has induced conditions which can no longer be controlled by the old capitalistic methods, and that the country must be brought to a level of administrative efficiency competent to deal with the strains and stresses of the twentieth century, just as, a hundred and twenty-five years ago, the country was brought to an administrative level competent for that age, by the adoption of the Constitution. Acting on these premises, as I conjecture, whether consciously worked out or not, Mr. Roosevelt's next step was to begin the readjustment; but, I infer, that on attempting any correlated measures of reform, Mr. Roosevelt found progress impossible, because of the obstruction of the courts. Hence his instinct led him to try to overleap that obstruction, and he suggested, without, I suspect, examining the problem very deeply, that the people should assume the right of "recalling" judicial decisions made in causes which involved the nullifying of legislation. What would have happened had Mr. Roosevelt been given the opportunity to thoroughly formulate his ideas, even in the midst of an election, can never be known, for it chanced that he was forced to deal with subjects as vast and complex as ever vexed a statesman or a jurist, under difficulties at least equal to the difficulties of the task itself. If the modern mind has developed one characteristic more markedly than another, it is an impatience with prolonged demands on its attention, especially if the subject be tedious. No one could imagine that the New York press of to-day would print the disquisitions which Hamilton wrote in 1788 in support of the Constitution, or that, if it did, any one would read them, least of all the lawyers; and yet Mr. Roosevelt's audience was emotional and discursive even for a modern American audience. Hence, if he attempted to lead at all, he had little choice but to adopt, or at least discuss, every nostrum for reaching an immediate millennium which happened to be uppermost; although, at the same time, he had to defend himself against an attack compared with which any criticism to which Hamilton may have been subjected resembled a caress. The result has been that the Progressive movement, bearing Mr. Roosevelt with it, has degenerated into a disintegrating rather than a constructive energy, which is, I suspect, likely to become a danger to every one interested in the maintenance of order, not to say in the stability of property. Mr. Roosevelt is admittedly a strong and determined man whose instinct is arbitrary, and yet, if my analysis be sound, we see him, at the supreme moment of his life, diverted from his chosen path toward centralization of power, and projected into an environment of, apparently, for the most part, philanthropists and women, who could hardly conceivably form a party fit to aid him in establishing a vigorous, consolidated, administrative system. He must have found the pressure toward disintegration resistless, and if we consider this most significant phenomenon, in connection with an abundance of similar phenomena, in other countries, which indicate social incoherence, we can hardly resist a growing apprehension touching the future. Nor is that apprehension allayed if, to reassure ourselves, we turn to history, for there we find on every side long series of precedents more ominous still. Were all other evidence lacking, the inference that radical changes are at hand might be deduced from the past. In the experience of the English-speaking race, about once in every three generations a social convulsion has occurred; and probably such catastrophes must continue to occur in order that laws and institutions may be adapted to physical growth. Human society is a living organism, working mechanically, like any other organism. It has members, a circulation, a nervous system, and a sort of skin or envelope, consisting of its laws and institutions. This skin, or envelope, however, does not expand automatically, as it would had Providence intended humanity to be peaceful, but is only fitted to new conditions by those painful and conscious efforts which we call revolutions. Usually these revolutions are warlike, but sometimes they are benign, as was the revolution over which General Washington, our first great "Progressive," presided, when the rotting Confederation, under his guidance, was converted into a relatively excellent administrative system by the adoption of the Constitution. Taken for all in all, I conceive General Washington to have been the greatest man of the eighteenth century, but to me his greatness chiefly consists in that balance of mind which enabled him to recognize when an old order had passed away, and to perceive how a new order could be best introduced. Joseph Story was ten years old in 1789 when the Constitution was adopted; his earliest impressions, therefore, were of the Confederation, and I know no better description of the interval just subsequent to the peace of 1783, than is contained in a few lines in his dissenting opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case:-- "In order to entertain a just view of this subject, we must go back to that period of general bankruptcy, and distress and difficulty (1785).... The union of the States was crumbling into ruins, under the old Confederation. Agriculture, manufactures, and commerce were at their lowest ebb. There was infinite danger to all the States from local interests and jealousies, and from the apparent impossibility of a much longer adherence to that shadow of a government, the Continental Congress. And even four years afterwards, when every evil had been greatly aggravated, and civil war was added to other calamities, the Constitution of the United States was all but shipwrecked in passing through the state conventions."[1] This crisis, according to my computation, was the normal one of the third generation. Between 1688 and 1765 the British Empire had physically outgrown its legal envelope, and the consequence was a revolution. The thirteen American colonies, which formed the western section of the imperial mass, split from the core and drifted into chaos, beyond the constraint of existing law. Washington was, in his way, a large capitalist, but he was much more. He was not only a wealthy planter, but he was an engineer, a traveller, to an extent a manufacturer, a politician, and a soldier, and he saw that, as a conservative, he must be "Progressive" and raise the law to a power high enough to constrain all these thirteen refractory units. For Washington understood that peace does not consist in talking platitudes at conferences, but in organizing a sovereignty strong enough to coerce its subjects. The problem of constructing such a sovereignty was the problem which Washington solved, temporarily at least, without violence. He prevailed not only because of an intelligence and elevation of character which enabled him to comprehend, and to persuade others, that, to attain a common end, all must make sacrifices, but also because he was supported by a body of the most remarkable men whom America has ever produced. Men who, though doubtless in a numerical minority, taking the country as a whole, by sheer weight of ability and energy, achieved their purpose. Yet even Washington and his adherents could not alter the limitations of the human mind. He could postpone, but he could not avert, the impact of conflicting social forces. In 1789 he compromised, but he did not determine the question of sovereignty. He eluded an impending conflict by introducing courts as political arbitrators, and the expedient worked more or less well until the tension reached a certain point. Then it broke down, and the question of sovereignty had to be settled in America, as elsewhere, on the field of battle. It was not decided until Appomattox. But the function of the courts in American life is a subject which I shall consider hereafter. If the invention of gunpowder and printing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries presaged the Reformation of the sixteenth, and if the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth was the forerunner of political revolutions throughout the Western World, we may well, after the mechanical and economic cataclysm of the nineteenth, cease wondering that twentieth-century society should be radical. Never since man first walked erect have his relations toward nature been so changed, within the same space of time, as they have been since Washington was elected President and the Parisian mob stormed the Bastille. Washington found the task of a readjustment heavy enough, but the civilization he knew was simple. When Washington lived, the fund of energy at man's disposal had not very sensibly augmented since the fall of Rome. In the eighteenth, as in the fourth century, engineers had at command only animal power, and a little wind and water power, to which had been added, at the end of the Middle Ages, a low explosive. There was nothing in the daily life of his age which made the legal and administrative principles which had sufficed for Justinian insufficient for him. Twentieth-century society rests on a basis not different so much in degree, as in kind, from all that has gone before. Through applied science infinite forces have been domesticated, and the action of these infinite forces upon finite minds has been to create a tension, together with a social acceleration and concentration, not only unparalleled, but, apparently, without limit. Meanwhile our laws and institutions have remained, in substance, constant. I doubt if we have developed a single important administrative principle which would be novel to Napoleon, were he to live again, and I am quite sure that we have no legal principle younger than Justinian. As a result, society has been squeezed, as it were, from its rigid eighteenth-century legal shell, and has passed into a fourth dimension of space, where it performs its most important functions beyond the cognizance of the law, which remains in a space of but three dimensions. Washington encountered a somewhat analogous problem when dealing with the thirteen petty independent states, which had escaped from England; but his problem was relatively rudimentary. Taking the theory of sovereignty as it stood, he had only to apply it to communities. It was mainly a question of concentrating a sufficient amount of energy to enforce order in sovereign social units. The whole social detail remained unchanged. Our conditions would seem to imply a very considerable extension and specialization of the principle of sovereignty, together with a commensurate increment of energy, but unfortunately the twentieth-century American problem is still further complicated by the character of the envelope in which this highly volatilized society is theoretically contained. To attain his object, Washington introduced a written organic law, which of all things is the most inflexible. No other modern nation has to consider such an impediment. Moneyed capital I take to be stored human energy, as a coal measure is stored solar energy; and moneyed capital, under the stress of modern life, has developed at once extreme fluidity, and an equivalent compressibility. Thus a small number of men can control it in enormous masses, and so it comes to pass that, in a community like the United States, a few men, or even, in certain emergencies, a single man, may become clothed with various of the attributes of sovereignty. Sovereign powers are powers so important that the community, in its corporate capacity, has, as society has centralized, usually found it necessary to monopolize them more or less absolutely, since their possession by private persons causes revolt. These powers, when vested in some official, as, for example, a king or emperor, have been held by him, in all Western countries at least, as a trust to be used for the common welfare. A breach of that trust has commonly been punished by deposition or death. It was upon a charge of breach of trust that Charles I, among other sovereigns, was tried and executed. In short, the relation of sovereign and subject has been based either upon consent and mutual obligation, or upon submission to a divine command; but, in either case, upon recognition of responsibility. Only the relation of master and slave implies the status of sovereign power vested in an unaccountable superior. Nevertheless, it is in a relation somewhat analogous to the latter, that the modern capitalist has been placed toward his fellow citizens, by the advances in applied science. An example or two will explain my meaning. High among sovereign powers has always ranked the ownership and administration of highways. And it is evident why this should have been so. Movement is life, and the stoppage of movement is death, and the movement of every people flows along its highways. An invader has only to cut the communications of the invaded to paralyze him, as he would paralyze an animal by cutting his arteries or tendons. Accordingly, in all ages and in all lands, down to the nineteenth century, nations even partially centralized have, in their corporate capacity, owned and cared for their highways, either directly or through accountable agents. And they have paid for them by direct taxes, like the Romans, or by tolls levied upon traffic, as many mediaeval governments preferred to do. Either method answers its purpose, provided the government recognizes its responsibility; and no government ever recognized this responsibility more fully than did the autocratic government of ancient Rome. So the absolute régime of eighteenth-century France recognized this responsibility when Louis XVI undertook to remedy the abuse of unequal taxation, for the maintenance of the highways, by abolishing the corvée. Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, the application, by science, of steam to locomotion, made railways a favorite speculation. Forthwith, private capital acquired these highways, and because of the inelasticity of the old law, treated them as ordinary chattels, to be administered for the profit of the owner exclusively. It is true that railway companies posed as public agents when demanding the power to take private property; but when it came to charging for use of their ways, they claimed to be only private carriers, authorized to bargain as they pleased. Indeed, it grew to be considered a mark of efficient railroad management to extract the largest revenue possible from the people, along the lines of least resistance; that is, by taxing most heavily those individuals and localities which could least resist. And the claim by the railroads that they might do this as a matter of right was long upheld by the courts,[2] nor have the judges even yet, after a generation of revolt and of legislation, altogether abandoned this doctrine. The courts--reluctantly, it is true, and principally at the instigation of the railways themselves, who found the practice unprofitable--have latterly discountenanced discrimination as to persons, but they still uphold discrimination as to localities.[3] Now, among abuses of sovereign power, this is one of the most galling, for of all taxes the transportation tax is perhaps that which is most searching, most insidious, and, when misused, most destructive. The price paid for transportation is not so essential to the public welfare as its equality; for neither persons nor localities can prosper when the necessaries of life cost them more than they cost their competitors. In towns, no cup of water can be drunk, no crust of bread eaten, no garment worn, which has not paid the transportation tax, and the farmer's crops must rot upon his land, if other farmers pay enough less than he to exclude him from markets toward which they all stand in a position otherwise equal. Yet this formidable power has been usurped by private persons who have used it purely selfishly, as no legitimate sovereign could have used it, and by persons who have indignantly denounced all attempts to hold them accountable, as an infringement of their constitutional rights. Obviously, capital cannot assume the position of an irresponsible sovereign, living in a sphere beyond the domain of law, without inviting the fate which has awaited all sovereigns who have denied or abused their trust. The operation of the New York Clearing-House is another example of the acquisition of sovereign power by irresponsible private persons. Primarily, of course, a clearing-house is an innocent institution occupied with adjusting balances between banks, and has no relation to the volume of the currency. Furthermore, among all highly centralized nations, the regulation of the currency is one of the most jealously guarded of the prerogatives of sovereignty, because all values hinge upon the relation which the volume of the currency bears to the volume of trade. Yet, as everybody knows, in moments of financial panic, the handful of financiers who, directly or indirectly, govern the Clearing-House, have it in their power either to expand or to contract the currency, by issuing or by withdrawing Clearing-House certificates, more effectually perhaps than if they controlled the Treasury of the United States. Nor does this power, vast as it is, at all represent the supremacy which a few bankers enjoy over values, because of their facilities for manipulating the currency and, with the currency, credit; facilities, which are used or abused entirely beyond the reach of the law. Bankers, at their conventions and through the press, are wont to denounce the American monetary system, and without doubt all that they say, and much more that they do not say, is true; and yet I should suppose that there could be little doubt that American financiers might, after the panic of 1893, and before the administration of Mr. Taft, have obtained from Congress, at most sessions, very reasonable legislation, had they first agreed upon the reforms they demanded, and, secondly, manifested their readiness, as a condition precedent to such reforms, to submit to effective government supervision in those departments of their business which relate to the inflation or depression of values. They have shown little inclination to submit to restraint in these particulars, nor, perhaps, is their reluctance surprising, for the possession by a very small favored class of the unquestioned privilege, whether actually used or not, at recurring intervals, of subjecting the debtor class to such pressure as the creditor may think necessary, in order to force the debtor to surrender his property to the creditor at the creditor's price, is a wonder beside which Aladdin's lamp burns dim. As I have already remarked, I apprehend that sovereignty is a variable quantity of administrative energy, which, in civilizations which we call advancing, tends to accumulate with a rapidity proportionate to the acceleration of movement. That is to say, the community, as it consolidates, finds it essential to its safety to withdraw, more or less completely, from individuals, and to monopolize, more or less strictly, itself, a great variety of functions. At one stage of civilization the head of the family administers justice, maintains an armed force for war or police, wages war, makes treaties of peace, coins money, and, not infrequently, wears a crown, usually of a form to indicate his importance in a hierarchy. At a later stage of civilization, companies of traders play a great part. Such aggregations of private and irresponsible adventurers have invaded and conquered empires, founded colonies, and administered justice to millions of human beings. In our own time, we have seen the assumption of many of the functions of these and similar private companies by the sovereign. We have seen the East India Company absorbed by the British Parliament; we have seen the railways, and the telephone and the telegraph companies, taken into possession, very generally, by the most progressive governments of the world; and now we have come to the necessity of dealing with the domestic-trade monopoly, because trade has fallen into monopoly through the centralization of capital in a constantly contracting circle of ownership. Among innumerable kinds of monopolies none have been more troublesome than trade monopolies, especially those which control the price of the necessaries of life; for, so far as I know, no people, approximately free, have long endured such monopolies patiently. Nor could they well have done so without constraint by overpowering physical force, for the possession of a monopoly of a necessary of life by an individual, or by a small privileged class, is tantamount to investing a minority, contemptible alike in numbers and in physical force, with an arbitrary and unlimited power to tax the majority, not for public, but for private purposes. Therefore it has not infrequently happened that persistence in adhering to and in enforcing such monopolies has led, first, to attempts at regulation, and, these failing, to confiscation, and sometimes to the proscription of the owners. An example of such a phenomenon occurs to me which, just now, seems apposite. In the earlier Middle Ages, before gunpowder made fortified houses untenable when attacked by the sovereign, the highways were so dangerous that trade and manufactures could only survive in walled towns. An unarmed urban population had to buy its privileges, and to pay for these a syndicate grew up in each town, which became responsible for the town ferm, or tax, and, in return, collected what part of the municipal expenses it could from the poorer inhabitants. These syndicates, called guilds, as a means of raising money, regulated trade and fixed prices, and they succeeded in fixing prices because they could prevent competition within the walls. Presently complaints became rife of guild oppression, and the courts had to entertain these complaints from the outset, to keep some semblance of order; but at length the turmoil passed beyond the reach of the courts, and Parliament intervened. Parliament not only enacted a series of statutes regulating prices in towns, but supervised guild membership, requiring trading companies to receive new members upon what Parliament considered to be reasonable terms. Nevertheless, friction continued. With advances in science, artillery improved, and, as artillery improved, the police strengthened until the king could arrest whom he pleased. Then the country grew safe and manufactures migrated from the walled and heavily taxed towns to the cheap, open villages, and from thence undersold the guilds. As the area of competition broadened, so the guilds weakened, until, under Edward VI, being no longer able to defend themselves, they were ruthlessly and savagely plundered; and fifty years later the Court of King's Bench gravely held that a royal grant of a monopoly had always been bad at common law.[4] Though the Court's law proved to be good, since it has stood, its history was fantastic; for the trade-guild was the offspring of trade monopoly, and a trade monopoly had for centuries been granted habitually by the feudal landlord to his tenants, and indeed was the only means by which an urban population could finance its military expenditure. Then, in due course, the Crown tried to establish its exclusive right to grant monopolies, and finally Parliament--or King, Lords, and Commons combined, being the whole nation in its corporate capacity, --appropriated this monopoly of monopolies as its supreme prerogative. And with Parliament this monopoly has ever since remained. In fine, monopolies, or competition in trade, appear to be recurrent social phases which depend upon the ratio which the mass and the fluidity of capital, or, in other words, its energy, bears to the area within which competition is possible. In the Middle Ages, when the town walls bounded that area, or when, at most, it was restricted to a few lines of communication between defensible points garrisoned by the monopolists,--as were the Staple towns of England which carried on the wool trade with the British fortified counting-houses in Flanders,--a small quantity of sluggish capital sufficed. But as police improved, and the area of competition broadened faster than capital accumulated and quickened, the competitive phase dawned, whose advent is marked by Darcy _v_. Allein, decided in the year 1600. Finally, the issue between monopoly and free trade was fought out in the American Revolution, for the measure which precipitated hostilities was the effort of England to impose her monopoly of the Eastern trade upon America. The Boston Tea Party occurred on December 16, 1773. Then came the heyday of competition with the acceptance of the theories of Adam Smith, and the political domination in England, towards 1840, of the Manchester school of political economy. About forty years since, in America at least, the tide would appear once more to have turned. I fix the moment of flux, as I am apt to do, by a lawsuit. This suit was the Morris Run Coal Company _v._ Barclay Coal Company,[5] which is the first modern anti-monopoly litigation that I have met with in the United States. It was decided in Pennsylvania in 1871; and since 1871, while the area within which competition is possible has been kept constant by the tariff, capital has accumulated and has been concentrated and volatilized until, within this republic, substantially all prices are fixed by a vast moneyed mass. This mass, obeying what amounts to being a single volition, has its heart in Wall Street, and pervades every corner of the Union. No matter what price is in question, whether it be the price of meat, or coal, or cotton cloth, or of railway transportation, or of insurance, or of discounts, the inquirer will find the price to be, in essence, a monopoly or fixed price; and if he will follow his investigation to the end, he will also find that the first cause in the complex chain of cause and effect which created the monopoly in that mysterious energy which is enthroned on the Hudson. The presence of monopolistic prices in trade is not always a result of conscious agreement; more frequently, perhaps, it is automatic, and is an effect of the concentration of capital in a point where competition ceases, as when all the capital engaged in a trade belongs to a single owner. Supposing ownership to be enough restricted, combination is easier and more profitable than competition; therefore combination, conscious or unconscious, supplants competition. The inference from the evidence is that, in the United States, capital has reached, or is rapidly reaching, this point of concentration; and if this be true, competition cannot be enforced by legislation. But, assuming that competition could still be enforced by law, the only effect would be to make the mass of capital more homogeneous by eliminating still further such of the weaker capitalists as have survived. Ultimately, unless indeed society is to dissolve and capital migrate elsewhere, all the present phenomena would be intensified. Nor would free trade, probably, have more than a very transitory effect. In no department of trade is competition freer than in the Atlantic passenger service, and yet in no trade is there a stricter monopoly price. The same acceleration of the social movement which has caused this centralization of capital has caused the centralization of another form of human energy, which is its negative: labor unions organize labor as a monopoly. Labor protests against the irresponsible sovereignty of capital, as men have always protested against irresponsible sovereignty, declaring that the capitalistic social system, as it now exists, is a form of slavery. Very logically, therefore, the abler and bolder labor agitators proclaim that labor levies actual war against society, and that in that war there can be no truce until irresponsible capital has capitulated. Also, in labor's methods of warfare the same phenomena appear as in the autocracy of capital. Labor attacks capitalistic society by methods beyond the purview of the law, and may, at any moment, shatter the social system; while, under our laws and institutions, society is helpless. Few persons, I should imagine, who reflect on these phenomena, fail to admit to themselves, whatever they may say publicly, that present social conditions are unsatisfactory, and I take the cause of the stress to be that which I have stated. We have extended the range of applied science until we daily use infinite forces, and those forces must, apparently, disrupt our society, unless we can raise the laws and institutions which hold society together to an energy and efficiency commensurate to them. How much vigor and ability would be required to accomplish such a work may be measured by the experience of Washington, who barely prevailed in his relatively simple task, surrounded by a generation of extraordinary men, and with the capitalistic class of America behind him. Without the capitalistic class he must have failed. Therefore one most momentous problem of the future is the attitude which capital can or will assume in this emergency. That some of the more sagacious of the capitalistic class have preserved that instinct of self-preservation which was so conspicuous among men of the type of Washington, is apparent from the position taken by the management of the United States Steel Company, and by the Republican minority of the Congressional Committee which recently investigated the Steel Company; but whether such men very strongly influence the genus to which they belong is not clear. If they do not, much improvement in existing conditions can hardly be anticipated. If capital insists upon continuing to exercise sovereign powers, without accepting responsibility as for a trust, the revolt against the existing order must probably continue, and that revolt can only be dealt with, as all servile revolts must be dealt with, by physical force. I doubt, however, if even the most ardent and optimistic of capitalists would care to speculate deeply upon the stability of any government capital might organize, which rested on the fundamental principle that the American people must be ruled by an army. On the other hand any government to be effective must be strong. It is futile to talk of keeping peace in labor disputes by compulsory arbitration, if the government has not the power to command obedience to its arbitrators' decree; but a government able to constrain a couple of hundred thousand discontented railway employees to work against their will, must differ considerably from the one we have. Nor is it possible to imagine that labor will ever yield peaceful obedience to such constraint, unless capital makes equivalent concessions,--unless, perhaps, among other things, capital consents to erect tribunals which shall offer relief to any citizen who can show himself to be oppressed by the monopolistic price. In fine, a government, to promise stability in the future, must apparently be so much more powerful than any private interest, that all men will stand equally before its tribunals; and these tribunals must be flexible enough to reach those categories of activity which now lie beyond legal jurisdiction. If it be objected that the American people are incapable of an effort so prodigious, I readily admit that this may be true, but I also contend that the objection is beside the issue. What the American people can or cannot do is a matter of opinion, but that social changes are imminent appears to be almost certain. Though these changes cannot be prevented, possibly they may, to a degree, be guided, as Washington guided the changes of 1789. To resist them perversely, as they were resisted at the Chicago Convention of 1912, can only make the catastrophe, when it comes, as overwhelming as was the consequent defeat of the Republican party. Approached thus, that Convention of 1912 has more than a passing importance, since it would seem to indicate the ordinary phenomenon, that a declining favored class is incapable of appreciating an approaching change of environment which must alter its social status. I began with the proposition that, in any society which we now understand, civilization is equivalent to order, and the evidence of the truth of the proposition is, that amidst disorder, capital and credit, which constitute the pith of our civilization, perish first. For more than a century past, capital and credit have been absolute, or nearly so; accordingly it has not been the martial type which has enjoyed sovereignty, but the capitalistic. The warrior has been the capitalists' servant. But now, if it be true that money, in certain crucial directions, is losing its purchasing power, it is evident that capitalists must accept a position of equality before the law under the domination of a type of man who can enforce obedience; their own obedience, as well as the obedience of others. Indeed, it might occur, even to some optimists, that capitalists would be fortunate if they could certainly obtain protection for another fifty years on terms as favorable as these. But at Chicago, capitalists declined even to consider receding to a secondary position. Rather than permit the advent of a power beyond their immediate control, they preferred to shatter the instrument by which they sustained their ascendancy. For it is clear that Roosevelt's offence in the eyes of the capitalistic class was not what he had actually done, for he had done nothing seriously to injure them. The crime they resented was the assertion of the principle of equality before the law, for equality before the law signified the end of privilege to operate beyond the range of law. If this principle which Roosevelt, in theory at least, certainly embodied, came to be rigorously enforced, capitalists perceived that private persons would be precluded from using the functions of sovereignty to enrich themselves. There lay the parting of the ways. Sooner or later almost every successive ruling class has had this dilemma in one of its innumerable forms presented to them, and few have had the genius to compromise while compromise was possible. Only a generation ago the aristocracy of the South deliberately chose a civil war rather than admit the principle that at some future day they might have to accept compensation for their slaves. A thousand other instances of similar incapacity might be adduced, but I will content myself with this alone. Briefly the precedents induce the inference that privileged classes seldom have the intelligence to protect themselves by adaptation when nature turns against them, and, up to the present moment, the old privileged class in the United States has shown little promise of being an exception to the rule. Be this, however, as it may, and even assuming that the great industrial and capitalistic interests would be prepared to assist a movement toward consolidation, as their ancestors assisted Washington, I deem it far from probable that they could succeed with the large American middle class, which naturally should aid, opposed, as it seems now to be, to such a movement. Partially, doubtless, this opposition is born of fear, since the lesser folk have learned by bitter experience that the powerful have yielded to nothing save force, and therefore that their only hope is to crush those who oppress them. Doubtless, also, there is the inertia incident to long tradition, but I suspect that the resistance is rather due to a subtle and, as yet, nearly unconscious instinct, which teaches the numerical majority, who are inimical to capital, that the shortest and easiest way for them to acquire autocratic authority is to obtain an absolute mastery over those political tribunals which we call courts. Also that mastery is being by them rapidly acquired. So long as our courts retain their present functions no comprehensive administrative reform is possible, whence I conclude that the relation which our courts shall hold to politics is now the fundamental problem which the American people must solve, before any stable social equilibrium can be attained. Theodore Roosevelt's enemies have been many and bitter. They have attacked his honesty, his sobriety, his intelligence, and his judgment, but very few of them have hitherto denied that he has a keen instinct for political strife. Only of late has this gift been doubted, but now eminent politicians question whether he did not make a capital mistake when he presented the reform of our courts of law, as expounders of the Constitution, as one of his two chief issues, in his canvass for a nomination for a third presidential term. After many years of study of, and reflection upon, this intricate subject I have reached the conviction that, though Mr. Roosevelt may have erred in the remedy which he has suggested, he is right in the principle which he has advanced, and in my next chapter I propose to give the evidence and explain the reasons which constrain me to believe that American society must continue to degenerate until confusion supervenes, if our courts shall remain semi-political chambers. FOOTNOTES: [1] Charles River Bridge _v_. Warren Bridge, II Peters, 608, 609. [2] Fitchburg R.R. _v_. Gage, 12 Gray 393, and innumerable cases following it. [3] See the decisions of the Commerce Court on the Long and Short-Haul Clause. Atchison, T.&S.F. By. _v_. United States, 191 Federal Rep. 856. [4] Darcy _v_. Allein, 11 Rep. 84. [5] 68 Pa. 173. CHAPTER II THE LIMITATIONS OF THE JUDICIAL FUNCTION Taking the human race collectively, its ideal of a court of justice has been the omniscient and inexorable judgment seat of God. Individually, on the contrary, they have dearly loved favor. Hence the doctrine of the Intercession of the Saints, which many devout persons have sincerely believed could be bought by them for money. The whole development of civilization may be followed in the oscillation of any given society between these two extremes, the many always striving to so restrain the judiciary that it shall be unable to work the will of the favored few. On the whole, success in attaining to ideal justice has not been quite commensurate with the time and effort devoted to solving the problem, but, until our constitutional experiment was tried in America, I think it had been pretty generally admitted that the first prerequisite to success was that judges should be removed from political influences. For the main difficulty has been that every dominant class, as it has arisen, has done its best to use the machinery of justice for its own benefit. No argument ever has convinced like a parable, and a very famous story in the Bible will illustrate the great truth, which is the first lesson that a primitive people learns, that unless the judge can be separated from the sovereign, and be strictly limited in the performance of his functions by a recognized code of procedure, the public, as against the dominant class, has, in substance, no civil rights. The kings of Israel were judges of last resort. Solomon earned his reputation for wisdom in the cause in which two mothers claimed the same child. They were indeed both judge and jury. Also they were prosecuting officers. Also they were sheriffs. In fine they exercised unlimited judicial power, save in so far as they were checked by the divine interference usually signified through some prophet. Now David was, admittedly, one of the best sovereigns and judges who ever held office in Jerusalem, and, in the days of David, Nathan was the leading prophet of the dominant political party. "And it came to pass in an eveningtide, that David arose from off his bed, and walked upon the roof of the king's house: and from the roof he saw a woman washing herself; and the woman was very beautiful to look upon. And David sent and enquired after the woman. And one said, Is not this Bath-sheba, the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite? And David sent messengers, and took her; and she came in unto him, and he lay with her; ... and she returned unto her house." Uriah was serving in the army under Joab. David sent for Uriah, and told him to go home to his wife, but Uriah refused. Then David wrote a letter to Joab and dismissed Uriah, ordering him to give the letter to Joab. And David "wrote in the letter, saying, Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, that he may be smitten and die.... "And the men of the city went out and fought with Joab; and there fell some of the people of the servants of David; and Uriah the Hittite died also.... But the thing that David had done displeased the Lord. "And the Lord sent Nathan unto David. And he came unto him, and said unto him, There were two men in one city; the one rich and the other poor. The rich man had exceeding many flocks and herds: "But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter. "And there came a traveller unto the rich man, and he spared to take of his own flock, ... but took the poor man's lamb, and dressed it for the man that was come to him. "And David's anger was greatly kindled against the man; and he said to Nathan, As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this thing shall surely die: ... "And Nathan said to David, Thou art the man. Thus saith the Lord God of Israel ... Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou has despised me ... Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbor." Here, as the heading to the Twelfth Chapter of Second Book of Samuel says, "Nathan's parable of the ewe lamb causeth David to be his own judge," but the significant part of the story is that Nathan, with all his influence, could not force David to surrender his prey. David begged very hard to have his sentence remitted, but, for all that, "David sent and fetched [Bathsheba] to his house, and she became his wife, and bare him a son." Indeed, she bore him Solomon. As against David or David's important supporters men like Uriah had no civil rights that could be enforced. Even after the judicial function is nominally severed from the executive function, so that the sovereign himself does not, like David and Solomon, personally administer justice, the same result is reached through agents, as long as the judge holds his office at the will of the chief of a political party. To go no farther afield, every page of English history blazons this record. Long after the law had taken an almost modern shape, Alice Perrers, the mistress of Edward III, sat on the bench at Westminster and intimidated the judges into deciding for suitors who had secured her services. The chief revenue of the rival factions during the War of the Roses was derived from attainders, indictments for treason, and forfeitures, avowedly partisan. Henry VII used the Star Chamber to ruin the remnants of the feudal aristocracy. Henry VIII exterminated as vagrants the wretched monks whom he had evicted. The prosecutions under Charles I largely induced the Great Rebellion; and finally the limit of endurance was reached when Charles II made Jeffreys Chief Justice of England in order to kill those who were prominent in opposition. Charles knew what he was doing. "That man," said he of Jeffreys, "has no learning, no sense, no manners, and more impudence than ten carted street-walkers." The first object was to convict Algernon Sidney of treason. Jeffreys used simple means. Usually drunk, his court resembled the den of a wild beast. He poured forth on "plaintiffs and defendants, barristers and attorneys, witnesses and jurymen, torrents of frantic abuse, intermixed with oaths and curses." The law required proof of an _overt act_ of treason. Many years before Sidney had written a philosophical treatise touching resistance by the subject to the sovereign, as a constitutional principle. But, though the fragment contained nothing more than the doctrines of Locke, Sidney had cautiously shown it to no one, and it had only been found by searching his study. Jeffreys told the jury that if they believed the book to be Sidney's book, written by him, they must convict for _scribere est agere_, to write is to commit an overt act. A revolution followed upon this and other like convictions, as revolutions have usually followed such uses of the judicial power. In that revolution the principle of the limitation of the judicial function was recognized, and the English people seriously addressed themselves to the task of separating their courts from political influences, of protecting their judges by making their tenure and their pay permanent, and of punishing them by removal if they behaved corruptly, or with prejudice, or transcended the limits within which their duty confined them. Jeffreys had legislated when he ruled it to be the law that, to write words secretly in one's closet, is to commit an overt act of treason, and he did it to kill a man whom the king who employed him wished to destroy. This was to transcend the duty of a judge, which is to expound and not to legislate. The judge may develop a principle, he may admit evidence of a custom in order to explain the intentions of the parties to a suit, as Lord Mansfield admitted evidence of the customs of merchants, but he should not legislate. To do so, as Jeffreys did in Sidney's case, is tantamount to murder. Jeffreys never was duly punished for his crimes. He died the year after the Revolution, in the Tower, maintaining to the last that he was innocent in the sight of God and man because "all the blood he had shed fell short of the King's command." And Jeffreys was perfectly logical and consistent in his attitude. A judiciary is either an end in itself or a means to an end. If it be designed to protect the civil rights of citizens indifferently, it must be free from pressure which will deflect it from this path, and it can only be protected from the severest possible pressure by being removed from politics, because politics is the struggle for ascendancy of a class or a majority. If, on the other hand, the judiciary is to serve as an instrument for advancing the fortunes of a majority or a dominant class, as David used the Jewish judiciary, or as the Stuarts used the English judiciary, then the judicial power must be embodied either in a military or political leader, like David, who does the work himself, or in an agent, more or less like Jeffreys, who will obey his orders. In the colonies the subserviency of the judges to the Crown had been a standing grievance, and the result of this long and terrible experience, stretching through centuries both in Europe and America, had been to inspire Americans with a fear of intrusting power to any man or body of men. They sought to limit everything by written restrictions. Setting aside the objection that such a system is mechanically vicious because it involves excessive friction and therefore waste of energy, it is obviously futile unless the written restrictions can be enforced, and enforced in the spirit in which they are drawn. Hamilton, whose instinct for law resembled genius, saw the difficulty and pointed out in the _Federalist_ that it is not a writing which can give protection, but only the intelligence and the sense of justice of the community itself. "The truth is, that the general genius of a Government is all that can be substantially relied upon for permanent effects. Particular provisions, though not altogether useless, have far less virtue and efficiency than are commonly ascribed to them; and the want of them will never be, with men of sound discernment, a decisive objection to any plan which exhibits the leading characters of a good Government." After an experience of nearly a century and a quarter we must admit, I think, that Hamilton was right. In the United States we have carried bills of right and constitutional limitations to an extreme, and yet, I suppose that few would care to maintain that, during the nineteenth century, life and property were safer in America, or crime better dealt with, than in England, France, or Germany. The contrary, indeed, I take to be the truth, and I think one chief cause of this imperfection in the administration of justice will be found to have been the operation of the written Constitution. For, under the American system, the Constitution, or fundamental law, is expounded by judges, and this function, which, in essence, is political, has brought precisely that quality of pressure on the bench which it has been the labor of a hundred generations of our ancestors to remove. On the whole the result has been not to elevate politics, but to lower the courts toward the political level, a result which conforms to the _a priori_ theory. The abstract virtue of the written Constitution was not, however, a question in issue when Washington and his contemporaries set themselves to reorganize the Confederation. Those men had no choice but to draft some kind of a platform on which the states could agree to unite, if they were to unite peacefully at all, and accordingly they met in convention and drew the best form of agreement they could; but I more than suspect that a good many very able Federalists were quite alive to the defects in the plan which they adopted. Hamilton was outspoken in preferring the English model, and I am not aware that Washington ever expressed a preference for the theory that, because of a written fundamental law, the court should nullify legislation. Nor is it unworthy of remark that all foreigners, after a prolonged and attentive observation of our experiment, have avoided it. Since 1789, every highly civilized Western people have readjusted their institutions at least once, yet not one has in this respect imitated us, though all have borrowed freely from the parliamentary system of England.[6] Even our neighbor, Canada, with no adverse traditions and a population similar to ours, has been no exception to the rule. The Canadian courts indeed define the limits of provincial and federal jurisdiction as fixed under an act of Parliament, but they do not pretend to limit the exercise of power when the seat of power has been established. I take the cause of this distrust to be obvious. Although our written Constitution was successful in its primary purpose of facilitating the consolidation of the Confederation, it has not otherwise inspired confidence as a practical administrative device. Not only has constant judicial interference dislocated scientific legislation, but casting the judiciary into the vortex of civil faction has degraded it in the popular esteem. In fine, from the outset, the American bench, because it deals with the most fiercely contested of political issues, has been an instrument necessary to political success. Consequently, political parties have striven to control it, and therefore the bench has always had an avowed partisan bias. This avowed political or social bias has, I infer, bred among the American people the conviction that justice is not administered indifferently to all men, wherefore the bench is not respected with us as, for instance, it is in Great Britain, where law and politics are sundered. Nor has the dissatisfaction engendered by these causes been concealed. On the contrary, it has found expression through a series of famous popular leaders from Thomas Jefferson to Theodore Roosevelt. The Constitution could hardly have been adopted or the government organized but for the personal influence of Washington, whose power lay in his genius for dealing with men. He lost no time or strength in speculation, but, taking the Constitution as the best implement at hand, he went to the work of administration by including the representatives of the antagonistic extremes in his Cabinet. He might as well have expected fire and water to mingle as Jefferson and Hamilton to harmonize. Probably he had no delusions on that head when he chose them for his ministers, and he accomplished his object. He paralyzed opposition until the new mechanism began to operate pretty regularly, but he had not an hour to spare. Soon the French Revolution heated passions so hot that long before Washington's successor was elected the United States was rent by faction. The question which underlay all other questions, down to the Civil War, was the determination of the seat of sovereignty. Hamilton and the Federalists held it to be axiomatic that, if the federal government were to be more than a shadow, it must interpret the meaning of the instrument which created it, and, if so, that it must signify its decisions through the courts. Only in this way, they argued, could written limitations on legislative power be made effective. Only in this way could statutes which contravened the Constitution be set aside.[7] Jefferson was abroad when Hamilton wrote _The Federalist_, but his views have since been so universally accepted as embodying the opposition to Hamilton, that they may be conveniently taken as if they had been published while the Constitution was under discussion. Substantially the same arguments were advanced by others during the actual debate, if not quite so lucidly or connectedly then, as afterward by him. Very well, said Jefferson, in answer to Hamilton, admitting, for the moment, that the central government shall define its own powers, and that the courts shall be the organ through which the exposition shall be made, both of which propositions I vehemently deny, you have this result: The judges who will be called upon to pass upon the validity of national and state legislation will be plunged in the most heated of controversies, and in those controversies they cannot fail to be influenced by the same passions and prejudices which sway other men. In a word they must decide like legislators, though they will be exempt from the responsibility to the public which controls other legislators. Such conditions you can only meet by making the judicial tenure of office ephemeral, as all legislative tenure is ephemeral. It is vain to pretend, continued he, in support of fixity of tenure, that the greater the pressure on the judge is likely to be, the more need there is to make him secure. This may be true of judges clothed with ordinary attributes, like English judges, for, should these try to nullify the popular will by construing away statutes, Parliament can instantly correct them, or if Parliament fail in its duty, the constituencies, at the next election, can intervene. But no one will be able to correct the American judge who may decline to recognize the law which would constrain him. Nothing can shake him save impeachment for what is tantamount to crime, or being overruled by a constitutional amendment which you have purposely made too hard to obtain to be a remedy. He is to be judge in his own case without an appeal. Nowhere in all his long and masterly defence of the Constitution did Hamilton show so much embarrassment as here, and because, probably, he did not himself believe in his own brief. He really had faith in the English principle of an absolute parliament, restrained, if needful, by a conservative chamber, like the House of Lords, but not in the total suspension of sovereignty subject to judicial illumination. Consequently he fell back on platitudes about judicial high-mindedness, and how judges could be trusted not to allow political influences to weigh with them when deciding political questions. Pushed to its logical end, concluded he, the Jeffersonian argument would prove that there should be no judges distinct from legislatures.[8] Now, at length, exclaimed the Jeffersonian in triumph, you admit our thesis. You propose to clothe judges with the highest legislative functions, since you give them an absolute negative on legislation, and yet you decline to impose on them the responsibility to a constituency, which constrains other legislators. Clearly you thus make them autocratic, and in the worst sense, for you permit small bodies of irresponsible men under pretence of dispensing justice, but really in a spirit of hypocrisy, to annul the will of the majority of the people, even though the right of the people to exercise their will, in the matters at issue, be clearly granted them in the Constitution. No, rejoined Hamilton, thus driven to the wall, judges never will so abuse their trust. The duty of the judge requires him to suppress his _will_, and exercise his _judgment_ only. The Constitution will be before him, and he will have only to say whether authority to legislate on a given subject is granted in that instrument. If it be, the character of the legislation must remain a matter of legislative discretion. Besides, you must repose confidence somewhere, and judges, on the whole, are more trustworthy than legislators. How can you say that, retorted the opposition, when you, better than most men, know the line of despotic legal precedents from the Ship Money down to the Writs of Assistance? Looking back upon this initial controversy touching judicial functions under the Constitution, we can hardly suppose that Hamilton did not perceive that, in substance, Jefferson was right, and that a bench purposely constructed to pass upon political questions must be politically partisan. He knew very well that, if the Federalists prevailed in the elections, a Federalist President would only appoint magistrates who could be relied on to favor consolidation. And so the event proved. General Washington chose John Jay for the first Chief Justice, who in some important respects was more Federalist than Hamilton, while John Adams selected John Marshall, who, though one of the greatest jurists who ever lived, was hated by Jefferson with a bitter hatred, because of his political bias. As time went on matters grew worse. Before Marshall died slavery had become a burning issue, and the slave-owners controlled the appointing power. General Jackson appointed Taney to sustain the expansion of slavery, and when the anti-slavery party carried the country with Lincoln, Lincoln supplanted Taney with Chase, in order that Chase might stand by him in his struggle to destroy slavery. And as it has been, so must it always be. As long as the power to enact laws shall hinge on the complexion of benches of judges, so long will the ability to control a majority of the bench be as crucial a political necessity as the ability to control a majority in avowedly representative assemblies. Hamilton was one of the few great jurists and administrators whom America has ever produced, and it is inconceivable that he did not understand what he was doing. He knew perfectly well that, other things being equal, the simplest administrative mechanism is the best, and he knew also that he was helping to make an extremely complicated mechanism. Not only so, but at the heart of this complexity lay the gigantic cog of the judiciary, which was obviously devised to stop movement. He must have had a reason, beyond the reason he gave, for not only insisting on clothing the judiciary with these unusual political and legislative attributes, but for giving the judiciary an unprecedented fixity of tenure. I suspect that he was actuated by some such considerations as these: The Federalists, having pretty good cause to suppose themselves in a popular minority, purposed to consolidate the thirteen states under a new sovereign. There were but two methods by which they could prevail; they could use force, or, to secure assent, they could propose some system of arbitration. To escape war the Federalists convened the constitutional convention, and by so doing pledged themselves to arbitration. But if their plan of consolidation were to succeed, it was plain that the arbitrator must arbitrate in their favor, for if he arbitrated as Mr. Jefferson would have wished, the United States under the Constitution would have differed little from the United States under the Confederation. The Federalists, therefore, must control the arbitrator. If the Constitution were to be adopted, Hamilton and every one else knew that Washington would be the first President, and Washington could be relied on to appoint a strong Federalist bench. Hence, whatever might happen subsequently, when the new plan first should go into operation, and when the danger from insubordination among the states would probably be most acute, the judiciary would be made to throw its weight in favor of consolidation, and against disintegration, and, if it did so, it was essential that it should be protected against anything short of a revolutionary attack. In the convention, indeed, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina suggested that Congress should be empowered to negative state legislation, but such an alternative, for obvious reasons, would have been less palatable to Hamilton, since Congress would be only too likely to fall under the control of the Jeffersonian party, while a bench of judges, if once well chosen, might prove to be for many years an "excellent barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body."[9] I infer that Hamilton and many other Federalists reasoned somewhat thus, not only from what they wrote, but from the temper of their minds, and, if they did, events largely justified them. John Jay, Oliver Ellsworth, and John Marshall were successively appointed to the office of Chief Justice, nor did the complexion of the Supreme Court change until after 1830. What interests us, however, is not so much what the Federalists thought, or the motives which actuated them, as the effect which the clothing of the judiciary with political functions has had upon the development of the American republic, more especially as that extreme measure might have been avoided, had Pinckney's plan been adopted. Nor, looking back upon the actual course of events, can I perceive that, so far as the movement toward consolidation was concerned, the final result would have varied materially whether Congress or the Supreme Court had exercised control over state legislation. Marshall might just as well, in the one case as the other, have formulated his theory of a semi-centralized administration. He would only have had uniformly to sustain Congress, as an English judge sustains Parliament. Nor could either Congress or the Court have reached a definite result without an appeal to force. Either chamber might expound a theory, but nothing save an army could establish it. For two generations statesmen and jurists debated the relation of the central to the local sovereignties with no result, for words alone could decide no such issue. In America, as elsewhere, sovereignty is determined by physical force. Marshall could not conquer Jefferson, he could at most controvert Jefferson's theory. This he did, but, in doing so, I doubt if he were quite true to himself. Jefferson contended that every state might nullify national legislation, as conversely Pinckney wished Congress to be given explicitly the power to nullify state legislation; and Marshall, very sensibly, pointed out that, were Jefferson's claim carried into practice, it would create "a hydra in government,"[10] yet I am confident that Marshall did not appreciate whither his own assertion of authority must lead. In view of the victory of centralization in the Civil War, I will agree that the Supreme Court might have successfully maintained a position as arbitrator touching conflicting jurisdictions, as between the nation and the states, but that is a different matter from assuming to examine into the wisdom of the legislation itself. The one function might, possibly, pass by courtesy as judicial; the other is clearly legislative. This distinction only developed after Marshall's death, but the resentment which impelled Marshall to annul an act of Congress was roused by the political conflict which preceded the election of 1800, in which Marshall took a chief part. Apparently he could not resist the temptation of measuring himself with his old adversary, especially as he seems to have thought that he could discredit that adversary without giving him an opportunity to retaliate. In 1798 a Federalist Congress passed the Alien and Sedition Acts, whose constitutionality no Federalist judge ever doubted, but which Jefferson considered as clearly a violation of the fundamental compact, since they tended to drive certain states, as he thought, into "revolution and blood." Under this provocation Jefferson proclaimed that it was both the right and the duty of any state, which felt itself aggrieved, to intervene to arrest "the progress of the evil," within her territory, by declining to execute, or by "nullifying," the objectionable statutes. As Jefferson wrote the Kentucky Resolutions in 1798 and was elected President in 1800, the people at least appeared to have sustained him in his exposition of the Constitution, before he entered into office. At this distance of time we find it hard to realize what the election of 1800 seemed to portend to those who participated therein. Mr. Jefferson always described it as amounting to a revolution as profound as, if less bloody than, the revolution of 1776, and though we maybe disposed to imagine that Jefferson valued his own advent to power at its full worth, it must be admitted that his enemies regarded it almost as seriously. Nor were they without some justification, for Jefferson certainly represented the party of disintegration. "Nullification" would have been tantamount to a return to the condition of the Confederation. Besides, Jefferson not so many years before had written, in defence of Shays's rebellion, that the tree of Liberty could never flourish unless refreshed occasionally with the blood of patriots and tyrants. To most Federalists Jefferson seemed a bloodthirsty demagogue. In 1796 Oliver Ellsworth had been appointed Chief Justice by General Washington in the place of Jay, who resigned, and in 1799 John Adams sent Ellsworth as an envoy to France to try to negotiate a treaty which should reëstablish peace between the two countries. Ellsworth succeeded in his mission, but the hardships of his journey injured his health, and he, in turn, resigned in the autumn of 1800. Then Adams offered the Chief Justiceship to Jay, but Jay would not return to office, and after this the President selected his Secretary of State, John Marshall, one of the greatest of the great Virginians, but one of Jefferson's most irreconcilable enemies. Perhaps at no moment in his life did John Adams demonstrate his legal genius more convincingly than in this remarkable nomination. Yet it must be conceded that, in making John Marshall Chief Justice, John Adams deliberately chose the man whom, of all his countrymen, he thought to be the most formidable champion of those views which he himself entertained, and which he conceived that he had been elected President to advance. Nor was John Adams deceived. For thirty-four years John Marshall labored ceaselessly to counteract Jefferson's constitutional principles, while Jefferson always denounced the political partiality of the federal courts, and above all the "rancorous hatred which Marshall bears to the government of his country, and ... the cunning and sophistry within which he is able to enshroud himself."[11] No one, at this day, would be disposed to dispute that the Constitution, as a device to postpone war among the states, at least for a period, was successful, and that, as I have already pointed out, during the tentative interval which extended until Appomattox, the Supreme Court served perhaps as well, in ordinary times, as an arbiter between the states and the general government, as any which could have been suggested. So much may be conceded, and yet it remains true, as the record will show, that when it passed this point and entered into factional strife, the Supreme Court somewhat lamentably failed, probably injuring itself and popular respect for law, far more by its errors, than it aided the Union by its political adjudications. Although John Marshall, by common consent, ranks as one of the greatest and purest of Americans, yet even Marshall had human weaknesses, one of which was a really unreasonable antipathy to Thomas Jefferson; an antipathy which, I surmise, must, when Jefferson was inaugurated, have verged upon contempt. At least Marshall did what cautious men seldom do when they respect an adversary, he took the first opportunity to pick a quarrel with a man who had the advantage of him in position. In the last days of his presidency John Adams appointed one William Marbury a justice of the peace for the District of Columbia. The Senate confirmed the appointment, and the President signed, and John Marshall, as Secretary of State, sealed Marbury's commission; but in the hurry of surrendering office the commission was not delivered, and Jefferson found it in the State Department when he took possession. Resenting violently these "midnight" appointments, as he called them, Jefferson directed Mr. Madison, his Secretary of State, to withhold the commission; and, at the next December term of the Supreme Court, Marbury moved for a rule to Madison to show cause why he should not be commanded to deliver to the plaintiff the property to which Marbury pretended to be entitled. Of course Jefferson declined to appear before Marshall, through his Secretary of State, and finally, in February, 1803, Marshall gave judgment, in what was, without any doubt, the most anomalous opinion he ever delivered, in that it violated all judicial conventions, for, apparently, no object, save to humiliate a political opponent. Marshall had no intention of commanding Madison to surrender the commission to Marbury. He was too adroit a politician for that. Marshall knew that he could not compel Jefferson to obey such a writ against his will, and that in issuing the order he would only bring himself and his court into contempt. What he seems to have wished to do was to give Jefferson a lesson in deportment. Accordingly, instead of dismissing Marbury's suit upon any convenient pretext, as, according to legal etiquette, he should have done if he had made up his mind to decide against the plaintiff, and yet thought it inexpedient to explain his view of the law, he began his opinion with a long and extra-judicial homily, first on Marbury's title to ownership in the commission, and then on civil liberty. Having affirmed that Marbury's right to his office vested when the President had signed, and the Secretary of State had sealed the instrument, he pointed out that withholding the property thus vested was a violation of civil rights which could be examined in a court of justice. Were it otherwise, the Chief Justice insisted, the government of the United States could not be termed a government of laws and not of men. All this elaborate introduction was in the nature of a solemn lecture by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to the President of the United States upon his faulty discharge of his official duties. Having eased his mind on this head, Marshall went on, very dexterously indeed, but also very palpably, to elude the consequences of his temerity. He continued: The right of property being established, and the violation of that right clear, it is plain that a wrong has been committed, and it only remains to determine whether that wrong can be redressed under this form of procedure. We are of opinion that it cannot, because Congress has no constitutional power to confer upon the Supreme Court original jurisdiction in this class of litigation. In the lower courts alone can the relief prayed for be obtained. Of all the events of Marshall's life this controversy with Jefferson seems to me the most equivocal, and it was a direct effect of a constitutional system which has permitted the courts to become the censor of the political departments of the government. Marshall, probably, felt exasperated by Jefferson's virulence against these final appointments made by John Adams, while Marshall was Secretary of State, and for which he may have felt himself, in part, responsible. Possibly, even, he may have taken some of Jefferson's strictures as aimed at himself. At all events he went to extreme lengths in retaliation. He might have dismissed the litigation in a few words by stating that, whatever the abstract rights of the parties might have been, the Supreme Court had no power to constrain the President in his official functions; but he yielded to political animosity. Then, having taken a position practically untenable, he had to find an avenue of retreat, and he found it by asserting a supervisory jurisdiction over Congress, a step which, even at that early period, was most hazardous.[12] In reality Jefferson's temper, far from being vindictive and revolutionary, as his enemies believed, was rather gentle and timid, but he would have been more than mortal had he endured such an insult in silence. Nor could he, perhaps, have done so without risking the respect of his followers. So he decided on reprisals, and a scheme was matured among influential Virginians, like John Randolph and Senator William Giles, to purge the Supreme Court of Federalists. Among the associate justices of this court was Samuel Chase, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and an able lawyer, but an arrogant and indiscreet partisan. Chase had made himself obnoxious on various public occasions and so was considered to be the best subject to impeach; but if they succeeded with him the Jeffersonians proclaimed their intention of removing all his brethren seriatim, including the chief offender of all, John Marshall. One day in December, 1804, Senator Giles, of Virginia, in a conversation which John Quincy Adams has reported in his diary, discussed the issue at large, and that conversation is most apposite now, since it shows how early the inevitable tendency was developed to make judges who participate in political and social controversies responsible to the popular will. The conversation is too long to extract in full, but a few sentences will convey its purport:-- "He treated with the utmost contempt the idea of an _independent_ judiciary.... And if the judges of the Supreme Court should dare, _as they had done_, to declare an act of Congress unconstitutional, or to send a mandamus to the Secretary of State, _as they had done_, it was the undoubted right of the: House of Representatives to impeach them, and of the Senate to remove them, for giving such opinions, however honest or sincere they may have been in entertaining them. * * * And a removal by impeachment was nothing more than a declaration by Congress to this effect: You hold dangerous opinions, and if you are suffered to carry them into effect you will work the destruction of the nation. _We want your offices_, for the purpose of giving them to men who will fill them better."[13] Jefferson, though he controlled a majority in the Senate, failed by a narrow margin to obtain the two-thirds vote necessary to convict Chase. Nevertheless, he accomplished his object. Chase never recovered his old assurance, and Marshall never again committed a solecism in judicial manners. On his side, after the impeachment, Jefferson showed moderation. He might, if he had been malevolent, without doubt, have obtained an act of Congress increasing the membership of the Supreme Court enough to have put Marshall in a minority. Then by appointing men like Giles he could have compelled Marshall to resign. He did nothing of the kind. He spared the Supreme Court, which he might have overthrown, and contented himself with waiting until time should give him the opportunity to correct the political tendencies of a body of men whom he sincerely regarded as a menace to, what he considered, popular institutions. Thus the ebullition caused by Marshall's acrimony toward Jefferson, because of Jefferson's strictures on the appointments made by his predecessor subsided, leaving no very serious immediate mischief behind, save the precedent of the nullification of an act of Congress by the Supreme Court. That precedent, however, was followed by Marshall's Democratic successor. And nothing can better illustrate the inherent vice of the American constitutional system than that it should have been possible, in 1853, to devise and afterward present to a tribunal, whose primary purpose was to administer the municipal law, a set of facts for adjudication, on purpose to force it to pass upon the validity of such a statute as the Missouri Compromise, which had been enacted by Congress in 1820, as a sort of treaty of peace between the North and South, and whose object was the limitation of the spread of slavery. Whichever way the Court decided, it must have fallen into opprobrium with one-half the country. In fact, having been organized by the slaveholders to sustain slavery, it decided against the North, and therefore lost repute with the party destined to be victorious. I need not pause to criticise the animus of the Court, nor yet the quality of the law which the Chief Justice there laid down. It suffices that in the decade which preceded hostilities no event, in all probability, so exasperated passions, and so shook the faith of the people of the northern states in the judiciary, as this decision. Faith, whether in the priest or the magistrate, is of slow growth, and if once impaired is seldom fully restored. I doubt whether the Supreme Court has ever recovered from the shock it then received, and, considered from this point of view, the careless attitude of the American people toward General Grant's administration, when in 1871 it obtained the reversal of Hepburn _v_. Griswold by appointments to the bench, assumes a sombre aspect. Of late some sensitiveness has been shown in regard to this transaction, and a disposition has appeared to defend General Grant and his Attorney-General against the charge of manipulating the membership of the bench to suit their own views. At the outset, therefore, I wish to disclaim any intention of entering into this discussion. To me it is immaterial whether General Grant and Mr. Hoar did or did not nominate judges with a view to obtaining a particular judgment. I am concerned not with what men thought, but with what they did, and with the effect of their acts at the moment, upon their fellow-citizens. Hepburn _v_. Griswold was decided in conference on November 27, 1869, when eight justices were on the bench. On February 1, following, Justice Grier resigned, and, on February 7, judgment was entered, the court then being divided four to three, but Grier having been with the majority, the vote in reality stood five to three. Two vacancies therefore existed on February 7, one caused by the resignation of Grier, the other by an act of Congress which had enlarged the court by one member, and which had taken effect in the previous December. Chief Justice Chase held that the clause of the currency laws of 1862 and 1863 which made depreciated paper a legal tender for preëxisting debts was unconstitutional. No sooner had the judgment been recorded than all the world perceived that, if both vacancies should be filled with men who would uphold the acts, Hepburn _v_. Griswold might be reversed by a majority of one. The Republican party had full control of the government and was united in vehement support of the laws. On March 21, the second of the two new judges received his commission, and precisely ten days afterward the Attorney-General moved for a rehearing, taunting the Chief Justice with having changed his opinion on this point, and intimating that the issue was in reality political, and not judicial at all. In the December Term following Knox _v_. Lee was argued by the Attorney-General, and, on May 1, 1871, judgment was entered reversing Hepburn _v_. Griswold, both the new judges voting with the former minority, thus creating the necessary majority of one. No one has ever doubted that what General Grant did coincided with the drift of opinion, and that the Republican party supported him without inquiring how he had achieved success.[14] After this it is difficult to suppose that much respect could remain among the American people for the sanctity of judicial political decisions, or that a President, at the head of a popular majority, would incur much odium for intervening to correct them, as a party measure. The last example of judicial interference which I shall mention was the nullification, in 1895, of a statute of Congress which imposed an income tax. The states have since set this decision aside by constitutional amendment, and I should suppose that few would now dispute that the Court when it so decided made a serious political and social error. As Mr. Justice White pointed out, the judges undertook to deprive the people, in their corporate capacity, of a power conceded to Congress "by universal consensus for one hundred years."[15] These words were used in the first argument, but on the rehearing the present Chief Justice waxed warm in remonstrating against the unfortunate position in which his brethren placed the Court before the nation, protesting with almost passionate earnestness against the reversal by half-a-dozen judges of what had been the universally accepted legal, political, and economic policy of the country solely in order that "invested wealth" might be read "into the constitution" as a favored and protected class of property. Mr. Justice White closed by saying that by this act the Supreme Court had "deprived [the Government] of an inherent attribute of its being."[16] I might go on into endless detail, but I apprehend that these cases, which are the most important which have ever arisen on this issue, suffice for my purpose.[17] I contend that no court can, because of the nature of its being, effectively check a popular majority acting through a coordinate legislative assembly, and I submit that the precedents which I have cited prove this contention. The only result of an attempt and failure is to bring courts of justice into odium or contempt, and, in any event, to make them objects of attack by a dominant social force in order to use them as an instrument, much as Charles II used Jeffreys. The moment we consider the situation philosophically we perceive why using a court to control a coordinate legislature must, nearly inevitably, be sooner or later fatal to the court, if it asserts its prerogative. A court to be a fit tribunal to administer the municipal law impartially, or even relatively impartially, must be a small body of men, holding by a permanent and secure tenure, guarded from all pressure which may unduly influence them. Also they should be men of much experience and learned in the precedents which should make the rules which they apply stable and consistent. In short, a court should be rigid and emotionless. It follows that it must be conservative, for its members should long have passed that period of youth when the mind is sensitive to new impressions. Were it otherwise, law would cease to be cohesive. A legislature is nearly the antithesis of a court. It is designed to reflect the passions of the voters, and the majority of voters are apt to be young. Hence in periods of change, when alone serious clashes between legislatures and courts are likely to occur, as the social equilibrium shifts the legislature almost certainly will reflect the rising, the court the sinking power. I take the Dred Scott Case as an illustration. In 1857 the slaveholding interest had passed the zenith of high fortune, and was hastening toward its decline. In the elections of 1858 the Democratic party, which represented slavery, was defeated. But the Supreme Court had been organized by Democrats who had been dominant for many years, and it adhered, on the principle laid down by Jeffreys, to the master which created it. Occasionally, it is true, a court has been constructed by a rising energy, as was the Supreme Court in 1789, but then it is equally tenacious to the instinct which created it. The history of the Supreme Court is, in this point of view, eminently suggestive. The Federalist instinct was constructive, not destructive, and accordingly Marshall's fame rests on a series of constructive decisions like M'Culloch _v_. Maryland, Cohens _v_. Virginia, and Gibbons _v_. Odgen. In these decisions he either upheld actual national legislation, or else the power of the nation to legislate. Conversely, whenever Marshall or his successors have sought to obstruct social movement they have not prospered. Marbury _v_. Madison is not an episode on which any admirer of Marshall can linger with satisfaction. In theory it may be true, as Hamilton contended, that, given the fact that a written constitution is inevitable, a bench of judges is the best tribunal to interpret its meaning, since the duty of the judge has ever been and is now to interpret the meaning of written instruments; but it does not follow from this premise that the judges who should exercise this office should be the judges who administer the municipal law. In point of fact experience has proved that, so far as Congress is concerned, the results of judicial interference have been negative. And it would be well if in other spheres of American constitutional development, judicial activity had been always negative. Unfortunately, as I believe, it has extended into the domain of legislation. I will take the Dred Scott Case once more to illustrate my meaning. The North found it bad enough for the Supreme Court to hold that, under the Constitution, Congress could not exclude slavery from the national territory beyond a certain boundary which had been fixed by compromise between the North and South. But the North would have found it intolerable if the Court, while fully conceding that Congress might so legislate, if the character of the legislation commended itself to the judges, had held the Missouri Compromise to be unconstitutional because they thought it _unreasonable_. Yet this, in substance, is what our courts have done. And this brings me to the consideration of American courts as legislative chambers. FOOTNOTES: [6] The relation of courts to legislation in European countries has been pretty fully considered by Brinton Coxe, in _Judicial Power and Constitutional Legislation_. [7] _Federalist_ No. LXXVIII. [8] _The Federalist_, No. LXXVIII. [9] _The Federalist_, No. LXXVIII. [10] Cohens _v_. Virginia, 6 Wheaton 415. [11] To Madison, Ford, 9, 275. [12] Marshall's constitutional doctrine was not universally accepted, even in the courts of the northern states, until long afterward. As eminent a jurist as Chief Justice Gibson of Pennsylvania, as late as 1825, gave a very able dissenting opinion in opposition in Eakin _v_. Raub, 12 S.&R., 344. [13] Memoirs, I, 322. [14] Hepburn _v._ Griswold, 8 Wallace 603. Decided in conference on Nov. 27, 1869, more than a month before Grier's resignation. Knox _v_. Lee, 12 Wallace 457. [15] 157 U.S. 608. [16] Pollock _v_. The Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., 158 U.S. 715. [17] In 1889 Mr. J.C. Bancroft Davis compiled a table of the acts of Congress which up to that time had been held to be unconstitutional. It is to be found in the Appendix to volume 131 U.S. Reports, page CCXXXV. Mr. Davis has, however, omitted from his list the Dred Scott Case, probably for the technical reason that, in 1857, when the cause was decided, the Missouri Compromise had been repealed. Nevertheless, though this is true, Tansy's decision hinged upon the invalidity of the law. Besides the statutes which I have mentioned in the test, the two most important, I suppose, which have been annulled, have to me no little interest. These are the Civil Rights Act of 1875, and the Employers' Liability Act of 1906. The Civil Rights Act of 1875 grew rapidly unpopular, and the decision which overturned it coincided with the strong drift of opinion. The Civil Rights Cases were decided in October, 1883, and Mr. Cleveland was elected President in 1884. Doubtless the law would have been repealed had the judiciary supported it. Therefore this adjudication stood. On the other hand, the Employers' Liability Act of 1906 was held bad because Congress undertook to deal with commerce conducted wholly within the states, and therefore beyond the national jurisdiction. The Court, consequently, in the Employers' Liability Cases, simply defined the limits of sovereignty, as a Canadian Court might do; it did not question the existence of sovereignty itself. In 1908 Congress passed a statute free from this objection, and the Court, in the Second Employers' Liability Cases, 223 U.S. 1, sustained the legislation in the most thoroughgoing manner. I know not where to look for two better illustrations of my theory. CHAPTER III AMERICAN COURTS AS LEGISLATIVE CHAMBERS In one point of view many of the greatest of the Federalists were idealists. They seem sincerely to have believed that they could, by some form of written words, constrain a people to be honest against their will, and almost as soon as the new government went into operation they tested these beliefs by experiment, with very indifferent success. I take it that jurists like Jay and Marshall held it to be axiomatic that rules of conduct should be laid down by them which would be applicable to rich and poor, great and small, alike, and that courts could maintain such rules against all pressure. Possibly such principles may be enforced against individuals, but they cannot be enforced against communities, and it was here that the Federalist philosophy collapsed, as Hamilton, at least partly, foresaw that it must. Sovereigns have always enjoyed immunity from suit by private persons, unless they have been pleased to assent thereto, not because it is less wrongful for a sovereign than for an individual to cheat, but because the sovereign cannot be arrested and the individual can. With the Declaration of Independence the thirteen colonies became sovereigns. Petty sovereigns it is true, and singly contemptible in physical force as against most foreign nations, but none the less tenacious of the attributes of sovereignty, and especially of the attribute which enabled them to repudiate their debts. Jay, Marshall, and their like, thought that they could impose the same moral standard upon the states as upon private persons; they were unable to do so, but in making the attempt they involved the American judicial system in a maze of difficulties whose gravity, I fear, can hardly be exaggerated. Before entering upon this history, however, I must say a word touching the nature of our law. Municipal law, to be satisfactory, should be a body of abstract principles capable of being applied impartially to all relevant facts, just as Marshall and Jay held it to be. Where exceptions begin, equality before the law ends, as I have tried to show by the story of King David and Uriah, and therefore the great effort of civilization has been to remove judges from the possibility of being subjected to a temptation, or to a pressure, which may deflect them from impartiality as between suitors. In modern civilization, especially, nothing is so fatal to the principle of order as inequality in the dispensation of justice, and it would have been reasonable to suppose that Americans, beyond all others, would have been alive to this teaching of experience, and have studiously withdrawn their bench from politics. In fact they have ignored it, and instead they have set their judiciary at the focus of conflicting forces. The result has been the more unfortunate as the English system of jurisprudence is ill calculated to bear the strain, it being inflexible. In theory the English law moves logically from precedent to precedent, the judge originating nothing, only elaborating ideas which he has received from a predecessor, and which are binding on him. If the line of precedents leads to wrongful conclusions, the legislature must intervene with a statute rectifying the wrong. The Romans, who were gifted with a higher legal genius than we, managed better. The praetor, by his edict, suppressed inconvenient precedents, and hence the Romans maintained flexibility in their municipal law without falling into confusion. We have nothing to correspond to the praetor. Thus the English system of binding precedents is troublesome enough in a civilization in chronic and violent flux like modern civilization, even when applied to ordinary municipal law which may be changed at will by legislation, but it brings society almost to a stand when applied to the most vital functions of government, with no means at hand to obtain a corrective. For the court of last resort having once declared the meaning of a clause of the Constitution, that meaning remains fixed forever, unless the court either reverses itself, which is a disaster, or the Constitution can be amended by the states, which is not only difficult, but which, even if it be possible, entails years of delay. Yet pressing emergencies arise, emergencies in which a settlement of some kind must almost necessarily be reached somewhat rapidly to avert very serious disorders, and it has been under this tension, as I understand American constitutional development, that our courts have resorted to legislation. Nor is it fair for us to measure the sagacity of our great jurists by the standard of modern experience. They lived before the acceleration of movement by electricity and steam. They could not foresee the rapidity and the profundity of the changes which were imminent. Hence it was that, in the spirit of great lawyers, who were also possibly men tinged with a certain enthusiasm for the ideal, they began their work by ruling on the powers and limitations of sovereignty, as if they were ruling on the necessity of honest intent in dealings with one's neighbor. In 1789 General Washington is said to have offered John Jay his choice of offices under the new government, and Jay chose the chief justiceship, because there he thought he could make his influence felt most widely. If so he had his wish, and very shortly met with disappointment. In the August Term of 1792, one Chisholm, a citizen of South Carolina, sued the State of Georgia for a debt. Georgia declined to appear, and in February, 1793, Jay, in an elaborate opinion, gave judgment for Chisholm. Jay was followed by his associates with the exception of Iredell, J., of North Carolina. Forthwith a ferment began, and in the very next session of Congress an amendment to the Constitution was proposed to make such suits impossible. In January, 1798, five years after the case was argued, this amendment was declared to be adopted, but meanwhile Jay had resigned to become governor of New York. In December, 1800, he was again offered the chief justiceship by John Adams, on the resignation of Oliver Ellsworth, but Jay resolutely declined. I have often wondered whether Jay's mortification at having his only important constitutional decision summarily condemned by the people may not have given him a distaste for judicial life. The Federalist attempt to enforce on the states a positive rule of economic morality, therefore, collapsed at once, but it still remained possible to approach the same problem from its negative side, through the clause of the Constitution which forbade any state to impair the validity of contracts, and Marshall took up this aspect of the task where Jay left it. In Marshall's mind his work was simple. He had only to determine the nature of a contract, and the rest followed automatically. All contracts were to be held sacred. Their greater or less importance was immaterial. In 1810 Marshall expounded this general principle in Fletcher _v_. Peck.[18] "When ... a law is in its nature a contract ... a repeal of the law cannot devest" rights which have vested under it. A couple of years later he applied his principle to the extreme case of an unlimited remission of taxation.[19] The State of New Jersey had granted an exemption from taxation to lands ceded to certain Indians. Marshall held that this contract ran with the land, and inured to the benefit of grantees from the Indians. If the state cared to resume its power of taxation, it must buy the grant back, and the citizens of New Jersey must pay for their improvidence. Seven years later, in 1810, Marshall may, perhaps, be said to have reached the culmination of his career, for then he carried his moral standard to a breaking strain. But, though his theory broke down, perhaps the most striking evidence of his wonderful intellectual superiority is that he convinced the Democrat, Joseph Story,--a man who had been nominated by Madison to oppose him, and of undoubted strength of character,--of the soundness of his thesis. In 1769 King George III incorporated certain Trustees of Dartmouth College. The charter was accepted and both real and personal property were thereupon conveyed to this corporate body, in trust for educational purposes. In 1816 the legislature of New Hampshire reorganized the board of trustees against their will. If the incorporation amounted to a contract, the Court was clear that this statute impaired it; therefore the only really debatable issue was whether the grant of a charter by the king amounted to a contract by him, with his subjects to whom he granted it. After prolonged consideration Marshall concluded that it did, and I conceive that, in the eye of history, he was right. Throughout the Middle Ages corporate privileges of all kinds, but especially municipal corporate privileges, had been subjects of purchase and sale, and indeed the mediaeval social system rested on such contracts. So much was this the case that the right to return members of Parliament from incorporated boroughs was, as Lord Eldon pointed out in the debates on the Reform Bill, as much private property "as any of your lordships'" titles and peerages. It was here that Marshall faltered. He felt that the public would not support him if he held that states could not alter town and county charters, so he arbitrarily split corporations in halves, protecting only those which handled exclusively private funds, and abandoning "instruments of government," as he called them, to the mercy of legislative assemblies. Toward 1832 it became convenient for middle class Englishmen to confiscate most of the property which the aristocracy had invested in parliamentary boroughs, and this social revolution was effected without straining the judicial system, because of the supremacy of Parliament. In America, at about the same time, it became, in like manner, convenient to confiscate numerous equally well-vested rights, because, to have compensated the owners would have entailed a considerable sacrifice which neither the public nor the promoters of new enterprises were willing to make. The same end was reached in America as in England, in spite of Chief Justice Marshall and the Dartmouth College Case, only in America it was attained by a legal somerset which has disordered the course of justice ever since. In 1697 King William III incorporated Trinity Church in the City of New York, confirming to the society the possession of a parcel of land, adjoining the church, to be used as a churchyard for the burial of the dead. In 1823 the government of New York prohibited interments within the city limits, thus closing the churchyard for the purposes for which it had been granted. As compensation was refused, it appeared to be a clear case of confiscation, and Trinity resisted. In the teeth of recent precedents the Supreme Court of New York decided that, under the _Police Power_, the legislature of New York might authorize this sort of appropriation of private property for sanitary purposes, without paying the owners for any loss they might thereby sustain.[20] The court thus simply dispensed the legislature from obedience to the law, saying in effect, "although the Constitution forbids impairing contracts, and although this is a contract which you have impaired, yet, in our discretion, we suspend the operation of the Constitution, in this instance, by calling your act an exercise of a power unknown to the framers of the Constitution." I cannot doubt that Marshall would have flouted this theory had he lived to pass upon it, but Marshall died in 1835, and the Charles River Bridge Case, in which this question was first presented to the Supreme Court of the United States, did not come up until 1837. Then Joseph Story, who remained as the representative of Marshall's philosophy upon the bench, vehemently protested against the latitudinarianism of Chief Justice Taney and his associates, but without producing the slightest effect. In 1785 the Massachusetts legislature chartered the Charles River Bridge Company to build a bridge between Boston and Charlestown, authorizing it, by way of consideration, to collect tolls for forty years. In 1792 the franchise was extended to seventy years, when the bridge was to revert to the Commonwealth. In 1828 the legislature chartered the Warren Bridge Company, expressly to build a bridge parallel to and practically adjoining the Charles River Bridge, the Warren Bridge to become a free bridge after six years. The purpose, of course, was to accelerate movement by ruining the Charles River Bridge Company. The Charles River Bridge Company sought to restrain the building of the Warren Bridge as a breach of contract by the State, but failed to obtain relief in the state courts, and before the cause could be argued at Washington the Warren Bridge had become free and had destroyed the value of the Charles River Bridge, though its franchise had still twenty years to run. As Story pointed out, no one denied that the charter of the Charles River Bridge Company was a contract, and, as he insisted, it is only common sense as well as common justice and elementary law, that contracts of this character should be reasonably interpreted so far as quiet enjoyment of the consideration granted is concerned; but all this availed nothing. The gist of the opposing argument is contained in a single sentence in the opinion of the Chief Justice who spoke for the majority of the court: "The millions of property which have been invested in railroads and canals, upon lines of travel which had been before occupied by turnpike corporations, will be put in jeopardy" if this doctrine is to prevail.[21] The effect of the adoption by the Supreme Court of the United States of the New York theory of the Police Power was to vest in the judiciary, by the use of this catch-word, an almost unparalleled prerogative. They assumed a supreme function which can only be compared to the Dispensing Power claimed by the Stuarts, or to the authority which, according to the Council of Constance, inheres in the Church, to "grant indulgences for reasonable causes." I suppose nothing in modern judicial history has ever resembled this assumption; and yet, when we examine it, we find it to be not only the logical, but the inevitable, effect of those mechanical causes which constrain mankind to move along the lines of least resistance. Marshall, in a series of decisions, laid down a general principle which had been proved to be sound when applied by ordinary courts, dealing with ordinary social forces, and operating under the corrective power of either a legislature or a praetor, but which had a different aspect under the American constitutional system. He held that the fundamental law, embodied in the Constitution, commanded that all contracts should be sacred. Therefore he, as a judge, had but two questions to resolve: First, whether, in the case before him, a contract had been proved to exist. Second, admitting that a contract had been proved, whether it had also been shown to have been impaired. Within ten years after these decisions it had been found in practice that public opinion would not sustain so rigid an administration of the law. No legislature could intervene, and a pressure was brought to bear which the judges could not withstand; therefore, the Court yielded, declaring that if impairing a contract were, on the whole, for the public welfare, the Constitution, as Marshall interpreted it, should be suspended in favor of the legislation which impaired it. They called this suspension the operation of the "Police Power." It followed, as the "Police Power" could only come into operation at the discretion of the Court, that, therefore, within the limits of judicial discretion, confiscation, however arbitrary and to whatever extent, might go on. In the energetic language of the Supreme Court of Maine: "This duty and consequent power override all statute or contract exemptions. The state cannot free any person or corporation from subjection to this power. All personal, as well as property rights must be held subject to the Police Power of the state."[22] Once the theory of the Police Power was established it became desirable to define the limits of judicial discretion, but that proved to be impossible. It could not be determined in advance by abstract reasoning. Hence, as each litigation arose, the judges could follow no rule but the rule of common sense, and the Police Power, translated into plain English, presently came to signify whatever, at the moment, the judges happened to think reasonable. Consequently, they began guessing at the drift of public opinion, as it percolated to them through the medium of their education and prejudices. Sometimes they guessed right and sometimes wrong, and when they guessed wrong they were cast aside, as appeared dramatically enough in the temperance agitation. Up to about the middle of the last century the lawfulness of the liquor business had been unquestioned in the United States, and money had been invested as freely in it as in any other legitimate enterprise; but, as the temperance agitation swept over the country, in obedience to the impulsion given by science to the study of hygiene, dealing in liquor came to be condemned as a crime. Presently legislatures began to pass statutes to confiscate, more or less completely, this kind of property, and sufferers brought their cases before the courts to have the constitutionality of the acts tested, under the provisions which existed in all state constitutions, forbidding the taking, by the public, of private property without compensation, or without due process of law. Such a provision existed hi the constitution of the State of New York, adopted in 1846, and it was to invoke the protection of this clause that one Wynehamer, who had been indicted in 1855, carried his case to the Court of Appeals in the year 1856. In that cause Mr. Justice Comstock, who was one of the ablest jurists New York ever produced, gave an opinion which is a model of judicial' reasoning. He showed conclusively the absurdity of constitutional restrictions, if due process of law may be held to mean the enactment of the very statute drawn to work confiscation.[23] This decision, which represented the profoundest convictions of men of the calibre of Comstock and Denio, deserves to rank with Marshall's effort in the Dartmouth College Case. In both instances the tribunal exerted itself to carry out Hamilton's principle of judicial duty by exercising its _judgment_ and not its _will_. In other words, the judges propounded a general rule and then simply determined whether the set of facts presented to them fell within that rule. They resolutely declined to legislate by entering upon a consideration of the soundness or reasonableness of the policy which underlay the action of the legislature. In the one case as in the other the effort was unavailing, as Jefferson prophesied that it would be. I have told of Marshall's overthrow in the Charles River Bridge Case, and in 1887, after controversies of this category had begun to come before the Supreme Court of the United States under the Fourteenth Amendment, Mr. Justice Harlan swept Mr. Justice Comstock aside by quietly ignoring an argument which was unanswerable.[24] The same series of phenomena have appeared in regard to laws confiscating property invested in lotteries, when opinion turned against lotteries, or in occupations supposed to be unsanitary, as in the celebrated case of the taxing out of existence of the rendering establishment which had been erected as a public benefit to relieve the City of Chicago of its offal.[25] In fine, whenever pressure has reached a given intensity, on one pretext or another, courts have enforced or dispensed with constitutional limitations with quite as much facility as have legislatures, and for the same reasons. The only difference has been that the pressure which has operated most directly upon courts has not always been the pressure which has swayed legislatures, though sometimes both influences have combined. For example, during the Civil War, the courts sanctioned everything the popular majority demanded under the pretext of the War Power, as in peace they have sanctioned confiscations for certain popular purposes, under the name of the Police Power. But then, courts have always been sensitive to financial influences, and if they have been flexible in permitting popular confiscation when the path of least resistance has lain that way, they have gone quite as far in the reverse direction when the amount of capital threatened has been large enough to be with them a countervailing force. As the federal Constitution originally contained no restriction upon the states touching the confiscation of the property of their own citizens, provided contracts were not impaired, it was only in 1868, by the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment, that the Supreme Court of the United States acquired the possibility of becoming the censor of state legislation in such matters. Nor did the Supreme Court accept this burden very willingly or in haste. For a number of years it labored to confine its function to defining the limits of the Police Power, guarding itself from the responsibility of passing upon the "reasonableness" with which that power was used. It was only by somewhat slow degrees, as the value of the threatened property grew to be vast, that the Court was deflected from this conservative course into effective legislation. The first prayers for relief came from the Southern states, who were still groaning under reconstruction governments; but as the Southern whites were then rather poor, their complaints were neglected. The first very famous cause of this category is known as the Slaughter House Cases. In 1869 the Carpet Bag government of Louisiana conceived the plan of confiscating most of the property of the butchers who slaughtered for New Orleans, within a district about as large as the State of Rhode Island. The Fourteenth Amendment forbade states to deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law, and the butchers of New Orleans prayed for protection, alleging that the manner in which their property had been taken was utterly lawless. But the Supreme Court declined to interfere, explaining that the Fourteenth Amendment had been contrived to protect the emancipated slaves, and not to make the federal judiciary "a perpetual censor upon all legislation of the states, on the civil rights of their own citizens, with authority to nullify such as it did not approve."[26] Although, even at that relatively early day, this conservatism met with strong opposition within the Court itself, the pressure of vested wealth did not gather enough momentum to overcome the inertia of the bench for nearly another generation. It was the concentration of capital in monopoly, and the consequent effort by the public to regulate monopoly prices, which created the stress which changed the legal equilibrium. The modern American monopoly seems first to have generated that amount of friction, which habitually finds vent in a great litigation, about the year 1870; but only some years later did the states enter upon a determined policy of regulating monopoly prices by law, with the establishment by the Illinois legislature of a tariff for the Chicago elevators. The elevator companies resisted, on the ground that regulation of prices in private business was equivalent to confiscation, and so in 1876 the Supreme Court was dragged into this fiercest of controversies, thereby becoming subject to a stress to which no judiciary can safely be exposed. Obviously two questions were presented for adjudication: The first, which by courtesy might be termed legal, was whether the fixing of prices by statute was a prerogative which a state legislature might constitutionally exercise at all; the second, which was purely political, was whether, admitting that, in the abstract, such a power could be exercised by the state, Illinois had, in this particular case, behaved _reasonably_. The Supreme Court made a conscientious effort to adhere to the theory of Hamilton, that it should, in emergencies like this, use its _judgment_ only, and not its _will_; that it should lay down a rule, not vote on the wisdom of a policy. So the judges decided that, from time immemorial, the fixing of prices in certain trades and occupations had been a legislative function, which they supposed might be classified as a branch of the Police Power, but they declared that with this expression of opinion their jurisdiction ended. When it came to asking them to criticise the propriety of legislation, it was, in substance, proposing that they should substitute their _will_ for the _will_ of the representatives of the people, which was impossible. I well remember the stir made by the case of Munn _v_. Illinois.[27] Both in and out of the legal profession, those in harmony with the great vested interests complained that the Court had shirked its duty. But these complaints soon ceased, for a movement was in progress which swept, for the moment, all before it. The great aggregations of capital, which had been accumulating ever since the Charles River Bridge Case, not long after Munn _v._ Illinois attained to a point at which they began to grasp many important prerogatives of sovereignty, and to impose, what was tantamount to, arbitrary taxation upon a large scale. The crucial trial of strength came on the contest for control of the railways, and in that contest concentrated capital prevailed. The Supreme Court reversed its attitude, and undertook to do that which it had solemnly protested it could not do. It began to censor legislation in the interest of the strongest force for the time being, that force being actually financial. By the year 1800 the railway interest had expanded prodigiously. Between 1876 and 1890 the investment in railways had far more than doubled, and, during the last five years of this period, the increment had been at an average of about $450,000,000 annually. At this point the majority of the court yielded, as ordinary political chambers always must yield, to extraordinary pressure. Mr. Justice Bradley, however, was not an ordinary man. He was, on the contrary, one of the ablest and strongest lawyers who sat on the federal bench during the last half of the nineteenth century; and Bradley, like Story before him, remonstrated against turning the bench of magistrates, to which he belonged, from a tribunal which should propound general rules applicable to all material facts, into a jury to find verdicts on the reasonableness of the votes of representative assemblies. The legislature of Minnesota, in 1887, passed a statute to regulate railway rates, and provided that the findings of the commission which it erected to fix those rates should be final. The Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Railway contended that this statute was unconstitutional, because it was unreasonable, and the majority of the Court sustained their contention.[28] Justices Bradley, Gray, and Lamar dissented, and Bradley on this occasion delivered an opinion, from which I shall quote a paragraph or two, since the argument appears to me conclusive, not only from the point of view of law, but of political expediency and of common sense:-- "I cannot agree to the decision of the court in this case. It practically overrules Munn _v._ Illinois.... The governing principle of those cases was that the regulation and settlement of the fares of railroads and other public accommodations is a legislative prerogative, and not a judicial one. This is a principle which I regard as of great importance.... "But it is said that all charges should be reasonable, and that none but reasonable charges can be exacted; and it is urged that what is a reasonable charge is a judicial question. On the contrary, it is preëminently a legislative one, involving considerations of policy as well as of remuneration.... By the decision now made we declare, in effect, that the judiciary, and not the legislature, is the final arbiter in the regulation of fares and freights of railroads.... It is an assumption of authority on the part of the judiciary which, ... it has no right to make. The assertion of jurisdiction by this court makes it the duty of every court of general jurisdiction, state or federal, to entertain complaints [of this nature], for all courts are bound by the Constitution of the United States, the same as we are." There is little to add to these words. When the Supreme Court thus undertook to determine the reasonableness of legislation it assumed, under a somewhat thin disguise, the position of an upper chamber, which, though it could not originate, could absolutely veto most statutes touching the use or protection of property, for the administration of modern American society now hinges on this doctrine of judicial dispensation under the Police Power. Whether it be a regulation of rates and prices, of hours of labor, of height of buildings, of municipal distribution of charity, of flooding a cranberry bog, or of prescribing to sleeping-car porters duties regarding the lowering of upper berths,--in questions great and small, the courts vote upon the reasonableness of the use of the Police Power, like any old-fashioned town meeting. There is no rule of law involved. There is only opinion or prejudice, or pecuniary interest. The judges admit frankly that this is so. They avow that they try to weigh public opinion, as well as they can, and then vote. In 1911 Mr. Justice Holmes first explained that the Police Power extended to all great public needs, and then went on to observe that this Police Power, or extraordinary prerogative, might be put forth by legislatures "in aid of what is sanctioned by usage, or held by ... preponderant opinion to be ... necessary to the public welfare."[29] A representative chamber reaches its conclusions touching "preponderant opinion" by a simple process, but the influences which sway courts are obscurer,--often, probably, beyond the sphere of the consciousness of the judges themselves. Nor is this the worst; for, as I have already explained, the very constitution of a court, if it be a court calculated to do its legitimate work upon a lofty level, precludes it from keeping pace with the movement in science and the arts. Necessarily it lags some years behind. And this tendency, which is a benefit in the dispensation of justice as between private litigants, becomes a menace when courts are involved in politics. A long line of sinister precedents crowd unbidden upon the mind. The Court of King's Bench, when it held Hampden to be liable for the Ship Money, draped the scaffold for Charles I. The Parliament of Paris, when it denounced Turgot's edict touching the corvée, threw wide the gate by which the aristocracy of France passed to the guillotine. The ruling of the Superior Court of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, in the case of the Writs of Assistance, presaged the American Revolution; and the Dred Scott decision was the prelude to the Civil War. The capital essential of justice is that, under like conditions, all should fare alike. The magistrate should be no respecter of persons. The vice of our system of judicial dispensation is that it discriminates among suitors in proportion to their power of resistance. This is so because, under adequate pressure, our courts yield along the path of least resistance. I should not suppose that any man could calmly turn over the pages of the recent volumes of the reports of the Supreme Court of the United States and not rise from the perusal convinced that the rich and the poor, the strong and the weak, do not receive a common measure of justice before that judgment seat. Disregarding the discrimination which is always apparent against those who are unpopular, or who suffer under special opprobrium, as do liquor dealers, owners of lotteries, and the like,[30] I will take, nearly at random, a couple of examples of rate regulation, where tenderness has been shown property in something approaching to a mathematical ratio to the amount involved. In April, 1894, a record was produced before the Supreme Court which showed that the State of North Dakota had in 1891 established rates for elevating and storing grain, which rates the defendant, named Brass, who owned a small elevator, alleged to be, to him in particular, _utterly_ ruinous, and to be in general unreasonable. He averred that he used his elevator for the storage of his own grain, that it cost about $3000, that he had no monopoly, as there were many hundred such elevators in the state, and, as land fit for the purpose of building elevators was plenty and cheap, that any man could build an elevator in the town in which he lived, as well as he; that the rates he charged were reasonable, and that, were he compelled to receive grain generally at the rates fixed by the statute, he could not store his own grain. All these facts were admitted by demurrer, and Brass contended that if any man's property were ever to be held to be appropriated by the public without compensation, and under no form of law at all save a predatory statute, it should be his; but the Supreme Court voted the Dakota statute to be a reasonable exercise of the Police Power,[31] and dismissed Brass to his fate. The converse case is a very famous one known as Smyth _v._ Ames,[32] decided four years later, in 1898. In that case it appeared that the State of Nebraska had, in 1893, reduced freight rates within the state about twenty-nine per cent, in order to bring them into some sort of relation to the rates charged in the adjoining State of Iowa, which were calculated to be forty per cent lower than the Nebraska rates. Several of the most opulent and powerful corporations of the Union were affected by this law, among others the exceedingly prosperous and influential Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railway. No one pretended that, were the law to be enforced, the total revenues of the Burlington would be seriously impaired, nor was it even clear that, were the estimate of reduction, revenue, and cost confined altogether to the commerce carried on within the limits of the State of Nebraska, leaving interstate commerce out of consideration, a loss would be suffered during the following year. Trade might increase with cheaper rates, or economies might be made by the company, or both causes and many others of increased earnings might combine. Corporation counsel, however, argued that, were the principle of the statute admitted, and should all the states through which the line passed do the like, ultimately a point might be reached at which the railway would be unable to maintain, even approximately, its dividend of eight per cent, and that the creation of such a possibility was conceding the power of confiscation, and, therefore, an unreasonable exercise of the Police Power, by the State of Nebraska. With this argument the Supreme Court concurred. They held the Nebraska statute to be unreasonable. Very possibly it may have been unsound legislation, yet it is noteworthy that within three years after this decision Mr. Hill bought the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, at the rate of $200 for every share of stock of the par value of $100, thus fixing forever, on the community tributary to the road, the burden of paying a revenue on just double the value of all the stock which it had been found necessary to issue to build the highway. Even at this price Mr. Hill is supposed to have made a brilliant bargain. This brings me to the heart of my theorem. Ever since Hamilton's time, it has been assumed as axiomatic, by conservative Americans, that courts whose function is to expound a written constitution can and do act as a "barrier to the encroachments and oppressions of the representative body."[33] I apprehend that courts can perform no such office and that in assuming attributes beyond the limitations of their being they, as history has abundantly proved, not only fail in their object, but shake the foundations of authority, and immolate themselves. Hitherto I have confined myself to adducing historical evidence to prove that American courts have, as a whole, been gifted with so little political sagacity that their interference with legislation, on behalf of particular suitors, has, in the end, been a danger rather than a protection to those suitors, because of the animosity which it has engendered. I shall now go further. For the sake of argument I am willing to admit that the courts, in the exercise of the dispensing prerogative, called the Police Power, have always acted wisely, so much so that every such decree which they have issued may be triumphantly defended upon economic, moral, or social grounds. Yet, assuming this to be true, though I think I have shown it to be untrue, the assumption only strengthens my contention, that our courts have ceased to be true courts, and are converted into legislative chambers, thereby promising shortly to become, if they are not already, a menace to order. I take it to be clear that the function of a legislature is to embody the will of the dominant social force, for the time being, in a political policy explained by statutes, and when that policy has reached a certain stage of development, to cause it to be digested, together with the judicial decisions relevant to it, in a code. This process of correlation is the highest triumph of the jurist, and it was by their easy supremacy in this field of thought, that Roman lawyers chiefly showed their preeminence as compared with modern lawyers. Still, while admitting this superiority, it is probably true that the Romans owed much of their success in codification to the greater permanence of the Roman legislative tenure of office, and, therefore, stability of policy,--phenomena which were both probably effects of a slower social movement among the ancients. The Romans, therefore, had less need than we of a permanent judiciary to counteract the disintegrating tendency of redundant legislation; _a fortiori_, of course, they had still less to isolate the judiciary from political onslaughts which might cause justice to become a series of exceptions to general principles, rather than a code of unvarying rules. It is precisely because they are, and are intended to be, arenas of political combat, that legislatures cannot be trustworthy courts, and it was because this fact was notorious that the founders of this government tried to separate the legislative from the judicial function, and to make this separation the foundation of the new republic. They failed, as I conceive, not because they made their legislatures courts, but because, under the system they devised, their courts have become legislatures. A disease, perhaps, the more insidious of the two. Insidious because it undermines, order, while legislative murder and confiscation induce reaction. If a legislative chamber would act as a court, the first necessity is to eliminate its legislative character. For example, the House of Lords in England has long discharged the duties of a tribunal of last resort for the empire, and with general approbation, but only because, when sitting as a court, the law lords sit alone. Politicians and political influences are excluded. Where political influences enter disaster follows. Hence the infamous renown of political decisions in legal controversies, such as bills of attainder and _ex post facto_ laws, or special legislation to satisfy claims which could not be defended before legitimate courts, or the scandals always attending the trial of election petitions. The object of true courts is to shield the public from these and kindred abuses. In primitive communities courts are erected to defend the weak against the strong, by correlating local customs in such wise that some general principle can be deduced which shall protect the civil rights of those who cannot protect themselves, against the arbitrary exactions of powerful neighbors. In no community can every person have equal civil rights. That is impossible. Civil rights must vary according to status. But such rights as any person may have, those the courts are bound to guard indifferently. If the courts do not perform this, their first and most sacred duty, I apprehend that order cannot be permanently maintained, for this is equality before the law; and equality before the law is the cornerstone of order in every modern state. I conceive that the lawyers of the age of Washington were the ablest that America has ever produced. No men ever understood the principle of equality before the law more thoroughly than they, and after the establishment of this government a long series of great and upright magistrates strove, as I have shown, to carry this principle into effect. Jay and Marshall, Story and Bradley, and many, many more, struggled, protested, and failed. Failed, as I believe, through no fault of their own, but because fortune had placed them in a position untenable for the judge. When plunged in the vortex of politics, courts must waver as do legislatures, and nothing is to me more painful than to watch the process of deterioration by which our judges lose the instinct which should warn them to shun legislation as a breach of trust, and to cleave to those general principles which permit of no exceptions. To illustrate my meaning I shall refer to but one litigation, but that one is so extraordinary that I must deal with it in detail. In 1890 the dread of the enhancement of prices by monopoly, as the Supreme Court itself has explained, caused Congress to pass the famous Sherman Act, which prohibited indiscriminately all monopolies or restraints of trade. Presently the government brought a bill to dissolve an obnoxious railway pool, called the Trans-Missouri Freight Association, and in 1896 the case came up for adjudication. I have nothing to say touching the policy involved. I am only concerned with a series of phenomena, developed through several years, as effects of pressure acting upon a judiciary, exposed as the judiciary, under our system, is exposed. The Trans-Missouri Case was argued on December 8, 1896, very elaborately and by the most eminent counsel. After long consideration, and profound reflection, Mr. Justice Peckham, speaking for the majority of the tribunal, laid down a general principle in conformity to the legislative will, precisely as Marshall had laid down a general principle in the Dartmouth College Case, or Story in the Charles River Bridge Case, or Waite in Munn _v_. Illinois, or Bradley in the Minnesota Rate Case. Then the process of agitation immediately began. In the words of Mr. Justice Harlan, fifteen years later: "But those who were in combinations that were illegal did not despair. They at once set up the baseless claim that the decision of 1896 disturbed the 'business interests of the country,' and let it be known that they would never be content until the rule was established that would permit interstate commerce to be subjected to _reasonable_ restraints."[34] Other great causes, involving the same issue, were tried, the question was repeatedly reargued, but the Supreme Court tenaciously adhered to its general principle, that, under the Sherman Act, _all_ restraints of trade, or monopolies, were unlawful, and, therefore, the Court had but two matters before it, first to define a restraint of trade or a monopoly, second to determine whether the particular combination complained of fell within that definition. No discretion was permitted. Judicial duty ended there. The Court being found to be inflexible, recourse was had to Congress, and a bill in the form of an amendment to the Sherman Act was brought into the Senate authorizing, in substance, those who felt unsafe under the law, to apply to certain government officials, to be permitted to produce evidence of the reasonable methods they employed, and, if the evidence were satisfactory, to receive, what was tantamount to, an indulgence. The subject thus reopened, the Senate Committee on the Judiciary went into the whole question of monopoly anew, and in 1909 Senator Nelson presented an exhaustive report against the proposed relaxation. Thereupon the Senate indefinitely postponed further consideration of the amendment. The chief reasons given by Senator Nelson were summed up in a single sentence: "The defence of reasonable restraint would be made in every case and there would be as many different rules of reasonableness as cases, courts, and juries.... To amend the anti-trust act, as suggested by this bill, would be to entirely emasculate it, and for all practical purposes render it nugatory as a remedial statute.... The act as it exists is clear, comprehensive, certain and highly remedial. It practically covers the field of federal jurisdiction, and is in every respect a model law. To destroy or undermine it at the present juncture, ... would be a calamity. "In view of the foregoing, your committee recommend the indefinite postponement of the bill."[35] And so the Senate did indefinitely postpone the bill. Matters stood thus when the government brought process to dissolve the Standard Oil Company, as an unlawful combination. The cause was decided on May 15, 1911, the Chief Justice speaking for the majority of the bench, in one of the most suggestive opinions which I have ever read. To me this opinion, like Taney's opinion in the Charles River Bridge Case, indicates that the tension had reached the breaking point, the court yielding in all directions at once, while the dominant preoccupation of the presiding judge seemed to be to plant his tribunal in such a position that it could so yield, without stultifying itself hopelessly before the legal profession and the public. In striving to reach this position, however, I apprehend that the Chief Justice, unreservedly, crossed the chasm on whose brink American jurists had been shuddering for ninety years. The task the Chief Justice assumed was difficult almost beyond precedent. He proposed to surrender to the vested interests the principle of _reasonableness_ which they demanded, and which the tribunal he represented, together with Congress, had refused to surrender for fifteen years. To pacify the public, which would certainly resent this surrender, he was prepared to punish two hated corporations, while he strove to preserve, so far as he could, the respect of the legal profession and of the public, for the court over which he presided, by maintaining a semblance of consistency. To accomplish these contradictory results, the Chief Justice began, rather after the manner of Marshall in Marbury _v_. Madison, by an extra-judicial disquisition. The object of this disquisition was to justify his admission of the evidence of reasonableness as a defence, although it was not needful to decide that such evidence must be admitted in order to dispose of that particular cause. For the Chief Justice very readily agreed that the Standard Oil Company was, in fact, an unreasonable restraint of trade, and must be dissolved, no matter whether it were allowed to prove its reasonable methods or not. Accordingly, he might have contented himself with stating that, admitting for the sake of argument but without approving, all the defendant advanced, he should sustain the government; but to have so disposed of the case would not have suited his purpose. What the Chief Justice had it at heart to do was to surrender a fundamental principle, and yet to appear to make no surrender at all. Hence, he prepared his preliminary and extra-judicial essay on the human reason, of whose precise meaning, I must admit, I still, after many perusals, have grave doubts. I sometimes suspect that the Chief Justice did not wish to be too explicit. So far as I comprehend the Chief Justice, his chain of reasoning amounted to something like this: It was true, he observed, that for fifteen years the Supreme Court had rejected the evidence of reasonableness which he admitted, and had insisted upon a general principle which he might be supposed to renounce, but this apparent discrepancy involved no contradiction. It was only a progression in thought. For, he continued, the judges who, on various previous occasions, sustained that general principle, must have reached their conclusions by the light of reason; to-day we reach a contrary conclusion, but we also do so by the light of reason; therefore, as all these decisions are guided by the light of reason they fundamentally coincide, however much superficially they may seem to differ.[36] I have never supposed that this argument carried complete conviction either to the legal profession, to the public, or to Congress. Certainly, it did not convince Mr. Justice Harlan, who failed to fathom it, and bluntly expressed his astonishment in a dissenting opinion in another cause from which I regret to say I can only quote a couple of paragraphs, although the whole deserves attentive perusal:-- "If I do not misapprehend the opinion just delivered, the Court insists that what was said in the opinion in the Standard Oil Case, was in accordance with our previous decisions in the Trans-Missouri and Joint Traffic Cases, ... if we resort to _reason_. This statement surprises me quite as much as would a statement that black was white or white was black." "But now the Court, in accordance with what it denominates the 'rule of reason,' in effect inserts in the act the word 'undue,' which means the same as 'unreasonable,' and thereby makes Congress say what it did not say.... And what, since the passage of the act, it has explicitly refused to say.... In short, the Court now, by judicial legislation, in effect, amends an Act of Congress relating to a subject over which that department of the Government has exclusive cognizance."[37] The phenomenon which amazed Mr. Justice Harlan is, I conceive, perfectly comprehensible, if we reflect a little on the conflict of forces involved, and on the path of least resistance open to an American judge seeking to find for this conflict, a resultant. The regulation or the domination of monopoly was an issue going to the foundation of society, and popular and financial energy had come into violent impact in regard to the control of prices. Popular energy found vent through Congress, while the financiers, as financiers always have and always will, took shelter behind the courts. Congress, in 1890, passed a statute to constrain monopolies, against which financiers protested as being a species of confiscation, and which the Chief Justice himself thought harsh. To this statute the Supreme Court gave a harsh construction, as the Chief Justice had more than once pointed out, when he was still an associate upon the bench. From a series of these decisions an appeal had been made to Congress, and the Senate, in the report from which I have quoted, had sustained the construction given to the statute by the majority of his brethren with whom the Chief Justice differed. Since the last of these decisions, however, the complexion of the bench had been considerably changed by new appointments, much as it had been after Hepburn _v_. Griswold, and an opportunity seemed to be presented to conciliate every one. In any other country than the United States, a chief justice so situated would doubtless have affirmed the old precedents, permitting himself, at most, to point out the mischief which, he thought, they worked. Not so a lawyer nurtured under the American constitutional system, which breeds in the judge the conviction that he is superior to the legislator. His instinct, under adequate pressure, is always to overrule anything repugnant to him that a legitimate legislative assembly may have done. In this instance, had the case been one of first impression, nothing would have been easier than to have nullified the Sherman Act as an unreasonable exercise of the Police Power, as judges had been nullifying statutes of which they disapproved for a couple of generations previously; but the case was not one of first impression. On the contrary, the constitutionality of the Sherman Act had been so often upheld by the judiciary that the Chief Justice himself admitted that so long as Congress allowed him to use his reason, these "contentions [were] plainly foreclosed." Therefore, for him the path of least resistance was to use his _reason_, and, as a magistrate, to amend a statute which Congress ought to have amended, but had _unreasonably_ omitted to amend. Such was the final and logical result of the blending of judicial and legislative functions in a court, as they are blended under the American constitutional system. Nor is it unworthy of remark, that the Chief Justice, in abstaining from questioning the constitutionality of the act, expressly intimated that he did so because, by the use of his reason, he could make that reasonable and constitutional which otherwise might be unreasonable and unconstitutional. The defendants pressed the argument that destroying the freedom of contract, as the Sherman Law destroyed it, was to infringe upon the "constitutional guaranty of due process of law." To this the Chief Justice rejoined: "But the ultimate foundation of all these arguments is the assumption that reason may not be resorted to in interpreting and applying the statute.... As the premise is demonstrated to be unsound by the construction we have given the statute," these arguments need no further notice.[38] Should Congress amend the Sherman Act, as it seems somewhat disposed to do, by explicitly enacting the rule of the Trans-Missouri Case, a grave issue would be presented. The Chief Justice might submit, and thus avert, temporarily at least, a clash; or, he might hold such an amendment unconstitutional as denying to the Court the right to administer the law according to due process. A trial of strength would then be imminent. Nearly a century ago, Jefferson wrote to Spencer Roane, "The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please."[39] And however much we may recoil from admitting Jefferson's conclusion to be true, it none the less remains the fact that it has proved itself to be true, and that the people have recognized it to be true, and have taken measures to protect themselves by bringing the judiciary under the same degree of control which they enforce on other legislators. The progression has been steady and uniform, each advance toward an assumption of the legislative function by the judiciary having been counterbalanced by a corresponding extension of authority over the courts by the people. First came the protest against Marbury and Madison in the impeachment of Chase, because, as Giles explained, if judges were to annul laws, the dominant party must have on the bench judges they could trust. Next the Supreme Court of New York imagined the theory of the Police Power, which was adopted by the Supreme Court of the United States in 1837. But it stood to reason that if judges were to suspend constitutional limitations according to their notions of reasonableness, the people must have the means of securing judges whose views touching reasonableness coincided with their own. And behold, within ten years, by the constitution of 1846, New York adopted an elective judiciary. Then followed the Dred Scott Case, the Civil War, and the attack on legislative authority in Hepburn _v_. Griswold. Straightway the Court received an admonition which it remembered for a generation. Somewhat forgetful of this, on May 15, 1911, Chief Justice White gave his opinion in the Standard Oil Case, which followed hard upon a number of state decisions intended to override legislation upon several burning social issues. Forthwith, in 1912, the proposition to submit all decisions involving a question of constitutional law to a popular vote became an issue in a presidential election. Only one step farther could be taken, and that we see being taken all about us. Experience has shown, in New York and elsewhere, that an election, even for a somewhat short term, does not bring the judge so immediately under popular control that decisions objectionable to the majority may not be made. Hence the recall. The degradation of the judicial function can, in theory at least, go no farther. Thus the state courts may be said already to be prostrate, or likely shortly to become prostrate. The United States courts alone remain, and, should there be a struggle between them and Congress, the result can hardly be doubted. An event has recently occurred abroad which we may do well to ponder. Among European nations England has long represented intelligent conservatism, and at the heart of her conservatism lay the House of Lords. Through many centuries; and under many vicissitudes this ancient chamber had performed functions of the highest moment, until of late it had come to occupy a position not dissimilar to that which the Supreme Court of the United States yet holds. On one side it was the highest legal tribunal of the Empire, on the other it was a non-representative assembly, seldom indeed originating important legislation, but enjoying an absolute veto on legislation sent it from the Commons. One day in a moment of heated controversy the Lords vetoed a bill on which the Commons had determined. A dissolution followed and the House of Lords, as a political power, faded into a shadow; yet, notwithstanding this, its preeminence as a court has remained intact. Were a similar clash to occur in America no such result could be anticipated. Supposing a President, supported by a congressional majority, were to formulate some policy no more subversive than that which has been formulated by the present British Cabinet, and this policy were to be resisted, as it surely would be, by potent financial interests, the conflicting forces would converge upon the Supreme Court. The courts are always believed to tend toward conservatism, therefore they are generally supported by the conservative interest, both here and elsewhere. In this case a dilemma would be presented. Either the judges would seek to give expression to "preponderant" popular opinion, or they would legislate. In the one event they would be worthless as a restraining influence. In the other, I apprehend, a blow would fall similar to the blow which fell upon the House of Lords, only it would cut deeper. Shearing the House of Lords of political power did not dislocate the administration of English justice, because the law lords are exclusively judges. They never legislate. Therefore no one denounced them. Not even the wildest radical demanded that their tenure should be made elective, much less that they should be subjected to the recall. With us an entirely different problem would be presented for solution. A tribunal, nominally judicial, would throw itself across the path of the national movement. It would undertake to correct a disturbance of the social equilibrium. But what a shifting of the social equilibrium means, and what follows upon tampering with it, is a subject which demands a chapter by itself. FOOTNOTES: [18] 6 Cranch 135. [19] New Jersey _v_. Wilson, 7 Cranch 164; decided in 1812. [20] Coates _v_. Mayor of New York, 7 Cowen 585. [21] Charles River Bridge _v_. Warren Bridge, 11 Peters 420, 553. [22] Boston & Maine Railroad _v_. County Commissioners, 79 Maine 393. [23] Wynehamer _v_. The People, 13 N.Y. 393. [24] Mugler _v._ Kansas, 133 U.S. 623. [25] Fertilizing Co. _v_. Hyde Park, 97 U.S. 659. [26] Slaughter House Cases, 16 Wallace 78, decided in 1873. [27] 94 U.S. 113. [28] Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul Ry. _v._ Minnesota, 134 U.S. 461, decided March 24, 1890. [29] Noble State Bank _v._ Haskell, 219 U.S. 104. [30] See the extraordinary case of Douglas _v._ Kentucky, 168 U.S. 488, which must be read in connection with Gregory _v._ Trustees of Shelby College, 2 Metc. (Kentucky) 589. [31] Brass _v._ North Dakota, 133 U.S. 391. [32] 169 U.S. 466. [33] _The Federalist_, No. LXXVIII. [34] 221 U.S. 91. [35] 60th Congress, 2d Session, Senate, Report No. 848, Adverse Report by Mr. Nelson, Amending Anti-trust Act, January 26, 1909, page 11. [36] Standard Oil Company _v_. United States, 221 U.S. 1. [37] United States _v_. American Tobacco Company, 221 U.S. 191, 192. [38] 221 U.S. 69. [39] To Spencer Roane, Sept. 6, 1819, Ford, 10, 141. CHAPTER IV THE SOCIAL EQUILIBRIUM I assume it as self-evident that those who, at any given moment, are the strongest in any civilization, will be those who are at once the ruling class, those who own most property, and those who have most influence on legislation. The weaker will fare hardly in proportion to their weakness. Such is the order of nature. But, since those are the strongest through whom nature finds it, for the time being, easiest to vent her energy, and as the whole universe is in ceaseless change, it follows that the composition of ruling classes is never constant, but shifts to correspond with the shifting environment. When this movement is so rapid that men cannot adapt themselves to it, we call the phenomenon a revolution, and it is with revolutions that I now have to do. Nothing is more certain than that the intellectual adaptability of the individual man is very limited. A ruling class is seldom conscious of its own decay, and most of the worst catastrophes of history have been caused by an obstinate resistance to change when resistance was no longer possible. Thus while an incessant alteration in social equilibrium is inevitable, a revolution is a problem in dynamics, on the correct solution of which the fortunes of a declining class depend. For example, the modern English landlords replaced the military feudal aristocracy during the sixteenth century, because the landlords had more economic capacity and less credulity. The men who supplanted the mediaeval soldiers in Great Britain had no scruple about robbing the clergy of their land, and because of this quality they prospered greatly. Ultimately the landlords reached high fortune by controlling the boroughs which had, in the Middle Ages, acquired the right to return members to the House of Commons. Their domination lasted long; nevertheless, about 1760, the rising tide of the Industrial Revolution brought forward another type of mind. Flushed by success in the Napoleonic wars the Tories failed to appreciate that the social equilibrium, by the year 1830, had shifted, and that they no longer commanded enough physical force to maintain their parliamentary ascendancy. They thought they had only to be arrogant to prevail, and so they put forward the Duke of Wellington as their champion. They could hardly have made a poorer choice. As Disraeli has very truly said, "His Grace precipitated a revolution which might have been delayed for half a century, and need never have occurred in so aggravated a form." The Duke, though a great general, lacked knowledge of England. He began by dismissing William Huskisson from his Cabinet, who was not only its ablest member, but perhaps the single man among the Tories who thoroughly comprehended the industrial age. Huskisson's issue was that the franchise of the intolerably corrupt East Retford should be given to Leeds or Manchester. Having got rid of Huskisson, the Duke declared imperiously that he would concede nothing to the disfranchised industrial magnates, nor to the vast cities in which they lived. A dissolution of Parliament followed and in the election the Tories were defeated. Although Wellington may not have been a sagacious statesman, he was a capable soldier and he knew when he could and when he could not physically fight. On this occasion, to again quote Disraeli, "He rather fled than retired." He induced his friends to absent themselves from the House of Lords and permit the Reform Bill to become law. Thus the English Tories, by their experiment with the Duke of Wellington, lost their boroughs and with them their political preeminence, but at least they saved themselves, their families, and the rest of their property. As a class they have survived to this day, although shorn of much of the influence which they might very probably have retained had they solved more correctly the problem of 1830. In sum, they were not altogether impervious to the exigencies of their environment. The French Revolution is the classic example of the annihilation of a rigid organism, and it is an example the more worthy of our attention as it throws into terrible relief the process by which an intellectually inflexible race may convert the courts of law which should protect their decline into the most awful engine for their destruction. The essence of feudalism was a gradation of rank, in the nature of caste, based upon fear. The clergy were privileged because the laity believed that they could work miracles, and could dispense something more vital even than life and death. The nobility were privileged because they were resistless in war. Therefore, the nobility could impose all sorts of burdens upon those who were unarmed. During the interval in which society centralized and acquired more and more a modern economic form, the discrepancies in status remained, while commensurately the physical or imaginative force which had once sustained inequality declined, until the social equilibrium grew to be extremely unstable. Add to this that France, under the monarchy, was ill consolidated. The provinces and towns retained the administrative complexity of an archaic age, even to local tariffs. Thus under the monarchy privilege and inequality pervaded every phase of life, and, as the judiciary must be, more or less, the mouthpiece of society, the judiciary came to be the incarnation of caste. Speaking broadly, the judicial office, under the monarchy, was vendible. In legal language, it was an incorporeal hereditament. It could be bought and sold and inherited like an advowson, or right to dispose of a cure of souls in the English Church, or of a commission in the English army. The system was well recognized and widespread in the eighteenth century, and worked fairly well with the French judiciary for about three hundred years, but it was not adapted to an industrial environment. The judicial career came to be pretty strongly hereditary in a few families, and though the members of these families were, on the whole, self-respecting, honest, and learned, they held office in their own right and not as a public trust. So in England members of the House of Commons, who sat for nomination boroughs, did not, either in fact or theory, represent the inhabitants of those boroughs, but patrons; and in like manner French judges could never learn to regard themselves as the trustees of the civil rights of a nation, but as a component part of a class who held a status by private title. Looked at as a problem in dynamics the inherent vice in all this kind of property and in all this administrative system, was the decay, after 1760, of the physical force which had engendered it and defended it. As in England the ascendancy of the landlords passed away when England turned from an agricultural into an industrial society, so in France priests and nobles fell into contempt, when most peasants knew that the Church could neither harm by its curse nor aid by its blessing, and when commissions in the army were given to children or favorites, as a sort of pension, while the pith of the nation was excluded from military command because it could not prove four quarterings of nobility. Hardly an aristocrat in France had shown military talent for a generation, while, when the revolution began, men like Jourdan and Kleber, Ney and Augereau, and a host of other future marshals and generals had been dismissed from the army, or were eating out their hearts as petty officers with no hope of advancement. Local privileges and inequalities were as intolerable as personal. There were privileged provinces and those administered arbitrarily by the Crown, there were a multiplicity of internal tariffs, and endless municipal franchises and monopolies, so much so that economists estimated that, through artificial restraints, one-quarter of the soil of France lay waste. Turgot, in his edict on the grain trade, explained that kings in the past by ordinance, or the police without royal authority, had compiled a body "of legislation equivalent to a prohibition of bringing grain into Paris," and this condition was universal. One province might be starving and another oppressed with abundance. Meanwhile, under the stimulant of applied science, centralization went on resistlessly, and the cost of administration is proportionate to centralization. To bear the burden of a centralized government taxes must be equal and movement free, but here was a rapidly centralizing nation, the essence of whose organism was that taxes should be unequal and that movement should be restricted. As the third quarter of the eighteenth century closed with the death of Louis XV, all intelligent French administrators recognized the dilemma; either relief must be given, or France must become insolvent, and revolution supervene upon insolvency. But for the aristocracy revolution had no terrors, for they believed that they could crush revolution as their class had done for a thousand years. Robert Turgot was born in 1727, of a respectable family. His father educated him for the Church, but lack of faith caused him to prefer the magistracy, and on the death of his father he obtained a small place in the Court of Parliament. Afterward he became a Master of Requests, and served for seven years in that judicial position, before he was made Intendant of the Province of Limousin. Even thus early in life Turgot showed political sagacity. In an address at the Sorbonne he supported the thesis that "well-timed reform alone averts revolution." Distinguishing himself as Intendant, on the death of Louis XV the King called Turgot to the Council of State, and in August, 1774, Turgot became Minister of Finance. He came in pledged to reform, and by January, 1776, he had formulated his plan. In that month he presented to the King his memorable Six Edicts, the first of which was the most celebrated state paper he ever wrote. It was the Edict for the Suppression of the Corvée. The corvée threw the burden of maintaining the highways on the peasantry by exacting forced labor. It was admittedly the most hateful, the most burdensome, and the most wasteful of all the bad taxes of the time, and Turgot, following the precedent of the Roman Empire, advised instead a general highway impost. The proposed impost in itself was not considerable, and would not have been extraordinarily obnoxious to the privileged classes, but for the principle of equality by which Turgot justified it: "The expenses of government having for their object the interests of all, all should contribute to them; and the more advantages a man has, the more that man should contribute." Nor was this the most levelling of Turgot's arguments. He pointed out that though originally the exemption from taxation, which the nobility enjoyed, might have been defended on the ground that the nobles were bound to yield military service without pay, such service had long ceased to be performed, while on the contrary titles could be bought for money. Hence every wealthy man became a noble when he pleased, and thus exemption from taxation had come to present the line of cleavage between the rich and poor. By this thrust the privileged classes felt themselves wounded in their vitals, and the Parliament of Paris, the essence of privilege, assumed their defence. To be binding, the edicts had to be registered by the Parliament among the laws of France, and Parliament declined to make registration on the ground that the edicts were unconstitutional, as subversive of the monarchy and of the principle of order. The opinion of the court was long, but a single paragraph gives its purport: "The first rule of justice is to preserve to every one what belongs to him: this rule consists, not only in preserving the rights of property, but still more in preserving those belonging to the person, which arise from the prerogative of birth and of position.... From this rule of law and equity it follows that every system which, under an appearance of humanity and beneficence, would tend to establish between men an equality of duties, and to destroy necessary distinctions, would soon lead to disorder (the inevitable result of equality), and would bring about the overturn of civil society." This judicial opinion was an enunciation of the archaic law of caste as opposed to the modern law of equality, and the cataclysm of the French Revolution hinged upon the incapacity of the French aristocracy to understand that the environment, which had once made caste a necessity, had yielded to another which made caste an impossibility. In vain Turgot and his contemporaries of the industrial type, represented in England by Adam Smith or even by the younger Pitt, explained that unless taxes were equalized and movement accelerated, insolvency must supervene, and that a violent readjustment must follow upon insolvency. With their eyes open to the consequences, the Nobility and Clergy elected to risk revolt, because they did not believe that revolt could prevail against them. Nothing is so impressive in the mighty convulsion which ensued as the mental opacity of the privileged orders, which caused them to increase their pressure in proportion as resistance increased, until finally those who were destined to replace them reorganized the courts, that they might have an instrument wherewith to slaughter a whole race down to the women and children. No less drastic method would serve to temper the rigidity of the aristocratic mind. The phenomenon well repays an hour of study. Insolvency came within a decade after Turgot's fall, as Turgot had demonstrated that it must come, and an insolvency immediately precipitated by the rapacity of the court which had most need of caution. The future Louis XVIII, for example, who was then known as the Comte de Provence, on one occasion, when the government had made a loan, appropriated a quarter of it, laughingly observing, "When I see others hold out their hands, I hold out my hat." In 1787 the need for money became imperative, and, not daring to appeal to the nation, the King convoked an assembly of "notables," that is to say of the privileged. Calonne, the minister, proposed pretty much the measures of Turgot, and some of these measures the "notables" accepted, but the Parliament of Paris again intervened and declined to register the laws. The Provincial Parliaments followed the Parliament of Paris. After this the King had no alternative but to try the experiment of calling the States-General. They met on May 4, 1789, and instantly an administrative system, which no longer rested upon a social centre of gravity, crumbled, carrying the judiciary with it. At first the three estates sat separately. If this usage had continued, the Clergy and the Nobles combined would have annulled every measure voted by the Commons. For six weeks the Commons waited. Then on June 10, the Abbé Sieyès said, "Let us cut the cable. It is time." So the Clergy and the Nobility were summoned, and some of the Clergy obeyed. This sufficed. On motion of Sieyès, the Commons proclaimed themselves the National Assembly, and the orders fused. Immediately caste admitted defeat and through its mouthpiece, the King, commanded the Assembly to dissolve. The Commons refused to dissolve, and the Nobles prepared for a _coup d'etat._ The foreign regiments, in the pay of the government, were stationed about Paris, while the Bastille, which was supposed to be impregnable, was garrisoned with Swiss. In reply, on July 14, 1789, the citizens of Paris stormed the Bastille. An unstable social equilibrium had been already converted by pressure into a revolution. Nevertheless, excentric as the centre of gravity had now become, it might have been measurably readjusted had the privileged classes been able to reason correctly from premise to conclusion. Men like Lafayette and Mirabeau still controlled the Assembly, and if the King and the Nobility had made terms, probably the monarchy might have been saved, certainly the massacres would have been averted. As a decaying class is apt to do, the Nobility did that which was worst for themselves. Becoming at length partly conscious of a lack of physical force in France to crush the revolution, a portion of the nobility, led by the Comte d'Artois, the future Charles X, fled to Germany to seek for help abroad, while the bolder remained to plan an attack on the rebellion. On October 1, 1789, a great military banquet was given at Versailles. The King and Queen with the Dauphin were present. A royalist demonstration began. The bugles sounded a charge, the officers drew their swords, and the ladies of the court tore the tricolor from the soldiers' coats and replaced it with the white cockade. On October 5, a vast multitude poured out of Paris, and marched to Versailles. The next day they broke into the palace, killed the guards, and carried the King and Queen captive to the Tuileries. But Louis was so intellectually limited that he could not keep faith with those who wished him well. On July 14, 1790, the King swore, before half a million spectators, to maintain the new constitution. In that summer he was plotting to escape to Metz and join the army which had been collected there under the Marquis de Bouillé, while Bouillé himself, after the rising at Nancy, was busy in improving discipline by breaking on the wheel a selection of the soldiers of the Swiss regiment of Châteauvieux which had refused to march against Paris on the 14th of July, 1789. In October, 1790, Louis wrote to the King of Spain and other sovereigns to pay no heed to his concessions for he only yielded to duress, and all this even as Mirabeau made his supreme effort to save those who were fixed upon destroying themselves. Mirabeau sought the King and offered his services. The court sneered at him as a dupe. The Queen wrote, "We make use of Mirabeau, but we do not take him seriously." When Mirabeau awoke to his predicament, he broke out in mixed wrath and scorn: "Of what are these people thinking? Do they not see the abyss yawning at their feet? Both the King and Queen will perish, and you will live to see the rabble spurn their corpses." The King and Queen, the Nobility and Clergy, could not see the abyss which Mirabeau saw, any more than the lawyers could see it, because of the temper of their minds. In the eye of caste Europe was not primarily divided into nations to whom allegiance was due, but into superimposed orders. He who betrayed his order committed the unpardonable crime. Death were better than that. But to the true aristocrat it was inconceivable that serfs could ever vanquish nobles in battle. Battle must be the final test, and the whole aristocracy of Europe was certain, Frenchmen knew, to succor the French aristocracy in distress. So in the winter of 1790 the French fugitives congregated at Coblentz on the German frontier, persuaded that they were performing a patriotic duty in organizing an invasion of their country even should their onset be fatal to their relatives and to their King. And Louis doubted not that he also did his duty as a trustee of a divine commission when he in one month swore, before the Assembly, to maintain the constitution tendered him, and in the next authorized his brother, the Comte d'Artois, to make the best combination he could among his brother sovereigns for the gathering of an army to assert his divine prerogative. On June 21, 1791, Louis fled, with his whole family, to join the army of Bouillé, with intent to destroy the entire race of traitors from Mirabeau and Lafayette down to the peasants. He managed so ill that he was arrested at Varennes, and brought back whence he came, but he lied and plotted still. Two years had elapsed between the meeting of the States-General and the flight to Varennes, and in that interval nature had been busy in selecting her new favored class. Economists have estimated that the Church owned one-third of the land of Europe during the Middle Ages. However this may have been she certainly held a very large part of France. On April 16, 1790, the Assembly declared this territory to be national property, and proceeded to sell it to the peasantry by means of the paper _assignats_ which were issued for the purpose, and were supposed to be secured upon the land. The sales were generally made in little lots, as the sales were made of the public domain in Rome under the Licinian Laws, and with an identical effect. The Emperor of Germany and the King of Prussia met at Pilnitz in August, 1791, to consider the conquest of France, and, on the eve of that meeting, the Assembly received a report which stated that these lands to the value of a thousand million francs had already been distributed, and that sales were going on. It was from this breed of liberated husbandmen that France drew the soldiers who fought her battles and won her victories for the next five and twenty years. Assuming that the type of the small French landholder, both rural and urban, had been pretty well developed by the autumn of 1791, the crisis came rapidly, for the confiscations which created this new energy roused to frenzy, perhaps the most formidable energy which opposed it. The Church had not only been robbed of her property but had been wounded in her tenderest part. By a decree of June 12, 1790, the Assembly transferred the allegiance of the French clergy from the Pope to the state, and the priesthood everywhere vowed revenge. In May, 1791, the Marquis de la Rouërie, it is true, journeyed from his home in Brittany to Germany to obtain the recognition of the royal princes for the insurrection which he contemplated in La Vendée, but the insurrection when it occurred was not due so much to him or his kind as to the influence of the nonjuring priests upon the peasant women of the West. The mental condition of the French emigrants at Coblentz during this summer of 1791 is nothing short of a psychological marvel. They regarded the Revolution as a jest, and the flight to the Rhine as a picnic. These beggared aristocrats, male and female, would throw their money away by day among the wondering natives, and gamble among themselves at night. If they ever thought of the future it was only as the patricians in Pompey's camp thought; who had no time to prepare for a campaign against Caesar, because they were absorbed in distributing offices among themselves, or in inventing torments to inflict on the rebels. Their chief anxiety was lest the resistance should be too feeble to permit them to glut themselves with blood. The creatures of caste, the emigrants could not conceive of man as a variable animal, or of the birth of a race of warriors under their eyes. To them human nature remained constant. Such, they believed, was the immutable will of God. So it came to pass that, as the Revolution took its shape, a vast combination among the antique species came semi-automatically into existence, pledged to envelop and strangle the rising type of man, a combination, however, which only attained to maturity in 1793, after the execution of the King. Leopold II, Emperor of Germany, had hitherto been the chief restraining influence, both at Pilnitz and at Paris, through his correspondence with his sister, Marie Antoinette; but Leopold died on March 1, 1792, and was succeeded by Francis II, a fervid reactionist and an obedient son of the Church. Then caste fused throughout Germany, and Prussia and Austria prepared for war. Rouërie had returned to Brittany and only awaited the first decisive foreign success to stab the Revolution in the back. England also was ripening, and the instinct of caste, incarnated in George III, found its expression through Edmund Burke. In 1790 Burke published his "Reflections," and on May 6, 1791, in a passionate outbreak in the House of Commons, he renounced his friendship with Fox as a traitor to his order and his God. Men of Burke's temperament appreciated intuitively that there could be no peace between the rising civilization and the old, one of the two must destroy the other, and very few of them conceived it to be possible that the enfranchised French peasantry and the small bourgeoisie could endure the shock of all that, in their eyes, was intelligent, sacred, and martial in the world. Indeed, aristocracy had, perhaps, some justification for arrogance, since the revolt in France fell to its lowest depth of impotence between the meeting at Pilnitz in August, 1791, and the reorganization of the Committee of Public Safety in July, 1793. Until August, 1792, the executive authority remained with the King, but the court of Louis was the focus of resistance to the Revolution, and even though a quasi-prisoner the King was still strong. Monarchy had a firm hold on liberal nobles like Mirabeau and Lafayette, on adventurers like Dumouriez, and even on lawyers like Danton who shrank from excessive cruelty. Had the pure Royalists been capable of enough intellectual flexibility to keep faith upon any reasonable basis of compromise, even as late as 1792, the Revolution might have been benign. In June, 1792, Lafayette, who commanded the army of the North, came to Paris and not only ventured to lecture the Assembly on its duty, but offered to take Louis to his army, who would protect him against the Jacobins. The court laughed at Lafayette as a Don Quixote, and betrayed his plans to the enemy. "I had rather perish," said the Queen, "than be saved by M. de Lafayette and his constitutional friends." And in this she only expressed the conviction which the caste to which she belonged held of their duty. Cazalés protested to the Assembly, "Though the King perish, let us save the kingdom." The Archduchess Christina wrote to her sister, Marie Antoinette, "What though he be slain, if we shall triumph," and Condé, in December, 1790, swore that he would march on Lyons, "come what might to the King." France was permeated with archaic thought which disorganized the emerging society until it seemingly had no cohesion. To the French emigrant on the Rhine that society appeared like a vile phantom which had but to be exorcised to vanish. And the exorcism to which he had recourse was threats of vengeance, threats which before had terrified, because they had behind them a force which made them good. Torture had been an integral part of the old law. The peasant expected it were he insubordinate. Death alone was held to be too little to inspire respect for caste. Some frightful spectacle was usually provided to magnify authority. Thus Bouillé broke on the wheel, while the men were yet alive, every bone in the bodies of his soldiers when they disobeyed him; and for scratching Louis XV, with a knife, Damiens, after indescribable agonies, was torn asunder by horses in Paris, before an immense multitude. The French emigrants believed that they had only to threaten with a similar fate men like Kellermann and Hoche to make them flee without a blow. What chiefly concerned the nobles, therefore, was not to evolve a masterly campaign, but to propound the fundamental principles of monarchy, and to denounce an awful retribution on insurgents. By the middle of July, 1792, the Prussians were ready to march, and emperors, kings, and generals were meditating manifestoes. Louis sent the journalist Mallet du Pan to the Duke of Brunswick, the commander-in-chief, to assist him in his task. On July 24, and on August 4, 1792, the King of Prussia laid down the law of caste as emphatically as had the Parliament of Paris some twenty years before. On July 25, the Duke of Brunswick pronounced the doom of the conquered. I come, said the King of Prussia, to prevent the incurable evils which will result to France, to Europe and to all mankind from the spread of the spirit of insubordination, and to this end I shall establish the monarchical power upon a stable basis. For, he continued in the later proclamation, "the supreme authority in France being never ceasing and indivisible, the King could neither be deprived nor voluntarily divest himself of any of the prerogatives of royalty, because he is obliged to transmit them entire with his own crown to his successors." The Duke of Brunswick's proclamation contained some clauses written expressly for him by Mallet du Pan, and by Limon the Royalist. If the Palace of the Tuileries be forced, if the least violence be offered to their Majesties, if they are not immediately set at liberty, then will the King of Prussia and the Emperor of Germany inflict "on those who shall deserve it the most exemplary and ever-memorable avenging punishments." These proclamations reached Paris on July 28, and simultaneously the notorious Fersen wrote the Queen of France, "You have the manifesto, and you should be content." The court actually believed that, having insulted and betrayed Lafayette and all that body of conservative opinion which might have steadied the social equilibrium, they could rely on the fidelity of regiments filled with men against whom the emigrants and their allies, the Prussians, had just denounced an agonizing death, such as Bouillé's soldiers had undergone, together with the destruction of their homes. All the world knows what followed. The Royalists had been gathering a garrison for the Tuileries ever since Lafayette's visit, in anticipation of a trial of strength with the Revolutionists. They had brought thither the Swiss guard, fifteen hundred strong; the palace was full of Royalist gentlemen; Mandat, who commanded the National Guard, had been gained over. The approaches were swept by artillery. The court was very confident. On the night of August 9, Mandat was murdered, an insurrectional committee seized the City Hall, and when Louis XVI came forth to review the troops on the morning of the 10th of August, they shouted, "Vive la Nation" and deserted. Then the assault came, the Swiss guard was massacred, the Assembly thrust aside, and the royal family were seized and conveyed to the Temple. There the monarchy ended. Thus far had the irrational opposition of a moribund type thrown into excentricity the social equilibrium of a naturally conservative people. They were destined to drive it still farther. In this supreme moment, while the Prussians were advancing, France had no stable government and very imperfect means of keeping order. All the fighting men she could muster had marched to the frontier, and, even so, only a demoralized mass of levies, under Dumouriez and Kellermann, lay between the most redoutable regiments of the world and Paris. The emigrants and the Germans thought the invasion but a military promenade. At home treason to the government hardly cared to hide itself. During much of August the streets of Paris swarmed with Royalists who cursed the Revolution, and with priests more bitter than the Royalists. Under the windows of Louis, as he lay in the Temple, there were cries of "Long live the King," and in the prisons themselves the nobles drank to the allies and corresponded with the Prussians. Finally, Roland, who was minister, so far lost courage that he proposed to withdraw beyond the Loire, but Danton would hear of no retreat. "De l'audace," he cried, "encore de l'audace, et toujours de l'audace." The Assembly had not been responsible for the assault on the Tuileries on August 10, 1792. Filled with conservatives, it lacked the energy. That movement had been the work of a knot of radicals which had its centre in Danton's Club of the Cordeliers. Under their impulsion the sections of Paris chose commissioners who should take possession of the City Hall and eject the loyalist Council. They did so, and thus Danton became for a season the Minister of Justice and the foremost man in France. Danton was a semi-conservative. His tenure of power was the last possibility of averting the Terror. The Royalists, whom he trusted, themselves betrayed him, and Danton fell, to be succeeded by Robespierre and his political criminal courts. Meanwhile, on September 20, 1792, the Prussian column recoiled before the fire of Kellermann's mob of "vagabonds, cobblers and tailors," on the slope of Valmy, and with the victory of Valmy, the great eighteenth-century readjustment of the social equilibrium of Europe passed into its secondary stage. CHAPTER V POLITICAL COURTS In the eye of philosophy, perhaps the most alluring and yet illusive of all the phenomena presented by civilization is that which we have been considering. Why should a type of mind which has developed the highest prescience when advancing along the curve which has led it to ascendancy, be stricken with fatuity when the summit of the curve is passed, and when a miscalculation touching the velocity of the descent must be destruction? Although this phenomenon has appeared pretty regularly, at certain intervals, in the development of every modern nation, I conceive its most illuminating example to be that intellectual limitation of caste which, during the French Revolution, led to the creation of those political criminal tribunals which reached perfection with Robespierre. When coolly examined, at the distance of a century, the Royalist combination for the suppression of equality before the law, as finally evolved in 1792, did not so much lack military intelligence, as it lacked any approximate comprehension of the modern mind. The Royalists proposed to reëstablish privilege, and to do this they were ready to immolate, if necessary, their King and Queen, and all of their own order who stayed at home to defend them. Indeed, speaking generally, they valued Louis XVI, living, cheaply enough, counting him a more considerable asset if dead. "What a noise it would make throughout Europe," they whispered among themselves, "if the rabble should kill the King." Nor did Marie Antoinette delude herself on this score. At Pilnitz, in 1791, the German potentates issued a declaration touching France which was too moderate to suit the emigrants, who published upon it a commentary of their own. This commentary was so revolting that when the Queen read her brother-in-law's signature appended to it, she exclaimed--"Cain." The Royalist plan of campaign was this: They reckoned the energy of the Revolution so low that they counted pretty confidently, in the summer of 1792, on the ability of their party to defend the Tuileries against any force which could be brought against it; but assuming that the Tuileries could not be defended, and that the King and Queen should be massacred, they believed that their own position would be improved. Their monarchical allies would be thereby violently stimulated. It was determined, therefore, that, regardless of consequences to their friends, the invading army should cross the border into Lorraine and, marching by way of Sierk and Rodemach, occupy Châlons. Their entry into Châlons, which they were confident could not be held against them, because of the feeling throughout the country, was to be the signal for the rising in Vendée and Brittany which should sweep down upon Paris from the rear and make the capital untenable. At Châlons the allies would be but ninety miles from Paris, and then nothing would remain but vengeance, and vengeance the more complete the greater the crime had been. All went well with them up to Valmy. The German advance on August 11, 1792, reached Rodemach, and on August 19, the bulk of the Prussian army crossed the frontier at Rédagne. On August 20, 1792, Longwy was invested and in three days capitulated. In the camp of the Comte d'Artois "there was not one of us," wrote Las Casas, "who did not see himself, in a fortnight, triumphant, in his own home, surrounded by his humbled and submissive vassals." At length from their bivouacs at Saint-Remy and at Suippes the nobles saw in the distance the towers of Châlons. The panic at Châlons was so great that orders were given to cut the bridge across the Marne, but it was not until about September 2, that the whole peril was understood at Paris. It is true that for several weeks the government had been aware that the West was agitated and that Rouërie was probably conspiring among the Royalists and nonjuring priests, but they did not appreciate the imminence of the danger. On September 3, at latest, Danton certainly heard the details of the plot from a spy, and it was then, while others quailed, that he incited Paris to audacity. This was Danton's culmination. As we look back, the weakness of the Germans seems to have been psychological rather than physical. At Valmy the numbers engaged were not unequal, and while the French were, for the most part, raw and ill-compacted levies, with few trained officers, the German regiments were those renowned battalions of Frederick the Great whose onset, during the Seven Years' War, no adversary had been able to endure. Yet these redoubtable Prussians fell back in confusion without having seriously tried the French position, and their officers, apparently, did not venture to call upon them to charge again. In vain the French gentlemen implored the Prussian King to support them if they alone should storm Kellermann's batteries. Under the advice of the Duke of Brunswick the King decided on retreat. It is said that the Duke had as little heart in the war as Charles Fox, or, possibly, Pitt, or as his own troops. And yet he was so strong that Dumouriez, after his victory, hung back and offered the invaders free passage lest the Germans, if aroused, should turn on him and fight their way to the Marne. To the emigrants the retreat was terrible. It was a disaster from which, as a compact power, they never recovered. The rising in Vendée temporarily collapsed with the check at Châlons, and they were left literally naked unto their enemy. Some of them returned to their homes, preferring the guillotine to starvation, others, disguised in peasants' blouses, tried to reach Rouërie in La Vendée, some died from hardship, some committed suicide, while the bulk regained Liège and there waited as suppliants for assistance from Vienna. But these unfortunate men, who had entered so gayly upon a conflict whose significance they could not comprehend, had by this time lost more than lands and castles. Many of them had lost wives and children in one of the most frightful butcheries of history, and a butchery for which they themselves were responsible, because it was the inevitable and logical effect of their own intellectual limitations. When, after the affair of August 10, Danton and his party became masters of the incipient republic, Paris lay between two perils whose relative magnitude no one could measure. If Châlons fell, Vendée would rise, and the Republicans of the West would be massacred. Five months later Vendée did rise, and at Machecoul the patriots were slaughtered amidst nameless atrocities, largely at the instigation of the priests. In March, 1793, one hundred thousand peasants were under arms. Clearly the West could not be denuded of troops, and yet, if Châlons were to be made good, every available man had to be hurried to Kellermann, and this gigantic effort fell to the lot of a body of young and inexperienced adventurers who formed what could hardly be dignified with the name of an organized administration. For a long time Marat, with whom Danton had been obliged to coalesce, had been insisting that, if the enemy were to be resisted on the frontier, Paris must first be purged, for Paris swarmed with Royalists wild for revenge, and who were known to be arming. Danton was not yet prepared for extermination. He instituted domiciliary visits. He made about three thousand arrests and seized a quantity of muskets, but he liberated most of those who were under suspicion. The crisis only came with the news, on September 2, of the investment of Verdun, when no one longer could doubt that the net was closing about Paris. Verdun was but three or four days' march from Châlons. When the Duke of Brunswick crossed the Marne and Brittany revolted, the government would have to flee, as Roland proposed, and then the Royalists would burst the gates of the prisons and there would be another Saint Bartholomew. Toward four o'clock in the afternoon of September 2, 1792, the prison of the Abbaye was forced and the massacres began. They lasted until September 6, and through a circular sent out by Marat they were extended to Lyons, to Reims, and to other cities. About 1600 prisoners were murdered in Paris alone. Hardly any one has ever defended those slaughters. Even Marat called them "disastrous," and yet no one interfered. Neither Danton, nor Roland, nor the Assembly, nor the National Guard, nor the City of Paris, although the two or three hundred ruffians who did the work could have been dispersed by a single company of resolute men, had society so willed it. When Robespierre's time came he fell almost automatically. Though the head of the despotic "Committee of Public Safety," and nominally the most powerful man in France, he was sent to execution like the vilest and most contemptible of criminals by adversaries who would not command a regiment. The inference is that the September massacres, which have ever since been stigmatized as the deepest stain upon the Revolution, were, veritably, due to the Royalists, who made with the Republicans an issue of self-preservation. For this was no common war. In Royalist eyes it was a servile revolt, and was to be treated as servile revolts during the Middle Ages had always been treated. Again and again, with all solemnity, the Royalists had declared that were they to return as conquerors no stone of Paris should be left standing on another, and that the inhabitants should expire in the ashes of their homes on the rack and the wheel. Though Danton had many and obvious weaknesses he was a good lawyer, and Danton perceived that though he might not have been able to prevent the September massacres, and although they might have been and probably were inevitable under the tension which prevailed, yet that any court, even a political court, would be better than Marat's mob. Some months later he explained his position to the Convention when it was considering the erection of the tribunal which finally sent Danton himself to the scaffold. "Nothing is more difficult than to define a political crime. But, if a simple citizen, for any ordinary crime, receives immediate punishment, if it is so difficult to reach a political crime, is it not necessary that extraordinary laws ... intimidate the rebels and reach the culpable? Here public safety requires strong remedies and terrible measures. I see no compromise between ordinary forms and a revolutionary tribunal. History attests this truth; and since members have dared in this assembly to refer to those bloody days which every good citizen has lamented, I say that, if such a tribunal had then existed, the people who have been so often and so cruelly reproached for them, would never have stained them with blood; I say, and I shall have the assent of all who have watched these movements, that no human power could have checked the outburst of the national vengeance." In this perversion of the courts lay, as I understand it, the foulest horror of the French Revolution. It was the effect of the rigidity of privilege, a rigidity which found its incarnation in the judiciary. The constitutional decisions of the parliaments under the old régime would alone have made their continuance impossible, but the worst evil was that, after the shell crumbled, the mind within the shell survived, and discredited the whole regular administration of justice. When the National Assembly came to examine grievances it found protests against the judicial system from every corner of France, and it referred these petitions to a committee which reported in August, 1789. Setting aside the centralization and consolidation of the system as being, for us, immaterial, the committee laid down four leading principles of reform. First, purchase of place should be abolished, and judicial office should be recognized as a public trust. Second, judges should be confined to applying, and restrained from interpreting, the law. That is to say, the judges should be forbidden to legislate. Third, the judges should be brought into harmony with public opinion by permitting the people to participate in their appointment. Fourth, the tendency toward rigor in criminal cases, which had become a scandal under the old régime, should be tempered by the introduction of the jury. Bergasse proposed that judicial appointments should be made by the executive from among three candidates selected by the provincial assemblies. After long and very remarkable debates the plan was, in substance, adopted in May, 1790, except that the Assembly decided, by a majority of 503 to 450, that the judges should be elected by the people for a term of six years, without executive interference. In the debate Cazalès represented the conservatives, Mirabeau the liberals. The vote was a test vote and shows how strong the conservatives were in the Assembly up to the reorganization of the Clergy in July, 1790, and the electoral assemblies of the districts, which selected the judges, seem, on the whole, to have been rather more conservative than the Assembly. In the election not a sixth of those who were enfranchised voted for the delegates who, in turn, chose the judges, and these delegates were usually either eminent lawyers themselves, or wealthy merchants, or men of letters. The result was a bench not differing much from an old parliament, and equally incapable of understanding the convulsion about them. Installed early in 1791, not a year elapsed before these magistrates became as ill at ease as had been those whom they displaced, and in March, 1792, Jean Debry formally demanded their recall, although their terms properly were to expire in 1796. During the summer of 1792 they sank into contempt and, after the massacres, the Legislative Assembly, just before its dissolution, provided for a new constituency for the judicial elections. This they degraded so far that, out of fifty-one magistrates to be chosen in Paris, only twelve were professionally trained. Nor did the new courts inspire respect. After the 10th of August one or two special tribunals were organized to try the Swiss Guard who surrendered in the Palace, and other political offenders, but these proved to be so ineffective that Marat thrust them aside, and substituted for them his gangs of murderers. No true and permanent political court was evolved before Danton had to deal with the treason of Dumouriez, nor was this tribunal perfected before Danton gave way to the Committee of Public Safety, when French revolutionary society became incandescent, through universal attack from without and through insurrection within. Danton, though an orator and a lawyer, possibly even a statesman, was not competent to cope with an emergency which exacted from a minister administrative genius like that of Carnot. Danton's story may be briefly told. At once after Valmy the Convention established the Republic; on January 21, 1793, Louis was beheaded; and between these two events a new movement had occurred. The Revolutionists felt intuitively that, if they remained shut up at home, with enemies without and traitors within, they would be lost. If the new ideas were sound they would spread, and Valmy had proved to them that those ideas had already weakened the invading armies. Danton declared for the natural boundaries of France,--the Rhine, the Alps, and the ocean,--and the Convention, on January 29, 1793, threw Dumouriez on Holland. This provoked war with England, and then north, south, and east the coalition was complete. It represented at least half a million fighting men. Danton, having no military knowledge or experience, fixed his hopes on Dumouriez. To Danton, Dumouriez was the only man who could save France. On November 6, 1792, Dumouriez defeated the Austrians at Jemmapes; on the 14th, he entered Brussels, and Belgium lay helpless before him. On the question of the treatment of Belgium, the schism began which ended with his desertion. Dumouriez was a conservative who plotted for a royal restoration under, perhaps, Louis Philippe. The Convention, on the contrary, determined to revolutionize Belgium, as France had been revolutionized, and to this end Cambon proposed to confiscate and sell church land and emit assignats. Danton visited Dumouriez to attempt to pacify him, but found him deeply exasperated. Had Danton been more sagacious he would have been suspicious. Unfortunately for him he left Dumouriez in command. In February, Dumouriez invaded Holland and was repulsed, and he then fell back to Brussels, not strong enough to march to Paris without support, it is true, but probably expecting to be strong enough as soon as the Vendean insurrection came to a head. Doubtless he had relations with the rebels. At all events, on March 10, the insurrection began with the massacre of Machecoul, and on March 12, 1793, Dumouriez wrote a letter to the Convention which was equivalent to a declaration of war. He then tried to corrupt his army, but failed, and on April 4, 1793, fled to the Austrians. Meanwhile, La Vendée was in flames. To appreciate the situation one must read Carnot's account of the border during these weeks when he alone, probably, averted some grave disaster. For my purpose it suffices to say that the pressure was intense, and that this intense pressure brought forth the Revolutionary Tribunal, or the political court. On March 10, 1793, the Convention passed a decree constituting a court of five judges and a jury, to be elected by the Convention. To these was joined a public prosecutor. Fouquier-Tinville afterward attained to a sombre fame in this position. Six members of the Convention were to sit as a commission to supervise drawing the indictments, the preparation of evidence, and also to advise the prosecutor. The punishments, under the limitations of the Penal Code and other criminal laws, were to be within the discretion of the court, whose judgments were to be final.[40] Death was accompanied by confiscation of property. Considering that this was an extraordinary tribunal, working under extreme tension, which tried persons against whom usually the evidence was pretty conclusive, its record for the first six months was not discreditable. Between April 6 and September 21, 1793, it rendered sixty-three sentences of death, thirteen of transportation, and thirty-eight acquittals. The trials were held patiently, testimony was heard, and the juries duly deliberated. Nevertheless the Terror deepened as the stress upon the new-born republic increased. Nothing more awful can be imagined than the ordeal which France endured between the meeting of the Convention in September, 1792, and the completion of the Committee of Public Safety in August, 1793. Hemmed in by enemies, the revolution glowed in Paris like molten lava, while yet it was torn by faction. Conservative opinion was represented by the Girondists, radical opinion by the Mountain, and between the two lay the Plain, or the majority of the Convention, who embodied the social centre of gravity. As this central mass swayed, so did supremacy incline. The movement was as accurate as that of any scientific instrument for registering any strain. Dumouriez's treason in April left the northern frontier open, save for a few fortresses which still held out. When those should fall the enemy could make a junction with the rebels in Vendée. Still the Girondists kept control, and even elected Isnard, the most violent among them, President of the Convention. Then they had the temerity to arrest a member of the Commune of Paris, which was the focus of radicalism. That act precipitated the struggle for survival and with it came the change in equilibrium. On June 2, Paris heard of the revolt of Lyons and of the massacre of the patriots. The same day the Sections invaded the Convention and expelled from their seats in the Tuileries twenty-seven Girondists. The Plain or Centre now leant toward the Mountain, and, on July 10, the Committee of Public Safety, which had been first organized on April 6, 1793, directly after Dumouriez's treason, was reorganized by the addition of men like Saint-Just and Couthon, with Prieur, a lawyer of ability and energy, for President. On July 12, 1793, the Austrians took Condé, and on July 28, Valenciennes; while on July 25, Kleber, starving, surrendered Mayence. Nothing now but their own inertia stood between the allies and La Vendée. Thither indeed Kellermann's men were sent, since they had promised not to serve against the coalition for a year, but even of these a division was surrounded and cut to pieces in the disaster of Torfou. A most ferocious civil war soon raged throughout France. Caen, Bordeaux, Lyons, Marseilles, declared against the Convention. The whole of the northwest was drenched in blood by the Chouans. Sixty departments were in arms. On August 28 the Royalists surrendered Toulon to the English, who blockaded the coasts and supplied the needs of the rebels. About Paris the people were actually starving. On July 27 Robespierre entered the Committee of Safety; Carnot, on August 14. This famous committee was a council of ten forming a pure dictatorship. On August 16, the Convention decreed the _Levée en Masse_. When Carnot became Minister of War to this dictatorship the Republic had 479,000 demoralized soldiers with the colors, under beaten and discredited commanders. Bouillé had conspired against the States-General, Lafayette against the Legislative Assembly, and Dumouriez against the Convention. One year from that time it had a superb force, 732,000 strong, commanded by Jourdan and Pichegru, Hoche, Moreau, and Bonaparte. Above all Carnot loved Hoche. Up to Valmy the old regular army, however shaken, had remained as a core. Then it became merged in a mass of volunteers, and these volunteers had to be armed and disciplined and fed and led against the greatest and strongest coalition which the modern world had ever seen. France, under Camot, became a vast workshop. Its most eminent scientific men taught the people how to gather saltpetre and the government how to manufacture powder and artillery. Horses had to be obtained. Carnot was as reckless of himself as of others. He knew no rest. There was that to be done which had to be done quickly and at any cost; there was that or annihilation. On October 21, 1794, when the people had gathered in the Champ de Mars to celebrate the Festival of Victories, after the President of the Convention had proclaimed that the Republic had been delivered, Carnot announced what had been accomplished. France had won twenty-seven victories, of which eight had been pitched battles. One hundred and twenty lesser combats. France had killed eighty thousand enemies. Had taken ninety-one thousand prisoners. Also one hundred and sixteen places or towns, six after siege. Two hundred and thirty forts or redoubts. Three thousand eight hundred cannon. Seventy thousand muskets. Ninety flags. As Benjamin Constant has observed, nothing can change the stupendous fact "that the Convention found the enemy at thirty leagues from Paris, ... and made peace at thirty leagues from Vienna." Under the stimulus of a change in environment of mind is apt to expand with something of this resistless energy. It did so in the Reformation. It may be said almost invariably to do so, when decay does not supervene, and it now concerns us to consider, in some rough way, what the cost to the sinking class of attempting repression may be, when it miscalculates its power in such an emergency. I take it to be tolerably clear that, if the French privileged classes had accepted the reforms of Turgot in good faith, and thus had spread the movement of the revolution over a generation, there would have been no civil war and no confiscations, save confiscations of ecclesiastical property. I take it also that there would have been no massacres and no revolutionary tribunals, if France in 1793 had fought foreign enemies alone, as England did in 1688. Even as it was the courts did not grow thoroughly political until the preservation of the new type of mind came to hinge largely on the extermination of the old. Danton's first and relatively benign revolutionary tribunal, established in March, 1793, was reorganized by the Committee of Public Safety in the following autumn, by a series of decrees of which the most celebrated is that of September 17, touching suspected persons. By these decrees the tribunal was enlarged so that, in the words of Danton, every day an aristocratic head might fall. The committee presented a list of judges, and the object of the law was to make the possession of a reactionary mind a capital offence. It is only in extreme exigencies that pure thinking by a single person becomes a crime. Ordinarily, a crime consists of a malicious thought coupled with an overt act, but in periods of high tension, the harboring of any given thought becomes criminal. Usually during civil wars test oaths are tendered to suspected persons to discover their loyalty. For several centuries the Church habitually burnt alive all those who denied the test dogma of transubstantiation, and during the worst spasm of the French Revolution to believe in the principle of monarchy and privilege was made capital with confiscation of property. The question which the Convention had to meet was how to establish the existence of a criminal mind, when nothing tangible indicated it. The old régime had tortured. To prove heresy the Church also had always used torture. The Revolution proceeded more mildly. It acted on suspicion. The process was simple. The Committee, of whom in this department Robespierre was the chief, made lists of those who were to be condemned. There came to be finally almost a complete absence of forms. No evidence was necessarily heard. The accused, if inconvenient, was not allowed to speak. If there were doubt touching the probability of conviction, pressure was put upon the court. I give one or two examples: Scellier, the senior associate judge of the tribunal, appears to have been a good lawyer and a fairly worthy man. One day in February, 1794, Scellier was at dinner with Robespierre, when Robespierre complained of the delays of the court. Scellier replied that without the observance of forms there could be no safety for the innocent. "Bah!" replied Robespierre,--"you and your forms: wait; soon the Committee will obtain a law which will suppress forms, and then we shall see." Scellier ventured no answer. Such a law was drafted by Couthon and actually passed on 22 Prairial (June 10, 1794), and yet it altered little the methods of Fouquier-Tinville as prosecuting officer. Scellier having complained of this law of Prairial to Saint-Just, Saint-Just replied that if he were to report his words, or that he was flinching, to the Committee, Scellier would be arrested. As arrest was tantamount to sentence of death, Scellier continued his work. Without reasoning the subject out logically from premise to conclusion, or being, of course, capable of doing so in the mass, Frenchmen had collectively received the intuition that everything must be endured for a strong government, and that whatever obstructed that government must be eliminated. For the process of elimination they used the courts. Under the conditions in which they were placed by the domestic enemy, they had little alternative. If a political party opposed the Dictatorship in the Convention, that party must be broken down; if a man seemed likely to become a rival for the Dictatorship, that man must be removed; all who conspired against the Republic must be destroyed as ruthlessly at home as on the battle-field. The Republic was insolvent, and must have money, as it must have men. If the government needed men, it took them,--all. If it needed money, and a man were rich, it did not hesitate to execute him and confiscate his property. There are very famous examples of all these phenomena strewn through the history of the Terror. The Girondists were liberals. They always had been liberals; they had never conspired against the Republic; but they were impracticable. The ablest of them, Vergniaud, complained before the Tribunal, that he was being tried for what he thought, not for what he had done. This the government denied, but it was true. Nay, more; he was tried not for positive but for negative opinions, and he was convicted and executed, and his friends were convicted and executed with him, because, had they remained in the Convention, the Dictatorship, through their opposition, would have lost its energy. Also the form of the conviction was shocking in the extreme. The defence of these twenty-one men was, practically, suppressed, and the jury were directed to bring in a verdict of guilty. Still the prosecutions of the Girondists stopped here. When they refrained from obstruction, they were spared. Danton and his friends may have been, and probably were, whether intentionally or by force of circumstances, a menace to the Dictatorship. Either Robespierre or Danton had to be eliminated. There was not room for both. On April 1, 1793, Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and others were arrested on a warrant signed by such men as Cambacérès, Carnot, and Prieur. Carnot in particular was a soldier of the highest character and genius. He would have signed no such warrant had he not thought the emergency pressing. Nor was the risk small. Danton was so popular and so strong before a jury that the government appears to have distrusted even Fouquier-Tinville, for an order was given, and held in suspense, apparently to Henriot, to arrest the President and the Public Prosecutor of the Revolutionary Tribunal, on the day of Danton's trial. Under such a stimulant Fouquier did his best, but he felt himself to be beaten. Examining Cambon, Danton broke out: "Do you believe us to be conspirators? Look, he laughs, he don't believe it. Record that he has laughed." Fouquier was at his wits' end. If the next day the jury were asked if they had heard enough, and they answered, "No," there would be an acquittal, and then Fouquier's own head would roll into the basket. Probably there might even be insurrection. Fouquier wrote to the Committee that they must obtain from the Convention a decree silencing the defence. So grave was the crisis felt to be that the decree was unanimously voted. When Fouquier heard that the decree was on its way, he said, with a sigh of relief,--"Faith, we need it." But when it was read, Danton sprung to his feet, raging, declaring that the public cried out treason upon it. The President adjourned the court while the hall resounded with the protests of the defendants and the shouts of the police as they tore the condemned from the benches which they clutched and dragged them through the corridors toward the prison. They emerged no more until they mounted the carts which took them to the scaffold. Nor was it safe to hesitate if one were attached to this court. Fouquier had a clerk named Paris-Fabricius. Now Paris had been a friend of Danton and took his condemnation to heart. He even declined to sign the judgment, which it was his duty to do. The next day, when he presented himself to Fouquier, Fouquier looked at him sourly, and observed, "We don't want men who reason here; we want business done." The following morning Paris did not appear. His friends were disturbed, but he was not to be found. He had been cast into a secret dungeon in the prison of the Luxembourg. So, if a man were too rich it might go hard with him. Louis-Philippe-Joseph, Duc d'Orleans, afterward known as �galité, was one of the most interesting figures among the old nobility. The great-great-great-grandson of Louis XIII, he was a distant cousin of Louis XVI, and ranked as the first noble of France beyond the royal family. His education had been unfortunate. His father lived with a ballet-dancer, while his mother, the Princess Henriette de Bourbon-Conti, scandalized a society which was not easily shocked. During the Terror the sans culottes everywhere averred that the Duke was the son of a coachman in the service of the banker Duruet. Doubtless this was false, but the princess had abundant liaisons not much more reputable. Left to himself at sixteen years old, �galité led a life of extreme profligacy, but he married one of the most beautiful and charming women of the age, whom he succeeded in inspiring with a devoted affection. Born in 1747, his father died in 1785, leaving him, just at the outbreak of the Revolution, the master of enormous wealth, and the father of three sons who adored him. The eldest of these was the future king, Louis-Philippe. The man must have had good in him to have been loved as he was throughout life. He was besides more intelligent touching the Revolution and its meaning than any man approaching him in rank in France. The Duke, when a young man, served with credit in the navy, but after the battle of Ushant, in 1778, where he commanded the blue squadron, he was received with such enthusiasm in Paris, that Marie-Antoinette obtained his dismissal from the service. From this period he withdrew from court and his opposition to the government began. He adopted republican ideas, which he drew from America, and he educated his children as democrats. In 1789 he was elected to the States-General, where he supported the fusion of the orders, and attained to a popularity which, on one occasion, according to Madame de Campan, nearly made the Queen faint from rage and grief. It was from the garden of his palace of the Palais Royal that the column marched on July 14, wearing his colors, the red, white and blue, to storm the Bastille. It seemed that he had only to go on resolutely to thrust the King aside and become the ruler of France. He made no effort to do so. Mirabeau is said to have been disgusted with his lack of ambition. He was charitable also, and spent very large sums of money among the poor of Paris during the years of distress which followed upon the social disorders. The breach with the court, however, became steadily wider, and finally he adhered to the party of Danton and voted for the condemnation of the King. He sent two of his sons to serve in the army. The elder was still with Dumouriez at the time of his treason. On April 6, 1793, when Dumouriez's treachery had become known, the Assembly ordered the arrest of the whole Bourbon family, and among them the Duke was apprehended and sent to Marseilles. Thus it appears that whatever complaint his own order may have had against �galité, the Republic certainly had none. No man could have done more for modern France than he. He abandoned his class, renounced his name, gave his money, sent his sons to the war, and voted for his own relative's death. No one feared him, and yet Robespierre had him brought to Paris and guillotined. His trial was a form. Fouquier admitted that he had been condemned before he left Marseilles. The Duke was, however, very rich and the government needed his money. Every one understood the situation. He was told of the order for his arrest one night when at supper in his palace in Paris with his friend Monsieur de Monville. The Duke, much moved, asked Monville if it were not horrible, after all the sacrifices he had made and all that he had done. "Yes, horrible," said Monville, coolly, "but what would you have? They have taken from your Highness all they could get, you can be of no further use to them. Therefore, they will do to you, what I do with this lemon" (he was squeezing a lemon on a sole); "now I have all the juice." And he threw the lemon into the fireplace. But yet even then Robespierre was not satisfied. He harbored malice against this fallen man. On the way to the scaffold he ordered the cart, in which the Duke sat, to stop before the Palais Royal, which had been confiscated, in order that the Duke might contemplate his last sacrifice for his country. The Duke showed neither fear nor emotion. All the world knows the story of the Terror. The long processions of carts carrying victims to the guillotine, these increasing in number until after the Law of Prairial they averaged sixty or seventy a day in Paris alone, while in the provinces there was no end. At Nantes, Carrier could not work fast enough by a court, so he sank boat loads of prisoners in the Loire. The hecatombs sacrificed at Lyons, and the "Red Masses" of Orange, have all been described. The population of Toulon sank from 29,000 to 7,000. All those, in fine, were seized and slain who were suspected of having a mind tinged with caste, or of being traitors to the Republic. And it was the Centre, or the majority of the Convention, who did this, by tacitly permitting it to be done. That is to say, France permitted it because the onslaught of the decaying class made atrocities such as these appear to be a condition of self-preservation. I doubt if, in human history, there be such another and so awful an illustration of the possible effects of conservative errors of judgment. For France never loved the Terror or the loathsome instruments, such as Fouquier-Tinville, or Carrier, or Billaud-Varennes, or Collot-d'Herbois, or Henriot, or Robespierre, or Couthon, who conducted it. On this point there can, I think, be neither doubt nor question. I have tried to show how the Terror began. It is easy to show how and why it ended. As it began automatically by the stress of foreign and domestic war, so it ended automatically when that stress was relieved. And the most curious aspect of the phenomenon is that it did not end through the application of force, but by common consent, and when it had ended, those who had been used for the bloody work could not be endured, and they too were put to death. The procession of dates is convincing. When, on July 27, 1793, Robespierre entered the Committee of Public Safety, the fortunes of the Republic were near their nadir, but almost immediately, after Carnot took the War Department on August 14, they began to mend. On October 8, 1793, Lyons surrendered; on December 19, 1793, the English evacuated Toulon; and, on December 23, the insurrection in La Vendée received its death blow at Savenai. There had also been success on the frontiers. Carnot put Hoche in command in the Vosges. On December 23, 1793, Hoche defeated Wurmser at Freschweiller, when the Austrians, abandoning the lines of Wissembourg, fell back across the Rhine. Thus by the end of 1793, save for the great border fortresses of Valenciennes and Condé to the north, which commanded the road from Brussels to Paris, the soil of France had been cleared of the enemy, and something resembling domestic tranquillity had been restored at home. Simultaneously, as the pressure lessened, rifts began to appear in the knot of men who held the Dictatorship in the Republic. Robespierre, Couthon, and Saint-Just coalesced, and gained control of the police, while Billaud-Varennes, Collot-d'Herbois, and, secretly and as far as he dared, Barère, formed an opposition. Not that the latter were more moderate or merciful than Robespierre, but because, in the nature of things, there could be but one Dictator, and it became a question of the survival of the fittest. Carnot took little or no part in active politics. He devoted himself to the war, but he disapproved of the Terror and came to a breach with Saint-Just. Robespierre's power culminated on June 10, 1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Prairial, which put the life of every Frenchman in his hand, and after which, save for some dozen or two of his most intimate and devoted adherents like Saint-Just, Couthon, Le Bas, Fouquier, Fleuriot the Mayor of Paris, and Henriot, the commander of the national guard, no one felt his head safe on his shoulders. It needed but security on the northern frontier to cause the social centre of gravity to shift and Robespierre to fall, and security came with the campaign of Fleurus. Jourdan and Pichegru were in command on the Belgian border, and on June 26, 1794, just sixteen days after the passage of the Law of Prairial, Jourdan won the battle of Fleurus. This battle, though not decisive in itself, led to decisive results. It uncovered Valenciennes and Condé, which were invested, closing the entrance to France. On July 11, Jourdan entered Brussels; on July 16, he won a crushing victory before Louvain and the same day Namur opened its gates. On July 23, Pichegru, driving the English before him, seized Antwerp. No Frenchman could longer doubt that France was delivered, and with that certainty the Terror ended without a blow. Eventually the end must have come, but it came instantly, and, according to the old legend, it came through a man's love for a woman. John Lambert Tallien, the son of the butler of the Marquis of Bercy, was born in 1769, and received an education through the generosity of the marquis, who noticed his intelligence. He became a journeyman printer, and one day in the studio of Madame Lebrun, dressed in his workman's blouse, he met Thérézia Cabarrus, Marquise de Fontenay, the most seductive woman of her time, and fell in love with her on the instant. Nothing, apparently, could have been more hopeless or absurd. But the Revolution came. Tallien became prominent, was elected to the Convention, grew to be influential, and in September, 1793, was sent to Bordeaux, as representative of the Chamber, or as proconsul, as they called it. There he, the all-powerful despot, found Thérézia, trying to escape to Spain, in prison, humble, poor, shuddering in the shadow of the guillotine. He saved her; he carried her through Bordeaux in triumph in a car by his side. He took her with him to Paris, and there Robespierre threw her into prison, and accused Tallien of corruption. On June 12 Robespierre denounced him to the Convention, and on June 14, 1794, the Jacobins struck his name from the list of the club. When Fleurus was fought Thérézia lay in La Force, daily expecting death, while Tallien had become the soul of the reactionary party. On the 8 Thermidor (July 26,1794) Tallien received a dagger wrapped in a note signed by Thérézia,--"To-morrow they kill me. Are you then only a coward?"[41] On the morrow the great day had come. Saint-Just rose in the Convention to read a report to denounce Billaud, Collot, and Camot. Tallien would not let him be heard. Billaud followed him. Collot was in the chair. Robespierre mounted the tribune and tried to speak. It was not without reason that Thérézia afterwards said, "This little hand had somewhat to do with overthrowing the guillotine," for Tallien sprang on him, dagger in hand, and, grasping him by the throat, cast him from the tribune, exclaiming, "I have armed myself with a dagger to pierce his heart if the Convention dare not order his accusation." Then rose a great shout from the Centre, "Down with the tyrant, arrest him, accuse him!" From the Centre, which until that day had always silently supported the Robespierrian Dictatorship. Robespierre for the last time tried to speak, but his voice failed him. "It's Danton's blood that chokes him; arrest him, arrest him!" they shouted from the Right. Robespierre dropped exhausted on a bench, then they seized him, and his brother, and Couthon, and Saint-Just, and ordered that the police should take them to prison. But it was one thing for the Convention to seize Robespierre singly, and within its own hall; it was quite another for it to hold him and send him to the guillotine. The whole physical force of Paris was nominally with Robespierre. The Mayor, Fleuriot, closed the barriers, sounded the tocsin, and forbade any jailer to receive the prisoners; while Henriot, who had already been drinking, mounted a horse and galloped forth to rouse the city. Fleuriot caused Robespierre, Couthon, and Le Bas to be brought to the City Hall. A provisional government was completed. It only remained to disperse the Assembly. Henriot undertook a duty which looked easy. He seems to have collected about twenty guns, which he brought to the Tuileries and trained on the hall of the Convention. The deputies thought all was over. Collot-d'Herbois took the chair, which was directly in range, put on his hat, and calmly said, as Henriot gave the order to fire, "We can at least die at our post." No volley came--the men had mutinied. Then the Convention declared Henriot beyond the protection of the law, and Henriot fled to the City Hall. The Convention chose Barras to command their armed force, but save a few police they had no force. The night was wearing away and Fleuriot had not been able to persuade Robespierre to take any decisive step. Robespierre was, indeed, only a pettifogging attorney. At length he consented to sign an appeal to arms. He had written two letters of his name--"Ro"--when a section of police under Barras reached the City Hall. They were but a handful, but the door was unguarded. They mounted the stairs and as Robespierre finished the "o", one of these men, named Merda, fired on him, breaking his jaw. The stain of blood is still on the paper where Robespierre's head fell. They shot Couthon in the leg, they threw Henriot out of the window into a cesspool below where he wallowed all night, while Le Bas blew out his brains. The next day they brought Robespierre to the Convention, but the Convention refused to receive him. They threw him on a table, where he lay, horrible to be seen, his coat torn down the back, his stockings falling over his heels, his shirt open and soaking with blood, speechless, for his mouth was filled with splinters of his broken jaw. Such was the man who the morning before had been Dictator, and master of all the armies of France. Couthon was in little better plight. Twenty-one in all were condemned on the 10 Thermidor and taken in carts to the guillotine. An awful spectacle. There was Robespierre with his disfigured face, half dead, and Fleuriot, and Saint-Just, and Henriot next to Robespierre, his forehead gashed, his right eye hanging down his cheek, dripping with blood, and drenched with the filth of the sewer in which he had passed the night. Under their feet lay the cripple Couthon, who had been thrown in like a sack. Couthon was paralyzed, and he howled in agony as they wrenched him straight to fasten him to the guillotine. It took a quarter of an hour to finish with him, while the crowd exulted. A hundred thousand people saw the procession and not a voice or a hand was raised in protest. The whole world agreed that the Terror should end. But the oldest of those who suffered on the 10 Thermidor was Couthon, who was thirty-eight, Robespierre was thirty-five, and Saint-Just but twenty-seven. So closed the Terror with the strain which produced it. It will remain a by-word for all time, and yet, appalling as it may have been, it was the legitimate and the logical result of the opposition made by caste to the advent of equality before the law. Also, the political courts served their purpose. They killed out the archaic mind in France, a mind too rigid to adapt itself to a changing environment. Thereafter no organized opposition could ever be maintained against the new social equilibrium. Modern France went on steadily to a readjustment, on the basis of unification, simplification of administration, and equality before the law, first under the Directory, then under the Consulate, and finally under the Empire. With the Empire the Civil Code was completed, which I take to be the greatest effort at codification of modern times. Certainly it has endured until now. Governments have changed. The Empire has yielded to the Monarchy, the Monarchy to the Republic, the Republic to the Empire again, and that once more to the Republic, but the Code which embodies the principle of equality before the law has remained. Fundamentally the social equilibrium has been stable. And a chief reason of this stability has been the organization of the courts upon rational and conservative principles. During the Terror France had her fill of political tribunals. Since the Terror French judges, under every government, have shunned politics and have devoted themselves to construing impartially the Code. Therefore all parties, and all ranks, and all conditions of men have sustained the courts. In France, as in England, there is no class jealousy touching the control of the judiciary. FOOTNOTES: [40] _Histoire du Tribunal Revolutionaire de Paris_, H. Wallon, I, 57. [41] "C'est demain qu'on me tue; n'êtes-vous donc qu'un lache?" CHAPTER VI INFERENCES As the universe, which at once creates and destroys life, is a complex of infinitely varying forces, history can never repeat itself. It is vain, therefore, to look in the future for some paraphrase of the past. Yet if society be, as I assume it to be, an organism operating on mechanical principles, we may perhaps, by pondering upon history, learn enough of those principles to enable us to view, more intelligently than we otherwise should, the social phenomena about us. What we call civilization is, I suspect, only, in proportion to its perfection, a more or less thorough social centralization, while centralization, very clearly, is an effect of applied science. Civilization is accordingly nearly synonymous with centralization, and is caused by mechanical discoveries, which are applications of scientific knowledge, like the discovery of how to kindle fire, how to build and sail ships, how to smelt metals, how to prepare explosives, how to make paper and print books, and the like. And we perceive on a little consideration that from the first great and fundamental discovery of how to kindle fire, every advance in applied science has accelerated social movement, until the discovery of steam and electricity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries quickened movement as movement had never been quickened before. And this quickening has caused the rise of those vast cities, which are at once our pride and our terror. Social consolidation is, however, not a simple problem, for social consolidation implies an equivalent capacity for administration. I take it to be an axiom, that perfection in administration must be commensurate to the bulk and momentum of the mass to be administered, otherwise the centrifugal will overcome the centripetal force, and the mass will disintegrate. In other words, civilization would dissolve. It is in dealing with administration, as I apprehend, that civilizations have usually, though not always, broken down, for it has been on administrative difficulties that revolutions have for the most part supervened. Advances in administration seem to presuppose the evolution of new governing classes, since, apparently, no established type of mind can adapt itself to changes in environment, even in slow-moving civilizations, as fast as environments change. Thus a moment arrives when the minds of any given dominant type fail to meet the demands made upon them, and are superseded by a younger type, which in turn is set aside by another still younger, until the limit of the administrative genius of that particular race has been reached. Then disintegration sets in, the social momentum is gradually relaxed, and society sinks back to a level at which it can cohere. To us, however, the most distressing aspect of the situation is, that the social acceleration is progressive in proportion to the activity of the scientific mind which makes mechanical discoveries, and it is, therefore, a triumphant science which produces those ever more rapidly recurring changes in environment to which men must adapt themselves at their peril. As, under the stimulant of modern science, the old types fail to sustain themselves, new types have to be equally rapidly evolved, and the rise of a new governing class is always synonymous with a social revolution and a redistribution of property. The Industrial Revolution began almost precisely a century and a half ago, since when the scientific mind has continually gained in power, and, during that period, on an average of once in two generations, the environment has so far shifted that a social revolution has occurred, accompanied by the advent of a new favored class, and a readjustment of wealth. I think that a glance at American history will show this estimate to be within the truth. At the same time such rapidity of intellectual mutation is without precedent, and I should suppose that the mental exhaustion incident thereto must be very considerable. In America, in 1770, a well-defined aristocracy held control. As an effect of the Industrial Revolution upon industry and commerce, the Revolutionary War occurred, the colonial aristocracy misjudged the environment, adhered to Great Britain, were exiled, lost their property, and perished. Immediately after the American Revolution and also as a part of the Industrial Revolution, the cotton gin was invented, and the cotton gin created in the South another aristocracy, the cotton planters, who flourished until 1860. At this point the changing of the environment, caused largely by the railway, brought a pressure upon the slave-owners against which they, also failing to comprehend their situation, rebelled. They were conquered, suffered confiscation of their property, and perished. Furthermore, the rebellion of the aristocracy at the South was caused, or at all events was accompanied by, the rise of a new dominant class at the North, whose power rested upon the development of steam in transportation and industry. This is the class which has won high fortune by the acceleration of the social movement, and the consequent urban growth of the nineteenth century, and which has now for about two generations dominated in the land. If this class, like its predecessors, has in its turn mistaken its environment, a redistribution of property must occur, distressing, as previous redistributions have been, in proportion to the inflexibility of the sufferers. The last two redistributions have been painful, and, if we examine passing phenomena from this standpoint, they hardly appear to promise much that is reassuring for the future. Administration is the capacity of coördinating many, and often conflicting, social energies in a single organism, so adroitly that they shall operate as a unity. This presupposes the power of recognizing a series of relations between numerous special social interests, with all of which no single man can be intimately acquainted. Probably no very highly specialized class can be strong in this intellectual quality because of the intellectual isolation incident to specialization; and yet administration or generalization is not only the faculty upon which social stability rests, but is, possibly, the highest faculty of the human mind. It is precisely in this preëminent requisite for success in government that I suspect the modern capitalistic class to be weak. The scope of the human intellect is necessarily limited, and modern capitalists appear to have been evolved under the stress of an environment which demanded excessive specialization in the direction of a genius adapted to money-making under highly complex industrial conditions. To this money-making attribute all else has been sacrificed, and the modern capitalist not only thinks in terms of money, but he thinks in terms of money more exclusively than the French aristocrat or lawyer ever thought in terms of caste. The modern capitalist looks upon life as a financial combat of a very specialized kind, regulated by a code which he understands and has indeed himself concocted, but which is recognized by no one else in the world. He conceives sovereign powers to be for sale. He may, he thinks, buy them; and if he buys them; he may use them as he pleases. He believes, for instance, that it is the lawful, nay more! in America, that it is the constitutional right of the citizen to buy the national highways, and, having bought them, to use them as a common carrier might use a horse and cart upon a public road. He may sell his service to whom he pleases at what price may suit him, and if by doing so he ruins men and cities, it is nothing to him. He is not responsible, for he is not a trustee for the public. If he be restrained by legislation, that legislation is in his eye an oppression and an outrage, to be annulled or eluded by any means which will not lead to the penitentiary. He knows nothing and cares less, for the relation which highways always have held, and always must hold, to every civilized population, and if he be asked to inform himself on such subjects he resents the suggestion as an insult. He is too specialized to comprehend a social relation, even a fundamental one like this, beyond the narrow circle of his private interests. He might, had he so chosen, have evolved a system of governmental railway regulation, and have administered the system personally, or by his own agents, but he could never be brought to see the advantage to himself of rational concession to obtain a resultant of forces. He resisted all restraint, especially national restraint, believing that his one weapon --money--would be more effective in obtaining what he wanted in state legislatures than in Congress. Thus, of necessity, he precipitates a conflict, instead of establishing an adjustment. He is, therefore, in essence, a revolutionist without being aware of it. The same specialized thinking appears in his reasoning touching actual government. New York City will serve as an illustration. New York has for two generations been noted for a civic corruption which has been, theoretically, abominable to all good citizens, and which the capitalistic class has denounced as abominable to itself. I suspect this to be an imaginative conception of the situation. Tammany Hall is, I take it, the administrative bureau through which capital purchases its privileges. An incorruptible government would offend capital, because, under such a government, capital would have to obey the law, and privilege would cease. Occasionally, Tammany grows rapacious and exacts too much for its services. Then a reform movement is undertaken, and finally a new management is imposed on Tammany; but when Tammany has consented to a satisfactory scale of prices, the reform ends. To change the system would imply a shift in the seat of power. In fine, money is the weapon of the capitalist as the sword was the weapon of the mediaeval soldier; only, as the capitalist is more highly specialized than the soldier ever was, he is more helpless when his single weapon fails him. From the days of William the Conqueror to our own, the great soldier has been, very commonly, a famous statesman also, but I do not now remember, in English or American history, a single capitalist who has earned eminence for comprehensive statesmanship. On the contrary, although many have participated in public affairs, have held high office, and have shown ability therein, capitalists have not unusually, however unjustly, been suspected of having ulterior objects in view, unconnected with the public welfare, such as tariffs or land grants. Certainly, so far as I am aware, no capitalist has ever acquired such influence over his contemporaries as has been attained with apparent ease by men like Cromwell, Washington, or even Jackson. And this leads, advancing in an orderly manner step by step, to what is, perhaps, to me, the most curious and interesting of all modern intellectual phenomena connected with the specialized mind,--the attitude of the capitalist toward the law. Naturally the capitalist, of all men, might be supposed to be he who would respect and uphold the law most, considering that he is at once the wealthiest and most vulnerable of human beings, when called upon to defend himself by physical force. How defenceless and how incompetent he is in such exigencies, he proved to the world some years ago when he plunged himself and the country into the great Pennsylvania coal strike, with absolutely no preparation. Nevertheless, in spite of his vulnerability, he is of all citizens the most lawless.[42] He appears to assume that the law will always be enforced, when he has need of it, by some special personnel whose duty lies that way, while he may, evade the law, when convenient, or bring it into contempt, with impunity. The capitalist seems incapable of feeling his responsibility, as a member of the governing class, in this respect, and that he is bound to uphold the law, no matter what the law may be, in order that others may do the like. If the capitalist has bought some sovereign function, and wishes to abuse it for his own behoof, he regards the law which restrains him as a despotic invasion of his constitutional rights, because, with his specialized mind, he cannot grasp the relation of a sovereign function to the nation as a whole. He, therefore, looks upon the evasion of a law devised for public protection, but inimical to him, as innocent or even meritorious. If an election be lost, and the legislature, which has been chosen by the majority, cannot be pacified by money, but passes some act which promises to be annoying, the first instinct of the capitalist is to retain counsel, not to advise him touching his duty under the law, but to devise a method by which he may elude it, or, if he cannot elude it, by which he may have it annulled as unconstitutional by the courts. The lawyer who succeeds in this branch of practice is certain to win the highest prizes at the bar. And as capital has had now, for more than one or even two generations, all the prizes of the law within its gift, this attitude of capital has had a profound effect upon shaping the American legal mind. The capitalist, as I infer, regards the constitutional form of government which exists in the United States, as a convenient method of obtaining his own way against a majority, but the lawyer has learned to worship it as a fetich. Nor is this astonishing, for, were written constitutions suppressed, he would lose most of his importance and much of his income. Quite honestly, therefore, the American lawyer has come to believe that a sheet of paper soiled with printers' ink and interpreted by half-a-dozen elderly gentlemen snugly dozing in armchairs, has some inherent and marvellous virtue by which it can arrest the march of omnipotent Nature. And capital gladly accepts this view of American civilization, since hitherto capitalists have usually been able to select the magistrates who decide their causes, perhaps directly through the intervention of some president or governor whom they have had nominated by a convention controlled by their money, or else, if the judiciary has been elective, they have caused sympathetic judges to be chosen by means of a mechanism like Tammany, which they have frankly bought. I wish to make myself clearly understood. Neither capitalists nor lawyers are necessarily, or even probably, other than conscientious men. What they do is to think with specialized minds. All dominant types have been more or less specialized, if none so much as this, and this specialization has caused, as I understand it, that obtuseness of perception which has been their ruin when the environment which favored them has changed. All that is remarkable about the modern capitalist is the excess of his excentricity, or his deviation from that resultant of forces to which he must conform. To us, however, at present, neither the morality nor the present mental excentricity of the capitalist is so material as the possibility of his acquiring flexibility under pressure, for it would seem to be almost mathematically demonstrable that he will, in the near future, be subjected to a pressure under which he must develop flexibility or be eliminated. There can be no doubt that the modern environment is changing faster than any environment ever previously changed; therefore, the social centre of gravity constantly tends to shift more rapidly; and therefore, modern civilization has unprecedented need of the administrative or generalizing mind. But, as the mass and momentum of modern society is prodigious, it will require a correspondingly prodigious energy to carry it safely from an unstable to a stable equilibrium. The essential is to generate the energy which brings success; and the more the mind dwells upon the peculiarities of the modern capitalistic class, the more doubts obtrude themselves touching their ability to make the effort, even at present, and still more so to make it in the future as the magnitude of the social organism grows. One source of capitalistic weakness comes from a lack of proper instruments wherewith to work, even supposing the will of capital to be good; and this lack of administrative ability is somewhat due to the capitalistic attitude toward education. In the United States capital has long owned the leading universities by right of purchase, as it has owned the highways, the currency, and the press, and capital has used the universities, in a general way, to develop capitalistic ideas. This, however, is of no great moment. What is of moment is that capital has commercialized education. Apparently modern society, if it is to cohere, must have a high order of generalizing mind,--a mind which can grasp a multitude of complex relations,--but this is a mind which can, at best, only be produced in small quantity and at high cost. Capital has preferred the specialized mind and that not of the highest quality, since it has found it profitable to set quantity before quality to the limit which the market will endure. Capitalists have never insisted upon raising an educational standard save in science and mechanics, and the relative overstimulation of the scientific mind has now become an actual menace to order because of the inferiority of the administrative intelligence. Yet, even supposing the synthetic mind of the highest power to be increasing in proportion to the population, instead of, as I suspect, pretty rapidly decreasing, and supposing the capitalist to be fully alive to the need of administrative improvements, a phalanx of Washingtons would be impotent to raise the administrative level of the United States materially, as long as the courts remain censors of legislation; because the province of the censorial court is to dislocate any comprehensive body of legislation, whose effect would be to change the social status. That was the fundamental purpose which underlay the adoption of a written constitution whose object was to keep local sovereignties intact, especially at the South. Jefferson insisted that each sovereignty should by means of nullification protect itself. It was a long step in advance when the nation conquered the prerogative of asserting its own sovereign power through the Supreme Court. Now the intervention of the courts in legislation has become, by the change in environment, as fatal to administration as would have been, in 1800, the success of nullification. I find it difficult to believe that capital, with its specialized views of what constitutes its advantages, its duties, and its responsibilities, and stimulated by a bar moulded to meet its prejudices and requirements, will ever voluntarily assent to the consolidation of the United States to the point at which the interference of the courts with legislation might be eliminated; because, as I have pointed out, capital finds the judicial veto useful as a means of at least temporarily evading the law, while the bar, taken as a whole, quite honestly believes that the universe will obey the judicial decree. No delusion could be profounder and none, perhaps, more dangerous. Courts, I need hardly say, cannot control nature, though by trying to do so they may, like the Parliament of Paris, create a friction which shall induce an appalling catastrophe. True judicial courts, whether in times of peace or of revolution, seldom fail to be a substantial protection to the weak, because they enforce an established _corpus juris_ and conduct trials by recognized forms. It is startling to compare the percentage of convictions to prosecutions, for the same class of offences, in the regular criminal courts during the French Revolution, with the percentage in the Revolutionary Tribunal. And once a stable social equilibrium is reached, all men tend to support judicial courts, if judicial courts exist, from an instinct of self-preservation. This has been amply shown by French experience, and it is here that French history is so illuminating to the American mind. Before the Revolution France had semi-political courts which conduced to the overthrow of Turgot, and, therefore, wrought for violence; but more than this, France, under the old régime, had evolved a legal profession of a cast of mind incompatible with an equal administration of the law. The French courts were, therefore, when trouble came, supported only by a faction, and were cast aside. With that the old régime fell. The young Duke of Chartres, the son of �galité Orleans, and the future Louis Philippe, has related in his journal an anecdote which illustrates that subtle poison of distrust which undermines all legal authority, the moment that suspicion of political partiality in the judiciary enters the popular mind. In June, 1791, the Duke went down from Paris to Vendôme to join the regiment of dragoons of which he had been commissioned colonel. One day, soon after he joined, a messenger came to him in haste to tell him that a mob had gathered near by who were about to hang two priests. "I ran thither at once," wrote the Duke; "I spoke to those who seemed most excited and impressed upon them how horrible it was to hang men without trial; besides, to act as hangmen was to enter a trade which they all thought infamous; that they had judges, and that this was their affair. They answered that their judges were aristocrats, and that they did not punish the guilty." That is to say, although the priests were non-jurors, and, therefore, criminals in the eye of the law, the courts would not enforce the law because of political bias.[43] "It is your fault," I said to them, "since you elected them [the judges], but that is no reason why you should do justice yourselves." Danton explained in the Convention that it was because of the deep distrust of the judiciary in the public mind, which this anecdote shows, that the September massacres occurred, and it was because all republicans knew that the state and the army were full of traitors like Dumouriez, whom the ordinary courts would not punish, that Danton brought forward his bill to organize a true political tribunal to deal with them summarily. When Danton carried through this statute he supposed himself to be at the apex of power and popularity, and to be safe, if any man in France were safe. Very shortly he learned the error In his calculation. Billaud was a member of the Committee of Public Safety, while Danton had allowed himself to be dropped from membership. Danton had just been married, and to an aristocratic wife, and the turmoil of office had grown to be distasteful to him. On March 30, 1794, Billaud somewhat casually remarked, "We must kill Danton;" for in truth Danton, with conservative leanings, was becoming a grave danger to the extreme Jacobins. Had he lived a few months longer he would have been a Thermidorist. Billaud, therefore, only expressed the prevailing Jacobin opinion; so the Jacobins arrested Danton, Camille Desmoulins, and his other friends, and Danton at once anticipated what would be his doom. As he entered his cell he said to his jailer: "I erected the Tribunal. I ask pardon of God and men." But even yet he did not grasp the full meaning of what he had done. At his trial he wished to introduce his evidence fully, protesting "that he should understand the Tribunal since he created it;" nevertheless, he did not understand the Tribunal, he still regarded it as more or less a court. Topino-Lebrun, the artist, did understand it. Topino sat on the jury which tried Danton, and observed that the heart of one of his colleagues seemed failing him. Topino took the waverer aside, and said: "This is not a _trial_, it is a _measure_. Two men are impossible; one must perish. Will you kill Robespierre?--No.--Then by that admission you condemn Danton." Lebrun in these few words went to the root of the matter, and stated the identical principle which underlies our whole doctrine of the Police Power. A political court is not properly a court at all, but an administrative board whose function is to work the will of the dominant faction for the time being. Thus a political court becomes the most formidable of all engines for the destruction of its creators the instant the social equilibrium shifts. So Danton found, in the spring of 1794, when the equilibrium shifted; and so Robespierre, who slew Danton, found the next July, when the equilibrium shifted again. Danton died on the 5th April, 1794; about three months later Jourdan won the Fleurus campaign. Straightway Thermidor followed, and the Tribunal worked as well for the party of Thermidor as it had for the Jacobins. Carrier, who had wallowed in blood at Nantes, as the ideal Jacobin, walked behind the cart which carried Robespierre to the scaffold, shouting, "Down with the tyrant;" but that did not save him. In vain he protested to the Convention that, were he guilty, the whole Convention was guilty, "down to the President's bell." By a vote of 498 out of 500, Carrier was sent before the Tribunal which, even though reorganized, condemned him. Thérézia Cabarrus gaily presided at the closing of the Jacobin Club, Tallien moved over to the benches on the right, and therefore the court was ruthless to Fouquier. On the 11 Thermidor, seventy members, officers, or partisans of the Commune of Paris, were sent to the guillotine in only two batches. On the next day twelve more followed, four of whom were jurymen. Fouquier's turn came later. It may also be worth while for Americans to observe that a political court is quite as effective against property as against life. The Duke of Orleans is only the most celebrated example of a host of Frenchmen who perished, not because of revenge, fear, or jealousy, but because the party in power wanted their property. The famous Law touching Suspected Persons (loi des suspects) was passed on September 17, 1793. On October 10, 1793, that is three weeks afterward, Saint-Just moved that additional powers should be granted, by the Convention, to the Committee of Public Safety, defining, by way of justification for his motion, those who fell within the purview of this law. Among these, first of all, came "the rich," who by that fact alone were to be considered, _prima facie_, enemies to their country. As I stated at the beginning of this chapter, history never can repeat itself; therefore, whatever else may happen in the United States, we certainly shall have no Revolutionary Tribunal like the French Tribunal of 1793, but the mechanical principle of the political court always remains the same; it is an administrative board the control of which is useful, or may be even essential, to the success of a dominant faction, and the instinctive comprehension which the American people have of this truth is demonstrated by the determination with which they have, for many years, sought to impose the will of the majority upon the judiciary. Other means failing to meet their expectations, they have now hit on the recall, which is as revolutionary in essence as were the methods used during the Terror. Courts, from the Supreme Court downward, if purged by recall, or a process tantamount to recall, would, under proper stress, work as surely for a required purpose as did the tribunal supervised by Fouquier-Tinville. These considerations rather lead me to infer that the extreme complexity of the administrative problems presented by modern industrial civilization is beyond the compass of the capitalistic mind. If this be so, American society, as at present organized, with capitalists for the dominant class, can concentrate no further, and, as nothing in the universe is at rest, if it does not concentrate, it must, probably, begin to disintegrate. Indeed we may perceive incipient signs of disintegration all about us. We see, for example, an universal contempt for law, incarnated in the capitalistic class itself, which is responsible for order, and in spite of the awful danger which impends over every rich and physically helpless type should the coercive power collapse. We see it even more distinctly in the chronic war between capital and labor, which government is admittedly unable to control; we see it in the slough of urban politics, inseparable from capitalistic methods of maintaining its ascendancy; and, perhaps, most disquieting of all, we see it in the dissolution of the family which has, for untold ages, been the seat of discipline and the foundation of authority. For the dissolution of the family is peculiarly a phenomenon of our industrial age, and it is caused by the demand of industry for the cheap labor of women and children. Napoleon told the lawyers who drafted the Code that he insisted on one thing alone. They must fortify the family, for, said he, if the family is responsible to the father and the father to me, I can keep order in France. One of the difficulties, therefore, which capital has to meet, by the aid of such administrative ability as it can command, is how to keep order when society no longer rests on the cohesive family, but on highly volatilized individuals as incohesive as grains of sand. Meditating upon these matters, it is hard to resist the persuasion that unless capital can, in the immediate future, generate an intellectual energy, beyond the sphere of its specialized calling, very much in excess of any intellectual energy of which it has hitherto given promise, and unless it can besides rise to an appreciation of diverse social conditions, as well as to a level of political sagacity, far higher than it has attained within recent years, its relative power in the community must decline. If this be so the symptoms which indicate social disintegration will intensify. As they intensify, the ability of industrial capital to withstand the attacks made upon it will lessen, and this process must go on until capital abandons the contest to defend itself as too costly. Then nothing remains but flight. Under what conditions industrial capital would find migration from America possible, must remain for us beyond the bounds even of speculation. It might escape with little or no loss. On the other hand, it might fare as hardly as did the southern slaveholders. No man can foresee his fate. In the event of adverse fortune, however, the position of capitalists would hardly be improved by the existence of political courts serving a malevolent majority. Whatever may be in store for us, here at least, we reach an intelligible conclusion. Should Nature follow such a course as I have suggested, she will settle all our present perplexities as simply and as drastically as she is apt to settle human perturbations, and she will follow logically in the infinitely extended line of her own most impressive precedents. FOOTNOTES: [42] In these observations on the intellectual tendencies of capital I speak generally. Not only individual capitalists, but great corporations, exist, who are noble examples of law-abiding and intelligent citizenship. Their rarity, however, and their conspicuousness, seem to prove the general rule. [43] By the Law of November 27, 1790, priests refusing to swear allegiance to the "civil constitution" of the clergy were punished by loss of pay and of rights of citizenship if they continued their functions. By Law of August 26, 1792, by transportation to Cayenne. 
448	----	None 
59259	----	THE OUTER QUIET BY HERBERT D. KASTLE _Fear is often Man's greatest enemy. But when there is nothing left to lose, there is everything to gain.... And with everything to gain, where is the enemy?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, May 1955. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] He lay on the cot, listening to the breathing of the six men who shared apartment 2-B with him, and the panic fluttered deep in his stomach, threatening to break upward and out in a wild scream. He fought it by telling himself it was foolish for a man who had lived through the destruction of New York and eight months imprisonment to feel this way. He peered toward the window and tried to see the morning sun; not as a pale, shimmery fog but as the bright Spring yellow he knew it was. But the fog remained, no matter how many times he rubbed his eyes with saliva-wet fingers. It was as if he were seeing everything under water--a world of shimmery, hazy objects. The panic rose again. The Conquerors' beam had done its work well, and his chances of finding Adele before death found him, were now terribly small. The first punishment had brought only a slight blur, this one had almost blinded him, and it was only a matter of time before he committed the third offense. It made no difference that Conqueror Punitive assured all trainees that the degree of blindness decreased as the years went by. He knew that his third offense would come sooner than any improvement in his ability to see. And the third offense was punishable by death. Before another rush of fear could churn his brain, the morning whistle sounded. Shrill, commanding, it began each day of aimless wandering--the silent stroll over pavement connecting the five buildings of what had once been Brooklyn's prize housing development; a constant walk which destroyed those Americans unable to show complete obedience and turned the others into slaves. Again the whistle shrieked, and the room filled with coughs, groans and sighs, for it was forbidden to talk. Only when one of the many rules had been broken and a card bearing the trainee's number was found in the box outside the door did some American get a chance to speak. He would rush instantly to the small administration building near the wall's only exit and report to the squat, gray-uniformed Conqueror known as Punitive--the only Conqueror the trainees had ever seen. After an explanation of the offense in too-precise English, the trainee was told to sit on the stool facing the light tube. "I obey," he would croak. In silence broken only by the hum of electric generators in the basement, the beam of piercing white light would sear his eyes. Afterwards, the assurance about the disappearing effects of the beam; then back to the streets. With _only_ Punitive representing them, the Conquerors weeded out Americans who would not or could not obey. The vaguest suggestion of communication between trainees was picked up by the detector bulbs--the see-and-hear-all devices which hung much as oversized light bulbs from the ceiling of every room, and stood like dead street lamps every fifty feet or so along the pavements. George lay a second longer, then twisted his tall, slim body erect and sprang to his feet. As he slipped into the thick stockings, high-topped shoes, and one-piece cover-alls with serial number stitched in large red numerals across chest and back, he began sounding deep in his throat. This was so slight a touch of the vocal cords that no detector bulb or other trainee could hear it. But it was something more than thinking; it was listening to a voice repeating all the things that had mattered before the Conquerors' surprise attack atomized New York City. It was his fight against non-entity. "George Lowery," he said, "thirty-two, top salesman at Brady's Men's Shop, resident of Babylon, Long Island, owner of 12 North Rector Drive, husband of Adele Lowery, and today you may see her." But the last phrase stuck in his throat and he had to repeat it several times. Even so, he couldn't convince himself that the most important part of his ritual was true--that perhaps he would see his wife as she walked the streets. Two days ago he had turned the breakfast table to stone by asking his neighbor to pass the water. It was nothing more than a mistake--a stupid thinking aloud. But yesterday the card had been in the door-box. He had visited apartment 1-A in the Administration Building and, for the second time, the thin beam of light had seared his eyes. Now he was no longer sure he would be able to recognize his own wife. "George Lowery," he sounded, fighting off the panic. "George Lowery," and he turned and moved through the now-empty rooms. He was last in line outside the bathroom and waited dully for his turn. The men in front of him were nothing but tall, short or in-between nondescripts. The old group, of which he was the last, had been different. They had looked at each other with meaning, with hope. After six months passed, and realization came that no opposition to the Conquerors was in sight, they went out in one mad day of talk. He had watched silently, refusing to respond to the suicidal good morning's, pardon me's, and salty discussions of Conqueror Punitive's parentage. Not that life in the project meant anything to him. It was just that he had to see Adele again--to assure himself that she still remembered their life together. If her love had been stamped out, then the Conquerors were right in their men-live-by-bread-alone theory, and he was only one of a few remaining misfits--a breed as expendable in the battle for survival as the great, pre-historic lizards had been. He hadn't been in the bathroom more than five minutes when the third whistle sounded. With his beard still wet he rushed out of the apartment, pausing only to check the empty door-box, then ran down two flights of stairs to the street. It was windy for a morning in June and his face felt cold where the damp hair covered it. The Conquerors allowed nothing that could be used as a weapon to fall into American hands, but even after eight months he was still not used to his light brown beard and long shaggy hair. Hurrying through the street, following the one-way arrows which kept the trainees moving in the same direction, around and around the project, he felt the panic well up again. He made a wide detour of the excavation area which lay in the center of a rough square formed by the four apartment houses and the Administration Building. This forbidden area had been the cause of his first visit to Conqueror Punitive. Some two months ago, right after the last shipment of fresh trainees arrived, he had seen a group of women obviously new to the project, rigid in their terror of this silent hell, walking right in the direction of the excavation. Without thinking, he had shouted a warning which stopped them from committing an offense. By the time he reached the basement of building two, he was gasping for breath. If the last whistle sounded before he was seated at one of the long wooden tables, it would mean the third offense. There wasn't any light-beam treatment for that one; only an electrode clamped to the head and the oblivion of thousands of volts of electricity. He went down the flight of steps into the basement which was dining room for all the male prisoners, and grasped a spoon, cup and plate from the tinware table just inside the door. The benches nearest the door were filled, but he didn't have time to go any further. Just as he plumped between two trainees, the whistle sounded. He sat still a moment catching his breath, feeling the thin bodies adjust themselves away from him. Scooping some cereal from one of the center pots, he began to eat. The first mouthful stuck in his throat and he hastily filled his cup. But when he had gulped down the sugared water, a wave of nausea made him gag. He sat gripping the edge of the table, his head spinning. And thoughts crept into his mind--thoughts and questions he wanted to keep out. Why were the trainees being starved? If the Conquerors wanted to kill them, it would be simple enough to use the quicker and less expensive method of firing squads. The training area was proof that they wanted workers for their new world. And despite the hunger which made hollow-eyed skeletons of them all, the men and women walked straighter and with definite confidence. Their lips were sealed shut, their eyes flickered observantly, their heads were always rigidly forward. Except for a few lingering misfits like himself, the group conformed as well as humans ever could. Why then the delay in releasing them as had been promised? He screwed his eyes around and tried to see the other tables. Those even a short distance from the door were almost empty, and further into the hall they seemed deserted. He had no way of knowing the total number of men, but he was sure there weren't more than a hundred--out of an original five hundred. If the same proportion held true for the women, there were less than two hundred Americans left in the project! He twisted his eyes to the person on his left. The face was that of a boy in his late teens--the beard spotty and thin. The head barely moved as he chewed, he held himself rigid, his hand moved up to his mouth in a straight line and down the same way--he ate like a machine. George swung his eyes to the right. Another young machine turned out by the Conquerors. But was it only to be starved to death that these men, most of them so young, had obeyed? It made no sense and this, more than the conformity to slavery, terrified him. But his terror lasted only a moment. What had he to do with whether they lived or died? He was finished; all that mattered was seeing Adele. He picked up his spoon and ate until the whistle shrieked its order for the walking to begin. Then he rose with utensils in hand and was carried to the door in the silent rush. As he dropped his tinware into the barrel of chlorinated water, he thought with bitter amusement that there was nothing for the Conquerors to do anymore--hardly a full day's work for three or four men in operating the project now. When he walked into the street, the sun was warmer. It was a beautiful day; almost summer, he thought, and he breathed deeply. But the smell of fresh growth was not in the air--only the dusty, burnt odor of the ruined city beyond the walls. The sun grew brighter by the minute and he found it increasingly more difficult to see. It was as if the rays shattered into blinding blobs as they struck his eyes. Somehow, he knew he was using his ears more than ever before. Poor compensation, he thought. There was nothing to hear--no way of finding her by listening. And besides the absence of speech, there was the absence of _any_ sound. He forced himself to place one leg after another, and all the horror in the world crept into his brain. He wanted to turn around and speak to those in back of him--to stop the one-way tide of stroll and ask some questions. Just when had the last plane blurred by with jets roaring? And when had the Conquerors marched outside the wall, boots thudding, rifles clanking on canteen pack and buckle? When was the last atomic blast--a distant rumble causing the ground to tremble beneath the pavement? Months; two or even three, it seemed to him. His long legs faltered and he almost stumbled. Then he remembered his one purpose, and pushed the thoughts from his mind. By alternately hurrying and slowing his steps, he was able to pull alongside some trainees and let others catch up with him. With sidelong glances he tried to find Adele. He had to see her--to convince himself that she had not forgotten the happy years together. It had been between buildings three and four--the women's living quarters--that he had seen her that first and only time six months ago. He was walking quickly and pulled up beside her. One sidelong glance was exchanged and her face had filled with terror. Then she almost ran from him. He followed, but the weird chase ended after she actually turned to look back. Afraid she might commit further offenses in her efforts to avoid him, he had slowed his pace to a crawl and soon lost sight of her after turning a few comers. Now his time was running out and he had to see her. She should be wiser in the ways of the camp; they could exchange a glance and separate. But that glance would tell him whether or not she too had become a machine. _If she's alive_, a corner of his brain whispered. But he refused to think of her as being dead. The sun was getting hot and the faces he looked at were indistinguishable in their blurry outlines. Nausea and dizziness returned and he could no longer concentrate on his search. _It's too late_, he thought. The second treatment had finished his chances. He tried thinking of other things, to remember his feelings from the time of the blast to the day he had passed through the new brick wall into the project. But all he got was a blur of fear. Fear then, fear now, and fear until the day they would kill him. "Sick of fear!" a voice rusty from disuse rasped out. "Sick of the whole mess!" It was with a sense of complete surprise that he realized his mouth was open and it was his own voice shouting. "It's over," he rasped and turned around to face a startled, thin-faced woman whose blue eyes peered at him--but not with terror. He looked at her, his mouth sagging open. "Over for both of us," she whispered, and moved toward him with arms outstretched and trembling. He tried to turn and run, to save her from further violations, but she grasped his hand. "George." And she was in his arms. "My third offense--when I stopped walking. There's nothing to lose now." The shuffling of feet continued about them as they embraced, and she talked hurriedly as if afraid that the few hours before the evening meal would not be enough for all she had to say. "I've walked behind you all these months. I was sure you would say something if you saw me and I didn't want you to be punished. Each morning I waited until the last moment before leaving the women's dining room--until you came by looking for me. Then I'd walk behind you, sometimes within touching distance. Once I had to wait too long, and then I went to Punitive for the second time. But it was all for nothing. I hoped you would go free, but it was all for nothing." He kissed her then and she had to stop. When he took his lips from hers, they both turned to the nearest detector bulb. They were being watched, but what difference did a thousand violations make now? She was talking again, and actually smiling. "You look distinguished in a beard!" He laughed, and saw the nearby trainees pick up the forgotten sound. He took her lips back to his own and heard the shuffling feet slow down all around them. And the fear was gone. "Let's go to the excavation," he said. "We'll sit down at the bottom in privacy and talk and laugh. We're free, Adele, and the rest doesn't matter now." He put his arm around her waist and they strolled against the pattern, the rigid walkers parting before them. When they reached the huge pit he kicked at the OFF LIMITS sign and was surprised at how easily it fell. Then he took her hand and moved down the steep, sandy slope. It wasn't until Adele moaned and closed her eyes tightly that he saw that the bottom of the pit was covered with stones--and clean white bones. The blood pounded in his temples as he stared at the piled skeletons and chemical stained earth. And the few hours of peace was no longer enough. Adele helped him pick up stones, until his hands and her cradled arms could hold no more. Bulbs, at least, could be broken. Up they climbed, and when they reached the pavement there were many trainees shuffling slowly past the spot where the sign lay. He threw the first stone at a detector bulb while still some distance from it, and his ruined eyes failed him. But the next time he stood directly beneath it and the shattering of glass seemed as loud as the atomic blast had been. Down the street they went, smashing bulb after bulb, retrieving their missiles so as to have enough to last. And all the trainees moved slowly behind them, on up to the last bulb in front of the Administration Building. The new sound was a sharp crack, and someone screamed in a rusty voice. He turned to see one of the crowd twitching on the pavement, then followed the faces turned up to Conqueror Punitive's window. There was a shadow there--a shadow with a rifle. "The last bulb," Adele said. "Smash it." He drew back his arm and the crack of rifle fire reached him a second after the hot streak creased his shoulder. But he wasn't hurt, and threw the stone. As the glass shattered there was an eruption of strange language from the building--a terrified shouting. The trainees stopped walking, then broke into frenzied movement and hoarse shouts. They pushed George and Adele aside in pursuit of the gray-uniformed figure running toward the gate. The third shot was inside the building, and then the crowd picked up the fleeing Conqueror. His screams died quickly. Into the building the Americans poured--shaggy skeletons shrieking hatred. By the time George and Adele followed, men and women stood silently in the rooms and halls. Punitive looked ridiculously small crouched in a corner, his head back, the rifle between his knees with the barrel in his shattered mouth. The total number of gray-uniformed bodies was six, all but Punitive killed by the Americans. But the trainees began to file from the building and run back toward their rooms, for the body in the large room filled with complex electrical equipment was lying in front of a high-powered sending set--a radio whose tubes still glowed red. George looked at the radio, then at Adele. "They sent for help," he whispered. "Soon, every American here will be dead. And it's because of us." She didn't answer, and he expected no answer. The room grew dark as they stood looking at the humming set. Then he fumbled over the dials, switched the current off, and led her out into the street. There was no whistle for the evening meal. The streets were empty, and the silence hemmed them in like a solid wall. They walked toward the men's feeding hall. Passing through the hall, they entered the door leading to the kitchen. There were huge electric stoves and further on, wheat and sugar sacks piled ceiling high. In a large bin they found various canned goods--the Conquerors' personal food supply. The stoves worked, and Adele found an opener and pots in the glare of the unshaded light bulbs. They ate quickly; soup, meat, several cans of condensed milk. Then they left the basement and walked into the balmy evening air. On the grassy spot in front of the Administration Building they loved each other desperately. Afterwards, they spoke of God, of what they believed would come after death, and were comforted. But they did not talk of what would happen to the others--that was too painful for words. Before he fell asleep, with Adele breathing regularly beside him, he once again strained his ears to hear something--anything--from outside the wall. Except for the ever-present hum of the oil-fed electric generators in the Administration Building, there was nothing. Not the bark of a dog or the scream of a cat or the clash of inanimate objects. Even the wind was dead. But he was too exhausted for fear, and slipped quickly into sleep. Once during the night, he awoke and raised his head to listen. When he lay back, there was a thought in his mind both terrible and full of hope. Adele awakened him in the morning. From the sun he could tell that it was past the time for the first meal. They went to the feeding hall and ate; then returned to the grassy spot. This time they found little to speak of and sat silently, watching the gate. They watched until the sun dipped low and shadows engulfed the silent buildings. Then they saw the first trainees slipping toward the feeding hall; the women moving toward the men's section in the need for comfort and protection. When George and Adele arrived in the kitchen, all the Americans were there. The women cooked the meal and whispered among themselves. The men sat talking, following the women with their eyes, trying to forget despair and certain death. They finished eating and sat quietly at the tables, husbands reunited with wives, boys and girls whispering to each other, all unwilling to return to the rooms, George spoke his thoughts. It was hard to speak aloud; he had kept his thoughts to himself for so very long, but he managed to speak quietly and calmly. He reminded them of the tactics the aliens had used to ensure obedience, how they had held out the promise of freedom as a reward for conformity. How, backed by the fear and terror they were able to inspire with their drastic punishments, they were able to enslave all the Americans and keep them toeing the mark. How they had probably felt secure enough in their conquest of the minds and bodies of their captives to leave the Earth in the hands of a few Punitives and a host of electronic gadgets. He told them, too, that the fact that no help had arrived despite the radio messages held the promise that the conquerors had no interest in Earth any longer; he assumed that they were busy elsewhere, or had merely conquered for the sheer joy of it, or that they lost interest ... any reason would suffice. The important thing was that they they were free again. Free to live and laugh, to love and to hope ... and to prepare a defense should the need arise. When he finished, even Adele looked at him with disbelief. But they all followed him to the Administration Building and one of the young men seated himself at the radio. Filling the room and overflowing into the hall, they waited. The youth knew his radios and manipulated the dials skillfully, but there was nothing except the crackle of static. With dread and hope mingled together, George listened to the empty airwaves--to the messages sent out on the sending set, and again to the barren, static response. Then he turned to Adele and smiled weakly. "We've more than Noah had," he said, and held her trembling hand. It was not until two days passed and the fuel for the generators had been exhausted that the first search party ventured into the city. The report was one word ringing hollowly in the feeding hall. "Nothing." Later expeditions utilized automobiles from the city's streets and traveled far out to other states. They returned with several haggard Americans and reports of some few surviving Conquerors. They also told of farms heavy with crops and of livestock wandering wild. But there were no large human groups; no signs of organized humanity anywhere in the world. Two months after George and Adele Lowery's revolt, the trainees left the housing area for the fields where they could raise food and plan their civilization. George rode beside his wife in the lead car. There was no joy or laughter in them, nor would there be for many years. But the wrecked city fell behind, the green and brown of the fields took its place, and somewhere in the motorcade a voice began singing. 
60460	----	THE RAIDER BY DON BERRY _He was a hunter with a Cause that transcended all law. But, now, could the Cause forgive him his service?_ [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, April 1958. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] They dropped the raider on the night side, less than thirty miles from Thanlar, the capitol city. The dark, slim ship drifted silently to the ground, discharged its passenger and lifted again, moving slowly like a great shark in the night. On the way out into space, it was caught by the defense screens of Thanlar and disappeared in a gout of flaming energy that lit up the entire night sky. The raider did not see it; he was already asleep. He slept, and his dreams were troubled by images of a familiar face. Strong cheekbones, the mane of white hair, the famous half-smile of Mayne Landing, Earth Commissioner to the Colony Planets. Mayne Landing, the gentle representative of Terra to her children, the kindly old gentleman with the fist of steel, the benevolent despot over a hundred Colony Planets. Mayne Landing: victim. The raider woke with the dawn, a dawn that was slightly more red-tinged than the sun he was used to. He gathered his small store of equipment together and cached it in the low scrub of the surrounding forest. By a clear, sparkling stream he washed, wincing slightly from the shock of the too-cold water against his face. He wore clothes indistinguishable from the other farmers of this district, slightly shabby, a uniform dun color. They did not fit him well, but they could not hide the wide shoulder and slim waist. Well, it didn't matter: the farmers of this planet, like all the Colonies, had to work hard to scrape their meager living from the rocky soil. They were all in good condition; he would not be conspicuous. He finished washing and dried himself on the sleeve of his jumper. Then he began to walk down the rocky hill to the village that stood in the tiny valley below. In the early sun, the tiny assemblage of white clean houses sparkled like a handful of sand-polished shells clustered on a beach. He stopped for a moment, halfway down, looking at the village. It was a nice little place, he thought. Peaceful in the early light, calm. There were a few people moving about the streets, probably farmers early on their way to the fields. It was a pastoral scene, like something he had read in a book a long time ago. _Nice_, he thought. _Quiet. I wonder what it will be like when I'm finished here._ It didn't pay to think about things like that. Not in his business. He let his eyes shift slightly to take in the tall towers of Thanlar, just visible over the crest of hills on the other side of the valley. Thanlar, the capitol. That was his concern. That was what he had to think about, not the village. He sighed once, started down the hill again, walking slowly, picking his way through the loose rocks with care. As he neared the village, he passed several crews of men going out into the fields. He greeted them in Interlingua, and they replied shortly, without curiosity. He knew he was a stranger to them; they did not recognize him, but they showed no curiosity. These days, curiosity was not much advantage to anyone, he thought. The farmers had probably learned long ago not to show too much interest in any stranger who suddenly appeared from nowhere. He came into the village and walked quickly to the faded wooden sign that announced, TAILOR. Entering the little shop, more a general dry-goods store than a tailor, he moved to the rear, to a small counter. No one was there, and he rang the bell on the counter. After a moment, a man appeared, hastily buttoning a tunic, his hair still tousled, sleep in his eyes. "Yes, yes? What is it? You are too early." "My apologies, old man," said the raider. "I am looking for a hunting cloak." The small man's eyes narrowed. "Ah," he said. "A hunting cloak. I have several. What did you have in mind." "Something in gray. To suit my name." "Ah. And what might you be hunting, Mr.--Gray?" "An animal of my home planet. It is called a jackal." "Ah." The old man suddenly turned from the low rack of cloaks and stared directly at his customer. His mouth compressed in a thin, bitter line. "So. You are he. The Mr. Gray who hunts the jackal. Come." He turned and led the way into his living quarters behind the counter. "I will tell the others you are here," he said. He left through a rear door, leaving the raider to wander about the tiny room, inspecting it without interest. He had seen too many like it in the past five years to be interested. Dingy little rooms in the back of a store, insect-ridden chambers in public lodgings, shack in the backwoods outside a city, too many, too many. And never a place to rest. _After this one_, he promised himself. _After this one._ Soon the little tailor came back, and there were two others with him. One was a ferret-eyed little man with a suspicious stare, the other a heavy-set farmer. The heavy-set man had a scythe in his hand, he had apparently been on his way to his fields when the tailor found him. He held the scythe tightly, and the raider could see he was very nervous. It was probably the first time he had ever come into contact with one of the raider's--profession. He didn't like it. Extending his free right hand, the farmer said, "My name is Carroll. Joseph Carroll. You are--Mr. Gray?" The raider took the proffered hand warmly, trying to gain this man's friendship. He would need all the help he could get. "Gray is my given name, Mr. Carroll. My last name--" he laughed embarrassedly, "--well, they call me Wolf, for the time being." "Appropriate," said the man bitterly. "I'm sorry I have to meet you under these conditions, Mr. Carroll, very sorry." The other shrugged, keeping his eyes fixed on the raider's lean, brown face, trying to guess what sort of mind lay behind it. "In these times," he said finally, with an air of discouragement, "one cannot choose either one's friends or the conditions of meeting." The ferret-eyed man had been watching the exchange closely, and now he sidled up to the raider with his thin, white hand extended. "Please forgive Joseph," he said smoothly. "He is not happy about this affair." His voice exuded a sort of artificial charm, and Wolf found himself repelled by the man. "None of us do," he said. He turned to the farmer again, who was standing uncomfortably, his eyes on the floor. Wolf watched him for a moment, just long enough for the farmer to know he was being watched. "Perhaps," said Wolf slowly, "we had better straighten this out right now." The heavy-set man looked up defiantly. "All right," he said. "I admit I do not like this business, I do not like what you are here for, I do not like what will happen to our village when you are gone." The thin man laughed. "The old man means to say he is a coward." "No," said the man stubbornly, without taking his eyes away from Wolf. "I am not a coward. But your mission means death for many people, people I call my friends. I do not like that." "There is a necessity," said Wolf, quietly. "Perhaps, perhaps," said Joseph Carroll, shaking his head dubiously. "I do not pretend to understand the political complications. I know only that, whether you succeed or fail, our village is lost. Our people will suffer for what you do. Many will probably die. You cannot expect me to like that." "No," Wolf agreed. "We do not expect that of you, Joseph. No one expects you to like this. But, tell me--" "Yes." "What was your tax the past year?" Wolf asked. The old man laughed bitterly. "Seventy-nine percent." "Enough to live on?" "Barely," said Carroll, leaning heavily on the scythe. "It means we must work many hours, sixteen or more a day, in order to survive." "That is what we fight," said Wolf simply. "That, and the near slavery of many of the Colonies. Do you know what happens to the money you pay the Terran Federation in taxes?" "No," admitted Carroll. "No one has dared ask." Wolf laughed. "And yet they say the Federation is a republic? When the citizen does not dare ask what happens to the taxes that are ground out of him? I'll tell you, my friend Joseph. It is used for administration. Simply that. Administration of a space empire is an expensive project, and you must pay for it. It costs a great deal of money, our treasured Empire. And what does the administration consist of? Machinery to collect taxes. It is like a snake that feeds on its own tail, Joseph. Taxes are increased in order to have enough money to collect more taxes. It never ends." "This is one thing," said Joseph. "The killing of people is another." "How many do you know who have died in Debtor's camps, or died because they could not work hard enough? Joseph, this is no life for a man. The Colonies cannot develop under the Federation. They must be free to govern themselves. Otherwise, we have simply a great, cancerous tumor, spreading through the universe, calling itself the Terran Federation." Joseph sighed. "All right," he said. "In principle I agree. The colonies must be free. But is there no other way than murder and assassination? This violence--what can come of it? And if the revolution succeeds eventually, how can we know the Federation will not be replaced by the same thing under another name?" "Because you will govern yourselves," Wolf said. "Every Colony will be autonomous, trading as a sovereign nation with the other Colonies. The idea of a Galactic Empire is self-defeating, Joseph, it is unhealthy, vicious. The only way man can go to the stars with his head up, is without dreams of infinite power blinding him." "You are an idealist," said the ferret-eyed man, with surprise. "A man must live for something," said Wolf, quietly. "Certainly, certainly," the thin man agreed quickly. "I was surprised to find an idealist in your--trade." "My trade is as distasteful to me as it is to you," said Wolf, speaking more to Joseph Carroll than to the pale, thin man. "What will the death of Mayne Landing accomplish?" Carroll asked. "Confusion. He is the Administrator of over one hundred planets. He is a strong man, a focal point. Without him, without his personal strength, the administration of those planets will falter, and stop. It isn't that he carries on the routine work, of course. But decisions come from him, the decisions that cannot be made by routine, the decisions that require a man's creative spark. Without that, the routine itself cannot stand." "It rather sounds as if you respect the man," said Carroll. "Respect him? I--" Wolf hesitated, uncertain. "Yes," he finished. "I respect him. He is doing what he thinks is right, as I do what I think is right." "And you would kill a man for whom you hold no hatred," Carroll muttered. "This thing is making beasts of us all." _If you only knew_, thought Wolf, _if you only knew._ "Sometimes it is necessary," he said aloud. "Sometimes bad things are necessary, that good may follow." Carroll sighed. "Well, we are committed now. We must go ahead." "I will need detailed information on Landing's plan of inspection," Wolf said. "You will have it," Carroll told him. "Daimya has been in the city for five days, listening and watching." "Good," said Wolf. He felt better now, getting into the operation. This he knew, this he could handle. It was what he was trained for. It was the other things that were bad, the thinking, the wondering, the long nights spent sleepless, uncertain. "When will he be back?" Wolf asked. "This Daimya." "She. Daimya is my daughter," Carroll said. "Even our children must have blood on their hands. She will return this evening." * * * * * Daimya came, just after dark. Wolf was startled. He had expected a child, from the way Carroll spoke, and Daimya was far from a child. She was a slim woman, in her early twenties, he estimated. Her body was sleek and fit, and her long black hair was tied behind her head, where it flowed over her back like a waterfall carved from ebony. She had large eyes, slightly almond shaped, that regarded him solemnly as she gave the information she had gathered. "He will come to inspect this village in two days," she said. "He will visit four farms, picked at random, and then there will be a procession down the main street." "That would be our time," Wolf mused. "Crowds about." "Some will be killed," Daimya objected. "His guards will not take this thing lightly." "I am sorry," Wolf said sincerely. "It is our best chance of success." Daimya shrugged. "You are the killer, not I," she said, with obvious distaste. Wolf felt an impulse to explain, to justify, to make this slight girl see that he hated this. Angrily he fought it down. _It doesn't matter what she thinks_, he told himself. _It doesn't matter. What matters is to get the job done and get out. That's all._ "Tell me," Daimya said curiously, "how do you come to be mixed up in a thing like this? You don't act like a hired killer." Wolf laughed shortly. "No," he said. "I'm an amateur. I was a Captain of the Security Patrol once. My whole family was in Federation Service, as a matter of fact. I was on Colony Patrol for three years. In that time I saw so much suffering, so much injustice, so much simple cruelty that--well, never mind. When I was contacted by a member of the revolution underground, I deserted. It almost killed my father. Since I was familiar with the Federation's higher echelons, I was assigned the pleasant job of assassin." "How many men have you killed in that job?" Daimya asked, almost casually. Wolf watched her for a long moment before answering. "You don't want to know that," he said slowly. The girl dropped her eyes. "No. No, I guess you're right. I'm sorry." She stood and went to the door. She stopped there and turned, looking at Wolf. He met her eyes and held them with his own, frankly, without embarrassment. "I'm sorry," she repeated. She closed the door softly behind her, and Wolf bent to study the map of the village she had provided. * * * * * The village lay in a cup-shaped valley. The main street was also a direct highway out of Thanlar. On either side of the highway, the farmer's fields stretched, checkered brown and green, to the foothills. The entire valley was not more than a mile wide, and the fields extended only a quarter of a mile on either side of the main road. The foothills added another quarter of a mile, and then, abruptly, the mountains started. Though one of the principal highways to Thanlar, the main street was fairly narrow, bordered closely on either side by the small business district, composed mostly of single story buildings constructed out of native lumber from the hills. Wolf decided the center of the business district would offer the most concealment. Any group of men at any other place would be viewed with suspicion by Mayne Landing's bodyguards, and their chances would be proportionately diminished. It remained to determine the most effective weapon. Explosive? No, too many villagers would be killed. Yet that would certainly be the most certain way, a grenade thrown from the roof of one of the low buildings. He wondered how thoroughly the Administrator's men would check the village before the procession. Joseph Carroll told him the check was cursory; except for the spasmodic attacks of the revolution underground, the Colonies were submissive enough, and the precautions taken were in the nature of routine. It looked to be easy, Wolf thought wryly. The easiest of them all, since the planet was fairly distant from the scene of previous underground operations. They wouldn't be expecting it, he thought. Down the main street in procession, the Administrator standing in the little ground car, smiling and waving to his subjects, genial, effusive. And then-- "Joseph," said Wolf suddenly. "How many men can I depend on?" "Perhaps thirty," said the farmer. "Perhaps a few more." "Are they completely dependable?" "Within reason," said Carroll. "They are farmers, not soldiers. Plows are more familiar to them than guns." "How many can you get me that will obey me without question, no matter what?" Joseph Carroll tugged absently at his ear. Finally, he shrugged. "Perhaps five," he said. "Including myself." "All right," sighed Wolf. "It will have to be that way, then. But the others can be depended on 'within reason?'" "Yes," Carroll said. "Do not expect too much. They do not like this business." "Neither do you," Wolf said. "But you count yourself among the five trustworthy." Carroll didn't answer, and Wolf took his silence as a declaration of faith. "All right," he said. "Leave me now. At sunset, bring your men to me, all of them. I will work out the attack." "Very well," said Carroll, and started to leave. "Joseph," said Wolf softly, and the older man turned at the door. "What is it?" "What about Daimya?" "What about her?" "Where will she be during--this attack?" "At home, I expect," said Carroll. "Where she belongs." Wolf toyed for a moment with the map that lay before him. "Joseph," he said. "What _will_ happen to the village?" "You don't know?" asked Carroll in surprise. "No," Wolf admitted. "I have never stayed behind." Carroll laughed bitterly. "One of two things," he said. "They will either demolish it from the air, including the populace, or they will put everyone in one of the forced labor camps." The farmer made a small gesture of resignation. "I didn't know," Wolf said, almost under his breath. _Can I be responsible for that?_ "They don't like Colonists cooperating with the revolutionaries," Carroll continued. "Did you expect they exempted us all from our taxes as a reward?" "No," Wolf said. "But I didn't know it was so--complete." "They are thorough," the old man shrugged. "Any village where an incident occurs is made an example. Before long, you people will not find much welcome in the Colonies." "I suppose not," Wolf mused. "Perhaps by then--" "You really believe you're going to succeed in overthrowing the Federation, don't you?" "I must," said Wolf. "Without that, all this--" he gestured to the map before him, traced with arrows, notations, ideas, "--is meaningless slaughter." "So it seems," Carroll said flatly. "Joseph," said Wolf suddenly. "With luck, there will be a ship waiting for me in the mountains when I've--finished here." "That's your good fortune," Carroll said grimly. "Will you come with me?" "And join the revolutionaries?" "You--and Daimya." Carroll considered it slowly. "No," he said finally. "Not I. I have gotten my people into this, I must stay with them. All were against it when you first contacted us. All but me. It is my fault. I have to stay with them." Wolf felt a sudden surge of affection for the old man. Reluctant he might be, but he knew what he was doing and he knew the consequences and was willing to accept them. "And Daimya?" "That is a different matter," said Carroll. "It is not right that she should suffer for her father's folly." _Or that a father should suffer for his son's folly_, thought Wolf. But he said nothing. "You would take her?" Carroll asked. "If I am--able," said Wolf. "All right," said the old man. "I will see to it. Better she should be alive than dead. That is all that matters." * * * * * Wolfs final plan was simple. He had not enough men to count on a direct attack. The major work would be performed by the dependable five, of which Carroll assured him. The others would be used to create a diversion to cover the actual assault. There was a slight bend to the highway just before it entered the village. When the procession passed this point, they would see a group of men disperse quickly into the low scrub at the side of the road. This would put them on their guard, they would be apprehensive, watching. When the procession had entered the village itself and was within the short commercial strip, there would be an explosion back of them. Grenades, perhaps some shooting. If Wolf's prediction were accurate, this would divert the attention of at least the major portion of guards for long enough. Long enough for the five men in the crowd to do what they had to do-- "This must be timed perfectly," he told the man who was to head the diversionary squad. "I understand that." "Too soon or too late, either will destroy us. It will take us too long to reach the Administrator. He must be exactly opposite the tailor's shop. It must be done right." "It will be done right." "If it is not, all the sacrifices are for nothing, you understand that? The consequences will be as bad, or worse, for the village, and we will have accomplished nothing. If the Administrator is dead, there will be time for most of the villagers to escape into the hills before the Federation can take action against them." The man left, after Wolf had provided him with the weapons his group would need from his cache on the nearby hillside. The dependable five were instructed in their parts, and then there was nothing to do but wait. The next morning dawned clear. The air was cool, a slight breeze ruffled the fields around the village. As the sun rose higher in the sky, it glinted sharply from the towers of Thanlar. It had been impossible to keep the entire operation a secret from the villagers. They knew something was to happen, and they knew it concerned the inspection trip of Mayne Landing to the village. It was not hard to guess what it was. As the day drew on toward noon, the tension of the people grew. Small knots of farmers gathered on the corners, their fields forgotten for the day, talking low. Wolf didn't like it, it was too obvious. The village was primed, ready to explode, and he was afraid the tension would make the guards _too_ alert. They had to be just tense enough to respond to the diversion, not enough so they would be watching _everywhere_. He was counting on an instinctive, rapid response. He sat behind the tailor shop, talking to his men with a confidence and calm he did not feel. He spoke as if the success of the mission were a foregone fact, and the escape of the villagers into the hills. But he knew it was tenuous. Perhaps he had planned it too critically. Perhaps a simple direct attack would have been better. Perhaps, perhaps-- Any number of things were possible, he thought. But it was done now. If he had made a mistake, they would know soon. On the contraband comset behind the tailor shop, Wolf had called the mother-ship that hovered just out of detection range. All right, they confirmed, there would be a shuttle in the hills back of the town. Did he know the shuttle that had brought him had been lost? No? Well, it had. With the whole crew aboard. _That many more_, thought Wolf. _If anybody's keeping a list, I've got a lot to my credit. Or damnation._ And, bitterly: _More friends than enemies._ Don't think about it. Do your job and get the hell out. If you can. He spoke to Daimya, but on her father's advice did not tell her of his plan to take her along. "She won't go voluntarily," the old man said frankly. "We will have to pretend we are all going to the hills. After that--" he nodded slowly, "--the problem is yours." "I will take care of her, Joseph," Wolf had promised, and the sun-browned farmer had clasped his hand tightly in a mute gesture of hopefulness. "You understand--a man and his daughter--you understand?" _More than you probably know, Joseph._ "Yes," he said aloud. "I think I understand." And then came the word that the Administrator's procession was in sight. Wolf looked at his five dependables. He passed each face slowly, as if he had never seen them before. They were young, and old, and middle-aged. They were dark from the hours in the sun, strong from the work that pulled their muscles for the long hours each day. They smiled at him, grimly, nervous, but they were good men. _The faces of freedom_, Wolf thought. _These are the faces and the bodies of freedom._ Then it was time. * * * * * The streets were lined with silent people when the procession came into view around the slight curve. Then there was a tentative cheer from someone. It was taken up by someone else, and soon the crowd was roaring its synthetic appreciation of Administrator Mayne Landing. Wolf breathed easier. Craning his neck in the crowd, Wolf spotted the other five, standing dispersed in the crowd, but all near the spot on the street opposite the tailor's shop. They made no acknowledgement except meeting his eyes, then turning away to watch the procession near. As they came closer, Wolf noted with satisfaction that several of the guards occasionally glanced at the street behind them. Good. They had seen the knot of men outside town, then. If they expected anything, they were expecting it from behind them. He could see the tall, straight figure of Mayne Landing in the ground car. He took in the familiar face almost hungrily, the great shock of white hair moving gently in the slight breeze, the characteristic gesture, a half-salute, the slight smile, the kindly eyes of the old man-- He tore his eyes away from the dignified figure and glanced behind him, down the street. He saw a figure move on a roof-top, and wondered if the guards saw it, too. Then the ground car was opposite, and Wolf had a wrenching sensation that the diversionary squad was not going to go through with it.... An explosion rocked the street a block away, shaking the ground underfoot, shattering windows in the adjacent stores. A billow of dirty black smoke began to drift toward the sky. There was a scattering of small, explosive fire. The tone of the crowd's roar changed. It deepened and became a mass cry of confusion and fright. Quietly, Wolf edged forward to the street, automatically noting that his men were doing the same. Several of the guards had turned, were running back toward the source of the excitement, and others were turned toward it. But those around Mayne Landing had not responded. They were keeping their eyes fixed on the crowd. They were too well trained to be drawn off, and Wolf cursed under his breath. He stopped his forward motion and waited, rocking on the balls of his feet. This was the part he hadn't told his five about. Suddenly there was a flurry in the crowd on the opposite side of the street. The nearest guard whirled, in time to draw his hand gun and fire. The first of the five sprawled in the street, a bloody stump where his head had been. But the guard's blast had not been in time to stop the long mowing knife that buried itself to the hilt in his throat. He lurched forward, dropping the hand gun. His momentum carried him almost into the edge of the crowd, and a woman screamed hysterically. Wolf's other men had been only a fraction of a second behind the first, and the street was now a chaos of shouting and the sharp, flat reports of the guards' hand guns. The crowd milled frantically, adding to the confusion as the attackers leaped at the procession. Wolf waited, waited, watching for the single split-second when the guards were fully engaged with the crowd. Then it came, and their heads were momentarily turned away from Mayne Landing. Wolf sprinted from the crowd, the short stiletto cradled in his hand. He leaped to the side of the ground car just as Mayne Landing turned toward him. He saw the old man's face clearly in that moment. It held no fear, but only an unbelievable surprise, an astonishment beyond understanding. Then the stiletto slid gently into the throat, severing the jugular, and all surprise and emotion was lost in the implacable blank agony of death. The still-pumping heart forced a pulsing stream of bright arterial blood around the blade of the knife. Then, as quickly as he had come, Wolf was gone. He slipped back through the crowd, into the door of the tailor shop. Seconds later, Joseph Carroll was there, one side of his gray farmer's tunic turning brown-black from the blood that soaked it. "Come on!" Carroll snapped, running for the back. "What about the others?" "Gone," said the old man shortly. "All of them." He dashed out the door of the tailor shop into the back and Wolf followed him. "Daimya!" Wolf shouted. "She's waiting for us in the foothills." The sound of the crowd and the blasting of hand guns was loud behind them as they began their dash across the checkered fields. For a few moments, nothing followed. Then Wolf heard a faint shout behind them, and a huge gout of dirt erupted from the field beside him, almost knocking him down. He regained his balance and started to run low, crouched and zig-zagging while the tiny explosive pellets pocked the field around him. It seemed an eternity before they had crossed the field, but he knew it was not more than a couple of minutes. Joseph Carroll was ahead of him, already beginning to tear through the scrub growth of the foothills, making his way up. Just as he entered the undergrowth, Wolf saw the old man joined by a smaller, slighter figure. There was a roar in his ears, and he fell, a searing pain across his back. Numbly, he realized he'd been hit, but somehow it didn't seem important. He picked himself up and followed Carroll into the scrub. Soon he was out of sight of their pursuers, though the explosions of their weapons still followed them with uncanny accuracy. He caught up with the old man and his daughter in a small clearing. Carroll lay with his head cradled in Daimya's lap, gasping for breath. "We've got to go on," Wolf said. "Come on, I'll help." "You're hurt!" the girl said. "Not badly. Come on, we've got to get your father out of here!" The old man put his arms around the shoulders of the other two, and they struggled up the hill, breaking their way through the brush, slipping, sometimes falling. Behind them, there was still the occasional sound of the explosive pellets, and infrequently, one came very near. "Close," muttered Wolf as an explosion showered them with dirt. "They're on the path now." They went a few steps farther, and Joseph slumped between them. "Dad!" called Daimya. "Please! Please try to go on!" Wolfs hand slid down the old man's back, came away warm and wet. He was silent for a moment, then gently lowered the suddenly limp body to the ground. "Come on," he said to Daimya. The girl was standing over the inert form of her father, not understanding what had happened, words of encouragement still on her lips. "Dad?" she said, bewildered. Wolf took her arm. "Daimya, he's gone. Come on." "No--Dad--" She knelt beside him on the ground. "Sorry, Daimya," Wolf said under his breath. He swung, hitting her cleanly behind the head. The girl collapsed soundlessly, and he slung her over his shoulder and started on up the hill. Finally, he cleared the crest. Just beyond it, lying in a tiny meadow lay the black, unmarked shuttle ship. As he came in view, the port opened and a man ran toward him. Wolf stumbled, caught his balance, went on. "Here," said the crewman, "let me take her." Silently, out of fatigue, Wolf relinquished his load and stumbled toward the port. It slid shut behind them, just in time to keep them from being covered with dirt blown from a hole that suddenly appeared a yard behind. Wolf caught a glimpse of men appearing at the crest. Inside the ship, he could hear the thud and clang of the explosive cartridges detonating uselessly against the permalloy hull. Then the drives roared their song of power, and the shuttle lifted clear. * * * * * The crewmen were more than curious. "Who the hell's the girl?" "Got me. Never heard of such a thing." "Well, I suppose a Raider has a right to pick up a little booty now and then," another laughed. "They don't have the easiest job in the world." "Bet she's going to be mad when she wakes up." "Yeah. Looks like the Raider might be worrying a little about that right now." Wolf stood at the forward screen, silently watching the shape of the mother-ship grow larger and larger until the screen held nothing but the great black hull. The crewmen were wrong, he wasn't worried about Daimya's waking. He could take care of that when the time came. He was thinking about other things, the things that came to him when he slept, the faces, the names, the actions, the right and wrong of living according to what you think is right, no matter what the cost. But the cost, the cost.... It was so high sometimes, so terribly high. _This trip_, he thought. A shuttle crew. Five good men, probably the whole village, eventually. Those who did escape into the hills would lead a life of fear and pursuit, foraging as they went until finally they were caught. And worst of all, this was worst of all, and mentally he saw the list, the list of his responsibilities, the list for which he would someday have to account. The bright name of Mayne Landing: victim. His mind shied away from it. _Can that be forgiven? Can such a thing ever be forgiven?_ Gray Landing, called Wolf in the underground, turned away from the forward screen and began to prepare to board the mother-ship. 
61696	----	MARTIAN TERROR _A Novelet of Revolution Among the Venusians_ By ED EARL REPP Lolan, the Martian Sub-Commander, had no choice. He sorrowed for Princess Mora's beaten, X-ray starved subjects. But when the desperate Venusians raised their empty fists, duty commanded him to cut loose his force-bolts. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Spring 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Lolan's pen made the only sound in the stuffy barracks room. The words took shape reluctantly beneath the official army letterhead, even as his mind had fought against framing them. He sat alone at his desk, the open window behind him crowding in the dank heat of a Venusian summer night. The collar of his ornate, iridite-crusted uniform was open, but a dark ring of perspiration stained its top. Lolan laid the pen down and looked at what he had written. His violet-gray eyes became stony. This letter might mean demotion to the ranks, or even court-martial, but the things in him had festered there too long. "Herewith I tender my resignation as Sub-Commander of the Martian Army of Occupation on the planet Venus," he read. "If it is the wish of the Council-Royal, I desire immediate transfer to some post on Mars. I can no longer blind my conscience to the brutal treatment Venusians are receiving at the hands of us, their conquerors. "When I accepted this post two years ago, I understood that, under Commander Arzt, I would be endeavoring to control a savage, half-wild people scarcely more intelligent than beasts. I found them gentle, intelligent, cheerful, demanding only the treatment we accord our slaves at home. But do they receive it? No! We dole them food not fit for swine. We work them fifteen hours a day in their own iridite mines, in the sulphur holes, at whatever other work is beneath a Martian soldier. Their population has been reduced twenty percent during the twenty years since Mars conquered them. Disease is prevalent in their poorer quarters--little better than the 'improved' sections--to such an extent that few officers ever venture into these pestilential streets except to put down an occasional uprising. "Because I feel that to continue in this post would demean--" Lolan scowled at the unfinished sentence. He went to the window and stood staring out, his eyes not seeing the low clouds brushing the barracks roofs, nor the jagged tracery of lights a half-mile below, where Areeba sprawled in miserable squalor over the foothills. Before him was the vision of a girl's sober face--the face of a Venusian, high-caste woman. Princess Mora ... princess only in name, but beloved of her people--and of Lolan. But for her, that letter would have been written and handed in a year ago. But somehow the young Martian could not leave Venus while she and her father, old ex-Emperor Atarkus, were still here and under continual threat of death. There could never be any more intimate relation between them than that of master and slave--yet Lolan kept a forlorn flame of hope guttering in his heart. There were two good reasons why he was a fool to let Mora be a factor in his staying on Venus. In the first place, inter-marriage was strictly forbidden by Arzt, high commander of the army. Second--and more important to Lolan--biology entered in. Years ago, a few Martian soldiers had taken native wives, with tragic results. Although the two races were almost alike in appearance, except for the deeper coloring of the invaders, the children resulting from such unions were ugly, half-witted little monsters. Fortunately, none of them lived for more than a few years. Lolan's lean young features hardened. Why fight it any longer? He couldn't have Mora, couldn't help her people without being a traitor to his own race. With an oath he pivoted from the window. It was then that he saw the indicator on his tele-screen flashing angrily. Quick strides carried him there, a flip of the thumb made the silver screen a window to the outside world. The brutal face of Irak, Captain of the Secret Service, took shape. "--repeating:" came the tail end of his announcement. "Two minutes ago the house in which Ars Lugo is hiding was entered by two persons. I am in an upstairs room across the street. I could not be sure of their identity, but I believe we are on the verge of breaking the secret of the recent revolution rumors. Haste is imperative if we are to trap them together...." Excitement tingled through Lolan. Ars Lugo, a condemned revolutionary lately escaped from the Sulphur Holes, had contacted friends. Arzt had been right in deliberately letting him escape and tracking him to a hideout. "Rotten meat draws flies quickly," was his way of putting it. Now the flies had been drawn. But an unknown terror kept Lolan from even guessing at their identities--swiftly he hurried from the room as somewhere the officers' alarm began chiming. A small, silent gravity-repulsion ship set eight men in the uniform of high Martian officers down a few blocks from the slum in which Captain Irak was tensely waiting for them. Lolan emerged with set face. Around him on the flat roof of the building where they had landed were grouped the others. The voice of Arzt came harshly through the quiet. He was a short, immensely powerful man, with reddish features stamped with the cast of brutality. There was a slovenliness to him, a brutal arrogance that was betrayed by every ugly twist of his mouth as he spoke. "Lolan, you'll give the order," he snapped. "These filthy revolutionists won't be looking for trouble if you handle it right. We'll have them before they know what's happened. I told you Ars Lugo would get in touch with his cronies as soon as he thought he wasn't being watched. Come on!" They left the ship on the roof and groped down an outside stairway to the narrow street. A light fog hung yellowish in the streets. For a moment after their feet touched the slimy cobblestones, the eight Martians huddled together by a single impulse--revulsion at the sordidness of the lower-class quarter. Sickly gleams kindled on their uniforms where stray beams from dingy windows found them. The stench of rotting offal insulted their nostrils, mingled with the musty, revolting odors peculiar to the south side of Areeba, principal city of Venus. A place of drunken, tottering buildings and vice and sickness that festered like a raw sore, the south side was the abode of the diseased, the degenerate, the lawless. With a muttered curse, Lolan swung down the street. It didn't have to be like this. It was commanders like Arzt who let the Venusians suffer for their own enrichment. Inwardly, a resolution was taking possession of the young officer that this was his last duty on Venus. Tomorrow ... his letter of resignation would be handed in. * * * * * In a dark alley across the street from a crumbling, one-story hovel, he slipped into the shadows. His eyes were riveted to the yellow cracks of light opposite him, where bolted shutters guarded some furtive scene within that house. Then he was moving swiftly backwards as two forms reeled from the fog. His eyes narrowed to careful slits that raked the pair. They had not seen him, nor, apparently, the other hidden Martians they had just passed. Their bellies were so full of cheap Martian _gyla_ that all they could see was the heaving stones under their feet. Lolan's slim, dark fingers fell from the _sadon_ pistol at his side. The fog swallowed the derelicts. Ragged nerves leaping, Lolan strode across the street, knocked softly at the door. Frightened gasps found their way through the portal. Someone gruffed: "Who is it? What do you want?" Lolan pressed his lips against a crack in the door. "Lugo--you've got to get out! They know you're here! I heard two of them talking. Let me in, will you! I can't stand here shouting." A bolt scraped in its bed and the door inched back the width of a man's black eye. From both sides of Lolan, burly, powerful shapes lunged at the door. The man behind it cried out a single shrill warning as he was hurled to the floor. Six Martian officers clanked inside. Arzt loomed up with Captain Irak, gripped Lolan's arm. "Good work!" he grunted. "Now we'll have these dirty Venusian rebels where we want them, eh?" Hard-jawed, Lolan made no answer but strode in. One glimpse of the room's interior sent shock through his vitals like a sword. A single, whispered word parted his bloodless lips: "Mora!" The girl across the room glanced at him in hurt surprise. Quickly she looked away. She stood erect and pale under the soldiers' eager glances. She was tall, for a Venusian, with slim, strong limbs and golden hair lying soft about her shoulders. Her garments were of the roughest cloth, but dignity and courage were in the flash of her eyes and the spots of color in her cheeks. During those first moments Lolan was conscious only of a growing ache in his throat. He wanted to ask Mora and her father, standing there beside her, why they had come here, since they knew it meant death to consort with revolutionists. But he sensed that their kind of courage would laugh at the question. In Lolan's breast, a cold, dead thing had taken the place of his heart. The ex-emperor stood fierce and tall, a shaggy-headed man of sixty-five. He was a living skeleton dressed in hanging garments. Most of the life in him seemed to be concentrated in his blazing eyes. There was force in his countenance, but his voice came in the cracked accents of an old man. "What's the meaning of this? Can't a man and his daughter call on their friends without being watched like criminals?" Arzt swaggered close, his stubby legs moving stiffly. "Not when they'd like to see a revolution as much as you two!" he taunted. "You admit conspiracy with this rebel?" Ars Lugo stood between two hulking officers, scowling at the Commander. "Conspiracy!" he spat. "Don't hang that crime on them. I was out of food and money and knew they could help me a little. I sent for them." Arzt smashed a thick palm across the man's face. Contempt twisted his ill-formed features. He jerked a thumb at the well-like hole, guarded by a low rim, in a far corner, where refuse was thrown in such cheap hovels as this. "Another of your filthy lies and you'll go down the sewer. In the underground rivers you'll have plenty of time to think up better ones. Now, you two--" He grinned wickedly at Mora and Atarkus. "There's a little matter of a map I've heard rumors of. Who's got it--one of you, or Lugo?" "You talk like a fool!" raged Atarkus. "We've got no map, you vile butcher." Arzt's struggle for self-control was evident in the working of his jaw muscles. Presently he relaxed. He drew on his feeble powers of sarcasm. "The matter has been brought to my attention," he purred gutturally, "that one of your esteemed countrymen, a garbage-boy in the barracks, has been making a map of the buildings. I had the extremely painful duty--painful to him--of cutting his body here and there and pouring in burning sulphur; but the lad would not talk. But since he carried no papers, I judge he passed them on earlier. Now, you bag of bones--" he roared suddenly, "where is that map?" "You are screaming into the wrong hole to get an echo," Mora replied coldly. "We know nothing." "Nothing, eh?" A small knife flashed into Arzt's fingers. He caught Atarkus in a vicious hug and placed the blade just under his ear. "Then remember it, before your father strangles on his own blood!" Lolan stiffened, his hand dropping to the _sadon_ pistol. The weapon was halfway out of its holster when a new voice intruded obsequiously. "Commander--I wouldn't do that!" II It was scrawny little Captain Irak who had spoken. An apologetic smile bracketed his lips and he was shaking his head slowly. Lolan knew a warm rush of gratitude toward him. Ugly as he was, he was intelligent and less sadistic than many of the officers. He said little--which made the Sub-Commander suspect he knew much. Arzt grunted, puzzled, "You wouldn't--? Why not, you grinning, ugly little ape?" Irak kept on smiling blandly. "Look outside," he advised. Arzt did, but still kept his hold on the old man. There were a score of shabby Venusians peering in from the dark street like wolves around a fire on the high Martian steppes. They fell back under the impact of so many eyes. Irak closed the door. "Kill Atarkus tonight and by morning we'll have a first-class revolution on our hands," he said. "These people worship Atarkus and his daughter. If he is to die, it must be otherwise ... secretly, perhaps, in the dungeons where no one will ever learn." Arzt's hands fell to his side. "There's wisdom in what you say," he begrudged. "Especially ... the last part. But if I find the proof I need of their guilt tonight, there'll be no waiting. We can try, and execute them, publicly. Search the woman, Lolan. I'll search this ancient blasphemer myself." Lolan hesitantly fell to the task. "I'm sorry!" he whispered. She gave no sign that she had heard, no indication that it meant any more or less to her that he must perform the job than anyone else; nor had Lolan ever known if she returned his feelings. Their meetings had been few, when they had come to Arzt's court-martial occasionally to plead for their countrymen on some matter. With his pulses racing, he searched her gown thoroughly and found no suspicious articles. He was red-faced and perspiring when Arzt barked: "Then that devil's got it! Search Lugo, men!" That order was the cue for the lanky Venusian to hurl himself from the arms of his captors. "The sewer!" Lolan gasped. Lugo was heading for the black-mouthed hole to hurl himself into the underground river two hundred feet below ... himself and anything he carried! The young Martian did not stop to reason that Ars Lugo might be carrying the evidence that would send Mora and her father to their deaths. He acted purely by instinct, flinging himself upon the revolutionary and dragging him to the floor. But Lugo was up again, like a released spring. Lolan crawled frantically after him. He grabbed a heel, brought the Venusian spinning about while he lurched to his feet. A jabbing fist sent him reeling back. In the next moment Ars Lugo was diving feet first down the hole! Lolan's muscles had been leaned to spring-steel tautness in rigorous Martian military exercises. It was only that whiplash power of them that enabled him to grasp one of Ars Lugo's hands as he vaulted the low rim. In a flash he knew his error. The Venusian's weight was hauling him across the smooth floor and into the pit of death! * * * * * There was a moment of un-thinking panic, of hearing the distant roar of tumbling black water and the savage grunts of the man dangling below him. Someone grabbed his feet and his headlong plunge was arrested. Arzt was shouting: "Hold him! Don't let him get away with that paper!" Lolan fought the burning numbness of his forearm. Ars Lugo had ripped off a belt-buckle and was slashing at his knuckles with it. The men above kept shouting encouragement while they fought for leverage. Every sinew in the Martian's body stood out in ridges and knots. Sweat bathed his flesh, and he knew that moisture was causing Lugo to slip still further. "Hurry!" he groaned. "I can't--" With startling abruptness he was flying out of the hole, while Ars Lugo, with strips of skin under his fingernails that he had ripped from Lolan's hand, went spinning down into black nothingness. Pain had beaten determination. Ars Lugo had won--death! Horror held the officers around the hole like statues, staring down. It was during that interval that Lolan felt a hard, slippery object in his hand. He opened it to see the bracelet Ars Lugo had worn, which he had somehow torn loose. A curious, heavy ornament of iridite crystals and onyx, and on the inside of it strange scratchings, like-- Like a map! Some impulse caused Lolan's fingers to clamp on the bracelet. Arzt was staring. "And there goes our chance for a quick disposal of these other two," he grunted sourly. "If you could have ... well, it's done now." Briskly he gave an order. "Take them home. But remember this, Venusians--your consorting with revolutionaries has marked you for death! At any day, any hour, I may have you seized and brought back." Atarkus paused scornfully on the threshold. Mora had already gone, her head high and eyes straight ahead. "We don't frighten easily," the old ruler flung back. "When you live in hell as we do, one more pit of damnation merely serves to bore us. May you boil in your own lard, Martian pig!" Arzt swore at him and half-drew his pistol. Sneering, then, he relaxed and turned to fix Lolan with a burning glance. "Your failure tonight intrigues me," he offered suggestively. "You never seemed to be hindered by pain to that extent before." Lolan showed him his bleeding fingers, from which great drops of blood were falling. "It was the shock," he murmured. "You don't think I let him escape on purpose--!" "I hardly imagine you could be so foolish. At any rate, you'll be given a chance to redeem yourself. Sometime in the next three or four days I want those two killed, very quietly and--very thoroughly. The honor is to be yours." Lolan's shocked eyes flashed to a pair of burning, amused ones. Arzt's broad lips were smiling fixedly. The young officer tried to mask his horror. "Let someone else do it," he countered. "Killing women is out of my line." "Killing _that_ woman, you mean!" the Commander pounced on him. "I've known what was in your mind all these months. I hoped you'd see the foolishness of it. You're too good a man to lose inside the execution chamber. What's the matter with you, Lolan? Are you deceiving yourself that these damned Venusian dogs are good enough for a Martian officer?" Hatred swept Lolan suddenly like a flame. With difficulty he held his voice to a flat, deadly hiss. "Good enough! Too good, if you ask me! I'm sick of driving sick men into mines reeking of sulphur fumes, to dig iridite for us to decorate our uniforms with. Tired of seeing them live like animals, in filthy shacks ready to fall in on them or in tenements crawling with vermin. If cracking a bloody whip is what being a Martian officer means, I'm ashamed of being one. I'd change my Sub-Commander's rank here for that of a private back on Mars!" Arzt's face grew hot and red with a dark suffusion of blood. "The only transfer I'll give you is to Rock Island, on the Fluorine Sea," he grated. "Would that suit you better?" Lolan's spine crawled. Rock Island was a tiny hump of land in the middle of a sea perpetually blanketed in fogs--fogs laden with deadly fluorine. But someone had to keep the light on that island to guide incoming space-ships. The keepers usually lasted about six weeks. "In other words, I stay here or I die!" he stated flatly. "Exactly. So let's hear the last of this. If you complain again I'll take it as treason. Remember my orders: In four days I want to see their bodies in the dead-house. If I don't--it will be yours I'll see there!" * * * * * Lolan's first chance to examine the bracelet was in the solitude of his room an hour later. He drew all the shades, while a feeling of tension built stiflingly within him. Under the soft glow of a lamp he studied it. Plainly he traced the outlines of all the buildings in the rambling system of barracks that sprawled over the hill. Rooms had been marked in by someone who knew the set-up. The Martian received a stiff jolt at seeing his room, and Arzt's, marked with X's. Marked for death, he knew! Lolan's fist closed on the bauble. He let his glance go to the curtained window, seeming to see through and beyond it. A tumult of jarring thoughts rang harsh discordance in his mind. But clear and sharp sounded one note, that his hands must slay Mora and her father or he himself would die. No night-long brain-wracking was needed for him to know that he preferred death to carrying out Arzt's orders. But perhaps ... there was another way! Lolan stood rigid, letting the idea revolve in his mind. Abruptly, he swung from the window, jamming the bracelet onto his own wrist. He left his room silently, and through the dim corridors he found his way to the commissionary. His private keys unlocked the dark vaults. Carefully shutting the door, he switched on the lights. Piles of goods were everywhere, looming in long rows before him and filling great bins. The Martian's nerves set up a raw tingling as he found a box and hurried to a bin. Five nervous minutes passed, with Lolan piling preserved foods of all kinds into the box. As a last item, he buried a pair of _sadon_ pistols in the mass of foodstuffs. Grim resolution was in the hard set of his jaw when he switched off the lights, re-locked the place, and left by a back entrance. He was able to reach a pursuit ship in the hangar and load his stuff in without being observed. Panic struck at him, then ... a sentry's running feet sounded outside! Lolan sprang to the door. He eased through it, to be speared by the man's torch. Casually, he nodded to him. "Oh! Sorry, sir, I didn't realize it was an officer," the sentry apologized. "Taking your ship out this late?" Lolan said crisply, "Official business down below. Go back to your post. I can manage it alone." The sentry clicked his heels, saluted, and departed. Lolan's knees shook a little. He rolled the battered pursuit ship out and hurriedly entered it. Hope that the guard didn't realize he wasn't taking his private ship tonight kept him glancing around at the dim form of the sentry. On that fact hinged his life. Then he was slamming the accelerator on full. The ship screamed upward, borne aloft on the green mushroom of flame. Almost immediately he had crossed the city and gained the plains beyond. In a broken expanse of rock and sand just outside the lower quarter, he set the craft down gently. No one saw him enter the city. He threaded the tortuous alleys of the squalid section with his heart hammering in his ears. At last he was stopping across from a large, five-story building. It was a ponderous, gabled affair full of reminiscences of former glory--elaborate cornices crumbling away, great, metal doors green with age, once white walls now streaked with black and gray. In carved Venusian characters, a plaque over the door lamented: "Hall of Justice." Lolan was thinking of that sad commentary as he ascended to the top floor. Justice--when the man who once ruled this entire planet now lived on crusts in a tiny room in the tower! It was Princess Mora whose hand opened the door at his knock. In the dim light of the room, her face showed sad and accusing. "What?" she asked bitterly. "Haven't you done with persecuting us for one night?" Atarkus looked up from a table where he had been poring over old Venusian books, a pair of spectacles perched on his beak-nose. "Well, speak!" he shrilled finally. "What miserable errand brings you here?" Lolan's face was hard. He kept his glance on Mora's widening eyes as he took off Ars Lugo's bracelet and extended it to her. "Ars Lugo died trying to hide this," he growled. "I thought you might like to save it. But as a favor--would you mind taking the black cross off my quarters?" III Atarkus was on his feet, shaking. Mora let the Martian place the bracelet in her hand before she gasped: "You--you knew! And didn't tell! Why?" Lolan lowered himself into a chair. He sighed despondently: "I don't know. If I'd valued my own life I'd have turned it over to Arzt. But I've had my fill of watching you Venusians tortured." The girl's eyes glowed. She said softly: "That was your only reason?" Lolan's heart thumped. His face flamed, and he tried to hide his embarrassment by springing to his feet and pacing to a window. "It's reason enough," he muttered. He swung suddenly to face them across the room. "But that isn't why I came here tonight. It's something more important than that. You've got to leave Areeba immediately!" Atarkus' face folded into grim lines. "You mean Arzt has decreed our death?" "That's it. You might have expected something like this for being seen with men like Ars Lugo." Mora looked up into the officer's face. "I can't understand you, Lolan. You're supposed to be second in command of the race that oppresses us. Yet you risked death to hide that bracelet, and undoubtedly you've taken the same risk to come here." "Don't try to understand me. Simply do as I say. Arzt has appointed me to execute you within four days. I--I can't do it, that's all. So I'm going to try to dodge the issue by letting you escape. Beyond the city there's a pursuit ship loaded with food and a pair of pistols. With that outfit you can make it to Lyna or some other settlement where you won't be known. But you've got to do it tonight!" Atarkus snorted. "Leave our people when they need us most? Never!" Lolan's eyes narrowed. "When they need us most," the ex-emperor had said. Why were they needed especially now--because of a coming revolution? He drove the question from his mind. "Don't quibble!" he snapped. "I can't promise you more than a few hours' leeway. You've got to leave within the hour." "It's no use," Mora smiled wearily. "Our people look up to us for the answer to every problem that arises. What would they think of us if we ran out now?" "What good will you be to them dead?" Lolan argued desperately. "Arzt means to have you out of the way once and for all. You're dangerous and he knows it. Get your things together and let's go!" The flush of repressed fear colored the flat angles of his jaws. His mind was a whirlpool of hope and regret--regret at losing Mora forever, though he could never own her; a deep soul-sickness at the idea of sending a force-charge into her lovely body.... But Mora was shaking her head and Atarkus had smashed his fist on the table. "Arzt can't scare us!" the aged monarch scorned. "They say we Venusians are weak, that we don't know how to fight. Some day soon the butcher will learn differently." His eyes grew softer. He laid his bony hand on Lolan's hard forearm. "I know your position, young man. You have taken a liking to us for some reason--I think I know what it is--and the thought of killing us disturbs you. Perhaps you won't have to perform that duty--" Suspicion and wonder blended into the creases of Lolan's forehead. "Then you won't go?" he breathed. "We can't," Mora told him. "But you have our gratitude for all you've done." Lolan straightened. He tried to keep his voice clipped and emotionless. "You are foolish--and brave. Good night!" When he reached the boulder-hidden rocket ship it was still safely masked in its hiding place. The fog had torn apart for a few hours, and through the ragged holes in it he could see stars blinking solemnly down at him. The young Martian's heart leaped at the thought of leaving for one of those far-off worlds; no one would miss him before morning and he could stock up on supplies and leave right away. But a leaden despondency kept that idea from gaining much headway. Gloomily he climbed into the ship. It was when his fingers had sent the rocket car tearing up into the low clouds that Arzt's voice, just behind him, made his blood turn to water and his lips go dry. "You're heading the right way, Sub-Commander. Over the hill to the Sulphur Holes. Tonight's warning was my last." * * * * * In the gleaming black disk of one of the space-ports Lolan could see Arzt's reflection, then, looming squat and dangerous three feet in back of him. He had quietly removed Lolan's pistol and held it on the back of his head. "Planning a trip, were you?" the taunting voice went on. "I found quite a store of food here. The only trip you'll be making now is into the bottom dungeon of the Holes. By the gods, Lolan, you're a fool!" "Am I? It might as well be now as four days from now. You know I couldn't kill them." "I knew this: That if you couldn't, you weren't fit to be a Martian officer. Now I'll have to do the job myself. Because you're going to die tomorrow!" Silence piled up between them. Too soon the gaping slash on the planet's surface known as the Sulphur Holes was pivoting beneath them as they circled to a landing. Here, where subterranean forces had carved a series of natural dungeons and rock-bound gases still seeped through the holes in a stifling mist, the least fortunate of Arzt's prisoners were imprisoned. Burly guards came running up to take charge of Lolan. Arzt stood back with fists on hips. "Take him to the bottom level," his guttural command came. "Watch him closely. The devil's been conspiring with Venusians for a revolution!" He watched coldly while they jostled his former chief officer into the little rock house that housed the elevator. He stood there stolidly until a deep-pitched sigh emanated from the structure, denoting that one more soul had been carried down ... to hell. A fierce grin twisted his lax features. He was so engrossed in his own thoughts that he did not hear the closing of the storage-hatch on the pursuit ship they had come in, nor did he see the spidery form that slid from it to the shelter of some rocks. Deeply and sadistically satisfied, Commander Arzt turned and departed. For the first ten minutes after his captors had left him, Lolan sat on the edge of a hard, filthy cot with his head buried in his hands. The cell was low-ceilinged, with eroded sandstone walls studded with sharp metal crystals. Through the barred door drifted stringy tendrils of gas--sulphur smoke, belching up from the planet's bowels. From nearby cells came horrible moans, a ragged scream, the rattling of a door as some hapless prisoner shook it and shouted for food. The soft plod-plod of someone pacing the floor like a caged beast reached the Martian's ears. Lolan's lungs seemed filled with acid. He coughed until tears streamed from his eyes. Finally he fell back in despair on the cot. But even in his desperate physical pain he was far more conscious of acute despair over the failure of his plans to save Mora and Atarkus. He felt that no torture could be worse than imagining what devilish end Arzt would find for them. The grating of a key in the lock brought Lolan to a sitting posture. Then he had sprung to the door as Captain Irak, spindly, grinning little imp that he was, flung the door open and dodged in. "Irak--what the devil are you doing here?" Lolan coughed. The other pressed something hard and cold into his hand--a gun. "No questions now!" he rapped. "Follow me and use this if you need it--which you will!" "But the keys--how did you get them?" Irak closed one shoe-button eye in a sly wink, and gestured with his gun. "Come on!" he jerked his head. Roughly he shoved the younger man into the tunnel. Not understanding what it all meant, Lolan fled through the corridors beside him. Hope was kindling like a fire in his breast. Once the captain paused before a cell and through the bars tossed the bunch of keys. "Use them yourself and pass them on!" he laughed at the astonished prisoner. Up ahead the elevator loomed out of the wisps of gas. Irak plunged into it and Lolan followed. There was silence until they had almost reached the top. "Be on your guard," Irak snapped. "I killed the turnkey to get the keys. If they've found his body--" The automatic door flew open, light from the guard-house flooded their figures and they stiffened. The shouting of angry men reached their ears from outside. Irak looked at him in somber decision. "We'll try a run for it out the back. There's a rocket car in the field. It's our one chance." Lolan grinned boyishly, ready for anything. "Lead the way!" he offered. "I'm with you!" * * * * * But they had not gone forty feet when a harsh shout arrested them. "There they go--_get them_!" Five men sprang up from where they had knelt about the body of a dead Martian. Captain Irak stuck a skinny leg between Lolan's running feet and sent him sprawling in the dirt. Lolan was puzzled, until he felt the searing impact of force bolts inches over his head. The movement had saved his life. Instantly he had twisted about to sight down the chrome-steel shaft of his pistol. It roared, jarred heavily against his hand. And one of the men staggered back with his head and shoulders half torn off. Irak chuckled fiendishly. His own gun blasted twice, destroying a man at each shot. The remaining pair spread out and came at a low run for them, with guns crackling blue lightning over the terrain. Lolan's eyes were hard and narrow, his jaw was firm. The impact of deadly charges exploded all around him, making his ears ring with the terrific concussion. He cuffed at his coat-sleeve as blobs of molten earth splattered on it. Some of the fiery stuff bit through to his skin. The Martian's hate-twisted countenances were plain now, thirty feet away. With a simultaneous impulse they flung themselves prone and leveled their guns. Lolan squeezed the trigger of his weapon. He kept it pulled back until the gun grew hot and smoking and the last bolt had been launched. Irak had done the same. A grisly silence came down over the field. Horror gripped Lolan as the smoke drifted away and showed two shapeless masses of burning flesh on the ground before them. Doggedly he turned away, getting to his feet. From nearby came the clamor of hurrying guards. "Quick!" Irak's voice crackled. "Into the ship." They made it none too soon. Force charges were exploding under their soaring ship like blue balloons that swelled to magnificent proportions and then exploded. Not until they had gained thirty thousand feet altitude did Lolan relax from the controls. His face was sweaty and grinning. "Am I crazy or are you, Irak? I thought you were Captain of the Secret Service, sworn to track down rebels like me--not help them escape!" Irak was lighting a Martian cigarette. He paused with the lighter held to the cylinder's tip. "Quite true," he smiled. "That is my job. But when the rebel is a fellow-Venusian, I am tempted to reverse the usual order of things!" IV Lolan's mouth hung open. Had he heard aright? "You said--a fellow _Venusian_? Didn't you mean...." "I mean Venusian. And by the way--congratulations on your escape, _Prince Lolan_!" Somewhere in him a pulse began throbbing, as Lolan fumbled to put the controls on automatic. Then he twisted about on the seat and gripped his knees with his hands. "Let's get this straight," he suggested impatiently. "I'm Sub-Commander Lolan--ex-Sub-Commander, I should say. You're Captain Irak--also 'ex', I'm afraid. We're both Martians and neither of us has so much as a drop of royal blood of any race coloring his veins. Starting from that basis, would you mind explaining your remarks?" Irak leaned back in his chair. "Not at all. You are Prince Lolan, of the House of Sarn. Twenty years ago, when you were two years old, all of your people were killed in the Martian invasion. Among fifty other Venusian children, you were taken back to Mars. The war chiefs wanted to experiment, to find out what difference the Martian atmosphere had on the development of a child of Venus. All of those other children were killed due to lack of care on the return voyage. You alone lived ... to become a high-ranking Martian officer!" The blood had drained from Lolan's face, leaving it a sickly color. His hands shook a little. It was too much to grasp at once. "Irak, you're telling the truth?" he gasped. "But you can't be. Look at me: I'm dark, like a Martian ... so are you, as far as that goes. And why would they let me hold such a responsible position?" "Of course you're dark!" Irak laughed. "Who wouldn't be, after eighteen years of blistering Martian suns? As far as their letting you gain position is concerned, they had two reasons for doing it. In the first place, they found that you were developing into a brilliant, scholarly youth who could go far if allowed to. You had something no other Venusian before you had: initiative and the ability to fight like a bulldog on any problem you attempted. Perhaps the ultraviolet rays so strong on Mars and so feeble here have something to do with that. At any rate, you are strong and determined where the rest of our race is vacillating, good-natured, and pliable. Their other reason for letting you fight your way to the top in their own army was that, to their cruel minds, it seemed a good joke to let a Venusian have partial charge of his own down-trodden people. But the joke may backlash...." "And you?" Lolan murmured. "Where do you come in?" "I went back on the same ship that took you, but as a stowaway. I hid in the upper part of the ship where the constant, harsh light of the sun soon blackened my fair skin as dark as theirs. I killed a soldier one night and took his uniform. It wasn't hard to take his place. They were a motley crew from all over Mars, a sort of foreign legion, and few knew each other. By the time we reached Mars I was able to mingle safely with the men. And as years went on I completed my Martian education, vied with others for honors. I gained those honors for one purpose--to fight again in a Venusian army, to wipe the scourge from the face of our planet. Now we are ready!" Lolan sank back. He felt like a man who has had too strong a dose of some powerful drug. "Now I can explain a lot of things," he murmured. "I've had the feeling so many times that I've been a certain place before, yet I never understood why." He got up, began pacing the tiny cabin with restless tread. When he spoke again, at last, he seemed to be talking to himself. "Then it must be true. I'm not one of Arzt's bloodthirsty race, I'm a Venusian--one of Mora's race!" Abruptly, he whirled on the little intelligence officer. "Well, what now? Where are we going?" Irak let a thin smile curve his lips. "To the old palace. There we'll meet Mora and Atarkus and many others. You will see things you haven't dreamed existed on this planet. Areeba is ready to strike for freedom!" Lolan's eyes sparkled. But it was not entirely the revolution he was thinking of. "They knew about me?" he jerked. Irak nodded, made an adjustment in the flight. "But none of us ever dared tell you of our plans until we knew exactly how you stood. If you had become a true Martian, we wanted you always to remain ignorant." Silence came into the rocket ship. They were soaring along above a thick blanket of yellowish clouds. Irak's hand sent them plummeting down into the clear air beneath. Directly below them a cluster of crumbling buildings topped a hill in the north section of the city. Ruin had laid its bony hand over all, tumbling towers and cornices back into the dust from which they had sprung. Squarely in the midst of it the ship settled to a landing. Memory troubled Lolan at sight of the old palace. Irak sprang out. "Follow me!" he shot at Lolan. They hurried into a roofless room of magnificent size, passing through it into a small room still partially covered. The captain found a ring in the floor, beneath a litter of rubbish. It yielded to insistent tugging, to reveal a flight of stairs sliding away into dim obscurity. Irak flashed a light into the depths and descended. Wondering strangely, Lolan followed. A half hour passed, while steps blended into winding corridors and corridors changed back into stairs. Lolan's head was spinning by the time they reached a heavy bronze door. Irak flashed a smile. "Now--watch!" he breathed. His thumb flattened on a button. Seconds dragged out. Nothing happened. But ... was the door moving? A crack of light split down the middle of the portal. It widened, and suddenly the two parts drew wide and light and sound flooded through them. Lolan started. Dumbly he moved ahead. What he saw made his legs wobbly with astonishment. * * * * * Below them, in a spacious, high-vaulted hall, thousands of men were at work with various machines. At one end of the room a continual stream of Venusians filed through one door, past a long table where workers were doling out some kind of apparatus, and back through another door. The clank of stamp machines, the scream of drill-presses, the whine of lathes, blended into a confused wail. And over all was the roar of the underground river, that flowed between black banks squarely through the middle of the cavern. Questions sprang to Lolan's lips, but Irak stifled them. "Come along," he ordered. "Others can explain better than I." A winding path led down the wall of the place. At the bottom they turned left and found their way to where a large crowd of men were in noisy conference with two persons in their midst. Irak raised his voice in a triumphant shout. Instantly the babble broke. Irak bowed low as Atarkus emerged from the crowd. "It is done, Emperor! I bring you--Prince Lolan!" Unnameable feelings swept over Lolan as a great cry went up. Before he could move, he was surrounded by a laughing, shouting crowd that grew steadily larger. Their words were only a confused sound in his ears, but he knew what they meant: That he was whole-heartedly welcomed back into the race from which he had been stolen so long ago! Mora came to his side, then, flushed and happy. "We sent for you," she said, "as soon as we learned you had been imprisoned. We have wanted so long to tell you of our plans. We--we need you." "But we were afraid," Atarkus frowned. "It is with joy that we receive you, Prince, but ... sadness has awaited your coming." The exuberance that had buoyed Lolan up fled from beneath him and left him on the rock-bottom of unpleasant reality. "For what part I've had in your misery, I humbly beg forgiveness," he apologized. "But--this cavern ... the machines: what do they mean?" Atarkus' thin form drew up stiffly. His eyes swept the length of the vast room. "They mean the revolution is here! Tomorrow--at high noon!" Through the crowd ran a tremor of excitement. Faces that wore graven looks of hopelessness flamed eagerly. Tired eyes sparkled. "Revolution!" Lolan's word was a harsh, incredulous gasp. "But you have no weapons! No--no chance, against Arzt's legions of trained murderers!" "We have weapons," Atarkus grunted. "But I wanted more time. Now, word has come that since your escape that butcher is running wild. Men and women are being shot down in their homes while soldiers search for you. The slightest word of reproach is sufficient to condemn a man to the Holes, or to instant death. We can wait no longer. In a few days my people will be so cowed even I cannot lead them to the battle." "But your weapons?" Lolan inquired eagerly. Atarkus led the way to where the line of hurrying Venusians were being given small, copper-colored articles like tiny drum-majors' batons. He picked one up and handed it to Lolan. "Try it!" he offered. The prince regarded it curiously. He found a small trigger on one side. Training it on the wall twenty feet away, he fired. After a moment a round spot of phosphorescence appeared, that gradually turned red, then crumbled away. Slowly he handed the gun back to Atarkus. "Well?" the Emperor inquired eagerly. "Do you think we're unarmed now, with four out of five Venusians owning one of these?" Lolan drew his own weapon and directed it on the wall. He fired, the charge instantly crashing against the wall and tearing a ragged hole in it. He was white-lipped when he turned back. "There is your answer. Against these--these toys of yours, the Martian guns will be like long-range cannons. No, my friends. If this is the best you have to offer, the revolution is doomed before it starts!" V The shocked hush seemed to reach to all parts of the room. Lolan's thoughts were bitter ones. They concerned the thing that had cursed his people for centuries. Their childish inability to think a problem through, their pathetic attempts to fight back against their aggressors. Now those qualities had doomed them again to misery. Atarkus was muttering to himself. "We--we thought they would work if we could get within ten or fifteen feet of them." "But how are you going to approach that close when _their_ guns are effective at two hundred feet?" Lolan countered. Idly he glanced at the piles and piles of ray pistols still being doled out. "How do they operate? Draw on the Martian power station, I suppose?" Mora pointed at a massive apparatus at the upper end of the hall. "Electronic power," she told him. "We generate our own power. As long as the turbines are running, the guns will operate." Lolan's eyes went a little wide at that. He scratched his head, scowled, then walked off a little. He whirled about and came back to them. "That gives me a clue! The Martian guns also draw from a central station. Only it's a radioactive type of power. Underneath the barracks there's a huge mass of _radite_. If that stuff were carried off, they'd have guns no more effective than water pistols!" Irak snorted. "Who's going to carry it off? It weighs tons. I've seen it. It's like a great lump of radium. If you get too close, even, you'll be poisoned." "We couldn't carry it off--in its present form! But there is a large, unused sewer hole in a room near it. If we could break it up, using workmen's lead suits, it might be possible to drop it into the underground river. Contact with the water would result in an explosion that would destroy its radioactivity." Atarkus licked his lips. "Would this be possible? Could anyone get that close to it without being caught?" "We could try!" Lolan gave back. "If the plan succeeded--well, we number twenty thousand in Areeba to the Martians' two. Once their weapons were destroyed, the city would be ours!" "Then it must be attempted!" Atarkus raised his fist high. "Irak--call the leaders. We must lay our plans tonight, for the struggle tomorrow!" They met in a little alcove off the main room, ten men whose grim countenances stamped them as men ready to die for the cause. Lolan sensed immediately, as they took places around a long table, that he was being looked to as their leader. And old Atarkus willingly fell away to make room for younger, more dynamic blood. When all were quiet, Prince Lolan stood up. It came to him strongly, the feeling that everything, the fate of every soul on Venus, hinged on what happened in this little room tonight. His voice came gravely, freighted with importance. "I won't try to deceive you for one instant that our battle is going to be easy," he told them sternly. "It isn't. The odds are a hundred to one against us. But I will tell you this: The game is worth it! If we win Areeba, all Venus is ours. With improved weapons, the Martians' own, we'll be able to descend on the smaller settlements and conquer them before they know what has happened here. Then there will be the task of building up a space fleet. We can do it. If Mars sends a new army out to re-capture us, they'll find us ready, trained in their own modes of warfare and as brutal as they themselves. I have a theory that once we have won our independence, progress on Venus will be different. My experience has proved that all the Venusian lacks for a complete, balanced fighting personality is an abundance of ultraviolet light. We can provide that artificially, in street-lights, in the nursery, everywhere. It will be the beginning of the greater Venus. Yes, the game is worth the risk. We have all to win ... nothing to lose!" Vesh-Tu, a squat, hairy little man, leaned forward. "But how are we to do it, Prince? The _radite_ is guarded, is it not?" "I have a plan--" Lolan murmured thoughtfully. "We can enter, I believe, by the sewers, following the river upstream to the holes and climbing them by their ladders. They will probably know immediately what we are doing, when their machines and guns begin to lose power. But by that time I hope to have the army mostly concentrated on the south side." "How?" Irak demanded flatly. "By starting fires, riots, dynamiting buildings--everything we can think of. Then, when the soldiers have been decoyed into the midst of our people, we will have destroyed the last of the _radite_ and the revolution will begin in earnest!" Atarkus rubbed his hands. "Suppose we set a zero hour--say twelve o'clock, for the time for fighting to begin. It would make for a concerted, simultaneous outbreak all over the city." Lolan nodded grimly. "Twelve o'clock. I will need three men to help me. Irak, Vesh-Tu, and you, Atarkus. The rest of you had better go back, now, to pass the word. We strike at high noon--and we strike hard!" * * * * * Dawn came, but only by their watches did those four who fought their way up the treacherous, slippery banks of the subterranean river realize it. They stumbled along in darkness complete except for the feeble glow of hand torches. At ten o'clock they reached a spot where refuse of all kinds had collected on the bank. They sent light spraying the roof of the cavern. A honeycomb of holes broke its rough expanse. Lolan read the labels crudely painted beside each. His heart gave a bound as he found the one he sought. Nimbly he ran up the iron rungs in the wall, then swung hand over hand to the hole and paused in its entrance, over the roaring torrent below. The others were following more slowly. Atarkus came haltingly, handicapped by his years. At length all were ascending the inky tunnel. Four times they were forced to stop and rest. It was gruelling work. Their hands were rubbed raw by the pitted surface of the iron ladder. Over an hour had elapsed when they reached a flat iron plate that covered the hole. Eleven o'clock! An hour left. Lolan trembled with impatience. Wedging himself securely on the ladder, he forced upward on the plate. Dim light flowed into the tunnel. With his nerves crying for caution, he shoved the plate aside and crawled forth. Gun in fist, he shot his glance about the small room. The others emerged with bloody hands and dirty clothes, tired to the bone, but eager for whatever lay ahead. Prince Lolan paced to the door. "We're in luck!" he hissed. "No guards around. Now to find protective armor and go to work!" * * * * * They found the heavy suits used by workmen in a room near the ramp leading down to the _radite_ deposit. When they had crawled into them, they could hardly walk. Constructed of heavy rubber and slabs of lead, each one weighed over two hundred pounds. Helmets provided poor vision through thick, murky glass. But the outfits would be all that stood between them and death in the _radite_ pit. Now they were staggering down the ramp and through a wide door. All four recoiled from the sight that struck their eyes. On gigantic insulators, a huge lump of blazing diamond seemed to repose. Even through colored glass it pained the eyes to look at it. The walls and floor all about it glowed with the same supernal brilliance. Tiny white flame ran ceaselessly over the jagged surface of the stone. Lolan squinted at his watch. "Eleven-fifteen!" he blurted. "Can we do it in forty-five minutes?" "We can if we've got to!" Vesh-Tu grunted. "How do we move the blessed thing?" The prince drew his gun. "Stand back," he snapped. "This should break it down into convenient sizes!" He levelled the gun, squeezed the trigger twice. A convulsive roar shook the very walls. For an entire minute, every man in the room was blinded. When they could see again, it was to regard the crumbled remains that strewed the floor. No pieces larger than a good-sized book remained. But when they tried to lift them, they discovered the chunks weighed as much as corresponding pieces of gold! Staggering under their burdens, they ascended the ramp with their small loads and hurried to the sewer opening. One after the other, four pieces tumbled in. Tensely they waited for the detonation. It came, a rumbling roar that drove a blast of air into their faces. Lolan grinned bleakly. "Their guns are just that much less powerful!" he promised. "Now if we can just clear up all that stuff in time--" At a wabbling run they staggered back to the job. It went like that for a half hour, while the litter of shattered _radite_ grew smaller and smaller. Lolan's watch showed a quarter to twelve. He thought of the thousands of Venusians out on the streets, waiting to act ... thought of Mora, ready to lead her little group. Then there came the sound that drove all other thoughts from his mind. The tramp of running feet! Lolan acted instinctively. "Keep it up!" he shouted through his mask. "Irak and I have guns. We'll stand them off somehow!" Fear shot through the pit like an electric charge. Lolan and Irak struggled for speed as they ran up the incline. The sound of voices and footfalls was louder. They made it past the room where the _radite_ was being disposed of. That door must be kept available, or Arzt's victory was certain. On down the hall they plunged, around a turn, into another.... Their running steps locked in a halt. Arzt and his crew were racing toward them a hundred feet ahead! * * * * * The shooting broke out simultaneously. Rock dust filled the tunnel from the battering of force-bolts. Arzt's voice struck through the sounds, bellowing orders. Lolan and Irak were back of the corner, now, waiting-- Two Martians raced up, prodded by their leader's hoarse screams. They never fired their guns, for the Venusians chopped them down in full stride. Lolan tore his mask off. "Won't need these any more," he grunted. "The job's up to them now. If I go out, it's not going to be in that smelly thing." In back of them he could hear Atarkus and Vesh-Tu's labored breathing. From time to time there came the deep, thunderous explosions that meant the work was going on. Lolan darted a glance at his watch. Five minutes to twelve! Now they pressed back against the wall in wait for another pair who raced up. The Martians plunged into their sights. Triggers were squeezed, guns steadied. But the shots, when they came, were feeble. Beside Lolan the wall shuddered slightly and a trickle of rocks slid down it. He watched the man he had hit stagger back, screaming. It took another shot to finish him. A new tenseness came into the tunnel. Every man present, Martian or Venusian, knew what was happening. The last of the _radite_ was being disposed of. In another five minutes Arzt's hordes would be no more than a handful among an army of vengeance-driven natives. The seconds slogged slowly through Prince Lolan. He was waiting, hoping--then his hopes were dashed as twenty-five Martians raced concertedly for the pair of them. Arzt was sacrificing everything to stop them. Irak began to swear excitedly. "This gun--the thing won't work fast enough, Lolan! Can't stop them with these." "Then we'll use the new guns!" The idea took him so swiftly he fumbled through two seconds getting his little copper disintegrator into position. A long blue serpent of flame licked out at the Martians. Where it touched, men withered and went down without a sound. Arzt roared his anger. He flung his useless weapon with all his might at his former subordinate. "Damn your Venusian heart!" he screamed. "You can't stop us! Can't--" The words choked off. Irak had cut him down with a single shot. Silence dwelt in the tunnel, and through it came a hoarse cry: "Lolan! It's done! The last of it's gone. Were--were we in time?" Lolan sank back against the wall. He let his eyes fill with the ghastly remains of his former underlings. "Yes," he muttered to himself. "Yes! They're--finished!" * * * * * There was jubilation throughout all Areeba that day. The scene in the tunnel had been duplicated everywhere. Martians, one minute brutal and ruthless, became craven cowards the next. There was not a man of them alive by night. At sundown, Lolan stood with Mora, Atarkus, and the others high in command at the ruins of the palace. The sun had broken through the perpetual clouds to cast a golden fog over everything. The beauty of it seemed to hold them all. "It's symbolic," Lolan told the Emperor. "Symbolic of the grandeur to come for Venus. I see a future for you as the greatest emperor our world has ever known." Atarkus shook his head. "Not for me, my boy. For you! I am old, ready to leave the struggle to the young. Irak, who could be a more fitting ruler for Venus than the prince we lost and gained again?" Irak's ugly face grinned. "No one. But an Emperor must have an Empress! Could that not be arranged too?" Atarkus saw the flush on his daughter's face, the corresponding color in Prince Lolan's cheeks. "Arranged!" he grunted. "That's been done a long time. It was arranged the day Lolan came back from Mars!" 
61499	----	MONOPOLY By Vic Phillips and Scott Roberts Sheer efficiency and good management can make a monopoly grow into being. And once it grows, someone with a tyrant mind is going to try to use it as a weapon if he can-- [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Astounding Science-Fiction April 1942. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "That all, chief? Gonna quit now?" Brian Hanson looked disgustedly at Pete Brent, his lanky assistant. That was the first sign of animation he had displayed all day. "I am, but you're not," Hanson told him grimly. "Get your notes straightened up. Run those centrifuge tests and set up the still so we can get at that vitamin count early in the morning." "Tomorrow morning? Aw, for gosh sakes, chief, why don't you take a day off sometime, or better yet, a night off. It'd do you good to relax. Boy, I know a swell blonde you could go for. Wait a minute, I've got her radiophone number somewhere--just ask for Myrtle." Hanson shrugged himself out of his smock. "Never mind Myrtle, just have that equipment set up for the morning. Good night." He strode out of the huge laboratory, but his mind was still on the vitamin research they had been conducting, he barely heard the remarks that followed him. "One of these days the chief is going to have his glands catch up with him." "Not a chance," Pete Brent grunted. Brian Hanson wondered dispassionately for a moment how his assistants could fail to be as absorbed as he was by the work they were doing, then he let it go as he stepped outside the research building. He paused and let his eyes lift to the buildings that surrounded the compound. This was the administrative heart of Venus City. Out here, alone, he let his only known emotion sweep through him, pride. He had an important role in the building of this great new city. As head of the Venus Consolidated Research Organization, he was in large part responsible for the prosperity of this vigorous, young world. Venus Consolidated had built up this city and practically everything else that amounted to anything on this planet. True, there had been others, pioneers, before the company came, who objected to the expansion of the monopolistic control. But, if they could not realize that the company's regime served the best interests of the planet, they would just have to suffer the consequences of their own ignorance. There had been rumors of revolution among the disgruntled older families. He heard there had been killings, but that was nonsense. Venus Consolidated police had only powers of arrest. Anything involving executions had to be referred to the Interplanetary Council on Earth. He dismissed the whole business as he did everything else that did not directly influence his own department. He ignored the surface transport system and walked to his own apartment. This walk was part of a regular routine of physical exercise that kept his body hard and resilient in spite of long hours spent in the laboratory. As he opened the door of his apartment he heard the water running into his bath. Perfect timing. He was making that walk in precisely seven minutes, four and four-fifths seconds. He undressed and climbed into the tub, relaxing luxuriously in the exhilaration of irradiated water. He let all the problems of his work drift away, his mind was a peaceful blank. Then someone was hammering on his head. He struggled reluctantly awake. It was the door that was being attacked, not his head. The battering thunder continued persistently. He swore and sat up. "What do you want?" There was no answer; the hammering continued. "All right! All right! I'm coming!" He yelled, crawled out of the tub and reached for his bathrobe. It wasn't there. He swore some more and grabbed a towel, wrapping it inadequately around him; it didn't quite meet astern. He paddled wetly across the floor sounding like a flock of ducks on parade. Retaining the towel with one hand he inched the door cautiously open. "What the devil--" He stopped abruptly at the sight of a policeman's uniform. "Sorry, sir, but one of those rebels is loose in the Administration Center somewhere. We're making a check-up of all the apartments." "Well, you can check out; I haven't got any blasted rebels in here." The policeman's face hardened, then relaxed knowingly. "Oh, I see, sir. No rebels, of course. Sorry to have disturbed you. Have a good--Good night, sir," he saluted and left. Brian closed the door in puzzlement. What the devil had that flat-foot been smirking about? Well, maybe he could get his bath now. * * * * * Hanson turned away from the door and froze in amazement. Through the open door of his bedroom he could see his bed neatly turned down as it should be, but the outline under the counterpane and the luxuriant mass of platinum-blond hair on the pillow was certainly no part of his regular routine. "Hello." The voice matched the calm alertness of a pair of deep-blue eyes. Brian just stared at her in numbed fascination. That was what the policeman had meant with his insinuating smirk. "Just ask for Myrtle." Pete Brent's joking words flashed back to him. Now he got it. This was probably the young fool's idea of a joke. He'd soon fix that. "All right, joke's over, you can beat it now." "Joke? I don't see anything funny, unless it's you and that suggestive towel. You should either abandon it or get one that goes all the way round." Brian slowly acquired a complexion suitable for painting fire plugs. "Shut up and throw me my dressing gown." He gritted. The girl swung her legs out of bed and Brian blinked; she was fully dressed. The snug, zippered overall suit she wore did nothing to conceal the fact that she was a female. He wrapped his bathrobe austerely around him. "Well, now what?" she asked and looked at him questioningly. "Well, what do you think?" he burst out angrily. "I'm going to finish my bath and I'd suggest you go down to the laboratory and hold hands with Pete. He'd appreciate it." He got the impression that the girl was struggling heroically to refrain from laughing and that didn't help his dignity any. He strode into the bathroom, slammed the door and climbed back into the bath. The door opened a little. "Well, good-by now." The girl said sweetly. "Remember me to the police force." "Get out of here!" he yelled and the door shut abruptly on a rippling burst of laughter. Damn women! It was getting so a man had to pack a gun with him or something. And Pete Brent. He thought with grim satisfaction of the unending extra work that was going to occur around the laboratory from now on. He sank back into the soothing liquid embrace of the bath and deliberately set his mind loose to wander in complete relaxation. A hammering thunder burst on the outer door. He sat up with a groan. "Lay off, you crazy apes!" he yelled furiously, but the pounding continued steadily. He struggled out of the bath, wrapped his damp bathrobe clammily around him and marched to the door with a seething fury of righteous anger burning within him. He flung the door wide, his mouth all set for a withering barrage, but he didn't get a chance. Four police constables and a sergeant swarmed into the room, shoving him away from the door. "Say! What the--" "Where is she?" the sergeant demanded. "Wherethehell's who?" "Quit stallin', bud. You know who. That female rebel who was in here." "Rebel? You're crazy! That was just ... Pete said ... rebel? Did you say rebel?" "Yeah, I said rebel, an' where is she?" "She ... why ... why ... she left, of course. You don't think I was going to have women running around in here, do you?" "She wuz in his bed when I seen her, sarge," one of the guards contributed. "But she ain't there now." "You don't think that I--" "Listen, bud, we don't do the thinkin' around here. You come on along and see the chief." Brian had had about enough. "I'm not going anywhere to see anybody. Maybe you don't know who I am. You can't arrest me." * * * * * Brian Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, as dignified as possible in a damp bathrobe, glared out through the bars at a slightly bewildered Pete Brent. "What the devil do you want? Haven't you caused enough blasted trouble already?" "Me? For gosh sakes, chief--" "Yes, you! If sending that damn blonde to my apartment and getting me arrested is your idea of a joke--" "But, my gosh, I didn't send anybody, chief. And this is no joke. That wasn't Myrtle, that was Crystal James, old man James' daughter. They're about the oldest family on Venus. Police have been after her for months; she's a rebel and she's sure been raising plenty of hell around here. She got in and blew out the main communications control panel last night. Communications been tied up all day." Pete lowered his voice to an appreciative whisper, "Gosh, chief, I didn't know you had it in you. How long have you been in with that bunch? Is that girl as good-looking as they say she is?" "Now listen here, Brent. I don't know--" "Oh, it's all right, chief. You can trust me. I won't give you away." "There's nothing to give away, you fool!" Brian bellowed. "I don't know anything about any damn rebels. All I want is to get out of here--" "Gotcha, chief," Brent whispered understandingly. "I'll see if I can pass the word along." "Come here, you idiot!" Brian screamed after his erstwhile assistant. "Pipe down there, bud," a guard's voice cut in chillingly. Brian retired to his cell bunk and clutched his aching head in frustrated fury. For the nineteenth time Brian Hanson strode to the door of his cell and rattled the bars. "Listen here, guard, you've got to take a message to McHague. You can't hold me here indefinitely." "Shut up. Nobody ain't takin' no message to McHague. I don't care if you are--" Brian's eyes almost popped out as he saw a gloved hand reach around the guard's neck and jam a rag over his nose and mouth. Swift shadows moved expertly before his astonished gaze. Another guard was caught and silenced as he came around the end of the corridor. Someone was outside his cell door, a hooded figure which seemed, somehow, familiar. "Hello, pantless!" a voice breathed. He knew that voice! "What the devil are you doing here?" "Somebody by the name of Pete Brent tipped us off that you were in trouble because of me. But don't worry, we're going to get you out." "Damn that fool kid! Leave me alone. I don't want to get out of here that way!" he yelled wildly. "Guards! Help!" "Shut up! Do you want to get us shot?" "Sure I do. Guards! Guards!" Someone came running. "Guards are coming," a voice warned. He could hear the girl struggling with the lock. "Damn," she swore viciously. "This is the wrong key! Your goose is sure cooked now. Whether you like it or not, you'll hang with us when they find us trying to get you out of here." Brian felt as though something had kicked him in the stomach. She was right! He had to get out now. He wouldn't be able to explain this away. "Give me that key," he hissed and grabbed for it. He snapped two of the coigns off in the lock and went to work with the rest of the key. He had designed these escape-proof locks himself. In a few seconds the door swung open and they were fleeing silently down the jail corridor. The girl paused doubtfully at a crossing passage. "This way," he snarled and took the lead. He knew the ground plan of this jail perfectly. He had a moment of wonder at the crazy spectacle of himself, the fair-haired boy of Venus Consolidated, in his flapping bathrobe, leading a band of escaping rebels out of the company's best jail. They burst around a corner onto a startled guard. "They're just ahead of us," Brian yelled. "Come on!" "Right with you," the guard snapped and ran a few steps with them before a blackjack caught up with him and he folded into a corner. "Down this way, it's a short cut." Brian led the way to a heavily barred side door. The electric eye tripped a screaming alarm, but the broken key in Brian's hands opened the complicated lock in a matter of seconds. They were outside the jail on a side street, the door closed and the lock jammed immovably behind them. Sirens wailed. The alarm was out! The street suddenly burst into brilliance as the floodlights snapped on. Brian faltered to a stop and Crystal James pushed past him. "We've got reinforcements down here," she said, then skidded to a halt. Two guards barred the street ahead of them. Brian felt as though his stomach had fallen down around his ankles and was tying his feet up. He couldn't move. The door was jammed shut behind them, they'd have to surrender and there'd be no explaining this break. He started mentally cursing Pete Brent, when a projector beam slashed viciously by him. These guards weren't fooling! He heard a gasping grunt of pain as one of the rebels went down. They were shooting to kill. He saw a sudden, convulsive movement from the girl. A black object curved out against the lights. The sharp, ripping blast of an atomite bomb thundered along the street and slammed them to the ground. The glare left them blinded. He struggled to his feet. The guards had vanished, a shallow crater yawned in the road where they had been. "We've got to run!" the girl shouted. He started after her. Two surface transport vehicles waited around the corner. Brian and the rebels bundled into them and took away with a roar. The chase wasn't organized yet, and they soon lost themselves in the orderly rush of Venus City traffic. * * * * * The two carloads of rebels cruised nonchalantly past the Administration Center and pulled into a private garage a little beyond. "What are we stopping here for?" Brian demanded. "We've got to get away." "That's just what we're doing," Crystal snapped. "Everybody out." The rebels piled out and the cars pulled away to become innocuous parts of the traffic stream. The rebels seemed to know where they were going and that gave them the edge on Brian. They followed Crystal down into the garage's repair pit. She fumbled in the darkness a moment, then a darker patch showed as a door swung open in the side of the pit. They filed into the solid blackness after her and the door thudded shut. The beam of a torch stabbed through the darkness and they clambered precariously down a steep, steel stairway. "Where the dickens are we?" Brian whispered hoarsely. "Oh, you don't have to whisper, we're safe enough here. This is one of the air shafts leading down to the old mines." "Old mines? What old mines?" "That's something you newcomers don't know anything about. This whole area was worked out long before Venus Consolidated came to the planet. These old tunnels run all under the city." They went five hundred feet down the air shaft before they reached a level tunnel. "What do we do? Hide here?" "I should say not. Serono Zeburzac, head of McHague's secret police will be after us now. We won't be safe anywhere near Venus City." "Don't be crazy. That Serono Zeburzac stuff is just a legend McHague keeps up to scare people with." "That's what you think," Crystal snapped. "McHague's legend got my father and he'll get all of us unless we run the whole company right off the planet." "Well, what the dickens does he look like?" Brian asked doubtfully. "I don't know, but his left hand is missing. Dad did some good shooting before he died," she said grimly. Brian was startled at the icy hardness of her voice. Two of the rebels pulled a screening tarpaulin aside and revealed one of the old-type ore cars that must have been used in the ancient mines. A brand-new atomic motor gleamed incongruously at one end. The rebels crowded into it and they went rumbling swiftly down the echoing passage. The lights of the car showed the old working, rotten and crumbling, fallen in in some places and signs of new work where the rebels had cleared away the debris of years. Brian struggled into a zippered overall suit as they followed a twisting, tortuous course for half an hour, switching from one tunnel to another repeatedly until he had lost all conception of direction. Crystal James, at the controls, seemed to know exactly where they were going. The tunnel emerged in a huge cavern that gloomed darkly away in every direction. The towering, massive remains of old machinery, eroded and rotten with age crouched like ancient, watching skeletons. "These were the old stamp mills," the girl said, and her voice seemed to be swallowed to a whisper in the vast, echoing darkness. Between two rows of sentinel ruins they came suddenly on two slim Venusian atmospheric ships. Dim light spilled over them from a ragged gash in the wall of the cavern. Brian followed Crystal into the smaller of the two ships and the rest of the rebels manned the other. "Wait a minute, how do we get out of here?" Brian demanded. "Through that hole up there," the girl said matter-of-factly. "You're crazy, you can't get through there." "Oh, yeah? Just watch this." The ship thundered to life beneath them and leaped off in a full-throttled take-off. "We're going to crash! That gap isn't wide enough!" The sides of the gap rushed in on the tips of the stubby wings. Brian braced himself for the crash, but it didn't come. At the last possible second, the ship rolled smoothly over. At the moment it flashed through the opening it was stood vertically on edge. * * * * * Crystal held the ship in its roll and completed the maneuver outside the mountain while Brian struggled to get his internal economy back into some semblance of order. "That's some flying," he said as soon as he could speak. Crystal looked at him in surprise. "That's nothing. We Venusians fly almost as soon as we can walk." "Oh--I see," Brian said weakly and a few moments later he really did see. Two big, fast, green ships, carrying the insignia of the Venus Consolidated police, cruised suddenly out from a mountain air station. An aërial torpedo exploded in front of the rebel ship. Crystal's face set in grim lines as she pulled the ship up in a screaming climb. Brian got up off the floor. "You don't have to get excited like that," he complained. "They weren't trying to hit us." "That's what you think," Crystal muttered. "Those children don't play for peanuts." "But, girl, they're just Venus Consolidated police. They haven't got any authority to shoot anyone." "Authority doesn't make much difference to them," Crystal snapped bitterly. "They've been killing people all over the planet. What do you think this revolution is about?" "You must be mistak--" He slumped to the floor as Crystal threw the ship into a mad, rolling spin. A tremendous crash thundered close astern. "I guess that was a mistake!" Crystal yelled as she fought the controls. Brian almost got to his feet when another wild maneuver hurled him back to the floor. The police ship was right on their tail. The girl gunned her craft into a snap Immelmann and swept back on their pursuers, slicing in close over the ship. Brian's eyes bulged as he saw a long streak of paint and metal ripped off the wing of the police ship. He saw the crew battling their controls in startled terror. The ship slipped frantically away and fell into a spin. "That's them," Crystal said with satisfaction. "How are the others doing?" "Look! They're hit!" Brian felt sick. The slower rebel freight ship staggered drunkenly as a torpedo caught it and ripped away half a wing. It plunged down in flames with the white flowers of half a dozen parachutes blossoming around it. Brian watched in horror as the police ship came deliberately about. They heard its forward guns go into action. The bodies of the parachutists jerked and jumped like crazy marionettes as the bullets smashed into them. It was over in a few moments. The dead rebels drifted down into the mist-shrouded depths of the valley. "The dirty, murdering rats!" Brian's voice ripped out in a fury of outrage. "They didn't have a chance!" "Don't get excited," Crystal told him in a dead, flat voice. "That's just normal practice. If you'd stuck your nose out of your laboratory once in a while, you'd have heard of these things." "But why--" He ducked away instinctively as a flight of bullets spanged through the fuselage. "They're after us now!" Crystal's answer was to yank the ship into a rocketing climb. The police were watching for that. The big ship roared up after them. "Just follow along, suckers," Crystal invited grimly. She snapped the ship into a whip stall. For one nauseating moment they hung on nothing, then the ship fell over on its back and they screamed down in a terminal velocity dive, heading for the safety of the lower valley mists. The heavier police ship, with its higher wing-loading, could not match the maneuver. The rebel craft plunged down through the blinding fog. Half-seen, ghostly fingers of stone clutched up at them, talons of gray rock missed and fell away again as Crystal nursed the ship out of its dive. "_Phew!_" Brian gasped. "Well, we got away that time. How in thunder can you do it?" "Well, you don't do it on faith. Take a look at that fuel gauge! We may get as far as our headquarters--or we may not." * * * * * For twenty long minutes they groped blindly through the fog, flying solely by instruments and dead reckoning. The needle of the fuel gauge flickered closer and closer to the danger point. They tore loose from the clinging fog as it swung firmly to "Empty." The drive sputtered and coughed and died. "That's figuring it nice and close," Crystal said in satisfaction. "We can glide in from here." "Into where?" Brian demanded. All he could see immediately ahead was the huge bulk of a mountain which blocked the entire width of the valley and soared sheer up to the high-cloud level. His eyes followed it up and up-- "Look! Police ships. They've seen us!" "Maybe they haven't. Anyway, there's only one place we can land." The ship lunged straight for the mountain wall! "Are you crazy? Watch out--we'll crash!" "You leave the flying to me," Crystal snapped. She held the ship in its glide, aiming directly for the tangled foliage of the mountain face. Brian yelped and cowered instinctively back. The lush green of the mountainside swirled up to meet them. They ripped through the foliage--there was no crash. They burst through into a huge, brilliantly lighted cavern and settled to a perfect landing. Men came running. Crystal tumbled out of her ship. "Douse those lights," she shouted. "The police are outside." A tall, lean man with bulbous eyes and a face like a startled horse, rushed up to Crystal. "What do you mean by leading them here?" he yelled, waving his hands. "They jumped us when we had no fuel, and quit acting like an idiot." The man was shaking, his eyes looked wild. "They'll kill us. We've got to get out of here." "Wait, you fool. They may not even have seen us." But he was gone, running toward a group of ships lined up at the end of the cavern. "Who was that crazy coot and what is this place?" Brian demanded. "That was Gort Sterling, our leader," the girl said bitterly. "And this is our headquarters." One of the ships at the back of the cavern thundered to life, streaked across the floor and burst out through the opening Crystal's ship had left. "He hasn't got a chance! We'll be spotted for sure, now." The other rebels waited uncertainly, but not for long. There was the crescendoing roar of ships in a dive followed by the terrific crash of an explosion. "They got him!" Crystal's voice was a moan. "Oh, the fool, the fool!" "Sounded like more than one ship. They'll be after us, now. Is there any other way of getting out of this place?" "Not for ships. We'll have to walk and they'll follow us." "We've got to slow them down some way, then. I wonder how the devil they traced us? I thought we lost them in that fog." "It's that Serono Zeburzac, the traitor. He knows these mountains as well as we do." "How come?" "The Zeburzacs are one of the old families, but he sold out to McHague." "Well, what do we do now? Just stand here? It looks like everybody's leaving." "We might as well just wait," Crystal said hopelessly. "It won't do us any good to run out into the hills. Zeburzac and his men will follow." "We could slow them down some by swinging a couple of those ships around so their rocket exhausts sweep the entrance to the cavern," Brian suggested doubtfully. She looked at him steadily. "You sound like the only good rebel left. We can try it, anyway." * * * * * They ran two ships out into the middle of the cavern, gunned them around and jockeyed them into position--not a moment too soon. Half a dozen police showed in brief silhouette as they slipped cautiously into the cavern, guns ready, expecting resistance. They met a dead silence. A score or more followed them without any attempt at concealment. Then Brian and Crystal cut loose with the drives of the two ships. Startled screams of agony burst from the crowded group of police as they were caught in the annihilating cross fire of roaring flame. They crisped and twisted, cooked to scorched horrors before they fell. A burst of thick, greasy smoke rushed out of the cavern. Two of the police, their clothes and flesh scorched and flaming, plunged as shrieking, living torches down the mountainside. Crystal was white and shaking, her face set in a mask of horror, as she climbed blindly from her ship. "Let's get away! I can smell them burning," she shuddered and covered her face with her hands. Brian grabbed her and shook her. "Snap out of it," he barked. "That's no worse than shooting helpless men in parachutes. We can't go, yet; we're not finished here." "Oh, let them shoot us! I can't go through that again!" "You don't have to. Wait here." He climbed back into one of the ships and cut the richness of the fuel mixture down till the exhaust was a lambent, shuddering stutter, verging on extinction. He dashed to the other ship and repeated the maneuver, fussing with the throttle till he had the fuel mixture adjusted to critical fineness. The beat of the stuttering exhaust seemed to catch up to the other and built to an aching pulsation. In a moment the whole mass of air in the cavern hit the frequency with a subtle, intangible thunder of vibration. Crystal screamed. "Brian! There's more police cutting in around the entrance." Brian clambered out of the ship and glanced at the glowing points in the rock where the police were cutting their way through outside the line of the exhaust flames. The pulsating thunder in the cavern crescendoed to an intolerable pitch. A huge mass of stalactites crashed to the floor. "It's time to check out," Brian shouted. Crystal led the way as they fled down the escape tunnel. The roaring crash of falling rock was a continuous, increasing avalanche of sound in the cavern behind them. They emerged from the tunnel on the face of the mountain, several hundred yards to the east of the cavern entrance. The ground shook and heaved beneath them. "The whole side of the mountain's sliding," Crystal screamed. "Run!" Brian shoved her and they plunged madly through the thick tangle of jungle away from the slide. Huge boulders leaped and smashed through the matted bush around them. Crystal went down as the ground slipped from under her. Brian grabbed her and a tree at the same time. The tree leaned and crashed down the slope, the whole jungle muttered and groaned and came to life as it joined the roaring rush of the slide. They were tumbled irresistibly downward, riding the edge of the slide for terrifying minutes till it stilled and left them bruised and shaken in a tangle of torn vegetation. The remains of two police ships, caught without warning in the rush as they attempted to land, stuck up grotesquely out of the foot of the slide. The dust was settling away. A flock of brilliant blue, gliding lizards barking in raucous terror, fled down the valley. Then they were gone and the primeval silence settled back into place. Brian and Crystal struggled painfully to solid ground. Crystal gazed with a feeling of awe at the devastated mountainside. "How did you do it?" "It's a matter of harmonics," Brian explained. "If you hit the right vibratory combination, you can shake anything down. But now that we've made a mess of the old homestead, what do we do?" "Walk," Crystal said laconically. She led the way as they started scrambling through the jungle up the mountainside. "Where are we heading for?" Brian grunted as he struggled along. "The headquarters of the Carlton family. They're the closest people we can depend on. They've kept out of the rebellion, but they're on our side. They've helped us before." * * * * * Two days later, Crystal and Brian, weary, bedraggled and bushworn, stumbled on a rocky trail that twisted up through a narrow valley toward the Carlton place. Trails were scarce in the terrific Venusian mountain country where nearly all communication was by air. Crystal knew this path. "We're almost there," she said, and they pushed along faster. "Listen! What's that?" Brian stopped and they both heard the sound of aircraft taking off. The pulsing roar of the rocket drives approached and a V formation of five ships swept by overhead. Crystal looked at Brian with dawning horror behind her eyes. "Police!" "Good. They're just leaving; they were probably just checking up on the Carltons." Crystal shivered. "When Serono Zeburzac checks up on someone, there usually isn't much left. Come on." She started at a run down the trail. They slowed at the sight of a clearing ahead. A faint sound reached them, a sobbing, inarticulate moan of unexpressible agony that froze them in their tracks. "What's that?" Brian gasped. Crystal's face was dead-white as they moved cautiously forward. They stared out into the clearing in dumb horror. The huge, rambling Carlton mansion was a smoking heap of ruins. A giant Venus thorn bush in front of the house was scorched and charred by the flames. One of its murderous, yard-long spikes carried a terribly gruesome burden. Crystal whimpered and stumbled forward before Brian could stop her. She collapsed in a sobbing heap in front of the gray-haired man impaled on the giant thorn. The figure stirred feebly. "He's alive," Brian muttered. "Crystal! Snap out of it. Get up and give me a hand. We'll cut him down." With Crystal's help Brian hacked off the thorn and gently eased the frail, old man to the ground. His breath fluttered out between lips flecked with pink-tinged froth. His eyes tried to smile his thanks through their haze of pain. Crystal held the weakly gripping hands. "Who did this to you?" The gray lips moved and worked, struggling painfully to form words. The whisper was almost inaudible: "Serono ... Zeburzac." Crystal's face hardened to a mask of vicious cruelty as she fought her emotions down. "We'll get him." "No." The elder Carlton seemed to gather strength. "Get away--escape." Crystal gripped his hands and seemed to hold him back from the edge of Eternity by sheer strength of will. "Where? Where can we go?" The eyes fluttered open again, the shadow of death lurked in their depths. "Go ... the place where the Five Valleys meet ... beware ... Zeburzac." His breath drifted out in an effortless sigh. The tortured body was still. Crystal rose unsteadily to her feet. She turned blindly and Brian took her in his arms, trying to comfort her as her wild sobbing got out of control. He patted her shoulder awkwardly. "Take it easy, kid," he muttered helplessly. His laboratory experience hadn't covered any such contingency as this. "Brian, take me away. I can't stand this. Hide me somewhere before that fiend comes back." "I thought we were part of a revolution that was going to clean them off the planet," Brian reminded her grimly. "We can't fight this. We haven't got a chance. Zeburzac has everything." "He hasn't got us yet. Where's this Five Valleys place? Can we get there?" "Yes, but it will be no use. I want to quit now." Brian's arms tightened around her. His voice was bleak and cold. "I'm not quitting. I'm going to get Serono Zeburzac." The girl in his arms was still for a moment. Then she let go a long, trembling sigh of weary resignation. "All right, I'm with you. Let's start traveling." * * * * * "The place where Five Valleys meet." Crystal waved her arm out toward the tremendous green bowl of emptiness that curved away all round them. The sides of the gigantic cup had been cracked and split by some cataclysmic upheaval in the turbulent youth of the young planet. They stood at the mouth of one of the sheer, ragged slashes that had given the place its name. The other four were streaks of darker green against the distant walls. Beneath the eternal-night cloud level the air was clear. Directly across from them a tremendous, sharp-prowed promontory sheered up from the depths. Capping it, against the somber green of the valley walls, the snow-white structure of a dream palace rose in airy splendor. In the dark setting, the walls were radiant with breath-taking beauty, so perfect in balance and line that it concealed the huge massiveness of the buildings, postponed for a moment the realization that the great structure was a glorious ruin. Brian let his breath go. "I didn't know there was anything like that on Venus," he said in open admiration. "Who built it?" "The Martins. They used to operate the mines in this district, but they were worked out years ago and the family scattered. They still own this place. Nobody lives in it officially, but there must be some help here or Grenville Carlton wouldn't have told us to come. Maybe the rebels are using the old hangars." "Well, there's only one way to find out. We gotta climb." * * * * * "There's somebody here, all right," Brian said as they entered the great courtyard through a ruined gateway. "Look, there's a couple of ships over there." "And they're our people, too." There was a lilt in Crystal's voice. "That far ship is Jimmy Thornton's--I'd know it anywhere." They approached the huge main doors of the great, white mansion. One door swung partly open and a swarthy, powerful man stepped hastily out. He carried an atomic projector. "Halt!" he commanded. "Who are you?" "Oh, you don't need to get excited, we're rebels, too," Crystal told him. "Who's here?" "Who is it, Max?" a pleasant voice inquired from the dim hallway. "Two more of the rebels, sir," the guard replied woodenly. "Oh--rebels? Oh, yes, of course. Show them in, Max." The guard stood respectfully aside as Crystal and Brian entered the huge, echoing chamber. "To your right," the guard directed and they entered a small, exquisite room. The man behind the desk seemed to fit perfectly into this cultured setting, he was small and neat, silver hair frosted his temples, framing gentle, delicate features. He smiled with pleasant, disarming frankness as he rose to greet them. "You'll have to excuse Max, we didn't know you were coming, of course. Just make yourselves at home. Young Jim Thornton arrived a short while ago. You'll be able to see him presently. You'll be hungry, of course. Max, bring some refreshment." "Have many of us arrived?" Crystal asked anxiously. "I'm sorry to say, very few. Just Jim Thornton and his party and you and Mr. Hanson." Brian started. "How do you now know my name?" he asked in surprise. "Oh, we've all heard of you, Mr. Hanson, and how you got Miss James out of Venus City. Brilliant work, I must say, and the way you routed the police in the caverns was truly a remarkable accomplishment. But--what made you come to this place? We've not been established here long." "Grenville Carlton told us about it," Crystal said briefly. "Carlton? Old Grenville. How is he?" "He's dead." Crystal's face hardened to a white mask of hatred at the memory. "We found him impaled on a thorn bush in front of the ruins of his own house." Her words were brutally blunt with the tremendous surge of emotion behind them. "Impaled ... _tut tut tut_ ... my goodness, how terrible! Do you know who could have done it?" "Yes. We found Carlton before he died. It was that rat Serono Zeburzac who killed him." "Oh--do you know what this Serono Zeburzac looks like?" "We've never seen him," Crystal cut in grimly, "but my father did, over the sights of an atomic flame projector. Serono Zeburzac has no left hand." "Oh--" The gray-haired man behind the desk was interrupted by a terrible scream of human agony. "No ... NO--" The words rose in a tortured frenzy. "Oh, God!... Not that again.... AAAAaaaaa--" * * * * * Crystal leaped to her feet. "Jim--that was Jim Thornton! What's happened--" Her eyes turned in startled question to the slight, calm figure behind the desk. His benign expression of quiet peace had not been disturbed in the slightest by the soul-rending cry. He placed his fingertips precisely together. "Are you sure Zeburzac was missing his left hand?"--he flexed the fingers of his own left hand for emphasis--"and not--his right?" There was a sickening click in the sudden, dead stillness of the room as he twisted at his right hand. It came away at the wrist, the thumb dropped lifelessly down. The fingers of his left hand curled around it. The wrist of the severed member was pointed toward them. In fascinated horror they stared down the muzzle of a tiny, short-range, atomic projector concealed in the artificial hand. Crystal recoiled, one faltering step. "Serono--Grenville was trying to warn us!" Brian caught her before she fell. "There is no cause for excitement. Sit down, please." The quiet courtesy of Serono's voice did not alter, but the steel thread of command was subtly woven into his words. "You have been very clever, Hanson, too clever. I thought, almost, you had escaped me, but no one ever does. My enemies are delivered into my hands; soon there will be none on Venus." The moment of shock passed. Brian's superlatively keen faculties keyed acutely to the emergency. They needed time first. "How do we rate as your enemies?" he stalled. "Mr. Hanson, we are not children. You know why you are my enemy. I recognized you years ago, you are far too brilliant a man to have against me, and you would never be with me. Your loyalty to Venus Consolidated made you dangerous." "My loyalty? What about yours? I thought you were working with McHague and the company." "Oh, of course, as long as it suits my purpose." "Suppose someone got word to the Earth Council. You wouldn't last long, then." "Perhaps not, but Venus Consolidated controls all communication with Earth and soon I will control Venus Consolidated. But I'm sure you must be tired. Max will show you to your quarters." The guard ushered them out with the muzzle of a projector. * * * * * They started across the huge, ruined hall. Crystal stumbled blindly over a fragment of broken masonry. She sagged to her knees. The guard stopped abruptly. "Don't try nothin', you guys," he snarled warningly. "Quit being a fool, you idiot," Brian barked to cover Crystal's quick whisper of instructions. "This girl's sick. Give me a hand. You take her feet," he directed, as he lifted her shoulders. The guard hesitated doubtfully; his instructions didn't cover this. "O. K., but just don't try nothin'." He hung the projector on his belt and bent down. One startled yelp gurgled and died in his throat as Crystal's feet slammed into his jaw and Brian's clenched hands rabbit-punched down on the back of his neck. "That ought to hold him," Crystal muttered as she struggled to her feet. Brian picked up the projector. He recognized it; it was a new model, two of this type had been sent to his laboratory for testing before the company invested in them. "Well, what are we waiting for? C'mon, we'll go shoot Serono's other hand off," Crystal suggested grimly. "D'you think that'd stop them? Us with one projector against what they've got?" "Well, it would make it interesting for a while. You don't think we have a chance of getting away from here, do you?" "I don't know," Brian said thoughtfully. "But when we were testing this model projector one of them kind of blew up in our face. I think it developed a short that converted it into the old-type regenerative circuit. We never were sure about it; there wasn't enough left to find out. Those old regeneratives are always dangerous, they were liable to heat up and explode at any time if you didn't watch them. If we'd been testing the model with a full charge of fuel, I wouldn't be here in this mess now." He slid back the inspection cover of the projector's compactly complicated ignition circuit and started poking experimentally at the system of tiny coils and delicate wires. "Damn!" He swore briefly as a white-hot spark jabbed at his fingers, but he held on and the wires fused together. "That should do it. Now we're all set. Where's a hole to get out through?" "How do you like that one?" Crystal suggested, indicating a ragged gap in the broken, ancient wall of the hall. "That's big enough to fly through and there's two guards out there in the courtyard with nice, shiny, new projectors ready to make smoke out of us. Want to go and interview them?" "No. If we make enough noise here, they'll come and see us," Brian muttered as he closed the firing switch of the projector. There was no stab of flame from the muzzle. He heaved the weapon back into the middle of the hall. "As soon as that warms up there should be considerable distraction taking place in here." "Why? What's going to happen?" Crystal asked. "C'mon. Get over by the wall and be ready to run." They started for the gap in the wall. A dull, heavy rumble got under way behind them. It built to a terrific, thundering crash as the universe split in a sheet of roaring flame. They were lifted and hurled bodily outward. They sprawled in a tangled heap on the pavement. Brian struggled to his feet in a choking swirl of dust and yanked Crystal with him. The progressive explosion of the projector's fuel battered the ancient structure, the wall bulged and cracked. The startled guards gawped stupidly at the two figures that had erupted so violently. Masonry crashed to the pavement. The guards climbed over each other in a mad scramble to escape. Crystal and Brian staggered groggily after them, heading for Jim Thornton's ship. Brian boosted Crystal in, scrambled after her and slammed the hatch shut. The drive spluttered and roared to life, the ship ripped crazily into the air. * * * * * Arnold McHague, Director in Chief of Venus Consolidated, swung his heavy body around in fearful expectancy. Just a faint snick as though a lock had sprung, but there was no door on that wall. A panel slipped noiselessly aside. "Serono--" The half-voiced question hung on a note of fear. "No, it's not Serono, McHague." A tall, ragged figure, followed by a smaller one, stepped from the opening. "Hanson!" A surge of relief sounded in McHague's voice, then died out. Brian Hanson was a rebel. He fumbled vaguely for the panel of call buttons on his desk, but his hand froze as he saw the projector trained on his expansive middle. "I couldn't miss your stomach from here," Brian told him softly. "What do you want?" "I want to get to Earth and I want your private getaway ship." "I don't know anything about any ship." "It's no good, McHague. The drive tests for that ship were run in my laboratory." "There's no fuel on board. It's in no condition to fly," McHague said hopelessly. "It had better be ready to take off. Serono doesn't trust you any more than you trust him. About your only chance of living is for me to get to Earth and bring enough of the Planetary Patrol to head Serono off." "I can't help you. I'm in this with Zeburzac. If the police get him, they've got me." "You can be on our side. The way I'll tell it on Earth you were just stringing Serono along till I could get clear." McHague shook his head. "I wouldn't live for a day if I helped you. You don't know Zeburzac. His family ran Venus in the old days. He means to restore that rule with himself as absolute dictator. I wouldn't be safe even on Earth." "You'll just have to take that chance." "We're wasting time," Crystal cut in sharply anxious. "Come on." Her words brought McHague reluctantly to his feet. "I'll do it," he muttered thickly. "Come with me." * * * * * The misty gloom of a Venusian night shrouded the jungle as three figures forced their way along an almost completely overgrown trail. The lights of Venus City gleamed dimly through the night murk behind them. McHague stumbled and swore in the lead as the trail twisted down the steepness of the ridge. He came to a halt on a long, level bench. "This is the place." "I don't see anything," Crystal said doubtfully. "You didn't think I was going to leave the ship where Zeburzac could find it, did you?" McHague scrabbled around in the roots of a bush, found what he wanted, a metal lever hardly distinguishable in the tangle, and yanked it up. His action was followed by a slight vibration underfoot, a heavy, dull ripping of roots sounded in front of them as the ground parted before their eyes. Two balanced sections tilted upward, away from each other, revealing the Stygian blackness of a pit. "It's a ventilating shaft of one of the old mines. The ship's down there about two hundred feet. It's got a Nordenfeldt control panel. Can you handle it?" "Sure, but how can I get down?" "There's a ladder--but wait a minute, Hanson." McHague's heavy-jowled face was ghastly in the dim light. "You've got to play this straight, see. I'm giving you a chance and you've got to stand by me. If Serono knew I was doing this--You've got to get those police here--" "Don't worry," Brian told him grimly. "Serono is no friend of mine, either. Where's this ladder?" "Just over the edge on this side." Crystal laid her hand on Brian's arm. "Good luck." She started to smile encouragingly, but she couldn't quite make it. "Brian--" Her voice choked up. "Oh, Brian, be careful--" It was almost a sob. Then she was in his arms. He held her for a moment and buried his face in the soft, silver glory of her hair. "I'll be all right. You take care of yourself till I get back. I won't be long, then we'll get this mess cleaned up." He disengaged himself gently. Crystal watched in silence as Brian clambered over the edge and disappeared into the blackness of the shaft. Minutes dragged slowly by. "Oh, I hope he makes it," Crystal murmured. "He probably will. Mr. Hanson is a very resourceful man." The soft, quiet voice was just behind her. Crystal turned in slow, hopeless terror. "Serono--" McHague's breath sucked in in a startled gasp of horror. "Zeburzac!" "But, of course. I wanted to be here to wish Mr. Hanson _bon voyage_. I hope he has a pleasant flight--although it will be a short one." "What do you mean?" McHague whispered. "Why, McHague, my dear friend, you didn't think I would overlook a simple thing like this?" "You knew?" "Oh, yes. I visited this place several times. I supposed you might be leaving me some time, so, of course, I made arrangements." The silky softness of Serono's voice, changed to a sinister rasp, "That ship will be blown apart fifty seconds after it takes off!" "No--" Crystal screamed, "Brian!" She turned and stumbled toward the shaft, then staggered back as a tremendous, roaring rush of flame fountained madly upward behind the screaming flight of the escaping ship. The exhaust trail towered magnificently into the night, arching gracefully over as the ship swung smoothly into its first acceleration orbit. "Brian ... Brian--" Crystal sobbed hopelessly. The burning streak of fire traced steadily across the sky--then abruptly it ended in a bursting nova of flaming incandescence. The light faded slowly into the twilight darkness. "He's gone," McHague whimpered. Serono laughed softly. "Oh, don't sound so disappointed, McHague. You'll soon be with him." The dry click of Serono's artificial hand crisped in McHague's ears. "No... no... Serono... wait... wait a minute--" McHague babbled. Half paralyzed with terror, he sidled desperately away from the hideous weapon in Serono's hand. "He held a gun on me.... I had to--" McHague's stumbling words trailed off as he read "Death" in Serono's eyes. His terrified scream ripped out as he turned blindly and plunged down the yawning blackness of the shaft. Serono's dry chuckle stirred like the rustling wings of a bat. "And now, Crystal James--" He turned. There was nothing but the impassive stillness of the jungle; the girl was not in sight. * * * * * "--and that, gentlemen, completes my report on the present status of Venus. This folder contains the vital statistics for the period since your last inspection. You will find there the reason for me presenting this report instead of Governor McHague. He was killed, together with Mr. Hanson, Chief of Research for Venus Consolidated, in an explosion during an experiment in rocketry which Mr. Hanson was conducting." "Ah, thank you, Zeburzac." Chief Inspector Nathan accepted the final folio of the voluminous annual report on Venus. He sat with the other members of the Board of Inspection in the governor's offices as they carefully sorted through the stacks of report form and record sheets. "Hm-m-m--I see you have a Crystal James listed here as killed in an aircraft accident. Was she one of the old Venusian family of James?" Serono nodded regretfully. "Yes, I believe she was the last of them. I knew them well." "That is too bad," Inspector Nathan said softly. "They were a fine, old family. Well, that cleans up the report, Zeburzac; everything seems to be perfectly in order." "Thank you, inspector." Of course, it was. He had spent three months on those reports and everything had run smoothly on schedule. In a few more hours this inquisitive crew of inspectors would be gone and Venus would be his. The mild gentleness of Serono's face revealed nothing of his dictatorial intentions as he listened to Inspector Nathan's closing remarks. In a moment they would be offering him the governorship, legalizing the power he already possessed. With Venus in his hands to be forged into a weapon, the easy-going democracy of Earth would be no serious obstacle. What one clever man could do--Nathan was speaking. "There is one item here, however, that seriously affects several of these reports. This Mr. Hanson--" "Hanson? Yes, I think I mentioned, he died. A very violent explosion." Chief Inspector Nathan's formal politeness melted abruptly in the sudden fire of his rage. "Explosion? I know all about that explosion, you blundering murderer. Come in here, Hanson!" "Hanson!" Serono stared in shocked unbelief at the grim figure of a man who should have died, but only for a moment. Then he leaned back and relaxed, his fingertips met and tapped rhythmically. "Mr. Hanson--hm-m-m--this is almost unbelievable." "Next time you plant a time bomb in a ship, don't connect it through the lighting circuit, it shows on the ammeter," Brian told him grimly. "And if you want to keep people on Venus, you should watch your freight ships more closely." "Oh, I wasn't as careless as you might think. That trap was set for McHague. I would have made other arrangements if I had known you were to be present. As it was I thought I had got you. However, I can remedy that slight omission almost immediately." Serono twisted abruptly to his feet. His right hand snatched at his left. The spluttering crackle of a projector flame lashed out. Serono screamed as he dropped the red-hot wreckage of his artificial hand. "We'd been told about that, too, and I can still shoot," Inspector Nathan growled. Serono stared stupidly at the empty socket on his left arm. His face grayed lividly. He staggered against the desk, threw out his hand for support and vanished. There was a moment of stunned silence in the room. * * * * * "It's a trapdoor!" Brian yelled and leaped for the opening. He caught a glimpse of a descending chute as the section of floor swung solidly back into place. "Where does that lead to?" Nathan barked. Brian didn't answer; he was already on his way. Nathan and the rest of the Board of Inspectors pounded along behind him. They thudded down two flights of stairs. "There he goes!" The pack of inspectors let out a howl and raced down the corridor behind Brian. Zeburzac, racing for his life, started to draw away from them. They saw him stop. There were men in the corridor ahead of him, half a dozen of them. They were on him! Serono screamed terribly, once, as a swinging knife ripped him open. He was slammed to the floor, his head beaten in by the vicious blows of his assailants. One of them lunged viciously at the prostrate form. Brian felt sick as he saw the crushed and bloody form of Zeburzac stabbed through the middle with the yard-long spike of a giant Venusian thorn bush. Having finished their business the killers calmly faced the projectors in the hands of Inspector Nathan and his crew. "Who are you?" Nathan demanded. "My name's Carlton. We're rebels. You better hurry up and shoot, it'll save you trouble." "These men are all right," Brian defended hastily. "Serono murdered some of the Carltons." Nathan grunted. "Well, thanks, boys. You saved us a job." He slipped his atomic projector back into its holster. "We're inspectors from Earth. We'll have to arrest you for murder, but I guess it's up to Governor Hanson here to decide what to do with you." "Governor?" "Yeah. That was decided before we left Earth. Where was Zeburzac heading? Where does this corridor lead to?" "To his apartments. Maybe he had something there. I'll go and see." Brian started down the corridor. Governor! Governor of this young, green frontier planet. There should have been a thrill in it somewhere but he felt as though he had come to the end of a pointless journey. He opened the door of Serono's apartment and stepped inside. There was no one in the luxurious room. Brian's scalp tingled; he felt that he was not alone. He shuddered as he remembered Serono's ghastly death, then stepped quickly to the bedroom door. He opened it cautiously, then moved in and shut it noiselessly behind him. He stiffened as something prodded him in the middle of his spine. "Don't move!" The voice was thin and vicious with hate. It stopped incredulously--"Brian!" He swung around in amazement, and in synchronism as perfect as a trained chorus, he and Crystal James cried: "You! I thought you were dead!" Their next moves were in perfect synchronism, too. 
50906	----	SAVROLA A TALE OF THE REVOLUTION IN LAURANIA BY WINSTON SPENCER CHURCHILL AUTHOR OF "THE RIVER WAR: AN ACCOUNT OF THE RECOVERY OF THE SOUDAN" AND "THE STORY OF THE MALAKAND FIELD FORCE" LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 91 AND 93 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK LONDON AND BOMBAY 1900 COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED TYPOGRAPHY BY J. B. CUSHING & CO., NORWOOD, MASS. THIS BOOK IS INSCRIBED TO THE OFFICERS OF THE IVTH (QUEEN'S OWN) HUSSARS IN WHOSE COMPANY THE AUTHOR LIVED FOR FOUR HAPPY YEARS PREFATORY NOTE This story was written in 1897, and has already appeared in serial form in _Macmillan's Magazine_. Since its first reception was not unfriendly, I resolved to publish it as a book, and I now submit it with considerable trepidation to the judgment or clemency of the public. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL. CONTENTS I. An Event of Political Importance II. The Head of the State III. The Man of the Multitude IV. The Deputation V. A Private Conversation VI. On Constitutional Grounds VII. The State Ball VIII. "In the Starlight" IX. The Admiral X. The Wand of the Magician XI. In the Watches of the Night XII. A Council of War XIII. The Action of the Executive XIV. The Loyalty of the Army XV. Surprises XVI. The Progress of the Revolt XVII. The Defence of the Palace XVIII. From a Window XIX. An Educational Experience XX. The End of the Quarrel XXI. The Return of the Fleet XXII. Life's Compensations CHAPTER I. AN EVENT OF POLITICAL IMPORTANCE. There had been a heavy shower of rain, but the sun was already shining through the breaks in the clouds and throwing swiftly changing shadows on the streets, the houses, and the gardens of the city of Laurania. Everything shone wetly in the sunlight: the dust had been laid; the air was cool; the trees looked green and grateful. It was the first rain after the summer heats, and it marked the beginning of that delightful autumn climate which has made the Lauranian capital the home of the artist, the invalid, and the sybarite. The shower had been heavy, but it had not dispersed the crowds that were gathered in the great square in front of the Parliament House. It was welcome, but it had not altered their anxious and angry looks; it had drenched them without cooling their excitement. Evidently an event of consequence was taking place. The fine building, where the representatives of the people were wont to meet, wore an aspect of sombre importance that the trophies and statues, with which an ancient and an art-loving people had decorated its façade, did not dispel. A squadron of Lancers of the Republican Guard was drawn up at the foot of the great steps, and a considerable body of infantry kept a broad space clear in front of the entrance. Behind the soldiers the people filled in the rest of the picture. They swarmed in the square and the streets leading to it; they had scrambled on to the numerous monuments, which the taste and pride of the Republic had raised to the memory of her ancient heroes, covering them so completely that they looked like mounds of human beings; even the trees contained their occupants, while the windows and often the roofs, of the houses and offices which overlooked the scene were crowded with spectators. It was a great multitude and it vibrated with excitement. Wild passions surged across the throng, as squalls sweep across a stormy sea. Here and there a man, mounting above his fellows, would harangue those whom his voice could reach, and a cheer or a shout was caught up by thousands who had never heard the words but were searching for something to give expression to their feelings. It was a great day in the history of Laurania. For five long years since the Civil War the people had endured the insult of autocratic rule. The fact that the Government was strong, and the memory of the disorders of the past, had operated powerfully on the minds of the more sober citizens. But from the first there had been murmurs. There were many who had borne arms on the losing side in the long struggle that had ended in the victory of President Antonio Molara. Some had suffered wounds or confiscation; others had undergone imprisonment; many had lost friends and relations, who with their latest breath had enjoined the uncompromising prosecution of the war. The Government had started with implacable enemies, and their rule had been harsh and tyrannical. The ancient constitution to which the citizens were so strongly attached and of which they were so proud, had been subverted. The President, alleging the prevalence of sedition, had declined to invite the people to send their representatives to that chamber which had for many centuries been regarded as the surest bulwark of popular liberties. Thus the discontents increased day by day and year by year: the National party, which had at first consisted only of a few survivors of the beaten side, had swelled into the most numerous and powerful faction in the State; and at last they had found a leader. The agitation proceeded on all sides. The large and turbulent population of the capital were thoroughly devoted to the rising cause. Demonstration had followed demonstration; riot had succeeded riot; even the army showed signs of unrest. At length the President had decided to make concessions. It was announced that on the first of September the electoral writs should be issued and the people should be accorded an opportunity of expressing their wishes and opinions. This pledge had contented the more peaceable citizens. The extremists, finding themselves in a minority, had altered their tone. The Government, taking advantage of the favourable moment, had arrested several of the more violent leaders. Others, who had fought in the war and had returned from exile to take part in the revolt, fled for their lives across the border. A rigorous search for arms had resulted in important captures. European nations, watching with interested and anxious eyes the political barometer, were convinced that the Government cause was in the ascendant. But meanwhile the people waited, silent and expectant, for the fulfilment of the promise. At length the day had come. The necessary preparations for summoning the seventy thousand male electors to record their votes had been carried out by the public officials. The President, as the custom prescribed, was in person to sign the necessary writ of summons to the faithful citizens. Warrants for election would be forwarded to the various electoral divisions in the city and the provinces, and those who were by the ancient law entitled to the franchise would give their verdict on the conduct of him whom the Populists in bitter hatred had called the Dictator. It was for this moment that the crowd was waiting. Though cheers from time to time arose, they waited for the most part in silence. Even when the President had passed on his way to the Senate, they had foreborne to hoot; in their eyes he was virtually abdicating, and that made amends for all. The time-honoured observances, the long-loved rights would be restored, and once more democratic government would be triumphant in Laurania. Suddenly, at the top of the steps in the full view of the people, a young man appeared, his dress disordered and his face crimson with excitement. It was Moret, one of the Civic Council. He was immediately recognised by the populace, and a great cheer arose. Many who could not see him took up the shout, which re-echoed through the square, the expression of a nation's satisfaction. He gesticulated vehemently, but his words, if he spoke at all, were lost in the tumult. Another man, an usher, followed him out hurriedly, put his hand on his shoulder, appeared to speak with earnestness, and drew him back into the shadow of the entrance. The crowd still cheered. A third figure issued from the door, an old man in the robes of municipal office. He walked, or rather tottered feebly down the steps to a carriage, which had drawn up to meet him. Again there were cheers. "Godoy! Godoy! Bravo, Godoy! Champion of the People! Hurrah, hurrah!" It was the Mayor, one of the strongest and most reputable members of the party of Reform. He entered his carriage and drove through the open space, maintained by the soldiery, into the crowd, which, still cheering, gave way with respect. The carriage was open and it was evident that the old man was painfully moved. His face was pale, his mouth puckered into an expression of grief and anger, his whole frame shaken with suppressed emotion. The crowd had greeted him with applause, but, quick to notice, were struck by his altered appearance and woeful looks. They crowded round the carriage crying: "What has happened? Is all well? Speak, Godoy, speak!" But he would have none of them, and quivering with agitation bade his coachman drive the faster. The people gave way slowly, sullenly, thoughtfully, as men who make momentous resolutions. Something had happened, untoward, unforeseen, unwelcome; what this was, they were anxious to know. And then began a period of wild rumour. The President had refused to sign the writs; he had committed suicide; the troops had been ordered to fire; the elections would not take place, after all; Savrola had been arrested,--seized in the very Senate, said one, murdered added another. The noise of the multitude changed into a dull dissonant hum of rising anger. At last the answer came. There was a house, overlooking the square, which was separated from the Chamber of Representatives only by a narrow street, and this street had been kept clear for traffic by the troops. On the balcony of this house the young man, Moret, the Civic Councillor, now reappeared, and his coming was the signal for a storm of wild, anxious cries from the vast concourse. He held up his hand for silence and after some moments his words became audible to those nearest. "You are betrayed--a cruel fraud--the hopes we had cherished are dashed to the ground--all has been done in vain-- Cheated! cheated! cheated!" The broken fragments of his oratory reached far into the mass of excited humanity, and then he shouted a sentence, which was heard by thousands and repeated by thousands more. "The register of citizenship has been mutilated, and the names of more than half the electors have been erased. To your tents, oh people of Laurania!" For an instant there was silence, and then a great sob of fury, of disappointment, and of resolve arose from the multitude. At this moment the presidential carriage, with its four horses, its postilions in the Republican livery, and an escort of Lancers, moved forward to the foot of the steps, as there emerged from the Parliament House a remarkable figure. He wore the splendid blue and white uniform of a general of the Lauranian Army; his breast glittered with medals and orders; his keen strong features were composed. He paused for a moment before descending to his carriage, as if to give the mob an opportunity to hiss and hoot to their content, and appeared to talk unconcernedly with his companion, Señor Louvet, the Minister of the Interior. He pointed once or twice towards the surging masses, and then walked slowly down the steps. Louvet had intended to accompany him, but he heard the roar of the crowd and remembered that he had some business to attend to in the Senate that could not be delayed; the other went on alone. The soldiers presented arms. A howl of fury arose from the people. A mounted officer, who sat his horse unmoved, an inexorable machine, turned to a subordinate with an order. Several companies of foot-soldiers began defiling from the side street on the right of the Chamber, and drawing up in line in the open space which was now partly invaded by the mob. The President entered his carriage which, preceded by an entire troop of Lancers, immediately started at a trot. So soon as the carriage reached the edge of the open space, a rush was made by the crowd. The escort closed up; "Fall back there!" shouted an officer, but he was unheeded. "Will you move, or must we move you?" said a gruffer voice. Yet the mob gave not an inch. The danger was imminent. "Cheat! Traitor! Liar! Tyrant!" they shouted, with many other expressions too coarse to be recorded. "Give us back our rights--you, who have stolen them!" And then some one at the back of the crowd fired a revolver into the air. The effect was electrical. The Lancers dropped their points and sprang forward. Shouts of terror and fury arose on all sides. The populace fled before the cavalry; some fell on the ground and were trampled to death; some were knocked down and injured by the horses; a few were speared by the soldiers. It was a horrible scene. Those behind threw stones, and some fired random pistol shots. The President remained unmoved. Erect and unflinching he gazed on the tumult as men gaze at a race about which they have not betted. His hat was knocked off, and a trickle of blood down his cheek showed where a stone had struck. For some moments the issue seemed doubtful. The crowd might storm the carriage and then,--to be torn to pieces by a rabble! There were other and more pleasant deaths. But the discipline of the troops overcame all obstacles, the bearing of the man appeared to cow his enemies, and the crowd fell back, still hooting and shouting. Meanwhile the officer commanding the infantry by the Parliament House had been alarmed by the rushes of the mob, which he could see were directed at the President's carriage. He determined to create a diversion. "We shall have to fire on them," he said to the Major who was beside him. "Excellent," replied that officer; "it will enable us to conclude those experiments in penetration, which we have been trying with the soft-nosed bullet. A very valuable experiment, Sir," and then turning to the soldiers he issued several orders. "A very valuable experiment," he repeated. "Somewhat expensive," said the Colonel dryly; "and half a company will be enough, Major." There was a rattle of breech-blocks as the rifles were loaded. The people immediately in front of the troops struggled madly to escape the impending volley. One man, a man in a straw hat, kept his head. He rushed forward. "For God's sake don't fire!" he cried. "Have mercy! We will disperse." There was a moment's pause, a sharp order and a loud explosion, followed by screams. The man in the straw hat bent backwards and fell on the ground; other figures also subsided and lay still in curiously twisted postures. Every one else except the soldiers fled; fortunately there were many exits to the square, and in a few minutes it was almost deserted. The President's carriage made its way through the flying crowd to the gates of the palace, which were guarded by more soldiers, and passed through in safety. All was now over. The spirit of the mob was broken and the wide expanse of Constitution Square was soon nearly empty. Forty bodies and some expended cartridges lay on the ground. Both had played their part in the history of human developement and passed out of the considerations of living men. Nevertheless the soldiers picked up the empty cases, and presently some police came with carts and took the other things away, and all was quiet again in Laurania. CHAPTER II. THE HEAD OF THE STATE. The carriage and its escort passed the ancient gateway and driving through a wide courtyard drew up at the entrance of the palace. The President alighted. He fully appreciated the importance of retaining the good will and support of the army, and immediately walked up to the officer who commanded the Lancers. "None of your men hurt, I trust," he said. "Nothing serious, General," replied the subaltern. "You handled your troop with great judgment and courage. It shall be remembered. But it is easy to lead brave men; they shall not be forgotten. Ah, Colonel, you are quite right to come to me. I anticipated some trouble with the disaffected classes, so soon as it became known that we were still determined to maintain law and order in the State." These last words were spoken to a dark, bronzed man who had hurriedly entered the courtyard by a side gate. Colonel Sorrento, for such was the newcomer's name, was the military chief of the Police. Besides filling this important office, he discharged the duties of War-Minister to the Republic. The combination enabled the civil power to be supplemented by the military with great and convenient promptitude, whenever it was necessary or desirable to take strong measures. The arrangement was well suited to the times. Usually Sorrento was calm and serene. He had seen many engagements and much war of the type which knows no quarter, had been several times wounded, and was regarded as a brave and callous man. But there is something appalling in the concentrated fury of a mob, and the Colonel's manner betrayed the fact that he was not quite proof against it. "Are you wounded, Sir?" he asked, catching sight of the President's face. "It is nothing,--a stone; but they were very violent. Some one had roused them; I had hoped to get away before the news was known. Who was it spoke to them?" "Moret, the Civic Councillor, from the balcony of the hotel. A very dangerous man! He told them they were betrayed." "Betrayed? What audacity! Surely such language would come within the 20th Section of the Constitution: _Inciting to violence against the person of the Head of the State by misrepresentation or otherwise_." The President was well versed in those clauses of the public law which were intended to strengthen the hands of the Executive. "Have him arrested, Sorrento. We cannot allow the majesty of Government to be insulted with impunity,--or stay, perhaps it would be wiser to be magnanimous now that the matter is settled. I do not want a State prosecution just at present." Then he added in a louder voice: "This young officer, Colonel, discharged his duty with great determination,--a most excellent soldier. Please see that a note is made of it. Promotion should always go by merit, not by age, for services and not for service. We will not forget your behaviour, young man." He ascended the steps and entered the hall of the palace, leaving the subaltern, a boy of twenty-two, flushed with pleasure and excitement, to build high hopes of future command and success. The hall was spacious and well-proportioned. It was decorated in the purest style of the Lauranian Republic, the arms of which were everywhere displayed. The pillars were of ancient marble and by their size and colour attested the wealth and magnificence of former days. The tessellated pavement presented a pleasing pattern. Elaborate mosaics on the walls depicted scenes from the national history: the foundation of the city; the peace of 1370; the reception of the envoys of the Great Mogul: the victory of Brota; the death of Saldanho, that austere patriot, who died rather than submit to a technical violation of the Constitution. And then coming down to later years, the walls showed the building of the Parliament House: the naval victory of Cape Cheronta, and finally the conclusion of the Civil War in 1883. On either side of the hall, in a deep alcove, a bronze fountain, playing amid surrounding palms and ferns, imparted a feeling of refreshing coolness to the eye and ear. Facing the entrance was a broad staircase, leading to the state rooms whose doors were concealed by crimson curtains. A woman stood at the top of the stairs. Her hands rested on the marble balustrade; her white dress contrasted with the bright-coloured curtains behind her. She was very beautiful, but her face wore an expression of alarm and anxiety. Woman-like she asked three questions at once. "What has happened, Antonio? Have the people risen? Why have they been firing?" She paused timidly at the head of the stairs, as if fearing to descend. "All is well," replied the President in his official manner. "Some of the disaffected have rioted, but the Colonel here has taken every precaution and order reigns once more, dearest." Then turning to Sorrento, he went on: "It is possible that the disturbances may be renewed. The troops should be confined to barracks and you may give them an extra day's pay to drink the health of the Republic. Double the Guards and you had better have the streets patrolled to-night. In case anything happens, you will find me here. Good-night, Colonel." He walked up a few steps, and the War-Minister, bowing gravely, turned and departed. The woman came down the stairs and they met midway. He took both her hands in his and smiled affectionately; she, standing one step above him, bent forward and kissed him. It was an amiable, though formal, salutation. "Well," he said, "we have got through to-day all right, my dear; but how long it can go on, I do not know; the revolutionaries seem to get stronger every day. It was a very dangerous moment just now in the square; but is over for the present." "I have passed an anxious hour," she said, and then, catching sight for the first time of his bruised forehead, she started. "But you are wounded." "It is nothing," said the President. "They threw stones; now, we used bullets; they are better arguments." "What happened at the Senate?" "I had expected trouble, you know. I told them in my speech that, in spite of the unsettled state of affairs, we had decided to restore the ancient Constitution of the Republic, but that it had been necessary to purge the register of the disaffected and rebellious. The Mayor took it out of the box and they scrambled over each other to look at the total electorates for the divisions. When they saw how much they were reduced they were very angry. Godoy was speechless; he is a fool, that man. Louvet told them that it must be taken as an instalment, and that as things got more settled the franchise would be extended; but they howled with fury. Indeed, had it not been for the ushers and for a few men of the Guard, I believe they would have assaulted me there and then in the very Chamber itself. Moret shook his fist at me,--ridiculous young ass--and rushed out to harangue the mob." "And Savrola?" "Oh, Savrola,--he was quite calm; he laughed when he saw the register. 'It is only a question of a few months,' he said; 'I wonder you think it worth while.' I told him that I did not understand him, but he spoke the truth for all that;" and then, taking his wife's hand in his, he climbed the stairs slowly and thoughtfully. But there is little rest for a public man in times of civil disturbance. No sooner had Molara reached the top of the stairs and entered the reception-room, than a man advanced to meet him from a door at the far end. He was small, dark, and very ugly, with a face wrinkled with age and an indoor life. Its pallor showed all the more by contrast with his hair and short moustache, both of which were of that purple blackness to which Nature is unable to attain. In his hand he carried a large bundle of papers, carefully disposed into departments by his long and delicate fingers. It was the Private Secretary. "What is it, Miguel?" asked the President; "you have some papers for me?" "Yes, Sir; a few minutes will suffice. You have had an exciting day; I rejoice it has terminated successfully." "It has not been devoid of interest," said Molara, wearily. "What have you got for me?" "Several foreign despatches. Great Britain has sent a note about the Sphere of Influence to the south of the African Colony, to which the Foreign Minister has drafted a reply." "Ah! these English,--how grasping, how domineering! But we must be firm. I will maintain the territories of the Republic against all enemies, internal or external. We cannot send armies, but, thank God, we can write despatches. Is it strong enough?" "Your Excellency need have no fears. We have vindicated our rights most emphatically; it will be a great moral victory." "I hope we shall get material as well as moral good out of it. The country is rich; there is paying gold; that explains the note. Of course we must reply severely. What else?" "There are some papers relating to the army, commissions and promotions, Sir," said Miguel, fingering one particular bundle of his papers, the bundle that lay between his first and second fingers. "Those sentences for confirmation, a draft of Morgon's Budget for information and opinion, and one or two minor matters." "H'm, a long business! Very well, I will come and see to it. Dearest, you know how pressed I am. We shall meet to-night at the dinner. Have all the Ministers accepted?" "All but Louvet, Antonio. He is detained by business." "Business, pooh! He is afraid of the streets at night. What a thing it is to be a coward! Thus he misses a good dinner. At eight then, Lucile." And with a quick and decided step he passed through the small door of the private office followed by the Secretary. Madame Antonio Molara remained standing for a moment in the great reception-room. Then she walked to the window and stepped out on to the balcony. The scene which stretched before her was one of surpassing beauty. The palace stood upon high ground commanding a wide view of the city and the harbour. The sun was low on the horizon, but the walls of the houses still stood out in glaring white. The red and blue tiled roofs were relieved by frequent gardens and squares whose green and graceful palms soothed and gratified the eye. To the north the great pile of the Senate House and Parliament buildings loomed up majestic and imposing. Westward lay the harbour with its shipping and protecting forts. A few warships floated in the roads, and many white-sailed smacks dotted the waters of the Mediterranean Sea, which had already begun to change their blue for the more gorgeous colours of sunset. As she stood there in the clear light of the autumn evening, she looked divinely beautiful. She had arrived at that age of life, when to the attractions of a maiden's beauty are added those of a woman's wit. Her perfect features were the mirror of her mind, and displayed with every emotion and every mood that vivacity of expression which is the greatest of woman's charms. Her tall figure was instinct with grace, and the almost classic dress she wore enhanced her beauty and harmonised with her surroundings. Something in her face suggested a wistful aspiration. Lucile had married Antonio Molara nearly five years before, when he was in the height and vigour of his power. Her family had been among the stoutest supporters of his cause, and her father and brother had lost their lives on the battlefield of Sorato. Her mother, broken down by calamity and sorrow, lived only to commend her daughter to the care of their most powerful friend, the general who had saved the State and would now rule it. He had accepted the task at first from a feeling of obligation to those who had followed his star so faithfully, but afterwards from other motives. Before a month had passed he fell in love with the beautiful girl whom Fortune had led to him. She admired his courage, his energy, and his resource; the splendours of the office that he filled were not without their influence; he offered her wealth and position,--almost a throne; and besides he was a fine figure of a man. She was twenty-three when they married. For many months her life had been a busy one. Receptions, balls, and parties had filled the winter season with the unremitting labour of entertaining. Foreign princes had paid her homage, not only as the loveliest woman in Europe, but also as a great political figure. Her _salon_ was crowded with the most famous men from every country. Statesmen, soldiers, poets, and men of science had worshipped at the shrine. She had mixed in matters of State. Suave and courtly ambassadors had thrown out delicate hints, and she had replied with unofficial answers. Plenipotentiaries had explained the details of treaties and protocols, with remarkable elaboration, for her benefit. Philanthropists had argued, urged, and expounded their views or whims. Every one talked to her of public business. Even her maid had approached her with an application for the advancement of her brother, a clerk in the Post Office; and every one had admired her until admiration itself, the most delicious drink that a woman tastes, became insipid. But even during the first few years there had been something wanting. What it was Lucile had never been able to guess. Her husband was affectionate and such time as he could spare from public matters was at her service. Of late things had been less bright. The agitation of the country, the rising forces of Democracy, added to the already heavy business of the Republic, had taxed the President's time and energies to the full. Hard lines had come into his face, lines of work and anxiety, and sometimes she had caught a look of awful weariness, as of one who toils and yet foresees that his labour will be vain. He saw her less frequently, and in those short intervals talked more and more of business and politics. A feeling of unrest seemed to pervade the capital. The season, which had just begun, had opened badly. Many of the great families had remained in their summer residences on the slopes of the mountains, though the plains were already cool and green; others had kept to their own houses in the city, and only the most formal entertainments at the palace had been attended. As the outlook became more threatening it seemed that she was able to help him less. Passions were being roused that blinded the eyes to beauty and dulled the mind to charm. She was still a queen, but her subjects were sullen and inattentive. What could she do to help him, now that he was so hard pressed? The thought of abdication was odious to her, as to every woman. Must she remain directing the ceremonies of the Court after the brilliancy had died out, while enemies were working night and day to overturn all that she was attached to? "Can I do nothing, nothing?" she murmured. "Have I played my part? Is the best of life over?" and then, with a hot wave of petulant resolve, "I will do it,--but what?" The question remained unanswered; the edge of the sun dipped beneath the horizon and at the end of the military mole, from the shapeless mound of earth that marked the protecting battery of the harbour, sprang a puff of smoke. It was the evening gun, and the sound of the report, floating faintly up to her, interrupted the unpleasing reflections which had filled her thoughts; but they left a memory behind. She turned with a sigh and re-entered the palace; gradually the daylight died away and it became night. CHAPTER III. THE MAN OF THE MULTITUDE. Dismay and bitter anger filled the city. The news of the fusilade spread fast and far, and, as is usual on such occasions, its effects were greatly exaggerated. But the police precautions were well conceived and ably carried out. Nothing like a crowd was allowed to gather, and the constant patrolling of the streets prevented the building of barricades. The aspect of the Republican Guard was moreover so formidable that, whatever the citizens might feel, they found it discreet to display an acquiescent, and in some cases even a contented demeanour. With the leaders of the Popular party it was however different. They immediately assembled at the official residence of the Mayor, and a furious discussion ensued. In the hall of the Mayoralty an emergency meeting was held, at which all the power of the party was represented. Moret, the Civic Councillor and former editor of the suppressed TRUMPET CALL, was much cheered as he entered the room. His speech had appealed to many, and the Lauranians were always ready to applaud a daring act. Besides, every one was agitated by the recent riot and was eager to do something. The Labour delegates were particularly angry. Working-men, assembled in constitutional manner to express their grievances, had been shot down by a hireling soldiery,--_massacred_ was the word most generally used. Vengeance must be taken; but how? The wildest schemes were suggested. Moret, always for bold counsels, was for sallying into the streets and rousing the people to arms; they would burn the palace, execute the tyrant, and restore the liberties of the land. Godoy, old and cautious, strongly opposed the suggestion, though indeed no particular eagerness was shown to adopt it. He advocated a calm and dignified attitude of reproach and censure, which would appeal to the comity of nations and vindicate the justice of their cause. Others took up the argument. Renos, the barrister, was for what he called constitutional methods. They should form themselves into a Committee of Public Safety; they should appoint the proper officers of State (including of course an Attorney-General), and decree the deposition of the President for violation of the fundamental principles contained in the preamble of the Declaration of National Rights. He proceeded to dilate upon the legal points involved, until interrupted by several members who were anxious to offer their own remarks. Several resolutions were passed. It was agreed that the President had forfeited the confidence of the citizens, and he was forthwith called upon to resign his office and submit himself to the Courts of Law. It was also agreed that the army had deserved ill of the Republic. It was resolved to prosecute at civil law the soldiers who had fired on the people, and a vote of sympathy was carried in favour of the relations of the killed and wounded, or _martyrs_ as they were called. This scene of impotence and futility was ended by the entrance of the remarkable man who had raised a party from the dust, and had led them from one success to another until it had seemed that the victory was won. Silence fell upon the assemblage; some stood up in respect; everyone wondered what he would say. How would he bear the crushing defeat that had fallen upon them? Would he despair of the movement? Would he be angry or sad or cynical? Above all, what course would he propose? He walked to the end of the long table around which the members were grouped, and sat down deliberately. Then he looked round the room, with a face as calm and serene as ever. In that scene of confusion and indecision he looked magnificent. His very presence imparted a feeling of confidence to his followers. His high and ample forehead might have contained the answer to every question; his determined composure seemed equal to the utmost stroke of Fate. After a moment's pause, invited by the silence, he rose. His words were studiously moderate. It had been a disappointment to him, he said, to find that the registers had been mutilated. The ultimate success was deferred, but it was only deferred. He had waited before coming to the Mayoralty to make a few calculations. They were necessarily rough and hurried, but he thought they were approximately correct. The President, it was true, would have a majority in the forthcoming Parliament, and a substantial majority; but they would win certain seats, in spite of the restricted electorate; about fifty, he thought, in a house of three hundred. Smaller minorities than that had overthrown more powerful Governments. Every day added to their strength; every day increased the hatred of the Dictator. Besides, there were other alternatives than constitutional procedure,--and at these words some set their teeth and looked at each other in deep significance--but for the present they must wait; and they could afford to wait, for the prize was worth winning. It was the most precious possession in the world,--liberty. He sat down amid brighter faces and calmer minds. The deliberations were resumed. It was decided to relieve, out of the general funds of the party, those who were in poverty through the massacre of their relations; that would increase their popularity with the working classes, and might win the sympathy of foreign nations. A deputation should wait on the President to express the grief of the citizens at the mutilation of their ancient register, and to beg that he would restore their franchises. It should also demand the punishment of the officers who had fired on the people, and should acquaint the President with the alarm and indignation of the city. Savrola, Godoy, and Renos were named as the members of the deputation, and the Reform Committee then dispersed quietly. Moret lingered till the end and approached Savrola. He was surprised that he had not been suggested as a member of the deputation. He knew his leader much better than Renos, a pedantic lawyer who made few friends: he had followed Savrola from the beginning with blind enthusiasm and devotion; and he now felt hurt that he should be passed over like this. "It has been a bad day for us," he said tentatively; and then as Savrola did not reply, he continued, "Who would have thought they would have dared to trick us?" "It has been a very bad day,--for you," replied Savrola thoughtfully. "For me? Why, what do you mean?" "Have you reflected that you have forty human lives to answer for? Your speech was useless,--what good could it do? Their blood is on your head. The people too are cowed. Much harm has been done; it is your fault." "My fault! I was furious,--he cheated us,--I thought only of revolt. I never dreamed you would sit down tamely like this. That devil should be killed now, at once,--before more mischief happens." "Look here, Moret: I am as young as you; I feel as acutely; I am full of enthusiasm. I, too, hate Molara more than is wise or philosophic; but I contain myself, when nothing is to be gained by giving way. Now mark my words. Either you learn to do so, or you can go your ways, for I will have none of you,--politically, that is,--as a friend, it is different." He sat down and began to write a letter, while Moret, pale with that mortification which is made up of anger and self-reproach, and quivering under his rebuke, left the room in haste. Savrola remained. There was much business to do that evening; letters had to be written and read, the tone of the leading-articles in the Democratic Press explained, and many other matters decided. The machinery of a great party, and still more of a great conspiracy, needed careful and constant attention. It was nine o'clock before he finished. "Well, good-night, Godoy," he said to the Major; "we shall have another busy day to-morrow. We must contrive to frighten the Dictator. Let me know at what time he will give audience." At the door of the Mayoralty he called a hackney-coach, a conveyance which neither the dulness of the social season nor the excitement of political affairs could restrain from its customary occupation. After a short drive he arrived at a small though not inelegant house, for he was a man of means, in the most fashionable quarter of the town. An old woman opened the door to his knock. She looked rejoiced to see him. "La," she said, "I have had a fearful time with you away, and all this shooting and noise. But the afternoons are chilly now and you should have had your coat; I fear you will have a cold to-morrow." "It is all right, Bettine," he answered kindly; "I have a good chest, thanks to your care; but I am very tired. Send me some soup to my room; I will not dine to-night." He went upstairs, while she bustled off to get him the best dinner she could improvise. The apartments he lived in were on the second storey--a bedroom, a bathroom, and a study. They were small, but full of all that taste and luxury could devise and affection and industry preserve. A broad writing-table occupied the place of honour. It was arranged so that the light fell conveniently to the hand and head. A large bronze inkstand formed the centrepiece, with a voluminous blotting-book of simple manufacture spread open before it. The rest of the table was occupied by papers on files. The floor, in spite of the ample waste-paper basket, was littered with scraps. It was the writing-table of a public man. The room was lit by electric light in portable shaded lamps. The walls were covered with shelves, filled with well-used volumes. To that Pantheon of Literature none were admitted till they had been read and valued. It was a various library: the philosophy of Schopenhauer divided Kant from Hegel, who jostled the Memoirs of St. Simon and the latest French novel; RASSELAS and LA CURÉE lay side by side; eight substantial volumes of Gibbon's famous History were not perhaps inappropriately prolonged by a fine edition of the DECAMERON; the ORIGIN OF SPECIES rested by the side of a black-letter Bible; THE REPUBLIC maintained an equilibrium with VANITY FAIR and the HISTORY OF EUROPEAN MORALS. A volume of Macaulay's Essays lay on the writing-table itself; it was open, and that sublime passage whereby the genius of one man has immortalised the genius of another was marked in pencil. _And history, while for the warning of vehement, high, and daring natures, she notes his many errors, will yet deliberately pronounce that among the eminent men whose bones lie near his, scarcely one has left a more stainless, and none a more splendid name_. A half-empty box of cigarettes stood on a small table near a low leathern armchair, and by its side lay a heavy army-revolver, against the barrel of which the ashes of many cigarettes had been removed. In the corner of the room stood a small but exquisite Capitoline Venus, the cold chastity of its colour reproaching the allurements of its form. It was the chamber of a philosopher, but of no frigid, academic recluse; it was the chamber of a man, a human man, who appreciated all earthly pleasures, appraised them at their proper worth, enjoyed, and despised them. There were still some papers and telegrams lying unopened on the table, but Savrola was tired; they could, or at any rate should wait till the morning. He dropped into his chair. Yes, it had been a long day, and a gloomy day. He was a young man, only thirty-two, but already he felt the effects of work and worry. His nervous temperament could not fail to be excited by the vivid scenes through which he had lately passed, and the repression of his emotion only heated the inward fire. Was it worth it? The struggle, the labour, the constant rush of affairs, the sacrifice of so many things that make life easy, or pleasant--for what? A people's good! That, he could not disguise from himself, was rather the direction than the cause of his efforts. Ambition was the motive force, and he was powerless to resist it. He could appreciate the delights of an artist, a life devoted to the search for beauty, or of sport, the keenest pleasure that leaves no sting behind. To live in dreamy quiet and philosophic calm in some beautiful garden, far from the noise of men and with every diversion that art and intellect could suggest, was, he felt, a more agreeable picture. And yet he knew that he could not endure it. 'Vehement, high, and daring' was his cast of mind. The life he lived was the only one he could ever live; he must go on to the end. The end comes often early to such men, whose spirits are so wrought that they know rest only in action, contentment in danger, and in confusion find their only peace. His thoughts were interrupted by the entrance of the old woman with a tray. He was tired, but the decencies of life had to be observed; he rose, and passed into the inner room to change his clothes and make his toilet. When he returned, the table was laid; the soup he had asked for had been expanded by the care of his house-keeper into a more elaborate meal. She waited on him, plying him the while with questions and watching his appetite with anxious pleasure. She had nursed him from his birth up with a devotion and care which knew no break. It is a strange thing, the love of these women. Perhaps it is the only disinterested affection in the world. The mother loves her child; that is material nature. The youth loves his sweetheart; that too may be explained. The dog loves his master; he feeds him; a man loves his friend; he has stood by him perhaps at doubtful moments. In all there are reasons; but the love of a foster-mother for her charge appears absolutely irrational. It is one of the few proofs, not to be explained even by the association of ideas, that the nature of mankind is superior to mere utilitarianism, and that his destinies are high. The light and frugal supper finished, the old woman departed with the plates, and he fell to his musings again. Several difficult affairs impended in the future, about the conduct of which he was doubtful. He dismissed them from his mind; why should he be always oppressed with matters of fact? What of the night? He rose, walked to the window, and drawing the curtains looked out. The street was very quiet, but in the distance he thought he heard the tramp of a patrol. All the houses were dark and sullen; overhead the stars shone brightly; it was a perfect night to watch them. He closed the window and taking a candle walked to a curtained door on one side of the room; it opened on a narrow, spiral stair which led to the flat roof. Most of the houses in Laurania were low, and Savrola when he reached the leads overlooked the sleeping city. Lines of gas-lamps marked the streets and squares, and brighter dots indicated the positions of the shipping in the harbour. But he did not long look at these; he was for the moment weary of men and their works. A small glass observatory stood in one corner of this aerial platform, the nose of the telescope showing through the aperture. He unlocked the door and entered. This was a side of his life that the world never saw; he was no mathematician intent on discovery or fame, but he loved to watch the stars for the sake of their mysteries. By a few manipulations the telescope was directed at the beautiful planet of Jupiter, at this time high in the northern sky. The glass was a powerful one, and the great planet, surrounded by his attendant moons, glowed with splendour. The clock-work gear enabled him to keep it under continual observation as the earth rolled over with the hours. Long he watched it, becoming each moment more under the power of the spell that star-gazing exercises on curious, inquiring humanity. At last he rose, his mind still far away from earth. Molara, Moret, the Party, the exciting scenes of the day, all seemed misty and unreal; another world, a world more beautiful, a world of boundless possibilities, enthralled his imagination. He thought of the future of Jupiter, of the incomprehensible periods of time that would elapse before the cooling process would render life possible on its surface, of the slow steady march of evolution, merciless, inexorable. How far would it carry them, the unborn inhabitants of an embryo world? Perhaps only to some vague distortion of the vital essence; perhaps further than he could dream of. All the problems would be solved, all the obstacles overcome; life would attain perfect developement. And then fancy, overleaping space and time, carried the story to periods still more remote. The cooling process would continue; the perfect developement of life would end in death; the whole solar system, the whole universe itself, would one day be cold and lifeless as a burned-out firework. It was a mournful conclusion. He locked up the observatory and descended the stairs, hoping that his dreams would contradict his thoughts. CHAPTER IV. THE DEPUTATION. It was the President's custom to rise early, but before doing so he invariably received the newspapers and read such remarks as dealt with the policy of the Government or criticised its actions. This morning his literature was exceptionally plentiful. All the papers had leading articles on the restriction of the franchise and the great riot which had followed its announcement. He first opened THE HOUR, the organ of orthodox mediocrity, which usually cautiously supported the Government in consideration of occasional pieces of news with which it was from time to time favoured. In a column and a half of print THE HOUR gently regretted that the President had been unable to restore the franchises unimpaired; it thus gratified the bulk of its readers. In a second column it expressed its severe disapproval--(_unqualified condemnation_ was the actual term)--of the disgraceful riot which had led to such _deplorable consequences_; it thus repaid the President for sending round the text of the English note, which had arrived the night before, and which it printed _verbatim_ with pomp and circumstance as coming from Our Special Correspondent in London. THE COURTIER, the respectable morning journal of the upper classes, regretted that so unseemly a riot should have taken place at the beginning of the season, and expressed a hope that it would not in any way impair the brilliancy of the State Ball which was to take place on the 7th. It gave an excellent account of the President's first ministerial dinner, with the _menu_ duly appended, and it was concerned to notice that Señor Louvet, Minister of the Interior, had been suffering from an indisposition which prevented his attending the function. THE DIURNAL GUSHER, a paper with an enormous circulation, refrained from actual comments but published an excellent account of the _massacre_, to the harrowing details of which it devoted much fruity sentiment and morbid imagination. These were practically the organs on which the Government relied for support, and the President always read them first to fortify himself against the columns of abuse with which the Radical, Popular, and Democratic Press saluted him, his Government, and all his works. The worst result of an habitual use of strong language is that when a special occasion really does arise, there is no way of marking it. THE FABIAN, THE SUNSPOT, and THE RISING TIDE had already exhausted every epithet in their extensive vocabularies on other and less important incidents. Now that a severe fusilade had been made upon the citizens and an ancient privilege attacked, they were reduced to comparative moderation as the only outlet for their feelings. They had compared the Head of the State so often and so vividly to Nero and Iscariot, very much to the advantage of those worthies, that it was difficult to know how they could deal with him now. They nevertheless managed to find a few unused expressions, and made a great point of the Ministerial dinner as being an instance of his "brutal disregard of the commonest instincts of humanity." THE SUNSPOT was thought by its readers to have been particularly happy in alluding to the ministers as, "Indulging in a foul orgie of gluttony and dipping their blood-stained fingers in choice dishes, while the bodies of their victims lay unburied and unavenged." Having finished his perusal the President pushed the last paper off the bed and frowned. He cared nothing for criticism, but he knew the power of the Press and he knew that it reflected as well as influenced public opinion. There could be no doubt that the balance was rising against him. At breakfast he was moody and silent, and Lucile tactfully refrained from irritating him by the laboured commonplaces of matutinal conversation. By nine o'clock he was always at work and this morning he began earlier than usual. The Secretary was already at his table busily writing when Molara entered. He rose and bowed, a formal bow, which seemed an assertion of equality rather than a tribute of respect. The President nodded and walked to his table on which such parts of correspondence as needed his personal attention were neatly arranged. He sat down and began to read. Occasionally he uttered an exclamation of assent or disapproval, and his pencil was often employed to express his decisions and opinions. From time to time Miguel collected the papers he had thus dealt with and carried them to the inferior secretaries in the adjoining room, whose duty it was to elaborate into the stately pomposity of official language such phrases as "Curt Refusal" "Certainly not" "Apply to War Office" "Gushing Reply" "I do not agree" "See last year's Report." Lucile also had letters to read and write. Having finished these she determined to take a drive in the park. For the last few weeks, since, in fact, they had returned from their summer residence, she had discontinued what had been in former years her usual practice; but after the scenes and riots of the day before she felt it her duty to display a courage which she did not feel. It might help her husband, for her beauty was such that an artistic people invariably showed her respect. It could at least do no harm, and besides she was weary of the palace and its gardens. With this intention her carriage was ordered and she was about to enter it, when a young man arrived at the door. He saluted her gravely. It was the boast of the citizens of the Republic of Laurania that they never brought politics into private life or private life into politics. How far they justified it will appear later. The present situation had undoubtedly strained the principle to the full, but civilities were still exchanged between political antagonists. Lucile, who had known the great Democrat as a frequent visitor at her father's house before the Civil War, and who had always kept up a formal acquaintance with him, smiled and bowed in return and asked whether he came to see the President. "Yes," he replied. "I have an appointment." "Public matters I suppose?" she inquired with the suspicion of a smile. "Yes," he repeated somewhat abruptly. "How tiresome you all are," she said daringly, "with your public businesses and solemn looks. I hear nothing but matters of State from morning till night, and now, when I fly the palace for an hour's relaxation, they meet me at the very door." Savrola smiled. It was impossible to resist her charm. The admiration he had always felt for her beauty and her wit asserted itself in spite of the watchful and determined state of mind into which he had thrown himself as a preparation for his interview with the President. He was a young man, and Jupiter was not the only planet he admired. "Your Excellency," he said, "must acquit me of all intention." "I do," she answered laughing, "and release you from all further punishment." She signed to the coachman and bowing, drove off. He entered the palace and was ushered by a footman resplendent in the blue and buff liveries of the Republic, into an ante-room. A young officer of the Guard, the Lieutenant who had commanded the escort on the previous day, received him. The President would be disengaged in a few minutes. The other members of the deputation had not yet arrived; in the meantime would he take a chair? The Lieutenant regarded him dubiously, as one might view some strange animal, harmless enough to look at, but about whose strength, when roused, there were extraordinary stories. He had been brought up in the most correct regimental ideas: the people (by which he meant the mob) were "swine"; their leaders were the same, with an adjective prefixed; democratic institutions, Parliament, and such like, were all "rot." It therefore appeared that he and Savrola would find few topics in common. But besides his good looks and good manners, the young soldier had other attainments; his men knew him as "all right" and "all there," while the Lancers of the Guard polo team regarded him as a most promising player. Savrola, whose business it was to know everything, inquired respecting the project lately mooted by the Lauranian Cavalry of sending a polo team to England to compete in the great annual tournament at Hurlingham. Lieutenant Tiro (for that was his name) addressed himself to the subject with delight. They disputed as to who should be taken as "back." The discussion was only interrupted by the entrance of the Mayor and Renos, and the Subaltern went off to inform the President that the deputation waited. "I will see them at once," said Molara; "show them up here." The deputation were accordingly conducted up the stairs to the President's private room. He rose and received them with courtesy. Godoy stated the grievances of the citizens. He recalled the protests they had made against the unconstitutional government of the last five years, and their delight at the President's promise to call the Estates together. He described their bitter disappointment at the restriction of the franchise, and their keen desire that it should be fully restored. He dilated on their indignation at the cruelty with which the soldiers had shot down unarmed men, and finally declared that, as Mayor, he could not vouch for their continued loyalty to the President or their respect for his person. Renos spoke in the same strain, dwelling particularly on the legal aspect of the President's late action, and on the gravity of its effects as a precedent to posterity. Molara replied at some length. He pointed out the disturbed state of the country, and particularly of the capital; he alluded to the disorders of the late war and the sufferings it had caused to the mass of the people. What the State wanted was strong stable government. As things became more settled the franchise should be extended until it would ultimately be completely restored. In the meanwhile, what was there to complain about? Law and order were maintained; the public service was well administered; the people enjoyed peace and security. More than that, a vigorous foreign policy held the honour of the country high. They should have an instance. He turned and requested Miguel to read the reply to the English note on the African Dispute. The Secretary stood up and read the paper in question, his soft, purring voice, proving well suited to emphasising the insults it contained. "And that, Gentlemen," said the President, when it was finished, "is addressed to one of the greatest military and naval powers in the world." Godoy and Renos were silent. Their patriotism was roused; their pride was gratified; but Savrola smiled provokingly. "It will take more than despatches," he said, "to keep the English out of the African sphere, or to reconcile the people of Laurania to your rule." "And if stronger measures should be necessary," said the President, "rest assured they will be taken." "After the events of yesterday we need no such assurance." The President ignored the taunt. "I know the English Government," he continued; "they will not appeal to arms." "And I," said Savrola, "know the Lauranian people. I am not so confident." There was a long pause. Both men faced each other, and their eyes met. It was the look of two swordsmen who engage, and it was the look of two bitter enemies; they appeared to measure distances and calculate chances. Then Savrola turned away, the ghost of a smile still lingering on his lips; but he had read the President's heart and he felt as if he had looked into hell. "It is a matter of opinion, Sir," said Molara at last. "It will soon be a matter of history." "Other tales will have to be told before," said the President, and then with great formality, "I am obliged to you, Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen, for representing the dangerous elements of disorder which exist among certain classes of the people. You may rely on every precaution being taken to prevent an outbreak. I beg you will keep me further informed. Good morning." The only course open appeared to be the door, and the deputation withdrew, after Savrola had thanked the President for his audience and had assured him that he would lose no opportunity of bringing home to him the hostile attitude of the citizens. On the way down-stairs they were met by Lucile, who had returned unexpectedly early from her drive. She saw by the expression of their faces that a heated discussion had taken place. Godoy and Renos she passed unnoticed, but she smiled merrily at Savrola, as if to convey to him that she was uninterested by politics and could not understand how people ever managed to get excited about them. The smile did not deceive him; he knew too much of her tastes and talents, but he admired her all the more for her acting. He walked home. The interview had not been altogether unsatisfactory. He had never hoped to convince the President; that indeed was hardly likely; but they had expressed the views of the people, and Godoy and Renos had already sent copies of their remarks to the newspapers, so that the party could not complain of their leaders' inaction at such a crisis. He thought he had frightened Molara, if indeed it were possible to frighten such a man; at any rate he had made him angry. When he thought of this he was glad. Why? He had always hitherto repressed such unphilosophic and futile emotions so far as possible, but somehow to-day he felt his dislike of the President was invested with a darker tinge. And then his mind reverted to Lucile. What a beautiful woman she was! How full of that instinctive knowledge of human feelings which is the source of all true wit! Molara was a lucky man to have such a wife. Decidedly he hated him personally, but that, of course, was on account of his unconstitutional conduct. When he reached his rooms, Moret was awaiting him, much excited and evidently angry. He had written several long letters to his leader, acquainting him with his unalterable decision to sever all connection with him and his party; but he had torn them all up, and was now resolved to tell him in plain words. Savrola saw his look. "Ah, Louis," he cried, "I am glad you are here. How good of you to come! I have just left the President; he is recalcitrant; he will not budge an inch. I need your advice. What course shall we adopt?" "What has happened?" asked the young man, sulkily but curiously. Savrola related the interview with graphic terseness. Moret listened attentively and then said, still with great ill humour, "Physical force is the only argument he understands. I am for raising the people." "Perhaps you are right," said Savrola reflectively, "I am half inclined to agree with you." Moret argued his proposition with vigour and earnestness, and never had his leader seemed so agreeable to the violent measures he proposed. For half an hour they discussed the point. Savrola still appeared unconvinced; he looked at his watch. "It is past two o'clock," he said. "Let us lunch here and thrash the matter out." They did so. The luncheon was excellent, and the host's arguments became more and more convincing. At last, with the coffee, Moret admitted that perhaps it was better to wait, and they parted with great cordiality. CHAPTER V. A PRIVATE CONVERSATION. "That," said the President to his confidential secretary, so soon as the door had closed on the retiring deputation, "is over, but we shall have plenty more in the future. Savrola will most certainly be elected for the Central Division, and we shall then have the pleasure of listening to him in the Senate." "Unless," added Miguel, "anything should happen." The President, who knew his man well, understood the implication. "No, it is no good; we cannot do that. Fifty years ago it might have been possible. People won't stand that sort of thing now-a-days; even the army might have scruples. So long as he keeps within the law, I don't see how we can touch him constitutionally." "He is a great force, a great force; sometimes, I think, the greatest in Laurania. Every day he grows stronger. Presently the end will come," said the Secretary slowly and thoughtfully, who, as the partner of Molara's dangers, no less than of his actions, had a claim to be heard. "I think the end is coming," he continued; "perhaps quite soon--unless----?" he paused. "I tell you it can't be done. Any accident that happened would be attributed to me. It would mean a revolution here, and close every asylum abroad." "There are other ways besides force, physical force." "None that I can see, and he is a strong man." "So was Samson, nevertheless the Philistines spoiled him." "Through a woman. I don't believe he has ever been in love." "That is no reason against the future." "Wanted a Delilah," said the President dryly. "Perhaps you will find one for him." The Secretary's eyes wandered round the room artlessly, and paused for a moment on a photograph of Lucile. "How dare you, Sir! You are a scoundrel! You have not an ounce of virtue in you!" "We have been associated for some time, General." He always called him _General_ on these occasions, it reminded the President of various little incidents which had taken place when they had worked together during the war. "Perhaps that is the cause." "You are impertinent." "My interests are concerned. I too have enemies. You know very well how much my life would be worth without the protection of the Secret Police. I only remember with whom and for whom these things were done." "Perhaps I am hasty, Miguel, but there is a limit, even between----" He was going to say _friends_ but Miguel interposed _accomplices_. "Well," said Molara, "I do not care what you call it. What is your proposition?" "The Philistines," replied Miguel, "spoiled Samson, but Delilah had to cut his hair first." "Do you mean that she should implore him to hold his hand?" "No, I think that would be useless, but if he were compromised----" "But she, she would not consent. It would involve her." "She need not necessarily know. Another object for making his acquaintance might be suggested. It would come as a surprise to her." "You are a scoundrel--an infernal scoundrel," said the President quietly. Miguel smiled, as one who receives a compliment. "The matter," he said, "is too serious for the ordinary rules of decency and honour. Special cases demand special remedies." "She would never forgive me." "The forgiveness would rest with you. Your charity would enable you to pardon an uncommitted crime. You have only to play the jealous husband and own your mistake later on." "And he?" "Fancy the great popular leader. Patriot, Democrat, what not, discovered fawning to the tyrant's wife! Why, the impropriety alone would disgust many. And more than that,--observe him begging for mercy, grovelling at the President's feet,--a pretty picture! It would ruin him; ridicule alone would kill him." "It might," said Molara. The picture pleased him. "It must. It is the only chance that I can see, and it need cost you nothing. Every woman is secretly flattered by the jealousy of the man she loves, even if he be her husband." "How do you know these things?" asked Molara, looking at the ugly pinched figure and glistening hair of his companion. "_I_ know," said Miguel with a grin of odious pride. The suggestion of his appetites was repulsive. The President was conscious of disgust. "Mr. Secretary Miguel," he said with the air of one who has made up his mind, "I must request you not to speak to me of this matter again. I consider it shows less to the advantage of your heart than of your head." "I see by Your Excellency's manner that further allusion is unnecessary." "Have you the report of the Agricultural Committee for last year? Good,--please have a _précis_ made of it; I want some facts. The country may be kept, even if we lose the capital; that means a good part of the army." Thus the subject dropped. Each understood the other, and behind lay the spur of danger. After the President had finished the morning's business, he rose to leave the room, but before he did so he turned to Miguel and said abruptly: "It would be a great convenience for us to know what course the Opposition intends to pursue on the opening of the Senate, would it not?" "Assuredly." "How can we induce Savrola to speak? He is incorruptible." "There is another method." "I tell you physical force is not to be thought of." "There is another method." "And that," said the President, "I directed you not to speak of again." "Precisely," said the Secretary, and resumed his writing. The garden into which Molara walked was one of the most beautiful and famous in a country where all vegetation attained luxuriant forms. The soil was fertile, the sun hot, and the rains plentiful. It displayed an attractive disorder. The Lauranians were no admirers of that peculiar taste which finds beauty in the exact arrangement of an equal number of small trees of symmetrical shape in mathematical designs, or in the creation of geometrical figures by means of narrow paths with box-hedges. They were an unenlightened people, and their gardens displayed a singular contempt for geometry and precision. Great blazes of colour arranged in pleasing contrasts were the lights, and cool green arbours the shades of their rural pictures. Their ideal of gardening was to make every plant grow as freely as if directed by nature, and to as high perfection as if cultivated by art. If the result was not artistic, it was at least beautiful. The President, however, cared very little for flowers or their arrangement; he was, he said, too busy a man to have anything to do with the beauties of colour, harmony, or line. Neither the tints of the rose nor the smell of the jasmine awakened in him more than the rudimentary physical pleasures which are natural and involuntary. He liked to have a good flower garden, because it was the right thing to have, because it enabled him to take people there and talk to them personally on political matters, and because it was convenient for afternoon receptions. But he himself took no interest in it. The kitchen garden appealed to him more; his practical soul rejoiced more in an onion than an orchid. He was full of thought after his conversation with Miguel, and turned down the shady path which led to the fountains with long, hasty strides. Things were looking desperate. It was, as Miguel had said, a question of time, unless,--unless Savrola were removed or discredited. He refrained from precisely formulating the idea that had taken possession of his mind. He had done many things in the rough days of the war when he was a struggling man, the memory of which was not pleasant. He remembered a brother officer, a rising man, the colonel of a regiment, who had been a formidable rival; at a critical moment he had withheld the supports, and left it to the enemy to remove one obstacle from his path. Then another tale came into his mind which also was not a pretty one, a tale of a destroyed treaty, and a broken truce; of men, who had surrendered to terms, shot against the wall of the fort they had held so long. He also recalled with annoyance the methods he had adopted to extract information from the captured spy; five years of busy life, of success and fortune, had not obscured the memory of the man's face as it writhed in suffering. But this new idea seemed the most odious of all. He was unscrupulous, but like many men in history or modern life, he had tried to put away a discreditable past. Henceforth, he had said when he obtained power, he would abandon such methods: they would no longer be necessary; and yet, here was the need already. Besides, Lucile was so beautiful; he loved her in his hard way for that alone; and she was such a consort, so tactful, so brilliant, that he admired and valued her from a purely official standpoint. If she ever knew, she would never forgive him. She never should know, but still he hated the idea. But what other course remained? He thought of the faces of the crowd the day before; of Savrola; of the stories which reached him from the army; of other tales of a darker and more mysterious kind,--tales of strange federations and secret societies, which suggested murder, as well as revolution. The tide was rising; it was dangerous to tarry. And then the alternative presented itself; flight, abdication, a squalid existence in some foreign country, despised, insulted, suspected; and exiles always lived to a great age he had heard. He would not think of it; he would die first; nothing but death should drag him from the palace, and he would fight to the last. His mind returned to the starting point of his reflections. Here was a chance, the one solution which seemed possible; it was not an agreeable one, but it was that or none. He had reached the end of the path and turning the corner saw Lucile seated by the fountain. It was a beautiful picture. She saw his preoccupied look and rose to meet him. "What is the matter, Antonio? You look worried." "Things are going wrong with us, my dear. Savrola, the deputation, the newspapers, and, above all, the reports I receive of the people, are ominous and alarming." "I noticed black looks this morning when I drove. Do you think there is danger?" "I do," he answered in his precise official manner, "grave danger." "I wish I could help you," she said, "but I am only a woman. What can I do?" He did not answer and she continued: "Señor Savrola is a kind man. I used to know him quite well before the war." "He will ruin us." "Surely not." "We shall have to fly the country, if indeed they allow us to do that." She turned paler. "But I know what men look like; there is a sympathy between us; he is no fanatic." "There are powers behind and beneath him of which he knows little, which he cannot control, but which he has invoked." "Can you do nothing?" "I cannot arrest him; he is too popular, and besides he has broken no law. He will go on. In a fortnight are the elections; he will be returned in spite of my precautions; then the trouble will begin." He paused, and then speaking as if to himself continued: "If we could learn what he means to do, perhaps we might defeat it." "Can I not help you?" she asked quickly. "I know him; I think he likes me. He might whisper to me what he would not tell to others." She thought of many victories in the past. "My darling," said Molara, "why should you spoil your life by mixing in the darker side of politics? I would not ask you." "But I want to. I will try if it would help you." "It might do much more." "Very well, I will find out for you; in a fortnight you shall know. He must come to the State Ball; I will meet him there." "I am loth to let you talk to such a man, but I know your wit, and the need is great. But will he come?" "I will write him a note with the invitation," she said, "laugh at politics and advise him to keep his private life at least free from them. I think he will come; if not, I will find some other way of seeing him." Molara looked at her with admiration. At no time did he love her more than when he realised of what use she was to him. "I leave it to you, then. I fear you will fail, but if you can do it, you may have saved the State. If not, no harm will have been done." "I shall succeed," she answered confidently, and rising from her seat began to walk towards the house. She saw from her husband's manner that he would like to be alone. He remained seated there for a long time, staring into the water in which the fat, lazy, gold fish swam placidly. His face wore the expression of one who has swallowed some nasty thing. CHAPTER VI. ON CONSTITUTIONAL GROUNDS. The sagacious founders of the Lauranian Republic had recognised the importance of preserving and promoting the practice of social civilities between the public men of the State, irrespective of party. It had therefore long been the custom for the President to give several official entertainments during the autumn season, to which all the distinguished characters of either side were invited, and which it was considered _etiquette_ to attend. This year feeling ran so high and relations were so strained that Savrola had decided not to accept, and had already formally declined the invitation; he was therefore not a little surprised when he received a second card, and still more when he read Lucile's note which accompanied it. He saw she had exposed herself to a rebuff with her eyes open, and wondered why she had done so. Of course she counted on her charms. It is hard, if not impossible, to snub a beautiful woman; they remain beautiful and the rebuke recoils. He might indeed have made political capital out of so pressing an invitation sent at such a critical time; but he felt she had judged him well, and knew she was safe at least from that. This pleased him. He was sorry he could not go; but he had made up his mind, and sat down to write and decline. Half way through the letter, he paused; the thought occurred to him, that perhaps she might stand in need of his help. He read the letter again and fancied, though the words did not warrant it, that he detected a note of appeal. And then he began to look for reasons for changing his mind: the old established custom; the necessity of showing his followers that for the present he was in favour of constitutional agitation only; the opportunity of displaying his confidence in the success of his plans; in fact, every argument, but the true one, was arrayed against his determination. Yes, he would go: the party might object, but he did not care; it was none of their business, and he was strong enough to face their displeasure. These reflections were interrupted by the entrance of Moret, his face glowing with enthusiasm. "The Central Division Committee have nominated you unanimously as their candidate at the elections. The Dictator's puppet, Tranta, was howled down. I have arranged for a public meeting on Thursday night for you to address. We are on the crest of the wave!" "Capital!" said Savrola. "I had expected to be nominated; our influence in the capital is supreme. I am glad of an opportunity of speaking; I have not had a meeting for some time, and there is a good deal to talk about just now. What day did you say you had arranged it for?" "Thursday in the City-Hall at eight in the evening," said Moret, who, though sanguine, was not unbusiness-like. "Thursday?" "Yes, you are not engaged anywhere." "Well," said Savrola speaking slowly and appearing to weigh his words, "Thursday is the night of the State Ball." "I know," said Moret, "that was why I arranged it so. They will feel they are dancing on a volcano; only a mile from the palace will be the people, massed, agreed, determined. Molara will not enjoy his evening; Louvet will not go; Sorrento will be making arrangements to massacre, if necessary. It will spoil the festivities; they will all see the writing on the wall." "Thursday will not do, Moret." "Not do! Why not?" "Because I am going to the ball that night," said Savrola deliberately. Moret gasped. "What," he cried, "you!" "Most certainly I shall go. The ancient customs of the State cannot be set aside like this. It is my duty to go; we are fighting for the Constitution, and we are bound to show our respect for its principles." "You will accept Molara's hospitality,--enter his house,--eat his food?" "No," said Savrola; "I shall eat the food provided by the State. As you well know, the expenses of these official functions are chargeable to the public." "You will talk to him?" "Certainly, but he will not enjoy it." "You will insult him, then?" "My dear Moret, what should make you think that? I shall be very civil. That will frighten him most of all; he will not know what is impending." "You cannot go," said Moret decidedly. "Indeed I am going." "Think what the Trade-Unions will say." "I have thought about all these things and have made up my mind," said Savrola. "They may say what they like. It will show them that I do not intend to discard Constitutional methods for a long time yet. These people want their enthusiasm cooling from time to time; they take life too seriously." "They will accuse you of betraying the cause." "I have no doubt stupid people will make characteristic remarks, but I trust none of my friends will bore me by repeating them to me." "What will Strelitz say? It will very likely make him cross the frontier with his followers. He thinks we are lukewarm, and has been growing more impatient every week." "If he comes before we are ready to help, the troops will make short work of him and his rabble. But he has definite orders from me and will, I hope, obey them." "You are doing wrong, and you know it," said Moret harshly and savagely; "to say nothing of the contemptible humiliation of cringing to your enemy." Savrola smiled at his follower's anger. "Oh," he said, "I shall not cringe. Come, you have not yet seen me do that," and he put his hand on his companion's arm. "It is strange, Louis," he continued, "that we differ in so many things, and yet, if I were in difficulty and doubt, there is no one to whom I would go sooner than to you. We squabble about trifles, but if it were a great matter, your judgment should rule me, and you know it well." Moret yielded. He always yielded to Savrola when he talked like that. "Well," he said, "when will you speak?" "Whenever you like." "Friday, then, the sooner the better." "Very well; do you make the arrangements; I will find something to say." "I wish you were not going," said Moret, reverting to his former objection; "nothing on earth would induce me to go." "Moret," said Savrola with strange earnestness, "we have settled that; there are other things to talk about. I am troubled in my mind. There is an undercurrent of agitation, the force of which I cannot gauge. I am the acknowledged leader of the party, but sometimes I realise that there are agencies at work, which I do not control. That secret society they call the League is an unknown factor. I hate that fellow, that German fellow, Kreutze, Number One as he styles himself. He is the source of all the opposition I encounter in the party itself; the Labour Delegates all seem to be under his influence. Indeed there are moments when I think that you and I and Godoy and all who are striving for the old Constitution, are but the political waves of a social tide that is flowing we know not whither. Perhaps I am wrong, but I keep my eyes open and their evidence makes me thoughtful. The future is inscrutable but appalling; you must stand by me. When I can no longer restrain and control, I will no longer lead." "The League is nothing," said Moret, "but a small anarchist group, who have thrown in their lot, for the present, with us. You are the indispensable leader of the party; you have created the agitation, and it is in your hands to stimulate or allay it. There are no unknown forces; you are the motive power." Savrola walked to the window. "Look out over the city," he said. "It is a great mass of buildings; three hundred thousand people live there. Consider its size; think of the latent potentialities it contains, and then look at this small room. Do you think I am what I am, because I have changed all those minds, or because I best express their views? Am I their master or their slave? Believe me, I have no illusions, nor need you." His manner impressed his follower. It almost seemed to him, as he watched the city and listened to Savrola's earnest words, that he heard the roar of a multitude, distant, subdued, but intense as the thunder of the surf upon a rocky coast when the wind is off the sea. He did not reply. His highly wrought temperament exaggerated every mood and passion; he always lived in the superlative. He had no counterpoise of healthy cynicism. Now he was very solemn, and bidding Savrola good-morning, walked slowly down the stairs, swayed by the vibrations of a powerful imagination which had been stimulated to an extreme. Savrola lay back in his chair. His first inclination was to laugh, but he realised that his mirth would not be entirely at Moret's expense. He had tried to trick himself as well, but the parts of that subtle brain were too intimately connected to have secrets from one another. Still he would not allow them to formulate the true reason of his change of mind. It was not so, he said to himself several times, and even if it were it was of no importance and signified nothing. He took a cigarette from his case, and lighting it, watched the coiling rings of smoke. How much of what he had said had he believed? He thought of Moret's serious face; that was not entirely produced by his influence. The young revolutionist had noticed something too, but had feared, or failed, to reduce his impressions to words. There was an undercurrent then; there were many dangers ahead. Well, he did not care; he was confident in his own powers. As the difficulties arose, he would meet them; when dangers threatened he would overcome them. Horse, foot, and artillery, he was a man, a complete entity. Under any circumstances, in any situation he knew himself a factor to be reckoned with; whatever the game, he would play it to his amusement, if not to his advantage. The smoke of his cigarette curled round his head. Life,--how unreal, how barren, and yet, how fascinating! Fools, calling themselves philosophers, had tried to bring home the bitter fact to men. His philosophy lent itself to a pious fraud--taught him to minimise the importance of his pains, and to magnify that of his pleasures; made life delightful and death incidental. Zeno had shown him how to face adversity, and Epicurus how to enjoy pleasure. He basked in the smiles of fortune, and shrugged his shoulders at the frowns of fate. His existence, or series of existences, had been agreeable. All that he remembered had been worth living. If there was a future state, if the game was to begin again elsewhere, he would take a hand. He hoped for immortality, but he contemplated annihilation with composure. Meanwhile the business of living was an interesting problem. His speech,--he had made many and knew that nothing good can be obtained without effort. These impromptu feats of oratory existed only in the minds of the listeners; the flowers of rhetoric were hothouse plants. What was there to say? Successive cigarettes had been mechanically consumed. Amid the smoke he saw a peroration, which would cut deep into the hearts of a crowd; a high thought, a fine simile, expressed in that correct diction which is comprehensible even to the most illiterate, and appeals to the most simple; something to lift their minds from the material cares of life and to awake sentiment. His ideas began to take the form of words, to group themselves into sentences; he murmured to himself; the rhythm of his own language swayed him; instinctively he alliterated. Ideas succeeded one another, as a stream flows swiftly by and the light changes on its waters. He seized a piece of paper and began hurriedly to pencil notes. That was a point; could not tautology accentuate it? He scribbled down a rough sentence, scratched it out, polished it, and wrote it in again. The sound would please their ears, the sense improve and stimulate their minds. What a game it was! His brain contained the cards he had to play, the world the stakes he played for. As he worked, the hours passed away. The housekeeper entering with his luncheon found him silent and busy; she had seen him thus before and did not venture to interrupt him. The untasted food grew cold upon the table, as the hands of the clock moved slowly round marking the measured tread of time. Presently he rose, and, completely under the influence of his own thoughts and language, began to pace the room with short rapid strides, speaking to himself in a low voice and with great emphasis. Suddenly he stopped, and with a strange violence his hand descended on the table. It was the end of the speech. The noise recalled him to the commonplaces of life. He was hungry and tired, and with a laugh at his own enthusiasm sat down at the table and began his neglected luncheon. A dozen sheets of note paper, covered with phrases, facts, and figures, were the result of the morning's work. They lay pinned together on the table, harmless insignificant pieces of paper; and yet Antonio Molara, President of the Republic of Laurania, would have feared a bombshell less. Nor would he have been either a fool or a coward. CHAPTER VII. THE STATE BALL. The palace of Laurania was admirably suited to the discharge of the social ceremonies of the State. The lavish expenditure on public entertainments, which the constitutional practice encouraged, allowed the hospitalities of the Republic to be extended upon the most magnificent scale. The opening State Ball of the season was in many ways the most important of these affairs. It was at this function that the great men of both parties met, for the first time after the summer heats, before the autumn session, and the brilliant society of the capital reunited after their absence in their country and mountain villas. Taste, elegance, and magnificence were equally displayed. The finest music, the best champagne, the most diverse, yet select, company were among the attractions of the evening. The spacious courtyard of the palace was completely covered by a gigantic awning. Rows of the Infantry of the Guard lined the approaches, and with their bright steel bayonets increased the splendour and the security of the occasion. The well-lit streets were crowded with the curious populace. The great hall of the palace, at all times imposing and magnificent, displayed a greater pomp when filled with a gaily dressed company. At the head of the stairs stood the President and his wife, he resplendent in his orders and medals, she in her matchless beauty. As the guests ascended, an aide-de-camp, a gorgeous thing in crimson and gold, inquired their names and styles and announced them. Many and various was the company; every capital in Europe, every country in the world, was represented. The guest of the evening was the King of Ethiopia, a mass of silk and jewels framing a black but vivacious face. He came early,--unwisely as, had he come later, there would have been a better audience to watch his arrival; however, to his untutored mind perhaps this was a matter of little importance. The Diplomatic Corps followed in a long succession. Coach after coach drew up at the entrance and discharged its burden of polite astuteness, clothed in every conceivable combination of gold and colour. Arrived at the top of the stairs, the Russian Ambassador, grey but gallant, paused and, bowing with a stately courtesy, kissed the hand Lucile extended. "The scene is an appropriate setting to a peerless diamond," he murmured. "Would it sparkle as brightly in the Winter Palace?" inquired Lucile lightly. "Assuredly the frosty nights of Russia would intensify its brilliancy." "Among so many others it would be lost." "Among all others it would be unrivalled and alone." "Ah," she said, "I hate publicity, and as for solitude, frosty solitude, the thought of it alone makes me shiver." She laughed. The diplomatist threw her a look of admiration, and stepping into the crowd, that already blocked the head of the stairs, received and returned the congratulations of his numerous friends. "Madame Tranta," said the aide-de-camp. "I am so glad to see you," said Lucile. "What a pity your daughter could not come; it has been a great disappointment to many." The ugly old woman thus addressed beamed with delight, and moving up the stairs pushed her way to the marble balustrade of the balcony. She watched the later arrivals, and commented freely to her acquaintance on their dresses and deportments; she also gave a little information about each one, which would have been ill-natured even had it not been untrue; but though she told her friends many things, she did not mention that she had had to make Tranta write and threaten to desert the President's party unless she was asked to the ball, and that even this had failed to procure an invitation for her daughter, an unfortunate girl who added a bad complexion to the family features. Louvet came next, looking anxiously at the crowd of faces which gazed from the landing, and imagining bombs and daggers at every step. He regarded Lucile with apprehension, but her smile seemed to give him courage and he mingled with the throng. Then Sir Richard Shalgrove, the British Ambassador, whose genial and cheery face displayed an innocence which contrasted with his reputation, advanced to make his bow. The strained relations between Laurania and Great Britain seemed to disappear in that comprehensive salutation. Lucile engaged him for a moment in conversation; she pretended to know little or nothing. "And when," she asked merrily, "do we declare war?" "Not until after I have had the pleasure of the third waltz, I hope," said the Ambassador. "How annoying! I wanted so much to dance it with you." "And you will not?" he asked in great concern. "Dare I plunge two nations into war for the sake of a waltz?" "Had you my inducement you would not hesitate," he replied gallantly. "What, to precipitate hostilities! What have we done? What is your great inducement to fight?" "Not to fight,--to dance," said Sir Richard with a little less than his usual assurance. "For a diplomatist you are indeed explicit. While you are in so good a mood, tell me what has happened; is there danger?" "Danger? No--how could there be?" He selected a formula: "Between traditionally friendly powers arbitration settles all disputes." "You realise," she said earnestly and with an entire change of manner, "that we have to consider the political situation here? A strong despatch improves the position of the Government." "I have felt all through," said the Ambassador uncompromisingly, "that there was no danger." He did not however mention that H.M. battleship _Aggressor_ (12,000 tons displacement and 14,000 horse power, armed with four 11-inch guns) was steaming eighteen knots an hour towards the African port of the Lauranian Republic, or that he himself had been busy all the afternoon with cipher telegrams relating to ships, stores, and military movements. He thought that would be only boring her with purely technical details. While this conversation had been taking place, the stream of people had passed continuously up the stairs, and the throng on the wide balcony that ran round the entire hall had become dense. The wonderful band was almost drowned by the hum of conversation; the perfect floor of the ball-room was only occupied by a few young couples whose own affairs absorbed their minds and excluded all other interests. A feeling of expectancy pervaded the hall; the rumour that Savrola would come had spread far and wide throughout Laurania. Suddenly everyone became hushed, and above the strains of the band the distant sound of shouting was heard. Louder and louder it swelled, swiftly approaching until it was at the very gate; then it died away, and there was a silence through the hall filled only by the music. Had he been hooted or cheered? The sound had seemed strangely ambiguous; men were prepared to wager about it; his face would tell them the answer. The swing-doors opened and Savrola entered. All eyes were turned on him, but his face showed them nothing, and the bets remained undecided. As he leisurely ascended the stairs, his eye travelled with interest round the crowded galleries and the brilliant throng who lined them. No decorations, no orders, no star relieved the plain evening dress he wore. Amid that blaze of colour, that multitude of gorgeous uniforms, he appeared a sombre figure; but, like the Iron Duke in Paris, he looked the leader of them all, calm, confident, and composed. The President walked down a few steps to meet his distinguished guest. Both bowed with grave dignity. "I am glad you have come, Sir," said Molara; "it is in harmony with the traditions of the State." "Duty and inclination combined to point the way," answered Savrola with a smile marked by a suggestion of irony. "You had no difficulty with the crowd?" suggested the President acidly. "Oh, no difficulty, but they take politics a little seriously; they disapproved of my coming to your palace." "You are right to come," said Molara. "Now we who are engaged in matters of State know what these things are worth; men of the world do not get excited over public affairs, nor do gentlemen fight with bludgeons." "I prefer swords," said Savrola reflectively. He had reached the head of the stairs and Lucile stood before him. What a queen she looked, how peerless and incomparable among all women! The fine tiara she wore suggested sovereignty, and democrat as he was, he bowed to that alone. She held out her hand; he took it with reverence and courtesy, but the contact thrilled him. The President selected a fat but famous woman from the aristocracy of Laurania, and led the way into the ball-room. Savrola did not dance; there were some amusements which his philosophy taught him to despise. Lucile was captured by the Russian Ambassador, and he remained a spectator. Lieutenant Tiro saw him thus alone and approached him, wishing to finish their discussion about the "back" of the polo team, which had been interrupted the week before. Savrola received him with a smile; he liked the young soldier, as indeed did everyone. Tiro was full of arguments; he was in favour of a strong heavy player who should lie back in the game and take no chances. Savrola, having remarked on the importance of the Lauranian Army being properly represented in an international contest, favoured a light weight, playing right up to his forwards and ready to take the ball on himself at any moment. It was an animated discussion. "Where have you played?" asked the Subaltern, surprised at his knowledge. "I have never played the game," answered Savrola; "but I have always thought it a good training for military officers." The subject was changed. "Explain to me," said the great Democrat, "what all these different orders are. What is that blue one that Sir Richard, the British Ambassador, is wearing?" "That is the Garter," replied the Subaltern; "the most honourable order in England." "Really, and what is this that you are wearing?" "I! Oh, that's the African medal. I was out there in '86 and '87, you know." As Savrola had anticipated, he was intensely pleased at being asked. "It must have been a strange experience for you, who are so young." "It was damned good fun," said the Subaltern with decision. "I was at Langi Tal. My squadron had a five-mile pursuit. The lance is a beautiful weapon. The English in India have a sport called pig-sticking; I have never tried it, but I know a better." "Well, you may have another chance soon. We seem to be getting into difficulties with the British Government." "Do you think there is any chance of war?" asked the boy eagerly. "Well, of course," said Savrola, "a war would distract the attention of the people from internal agitation and the Reform movement. The President is a clever man. There might be war. I should not care to prophesy; but do you wish for it?" "Certainly I do; it is my profession. I am sick of being a lap-dog in this palace; I long for the camp and the saddle again. Besides, these English will be worth fighting; they will give us a gallop all right. There was one of their officers with me at Langi Tal, a subaltern; he came as a spectator searching for adventure." "What happened to him?" "Well, you know, we pursued the enemy all the way to the hills and played the devil with them. As we were galloping along, he saw a lot making off towards a wood, and wanted to cut them off. I said there wasn't time; he laid me six to four there was, so I sent a troop,--I was in command of the squadron that day--you know. He went with them and showed them the way straight enough,--but I bore you?" "On the contrary, I am greatly interested; what then?" "He was wrong; the enemy got to the wood first and picked him off in the open. Our fellows brought him back, shot through the big artery of the leg; that doesn't take long, you know. All he said was: 'Well, you've won, but how the deuce you'll get paid, I can't think. Ask my brother,--Royal Lancers.'" "And then?" asked Savrola. "Well, I couldn't find the artery to compress it, and none of the doctors were about. He died,--a gallant fellow!" The Subaltern paused, rather ashamed at having talked so much about his military adventures. Savrola felt as if he had looked into a new world, a world of ardent, reckless, warlike youth. He was himself young enough to feel a certain jealousy. This boy had seen what he had not; he possessed an experience which taught him lessons Savrola had never learned. Their lives had been different; but one day perhaps he would open this strange book of war, and by the vivid light of personal danger read the lessons it contained. Meanwhile the dances had succeeded each other and the night was passing. The King of Ethiopia, horrified at the low dresses of the unveiled women and dreading the prospect of eating with odious white people, had taken his departure. The President, approaching Savrola, invited him to take his wife down to supper; a procession was formed; he offered Lucile his arm and they descended the stairs. The supper was excellent: the champagne was dry and the quails fat. A profusion of rare and beautiful orchids covered the table; Savrola's surroundings were agreeable, and he sat next the most beautiful woman in Laurania, who, though he did not know it, was exerting herself to captivate him. At first they talked amusing frivolities. The President, whose manners were refined, showed himself a pleasant companion and an accomplished talker. Savrola, who delighted in sparkling conversation, found it difficult to keep to the part of a purely official visitor which he had determined to observe. The influence of wit, wine, and beauty were combined to break his reserve; before he knew it, he had joined in a discussion, one of those half cynical, half serious discussions which are characteristic of an age which inquires because it doubts, and doubts the more because it has inquired. The Russian Ambassador had said that he worshipped beauty, and had told his partner, the youthful Countess of Ferrol, that he regarded taking her into dinner as a religious observance. "I suppose that means you are bored," she replied. "By no means; in my religion the ceremonies are never dull; that is one of the principal advantages I claim for it." "There are few others," said Molara; "you devote yourself to an idol of your own creation. If you worship beauty, your goddess stands on no surer pedestal than human caprice. Is it not so, Princess?" The Princess of Tarentum, who was on the President's right, replied that even that foundation was more secure than that on which many beliefs repose. "You mean that in your own case human caprice has been sufficiently constant? I can well believe it." "No," she said; "I only mean that the love of beauty is common to all human beings." "To all living things," corrected Savrola. "It is the love of the plant that produces the flower." "Ah," said the President, "but, though the love of beauty may be constant, beauty itself may change. Look how everything changes: the beauty of one age is not the beauty of the next; what is admired in Africa is hideous in Europe. It is all a matter of opinion, local opinion. Your goddess, Monsieur, has as many shapes as Proteus." "I like change," said the Ambassador. "I regard variability of form as a decided advantage in a goddess. I do not care how many shapes I look at, so long as all are beautiful." "But," interposed Lucile, "you make no distinction between what is beautiful and what we think is beautiful." "There is none," said the President. "In Her Excellency's case there would be none," interposed the Ambassador politely. "What is beauty," said Molara, "but what we choose to admire?" "Do we choose? Have we the power?" asked Savrola. "Certainly," answered the President; "and every year we alter our decisions; every year the fashion changes. Ask the ladies. Look at the fashions of thirty years ago; they were thought becoming then. Observe the different styles of painting that have succeeded each other, or of poetry, or of music. Besides, Monsieur de Stranoff's goddess, though beautiful to him, might not be so to another." "I regard that also as a real advantage; you make me more enamoured with my religion each moment. I do not worship my ideals for the _reclamé_," said the Ambassador with a smile. "You look at the question from a material point of view." "Material rather than moral," said Lady Ferrol. "But in the spirit-worship of my goddess the immorality is immaterial. Besides, if you say that our tastes are always changing, it seems to me that constancy is the essence of my religion." "That is a paradox which we shall make you explain," said Molara. "Well, you say I change each day, and my goddess changes too. To-day I admire one standard of beauty, to-morrow another, but when to-morrow comes I am no longer the same person. The molecular structure of my brain is altered; my ideas have changed; my old self has perished, loving its own ideal; the renovated _ego_ starts life with a new one. It is all a case of wedded till death." "You are not going to declare that constancy is a series of changes? You may as well assert that motion is a succession of halts." "I am true to the fancy of the hour." "You express my views in other words. Beauty depends on human caprice, and changes with the times." "Look at that statue," said Savrola suddenly, indicating a magnificent marble figure of Diana which stood in the middle of the room surrounded by ferns. "More than two thousand years have passed since men called that beautiful. Do we deny it now?" There was no answer and he continued: "That is true beauty of line and form, which is eternal. The other things you have mentioned, fashions, styles, fancies, are but the unsuccessful efforts we make to attain to it. Men call such efforts art. Art is to beauty what honour is to honesty, an unnatural allotropic form. Art and honour belong to gentlemen; beauty and honesty are good enough for men." There was a pause. It was impossible to mistake the democratic tone; his earnestness impressed them. Molara looked uneasy. The Ambassador came to the rescue. "Well, I shall continue to worship the goddess of beauty, whether she be constant or variable"--he looked at the Countess; "and to show my devotion I shall offer up a waltz in that sacred fane, the ball-room." He pushed his chair back, and, stooping, picked up his partner's glove, which had fallen to the floor. Everyone rose, and the party separated. As Savrola walked back to the hall with Lucile, they passed an open doorway leading to the garden. A multitude of fairy lights marked out the flower-beds or hung in festoons from the trees. The paths were carpeted with red cloth; a cool breeze fanned their faces. Lucile paused. "It is a lovely night." The invitation was plain. She had wanted to speak to him, then, after all. How right he was to come,--on constitutional grounds. "Shall we go out?" he said. She consented, and they stepped on to the terrace. CHAPTER VIII. "IN THE STARLIGHT." The night was very still. The soft breeze was not strong enough to stir even the slender palms which rose on all sides, and whose outlines, above the surrounding foliage, framed the starlit sky. The palace stood on high ground, and the garden sloped on the western side towards the sea. At the end of the terrace was a stone seat. "Let us sit here," said Lucile. They sat down. The dreamy music of a waltz floated down as a distant accompaniment to their thoughts. The windows of the palace blazed with light and suggested glitter, glare, and heat; in the garden all was quiet and cool. "Why do you sneer at honour?" asked Lucile, thinking of the interrupted conversation. "Because it has no true foundation, no ultra-human sanction. Its codes are constantly changing with times and places. At one time it is thought more honourable to kill the man you have wronged than to make amends; at another it is more important to pay a bookmaker than a butcher. Like art it changes with human caprice, and like art it comes from opulence and luxury." "But why do you claim a higher origin for beauty and honesty?" "Because, wherever I have looked, I see that all things are perpetually referred to an eternal standard of fitness, and that right triumphs over wrong, truth over falsehood, beauty over ugliness. _Fitness_ is the general expression! Judged by this standard art and honour have little value." "But are these things so?" she asked wonderingly. "Surely there are many exceptions?" "Nature never considers the individual; she only looks at the average fitness of the species. Consider the statistics of mortality. How exact they are: they give to a month the expectation of life to men; and yet they tell a man nothing. We cannot say that a good man will always overcome a knave; but the evolutionist will not hesitate to affirm that the nation with the highest ideals would succeed." "Unless," said Lucile, "some other nation with lower ideals, but stronger arms, intervenes." "Well, even then might is a form of fitness; I think a low form, but still physical force contains the elements of human progress. This is only the instance; we must enlarge our view. Nature does not consider the individual species. All we will now assert is that organisms imbued with moral fitness would ultimately rise above those whose virtue is physical. How many times has civilisation, by which I mean a state of society where moral force begins to escape from the tyranny of physical forces, climbed the ladder of Progress and been dragged down? Perhaps many hundred times in this world alone. But the motive power, the upward tendency, was constant. Evolution does not say 'always,' but 'ultimately.' Well, ultimately civilisation has climbed up beyond the reach of barbarism. The higher ideals have reached the surface by superior buoyancy." "Why do you assume that this triumph is permanent? How do you know that it will not be reversed, as all others have been?" "Because we have got might on our side, as well as moral ascendancy." "Perhaps the Romans in the summit of their power thought that too?" "Very likely, but without reason. They had only their swords to fall back upon as an ultimate appeal; and when they became effete they could no longer wield them." "And modern civilisation?" "Ah, we have other weapons. When we have degenerated, as we must eventually degenerate, when we have lost our intrinsic superiority, and other races, according to the natural law, advance to take our place, we shall fall back upon these weapons. Our morals will be gone, but our Maxims will remain. The effete and trembling European will sweep from the earth by scientific machinery the valiant savages who assail him." "Is that the triumph of moral superiority?" "At first it would be, for the virtues of civilisation are of a higher type than those of barbarism. Kindness is better than courage, and charity more than strength. But ultimately the dominant race will degenerate, and as there will be none to take its place, the degeneration must continue. It is the old struggle between vitality and decay, between energy and indolence; a struggle that always ends in silence. After all, we could not expect human developement to be constant. It is only a question of time before the planet becomes unfitted to support life on its surface." "But you said that fitness must ultimately triumph." "Over relative unfitness, yes. But decay will involve all, victors and vanquished. The fire of life will die out, the spirit of vitality become extinct." "In this world perhaps." "In every world. All the universe is cooling--dying, that is,--and as it cools, life for a spell becomes possible on the surface of its spheres, and plays strange antics. And then the end comes; the universe dies and is sepulchred in the cold darkness of ultimate negation." "To what purpose then are all our efforts?" "God knows," said Savrola cynically; "but I can imagine that the drama would not be an uninteresting one to watch." "And yet you believe in an ultra-human foundation, an eternal ideal for such things as beauty and virtue." "I believe that the superiority of fitness over relative unfitness is one of the great laws of matter. I include all kinds of fitness,--moral, physical, mathematical." "Mathematical!" "Certainly; words only exist by conforming to correct mathematical principles. That is one of the great proofs we have that mathematics have been discovered, not invented. The planets observe a regular progression in their distances from the sun. Evolution suggests that those that did not observe such principles were destroyed by collisions and amalgamated with others. It is a universal survival of the fittest." She was silent. He continued: "Now let us say that in the beginning there existed two factors, matter animated by the will to live, and the eternal ideal; the great author and the great critic. It is to the interplay and counter-action of these two that all developement, that all forms of life are due. The more the expression of the will to live approximates to the eternal standard of fitness, the better it succeeds." "I would add a third," she said; "a great Being to instil into all forms of life the desire to attain to the ideal; to teach them in what ways they may succeed." "It is pleasant," he replied, "to think that such a Being exists to approve our victories, to cheer our struggles, and to light our way; but it is not scientifically or logically necessary to assume one after the two factors I have spoken of are once at work." "Surely the knowledge that such an ultra-human ideal existed must have been given from without." "No; that instinct which we call conscience was derived as all other knowledge from experience." "How could it be?" "I think of it in this way. When the human race was emerging from the darkness of its origin and half animal, half human creatures trod the earth, there was no idea of justice, honesty, or virtue, only the motive power which we may call the 'will to live.' Then perhaps it was a minor peculiarity of some of these early ancestors of man to combine in twos and threes for their mutual protection. The first alliance was made; the combinations prospered where the isolated individuals failed. The faculty of combination appeared to be an element of fitness. By natural selection only the combinations survived. Thus man became a social animal. Gradually the little societies became larger ones. From families to tribes, and from tribes to nations the species advanced, always finding that the better they combined, the better they succeeded. Now on what did this system of alliance depend? It depended on the members keeping faith with each other, on the practice of honesty, justice, and the rest of the virtues. Only those beings in whom such faculties were present were able to combine, and thus only the relatively honest men were preserved. The process repeated itself countless times during untold ages. At every step the race advanced, and at every step the realisation of the cause increased. Honesty and justice are bound up in our compositions and form an inseparable part of our natures. It is only with difficulty that we repress such awkward inclinations." "You do not then believe in God?" "I never said that," said Savrola. "I am only discussing the question of our existence from one standpoint, that of reason. There are many who think that reason and faith, science and religion, must be everlastingly separated, and that if one be admitted the other must be denied. Perhaps it is because we see so short a span, that we think that their lines are parallel and never touch each other. I always cherish the hope that somewhere in the perspective of the future there may be a vanishing point where all lines of human aspiration will ultimately meet." "And you believe all this that you have said?" "No," he answered, "there is no faith in disbelief, whatever the poets have said. Before we can solve the problems of existence we must establish the fact that we exist at all. It is a strange riddle, is it not?" "We shall learn the answer when we die." "If I thought that," said Savrola, "I should kill myself to-night out of irresistible curiosity." He paused, and looked up at the stars, which shone so brightly overhead. She followed his gaze. "You like the stars?" she asked. "I love them," he replied; "they are very beautiful." "Perhaps your fate is written there." "I have always admired the audacity of man in thinking that a Supreme Power should placard the skies with the details of his squalid future, and that his marriage, his misfortunes, and his crimes should be written in letters of suns on the background of limitless space. We are consequential atoms." "You think we are of no importance?" "Life is very cheap. Nature has no exaggerated idea of its value. I realise my own insignificance, but I am a philosophic microbe, and it rather adds to my amusement than otherwise. Insignificant or not, I like living, it is good to think of the future." "Ah," said Lucile impetuously, "whither are you hurrying us in the future,--to revolution?" "Perhaps," said Savrola calmly. "You are prepared to plunge the country in a civil war?" "Well, I hope it will not come to that extreme. Probably there will be some street-fighting and some people will be killed, but----" "But why should you drive them like this?" "I discharge a duty to the human species in breaking down a military despotism. I do not like to see a Government supported only by bayonets; it is an anachronism." "The Government is just and firm; it maintains law and order. Why should you assail it merely because it does not harmonise with your theories?" "My theories!" said Savrola. "Is that the name you give to the lines of soldiers with loaded rifles that guard this palace, or to the Lancers I saw spearing the people in the square a week ago?" His voice had grown strangely vehement and his manner thrilled her. "You will ruin us," she said weakly. "No," he replied with his grand air, "you can never be ruined. Your brilliancy and beauty will always make you the luckiest of women, and your husband the luckiest of men." His great soul was above the suspicion of presumption. She looked up at him, smiled quickly, and impulsively held out her hand. "We are on opposite sides, but we will fight under the rules of war. I hope we shall remain friends even though----" "We are officially enemies," said Savrola, completing the sentence, and taking her hand in his he bowed and kissed it. After that they were both very silent, and walking along the terrace re-entered the palace. Most of the guests had already gone, and Savrola did not ascend the stairs, but passing through the swing-doors took his departure. Lucile walked up to the ball-room in which a few youthful and indefatigable couples were still circling. Molara met her. "My dear," he said, "where have you been all this time?" "In the garden," she replied. "With Savrola?" "Yes." The President repressed a feeling of satisfaction. "Did he tell you anything?" he asked. "Nothing," she answered, remembering for the first time the object with which she had sought the interview; "I must see him again." "You will continue to try and find out his political intentions?" inquired Molara anxiously. "I shall see him again," she replied. "I trust to your wit," said the President; "you can do it, if anyone can, my dearest." The last dance came to an end and the last guest departed. Very weary and thoughtful Lucile retired to her room. Her conversation with Savrola filled her mind; his earnestness, his enthusiasm, his hopes, his beliefs, or, rather, his disbeliefs, all passed again in review before her. What a great man he was! Was it wonderful the people followed him? She would like to hear him speak to-morrow. Her maid came in to assist her to undress. She had looked from an upper balcony and had seen Savrola. "Was that," she asked her mistress curiously, "the great Agitator?" Her brother was going to hear him make his speech to-morrow. "Is he going to make a speech to-morrow?" asked Lucile. "So my brother says," said the maid; "he says that he is going to give them such a dressing down they will never forget it." The maid paid great attention to her brother's words. There was much sympathy between them; in fact she only called him her brother because it sounded better. Lucile took up the evening paper which lay on the bed. There on the first page was the announcement, the great meeting would take place at the City-Hall at eight the next evening. She dismissed the maid and walked to the window. The silent city lay before her; to-morrow the man she had talked with would convulse that city with excitement. She would go and hear him; women went to these meetings; why should she not go, closely veiled? After all it would enable her to learn something of his character and she could thus better assist her husband. With this reflection, which was extremely comforting, she went to bed. The President was going up-stairs, when Miguel met him. "More business?" he asked wearily. "No," said the Secretary; "things are going on very well." Molara looked at him with quick annoyance; but Miguel's face remained impassive, so he simply replied, "I am glad of that," and passed on. CHAPTER IX. THE ADMIRAL. The disapproval which Moret had expressed at Savrola's determination to go to the State Ball was amply justified by the result. Every paper, except those actually controlled by the party organisation, commented severely or contemptuously on his action. THE HOUR alluded to the groans with which the crowd had received him, as marking the decline of his influence with the masses and the break-up of the Revolutionary party. It also reminded its readers that social distinction was always the highest ambition of the Demagogue, and declared that, by accepting the President's invitation, Savrola had revealed "his sordid personal aims." The other Government organs expressed a similar opinion in an even more offensive manner. "These agitators," said THE COURTIER, "have at all times in the history of the world hankered after titles and honours, and the prospect of mixing with persons of rank and fashion has once again proved irresistible to an austere and unbending son of the people." This superior vulgarity, though more unpleasant, was less dangerous than the grave and serious warnings and protests which the Democratic journals contained. THE RISING TIDE said plainly that, if this sort of thing continued, the Popular party would have to find another leader, "One who did not cringe to power nor seek to ingratiate himself with fashion." Savrola read these criticisms with disdain. He had recognised the fact that such things would be said, and had deliberately exposed himself to them. He knew he had been unwise to go: he had known that from the first; and yet somehow he did not regret his mistake. After all, why should his party dictate to him how he should rule his private life? He would never resign his right to go where he pleased. In this case he had followed his own inclination, and the odium which had been cast upon him was the price he was prepared to pay. When he thought of his conversation in the garden, he did not feel that he had made a bad bargain. The damage however must be repaired. He looked over the notes of his speech again, polished his sentences, considered his points, collected his arguments, and made some additions which he thought appropriate to the altered state of public feeling. In this occupation the morning passed. Moret came in to luncheon. He refrained from actually saying "I told you so," but his looks showed that he felt his judgment was for the future established on unshakable foundations. His was a character easily elated or depressed. Now he was gloomy and despondent, regarding the cause as already lost. Only a forlorn hope remained; Savrola might express his regret at the meeting, and appeal to the people to remember his former services. He suggested this to his leader, who laughed merrily at the idea. "My dear Louis," he said, "I shall do nothing of the sort. I will never resign my own independence; I shall always go where I like and do what I like, and if they are not pleased, they can find someone else to discharge their public business." Moret shuddered. Savrola continued: "I shall not actually tell them so, but my manner will show them that I fear their reproaches as little as Molara's enmity." "Perhaps they will not listen; I hear reports that there will be some hostility." "Oh, I shall make them listen. There may be some howling at first, but they will change their note before I have gone very far." His confidence was contagious. Moret's spirits revived under its influence and that of a bottle of excellent claret. Like Napoleon the Third, he felt that all might yet be regained. Meanwhile the President was extremely well satisfied with the first result of his schemes. He had not foreseen that Savrola's acceptance of the invitation to the ball would involve him in so much unpopularity, and, although it was a poor compliment to himself, it was an unexpected advantage. Besides, as Miguel had remarked, everything was going on very well in other directions. He had hardened his heart and dismissed his scruples; stern, bitter necessity had thrust him on an unpleasant course, but now that he had started he was determined to go on. In the meantime affairs pressed on all sides. The British Government were displaying an attitude of resolution on the African Question. His violent despatch had not settled the matter, as he had hoped and even anticipated; it had become necessary to supplement his words by actions. The African port must not be left undefended; the fleet must go there at once. It was not a moment when he could well afford to be without the five ships of war whose presence in the harbour overawed many of the discontented; but he felt that a vigorous foreign policy would be popular, or at least sufficiently interesting to keep the public mind from domestic agitation. He also knew that a disaster abroad would precipitate a revolution at home. It was necessary to be very careful. He recognised the power and resources of Great Britain; he had no illusions on the subject of the comparative weakness of Laurania. In that indeed lay their only strength. The British Government would do all in their power to avoid fighting (bullying, polite Europe would call it) so small a State. It was a game of bluff; the further he could go, the better for the situation at home, but one step too far meant ruin. It was a delicate game to play, and it taxed to the utmost the energies and talents of a strong, able man. "The Admiral is here, Your Excellency," said Miguel entering the room, followed immediately by a short, red-faced man in naval uniform. "Good-morning, my dear de Mello," cried the President, rising and shaking the newcomer's hand with great cordiality. "I have got some sailing-orders for you at last." "Well," said de Mello bluntly, "I am sick of lying up waiting for your agitators to rise." "There is work of a difficult and exciting nature before you. Where's that translation of the cipher telegram, Miguel? Ah, thank you,--look here, Admiral." The sailor read the paper, and whistled significantly. "It may go further than you wish, Molara, this time," he said unceremoniously. "I shall place the matter in your hands; you will be able to save this situation, as you have saved so many others." "Where did this come from?" asked de Mello. "From French sources." "She is a powerful ship, the _Aggressor_,--latest design, newest guns, in fact all the modern improvements; I have nothing that she could not sink in ten minutes; besides, there are some gunboats there as well." "I know the situation is difficult," said the President; "that is why I am entrusting it to you! Now listen; whatever happens I don't want fighting; that would only end in disaster; and you know what disaster would mean here. You must argue and parley and protest on every point, and cause as much delay as possible. Consult me by telegraph on every occasion, and try to make friends with the English admiral; that is half the battle. If it ever comes to a question of bombardment, we shall give in and protest again. I will have your instructions forwarded to you in writing this evening. You had better steam to-night. You understand the game?" "Yes," said de Mello, "I have played it before." He shook hands and walked to the door. The President accompanied him. "It is possible," he said earnestly, "that I shall want you back here before you have gone very far; there are many signs of trouble in the city, and after all Strelitz is still on the frontier waiting for a chance. If I send for you, you will come?" There was almost an appealing note in his tone. "Come?" said the Admiral. "Of course I will come,--full steam ahead. I have had my big gun trained on the Parliament House for the last month, and I mean to let it off one day. Oh, you can trust the fleet." "Thank God I never doubted that," said the President with some emotion, and shaking de Mello's hand warmly, he returned to his writing-table. He felt that the Admiral was thoroughly loyal to the Government. These men who live their lives in great machines, become involved in the mechanism themselves. De Mello had lived on warships all his days, and neither knew nor cared for anything else. Landsmen and civilians he despised with a supreme professional contempt. Such parts of the world as bordered on the sea, he regarded as possible targets of different types; for the rest he cared nothing. With equal interest he would burst his shells on patriots struggling to be free or foreign enemies, on a hostile fort or on his native town. As long as the authority to fire reached him through the proper channel, he was content; after that he regarded the question from a purely technical standpoint. The afternoon was far advanced before the President finished the varied labours of his office. "There is a great meeting to-night, is there not?" he asked Miguel. "Yes," said the Secretary, "in the City-Hall; Savrola is going to speak." "Have you arranged about an opposition?" "Some of the secret police are going to make a little, I believe; Colonel Sorrento has arranged that. But I fancy Señor Savrola's party are rather displeased with him, as it is." "Ah," said Molara, "I know his powers; he will tear their very hearts out with his words. He is a terrible force; we must take every precaution. I suppose the troops have been ordered to be under arms? There is nothing he cannot do with a crowd,--curse him!" "The Colonel was here this morning; he told me he was making arrangements." "It is good," said the President; "he knows his own safety is involved. Where do I dine to-night?" "With Señor Louvet, at the Home Office, an official dinner." "How detestable! Still he has a plain cook and he will be worth watching to-night. He gets in such a state of terror when Savrola holds forth that he is ridiculous. I hate cowards, but they make the world the merrier." He bade the Secretary good-night and left the room. Outside he met Lucile. "Dearest," he said, "I am dining out to-night, an official dinner at Louvet's. It is a nuisance, but I must go. Perhaps I shall not be back till late. I am sorry to leave you like this, but in these busy days I can hardly call my soul my own." "Never mind, Antonio," she replied; "I know how you are pressed with work. What has happened about the English affair?" "I don't like the situation at all," said Molara. "They have a Jingo Government in power and have sent ships as an answer to our note. It is most unfortunate. Now I have to send the fleet away,--at such a moment." He groaned moodily. "I told Sir Richard that we had to think of the situation here, and that the despatch was meant for domestic purposes," said Lucile. "I think," said the President, "that the English Government also have to keep the electorate amused. It is a Conservative ministry; they must keep things going abroad to divert the public mind from advanced legislation. What, more still, Miguel?" "Yes, Sir; this bag has just arrived, with several important despatches which require your immediate attention." The President looked for a moment as if he would like to tell Miguel to take himself and his despatches to the infernal regions; but he repressed the inclination. "Good, I will come. I shall see you at breakfast to-morrow, my dear, till then, farewell," and giving her a weary smile he walked off. Thus it is that great men enjoy the power they risk their lives to gain and often meet their deaths to hold. Lucile was left alone, not for the first time when she had wanted companionship and sympathy. She was conscious of an unsatisfactory sensation with regard to existence generally. It was one of those moments when the prizes and penalties of life seem equally stale and futile. She sought refuge in excitement. The project she had conceived the night before began to take actual shape in her mind; yes, she would hear him speak. Going to her room she rang the bell. The maid came quickly. "What time is the meeting to-night?" "At eight, Your Excellency," said the girl. "You have a ticket for it?" "Yes, my brother----" "Well, give it to me; I want to hear this man speak. He will attack the Government; I must be there to report to the President." The maid looked astonished, but gave up the ticket meekly. For six years she had been Lucile's maid, and was devoted to her young and beautiful mistress. "What will Your Excellency wear?" was her only remark. "Something dark, with a thick veil," said Lucile. "Don't speak of this to anyone." "Oh no, Your Ex----" "Not even to your brother." "Oh, no, Your Excellency." "Say I have a headache and have gone to bed. You must go to your room yourself." The maid hurried off to get the dress and bonnet. Lucile felt full of the nervous excitement her resolve had raised. It was an adventure, it would be an experience, more than that, she would see him. The crowd,--when she thought of them she felt a little frightened, but then she remembered that women frequently went to these demonstrations, and there would be plenty of police to keep order. She dressed herself hastily in the clothes that the maid brought, and descending the stairs, entered the garden. It was already dusk, but Lucile had no difficulty in finding her way to a small private gate in the wall, which her key unlocked. She stepped into the street. All was very quiet. The gas lamps flared in a long double row till they almost met in the distant perspective. A few people were hurrying in the direction of the City-Hall. She followed them. CHAPTER X. THE WAND OF THE MAGICIAN. The City-Hall was a gigantic meeting-house in which for many years all the public discussions of the Lauranian people had taken place. Its stone façade was showy and pretentious, but the building itself consisted merely of the great hall and of a few smaller rooms and offices. The hall was capable of holding nearly seven thousand people; with its white-washed roof sustained by iron girders, and well lit with gas, it served its purpose well without any affectation of display. Lucile was caught in the stream of those who were entering and carried inside. She had expected to find a seat, but, in view of a great crowd, all the chairs had been removed from the body of the hall, and only standing room remained. In this solid mass of humanity she found herself an atom. To move was difficult; to go back almost impossible. It was a striking scene. The hall, which was hung with flags, was crowded to overflowing; a long gallery, which ran round three sides, was densely packed to the very ceiling; the flaring gas-jets threw their yellow light on thousands of faces. The large majority of the audience were men, but Lucile noticed with relief that there were several women present. A platform at the far end of the hall displayed the customary table and the inevitable glass of water. In front of the platform were two long rows of reporters, getting their pads and pencils ready,--a kind of orchestra. Behind and above were again rows and rows of chairs filled by the numerous delegates, officials, and secretaries of the various political clubs and organisations, each distinguished by the badge and sash of his society. Moret had exerted himself to whip up the utmost power of the Party, and had certainly succeeded in organising the greatest demonstration Laurania had ever seen. All the political forces arrayed against the Government were represented. There was a loud hum of conversation, broken at intervals by cheers and the choruses of patriotic songs. Suddenly the clock in the tower of the building chimed the hour. At the same instant, from a doorway on the right of the platform, Savrola entered, followed by Godoy, Moret, Renos, and several other prominent leaders of the movement. He made his way along the row of chairs, until he reached that on the right of the table, sat down and looked quietly about him. There was a storm of discordant shouting, no two men seeming to hold the same opinion. At one moment it sounded as if all were cheering; at another hoots and groans obtained the supremacy. The meeting in fact was about equally divided. The extreme sections of the Reform' Party, regarding Savrola's attendance at the ball as an action of the grossest treachery, howled with fury at him; the more moderate cheered him as the safest man to cling to in times of civil disturbance. The delegates and regular officials, who occupied the chairs on the platform, were silent and sullen, like men who await an explanation without belief in its sufficiency. At length the shouting ceased. Godoy, who was in the chair, rose and made a short speech, in which he studiously avoided any contentious allusion to Savrola, confining himself only to the progress of the movement. He spoke well and clearly, but nobody wanted to hear him, and all were relieved when he concluded by calling upon "our leader," Savrola, to address the meeting. Savrola, who had been talking unconcernedly with one of the delegates on his right, turned round quickly towards the audience, and rose. As he did so, a man in a blue suit, one of a little group similarly clad, shouted out, "Traitor and toady!" Hundreds of voices took up the cry; there was an outburst of hooting and groaning; others cheered half-heartedly. It was an unpromising reception. Moret looked around him in blank despair. In spite of the heat and the pressure, Lucile could not take her eyes off Savrola. She could see that he was quivering with suppressed excitement. His composure had merely been assumed; crowds stirred his blood, and when he rose he could wear his mask no longer. He looked almost terrible, as he waited there, facing the outburst with defiance written in every line of his pale, earnest face and resolute figure. Then he began to speak, but his words could not at first be distinguished through the persistent shouts of the man in blue and his friends. At length, after five minutes of intense disorder, the curiosity of the audience triumphed over all other emotions, and they generally sank into silence, to hear what their leader had to say. Again Savrola began. Though he spoke very quietly and slowly, his words reached the furthest ends of the hall. He showed, or perhaps he feigned, some nervousness at first, and here and there in his sentences he paused as if searching for a word. He was surprised, he said, at his reception. He had not expected, now when the final result was so nearly attained, that the people of Laurania would change their minds. The man in blue began to howl his odious cry. There was another outbreak of hooting; but the majority of the audience were now anxious to listen, and silence was soon restored. Savrola continued. He briefly reviewed the events of the last year: the struggle they had had to form a party at all; the fierce opposition they had encountered and sustained; the success that had attended their threat of taking arms; the President's promise of a free Parliament; the trick that had been played on them; the firing of the soldiery on the crowd. His earnest, thoughtful words evoked a hum of approval. These were events in which the audience had participated, and they liked having them recalled to their memories. Then he went on to speak of the Deputation and of the contempt with which the President had thought fit to treat the accredited representatives of the citizens. "Traitor and toady!" shouted the man in blue loudly; but there was no response. "And," said Savrola, "I will invite your attention to this further matter. It has not been sufficient to strangle the Press, to shoot down the people, and to subvert the Constitution, but even when we are assembled here in accordance with our unquestioned right to discuss matters of State and decide upon our public policies, our deliberations are to be interrupted by the paid agents of the Government,"--he looked towards the man in blue, and there was an angry hum--"who insult by their abusive cries not only myself, a free Lauranian, but you also, the assembled citizens who have invited me to place my views before you." Here the audience broke out into indignant applause and agreement; cries of "Shame!" were heard, and fierce looks turned in the direction of the interrupters, who had, however, dispersed themselves unobtrusively among the crowd. "In spite of such tactics," Savrola continued, "and in the face of all opposition, whether by bribes or bullets, whether by hired bravos or a merciless and mercenary soldiery, the great cause we are here to support has gone on, is going on, and is going to go on, until at length our ancient liberties are regained, and those who have robbed us of them punished." Loud cheers rose from all parts of the hall. His voice was even and not loud, but his words conveyed an impression of dauntless resolution. And then, having got his audience in hand, he turned his powers of ridicule upon the President and his colleagues. Every point he made was received with cheers and laughter. He spoke of Louvet, of his courage, and of his trust in the people. Perhaps, he said, it was not inappropriate that the Ministry of the Interior should be filled by "a glutton," the Home Office by a "stay-at-home" who was afraid to go out among his countrymen at night. Louvet was indeed a good object for abuse; he was hated by the people, who despised his cowardice and had always jeered at him. Savrola continued. He described the President as clinging to office at whatever cost to himself or others. In order to draw the attention of the people from his tyrannical actions and despotic government at home, he had tried to involve them in complications abroad, and he had succeeded, more completely than he had bargained for. They were embroiled now in a dispute with a great Power, a dispute from which they had nothing to gain and everything to lose. Their fleets and armies must be despatched, to the cost of the State; their possessions were endangered; perhaps the lives of their soldiers and sailors would be sacrificed. And all for what? In order that Antonio Molara might do as he had declared he would, and die at the head of the State. It was a bad joke. But he should be warned; many a true word was spoken in jest. Again there was a fierce hum. Lucile listened spell-bound. When he had risen, amid the groans and hisses of that great crowd, she had sympathised with him, had feared even for his life, had wondered at the strange courage which made him attempt the seemingly impossible task of convincing such an audience. As he had progressed and had begun to gain power and approval, she had rejoiced; every cheer had given her pleasure. She had silently joined in the indignation which the crowd had expressed against Sorrento's police-agents. Now he was attacking her husband; and yet she hardly seemed to feel an emotion of antagonism. He left the subject of the Ministers with contemptuous scorn, amid the earnest assent of the audience and on the full tide of public opinion. They must now, he said, treat of higher matters. He invited them to consider the ideals at which they aimed. Having roused their tempers, he withheld from them the outburst of fury and enthusiasm they desired. As he spoke of the hopes of happiness to which even the most miserable of human beings had a right, silence reigned throughout the hall, broken only by that grave melodious voice which appealed to everyone. For more than three quarters of an hour he discussed social and financial reforms. Sound practical common sense was expressed with many a happy instance, many a witty analogy, many a lofty and luminous thought. "When I look at this beautiful country that is ours and was our fathers before us, at its blue seas and snow-capped mountains, at its comfortable hamlets and wealthy cities, at its silver streams and golden corn-fields, I marvel at the irony of fate which has struck across so fair a prospect the dark shadow of a military despotism." The sound of momentous resolution rose again from the crowded hall. He had held their enthusiasm back for an hour by the clock. The steam had been rising all this time. All were searching in their minds for something to relieve their feelings, to give expression to the individual determination each man had made. There was only one mind throughout the hall. His passions, his emotions, his very soul appeared to be communicated to the seven thousand people who heard his words; and they mutually inspired each other. Then at last he let them go. For the first time he raised his voice, and in a resonant, powerful, penetrating tone which thrilled the listeners, began the peroration of his speech. The effect of his change of manner was electrical. Each short sentence was followed by wild cheering. The excitement of the audience became indescribable. Everyone was carried away by it. Lucile was borne along, unresisting, by that strong torrent of enthusiasm; her interests, her objects, her ambitions, her husband, all were forgotten. His sentences grew longer, more rolling and sonorous. At length he reached the last of those cumulative periods which pile argument on argument as Pelion on Ossa. All pointed to an inevitable conclusion. The people saw it coming and when the last words fell, they were greeted with thunders of assent. Then he sat down, drank some water, and pressed his hands to his head. The strain had been terrific. He was convulsed by his own emotions; every pulse in his body was throbbing, every nerve quivering; he streamed with perspiration and almost gasped for breath. For five minutes everyone shouted wildly; the delegates on the platform mounted their chairs and waved their arms. At his suggestion the great crowd would have sallied into the streets and marched on the palace; and it would have taken many bullets from the soldiers that Sorrento had so carefully posted to bring them back to the realisation of the squalid materialities of life. The resolutions which Moret and Godoy proposed were carried by acclamation. Savrola turned to the former. "Well, Louis, I was right. How did it sound? I liked the last words. It is the best speech I have ever made." Moret looked at him as at a god. "Splendid!" he said. "You have saved everything." And now the meeting began to break up. Savrola walked to a side-door, and in a small waiting-room received the congratulations of all his principal supporters and friends. Lucile was hurried along in the press. Presently there was a block. Two men, of foreign aspect, stood in front of her, speaking in low tones. "Brave words, Karl," said one. "Ah," said the other, "we must have deeds. He is a good tool to work with at present; the time will come when we shall need something sharper." "He has great power." "Yes, but he is not of us. He has no sympathy with the cause. What does he care about a community of goods?" "For my part," said the first man with an ugly laugh, "I have always been more attracted by the idea of a community of wives." "Well, that too is part of the great scheme of society." "When you deal them out, Karl, put me down as part proprietor of the President's." He chuckled coarsely. Lucile shuddered. Here were the influences behind and beneath the great Democrat of which her husband had spoken. The human stream began to flow on again. Lucile was carried by a current down a side street which led to the doorway by which Savrola would leave the hall. A bright gas-lamp made everything plainly visible. At length he appeared at the top of the steps, at the foot of which his carriage had already drawn up to receive him. The narrow street was filled with the crowd; the pressure was severe. "Louis, come with me," said Savrola to Moret; "you can drop me and take the carriage on." Like many highly-wrought minds he yearned for sympathy and praise at such a moment; and he knew he would get them from Moret. The throng, on seeing him, surged forward. Lucile, carried off her feet, was pushed into a dark burly man in front of her. Chivalrous gallantry is not among the peculiar characteristics of excited democracy. Without looking round the man jobbed backwards with his elbow and struck her in the breast. The pain was intense; involuntarily she screamed. "Gentlemen," cried Savrola, "a woman has been hurt; I heard her voice. Give room there!" He ran down the steps. The crowd opened out. A dozen eager and officious hands were extended to assist Lucile, who was paralysed with terror. She would be recognised; the consequences were too awful to be thought of. "Bring her in here," said Savrola. "Moret, help me." He half carried, half supported her up the steps into the small waiting-room. Godoy, Renos, and half a dozen of the Democratic leaders, who had been discussing the speech, grouped themselves around her curiously. He placed her in a chair. "A glass of water," he said quickly. Somebody handed him one, and he turned to offer it to her. Lucile, incapable of speech or motion, saw no way of escape. He must recognise her. The ridicule, the taunts, the danger, all were plain to her. As she made a feeble effort with her hand to decline the water, Savrola looked hard at her through her thick veil. Suddenly he started, spilling the water he was holding out to her. He knew her then! Now it would come--a terrible exposure! "Why, Mirette," he cried, "my little niece! How could you come alone to such a crowded place at night? To hear my speech? Godoy, Renos, this is indeed a tribute! This means more to me than all the cheers of the people. Here is my sister's daughter who has risked the crowd to come and hear me speak. But your mother," he turned to Lucile, "should never have allowed you; this is no place for a girl alone. I must take you home. You are not hurt? If you had asked me, I could have ensured a seat for you out of the crowd. Is my carriage there? Good, we had better get home at once; your mother will be very anxious. Good-night, gentlemen. Come, my dear." He offered her his arm and led her down the steps. The people who filled the street, their upturned faces pale in the gas-light, cheered wildly. He put her into his carriage. "Drive on, coachman," he said, getting in himself. "Where to, Sir?" asked the man. Moret advanced to the carriage. "I will go on the box," he said. "I can take the carriage on after dropping you," and before Savrola could say a word he had climbed on to the seat beside the driver. "Where to, Sir?" repeated the coachman. "Home," said Savrola desperately. The carriage started, passed through the cheering crowds, and out into the less frequented parts of the city. CHAPTER XI. IN THE WATCHES OF THE NIGHT. Lucile lay back in the cushions of the brougham with a feeling of intense relief. He had saved her. An emotion of gratitude filled her mind, and on the impulse of the moment she took his hand and pressed it. It was the third time in their renewed acquaintance that their hands had met, and each time the significance had been different. Savrola smiled. "It was most imprudent of your Excellency to venture into a crowd like that. Luckily I thought of an expedient in time. I trust you were not hurt in the throng?" "No," said Lucile; "a man struck me with his elbow and I screamed. I should never have come." "It was dangerous." "I wanted to----" She paused. "To hear me speak," he added, finishing her sentence for her. "Yes; to see you use your power." "I am flattered by the interest you take in me." "Oh, it was on purely political grounds." There was the suspicion of a smile on her face. He looked at her quickly. What did she mean? Why should it be necessary to say so? Her mind had contemplated another reason, then. "I hope you were not bored," he said. "It is terrible to have power like that," she replied earnestly; and then after a pause, "Where are we going to?" "I would have driven you to the palace," said Savrola, "but our ingenuous young friend on the box has made it necessary that we should keep up this farce for a little longer. It will be necessary to get rid of him. For the present you had best remain my niece." She looked up at him with an amused smile, and then said seriously: "It was brilliant of you to have thought of it, and noble of you to have carried it out. I shall never forget it; you have done me a great service." "Here we are," said Savrola at length, as the brougham drew up at the entrance of his house. He opened the carriage-door; Moret jumped off the box and rang the bell. After a pause the old housekeeper opened the door. Savrola called to her. "Ah, Bettine, I am glad you are up. Here is my niece, who has been to the meeting to hear me speak and has been jostled by the crowd. I shall not let her go home alone to-night. Have you a bedroom ready?" "There is the spare room on the first floor," answered the old woman; "but I fear that would never do." "Why not?" asked Savrola quickly. "Because the sheets for the big bed are not aired, and since the chimney was swept there has been no fire there." "Oh, well, you must try and do what you can. Good-night, Moret. Will you send the carriage back as soon as you have done with it? I have some notes to send to THE RISING TIDE office about the articles for to-morrow morning. Don't forget,--as quickly as you can, for I am tired out." "Good-night," said Moret. "You have made the finest speech of your life. Nothing can stop us while we have you to lead the way." He got into the carriage and drove off. Savrola and Lucile ascended the stairs to the sitting-room, while the housekeeper bustled off to make preparations for the airing of sheets and pillow-cases. Lucile looked round the room with interest and curiosity. "I am in the heart of the enemy's camp now," she said. "You will be in many hearts during your life," said Savrola, "whether you remain a queen or not." "You are still determined to drive us out?" "You heard what I said to-night." "I ought to hate you," said Lucile; "and yet I don't feel that we are enemies." "We are on opposite sides," he replied. "Only politics come between us." "Politics and persons," he added significantly, using a hackneyed phrase. She looked at him with a startled glance. What did he mean? Had he read deeper into her heart than she herself had dared to look? "Where does that door lead to?" she asked irrelevantly. "That? It leads to the roof,--to my observatory." "Oh show it me," she cried. "Is it there you watch the stars?" "I often look at them. I love them; they are full of suggestions and ideas." He unlocked the door and led the way up the narrow winding stairs on to the platform. It was, as is usual in Laurania, a delicious night. Lucile walked to the parapet and looked over; all the lamps of the town twinkled beneath, and above were the stars. Suddenly, far out in the harbour, a broad white beam of light shot out; it was the search-light of a warship. For a moment it swept along the military mole and rested on the battery at the mouth of the channel. The fleet was leaving the port, and picking its way through the difficult passage. Savrola had been informed of the approaching departure of the admiral, and realised at once the meaning of what he saw. "That," he said, "may precipitate matters." "You mean that when the ships are gone you will no longer fear to rise?" "I do not fear; but it is better to await a good moment." "And that moment?" "Is perhaps imminent. I should like you to leave the capital. It will be no place for women in a few days. Your husband knows it; why has he not sent you away to the country?" "Because," she replied, "we shall suppress this revolt, and punish those who have caused it." "Have no illusions," said Savrola. "I do not miscalculate. The army cannot be trusted; the fleet is gone; the people are determined. It will not be safe for you to stay here." "I will not be driven out," she answered with energy; "nothing shall make me fly. I will perish with my husband." "Oh, we shall try to be much more prosaic than that," he said. "We shall offer a very handsome pension to the President, and he will retire with his beautiful wife to some gay and peaceful city, where he can enjoy life without depriving others of liberty." "You think you can do all this?" she cried. "Your power can rouse the multitude; but can you restrain them?" And she told him of the words she had heard in the crowd that night. "Are you not playing with mighty forces?" "Yes, I am," he said; "and that is why I have asked you to go away to the country for a few days, until things become settled one way or the other. It is possible that either I or your husband will go down. I shall of course try to save him, if we are successful; but, as you say, there are other forces which may be beyond control; and if he gets the upper hand----" "Well?" "I suppose I should be shot." "Fearful!" she said. "Why will you persist?" "Oh, it is only now, when the play is growing high, that I begin to appreciate the game. Besides, death is not very terrible." "Afterwards may be." "I do not think so. Life, to continue, must show a balance of happiness. Of one thing I feel sure; we may say of a future state,--'If any, then better.'" "You apply your knowledge of this world to all others." "Why not?" he said. "Why should not the same laws hold good all over the universe, and, if possible, beyond it? Other suns show by their spectra that they contain the same elements as ours." "You put your faith in the stars," she said doubtingly, "and think, though you will not admit it, they can tell you everything." "I never accused them of being interested in our concerns; but if they were, they might tell strange tales. Supposing they could read our hearts for instance?" She glanced up and met his eye. They looked at each other hard. She gasped; whatever the stars might know, they had read each other's secret. There was a noise of someone running up-stairs. It was the housekeeper. "The carriage has returned," said Savrola in a quiet voice. "It can now take you back to the palace." The old woman stepped out on to the roof, breathing hard from her climb. "I have aired the sheets," she said with exultation in her voice, "and the fire is burning brightly. There is some soup ready for the young lady, if she will come and take it, before it gets cold." The interruption was so commonplace that both Lucile and Savrola laughed. It was a happy escape from an awkward moment. "You always manage, Bettine," he said, "to make everyone comfortable; but after all the bedroom will not be needed. My niece is afraid lest her mother be alarmed at her absence, and I am going to send her back in the carriage so soon as it returns." The poor old soul looked terribly disappointed; the warm sheets, the cosy fire, the hot soup were comforts she loved to prepare for others, enjoying them, as it were, by proxy. She turned away and descended the narrow staircase mournfully, leaving them again alone. So they sat and talked, not as before, but with full knowledge of their sympathy, while the moon climbed higher in the sky and the soft breezes stirred the foliage of the palm-trees in the garden below. Neither thought much of the future, nor did they blame the coachman's delay. At length the silence of the night, and the train of their conversation were broken by the noise of wheels on the stony street. "At last," said Savrola without enthusiasm. Lucile rose and looked over the parapet. A carriage approached almost at a gallop. It stopped suddenly at the door, and a man jumped out in a hurry. The door-bell rang loudly. Savrola took both her hands. "We must part," he said; "when shall we meet again,--Lucile?" She made no answer, nor did the moonlight betray the expression of her features. Savrola led the way down the stairs. As he entered the sitting-room, the further door was opened hastily by a man who, seeing Savrola, stopped short, and respectfully took off his hat. It was Moret's servant. With considerable presence of mind Savrola shut the door behind him, leaving Lucile in the darkness of the staircase. She waited in astonishment; the door was thin. "My master, Sir," said a stranger's voice, "bade me bring you this with all speed and give it direct into your hand." There followed the tearing of paper, a pause, an exclamation, and then Savrola, in a voice steady with the steadiness which betrays intense emotion under control, replied: "Thank you very much; say I shall await them here. Don't take the carriage; go on foot,--stay, I will let you out myself." She heard the other door open and the sound of their footsteps going down-stairs; then she turned the handle and entered. Something had happened, something sudden, unexpected, momentous. His voice,--strange how well she was beginning to know it!--had told her that. An envelope lay on the floor; on the table,--the table where the cigarette-box and the revolver lay side by side,--was a paper, half curled up as if anxious to preserve its secret. Subtle, various, and complex are the springs of human action. She felt the paper touched her nearly; she knew it concerned him. Their interests were antagonistic; yet she did not know whether it was for his sake or her own that she was impelled to indulge a wild curiosity. She smoothed the paper out. It was brief and in a hurried hand, but to the point: _Code wire just received says, Strelitz crossed frontier this morning with two thousand men and is marching hither via Turga and Lorenzo. The hour has come. I have sent to Godoy and Renos and will bring them round at once. Yours through hell_, MORET. Lucile felt the blood run to her heart; already she imagined the sound of musketry. It was true the hour had come. The fatal paper fascinated her; she could not take her eyes from it. Suddenly the door opened and Savrola came in. The noise, her agitation, and above all the sense of detection wrung from her a low, short, startled scream. He grasped the situation immediately. "Bluebeard," he said ironically. "Treason," she retorted taking refuge in furious anger. "So you will rise and murder us in the night,--conspirator!" Savrola smiled suavely; his composure was again perfect. "I have sent the messenger away on foot, and the carriage is at your disposal. We have talked long; it is now three o'clock; your Excellency should not further delay your return to the palace. It would be most imprudent; besides, as you will realise, I expect visitors." His calmness maddened her. "Yes," she retorted; "the President will send you some,--police." "He will not know about the invasion yet." "I shall tell him," she replied. Savrola laughed softly. "Oh no," he said, "that would not be fair." "All's fair in love and war." "And this----?" "Is both," she said, and then burst into tears. After that they went down-stairs. Savrola helped her into the carriage. "Good-night," he said, though it was already morning, "and good-bye." But Lucile, not knowing what to say or think or do, continued to cry inconsolably and the carriage drove away. Savrola closed the door and returned to his room. He did not feel his secret was in any danger. CHAPTER XII. A COUNCIL OF WAR. Savrola had scarcely time to smoke a cigarette before the Revolutionary leaders began to arrive. Moret was the first; he rang the bell violently, stamping about on the doorstep till it was answered, ran upstairs three steps at a time, and burst impetuously into the room, aquiver with excitement. "Ah," he cried, "the hour has come,--not words but deeds now! We draw the sword in a good cause; for my part I shall fling away the scabbard; Fortune is on our side." "Yes," said Savrola; "have some whisky and soda-water,--on the sideboard there. It is a good drink to draw the sword on,--the best in fact." Moret somewhat abashed turned and walking to the table began opening a soda-water bottle. As he poured out the spirit the clinking of glass and bottle betrayed his agitation. Savrola laughed softly. Turning swiftly, his impetuous follower sought to hide his agitation by a fresh outburst. "I have told you throughout," he said, holding his glass on high, "that force was the only solution. It has come, as I predicted. I drink to it,--war, civil war, battle, murder, and sudden death,--by these means liberty will be regained!" "Wonderful soothing effect these cigarettes have. There's no opium in them either,--soft, fresh Egyptians. I get them every week from Cairo. A little, old man I met there three years ago makes them,--Abdullah Rachouan." He held out the box. Moret took one; the business of lighting it steadied him; he sat down and began to smoke furiously. Savrola watched him in dreamy calmness, looking often at the smoke-wreathes that rose about him. Presently he spoke. "So you are glad there is to be war and that people are to be killed?" "I am glad that this tyranny is to be ended." "Remember that we pay for every pleasure and every triumph we have in this world." "I will take my chance." "I trust, I would be glad if I could say with conviction, I pray, that the lot may not fall on you. But it is true nevertheless that we must pay, and for all the good things in life men pay in advance. The principles of sound finance apply." "How do you mean?" asked Moret. "Would you rise in the world? You must work while others amuse themselves. Are you desirous of a reputation for courage? You must risk your life. Would you be strong morally or physically? You must resist temptations. All this is paying in advance; that is prospective finance. Observe the other side of the picture; the bad things are paid for afterwards." "Not always." "Yes, as surely as the headache of Sunday morning follows the debauch of Saturday night, as an idle youth is requited by a barren age, as a gluttonous appetite promotes an ungainly paunch." "And you think I shall have to pay for this excitement and enthusiasm? You think I have paid nothing so far?" "You will have to take risks, that is paying. Fate will often throw double or quits. But on these hazards men should not embark with levity; the gentleman will always think of settling-day." Moret was silent. Brave and impetuous as he was, the conversation chilled him. His was not the courage of the Stoic; he had not schooled himself to contemplate the shock of dissolution. He fixed his thoughts on the struggles and hopes of the world, as one might look at the flowers and grasses that were growing on the edge of a precipice towards which he was being impelled. They remained for a few moments without speaking, till Godoy and Renos entered, having arrived simultaneously. Each man of the four had taken the news, which meant so much to them, according to their natures. Savrola had put on the armour of his philosophy, and gazed on the world as from a distance. Moret had been convulsed with excitement. The other two, neither composed nor elated by the proximity and the approach of danger, showed that they were not the men for stirring times. Savrola greeted them amiably, and all sat down. Renos was crushed. The heavy hammer of action had fallen on the delicate structures of precedent and technicality in which he had always trusted, and smashed them flat. Now that the crisis had arrived, the law, his shield and buckler, was first of all to be thrown away. "Why has he done this?" he asked. "What right had he to come without authorisation? He has committed us all. What can we do?" Godoy too was shocked and frightened. He was one of those men who fear danger, who shrink from it, but yet embark deliberately on courses which they know must lead to it. He had long foreseen the moment of revolt, but had persisted in going on. Now it was upon him, and he trembled; still, his dignity strengthened him. "What is to be done, Savrola?" he asked, turning instinctively to the greater soul and stronger mind. "Well," said the leader, "they had no business to come without my orders; they have, as Renos has observed, committed us, while our plans are in some respects incomplete. Strelitz has disobeyed me flatly; I will settle with him later. For the present, recriminations are futile; we have to deal with the situation. The President will know of the invasion in the morning; some of the troops here will, I take it, be ordered to strengthen the Government forces in the field. Perhaps the Guard will be sent. I think the others would refuse to march; they are thoroughly in sympathy with the Cause. If so we must strike, much as we have arranged. You, Moret, will call the people to arms. The Proclamation must be printed, the rifles served out, the Revolution proclaimed. All the Delegates must be notified. If the soldiers fraternise, all will be well; if not, you will have to fight--I don't think there will be much opposition--storm the palace and make Molara prisoner." "It shall be done," said Moret. "Meanwhile," continued Savrola, "we will proclaim the Provisional Government at the Mayoralty. Thence I shall send you orders; thither you must send me reports. All this will happen the day after to-morrow." Godoy shivered, but assented. "Yes," he said; "it is the only course, except flight and ruin." "Very well; now we will go into details. First of all, the Proclamation. I will write that to-night. Moret, you must get it printed; you shall have it at six o'clock to-morrow morning. Then prepare the arrangements we had devised for assembling and arming the people; wait till you get a written order from me to put them into action. You, Renos, must see the members of the Provisional Government. Have the constitution of the Council of Public Safety printed, and be ready to circulate it to-morrow night; yet again, wait till I give the word. Much depends on the attitude of the troops; but everything is really ready. I do not think we need fear the result." The intricate details of the plot, for plot it was, were well known to the leaders of the revolt. For several months they had looked to force as the only means of ending the government they detested. Savrola was not the man to commit himself to such an enterprise without taking every precaution. Nothing had been forgotten; the machinery of revolution only needed setting in motion. Yet in spite of the elaborate nature of the conspiracy and its great scale, the President and his police had been able to learn nothing definite. They feared that a rising was imminent; they had realised the danger for some months; but it was impossible to know where the political agitation ended, and the open sedition began. The great social position and almost European reputation of the principal leaders had rendered their arrest without certain proof a matter of extreme difficulty. The President, believing that the people would not rise unless spurred thereto by some act of power on the part of the Executive, feared to rouse them. But for this Savrola, Moret, and the others would have already filled cells in the State Prison; indeed, they would have had much to be thankful for had their lives been spared. But Savrola understood his position, and had played his game with consummate tact and skill. The great parade he made of the political agitation had prevented the President from observing the conspiracy to deliberate violence which lay beneath. At length the preparations were approaching completion. It had become only a matter of days; Strelitz's impetuous act had but precipitated the course of events. One corner of the great firework had caught light too soon; it was necessary to fire the rest lest the effect should be spoiled. He continued to go over the details of the scheme for nearly an hour, to make sure that there should be no mistakes. At last all was finished, and the members of the embryo Council of Public Safety took their departure. Savrola let them out himself, not wishing to wake the old nurse. Poor soul, why should she feel the force of the struggles of ambitious men? Moret went off full of enthusiasm; the others were gloomy and preoccupied. Their great leader shut the door, and once more that night climbed the stairs to his chamber. As he reached it, the first streaks of morning came in through the parted curtains of the windows. The room, in the grey light with its half-empty glasses and full ashtrays, looked like a woman, no longer young, surprised by an unsympathetic dawn in the meretricious paints and pomps of the previous night. It was too late to go to bed; yet he was tired, weary with that dry kind of fatigue which a man feels when all desire of sleep has passed away. He experienced a sensation of annoyance and depression. Life seemed unsatisfactory; something was lacking. When all deductions had been made on the scores of ambition, duty, excitement, or fame, there remained an unabsorbed residuum of pure emptiness. What was the good of it all? He thought of the silent streets; in a few hours they would echo with the crackle of musketry. Poor broken creatures would be carried bleeding to the houses, whose doors terrified women would close in the uncharitable haste of fear. Others, flicked out of human ken from solid concrete earth to unknown, unformulated abstractions, would lie limp and reproachful on the paving-stones. And for what? He could not find an answer to the question. The apology for his own actions was merged in the much greater apology nature would have to make for the existence of the human species. Well, he might be killed himself; and as the thought occurred to him he looked forward with a strange curiosity to that sudden change, with perhaps its great revelation. The reflection made him less dissatisfied with the shallow ends of human ambition. When the notes of life ring false, men should correct them by referring to the tuning-fork of death. It is when that clear menacing tone is heard that the love of life grows keenest in the human heart. All men, from such moods and reflections, are recalled to earth by hard matters of fact. He remembered the proclamation he had to write, and rising plunged into the numerous details of the business of living, and thus forgot the barrenness of life. So he sat and wrote, while the pale glimmer of the dawn glowed into the clear light of sunrise and the warm tints of broad day. CHAPTER XIII. THE ACTION OF THE EXECUTIVE. The private breakfast-room of the Presidential palace was a small but lofty apartment. The walls were hung with tapestries; over the doors weapons of ancient type and history were arranged in elaborate patterns. The great French windows were deeply set in the wall, and the bright light of the morning was softened by heavy crimson curtains. Like the rest of the house it wore an official aspect. The windows opened on to the stone terrace, and those who passed through them experienced a feeling of relief in exchanging the severe splendours of the palace for the beautiful confusion of the garden, where between the spreading trees and slender palms the sparkling waters of the harbour were displayed. The table, which was set for two, was comfortably small and well arranged. The generous revenue which it had long been the principle of the Lauranian Republic to bestow on her First Magistrate enabled the President to live in a style of elegance and luxury, and to enjoy the attractions of good silver, fresh-cut flowers, and an excellent cook. But it was with a clouded brow that Molara met his wife at breakfast on the morning after the events which have just been chronicled. "Bad news,--tiresome news again, dear," he said as, sitting down and depositing a handful of papers on the table, he signed to the servants to leave the room. Lucile experienced a feeling of intense relief. After all she would not have to tell him the secret she had learned. "Has he started?" she asked incautiously. "Yes, last night; but he will be stopped." "Thank heaven for that!" Molara looked at her in amazement. "What do you mean? Why are you glad that the Admiral and the fleet are prevented from carrying out my orders?" "The fleet!" "Good gracious! What did you think I meant?" he asked impatiently. A loophole of escape presented itself. She ignored his question. "I am glad the fleet is stopped because I think they will be wanted here, now that the city is so unsettled." "Oh," said the President shortly,--suspiciously, she thought. To cover her retreat she asked a question. "Why are they stopped?" Molara pulled out a Press telegram slip from among his papers. "_Port Said, September 9th, 6.0 a.m._," he said, reading; "_British steam-collier Maude, 1,400 tons, grounded this morning in canal, which is in consequence blocked for traffic. Every effort is being made to clear the fairway. Accident is believed to be due to the silting up of channel caused by extreme draught of H.B.M.S. Aggressor which passed through last night._" He added: "They know their business, these English pigs." "You think they have done it on purpose?" "Of course." "But the fleet is not there yet." "It will be there to-morrow night." "But why should they block the channel now,--why not wait?" "Characteristic dislike of _coups de théâtre_, I suppose. Now the French would have waited till we were at the entrance of the channel, and then shut the door in our faces neatly. But British Diplomacy does not aim at effects; besides, this looks more natural." "How abominable!" "And listen to this," said the President, as giving way to keen irritation he snatched another paper from his bundle and began to read. "From the Ambassador," he said: "_Her Majesty's Government have instructed the officers commanding the various British coaling-stations south of the Red Sea, to render every assistance to the Lauranian fleet and to supply them with coal at the local market-rate_." "It is an insult," she said. "It is a cat playing with a mouse," he rejoined bitterly. "What will you do?" "Do? Sulk, protest,--but give in. What else can we do? Their ships are on the spot; ours are cut off." There was a pause. Molara read his papers and continued his breakfast. Lucile came back to her resolution. She would tell him; but she would make terms. Savrola must be protected at all costs. "Antonio," she said nervously. The President, who was in a thoroughly bad temper, went on reading for a moment and then looked up abruptly. "Yes?" "I must tell you something." "Well, what is it?" "A great danger is threatening us." "I know that," he said shortly. "Savrola----" She paused uncertain and undecided. "What of him?" said Molara, suddenly becoming interested. "If you were to find him guilty of conspiracy, of plotting revolution, what would you do?" "I should shoot him with the greatest pleasure in the world." "What, without a trial?" "Oh no! He should have a trial under martial law and welcome. What of him?" It was a bad moment. She looked round for another loophole. "He--he made a speech last night," she said. "He did," said the President impatiently. "Well, I think it must have been very inflammatory, because I heard the crowds cheering in the streets all night." Molara looked at her in deep disgust. "My dear, how silly you are this morning," he said and returned to his paper. The long silence that followed was broken by the hurried entrance of Miguel with an opened telegram. He walked straight up to the President and handed it to him without speaking; but Lucile could see that he was trembling with haste, excitement, or terror. Molara opened the folded paper leisurely, smoothed it on the table and then jumped out of his chair as he read it. "Good God! when did this come?" "This moment." "The fleet," he cried, "the fleet, Miguel,--not an instant must be lost! Recall the Admiral! They must return at once. I will write the telegram myself." Crumpling the message in his hand he hurried out of the room, Miguel at his heels. At the door he found a waiting servant. "Send for Colonel Sorrento,--to come here immediately. Go! be off! Run!" he cried as the man departed with ceremonious slowness. Lucile heard them bustle down the corridor and the slam of a distant door; then all was silent again. She knew what that telegram contained. The tragedy had burst upon them all, that tragedy whose climax must strike her so nearly; but she felt glad she had meant to tell her husband,--and yet more glad that she had not told him. A cynic might have observed that Savrola's confidence, in the safety of his secret, was well founded. She returned to her sitting-room. The uncertainty of the immediate future terrified her. If the revolt succeeded, she and her husband would have to fly for their lives; if it were suppressed the consequences seemed more appalling. One thing was clear: the President would send her out of the capital at once to some place of safety. Whither? Amid all these doubts and conflicting emotions one desire predominated,--to see Savrola again, to bid him good-bye, to tell him she had not betrayed him. It was impossible. A prey to many apprehensions she walked aimlessly about the room, awaiting the developements she feared. Meanwhile the President and his secretary had reached the private office. Miguel shut the door. Both looked at each other. "It has come," said Molara with a long breath. "In an evil hour," replied the Secretary. "I shall win, Miguel. Trust to my star, my luck,--I will see this thing through. We shall crush them; but much is to be done. Now write this telegram to our agent at Port Said; send it in cipher and clear the line: _Charter at once fast despatch-boat and go personally to meet Admiral de Mello, who with fleet left Laurania midnight 8th instant for Port Said. Stop. Order him in my name return here urgent. Stop. Spare no expense_. Now send that off. With good luck the ships should be here to-morrow night." Miguel sat down and began to put the message into code. The President paced the room excitedly; then he rang the bell; a servant entered. "Has Colonel Sorrento come yet?" "No, Your Excellency." "Send and tell him to come at once." "He has been sent for, Your Excellency." "Send again." The man disappeared. Molara rang the bell once more. He met the servant in the doorway. "Is there a mounted orderly?" "Yes, Your Excellency." "Finished, Miguel?" "Here," said the Secretary, getting up and handing the message to the startled attendant,--"at speed." "Go on," shouted the President, striking the table with his open hand, and the man fled from the room. The sound of the galloping horse somewhat allayed Molara's impatience. "He crossed the frontier last night at nine o'clock, Miguel; he should have been at Turga at daybreak. We have a garrison there, a small one, but enough to delay the advance. Why is there no news? This telegram comes from Paris, from the Foreign Minister. We should have heard from--who is it commands the post?" "I don't know, Your Excellency. The Colonel will be here directly; but the silence is ugly." The President set his teeth. "I cannot trust the army; they are all disaffected. It is a terrible game; but I shall win, I shall win!" He repeated the sentence to himself several times with more energy than conviction, as if to fortify his heart. The door opened. "Colonel Sorrento," announced the usher. "Look here, old man," said Molara familiarly,--he felt he wanted a friend rather than a subordinate--"Strelitz has invaded us. He crossed the frontier last night with two thousand men and several Maxim guns, marching here by Turga and Lorenzo. We have no news from the Commandant at Turga; who is he?" Sorrento was one of those soldiers, not an uncommon type, who fear little but independent responsibility. He had served under the President for many years in the field and in the Government. Had he been alone when the news arrived, he would have been thunderstruck; now that he had a leader he followed and obeyed with military precision. Without any appearance of surprise he thought for a moment and then replied: "Major de Roc. He has four companies,--a good officer,--you can trust him, Sir." "But the troops?" "That's another matter altogether. The whole army, as I have several times informed you, Sir, is disturbed. Only the Guard can be relied on, and, of course, the officers." "Well, we shall see," said the President stoutly. "Miguel, get the map. You know the country, Sorrento. Between Turga and Lorenzo, the Black Gorge must be held. Here," he pointed on the map, which the Secretary unrolled, "here they must be stopped or at any rate delayed, till the fleet comes back. What is there at Lorenzo?" "A battalion and two machine-guns," replied the War-Minister. The President took a turn up and down the room. He was used to deciding quickly. "A brigade would do it for certain," he said. He took another turn. "Rail two battalions of the Guard at once to Lorenzo." Sorrento, who had produced his note-book, began to write. "Two field-batteries," said the President. "Which two are fit, Colonel?" "The first and second will do," answered Sorrento. "And the Lancers of the Guard." "All?" "Yes, all, except details for orderly-work." "That leaves you only one trustworthy battalion." "I know," said the President. "It is a bold course, but the only one. Now what about the Line regiments in the city? Which are the worst?" "The third, fifth, and eleventh have caused us most uneasiness." "Very well; we will get them out of the way. Let them march to-day towards Lorenzo and halt anywhere ten miles out of the city as a supporting brigade. Now, who is to command?" "Rollo is senior, Sir." "A fool, a fossil, and out of date," cried the President. "Stupid, but steady," said Sorrento. "You can rely upon his attempting nothing brilliant; he will do what he is told, and nothing more." Molara reflected on this tremendous military virtue. "Very well; give him the supporting brigade; they will have no fighting. But the other business; that is different. Brienz should have it." "Why not Drogan?" suggested the War-Minister. "I can't stand his wife," said the President. "He is a good musician, Sir," interposed Miguel. "Guitar,--very melodious." He shook his head appreciatively. "And has a capital cook," added Sorrento. "No," said Molara; "this is a matter of life and death. I cannot indulge my prejudices, nor yours; he is not a good man." "A good Staff would run him all right, Sir; he is very placid and easily led. And he is a great friend of mine; many's the good dinner----" "No, Colonel, it's no good; I cannot. Is it likely that when so much is at stake, when my reputation, my chances in life, indeed life itself, are on the hazard, that I or any one would give a great command on such grounds? If claims were equally balanced, I would oblige you; but Brienz is a better man and must have it. Besides," he added, "he has not got a horrid wife." Sorrento looked terribly disappointed but said no more. "Well, that is all settled. I leave all details to you. The Staff, everything, you may appoint; but the troops must start by noon. I will speak to them myself at the station." The War-Minister bowed and departed, solaced by the minor appointments which the President had left to his decision. Molara looked at his secretary dubiously. "Is there anything else to do? None of the revolutionaries in the city have moved, have they?" "They have given no sign, Sir; there is nothing to incriminate them." "It is possible this has surprised them; their plans are not ready. At the first overt act of violence or sedition, I will arrest them. But I must have proofs, not for my own satisfaction, but for the country." "This is a critical moment," said the Secretary. "If the leaders of the sedition could be discredited, if they could be made to appear ridiculous or insincere, it would have a great effect on public opinion." "I had thought," replied Molara, "that we might hope to learn something of their plans." "You have informed me that Her Excellency has consented to ask Señor Savrola for information on this point?" "I dislike the idea of any intimacy between them; it might be dangerous." "It might be made most dangerous for him." "In what way?" "In the way I have already indicated to you, General." "Do you mean in the way I forbade you to suggest, Sir?" "Certainly." "And this is the moment?" "Now or never." There was a silence, after which they resumed the morning's business. For an hour and a half both worked busily. Then Molara spoke. "I hate doing it; it's a dirty job." "What is necessary, is necessary," said the Secretary sententiously. The President was about to make a reply when a clerk entered the room with a deciphered telegram. Miguel took it from him, read it, and passed it to his chief, saying grimly as he did so: "Perhaps this will decide you." The President read the message, and as he read his face grew hard and cruel. It was from the Police Commissary at Turga, brief but terrible; the soldiers had deserted to the invaders, having first shot their officers. "Very well," said Molara at last, "I shall require you to accompany me to-night on a mission of importance. I will take an aide-de-camp as well." "Yes," said the Secretary; "witnesses are necessary." "I shall be armed." "That is desirable, but only as a threat, only as a threat," said the Secretary earnestly. "He is too strong for violence; the people would be up in a moment." "I know that," curtly replied the President, and then with savage bitterness he added: "but for that there would be no difficulty." "None whatever," said Miguel, and went on writing. Molara rose and went in search of Lucile, choking down the disgust and repugnance he felt. He was determined now; it might just make the difference to him in the struggle for power, and besides, it contained the element of revenge. He would like to see the proud Savrola grovel and beg for mercy at his feet. All mere politicians, he said to himself, were physical cowards; the fear of death would paralyse his rival. Lucile was still in her sitting-room when her husband entered. She met him with an anxious look. "What has happened, Antonio?" "We have been invaded, dearest, by a large force of revolutionaries. The garrison of Turga have deserted to the enemy, and killed their officers. The end is now in sight." "It is terrible," she said. "Lucile," he said with unwonted tenderness, "one chance remains. If you could find out what the leaders of the agitation in this city intend to do, if you can get Savrola to show his hand, we might maintain our position and overcome our enemies. Can you,--will you do this?" Lucile's heart bounded. It was, as he said, a chance. She might defeat the plot, and at the same time make terms for Savrola; she might still rule in Laurania, and, though this thought she repressed, save the man she loved. Her course was clear; to obtain the information and sell it to her husband for Savrola's life and liberty. "I will try," she said. "I knew you would not fail me, dearest," said Molara. "But the time is short; go and see him to-night at his rooms. He will surely tell you. You have power over men and will succeed." Lucile reflected. To herself she said, "I shall save the State and serve my husband;" and herself rejoined, "You will see him again." Then she spoke aloud. "I will go to-night." "My dear, I always trusted you," said the President; "I will never forget your devotion." Then he hurried away, convulsed with remorse,--and shame. He had indeed stooped to conquer. CHAPTER XIV. THE LOYALTY OF THE ARMY. The military force of the Lauranian Republic was proportioned to the duties of protecting its territories from invasion and of maintaining law and order within them, but was by the wisdom of former days restricted to limits which did not encourage great schemes of foreign conquest nor any aggressive meddling in the affairs of the neighbouring principalities. Four regiments of cavalry, twenty battalions of foot, and eight field-batteries comprised the Army of the Line. Besides these there was the Republican Guard, which consisted of a regiment of Lancers and three strong battalions of veteran infantry and supported by their discipline the authority, and by their magnificence the dignity, of the State. The great capital city, which exceeded in wealth, population, and turbulence the aggregate of the provincial towns, had for its garrison the Guard and half of the entire army. The remaining troops were scattered in small country stations and on the frontiers. All the pains that the President had taken to maintain the good will of the soldiery had proved vain. The revolutionary movement had grown apace in the ranks of the army, till they were now thoroughly disaffected, and the officers felt that their orders would be obeyed only so far as they were agreeable. With the Guard it was different. All, or nearly all, had borne their part in the late war and had marched to victory under the generalship of the President. They honoured and trusted their former commander, and were in turn honoured and trusted by him; indeed the favour he had shewn them may have been among the causes which had alienated the rest. It was the greater part of this Guard that Molara, in his heavy need, was about to send against the invaders. He well knew the danger of depriving himself of the only troops he could rely on, should the city itself rise; but the advancing forces must be stopped at all hazards, and the Guard alone were able and willing to do the work. He would be left almost alone amid the populace who detested him, in the city he had ruled so sternly, with mutinous soldiers as his only defenders. It was not an inviting prospect, yet it presented some chances of success. It displayed a confidence which, though assumed, might decide the waverers and disgust his foes; and it dealt with the most pressing emergency, which was after all the first duty of the Executive. He did not doubt the ability of the troops he had despatched to disperse, if not to destroy, the rabble that had crossed the frontier. That danger at least was removed by his action. In two days the fleet would return, and under its guns his Government might still continue, feared and respected. The intervening period was the crisis, a crisis which he hoped to pass safely through, partly by the force of his personality, and partly by the ridicule and contempt in which he intended to plunge his terrible rival. Punctually at eleven o'clock he left his private office to attire himself in his full uniform as a general of the army, in order that at the parade the troops might be reminded that he too was a soldier and one who had seen much war. At the door Lieutenant Tiro presented himself, in a great state of perturbation. "Sir," he said, "you will allow me to go with my squadron to the front? There will be nothing for me to do here." "On the contrary," replied the President, "there will be a great deal for you to do here. You must stay." Tiro turned pale. "I do beg you, Sir, to allow me to go," he said earnestly. "Impossible,--I want you here." "But, Sir----" "Oh, I know," said Molara impatiently; "you want to get shot at. Stay here, and I promise you shall hear bullets in plenty before you have done." He turned away, but the look of bitter disappointment on the young officer's face induced him to pause. "Besides," he added, assuming that charm of manner of which few great men are destitute, "I require you for a service of difficulty and extreme danger. You have been specially selected." The Subaltern said no more, but he was only half consoled. He thought ruefully of the green country, the glinting lances, the crack of the rifles, and all the interest and joy of war. He would miss everything; his friends would be there, but he would not share their perils. They would talk of their adventures in after days and he would have no part in their discussions; they would even laugh at him as a "tame cat" of the palace, an aide-de-camp for ornamental purposes only. And as he mourned, a distant trumpet-call stung him like the cut of a whip. It was Boots and Saddles,--the Lancers of the Guard were turning out. The President hurried off to array himself, and Tiro descended the stairs to order the horses. Molara was soon ready, and joined his aide-de-camp on the steps of the palace. Attended by a small escort they rode to the railway-station, passing, on the way, through groups of sullen citizens who stared insolently, and even spat on the ground in hatred and anger. The artillery had already been despatched, but the entraining of the rest of the troops had not commenced when the President arrived, and they were drawn up (the cavalry in mass, the infantry in line of quarter-columns) in the open space in front of the terminus. Colonel Brienz, who commanded the force, was mounted at their head. He advanced and saluted; the band struck up the Republican Hymn, and the infantry presented arms with a clash of precision. The President acknowledged these compliments with punctilious care; and then, as the rifles were shouldered, he rode towards the ranks. "You have a splendid force, Colonel Brienz," he said addressing the Colonel, but speaking loud enough to be heard by the troops. "To your skill and to their courage the Republic entrusts its safety, and entrusts it with confidence." He then turned to the troops: "Soldiers, some of you will remember the day I asked you to make a great effort for your country and your honour; Sorato is the name that history has given to the victory which was your answer to my appeal. Since then we have rested in peace and security, protected by the laurels that have crowned your bayonets. Now, as the years have passed, those trophies are challenged, challenged by the rabble whose backs you have seen so often. Take off the old laurels, soldiers of the Guard, and with the bare steel win new ones. Once again I ask you to do great things, and when I look along your ranks, I cannot doubt that you will do them. Farewell, my heart goes with you; would to God I were your leader!" He shook hands with Brienz and with the senior officers amid loud cheers from the troops, some of whom broke from the ranks to press around him, while others raised their helmets on their bayonets in warlike enthusiasm. But as the shouting ceased, a long, discordant howl of derision, till then drowned by the noise, was heard from the watching crowds,--a sinister comment! Meanwhile at the other end of the town the mobilisation of the Reserve Brigade revealed the extreme contrast between the loyalty and discipline of the Guard and the disaffection of the regiments of the Line. An ominous silence reigned throughout the barracks. The soldiers walked about moodily and sullenly, making little attempt to pack their kits for the impending march. Some loitered in groups about the parade-ground and under the colonnade which ran round their quarters; others sat sulking on their cots. The habit of discipline is hard to break, but here were men steeling themselves to break it. These signs did not pass unnoticed by the officers who awaited in anxious suspense the hour of parade. "Don't push them," Sorrento had said to the colonels, "take them very gently;" and the colonels had severally replied that they would answer with their lives for the loyalty of their men. It was nevertheless thought advisable to try the effect of the order upon a single battalion, and the 11th Regiment was the first to receive the command to turn out. The bugles blew briskly and cheerily, and the officers, hitching up their swords and pulling on their gloves, hurried to their respective companies. Would the men obey the summons? It was touch and go. Anxiously they waited. Then by twos and threes the soldiers shuffled out and began to form up in their ranks. At length the companies were complete, sufficiently complete, that is to say, for there were many absentees. The officers inspected their units. It was a dirty parade; the accoutrements were uncleaned, the uniforms carelessly put on, and the general appearance of the men was slovenly to a degree. But of these things no notice was taken, and as they walked along the ranks the subalterns found something to say in friendly chaff to many of their soldiers. They were greeted however with a forbidding silence, a silence not produced by discipline or by respect. Presently _Markers_ sounded, the companies moved to the general parade-ground, and soon the whole battalion was drawn up in the middle of the barrack-square. The Colonel was on his horse, faultlessly attired, and attended by his Adjutant. He looked calmly at the solid ranks before him, and nothing in his bearing revealed the terrible suspense which filled his mind and gripped his nerve. The Adjutant cantered along the column collecting the reports. "All present, Sir," said the company commanders, but there were several whose voices quavered. Then he returned to the Colonel, and fell into his place. The Colonel looked at his regiment, and the regiment at their Colonel. "Battalion,--attention!" he cried, and the soldiers sprang up with a clatter and a click. "Form,--fours." The word of command was loud and clear. About a dozen soldiers moved at the call of instinct--moved a little--looked about them, and shuffled back to their places again. The rest budged not an inch. A long and horrid silence followed. The Colonel's face turned grey. "Soldiers," he said, "I have given you an order; remember the honour of the regiment. Form,--fours." This time not a man moved. "As you were," he shouted desperately, though it was an unnecessary command. "The battalion will advance in quarter-column. Quick march!" The battalion remained motionless. "Captain Lecomte," said the Colonel, "what is the name of the right-hand man of your company?" "Sergeant Balfe, Sir," replied the officer. "Sergeant Balfe, I order you to advance. Quick--march!" The sergeant quivered with excitement; but he held his ground. The Colonel opened his pouch and produced his revolver with much deliberation. He looked carefully at it, as if to see that it was well cleaned; then he raised the hammer and rode up close to the mutineer. At ten yards he stopped and took aim. "Quick--march!" he said in a low menacing voice. It was evident that a climax had been reached, but at this instant Sorrento, who, concealed in the archway of the barrack-gate, had watched the proceedings, rode into the square and trotted towards the soldiers. The Colonel lowered his pistol. "Good-morning," said the War-Minister. The officer replaced his weapon and saluted. "Is the regiment ready to move off?" and then before a reply could be given he added: "A very smart parade, but after all it will not be necessary to march to-day. The President is anxious that the men should have a good night's rest before starting, and," raising his voice, "that they should drink a bumper to the Republic and confusion to her enemies. You may dismiss them, Colonel." "Fall out," said the Colonel, not even caring to risk going through the correct procedure for dismissing. The parade broke up. The ordered ranks dissolved in a crowd, and the soldiers streamed off towards their barracks. The officers alone remained. "I should have shot him, Sir, in another instant," said the Colonel. "No good," said Sorrento, "to shoot one man; it would only infuriate them. I will have a couple of machine-guns down here to-morrow morning, and we shall see then what will happen." He turned suddenly, interrupted by a storm of broken and confused cheering. The soldiers had almost reached their barracks; one man was raised on the shoulders of others, and surrounded by the rest of the regiment, waving their helmets, brandishing their rifles, and cheering wildly. "It is the sergeant," said the Colonel. "So I perceive," replied Sorrento bitterly. "A popular man, I suppose. Have you many non-commissioned officers like that?" The Colonel made no reply. "Gentlemen," said the War-Minister to the officers who loitered on the square, "I would recommend you to go to your quarters. You are rather tempting targets here, and I believe your regiment is a particularly good shooting regiment. Is it not, Colonel?" With which taunt he turned and rode away, sick at heart with anger and anxiety, while the officers of the 11th Regiment of Lauranian Infantry retired to their quarters to hide their shame and face their danger. CHAPTER XV. SURPRISES. It had been a busy and exciting day for Savrola. He had seen his followers, had issued orders, restrained the impetuous, stimulated the weak, encouraged the timid. All day long messages and reports had reached him about the behaviour of the soldiers. The departure of the Guard, and the refusal of the supporting brigade to march, were equally pleasing events. The conspiracy had now been made known to so many persons that he doubted the possibility of keeping it much longer secret from the Government agents. From every consideration he felt that the hour had come. The whole of the elaborate plan that he had devised had been put into execution. The strain had been severe, but at length all the preparations were completed, and the whole strength of the Revolutionary party was concentrated for the final struggle. Godoy, Renos, and the others were collected at the Mayoralty, whence at dawn the Provisional Government was to be proclaimed. Moret, to whom the actual duty of calling the people to arms had been assigned, instructed his agents at his own house and made arrangements for the posting of the proclamation. All was ready. The leader on whom everything depended, whose brain had conceived, whose heart had inspired, the great conspiracy, lay back in his chair. He needed and desired a few moments' rest and quiet reflection to review his schemes, to look for omissions, to brace his nerves. A small bright fire burned in the grate, and all around were the ashes of burnt papers. For an hour he had been feeding the flames. One phase of his life was over; there might be another, but it was well to have done with this one first. Letters from friends, dead now or alienated; letters of congratulation, of praise that had inspired his younger ambitions; letters from brilliant men and some from beautiful women,--all had met a common fate. Why should these records, be preserved for the curious eye of unsympathetic posterity? If he perished, the world might forget him, and welcome; if he lived, his life would henceforth be within the province of the historian. A single note, preserved from the general destruction, lay on the table beside him. It was the one with which Lucile had accompanied her invitation to the State Ball, the only one he had ever received from her. As he balanced it in his fingers, his thoughts drifted away from the busy hard realities of life to that kindred soul and lovely face. That episode too was over. A barrier stood between them. Whatever the result of the revolt, she was lost to him, unless--and that terrible unless was pregnant with suggestions of such awful wickedness that his mind recoiled from it as a man's hand starts from some filthy thing he has by inadvertence touched. There were sins, sins against the commonwealth of mankind, against the phenomenon of life itself, the stigma of which would cling through death, and for which there was pardon only in annihilation. Yet he hated Molara with a fierce hatred; nor did he care to longer hide from himself the reason. And with the recollection of the reason his mind reverted to a softer mood. Would he ever see her again? Even the sound of her name pleased him; "Lucile," he whispered sadly. There was a quick step outside; the door opened, and she stood before him. He sprang up in mute astonishment. Lucile looked greatly embarrassed. Her mission was a delicate one. Indeed she did not know her own mind, or did not care to know it. It was for her husband's sake, she said to herself; but the words she spoke belied her. "I have come to tell you that I did not betray your secret." "I know,--I never feared," replied Savrola. "How do you know?" "I have not yet been arrested." "No, but he suspects." "Suspects what?" "That you are conspiring against the Republic." "Oh!" said Savrola, greatly relieved; "he has no proofs." "To-morrow he may have." "To-morrow will be too late." "Too late?" "Yes," said Savrola; "the game begins to-night." He took out his watch; it was a quarter to eleven. "At twelve o'clock you will hear the alarm-bells. Sit down, and let us talk." Lucile sat down mechanically. "You love me," he said in an even voice, looking at her dispassionately, and as if the whole subject of their relations was but a psychological problem, "and I love you." There was no answer; he continued: "But we must part. In this world we are divided, nor do I see how the barrier can be removed. All my life I shall think of you; no other woman can ever fill the empty space. Ambitions I still have: I always had them; but love I am not to know, or to know it only to my vexation and despair. I will put it away from me, and henceforth my affections will be as lifeless as those burnt papers. And you,--will you forget? In the next few hours I may be killed; if so, do not allow yourself to mourn. I do not care to be remembered for what I was. If I have done anything that may make the world more happy, more cheerful, more comfortable, let them recall the action. If I have spoken a thought which, rising above the vicissitudes of our existence, may make life brighter or death less gloomy, then let them say, 'He said this or he did that.' Forget the man; remember, perhaps, his work. Remember too that you have known a soul, somewhere amid the puzzles of the universe, the complement of your own; and then forget. Summon your religion to your aid; anticipate the moment of forgetting; live, and leave the past alone. Can you do this?" "Never!" she answered passionately. "I will never forget you!" "We are but poor philosophers," he said. "Pain and love make sport of us and all our theories. We cannot conquer ourselves or rise above our state." "Why should we try?" she whispered, looking at him with wild eyes. He saw and trembled. Then, with the surge of impulse, he cried, "My God, how I love you!" and before she could frame a resolution or even choose her mind, they had kissed each other. The handle of the door turned quickly. Both started back. The door swung open and the President appeared. He was in plain clothes, his right hand concealed behind his back. Miguel followed from out of the darkness of the passage. For a moment there was silence. Then Molara in a furious voice broke out: "So, Sir, you attack me in this way also,--coward and scoundrel!" He raised his hand and pointed the revolver it held full at his enemy. Lucile, feeling that the world had broken up, fell back against the sofa, stunned with terror. Savrola rose and faced the President. Then she saw what a brave man he was, for as he did so he contrived to stand between the weapon and herself. "Put down your pistol," he said in a firm voice; "and you shall have an explanation." "I will put it down," said Molara, "when I have killed you." Savrola measured the distance between them with his eye. Could he spring in under the shot? Again he looked at the table where his own revolver lay. He shielded her, and he decided to stand still. "Down on your knees and beg for mercy, you hound; down, or I will blow your face in!" "I have always tried to despise death, and have always succeeded in despising you. I shall bow to neither." "We shall see," said Molara, grinding his teeth. "I shall count five,--one!" There was a pause. Savrola looked at the pistol barrel, a black spot encircled by a ring of bright steel; all the rest of the picture was a blank. "Two!" counted the President. So he was to die,--flash off this earth when that black spot burst into flame. He anticipated the blow full in his face; and beyond he saw nothing,--annihilation,--black, black night. "Three!" He could just see the rifling of the barrel; the lands showed faintly. That was a wonderful invention--to make the bullet spin as it travelled. He imagined it churning his brain with hideous energy. He tried to think, to take one grip of his philosophy or faith before the plunge; but his physical sensations were too violent. To the tips of his fingers he tingled, as the blood surged through his veins; the palms of his hands felt hot. "Four!" Lucile sprang up, and with a cry threw herself in front of the President "Wait, wait!" she cried. "Have mercy!" Molara met her look, and in those eyes read more than terror. Then at last he understood; he started as though he had caught hold of red-hot iron. "My God! it's true!" he gasped. "Strumpet!" he cried, as he pushed her from him, striking her with the back of his left hand in the mouth. She shrank into the far corner of the room. He saw it all now. Hoist with his own petard he had lost everything. Wild fury took hold of him and shook him till his throat rattled and ached. She had deserted him; power was slipping from his grasp; his rival, his enemy, the man he hated with all his soul was everywhere triumphant. He had walked into the trap only to steal the bait; but he should not escape. There was a limit to prudence and to the love of life. His plans, his hopes, the roar of an avenging crowd, all faded from his mind. Death should wipe out the long score that stood between them, death which settled all,--now on the instant. But he had been a soldier, and was ever a practical man in the detail of life. He lowered the pistol and deliberately cocked it; single action would make certainty more sure; then he took good aim. Savrola, seeing that the moment was upon him, lowered his head and sprang forward. The President fired. But Miguel's quick intelligence had appreciated the changed situation, and he remembered that there were consequences. He saw that the trick had become deadly earnest, and he did not forget the mob. He struck the pistol up, and the bullet, by a very little, flew high. In the smoke and the flash Savrola closed with his adversary and bore him to the ground. Molara fell underneath and with the concussion dropped the revolver. The other seized it, wrenched himself clear, and sprang back and away from the prostrate figure. For a moment he stood there and watched, while the hungry lust of killing rose in his heart and made his trigger-finger itch. Then very slowly the President rose. The fall had dazed him; he leaned against the book-case and groaned. Below there was a beating at the front door. Molara turned towards Lucile, who still cowered in the corner of the room, and began to revile her. The common, ugly material of his character showed through the veneer and polish that varied intercourse and the conduct of great affairs had superimposed. His words were not fit to hear, nor worth remembering; but they stung her to the quick and she rejoined defiantly: "You knew I was here; you told me to come! You have laid a trap; the fault is yours!" Molara replied by a filthy taunt. "I am innocent," she cried; "though I love him, I am innocent! Why did you tell me to come here?" Savrola began to perceive dimly. "I do not know," he said, "what villainy you have contrived. I have wronged you too much to care to have your blood on my head; but go, and go quickly; I will not endure your foulness. Go!" The President was now recovering his calmness. "I should have shot you myself," he said, "but I will have it done by a platoon of soldiers,--five soldiers and a corporal." "The murder will be avenged in either case." "Why did you stop me, Miguel?" "It is as he says, Your Excellency," replied the Secretary. "It would have been a tactical error." The official manner, the style of address, the man's composure, restored the President to his senses. He walked towards the door and stopping at the sideboard helped himself to a glass of brandy with ostentation. "Confiscated," he said, and held it up to the light, "by order of the Government." He swallowed it. "I will see you shot to-morrow," he added, heedless that the other held the pistol. "I shall be at the Mayoralty," said Savrola; "you may come and fetch me if you dare." "Revolt!" said the President. "Pooh! I will stamp it out, and you too, before the sun has gone down." "Perhaps there may be another ending to the tale." "One or the other," said the President. "You have robbed me of my honour; you are plotting to rob me of my power. There is not room for both of us in the world. You may take your mistress with you to hell." There was a noise of hasty footsteps on the stairs; Lieutenant Tiro flung open the door, but stopped abruptly in astonishment at the occupants of the room. "I heard a shot," he said. "Yes," answered the President; "there has been an accident, but luckily no harm was done. Will you please accompany me to the palace? Miguel, come!" "You had better be quick, Sir," said the Subaltern. "There are many strange folk about to-night, and they are building a barricade at the end of the street." "Indeed?" said the President. "It is time we took steps to stop them. Good-night, Sir," he added, turning to Savrola; "we shall meet to-morrow and finish our discussion." But Savrola, revolver in hand, looked at him steadily and let him go in silence, a silence that for a space Lucile's sobs alone disturbed. At length, when the retreating footsteps had died away and the street door had closed, she spoke. "I cannot stop here." "You cannot go back to the palace." "What am I to do, then?" Savrola reflected. "You had better stay here for the present. The house is at your disposal, and you will be alone. I must go at once to the Mayoralty; already I am late,--it is close on twelve,--the moment approaches. Besides, Molara will send policemen, and I have duties to discharge which I cannot avoid. To-night the streets are too dangerous. Perhaps I shall return in the morning." The tragedy had stunned them both. A bitter remorse filled Savrola's heart. Her life was ruined,--was he the cause? He could not say how far he was guilty or innocent; but the sadness of it all was unaltered, no matter who might be at fault. "Good-bye," he said rising. "I must go, though I leave my heart behind. Much depends on me,--the lives of friends, the liberties of a nation." And so he departed to play a great game in the face of all the world, to struggle for those ambitions which form the greater part of man's interest in life; while she, a woman, miserable and now alone, had no resource but to wait. And then suddenly the bells began to ring all over the city with quick impatient strokes. There was the sound of a far-off bugle-call and a dull report,--the boom of an alarm-gun. The tumult grew; the roll of a drum beating the _assembly_ was heard at the end of the street; confused shoutings and cries rose from many quarters. At length one sound was heard which put an end to all doubts,--_tap_, _tap_, _tap_, like the subdued slamming of many wooden boxes--the noise of distant musketry. The revolution had begun. CHAPTER XVI. THE PROGRESS OF THE REVOLT. Meanwhile the President and his two followers pursued their way through the city. Many people were moving about the streets, and here and there dark figures gathered in groups. The impression that great events were impending grew; the very air was sultry and surcharged with whisperings. The barricade, which was being built outside Savrola's house, had convinced Molara that a rising was imminent; half a mile from the palace the way was blocked by another. Three carts had been stopped and drawn across the street, and about fifty men were working silently to strengthen the obstruction: some pulled up the flat paving-stones; others were carrying mattresses and boxes filled with earth from the adjacent houses; but they paid little attention to the President's party. He turned up his collar and pressing his felt hat well down on his face clambered over the barrier,--the significance of what he saw filling his mind; the Subaltern indeed in his undress uniform drew some curious looks, but no attempt was made to stop his progress. These men waited for the signal. All this time Molara said not a word. With the approach of danger he made great efforts to regain his calmness, that he might have a clear head to meet it; but for all his strength of will, his hatred of Savrola filled his mind to the exclusion of everything else. As he reached the palace the revolt broke out all over the city. Messenger after messenger hurried up with evil news. Some of the regiments had refused to fire on the people; others were fraternising with them; everywhere barricades grew and the approaches to the palace were on all sides being closed. The Revolutionary leaders had gathered at the Mayoralty. The streets were placarded with the Proclamation of the Provisional Government. Officers from various parts of the town hastened to the palace; some were wounded, many agitated. Among them was Sorrento, who brought the terrible news that an entire battery of artillery had surrendered their guns to the rebels. By half-past three it was evident, from the reports which were received by telegram and messenger, that the greater part of the city had passed into the hands of the Revolutionaries with very little actual fighting. The President bore all with a calmness which revealed the full strength of his hard, stern character. He had, in truth, a terrible stimulant. Beyond the barricades and the rebels who lined them was the Mayoralty and Savrola. The face and figure of his enemy was before his eyes; everything else seemed of little importance. Yet he found in the blinding emergency an outlet for his fury, a counter-irritant for his grief; to crush the revolt, but above all to kill Savrola, was his heart's desire. "We must wait for daylight," he said. "And what then, Sir?" asked the War-Minister. "We will then proceed to the Mayoralty and arrest the leaders of this disturbance." The rest of the night was spent in organising a force with which to move at dawn. A few hundred faithful soldiers (men who had served with Molara in the former war), seventy officers of the regular army, whose loyalty was unquestionable, and the remaining battalion of the Guard with a detachment of armed police, were alone available. This band of devoted men, under fourteen hundred in number, collected in the open space in front of the palace-gates, and guarded the approaches while they waited for sunrise. They were not attacked. "Secure the city," had been Savrola's order, and the rebels were busily at work on the barricades, which in a regular system rose on all sides. Messages of varied import continued to reach the President. Louvet, in a hurried note, expressed his horror at the revolt, and explained how much he regretted being unable to join the President at the palace. He had to leave the city in great haste, he said; a relative was dangerously ill. He adjured Molara to trust in Providence; for his part he was confident that the Revolutionaries would be suppressed. The President in his room read this with a dry, hard laugh. He had never put the slightest faith in Louvet's courage, having always realised that in a crisis he would be useless and a coward. He did not blame him; the man had his good points, and as a public official in the Home-Office he was admirable; but war was not his province. He passed the letter to Miguel. The Secretary read it and reflected. He also was no soldier. It was evident that the game was up, and there was no need for him to throw his life away, merely out of sentiment as he said to himself. He thought of the part he had played in the drama of the night. That surely gave him some claims; it would be possible at least to hedge. He took a fresh piece of paper and began to write. Molara paced the room. "What are you writing?" he asked. "An order to the Commandant of the harbour-forts," replied Miguel promptly, "to acquaint him with the situation and tell him to hold his posts in your name at all hazards." "It is needless," said Molara; "either his men are traitors or they are not." "I have told him," said Miguel quickly, "to make a demonstration towards the palace at dawn, if he can trust his men. It will create a diversion." "Very well," said Molara wearily; "but I doubt it ever reaching him, and he has so few men that could be spared after the forts are held adequately." An orderly entered with a telegram. The clerk at the office, a loyalist, an unknown man of honour, had brought it himself, passing the line of barricades with extraordinary good-fortune and courage. While the President tore the envelope open, Miguel rose and left the room. Outside in the brilliantly lighted passage he found a servant, terrified but not incapable. He spoke to the man quickly and in a low voice; _twenty pounds, the Mayoralty, at all costs_, were the essentials of his instructions. Then he re-entered the office. "Look here," said Molara; "it is not all over yet." The telegram was from Brienz, near Lorenzo: _Clear the line. Strelitz and force two thousand rebels advanced on the Black Gorge this afternoon. I have repulsed them with heavy loss. Strelitz is prisoner. Am pursuing remainder. I await instructions at Turga_. "This must be published at once," he said. "Get a thousand copies printed, and have them circulated among the loyalists and as far as possible in the city." The news of the victory was received with cheers by the troops gathered in the palace-square, and they waited with impatience for morning. At length the light of day began to grow in the sky, and other lights, the glow of distant conflagrations, paled. The President, followed by Sorrento, a few officers of high rank, and his aide-de-camp Tiro, descended the steps, traversed the courtyard and passing through the great gates of the palace, entered the square where the last reserves of his power were assembled. He walked about and shook hands right and left with these faithful friends and supporters. Presently his eye caught sight of the rebel proclamation which some daring hand had placed on the wall under cover of the darkness. He walked up and read it by the light of a lantern. Savrola's style was not easy to mistake. The short crisp sentences of the appeal to the people to take up arms rang like a trumpet-call. Across the placard a small red slip, such as are used on theatrical advertisements to show the time of the performance, had been posted at a later hour. It purported to be the _facsimile_ of a telegram and ran thus: _Forced Black Gorge this morning. Dictator's troops in full retreat. Am marching on Lorenzo. Strelitz._ Molara quivered with fury. Savrola did not neglect details, and threw few chances away. "Infamous liar!" was the President's comment; but he realised the power of the man he sought to crush, and for a moment despair welled in his heart and seemed to chill his veins. He shook the sensation off with a great effort. The officers were already in possession of the details of the plan, whose boldness was its main recommendation. The rebels had succeeded in launching their enterprise; the Government would reply by a _coup d'état_. In any case the stroke was aimed at the heart of the revolt, and if it went home the results would be decisive. "The octopus of Rebellion, Gentlemen," said the President to those around him, and pointing to the Revolutionary proclamation, "has long arms. It will be necessary to cut off his head." And though all felt the venture to be desperate, they were brave men and knew their minds. The distance from the palace to the Mayoralty was nearly a mile and a half along a broad but winding avenue; by this avenue, and by the narrower streets on either side, the force advanced silently in three divisions. The President marched on foot with the centre column; Sorrento took command of the left, which was the threatened flank. Slowly, and with frequent halts to keep up communication with each other, the troops marched along the silent streets. Not a soul was to be seen: all the shutters of the houses were closed, all the doors fastened; and though the sky grew gradually brighter in the East, the city was still plunged in gloom. The advanced files pressed forward up the avenue, running from tree to tree, and pausing cautiously at each to peer through the darkness. Suddenly as they rounded a bend, a shot rang out in front. "Forward!" cried the President. The bugles sounded the charge and the drums beat. In the dim light the outline of a barricade was visible two hundred yards off, a dark obstruction across the roadway. The soldiers shouted and broke into a run. The defenders of the barricade, surprised, opened an ineffective fire and then, seeing that the attack was in earnest and doubtful of its strength, beat a retreat while time remained. The barricade was captured in a moment, and the assailants pressed on elated by success. Behind the barricade was a cross street, right and left. Firing broke out everywhere, and the loud noise of the rifles echoed from the walls of the houses. The flanking columns had been sharply checked at their barricades, but the capture of the centre position turned both of these, and their defenders, fearing to be cut off, fled in disorder. It was now daylight, and the scene in the streets was a strange one. The skirmishers darted between the trees, and the little blue-white puffs of smoke spotted the whole picture. The retiring rebels left their wounded on the ground, and these the soldiers bayoneted savagely. Shots were fired from the windows of the houses and from any shelter that offered,--a lamp-post, a pillar-box, a wounded man, an overturned cab. The rifle-fire was searching, and the streets were very bare. In their desire to get cover, to get behind something, both sides broke into the houses and dragged out chairs, tables, and piles of bedding; and though these were but little protection from the bullets, men felt less naked behind them. All this time the troops were steadily advancing, though suffering continual loss; but gradually the fire of the rebels grew hotter. More men were hurried to the scene each moment; the pressure on the flanks became severe; the enveloping enemy pressed in down the side streets, to hold which the scanty force at the President's disposal had to be further weakened. At length the rebels ceased to retreat; they had reached their guns, four of which were arranged in a row across the avenue. The Mayoralty was now but a quarter of a mile away, and Molara called on his soldiers for a supreme effort. A dashing attempt to carry the guns with the bayonet was defeated with a loss of thirty killed and wounded, and the Government troops took shelter in a side street at right angles to the main avenue. This in turn was enfiladed by the enemy, who swept round the columns and began to cut in on their line of retreat. Firing was now general along a wide half-circle. In the hope of driving the improvised artillery-men from their places, the troops forced their way into the houses on either side of the avenue, and climbing along the roofs began to fire down on their adversaries. But the rebels, repeating the manoeuvre, met them and the attempt dwindled into desperate but purposeless fighting among the chimney-pots and the skylights. The President exposed himself manfully. Moving from one part of the force to another, he animated his followers by his example. Tiro, who kept close to him, had seen enough war to realise that the check was fatal to their chances. Every moment was precious; time was slipping away, and the little force was already almost completely encircled. He had taken a rifle and was assisting to burst in the door of a house, when to his astonishment he saw Miguel. The Secretary was armed. He had hitherto remained carefully in the rear, and had avoided the danger in the air by hiding behind the trees of the avenue; but now he advanced boldly to the doorway and began to help in battering it down. No sooner was this done than he darted in and ran up the stairs crying out, "We are all soldiers to-day!" Several infantrymen followed him to fire from the lowest windows, but Tiro could not leave the President; he felt, however, surprised and pleased by Miguel's gallantry. It soon became evident to all that the attempt had failed. The numbers against them were too great. A third of the force had been killed or wounded, when the order to cut their way back to the palace was given. On all sides the exulting enemy pressed fiercely. Isolated parties of soldiers, cut off from the retiring column, defended themselves desperately in the houses and on the roofs. They were nearly all killed eventually, for everyone's blood was up, and it was a waste of time to ask for quarter. Others set fire to the houses and tried to escape under cover of the smoke; but very few succeeded. Others again, and among them Miguel, lay hid in closets and cellars, from which they emerged when men's tempers were again human and _surrender_ was not an unknown word. The right column, which consisted of five companies of the Guard battalion, were completely surrounded, and laid down their arms on the promise of a rebel general that their lives should be spared. The promise was kept, and it appeared that the superior officers among the Revolutionists were making great efforts to restrain the fury of their followers. The main body of the Government troops, massed in a single column, struggled on towards the palace losing men at every step. But in spite of their losses, they were dangerous people to stop. One party of rebels, who intercepted their line of retreat, was swept away in a savage charge, and some attempt was made to reform; but the rifle-fire was pitiless and incessant, and eventually the retreat became a rout. A bloody pursuit followed in which only some eighty men escaped capture or death, and with the President and Sorrento regained the palace alive. The great gates were closed, and the slender garrison prepared to defend themselves to the last. CHAPTER XVII. THE DEFENCE OF THE PALACE. "That," said Lieutenant Tiro to a Captain of Artillery, as they got inside the gate, "is about the best I've seen so far." "I thought it was a bad business all through," replied the other; "and when they brought the guns up it was a certainty." "It wasn't the guns that did us," said the Lancer Subaltern, who had no exaggerated idea of the value of artillery; "we wanted some cavalry." "We wanted more men," answered the Gunner, not anxious at that moment to argue the relative values of the different arms. "These rear-guard actions are the devil." "There was a damned sight more action than there was rear-guard about that last bit," said Tiro. "Do you suppose they cut up the wounded?" "Every one of them, I should think; they were like wolves at the end." "What's going to happen now?" "They're going to come in here and finish us off." "We'll see about that," said Tiro. His cheery courage could stand a prolonged test. "The fleet will be back soon; we shall hold this place till then." The palace was indeed not unsuited to defence. It was solidly built of stone. The windows were at some distance from the ground and the lower strongly barred, except on the garden-side, where the terrace and its steps gave access to the long French windows. But it was evident that a few good rifles could forbid the bare and narrow approaches in that quarter. Indeed it seemed as though the architect must have contemplated the occasion that had now arrived, for he had almost built a stronghold disguised as a palace. The side which faced the square seemed to afford the best prospects to an assault; yet the great gate was protected by two small towers containing guard-rooms, and the wall of the courtyard was high and thick. As it seemed, however, that on this front the enemy would be able to use their numbers to the greatest effect, the majority of the little garrison were concentrated there. The rebels were wisely and cautiously led. They did not at once push on to the attack of the palace; sure of their prey they could afford to wait. Meanwhile the surviving adherents of the Government endeavoured to make their last foothold secure. Rough-hewn cobblestones from the pavements of the courtyard were prized up, and the windows were with these converted into loopholes through which the garrison might fire without much exposure. The gates were closed and barred, and preparations made to strut them with baulks of timber. Ammunition was distributed. The duty and responsibility of each section of the defence was apportioned to the various officers. The defenders recognised that they had entered on a quarrel which must be carried to a definite conclusion. But Molara's mood had changed. The fury of the night had cooled into the hard, savage courage of the morning. He had led the desperate attempt to capture the Mayoralty, and had exposed himself freely and even recklessly in the tumult of the fight that followed; but now that he had come through unhurt, had regained the palace, and realised that his last chance of killing Savrola had passed, death appeared very ugly. All the excitement which had supported him had died away; he had had enough. His mind searched for some way of escape, and searched vainly. The torture of the moment was keen. A few hours might bring help: the fleet would surely come; but it would be too late. The great guns might take vengeance for his death; they could not save his life. A feeling of vexation shook him, and behind it grew the realisation of the approaching darkness. Terror began to touch his heart; his nerve flickered; he had more to fear than the others. The hatred of the multitude was centred in him; after all it was his blood they wanted,--his above all others. It was a dreadful distinction. He retired in deep despondency to his own room, and took no part in the defence. At about eleven o'clock the sharpshooters of the enemy began to make their way into the houses which surrounded the front of the palace. Presently from an upper window a shot was fired; others followed, and soon a regular fusilade began. The defenders, sheltered by their walls, replied carefully. Lieutenant Tiro and a sergeant of the Guards, an old war-time comrade of Molara's, were holding the window of the guard-room on the left of the great gate. Both were good shots. The Subaltern had filled his pockets with cartridges; the Sergeant arranged his on the sill in neat little rows of five. From their position they could shoot right down the street which led into the square and towards the gate. Outside the guard-room a dozen officers and men were still engaged in making the entrance more secure. They tried to wedge a great plank between the ground and the second cross-piece; should the rebels try to rush the gate-way, it would thus be strong enough to resist them. The fire from the surrounding houses was annoying rather than dangerous, but several bullets struck the stones of the improvised loopholes. The garrison fired carefully and slowly, anxious not to expend their ammunition, or to expose themselves without a result. Suddenly, about three hundred yards away, a number of men turned into the street which led to the gate, and began rapidly pushing and pulling something forward. "Look out," cried Tiro to the working-party; "they're bringing up a gun;" and taking good aim he fired at the approaching enemy. The Sergeant, and all the other defenders of this side of the palace, fired too with strange energy. The advancing crowd slackened speed. Among them men began to drop. Several in front threw up their hands; others began carrying these away. The attack dwindled. Then two or three men ran back alone. At that all the rest turned tail and scurried for the cover of the side street, leaving the gun (one of the captured twelve-pounders) standing deserted in the middle of the roadway, with about a dozen shapeless black objects lying round it. The garrison raised a cheer, which was answered from the surrounding houses by an increase of musketry. A quarter of an hour passed and then the rebels debouched from the side streets into the main approach and began pushing up four carts filled with sacks of flour. Again the defenders fired rapidly. Their bullets, striking the sacks, raised strange creamy white clouds; but the assailants, sheltered by their movable cover, continued to advance steadily. They reached the gun, and began emptying the carts by pushing the sacks out from behind, until a regular breastwork was formed, behind which they knelt down. Some began firing; others devoted their efforts to discharging the gun, on which the aim of the garrison was now directed. With a loss of two men they succeeded in loading it and pointing it at the gate. A third man advanced to fix the friction-tube by which it was fired. Tiro took steady aim and the distant figure collapsed to the shot. "Bull's eye," said the Sergeant appreciatively, and leaned forward to fire at another, who had advanced with desperate bravery to discharge the piece. He paused long on his aim, wishing to make certain; holding his breath he began gently to squeeze the trigger, as the musketry-books enjoin. Suddenly there was a very strange sound, half thud, half smash. Tiro, shrinking swiftly to the left, just avoided being splashed with blood and other physical details. The Sergeant had been killed by a bullet which had come to meet him as he looked through his loophole. The distant man had fixed his tube, and, catching up the lanyard, stood back and aside to fire. "Stand from the gate," shouted Tiro to the working-party; "I can't hold 'em!" He raised his rifle and fired on the chance. At the same instant a great cloud of smoke burst from the gun and another sprang up at the palace gate. The woodwork was smashed to pieces and, with the splinters of the shell, flew on, overtaking with death and wounds the working-party as they scampered to cover. A long loud burst of cheering arose on all sides from the surrounding houses and streets, and was taken up by the thousands who were waiting behind and heard the explosion of the gun. At first the rebel fire increased, but very soon a bugler began to sound perseveringly, and after about twenty minutes the musketry ceased altogether. Then from over the barricade a man with a white flag advanced, followed by two others. The truce was acknowledged from the palace by the waving of a handkerchief. The deputation walked straight up to the shattered gateway, and their leader, stepping through, entered the courtyard. Many of the defenders left their stations to look at him and hear what terms were offered. It was Moret. "I call upon you all to surrender," he said. "Your lives will be spared until you have been fairly tried." "Address yourself to me, Sir," said Sorrento stepping forward; "I am in command here." "I call upon you all to surrender in the name of the Republic," repeated Moret loudly. "I forbid you to address these soldiers," said Sorrento. "If you do so again, your flag shall not protect you." Moret turned to him. "Resistance is useless," he said. "Why will you cause further loss of life? Surrender, and your lives shall be safe." Sorrento reflected. Perhaps the rebels knew that the fleet was approaching; otherwise, he thought they would not offer terms. It was necessary to gain time. "We shall require two hours fro consider the terms," he said. "No," answered Moret decidedly. "You must surrender at once, here and now." "We shall do no such thing," replied the War-Minister. "The palace is defensible. We shall hold it until the return of the fleet and of the victorious field-army." "You refuse all terms?" "We refuse all you have offered." "Soldiers," said Moret turning again to the men, "I implore you not to throw away your lives. I offer fair terms; do not reject them." "Young man," said Sorrento with rising anger, "I have a somewhat lengthy score to settle with you already. You are a civilian and are ignorant of the customs of war. It is my duty to warn you that, if you continue to attempt to seduce the loyalty of the Government troops, I shall fire at you." He drew his revolver. Moret should have heeded; but tactless, brave, and impulsive as he was, he recked little. His warm heart generously hoped to save further loss of life. Besides, he did not believe that Sorrento would shoot him in cold blood; it would be too merciless. "I offer you all life," he cried; "do not choose death." Sorrento raised his pistol and fired. Moret fell to the ground, and his blood began to trickle over the white flag. For a moment he twisted and quivered, and then lay still. There were horrified murmurs from the bystanders, who had not expected to see the threat carried out. But it is not well to count on the mercy of such men as this War-Minister; they live their lives too much by rule and regulation. The two men outside the gate, hearing the shot, looked in, saw, and ran swiftly back to their comrades, while the garrison, feeling that they must now abandon all hope, returned to their posts slowly and sullenly. The report of a truce had drawn the President from his room, with a fresh prospect of life, and perhaps of vengeance, opening on his imagination. As he came down the steps into the courtyard, the shot, in such close proximity, startled him; when he saw the condition of the bearer of terms, he staggered. "Good God!" he said to Sorrento, "what have you done?" "I have shot a rebel, Sir," replied the War-Minister, his heart full of misgivings, but trying to brazen it out, "for inciting the troops to mutiny and desertion, after due warning that his flag would no longer protect him." Molara quivered from head to foot; he felt the last retreat cut off. "You have condemned us all to death," he said. Then he stooped and drew a paper which protruded from the dead man's coat. It ran as follows: _I authorise you to accept the surrender of Antonio Molara, ex-President of the Republic, and of such officers, soldiers, and adherents as may be holding the Presidential Palace. Their lives are to be spared, and they shall be protected pending the decision of the Government. For the Council of Public Safety_,--SAVROLA. And Sorrento had killed him,--the only man who could save them from the fury of the crowd. Too sick at heart to speak Molara turned away, and as he did so the firing from the houses of the square recommenced with savage vigour. The besiegers knew now how their messenger had fared. And all the while Moret lay very still out there in the courtyard. All his ambitions, his enthusiasms, his hopes had come to a full stop; his share in the world's affairs was over; he had sunk into the ocean of the past, and left scarcely a bubble behind. In all the contriving of the plot against the Lauranian Government Savrola's personality had dwarfed his. Yet this was a man of heart and brain and nerve, one who might have accomplished much; and he had a mother and two young sisters who loved the soil he trod on, and thought him the finest fellow in the world. Sorrento stood viewing his handiwork for a long time, with a growing sense of dissatisfaction at his deed. His sour, hard nature was incapable of genuine remorse, but he had known Molara for many years and was shocked to see his pain, and annoyed to think that he was the cause. He had not realised that the President wished to surrender; otherwise, he said to himself, he might have been more lenient. Was there no possible way of repairing the harm? The man who had authorised Moret to accept their surrender had power with the crowd; he would be at the Mayoralty,--he must be sent for,--but how? Lieutenant Tiro approached with a coat in his hands. Disgusted at his superior's brutality, he was determined to express his feelings, clearly if not verbally. He bent over the body and composed the limbs; then he laid the coat over the white expressionless face, and rising said insolently to the Colonel: "I wonder if they'll do that for you in a couple of hours' time, Sir." Sorrento looked at him, and laughed harshly. "Pooh! What do I care? When you have seen as much fighting as I have, you will not be so squeamish." "I am not likely to see much more, now that you have killed the only man who could accept our surrender." "There is another," said the War-Minister, "Savrola. If you want to live, go and bring him to call off his hounds." Sorrento spoke bitterly, but his words set the Subaltern's mind working. Savrola,--he knew him, liked him, and felt they had something in common. Such a one would come if he were summoned; but to leave the palace seemed impossible. Although the attacks of the rebels had been directed against the side of the main entrance only, a close investment and a dropping musketry were maintained throughout the complete circle. To pass the line of besiegers by the roads was out of the question. Tiro thought of the remaining alternatives: a tunnel, that did not exist; a balloon, there was not one. Shaking his head at the hopeless problem he gazed contemplatively into the clear air, thinking to himself: "It would take a bird to do it." The palace was connected with the Senate-House and with the principal Public Offices by telephone, and it happened that the main line of wires from the eastern end of the great city passed across its roof. Tiro, looking up, saw the slender threads overhead; there seemed to be nearly twenty of them. The War-Minister followed his gaze. "Could you get along the wires?" he asked eagerly. "I will try," answered the Subaltern, thrilled with the idea. Sorrento would have shaken his hand, but the boy stepped backward and saluting turned away. He entered the palace, and ascended the stairs which led to the flat roof. The attempt was daring and dangerous. What if the rebels should see him in mid air? He had often shot with a pea-rifle at rooks, black spots against the sky and among the branches. The thought seemed strangely disagreeable; but he consoled himself with the reflection that men who look through loopholes at the peril of their lives have little leisure for aught but aiming, and rarely let their eyes wander idly. He stepped out on to the roof and walked to the telegraph-post. There was no doubt as to its strength; nevertheless he paused, for the chances against him were great, and death seemed near and terrible. His religion, like that of many soldiers, was of little help; it was merely a jumble of formulas, seldom repeated, hardly understood, never investigated, and a hopeful, but unauthorised, belief that it would be well with him if he did his duty like a gentleman. He had no philosophy; he felt only that he was risking all that he had, and for what he was uncertain. Still, though there were gaps in his reasoning, he thought it might be done and he would have a dash for it. He said to himself, "It will score off those swine," and with this inspiring reflection he dismissed his fears. He swarmed up the pole to the lowest wire; then he pulled himself higher until he could get his foot on the insulators. The wires ran on both sides of the pole in two sets. He stood on the two lowest, took the top ones under his arms, and, reaching down over, caught one more in each hand. Then he started, shuffling awkwardly along. The span was about seventy yards. As he cleared the parapet he saw the street beneath him,--very far beneath him, it seemed. Shots were continually exchanged from the windows of the houses and the palace. Sixty feet below a dead man lay staring up through the wires undazzled by the bright sun. He had been _under_ fire before, but this was a novel experience. As he approached the middle of the span the wires began to swing, and he had to hold on tightly. At first the slope had been on his side, but after the centre was passed it rose against him; his feet slipped often backwards, and the wires commenced to cut into his armpits. Two-thirds of the distance was safely accomplished, when the wires under his left foot parted with a snap and dropped like a whip-lash against the wall of the opposite house. His weight fell on his shoulders; the pain was sharp; he twisted,--slipped,--clutched wildly, and recovered himself by a tremendous effort. A man at a lower window pulled back the mattress behind which he was firing and thrust his head and shoulders out. Tiro looked down and their eyes met. The man shouted in mad excitement, and fired his rifle point-blank at the Subaltern. The noise of the report prevented him from knowing how near the bullet had passed; but he felt he was not shot, and struggled on till he had passed the street. It was all up; yet to turn back was equally fatal. "I'll see it out," he said to himself, and dropped from the wires on to the roof of the house. The door from the leads was open. Running down the attic stairs and emerging on the landing, he peered over the bannisters; no one was to be seen. He descended the narrow staircase cautiously, wondering where his enemy could be. Presently he was opposite the front room on the second floor. Keeping close to the wall he peered in. The room was half-darkened. The windows were blocked by boxes, portmanteaus, mattresses, and pillow-cases filled with earth; broken glass, mingled with bits of plaster from the walls, littered the floor. By the light which filtered in through the chinks and loopholes, he saw a strange scene. There were four men in the room; one on his back on the ground, and the others bending over him. Their rifles were leaned against the wall. They seemed to have eyes only for their comrade who lay on the floor in an ever-widening pool of blood, gurgling, choking, and apparently making tremendous efforts to speak. The Subaltern had seen enough. Opposite the front room was a doorway covered by a curtain, behind which he glided. Nothing was to be seen, but he listened intently. "Poor chap," said a voice, "he's got it real bad." "How did it happen?" asked another. "Oh, he leaned out of the window to have a shot,--bullet hit him,--right through the lungs, I think,--fired in the air, and shouted." Then in a lower but still audible tone he added, "Done for!" The wounded man began making extraordinary noises. "Su'thin' he wants to tell 'is pore wife before he goes," said one of the Revolutionaries, who seemed by his speech a workman. "What is it, mate?" "Give him a pencil and paper; he can't speak." Tiro's heart stood still, and his hand stole back for his revolver. For nearly a minute nothing audible happened; then there was a shout. "By God, we'll cop him!" said the workman, and all three of them stamped past the curtained door and ran up-stairs. One man paused just opposite; he was loading his rifle and the cartridge stuck; he banged it on the ground, apparently with success, for the Subaltern heard the bolt click, and the swift footsteps followed the others towards the roof. Then he emerged from his hiding-place and stole downwards. But as he passed the open room he could not resist looking in. The wounded man saw him in an instant. He half raised himself from the ground and made terrible efforts to shout; but no articulate sound came forth. Tiro looked for a moment at this stranger whom chance had made his implacable enemy, and then, at the prompting of that cruel devil that lurks in the hearts of men and is awakened by bloodshed and danger, he kissed his hand to him in savage, bitter mockery. The other sank backwards in a paroxysm of pain and fury and lay gasping on the floor. The Subaltern hurried away. Reaching the lowest storey he turned into the kitchen, where the window was but six feet from the ground. Vaulting on to the sill he dropped into the backyard, and then, with a sudden feeling of wild panic, began to run at top speed,--the terror that springs from returning hope hard on his track. CHAPTER XVIII. FROM A WINDOW. While the swift succession of great events in the Lauranian capital had occupied with immediate emergency the minds of the men, it had been different with the women. Out in the streets there had been vivid scenes, hot blood, and excitement. The dangers of war, and the occasion of close and involved fighting, had given many opportunities for acts of devotion and brutality. The brave man had displayed his courage; the cruel had indulged his savagery; all the intermediate types had been thrilled with the business of the moment, and there had scarce been time for any but involuntary terror. Within the houses it was different. Lucile started up at the first sound of firing. There was not much to hear, a distant and confused popping with an occasional ragged crash; but she knew what all this meant and shuddered. The street below seemed from the noise to be full of people. She rose and going to the window looked down. By the sickly, uncertain light of the gas-lamps men were working busily at a barricade, which ran across the street about twenty yards from the door and on the side towards the palace. She watched the bustling figures with strange interest. They distracted her thoughts and she felt that if she had nothing to look at she would go mad with the dreadful suspense. Not a detail escaped her. How hard they worked! Men with crowbars and pickaxes were prizing up the paving-stones; others carried them along, staggering under their weight; others again piled them into a strong wall across the road. There were two or three boys working away as hard as any of them. One little fellow dropped the stone he was carrying on his foot, and forthwith sat down to cry bitterly. His companion came up and kicked him to stimulate his efforts, but he only cried the more. Presently a water-cart arrived, and the thirsty builders went by threes and fours to drink, dipping two tin mugs and a gallipot in the water. The people in the houses round were made to open their doors, and the rebels unceremoniously dragged out all sorts of things to put on their barricade. One party discovered several barrels which they appeared to consider a valuable prize. Knocking in the end of one cask they began filling it, spadeful by spadeful, with the earth which the removal of the pavement had laid bare. It was a long business, but at last they finished and tried to lift the barrel on to the wall; but it was too heavy, and falling with a crash to the ground it broke all in pieces. At this they were furious and disputed angrily, till an officer with a red sash came up and silenced them. They did not attempt to fill the other casks, but re-entering the house brought out a comfortable sofa and sat down on it sullenly, lighting their pipes. One by one, however, they got to work again, coming out of their sulky fit by degrees, and careful of their dignity. And all this time the barricade grew steadily. Lucile wondered why no one had entered Savrola's house. Presently she perceived the reason; there was a picket of four men with rifles on the doorstep. Nothing had been forgotten by that comprehensive mind. So the hours passed. From time to time her thoughts reverted to the tragedy which had swept upon her life, and she would sink back on to the sofa in despair. Once, from sheer weariness, she dozed for an hour. The distant firing had died away and, though single shots were occasionally heard, the city was generally silent. Waking with a strange feeling of uneasy trouble she ran again to the window. The barricade was completed now, and the builders were lying down behind it. Their weapons leaned against the wall on which two or three watchers stood, looking constantly up the street. Presently there was a hammering at the street-door, which made her heart beat with fear. She leaned cautiously out of the window. The picket was still at its post, but another man had joined them. Finding that he could not obtain an answer to his knocking, he stooped down, pushed something under the door, and went his way. After a time she summoned up courage to creep down, through the darkness of the staircase, to see what this might be. By the light of a match she saw that it was a note addressed simply _Lucile_ with the number of the house and street,--for the streets were all numbered in Laurania as in American cities. It was from Savrola, in pencil and to this effect: _The city and forts have passed into our hands, but there will be fighting at daylight. On no account leave the house or expose yourself_. Fighting at daylight! She looked at the clock,--a quarter to five, and already the sky was growing brighter; the time was at hand then! Fear, grief, anxiety, and, not the least painful, resentment at her husband conflicted in her mind. But the sleeping figures behind the barricade seemed to be troubled by none of these feelings; they lay silent and still, weary men who had no cares. But she knew it was coming, something loud and terrible that would wake them with a start. She felt as though she was watching a play at the theatre, the window suggesting a box. She had turned from it for a moment, when suddenly a rifle-shot rang out, apparently about three hundred yards down the street towards the palace. Then there was a splutter of firing, a bugle-call, and the sound of shouting. The defenders of the barricade sprang up in mad haste and seized their weapons. There was more firing, but still they did not reply, and she dared not put her head out of the window to see what prevented them. They were all greatly excited, holding their rifles over the barricade, and many talking in quick short sentences. In a moment a crowd of men, nearly a hundred it seemed, ran up to the wall and began scrambling over, helped by the others. They were friends, then; it occurred to her that there must be another barricade, and that the one under the window was in the second line. This was actually the case, and the first had been captured. All the time firing from the direction of the palace continued. As soon as the fugitives were all across the wall, the defenders of the second line began to fire. The rifles close by sounded so much louder than the others, and gave forth such bright flashes. But the light was growing every minute, and soon she could see the darting puffs of smoke. The rebels were armed with many kinds of firearms. Some, with old, muzzle-loading muskets, had to stand up and descend from the barricade to use their ramrods; others, armed with more modern weapons, remained crouching behind their cover and fired continually. The scene, filled with little foreshortened figures, still suggested the stage of a theatre viewed from the gallery. She did not as yet feel frightened; no harm had been done, and no one seemed to be any the worse. She had scarcely completed this thought when she noticed a figure being lifted off the barricade to the ground. In the growing daylight the pale face showed distinctly, and a deadly feeling of sickness came over her in a moment; but she stood spell-bound by the sight. Four men went off with the wounded one, carrying him by the shoulders and feet, so that he drooped in the middle. When they had passed out of her view, she looked back to the wall. There were five more men wounded; four had to be carried, the other leaned on a comrade's arm. Two more figures had also been pulled off the barricade, and laid carelessly on the pavement out of the way. Nobody seemed to take any notice of these, but just let them lie close to the area-railings. Then from the far end of the street came the sound of drums and the shrill call of a bugle, repeated again and again. The rebels began to shoot in mad excitement as fast as they could; several fell, and above the noise of the firing rose a strange sound, a sort of hoarse, screaming whoop, coming momentarily nearer. A man on the barricade jumped off and began to run down the street; five, six others followed at once; then all the defenders but three hurried away from that strange approaching cry. Several tried to drag with them the wounded, of which there already were a few more; these cried out in pain and begged to be left alone. One man, she saw, dragging another by the ankle, bumping him along the rough roadway in spite of his entreaties. The three men who had stayed fired methodically from behind their breastwork. All this took several seconds; and the menacing shout came nearer and louder all the time. Then in an instant a wave of men,--soldiers in blue uniforms faced with buff--surged up to the barricade and over it. An officer, quite a boy, in front of them all, jumped down the other side, shouting, "Make a clear sweep of the cowardly devils,--come on!" The three steadfast men had disappeared as rocks beneath the incoming tide. Crowds of soldiers climbed over the barricade; she could see groups of them swarming round each of the wounded rebels, jobbing downwards with their bayonets savagely. And then the spell broke, the picture swam, and she rushed screaming from the window to plunge her face among the sofa-cushions. The uproar was now terrific. The musketry-fire was loud and continuous, especially from the direction of the main avenue which ran parallel to the street in which Savrola lived, and the shouting and trampling of men added to the din. Gradually the wave of fighting rolled past the house and on towards the Mayoralty. As she realised this, all her own troubles returned to her mind. The fight was going against the rebels; she thought of Savrola. And then she prayed,--prayed convulsively, sending her entreaties into space in the hope that they would not fall on unheeding ears. She spoke no name; but the gods, who are omniscient, may have guessed, with sardonic smiles, that she prayed for the victory of the rebel she loved over her husband, the President. Presently there was a tremendous noise from the direction of the Mayoralty. "Cannons," she thought, but she dared not look out of the window; the horrid sights had sickened curiosity itself. But she could hear the fire coming nearer, coming back again; and at that she felt a strange joy; something of the joy of success in war, amid all her terrors. There was a noise of people streaming past the house; shots were fired under the windows; then came a great hammering and battering at the street-door. They were breaking into the house! She rushed to the door of the room and locked it. Down-stairs there were several shots, and the noise of splintering wood. The firing of the retreating troops drifted back past the house and towards the palace; but she did not heed it; another sound paralysed her attention, the sound of approaching footsteps. Someone was coming up-stairs. She held her breath. The handle turned, and then the unknown, finding the door locked, kicked it savagely. Lucile screamed. The kicking ceased, and she heard the stranger give a dreadful groan. "For the mercy of Heaven, let me in! I am wounded and have no arms." He began to wail pitifully. Lucile listened. It seemed that there was but one, and if he were wounded, he would not harm her. There was another groan outside. Human sympathy rose in her heart; she unlocked the door and opened it cautiously. A man walked quickly into the room: it was Miguel. "I beg Your Excellency's pardon," he said suavely, with that composure which always strengthened his mean soul; "I am in need of a hiding-place." "But your wound?" she said. "A _ruse-de-guerre_; I wanted you to let me in. Where can I hide? They may be here soon." "There on the roof, or in the observatory," she said pointing to the other door. "Do not tell them." "Why should I?" she replied. Calm though the man undoubtedly was, she despised him; there was no dirt, she knew well, that he would not eat if it suited his purpose to do so. He went up and concealed himself on the roof under the big telescope. Meanwhile she waited. Emotions had succeeded each other so rapidly that day in her heart that she felt incapable of further stress; a dull feeling of pain remained, like the numbness and sense of injury after a severe wound. The firing receded towards the palace, and presently all was comparatively silent in the city again. At about nine o'clock the bell of the front-entrance rang; but she did not dare to leave the room now that the door was broken down. Then after a while came the sound of people coming up-stairs. "There is no lady here; the young lady went back the night before last to her aunt's," said a voice. It was the old woman's; with a bound of joy and a passionate craving for the sympathy of her own sex, Lucile rushed to the door and opened it. Bettine was there, and with her an officer of the rebel army, who handed a letter to her with these words: "The President sends this to you, Madam." "The President!" "Of the Council of Public Safety." The note merely informed her that the Government troops had been repulsed and ended with the words: _Only one result is now possible, and that will be attained in a few hours_. The officer, saying that he would wait down-stairs in case she might wish to send an answer, left the room. Lucile pulled the old nurse inside the door and embraced her, weeping. Where had she been all that terrible night? Bettine had been in the cellar. It seemed that Savrola had thought of her as of everything; he had told her to take her bed down there, and had even had the place carpeted and furnished on the preceding afternoon. There she had remained as he had told her. Her perfect trust in her idol had banished all fears on her own account, but she had "fidgeted terribly" about him. He was all she had in the world; others dissipate their affections on a husband, children, brothers, and sisters; all the love of her kind old heart was centred in the man she had fostered since he was a helpless baby. And he did not forget. She displayed with pride a slip of paper, bearing the words, _Safe and well_. There was now a subdued sound of firing, from the direction of the palace, which continued throughout the morning; but Miguel, seeing that the streets were again quiet, emerged from his concealment and re-entered the room. "I want to see the President," he said. "My husband?" asked Lucile. "No, Your Excellency, Señor Savrola." Miguel was quick in adapting himself to circumstances. Lucile thought of the officer; she mentioned him to Miguel. "He will take you to the Mayoralty." The Secretary was delighted; he ran down-stairs and they saw him no more. The old nurse, with a practical soul, busied herself about getting breakfast. Lucile, to divert her thoughts, aided her, and soon--such is our composition--found comfort in eggs and bacon. They were relieved to find that a picket had again been posted at the street-door. Bettine discovered this, for Lucile, her mood unchanged, would not look into the street where she had seen such grim spectacles. And she did right, for though the barricade was now deserted, nearly twenty objects that had a few hours before been men, lay around or upon it. But about eleven some labourers arrived with two scavengers' carts; and soon only the bloodstains on the pavement showed that there had been any destruction other than that of property. The morning wore slowly and anxiously away. The firing near the palace was continual, but distant. Sometimes it swelled into a dull roar, at others the individual shots sounded in a sort of quick rattle. At last, at about half-past two, it stopped abruptly. Lucile trembled. The quarrel had been decided, one way or the other. Her mind refused to face all the possibilities. At times she clung in passionate fear to the old nurse, who tried in vain to soothe her; at others she joined her in the household tasks, or submitted to tasting the various meals which the poor old soul prepared for her in the hopes of killing care with comfort. The ominous silence that followed the cessation of the firing did not last long. It was while Lucile was being coaxed by Bettine to eat some custard-pudding that she had made on purpose for her, that the report of the first great gun reached them. The tremendous explosion, though a long way off, made the windows rattle. She shuddered. What was this? She had hoped that all was over; but one explosion succeeded another, until the thunder of a cannonade from the harbour almost drowned their voices. It was a weary waiting for the two women. CHAPTER XIX. AN EDUCATIONAL EXPERIENCE. Lieutenant Tiro reached the Mayoralty in safety, for though the streets were full of excited people, they were peaceful citizens, and on his proclaiming that he had been sent to see Savrola they allowed him to pass. The Municipal building was a magnificent structure of white stone, elaborately decorated with statuary and sculpture. In front of it, surrounded by iron railings and accessible by three gateways, stretched a wide courtyard, in which a great fountain, encircled by the marble figures of departed civic magnates, played continually with agreeable effect. The whole edifice was worthy of the riches and splendour of the Lauranian capital. Two sentries of the rebel forces stood on guard with fixed bayonets at the central gateway, and allowed none to enter without due authority. Messengers were hurrying across the courtyard incessantly, and orderlies coming or going at a gallop. Without the gates a large crowd, for the most part quiet, though greatly agitated, filled the broad thoroughfare. Wild rumours circulated at random in the mass and the excitement was intense. The sound of distant firing was distinct and continuous. Tiro made his way through the crowd without much difficulty, but found his path blocked by the sentries at the gateway. They refused to allow him to proceed, and for a moment he feared that he had run his risks in vain. Luckily, however, he was recognised as Molara's aide-de-camp by one of the Municipal attendants who were loitering in the courtyard. He wrote his name on a piece of paper and requested the man to take it to Savrola or, as he was now styled, the President of the Council of Public Safety. The servant departed, and after ten minutes returned with an officer, resplendent with the red sash of the Revolutionary party, who bade the Subaltern follow him forthwith. The hall of the Mayoralty was full of excited and voluble patriots who were eager to serve the cause of Liberty, if it could be done without risking their lives. They all wore red sashes and talked loudly, discussing the despatches from the fight which arrived by frequent messengers and were posted on the walls. Tiro and his guide passed through the hall and hurrying along a passage arrived at the entrance of a small committee-room. Several ushers and messengers stood around it; an officer was on duty outside. He opened the door and announced the Subaltern. "Certainly," said a well-known voice, and Tiro entered. It was a small, wainscotted apartment with two tall and deeply set glazed windows shaded by heavy, faded curtains of reddish hue. Savrola was writing at a table in the middle of the room; Godoy and Renos were talking near one of the windows; another man, whom for the moment he did not recognise, was busily scribbling in the corner. The great Democrat looked up. "Good-morning, Tiro," he said cheerily, then, seeing the serious and impatient look on the boy's face, he asked him what had happened. Tiro told him quickly of the President's wish to surrender the palace. "Well," said Savrola, "Moret is there, and he has full powers." "He is dead." "How?" asked Savrola, in a low pained voice. "Shot in the throat," replied the Subaltern laconically. Savrola had turned very white; he was fond of Moret and they had long been friends. A feeling of disgust at the whole struggle came over him; he repressed it; this was no time for regrets. "You mean that the crowd will accept no surrender?" "I mean they have probably massacred them all by now." "What time was Moret killed?" "A quarter-past twelve." Savrola took up a paper that lay beside him on the table. "This was sent off at half-past twelve." Tiro looked at it. It was signed _Moret_ and ran as follows: _Am preparing for final assault. All well_. "It is a forgery," said the Subaltern simply. "I started myself before the half-hour, and Señor Moret had been dead ten minutes then. Somebody has assumed the command." "By Jove," said Savrola getting up from the table. "Kreutze!" He caught up his hat and cane. "Come on; he will most certainly murder Molara, and probably the others, if he is not stopped. I must go there myself." "What?" said Renos. "Most irregular; your place is here." "Send an officer," suggested Godoy. "I have none to send of sufficient power with the people, unless you will go yourself." "I! No, certainly not! I would not think of it," said Godoy quickly. "It would be useless; I have no authority over the mob." "That is not quite the tone you have adopted all the morning," replied Savrola quietly, "or at least since the Government attack was repulsed." Then turning to Tiro, he said, "Let us start." They were leaving the room when the Subaltern saw that the man who had been writing in the corner was looking at him. To his astonishment he recognised Miguel. The Secretary bowed satirically. "Here we are again," he said; "you were wise to follow." "You insult me," said Tiro with profound contempt. "Rats leave a sinking ship." "The wiser they," rejoined the Secretary; "they could do no good by staying. I have always heard that aides-de-camp are the first to leave a fight." "You are a damned dirty dog," said the Subaltern falling back on a rudimentary form of repartee with which he was more familiar. "I can wait no longer," said Savrola in a voice that was a plain command. Tiro obeyed, and they left the room. Walking down the passage and through the hall, where Savrola was loudly cheered, they reached the entrance, where a carriage was waiting. A dozen mounted men, with red sashes and rifles, ranged themselves about it as an escort. The crowd outside the gates, seeing the great leader and hearing the applause within, raised a shout. Savrola turned to the commander of the escort. "I need no guard," he said; "that is necessary only for tyrants. I will go alone." The escort fell back. The two men entered the carriage and, drawn by strong horses, passed out into the streets. "You dislike Miguel?" asked Savrola after a while. "He is a traitor." "There are plenty about the city. Now I suppose you would call me a traitor." "Ah! but you have always been one," replied Tiro bluntly. Savrola gave a short laugh. "I mean," continued the other, "that you have always been trying to upset things." "I have been loyal to my treachery," suggested Savrola. "Yes,--we have always been at war with you; but this viper----" "Well," said Savrola, "you must take men as you find them; few are disinterested. The viper, as you call him, is a poor creature; but he saved my life, and asked me to save his in return. What could I do? Besides he is of use. He knows the exact state of the public finances and is acquainted with the details of the foreign policy. What are we stopping for?" Tiro looked out. The street was closed by a barricade which made it a _cul-de-sac_. "Try the next turning," he said to the coachman; "go on quickly." The noise of the firing could now be distinctly heard. "We very nearly pulled it off this morning," said Tiro. "Yes," answered Savrola; "they told me the attack was repulsed with difficulty." "Where were you?" asked the boy in great astonishment. "At the Mayoralty, asleep; I was very tired." Tiro was conscious of an irresistible feeling of disgust. So he was a coward, this great man. He had always heard that politicians took care of their skins, and sent others to fight their battles. Somehow he had thought that Savrola was different: he knew such a lot about polo; but he was the same as all the rest. Savrola, ever quick to notice, saw his look and again laughed dryly. "You think I ought to have been in the streets? Believe me, I did more good where I was. If you had seen the panic and terror at the Mayoralty during the fighting, you would have recognised that there were worse things to do than to go to sleep in confidence. Besides, everything in human power had been done; and we had not miscalculated." Tiro remained unconvinced. His good opinion of Savrola was destroyed. He had heard much of this man's political courage. The physical always outweighed the moral in his mind. He felt reluctantly convinced that he was a mere word-spinner, brave enough where speeches were concerned, but careful when sterner work was to be done. The carriage stopped again. "All these streets are barricaded, Sir," said the coach-man. Savrola looked out of the window. "We are close there, let us walk; it is only half a mile across Constitution Square." He jumped out. The barricade was deserted, as were the streets in this part of the town. Most of the violent rebels were attacking the palace, and the peaceable citizens were in their houses or outside the Mayoralty. They scrambled over the rough wail, which was made of paving-stones and sacks of earth piled under and upon two waggons, and hurried down the street beyond. It led to the great square of the city. At the further end was the Parliament House, with the red flag of revolt flying from its tower. An entrenchment had been dug in front of the entrance, and the figures of some of the rebel soldiery were visible on it. They had gone about a quarter of the distance across the square, when suddenly, from the entrenchment or barricade three hundred yards away, there darted a puff of smoke; five or six more followed in quick succession. Savrola paused, astonished, but the Subaltern understood at once. "Run for it!" he cried. "The statue,--there is cover behind it." Savrola began to run as fast as he could. The firing from the barricade continued. He heard two sucking kisses in the air; something struck the pavement in front of him so that the splinters flew, and while he passed a grey smudge appeared; there was a loud _tang_ on the area-railings beside him; the dust of the roadway sprang up in several strange spurts. As he ran, the realisation of what these things meant grew stronger; but the distance was short and he reached the statue alive. Behind its massive pedestal there was ample shelter for both. "They fired at us." "They did," replied Tiro. "Damn them!" "But why?" "My uniform--devilry--running man--good fun, you know--for them." "We must go on," said Savrola. "We can't go on across the square." "Which way, then?" "We must work down the street away from them, keeping the statue between us and their fire, and get up one of the streets to the left." A main street ran through the centre of the great square, and led out of it at right angles to the direction in which they were proceeding. It was possible to retire down this under cover of the statue, and to take a parallel street further along. This would enable them to avoid the fire from the entrenchment, or would at least reduce the dangerous space to a few yards. Savrola looked in the direction Tiro indicated. "Surely this is shorter," he said pointing across the square. "Much shorter," answered the Subaltern; "in about three seconds it will take you to another world." Savrola rose. "Come on," he said; "I do not allow such considerations to affect my judgment. The lives of men are at stake; the time is short. Besides, this is an educational experience." The blood was in his cheeks and his eyes sparkled; all that was reckless in him, all his love of excitement, stirred in his veins. Tiro looked at him amazed. Brave as he was, he saw no pleasure in rushing to his death at the heels of a mad politician; but he allowed no man to show him the way. He said no more, but drew back to the far end of the pedestal, so as to gain pace, and then bounded into the open and ran as fast as he could run. How he got across he never knew. One bullet cut the peak of his cap, another tore his trousers. He had seen many men killed in action, and anticipated the fearful blow that would bring him down with a smash on the pavement. Instinctively he raised his left arm as if to shield his face. At length he reached safety, breathless and incredulous. Then he looked back. Half way across was Savrola, walking steadily and drawn up to his full height. Thirty yards away he stopped and, taking off his felt hat, waved it in defiance at the distant barricade. Tiro saw him start as he lifted his arm, and his hat fell to the ground. He did not pick it up, and in a moment was beside him, his face pale, his teeth set, every muscle rigid. "Now tell me," he said, "do you call that a hot fire?" "You are mad," replied the Subaltern. "Why, may I ask?" "What is the use of throwing away your life, of waiting to taunt them?" "Ah," he answered, much excited, "I waved my hat in the face of Fate, not at those wretched irresponsible animals. Now to the palace; perhaps we are already too late." They hurried on through the deserted streets with the sound of musketry growing ever louder, and mingling with it now the shouts and yells of a crowd. As they approached the scene they passed through groups of people, peaceful citizens for the most part, anxiously looking towards the tumult. Several glanced fiercely at the soldier whose uniform made him conspicuous; but many took off their hats to Savrola. A long string of stretchers, each with a pale, shattered figure on it, passed by, filing slowly away from the fight. The press became thicker, and arms were now to be seen on all sides. Mutinous soldiers still in their uniforms, workmen in blouses, others in the dress of the National Militia, and all wearing the red sash of the revolt, filled the street. But Savrola's name had spread before him and the crowd divided, with cheers, to give him passage. Suddenly the firing in front ceased, and for a space there was silence, followed by a ragged spluttering volley and a low roar from many throats. "It's all over," said the Subaltern. "Faster!" cried Savrola. CHAPTER XX. THE END OF THE QUARREL. About a quarter of an hour after Lieutenant Tiro had escaped along the telegraph-wires, the attack on the palace was renewed with vigour. It seemed, moreover, that the rebels had found a new leader, for they displayed considerable combination in their tactics. The firing increased on all sides. Then, under cover of their musketry, the enemy debouched simultaneously from several streets, and, rushing down the great avenue, delivered a general assault. The garrison fired steadily and with effect, but there were not enough bullets to stop the advancing crowds. Many fell, but the rest pressed on impetuously and found shelter under the wall of the courtyard. The defenders, realising they could no longer hold this outer line of defence, fell back to the building itself, where they maintained themselves among the great pillars of the entrance, and for some time held the enemy's fire in check by shooting accurately at all those who put their heads over the wall or exposed themselves. Gradually, however, the rebels, by their great numbers, gained the supremacy in the fire-fight, and the defenders in their turn found it dangerous to show themselves to shoot. The musketry of the attack grew heavier, while that of the defence dwindled. The assailants now occupied the whole of the outer wall, and at length completely silenced the fire of the surviving adherents of the Government. Twenty rifles were discharged at any head that showed; yet they showed a prudent respect for these determined men, and gave no chances away. Under cover of their fire, and of the courtyard wall, they brought up the field-gun with which the gate had been broken in, and from a range of a hundred yards discharged it at the palace. The shell smashed through the masonry, and burst in the great hall. Another followed, passing almost completely through the building and exploding in the breakfast-room on the further side. The curtains, carpets, and chairs caught fire and began to burn briskly; it was evident that the defence of the palace was drawing to a close. Sorrento, who had long schooled himself to look upon all events of war from a purely professional standpoint, and who boasted that the military operation he preferred above all others was the organising of a rearguard from a defeated army, felt that nothing further could be done. He approached the President. Molara stood in the great hall where he had lived and ruled for five years with a bitter look of despair upon his face. The mosaic of the pavement was ripped and scored by the iron splinters of the shells; great fragments of the painted roof had fallen to the ground; the crimson curtains were smouldering; the broken glass of the windows lay on the floor, and heavy clouds of smoke were curling in from the further side of the palace. The President's figure and expression accorded well with the scene of ruin and destruction. Sorrento saluted with much ceremony. He had only his military code to believe in, and he took firm hold of that. "Owing, Sir," he began officially, "to the rebels having brought a gun into action at close range, it is my duty to inform you that this place has now become untenable. It will be necessary to capture the gun by a charge, and expel the enemy from the courtyard." The President knew what he meant; they should rush out and die fighting. The agony of the moment was intense; the actual dread of death was increased by the sting of unsatisfied revenge; he groaned aloud. Suddenly a loud shout arose from the crowd. They had seen the smoke of the fire and knew that the end was at hand. "Molara, Molara, come out! Dictator," they cried, "come out or burn!" It often happens that, when men are convinced that they have to die, a desire to bear themselves well and to leave life's stage with dignity conquers all other sensations. Molara remembered that, after all, he had lived famous among men. He had been almost a king. All the eyes of the world would be turned to the scene about to be enacted; distant countries would know, distant ages would reflect. It was worth while dying bravely, since die he must. He called his last defenders around him. There were but thirty left, and of these some were wounded. "Gentlemen," he said, "you have been faithful to the end; I will demand no more sacrifices of you. My death may appease those wild beasts. I give you back your allegiance, and authorise you to surrender." "Never!" said Sorrento. "It is a military order, Sir," answered the President, and walked towards the door. He stepped through the shattered woodwork and out on the broad flight of steps. The courtyard was filled with the crowd. Molara advanced until he had descended half way; then he paused. "Here I am," he said. The crowd stared. For a moment he stood there in the bright sunlight. His dark blue uniform-coat, on which the star of Laurania and many orders and decorations of foreign countries glittered, was open, showing his white shirt beneath it. He was bare-headed and drew himself up to his full height. For a while there was silence. Then from all parts of the courtyard, from the wall that overlooked it and even from the windows of the opposite houses, a ragged fusilade broke out. The President's head jerked forward, his legs shot from under him and he fell to the ground, quite limp. The body rolled down two or three steps and lay twitching feebly. A man in a dark suit of clothes, and who apparently exercised authority over the crowd, advanced towards it. Presently there was a single shot. At the same moment Savrola and his companion, stepping through the broken gateway, entered the courtyard. The mob gave passage readily, but in a sullen and guilty silence. "Keep close to me," said Savrola to the Subaltern. He walked straight towards the steps which were not as yet invaded by the rebel soldiery. The officers among the pillars had, with the cessation of the firing, begun to show themselves; someone waved a handkerchief. "Gentlemen," cried Savrola in a loud voice, "I call upon you to surrender. Your lives shall be spared." Sorrento stepped forward. "By the orders of His Excellency I surrender the palace and the Government troops who have defended it. I do so on a promise that their lives shall be safe." "Certainly," said Savrola. "Where is the President?" Sorrento pointed to the other side of the steps. Savrola turned and walked towards the spot. Antonio Molara, sometime President of the Republic of Laurania, lay on the three lowest steps of the entrance of his palace, head downwards; a few yards away in a ring stood the people he had ruled. A man in a black suit was reloading his revolver; it was Karl Kreutze, the Number One of the Secret Society. The President had bled profusely from several bullet-wounds in the body, but it was evident that the _coup de grâce_ had been administered by a shot in the head. The back and left side of the skull behind the ear was blown away, and the force of the explosion, probably at close quarters, had cracked all the bones of the face so that as the skin was whole, it looked like broken china in a sponge bag. Savrola stopped aghast. He looked at the crowd, and they shrank from his eye; gradually they shuffled back, leaving the sombre-clad man alone face to face with the great Democrat. A profound hush overspread the whole mass of men. "Who has committed this murder?" he asked in low hoarse tones, fixing his glance on the head of the Secret Society. "It is not a murder," replied the man doggedly; "it is an execution." "By whose authority?" "In the name of the Society." When Savrola had seen the body of his enemy, he was stricken with horror, but at the same time a dreadful joy convulsed his heart; the barrier was now removed. He struggled to repress the feeling, and of the struggle anger was born. Kreutze's words infuriated him. A sense of maddening irritation shook his whole system. All this must fall on his name; what would Europe think, what would the world say? Remorse, shame, pity, and the wicked joy he tried to crush, all fused into reckless ungovernable passion. "Vile scum!" he cried, and stepping down he slashed the other across the face with his cane. The man sprang at his throat on the sudden impulse of intense pain. But Lieutenant Tiro had drawn his sword; with a strong arm and a hearty good will he met him with all the sweep of a downward cut, and rolled him on the ground. The spring was released, and the fury of the populace broke out. A loud shout arose. Great as was Savrola's reputation among the Revolutionaries, these men had known other and inferior leaders more intimately. Karl Kreutze was a man of the people. His socialistic writings had been widely read; as the head of the Secret Society he had certain assured influences to support him, and he had conducted the latter part of the attack on the palace. Now he had been destroyed before their eyes by one of the hated officers. The crowd surged forward shouting in savage anger. Savrola sprang backwards up the steps. "Citizens, listen to me!" he cried. "You have won a victory; do not disgrace it. Your valour and patriotism have triumphed; do not forget that it is for our ancient Constitution that you have fought." He was interrupted by shouts and jeers. "What have I done?" he rejoined. "As much as any here. I too have risked my life in the great cause. Is there a man here that has a wound? Let him stand forth, for we are comrades." And for the first time, with a proud gesture, he lifted his left arm. Tiro perceived the reason of the start he had given when running the gauntlet in Constitution Square. The sleeve of his coat was torn and soaked with blood; the linen of his shirt protruded crimson; his fingers were stiff and smeared all over. The impression produced was tremendous. The mob, to whom the dramatic always appeals with peculiar force, were also swayed by that sympathy which all men feel for those injured in a common danger. A revulsion took place. A cheer, faint, at first, but growing louder, rose; others outside the courtyard, ignorant of the reason, took it up. Savrola continued. "Our State, freed from tyranny, must start fair and unsullied. Those who have usurped undue authority, not derived from the people, shall be punished, whether they be presidents or citizens. These military officers must come before the judges of the Republic and answer for their actions. A free trial is the right of all Lauranians. Comrades, much has been done, but we have not finished yet. We have exalted Liberty; it remains to preserve her. These officers shall be lodged in prison; for you there is other work. The ships are coming back; it is not yet time to put away the rifles. Who is there will see the matter through,--to the end?" A man, with a bloodstained bandage round his head, stepped forward. "We are comrades," he cried; "shake hands." Savrola gripped him. He was one of the subordinate officers in the rebel army, a simple honest man whom Savrola had known slightly for several months. "I entrust a high duty to you. Conduct these officers and soldiers to the State Prison; I will send full instructions by a mounted messenger. Where can you find an escort?" There was no lack of volunteers. "To the Prison then, and remember that the faith of the Republic depends on their safety. Forward, Gentlemen," he added, turning to the surviving defenders of the palace; "your lives are safe, upon my honour." "The honour of a conspirator," sneered Sorrento. "As you like, Sir, but obey." The party, Tiro alone remaining with Savrola, moved off, surrounded and followed by many of the crowd. While they did so a dull heavy boom came up from the sea-front; another and another followed in quick succession. The fleet had returned at last. CHAPTER XXI. THE RETURN OF THE FLEET. Admiral de Mello had been true to his word, and had obeyed the order which had reached him through the proper channel. He was within a hundred miles of Port Said when the despatch-boat, with the Agent of the Republic, had been met. He at once changed his course, and steamed towards the city he had so lately left. His fleet consisted of two battleships, which, though slow and out of date, were yet formidable machines, two cruisers, and a gunboat. The inopportune bursting of a steam-pipe on board the flagship, the _Fortuna_, caused a delay of several hours, and it was not till two o'clock in the afternoon of the second day that he rounded the point and saw the harbour and city of Laurania rise fair and white on the starboard bow. His officers scanned the capital, which was their home and of whose glories they were proud, with anxious eyes; nor were their fears unfounded. The smoke of half a dozen conflagrations rose from among the streets and gardens; the foreign shipping had moved out of the basin and lay off in the roads, for the most part under steam; a strange red flag flew from the fort at the end of the mole. The Admiral, signalling for half-speed, picked his way towards the mouth of the channel cautiously. It was so contrived that a vessel in passing must be exposed to a cross-fire from the heavy guns in the batteries. The actual passage was nearly a mile wide, but the navigable channel itself was dangerously narrow and extremely difficult. De Mello, who knew every foot of it, led the way in the _Fortuna_; the two cruisers, _Sorato_ and _Petrarch_, followed; the gunboat _Rienzi_ was next, and the other battleship, _Saldanho_, brought up the rear. The signal was made to clear for action; the men were beat to quarters; the officers went to their posts, and the fleet, assisted by a favourable tide, steamed slowly towards the entrance. The rebel gunners wasted no time in formalities. As the _Fortuna_ came into the line of fire, two great bulges of smoke sprang from the embrasures; the nine-inch guns of the seaward battery were discharged. Both shells flew high and roared through the masts of the warship, who increased her speed to seven knots and stood on her course followed by her consorts. As each gun of the forts came to bear, it was fired, but the aim was bad, and the projectiles ricochetted merrily over the water, raising great fountains of spray, and it was not until the leading ship had arrived at the entrance of the channel, that she was struck. A heavy shell, charged with a high explosive, crashed into the port-battery of the _Fortuna_, killing and wounding nearly sixty men, as well as dismounting two out of the four guns. This roused the huge machine; the forward turret revolved and, turning swiftly towards the fort, brought its great twin guns to bear. Their discharge was almost simultaneous, and the whole ship staggered with the violence of the recoil. Both shells struck the fort and exploded on impact, smashing the masonry to splinters and throwing heaps of earth into the air; but the harm done was slight. Safe in their bomb-proofs, the rebel gunners were exposed only to the danger of missiles entering the embrasures; while such guns as fired from _barbette_ mountings were visible only at the moment of discharge. Nevertheless the great ship began literally to spout flame in all directions, and her numerous quick-firing guns searched for the embrasures, sprinkling their small shells with prodigal rapidity. Several of these penetrated, and the rebels began to lose men. As the ships advanced, the cross-fire grew hotter, and each in succession replied furiously. The cannonade became tremendous, the loud explosions of the heavy guns being almost drowned by the incessant rattle of the quick firers; the waters of the harbour were spotted all over with great spouts of foam, while the clear air showed the white smoke-puffs of the bursting shells. The main battery of the _Fortuna_ was completely silenced. A second shell had exploded with a horrid slaughter, and the surviving sailors had fled from the scene to the armoured parts of the vessel; nor could their officers induce them to return to that fearful shambles, where the fragments of their comrades lay crushed between masses of senseless iron. The sides of the ships were scored and torn all over, and the copious streams of water from the scuppers attested the energy of the pumps. The funnel of the _Fortuna_ had been shot off almost level with the deck, and the clouds of black smoke floating across her quarters drove the gunners from the stern-turret and from the after-guns. Broken, dismantled, crowded with dead and dying, her vitals were still uninjured, and her captain, in the conning tower, feeling that she still answered the helm, rejoiced in his good fortune and held on his course. The cruiser _Petrarch_ had her steam steering-gear twisted and jammed by a shell, and becoming unmanageable grounded on a sand-bank. The forts, redoubling their fire, began to smash her to pieces. She displayed a white flag and stopped firing: but of this no notice was taken, and as the other ships dared not risk going ashore in helping her, she became a wreck and blew up at three o'clock with a prodigious report. The _Saldanho_, who suffered least and was very heavily armoured, contrived to shelter the gunboat a good deal, and the whole fleet passed the batteries after forty minutes' fighting and with a loss of two hundred and twenty men killed and wounded, exclusive of the entire crew of the _Petrarch_, who were all destroyed. The rebel loss was about seventy, and the damage done to the forts was slight. But it was now the turn of the sailors. The city of Laurania was at their mercy. The Admiral brought his ships to anchor five hundred yards from the shore. He hoisted a flag of truce, and as all his boats had been smashed in running the gauntlet, he signalled to the Custom-House that he was anxious for a parley, and desired that an officer should be sent. After about an hour's delay, a launch put out from the jetty and ran alongside the _Fortuna_. Two rebel officers in the uniform of the Republican Militia, and with red sashes round their waists, came on board. De Mello received them on his battered quarter-deck, with extreme politeness. Rough sailor as he was, he had mixed with men of many lands, and his manners were invariably improved by the proximity of danger or the consciousness of power. "May I ask," he said, "to what we are indebted for this welcome to our native city?" The senior of the two officers replied that the forts had not fired till they were fired upon. The Admiral did not argue the point, but asked what had happened in the city. On hearing of the Revolution and of the death of the President, he was deeply moved. Like Sorrento, he had known Molara for many years, and he was an honest, open-hearted man. The officers continued that the Provisional Government would accept his surrender and that of his ships, and would admit him and his officers to honourable terms as prisoners of war. He produced the authorisation of the Committee of Public Safety, signed by Savrola. De Mello somewhat scornfully requested him to be serious. The officer pointed out that the fleet in its battered condition could not again run the gauntlet of the batteries and would be starved out. To this De Mello replied that the forts at the head of the harbour were in like condition, as his guns now commanded both the approaches by the military mole and the promontory. He also stated that he had six weeks' provisions on board and added that he thought he had sufficient ammunition. His advantage was not denied. "Undoubtedly, Sir," said the officer, "it is in your power to render great services to the Provisional Government and to the cause of Liberty and Justice." "At present," replied the Admiral dryly, "it is the cause of Justice that appears to need my support." To that the officers could find no more to say than that they had fought for a free Parliament and meant to have their way. The Admiral took a turn or two before replying. "My terms are these," he said at last. "The leader of the conspiracy--this man, Savrola--must be surrendered at once and stand his trial for murder and rebellion. Until this has been done, I will not treat. Unless this is done by six o'clock to-morrow morning, I shall bombard the town and shall continue to do so until my terms are complied with." Both officers protested that this would be a barbarity, and hinted that he would be made to answer for his shells. The Admiral declined to discuss the matter or to consider other terms. As it was impossible to move him, the officers returned to the shore in their launch. It was now four o'clock. As soon as this _ultimatum_ was reported to the Committee of Public Safety at the Mayoralty, something very like consternation ensued. The idea of a bombardment was repugnant to the fat burgesses who had joined the party of revolt so soon as it had become obvious that it was the winning side. It was also distasteful to the Socialists who, however much they might approve of the application of dynamite to others, did not themselves relish the idea of a personal acquaintance with high explosives. The officers related their interview and the Admiral's demands. "And if we refuse to comply?" inquired Savrola. "Then he will open fire at six o'clock to-morrow morning." "Well, Gentlemen, we shall have to grin and bear it. They will not dare to shoot away all their ammunition, and so soon as they see that we are determined, they will give in. Women and children will be safe in the cellars, and it may be possible to bring some of the guns of the forts to bear on the harbour." There was no enthusiasm. "It will be an expensive game of bluff," he added. "There is a cheaper way," said a Socialist delegate from the end of the table, significantly. "What do you propose?" asked Savrola looking hard at him; the man had been a close ally of Kreutze. "I say that it would be cheaper if the leader of the revolt were to sacrifice himself for the sake of Society." "That is your opinion; I will take the sense of the Committee on it." There were cries of "No! No!" and "Shame!" from many present. Some were silent; but it was evident that Savrola had the majority. "Very well," he said acidly; "the Committee of Public Safety do not propose to adopt the honourable member's suggestion. He is overruled,"--here he looked hard at the man, who blenched,--"as he will frequently be among people of civilised habits." Another man got up from the end of the long table. "Look here," he said roughly; "if our city is at their mercy, we have hostages. We have thirty of these popinjays who fought us this morning; let us send and tell the Admiral that we shall shoot one for every shell he fires." There was a murmur of assent. Many approved of the proposal, because they thought that it need never be carried into execution, and all wanted to prevent the shells. Savrola's plan, however wise, was painful. It was evident that the new suggestion was a popular one. "It is out of the question," said Savrola. "Why?" asked several voices. "Because, Sirs, these officers surrendered to terms, and because the Republic does not butcher innocent men." "Let us divide upon it," said the man. "I protest against a division. This is not a matter of debate or of opinion; it is a matter of right and wrong." "Nevertheless I am for voting." "And I," "And I," "And I," shouted many voices. The voting went forward. Renos supported Savrola on legal grounds; the case of the officers was now _sub judice_, so he said. Godoy abstained. The majority in favour of the proposal was twenty-one to seventeen. The count of hands was received with cheering. Savrola shrugged his shoulders. "It is impossible that this can go on. Are we become barbarians in a morning?" "There is an alternative," said Kreutze's friend. "There is, Sir; an alternative that I should gladly embrace before this new plan was carried out. But," in a low menacing tone, "the people will be invited to pronounce an opinion first, and I may have an opportunity of showing them their real enemies and mine." The man made no reply to the obvious threat; like all the others he stood in considerable awe of Savrola's power with the mob and of his strong dominating character. The silence was broken by Godoy, who said that the matter had been settled by the Committee. A note was therefore drafted and despatched to the Admiral, informing him that the military prisoners would be shot should he bombard the city. After further discussion the Committee broke up. Savrola remained behind, watching the members move slowly away talking as they went. Then he rose and entered the small room he had used as his office. His spirits were low. Slight as it was, his wound hurt him; but worse than that, he was conscious that there were hostile influences at work; he was losing his hold over the Party. While victory was still in the balance he had been indispensable; now they were prepared to go on alone. He thought of all he had gone through that day; the terrible scene of the night, the excitement and anxiety while the fighting was going on, the strange experience in the square, and, last of all, this grave matter. His mind, however, was made up. He knew enough of De Mello to guess what his answer would be. "They are soldiers," he would say; "they must give their lives if necessary. No prisoner should allow his friends to be compromised on his account. They should not have surrendered." When the bombardment began he could imagine fear turning to cruelty, and the crowd carrying out the threat that their leaders had made. Whatever happened, the affair could not be allowed to continue. He rang the bell. "Ask the Secretary to come here," he said to the attendant. The man departed, and in a few moments returned with Miguel. "What officer has charge of the prison?" "I don't think the officials have been altered; they have taken no part in the Revolution." "Well, write an order to the Governor to send the prisoners of war, the military officers taken this afternoon, in closed carriages to the railway station. They must be there at ten o'clock to-night." "Are you going to release them?" asked Miguel opening his eyes. "I am going to send them to a place of security," answered Savrola ambiguously. Miguel began to write the order without further comment. Savrola took the telephone off the table and rang up the railway-station. "Tell the traffic-manager to come and speak to me. Are you there?--The President of the Executive Committee of the Council of Public Safety--do you hear? Have a special train,--accommodation for thirty--ready to start at ten p.m. Clear the line to the frontier,--yes,--right to the frontier." Miguel looked up from his writing quickly, but said nothing. Although he had deserted the President when he saw that he was ruined and his cause lost, he hated Savrola with a genuine hatred. An idea came into his head. CHAPTER XXII. LIFE'S COMPENSATIONS. Much had happened, though but a few hours had passed since Savrola left his house to hurry to the Mayoralty. The deep and intricate conspiracy, which had been growing silently and in secret for so many months, had burst on the world's stage and electrified the nations. All Europe had learned with amazement of the sudden and terrible convulsion that in a few hours had overthrown the Government which had existed for five years in Laurania. In the fighting that had raged throughout the ninth of September upwards of fourteen hundred persons had been killed and wounded. The damage done to property had been enormous. The Senate-House was in flames; the palace had been destroyed; both, together with many shops and private houses, had been looted by the mob and the mutineers. Fires were still smouldering in several parts of the city; in many homes there were empty places and weeping women; in the streets the ambulances and municipal carts were collecting the corpses. It had been a momentous day in the annals of the State. And all through the terrible hours Lucile had waited, listening to the sound of the musketry, which, sometimes distant and fitful, sometimes near and sustained, suggested the voice of a wrathful giant, now sunk in sulky grumblings, now raised in loud invective. She had listened in sorrow and suspense, till it was lost in the appalling din of the cannonade. At intervals, between the bathos of the material consolations of the old nurse,--soup, custards, and the like--she had prayed. Until four o'clock, when she had received a message from Savrola acquainting her with the tragedy at the palace, she had not dared to add a name to her appeals; but thenceforward she implored a merciful Providence to save the life of the man she loved. Molara she did not mourn: terrible and cruel as was his death, she could not feel she had suffered loss; but the idea that he had been killed on her account filled her heart with a dreadful fear of guilt. If that were so, she said to herself, one barrier was removed only to be replaced by another. But the psychologist might cynically aver that force and death were the only obstacles that would restrain her affection for Savrola, for above all she prayed for his return, that she might not be left alone in the world. Her love seemed all that was left to her now, but with it life was more real and strongly coloured than in the cold days at the palace amid splendour, power, and admiration. She had found what she had lacked, and so had he. With her it was as if the rising sunbeam had struck the rainbow from the crystal prism, or flushed the snow peak with rose, orange, and violet. With Savrola, in the fierce glow of love the steady blue-white fires of ambition had become invisible. The human soul is subjected to many refining agents in the world's crucible. He was sensible of a change of mood and thought; no longer would he wave his hat at Fate; to his courage he had now added caution. From the moment when he had seen that poor, hideous figure lying on the steps of the palace, he had felt the influence of other forces in his life. Other interests, other hopes, other aspirations had entered his mind. He searched for different ideals and a new standard of happiness. Very worn and very weary he made his way to his rooms. The strain of the preceding twenty-four hours had been tremendous, and the anxieties which he felt for the future were keen. The step he had taken in overruling the Council and sending the prisoners into foreign territory was one the results of which he could not quite estimate. It was, he was convinced, the only course; and for the consequences he did not greatly care, so far as he himself was concerned. He thought of Moret,--poor, brave, impetuous Moret, who would have set the world right in a day. The loss of such a friend had been a severe one to him, privately and politically. Death had removed the only disinterested man, the only one on whom he could lean in the hour of need. A sense of weariness, of disgust with struggling, of desire for peace filled his soul. The object for which he had toiled so long was now nearly attained and it seemed of little worth, of little comparative worth, that is to say, beside Lucile. As a Revolutionist he had long made such arrangements with his property as to make sure of a competence in another land, if he had to fly Laurania; and a strong wish to leave that scene of strife and carnage and to live with the beautiful woman who loved him took possession of his mind. It was, however, his first duty to establish a government in the place of that he had overthrown. Yet when he reflected on the cross-grained delegates, the mean pandering crowd of office-seekers, the weak, distrustful, timid colleagues, he hardly felt that he cared to try; so great was the change that a few hours had worked in this determined and aspiring man. Lucile rose to meet him as he entered. Fate had indeed driven them together, for she had no other hope in life, nor was there anyone to whom she could turn for help. Yet she looked at him with terror. His quick mind guessed her doubt. "I tried to save him," he said; "but I was too late, though I was wounded in taking a short cut there." She saw his bandaged arm, and looked at him with love. "Do you despise me very much?" she asked. "No," he replied; "I would not marry a goddess." "Nor I," she said, "a philosopher." Then they kissed each other, and thenceforward their relationship was simple. But in spite of the labours of the day Savrola had no time for rest. There was much to do, and, like all men who have to work at a terrible pressure for a short period, he fell back on the resources of medicine. He went to a little cabinet in the corner of the room and poured himself out a potent drug, something that would dispense with sleep and give him fresh energy and endurance. Then he sat down and began to write orders and instructions and to sign the pile of papers he had brought with him from the Mayoralty. Lucile, seeing him thus employed, betook herself to her room. It was about one o'clock in the morning when there came a ringing at the bell. Savrola, mindful of the old nurse, ran down and opened the door himself. Tiro, in plain clothes, entered. "I have come to warn you," he said. "Of what?" "Someone has informed the Council that you have released the prisoners. They have summoned an urgency meeting. Do you think you can hold them?" "The devil!" said Savrola pensively. Then after a pause he added, "I will go and join them." "There are stages laid by road to the frontier," said the Subaltern. "The President made me arrange them in case he should wish to send Her Excellency away. If you decide to give up the game you can escape by these; they will hold them to my warrant." "No," said Savrola. "It is good of you to think of it; but I have saved this people from tyranny and must now try to save them from themselves." "You have saved the lives of my brother-officers," said the boy; "you can count on me." Savrola looked at him and an idea struck him. "These relays were ordered to convey Her Excellency to neutral territory; they had better be so used. Will you conduct her?" "Is she in this house?" inquired the Subaltern. "Yes," said Savrola bluntly. Tiro laughed; he was not in the least scandalised. "I am beginning to learn more politics every day," he said. "You wrong me," said Savrola; "but will you do as I ask?" "Certainly, when shall I start?" "When can you?" "I will bring the travelling-coach round in half-an-hour." "Do," said Savrola. "I am grateful to you. We have been through several experiences together." They shook hands warmly, and the Subaltern departed to get the carriage. Savrola went up-stairs and, knocking at Lucile's door, informed her of the plan. She implored him to come with her. "Indeed I wish I could," he said; "I am sick of this; but I owe it to them to see it out. Power has little more attraction for me. I will come as soon as things are settled, and we can then be married and live happily ever afterwards." But neither his cynical chaff nor arguments prevailed. She threw her arms round his neck and begged him not to desert her. It was a sore trial. At last with an aching heart he tore himself away, put on his hat and coat, and started for the Mayoralty. The distance was about three quarters of a mile. He had accomplished about half of this when he met a patrol of the rebel forces under an officer. They called on him to halt. He pulled his hat down over his eyes, not wishing for the moment to be recognised. The officer stepped forward. It was the wounded man to whom Savrola had entrusted the escorting of the prisoners after the surrender of the palace. "How far are we away from the Plaza San Marco?" he asked in a loud voice. "It is there," said Savrola pointing. "Twenty-third Street is the number." The rebel knew him at once. "March on," he said to his men, and the patrol moved off. "Sir," he added to Savrola, in the low, quick voice of a man in moments of resolve, "I have a warrant from the Council for your arrest. They will deliver you to the Admiral. Fly, while there is time. I will take my men by a roundabout way, which will give you twenty minutes. Fly; it may cost me dear, but we are comrades; you said so." He touched Savrola's wounded arm. Then louder to the patrol: "Turn down that street to the right: we had better get out of the main thoroughfare; he may sneak off by some lane or other." Then again to Savrola: "There are others coming, do not delay;" and with that he hurried after his men. Savrola paused for a moment. To go on was imprisonment, perhaps death; to return, meant safety and Lucile. Had it been the preceding day, he would have seen the matter out; but his nerves had been strained for many hours,--and nothing stood between them now. He turned and hurried back to his house. The travelling-coach stood at the door. The Subaltern had helped Lucile, weeping, into it. Savrola called to him. "I have decided to go," he said. "Capital!" replied Tiro. "Leave these pigs to cut each other's throats; they will come to their senses presently." So they started, and as they toiled up the long ascent of the hills behind the city, it became daylight. "Miguel denounced you," said the Subaltern; "I heard it at the Mayoralty. I told you he would let you in. You must try and get quits with him some day." "I never waste revenge on such creatures," replied Savrola; "they are their own damnation." At the top of the hill the carriage stopped, to let the panting horses get their wind. Savrola opened the door and stepped out. Four miles off, and it seemed far below him, lay the city he had left. Great columns of smoke rose from the conflagrations and hung, a huge black cloud in the still clear air of the dawn. Beneath the long rows of white houses could be seen the ruins of the Senate, the gardens, and the waters of the harbour. The warships lay in the basin, their guns trained upon the town. The picture was a terrible one; to this pass had the once beautiful city been reduced. A puff of white smoke sprang from a distant ironclad, and after a while the dull boom of a heavy gun was heard. Savrola took out his watch; it was six o'clock; the Admiral had kept his appointment with scrupulous punctuality. The forts, many of whose guns had been moved during the night to the landward side, began to reply to the fire of the ships, and the cannonade became general. The smoke of other burning houses rose slowly to join the black, overhanging cloud against which the bursting shells showed white with yellow flashes. "And that," said Savrola after prolonged contemplation, "is my life's work." A gentle hand touched his arm. He turned and saw Lucile standing by him. He looked at her in all her beauty, and felt that after all he had not lived in vain. Those who care to further follow the annals of the Republic of Laurania may read how, after the tumults had subsided, the hearts of the people turned again to the illustrious exile who had won them freedom, and whom they had deserted in the hour of victory. They may, scoffing at the fickleness of men, read of the return of Savrola and his beautiful consort, to the ancient city he had loved so well. They may learn how Lieutenant Tiro was decorated for his valour in the war with the little bronze Lauranian Cross which is respected all over the world; of how he led the Lancers' polo team to England according to his desire, and defeated the Amalgamated Millionaires in the final match for the Open Cup; of how he served the Republic faithfully with honour and success and rose at last to the command of the army. Of the old nurse, indeed, they will read no more, for history does not concern itself with such. But they may observe that Godoy and Renos both filled offices in the State suited to their talents, and that Savrola bore no malice to Miguel, who continued to enjoy good-fortune as a compensation for his mean and odious character. But the chronicler, finding few great events, other than the opening of colleges, railways, and canals, to recount, will remember the splendid sentence of Gibbon, that history is "little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind"; and he will rejoice that, after many troubles, peace and prosperity came back to the Republic of Laurania. 
62043	----	ZURK By Richard O. Lewis Gentle Marene was next when the black space cruiser called for its youth-levy. If only Zurk would spark to life--Zurk, this huge, part-human war-machine of tubular steel muscles and blank, mechanical mind. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1941. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] There was both agony and defeat etched deeply into Guyard's lean face as he stood there in the center of the hidden, attic laboratory. His fists were clinched tightly at his sides and his hollow eyes were staring tensely and with supplication at the steel monstrosity before him. "Zurk, you must save her!" he pleaded. "You must save Marene!" Zurk, the man of steel, made no move. He sat there expressionless, his electric-cell eyes staring out through the small window at the far end of the laboratory. Year after year, the steel giant had sat there staring through that window, staring out into dim, perpetual daylight that always enveloped that half of the moon which kept its face constantly toward Jupiter. Week after week and month after month, Guyard had stood before the giant, had stood there hurling thought-waves into the brain, but to no avail. Something was wrong somewhere within the intricate mechanism, some trouble he could not locate. Nervous and shaken, he stood there glaring into the expressionless eyes. There were but a scant two weeks left. Then the evil creatures from the Land of Darkness on the other side of the moon would come to claim Marene. Desperation gave power to Guyard's tired brain. "_Zurk!_" His eyes blazed into the giant's with a final effort. "_Move your head!_" For a brief instant, Guyard was certain that a feeble thought-wave had tried to penetrate his own brain; he thought he caught a faint glow in the eyes. Then he wheeled quickly at the sound of a step upon the ladder up to the trap-door in the floor. His hand flashed to the gun at his belt, and he waited tensely. His hand relaxed as the door swung slowly upwards and he saw dark curls and a smiling face. Marene. Marene, his daughter. He went quickly to her, helped her up into the room and stood for a moment with his arms about her shoulders, holding her to him. A crazy panorama of thoughts went through his head. He remembered the day of her birth aboard that ill-fated spaceship that had set out to colonize Mars. That was the same day the commander of the ship had reported engine trouble. He remembered the first four years of her life aboard that helpless ship, the ship that had finally landed the thousand weary colonists on this moon of Jupiter's. And then had come the creatures from the Land of Darkness to claim youth as a tribute from the helpless Earthians. Once every four years, they came to claim young men and women for some hideous experiment of theirs on the other side of the moon. And now Marene was just sixteen, and the creatures would be coming again in their black spaceship within two weeks! Guyard was thankful that death had spared Marene's mother from this greater horror. He held the girl tightly to him. She drew away finally and smiled up at him with the bravery of youth. "Father," she said, "whatever happens, I'm not afraid." Her voice was like calm music to his troubled brain. "Anyway, I have news for you!" "News?" "Yes. Captain Simms is going to try, maybe trying right this instant to get a radio message through to the Earth!" "Impossible!" Guyard shook his head quickly. "Zuldi and his guards keep the city under constant surveillance! Captain Simms should know better, than to try! Zuldi and his devils will detect the vibration instantly!" "But Captain Simms is trying a different type of sender," Marene explained. "He hopes that Zuldi's detectors will not...." She broke off suddenly. Guyard, too, heard the tumult somewhere out in the street, and the sound of croaking shouts. He hurried to the window and looked out. * * * * * There in the street almost below him stood Zuldi and six other of the hated creatures, their scaly, bloated bodies smeared with a green substance as protection against the rigors of light. Thick-lensed glasses shaded their eyes. Zuldi, croaking loudly to attract attention, was waving his arms and pointing downward at the broken body of Captain Simms that lay at his feet. Beside the dead man lay the tangled mass of what might once have been a radio, a radio that would never send its message to distant Earth. Zuldi stopped his shouting, and spat upon the man in the dust and sent a heavily-clawed foot raking over the already lacerated chest. He was using Captain Simms as an example to all other Earthians in the city. Guyard felt a hot bitterness rising uncontrollably within him. He flung the window open, jerked the gun from his belt and centered the sights upon the center of Zuldi's bone-crested forehead. "Damn him!" he breathed. "I'll...." It was Marene who knocked the gun down before he had a chance to fire. A great fear was in her eyes as she wrested the weapon from his fingers. "You can't do it, Father! You can't do it!" She thrust the gun into a pocket beneath her short coat. "Putting Zuldi out of the way would not help us," she reminded him. "The other Earthians had guns. They would discover that you had a gun and guess that others would only kill you. They would end our chances to fight the black ship when it comes." A semblance of reason came back to Guyard. For the past two years, he had, when not training Zurk's mind, been turning out gun after gun in his small, electric furnace. Those guns had been secretly distributed to the men of the city to use when the right moment came. And now he had come very nearly to ruining those chances. He began speaking, as if thinking aloud. "They have dismantled our spaceship, broken our radios and killed every man who has tried to get a message through to Earth. They have taken our youth, searched out our secret laboratories and killed our scientists." His eyes were blazing. "But this time we are going to fight!" Guyard knew that a fight with the powerful creatures from the Land of Darkness would mean annihilation for the Earthians. But there was no other apparent way. He turned again to the steel giant, his eyes misty. "Had Zurk not failed us," he said, "I should have built a hundred more like him. Insulated against the shock of the voltage guns, a hundred men of steel could have marched into the Land of Darkness and crushed our captors--wiped them out!" Marene, too, had turned to look at the giant. She went forward now, raised one of the huge hands and let it fall with a metallic, squeaking "z-zzurk." Long ago, as a small child, she had done that same thing, and because of the sound had named the giant "Zurk." She stood looking up into the expressionless eyes. When she spoke, her voice was like that of a small girl talking to a disobedient doll. "You must not fail us now, Zurk. We need you. You must help us!" Guyard went to her and put an arm about her shoulders. "It's no use," he said. "I've tried day after day. He makes no move." "But I'm certain he understands you," insisted the girl. "Sometimes I am certain I have caught a glow in his eyes. A glow of understanding." "He _does_ understand me!" Guyard was staring into the eyes again, tense with emotion. "His brain is a part of my very own! I have nurtured that brain with my own thoughts. I have trained it." Then he shook his head slowly. "But it's no use. It is too late. One of him would not be enough. There is no time to build more." Guyard was so busy with his own thoughts that he did not hear the scaly sound of feet upon the ladder leading up into the laboratory. He did not see the bone-crested head that came slowly up above the level of the floor behind him. His first indication of danger was a green-smeared arm that whipped about Marene and jerked her roughly away from him. Guyard's hand raked at his belt as he wheeled about. But the gun was not in his belt. Marene had taken it from him, had placed it beneath her own short coat. He was unarmed. Four of the creatures were already in the room, Zuldi among them. More were coming up through the trap door. Guyard knew that he was facing death, a hideous death. Zuldi and his monsters would gleefully claw him to pieces, throw him into the street. One of the creatures charged him suddenly with huge arms and clawed hands outstretched. * * * * * Desperation and a sense of his own helplessness surged through Guyard. It gave him a mad strength beyond all reason. His balled fist lashed out with all the fury that twelve horrible years of hatred could give it. The flesh and bone of the beast's face fairly exploded into gory pulp as the blow landed. At almost the same instant, another clawed hand grasped Guyard by the shoulder and sent him spinning backward to land with a crash against the table at the far side of the room. It was Zuldi. Guyard stood leaning against the table, dazed and shaken. He heard Marene's scream and saw the two creatures forcing her down through the trap door. They would not harm her. They would let her live for a worse fate. The black ship would be coming in less than two weeks. "We saw you open the window a while ago. That's what brought us up." Zuldi was standing before him, his huge, round mouth with its yellow teeth hanging open in pleasure. "I'm so glad we came. Two examples in the same morning is more than I had hoped for." Guyard's hand closed over a heavy wrench upon the table behind him. He had no hope of winning through; his only desire was to take Zuldi with him in death. One of the guards saw the act, shouted a warning and hastily drew his voltage gun. With a mad cry upon his lips, Guyard sprang forward with wrench swinging. Zuldi's evil face was before him. Guyard wanted to smash it, obliterate it. But the wrench never reached its mark. A crackling flame filled the room. Guyard was spun half way around as the full charge of the voltage gun caught him high in the right side of his chest and filled his whole body with a burning agony. The wrench dropped to the floor. His arms became leaden things that hung heavily at his sides. He stood there gasping for air. Completely burned out inside, he had but a few seconds left. Only his brain seemed to be alive. Zuldi was before him, his hideous face black with anger beneath its smeared green. "So!" he hissed. "You would dare to strike!" His clawed hand flashed out to rake down the face and chest of the helpless man. Guyard felt no pain. His whole body was numb, dying. He stood there while Zuldi tore at him, stood there staring straight into the eyes of the great steel giant. "Zurk!" The thought-wave went out with all the power of his brain. "_Zurk! You've ... you've got to save ... Marene!_" For some reason, he felt closer to that steel-cased brain than he had ever felt before. He saw the light in the giant's eyes change almost imperceptibly. And he felt thought-waves hammering at his own brain. Zurk, even at the last moment, was trying to tell him something. But the message was garbled, incoherent. Then his tortured lungs could breathe no longer. His legs crumpled painlessly beneath him and he went sprawling forward to come to rest with one arm flung out across a steel foot. The next instant was a frightful one. It was filled with agony, bewilderment and awful blackness. It seemed to Guyard that something was reaching out for him, something that was struggling to wrest him away from the void of nothingness. Then there was a sudden peace--and silence. * * * * * The dim walls of the laboratory slowly took form. They seemed to grow out of nothingness. Gradually they began to take on a definite shape and brightness. Other objects in the room became clear-cut and distinct. And sound vibrations floated in. Guyard was puzzled. He thought he must be awakening from some nightmare. Perhaps, after all, Zuldi and his men had been but a bad dream. No! There was blood upon the floor of the laboratory! The electric furnace that had once been upon the table was gone, had been torn away! The wrench still lay where it had fallen from his nerveless fingers! He was dead! His body had been thrown into the street! And yet.... Guyard was more bewildered than ever. His body was dead! And yet he could see! His consciousness was still alive! For a long moment, he wondered. Then the realization of what had happened came to him with a startling clearness. During his last moment of life, he had been sending a message to Zurk's brain, had been in the closest harmony with it. And during that last moment, his own consciousness, released by the death of his body, had leaped the gap between those two closely related brains! _He was now occupying Zurk's brain! He was now Zurk!_ The thought of it thrilled him. He saw his barrel-like chest of steel, his huge arms, his extended, powerful legs. He would kill Zuldi now! But first he would go to Marene. He would tell her that he was still alive. He would explain to her the transformation that had taken place. He would go ... now.... His thoughts broke off suddenly. Something was wrong. He had willed to rise. But his great body had not responded. Half frightened, he tried again with all the force of his new-found brain. A tiny vibration at the back of his neck became increasingly painful. The vibration grew quickly in intensity until it became a searing flame of agony, a searing flame that robbed him of his strength and sent the walls of the laboratory floating away into darkness. It seemed to Zurk--or Guyard--that it was hours before the energy rebuilt itself within the steel frame. He knew now where the trouble was. One of the hundred tiny wires at the back of his neck was loose; it was shorting his energy through the huge body. That was the message Zurk had been trying to get through to him even at the last moment! That was what had kept the man of steel immobile through the years! One tiny, thread-like wire had cheated a thousand Earthians from their freedom! And there was nothing to be done! The trap door opened slowly some time later, and Marene came up into the room. Her eyes were hollow and sad, but she seemed even more beautiful. Zurk could not feel the hot tears that coursed down over the steel hand that Marene was holding against her soft cheek; but he could hear the sweet vibrations of her voice. "Zurk. Oh, Zurk!" She was sobbing quietly against the hand she held. "You're ... you're the only one I have left now." She raised her head and choked back the tears. "Forgive me, Zurk," she pleaded, "and please understand...." The transformed Zurk would have given anything to let her know that he understood. As it was, he struggled with all his might to give her some sign of understanding, struggled until the small flame at the back of his neck grew white hot and sent him reeling into an oblivion filled with blackness. When light rays and sound vibrations again began streaming into his consciousness, Marene had gone. He didn't know how much time had elapsed since Zuldi's visit. Maybe a day. Maybe a week. Soon the black ship would be coming.... The thought of that black ship and what it meant sent Zurk into another frantic struggle against the thing at the back of his neck. Time and time again he struggled until blackness overcame him. * * * * * Once, when consciousness returned to him, he became aware of two people standing before him looking up at him. One was Marene. The other was a slim youth a year or two older than she. "Too bad he doesn't work," the young man was saying. "He would be such a help in the fight that is soon to come." "Yes," said Marene. Her voice was hopeful. "Perhaps you could find out what is wrong with him." A ray of hope flashed through Zurk. If the young man could find the loose wire at the back of his neck.... But the young man was shaking his head. "There is not time enough for that," he said. "It would take weeks to go over that intricate mechanism. As it is, I have only time enough to get the gun assembled and placed." Zurk watched Marene lead the young man to the table at the end of the room near the window. She pressed a button, and a small door slid open in the floor beneath the table to expose two neatly coiled electrodes. The young man's face lighted. "Just the thing," he said. "With that electrical power, my gun is bound to be a success!" "But it's dangerous," warned Marene. "Zuldi knows of this laboratory." "I doubt if he'll come back. He'll probably believe that no one would dare to use this laboratory again." A shadow of doubt came across the young man's face. "But I can't understand how it happened that Zuldi tore out the electric furnace in which your father built the guns but failed to molest Zurk." Zurk could have told him. The answer was somewhere back in his sub-conscious mind. Zuldi had considered the metal giant as being but some Earthian god, a powerless entity. He had spat upon the god contemptuously and had left it standing. Marene's hand was upon the young man's arm and she was looking up into his eyes. "Bob," she said earnestly, "your gun _must_ be a success! It is not just for our own sakes; there are a thousand other lives depending upon it." Bob put his hand over hers. "It _will_ be a success!" he promised. Then, "But we've got to hurry. If they come a day earlier.... If they should happen to come tomorrow...." He left the sentence unfinished, gave Marene's hand a reassuring squeeze and hurried to the trap door that led down from the attic laboratory. Guyard was shocked to find that the two weeks was nearly up, was surprised to learn that his struggles against the thing at the back of his neck had sent him into such long periods of blackness. But the passing of time made one thing clear to him: it explained why he now constantly thought of himself not as Guyard, the man, but as Zurk, the giant of steel! The bustle of work in the laboratory made Zurk almost forget his helplessness. Time and time again, the young man hurried into the room to take molded pieces of steel from beneath his coat and to pile them upon the table before Marene. "Now!" he said finally. "Now if we can get them assembled in time!" He took off his coat and set to work with the hopeful energy of youth. "It's one of the blast rockets from the spaceship that brought us here," he explained. "The rockets get their power by disintegrating the atoms of fuel within their chambers. If we can change the procedure a bit, if we can get the disintegrating principle to work at long range instead of being confined merely to the fuel chamber." Zurk got the idea instantly. A disintegrator! The youth was constructing a long-range disintegrator with which to blow the black ship out of the sky! The thrill of it coursed through his brain. The Earthians were going to fight! They were going to make a last stand against the Creatures of Darkness. But he, Zurk, would be powerless to help. * * * * * Through the long hours of the day and night, Zurk sat there watching the two youngsters at their toil. They were working against time now, struggling for the right of freedom and happiness. But Zuldi might come. He might come before the gun was finished. Or he might come before the arrival of the black ship. Hours later, Bob made the final adjustments on the machine and stepped back to look at it. His face was pale and his hands trembled slightly with excitement. "Now to test it!" he told Marene. "And ... and I hope it works!" He turned the long snout of the gun toward the open window, connected the electrodes and made final adjustments. "Wait!" Marene placed a hand upon his arm. A sudden fear had come into her sparkling eyes. "If the gun makes a flash or a vibration of any kind, Zuldi will be sure to know. He will come here immediately!" Bob paused. "That's right," he said finally. Then, "But we've _got_ to test it! We can't wait until the black ship comes! We've got to be _sure_!" They stood there for a moment gazing into each other's eyes. Then Bob put his arm about her and drew her to him. "It doesn't matter so much about us," he told her. "We are doomed anyway. It's your father and my father and all the others in the city that we must think about! It is they...." He broke off short, his lips tight and his eyes blazing out of the window toward the far-away, dark horizon from whence the black ship would come. Several giant birds were soaring lazily through the pale sky. The young man seemed much older as he stood there. Zurk saw the lines of care in the cleanly cut face. And, at last, he recognized the youth. Bob Simms. The son of Captain Simms whose dead body had been dragged through the dusty streets by Zuldi and his men. "We've got to test it!" the young man said again. Zurk saw him put his shoulder determinedly against the piece and wheel the snout of it toward one of the soaring birds just outside the window. Zurk's photo-electric eyes saw the vibration of the charge slit through the pale sky scant inches from the bird as the youth pressed the release. But Bob had not seen that tell-tale vibration. He had seen only that the bird before him remained unharmed. The bitterness of defeat showed in his face. "Try again," urged Marene. Once again, the youth aimed the gun and pressed the release with trembling fingers. And once again Zurk's eyes saw the vibration miss its mark by inches. But he saw something else. He saw something no human eyes could see. Miles away on the far horizon, he saw another giant bird caught squarely by the charge. The bird disolved instantly into a smoky haze as every atom within it suddenly lost its valence. Zurk could have cried out with satisfaction had it not been for the tiny wire that shorted itself with white heat at the back of his neck. It made him realize once more his complete helplessness. Marene and the young man were standing there looking dejectedly at the gun. "It won't work," Bob groaned. "I've got to take it apart. I've got to try again." Zurk tried with all his might to tell the young man that the gun was a success. He tried until blackness sought to engulf him. Then his delicate ears picked up a sound vibration that sent a chill through his brain. He could hear the hurried scrape of many clawed feet in the street below. Zuldi and his men! They had detected the vibration of the gun! They were hurrying to investigate! And there was something else. Far above the distant horizon was a black speck that grew suddenly larger as it leaped forward through the pale sky. The black ship! It was coming a day ahead of schedule! * * * * * Zurk struggled desperately to warn the two who stood there in the attic laboratory. He tried to warn them of the black ship and of Zuldi and his guards who were even now within the house. But his struggles were in vain. The hot pain stabbed deep into the back of his neck, robbing him of his strength. The walls of the room reeled and faded before his waning eyes. He knew that further struggle was useless. It would only send him plunging deeper into that awful blackness. Anyway, he seemed not to have the strength to struggle more. He sat there motionless and terror stricken while the scene unfolded before his eyes. Bob and Marene had caught sight of the ship. It had come to a hovering stop just outside the window, its black hull seeming to fill the whole sky. A long ladder had been let down from one of its open ports and Creatures of Darkness were filing down into the city. Soon those evil monsters would be ferreting out the healthy youth of the city. Zurk, powerless to stop them or to shout a warning, watched Zuldi and his men come quickly up into the laboratory through the trap door. Neither Bob nor Marene saw their danger. Marene was staring fearfully out at the black ship and Bob was working frantically with the gun. "If we can blast the ship out of the sky," Bob was saying. "If we can kill the creatures already in the city, get their voltage guns...." Bob never finished his hopes. A giant, clawed hand clutched him by the shoulder at that moment and spun him back and away from the gun, spun him back and away until he nearly collided with Zurk's steel frame. Zurk felt the strain and horror of it all driving him deeper into blackness. Zuldi's hideous face was twisted into an anticipatory smirk. He took a slow, deliberate step closer to the young man. "You Earthians will never learn," he hissed. His clawed fingers were writhing nervously. "But one more example will not hurt. You know the penalty." Bob's jaws were clamped tightly. His whole body was trembling with pent rage and hate. He stood there looking steadily into the beast's eyes, waiting. "One less youth in the shipment to the other side will make little difference," Zuldi smirked. "The blood we have taken in the past is nearly enough for our needs. The transfusions have rendered my people almost immune from the ravages of heat and light rays." His red eyes were glowing behind their protective glasses. His heavy lips were twisting gloatingly. "Soon we shall be able to leave the Land of Darkness. Soon we shall conquer new lands." His eyes narrowed and he took a sudden step forward, clawed hands extended. "And we shall have no further use for Earthians!" "Damn you!" Bob's set face was livid with emotion. "Damn you!" he shouted again. "You'll never live to kill another Earthian!" His hand swept into the open front of his shirt and came out again with one of the hand guns Zurk--or Guyard--had made in the secret furnace. In one swift motion, he leveled the gun at Zuldi's huge chest and squeezed the trigger. The crash of the explosion jarred against Zurk's ears with a shattering force that drove some of the blackness from his brain. He saw immediately that the charge had not reached its intended mark. One of the other creatures, at sight of the gun, had leaped suddenly forward--to receive the heavy slug in his own chest. The bullet did not stop him. His momentum carried his dead body forward to crash into Bob, to knock the gun from his hand and to send him spinning and stumbling backward. Zuldi laughed, and drew his voltage gun. During that split second, a thousand other vibrations smashed into Zurk's hot brain. He heard bedlam break loose in the streets below. The Earthians were fighting! Mingled with the crash of the hand guns and the slithering vibrations of the voltage weapons were cries, groans, shouts and curses. And over it all came the sudden, high-pitched whine of the black ship's radio, a whine to the far side of the moon for help. Soon there would be other black ships. Marene was standing there looking at him, her eyes staring into his own, pleading with him! Then she turned and made a dash for the long-snouted gun upon the table, only to be dragged away from it by two of the monsters. Zurk knew that the last, insane episode had come. This was to be the last of the Earthians! And if he were ever going to come to their aid, he must do it now. * * * * * He threw all the power of his giant frame into the will to stand, into the will to rise up and to slay these evil creatures about him. He tried to ignore the stabbing pain at his back, tried to believe it did not exist. He hurled forth his energy in wave after wave until the flame became a consuming thing that ate deep within him and filled his brain with the shadows of dark despair. Through that creeping blackness, he saw Bob Simms frantically try to evade the sweep of Zuldi's weapon. He felt the young man stumble over one of his helpless, steel feet, felt him stagger against his metal knee and fall. And at almost the same instant the blast from Zuldi's voltage gun went crashing through the room. Zurk saw the streak of the charge as it passed just above the fallen youth and felt the full, deadly shock of it strike squarely into his own huge chest of steel with a force that quaked the whole of his giant frame. Then came deep silence. It seemed that all time had suddenly stopped. Zuldi and the other creatures were standing there staring at him, their bulging eyes terror-stricken. The vibration of Marene's sudden cry swept against his ears. "_Zurk! You are free!_" He realized then what had happened. His steel frame had taken the full stock of Zuldi's voltage gun. And that shock had burned off the wire that had been shorting his energy at the back of his neck! He was standing there on his own two feet! He was moving his head! He was free! Withering blasts from a half dozen voltage guns tore suddenly into his steel body, rocking him on his feet. But he didn't care. He was free! A savage cry came from his steel throat as he brushed aside the creatures and their guns. He went directly to the opening in the floor, put his heavy foot against the trap door and kicked it shut with a splintering crash that wedged it tightly home. Then he turned slowly about to face Zuldi and the creatures. There was no escape for them now! From outside, came the sound of successive, powerful blasts. The black ship was bringing its heavy guns into action, was bombarding the city. Zurk caught two of the creatures as a great cat would catch mice. Their gibbering death-cries filled his ears with pleasure as he smashed their heads together and flung their lifeless bodies against the wall. "The disintegrator!" he shouted to Bob. "Knock that ship out of the sky! This will be a fight they will remember!" His steel fist crashed into the evil brain of another. Then came a roaring bolt of destruction more powerful than all the others. It struck the corner of the attic, quaked the building to its foundations and sent one wall of the laboratory swirling away in a burst of flying debris. Two of the trapped creatures sprang out of the opening, screaming. Zuldi would have followed had not Zurk clutched him up in his huge hands. Slowly, the man of steel twisted the evil creature's head about in a complete circle. Then he raised the lifeless body high into the air and cast it down into the dust of the street below. [Illustration: _His great steel hand shot out and seized Zuldi's scaly neck._] He turned to find Marene and Bob standing beside the gun. Marene was sobbing quietly. Bob was staring bewilderedly at the dangling end of one of the electrodes he held in his hands. "The blast from the ship!" he cried. "The blast from the ship carried away one of the electrodes! We are without power for the disintegrator!" Zurk took the severed cable into his own hands. He saw immediately that repairs were out of the question. A long section had been blasted away between the floor and the gun. And the disintegrator was useless without power! Another blast from the black ship shuddered the laboratory and brought answering sparks from Zurk's steel shell. Then he knew! The solution came startlingly clear to his brain. He would make the connection with his own metal body! * * * * * Grasping the cable tighter in his hand, he set his foot down heavily upon the other end that lay upon the floor. His eyes glowed as he wheeled the snout of the gun about with his free hand, wheeled it directly toward the heart of the black ship and pressed the release with his thumb. The burning wave of hot power that surged through him nearly blinded him. But he saw the great ship shudder as the disintegrating force smashed into it, saw it lose form in a shapeless cloud of nothingness as its neutralized atoms went spinning away. A great cry of triumph rang out from the fighting men of the city. The hand guns redoubled their fury. "They've got the creatures on the run!" It was Marene. She was looking down into the street from the broken wall of the laboratory. But there were more ships coming. Zurk saw the tiny black specks that had leaped above the far horizon. He stopped two of them while they were still but specks, saw a third wheel back toward the dark side, its radio whining. The others came hurtling on. Methodically, one by one, he began blasting them from the sky. The hot charges of power that coursed through his body bleared his eyes and jarred his senses. Only two of the ships remained. He sent one of them into oblivion; missed the other. Twice more, the ravishing shudders of power racked his body before the black ship and its evil crew vanished into nothingness before his burning eyes. But there was no time for rest. Other black ships were coming. Zurk, now a glowing, burning thing, felt himself moving the gun slowly from one to another of the ships. Zurk was surprised to find so few ships left. He must have gotten more of them than he had thought. If he had been able to hang on a moment or two longer.... A wave of blackness began to spread over him. The great surges of energy pounding devastatingly through his heat-ridden body jarred him back again into consciousness. Through a black and red mist, he saw the youth bending over the gun. The young man's eyes were afire with the light of battle and his face was grim as he worked the weapon deliberately and methodically. Zurk felt an overwhelming desire for peace creep over him. He knew what that meant. But he didn't care. His steel body was solidly fused to the ends of the cable. Even in death, his body would continue to hold the connection while Bob Simms rid the city of the demons for all time. Never again would the black ships dare to attack. And the Earthians could rebuild their own spaceship. His heavy head slumped slowly forward to rest upon his hot arm. The wild, triumphant shouts of the people in the street came but dimly to his ears as he felt himself swimming away into a warm, red mist. Then came the last vibration of all. It was an infinitely sweet vibration that caressed his tired brain and gave to him the peace he needed. He knew it was Marene--_his Marene_--who had set that vibration into motion with her lips as close to his ear as she dared. "Thank you, Zurk," came that last vibration. "Thank you, _Father_!" 
1397	----	THE RUINS, OR, MEDITATION ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF EMPIRES: AND THE LAW OF NATURE, by C. F. VOLNEY, COMTE ET PAIR DE FRANCE. COMMANDEUR DE LA LEGION D'HONNEUR, MEMBRE DE L'ACADEMIE FRANCAISE, ET DE PLUSIEURS AUTRES SOCIETES SAVANTES. DEPUTY TO THE NATIONAL ASSEMBLY OF 1789, AND AUTHOR OF "TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND SYRIA," "NEW RESEARCHES ON ANCIENT HISTORY," ETC. TO WHICH IS ADDED VOLNEY'S ANSWER TO DR. PRIESTLY, A BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE BY COUNT DARU, AND THE ZODIACAL SIGNS AND CONSTELLATIONS BY THE EDITOR. I will cherish in remembrance the love of man, I will employ myself on the means of effecting good for him, and build my own happiness on the promotion of his.--Volney. NEW YORK, TWENTIETH CENTURY PUB. CO., 4 WARREN ST. 1890. PUBLISHER'S PREFACE. Having recently purchased a set of stereotyped plates of Volney's Ruins, with a view of reprinting the same, I found, on examination, that they were considerably worn by the many editions that had been printed from them and that they greatly needed both repairs and corrections. A careful estimate showed that the amount necessary for this purpose would go far towards reproducing this standard work in modern type and in an improved form. After due reflection this course was at length decided upon, and all the more readily, as by discarding the old plates and resetting the entire work, the publisher was enabled to greatly enhance its value, by inserting the translator's preface as it appeared in the original edition, and also to restore many notes and other valuable material which had been carelessly omitted in the American reprint. An example of an important omission of this kind may be found on the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth pages of this volume, which may be appropriately referred to, in this connection. It is there stated, in describing the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia, and the ruins of Thebes, her opulent metropolis, that "There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men, now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe." A voluminous note, in which standard authorities are cited, seems to prove that this statement is substantially correct, and that we are in reality indebted to the ancient Ethiopians, to the fervid imagination of the persecuted and despised negro, for the various religious systems now so highly revered by the different branches of both the Semitic and Aryan races. This fact, which is so frequently referred to in Mr. Volney's writings, may perhaps solve the question as to the origin of all religions, and may even suggest a solution to the secret so long concealed beneath the flat nose, thick lips, and negro features of the Egyptian Sphinx. It may also confirm the statement of Dioderus, that "the Ethiopians conceive themselves as the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and of every other religious practice." That an imaginative and superstitious race of black men should have invented and founded, in the dim obscurity of past ages, a system of religious belief that still enthralls the minds and clouds the intellects of the leading representatives of modern theology,--that still clings to the thoughts, and tinges with its potential influence the literature and faith of the civilized and cultured nations of Europe and America, is indeed a strange illustration of the mad caprice of destiny, of the insignificant and apparently trivial causes that oft produce the most grave and momentous results. The translation here given closely follows that published in Paris by Levrault, Quai Malaquais, in 1802, which was under the direction and careful supervision of the talented author; and whatever notes Count Volney then thought necessary to insert in his work, are here carefully reproduced without abridgment or modification. The portrait, maps and illustrations are from a French edition of Volney's complete works, published by Bossange Freres at No. 12 Rue de Seine, Paris, in 1821,--one year after the death of Mr. Volney. It is a presentation copy "on the part of Madame, the Countess de Volney, and of the nephew of the author," and it may therefore be taken for granted that Mr. Volney's portrait, as here given, is correct, and was satisfactory to his family. An explanation of the figures and diagrams shown on the map of the Astrological Heaven of the Ancients has been added in the appendix by the publisher. PETER ECKLER. New York, January 3, 1890. TRANSLATOR'S PREFACE OF THE ENGLISH EDITION PUBLISHED IN PARIS. To offer the public a new translation of Volney's Ruins may require some apology in the view of those who are acquainted with the work only in the English version which already exists, and which has had a general circulation. But those who are conversant with the book in the author's own language, and have taken pains to compare it with that version, must have been struck with the errors with which the English performance abounds. They must have regretted the loss of many original beauties, some of which go far in composing the essential merits of the work. The energy and dignity of the author's manner, the unaffected elevation of his style, the conciseness, perspicuity and simplicity of his diction, are everywhere suited to his subject, which is solemn, novel, luminous, affecting,--a subject perhaps the most universally interesting to the human race that has ever been presented to their contemplation. It takes the most liberal and comprehensive view of the social state of man, develops the sources of his errors in the most perspicuous and convincing manner, overturns his prejudices with the greatest delicacy and moderation, sets the wrongs he has suffered, and the rights he ought to cherish, in the clearest point of view, and lays before him the true foundation of morals--his only means of happiness. As the work has already become a classical one, even in English, and as it must become and continue to be so regarded in all languages in which it shall be faithfully rendered, we wish it to suffer as little as possible from a change of country;--that as much of the spirit of the original be transfused and preserved as is consistent with the nature of translation. How far we have succeeded in performing this service for the English reader we must not pretend to determine. We believe, however, that we have made an improved translation, and this without claiming any particular merit on our part, since we have had advantages which our predecessor had not. We have been aided by his labors; and, what is of still more importance, our work has been done under the inspection of the author, whose critical knowledge of both languages has given us a great facility in avoiding such errors as might arise from hurry or mistake. Paris, November 1, 1802. PREFACE OF THE LONDON EDITION.* * Published by T. Allman, 42 Holborn Hill, London, 1851. The plan of this publication was formed nearly ten years ago; and allusions to it may be seen in the preface to Travels in Syria and Egypt, as well as at the end of that work, (published in 1787). The performance was in some forwardness when the events of 1788 in France interrupted it. Persuaded that a development of the theory of political truth could not sufficiently acquit a citizen of his debt to society, the author wished to add practice; and that particularly at a time when a single arm was of consequence in the defence of the general cause. The same desire of public benefit which induced him to suspend his work, has since engaged him to resume it, and though it may not possess the same merit as if it had appeared under the circumstances that gave rise to it, yet he imagines that at a time when new passions are bursting forth,--passions that must communicate their activity to the religious opinions of men,--it is of importance to disseminate such moral truths as are calculated to operate as a curb and restraint. It is with this view he has endeavored to give to these truths, hitherto treated as abstract, a form likely to gain them a reception. It was found impossible not to shock the violent prejudices of some readers; but the work, so far from being the fruit of a disorderly and perturbed spirit, has been dictated by a sincere love of order and humanity. After reading this performance it will be asked, how it was possible in 1784 to have had an idea of what did not take place till the year 1790? The solution is simple. In the original plan the legislator was a fictitious and hypothetical being: in the present, the author has substituted an existing legislator; and the reality has only made the subject additionally interesting. PREFACE OF THE AMERICAN EDITION.* * The copy from which this preface is reprinted was published in Boston by Charles Gaylord, in 1833. It was given to the writer, when a mere lad, by a lady--almost a stranger--who was traveling through the little hamlet on the banks of the Hudson where he then resided. This lady assured me that the book was of great value, containing noble and sublime truths; and the only condition she attached to the gift was, that I should read it carefully and endeavor to understand its meaning. This I willingly promised and faithfully performed; and all who have "climbed the heights," and escaped from the thraldom of superstitious faith, will concede the inestimable value of such a gift-- rich with the peace and consolation that the truth imparts. --Pub. If books were to be judged of by their volume, the following would have but little value; if appraised by their contents, it will perhaps be reckoned among the most instructive. In general, nothing is more important than a good elementary book; but, also, nothing is more difficult to compose and even to read: and why? Because, as every thing in it should be analysis and definition, all should be expressed with truth and precision. If truth and precision are wanting, the object has not been attained; if they exist, its very force renders it abstract. The first of these defects has been hitherto evident in all books of morality. We find in them only a chaos of incoherent maxims, precepts without causes, and actions without a motive. The pedants of the human race have treated it like a little child: they have prescribed to it good behavior by frightening it with spirits and hobgoblins. Now that the growth of the human race is rapid, it is time to speak reason to it; it is time to prove to men that the springs of their improvement are to be found in their very organization, in the interest of their passions, and in all that composes their existence. It is time to demonstrate that morality is a physical and geometrical science, subject to the rules and calculations of the other mathematical sciences: and such is the advantage of the system expounded in this book, that the basis of morality being laid in it on the very nature of things, it is both constant and immutable; whereas, in all other theological systems, morality being built upon arbritary opinions, not demonstrable and often absurd, it changes, decays, expires with them, and leaves men in an absolute depravation. It is true that because our system is founded on facts and not on reveries, it will with much greater difficulty be extended and adopted: but it will derive strength from this very struggle, and sooner or later the eternal religion of Nature must overturn the transient religions of the human mind. This book was published for the first time in 1793, under the title of The French Citizen's Catechism. It was at first intended for a national work, but as it may be equally well entitled the Catechism of men of sense and honor, it is to be hoped that it will become a book common to all Europe. It is possible that its brevity may prevent it from attaining the object of a popular classical work, but the author will be satisfied if he has at least the merit of pointing out the way to make a better. ADVERTISEMENT OF THE AMERICAN EDITION. VOLNEY'S RUINS; OR MEDITATION ON THE REVOLUTIONS OF EMPIRES. The superior merits of this work are too well known to require commendation; but as it is not generally known that there are in circulation three English translations of it, varying materially in regard to faithfulness and elegance of diction, the publisher of the present edition inserts the following extracts for the information of purchasers and readers: PARIS TRANSLATION, First published in this Country by Dixon and Sickels. INVOCATION. Hail, solitary ruins! holy sepulchres, and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments--sublime contemplations. What useful lessons! what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you. When the whole earth, in chains and silence, bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor, and confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality! Within your pale, in solitary adoration of Liberty, I saw her Genius arise from the mansions of the dead; not such as she is painted by the impassioned multitude, armed with fire and sword, but under the august aspect of justice, poising in her hand the sacred balance, wherein are weighed the actions of men at the gates of eternity. O Tombs! what virtues are yours! you appal the tyrant's heart, and poison with secret alarm his impious joys; he flies, with coward step, your incorruptible aspect, and erects afar his throne of insolence. LONDON TRANSLATION. INVOCATION. Solitary ruins, sacred tombs, ye mouldering and silent walls, all hail! To you I address my invocation. While the vulgar shrink from your aspect with secret terror, my heart finds in the contemplation a thousand delicious sentiments, a thousand admirable recollections. Pregnant, I may truly call you, with useful lessons, with pathetic and irresistible advice to the man who knows how to consult you. A while ago the whole world bowed the neck in silence before the tyrants that oppressed it; and yet in that hopeless moment you already proclaimed the truths that tyrants hold in abhorrence: mixing the dust of the proudest kings with that of the meanest slaves, you called upon us to contemplate this example of Equality. From your caverns, whither the musing and anxious love of Liberty led me, I saw escape its venerable shade, and with unexpected felicity, direct its flight and marshal my steps the way to renovated France. Tombs! what virtues and potency do you exhibit! Tyrants tremble at your aspect--you poison with secret alarm their impious pleasures--they turn from you with impatience, and, coward like, endeavor to forget you amid the sumptuousness of their palaces. PHILADELPHIA TRANSLATION. INVOCATION. Hail, ye solitary ruins, ye sacred tombs, and silent walls! 'Tis your auspicious aid that I invoke; 'tis to you my soul, wrapt in meditation, pours forth its prayers! What though the profane and vulgar mind shrinks with dismay from your august and awe-inspiring aspect; to me you unfold the sublimest charms of contemplation and sentiment, and offer to my senses the luxury of a thousand delicious and enchanting thoughts! How sumptuous the feast to a being that has a taste to relish, and an understanding to consult you! What rich and noble admonitions; what exquisite and pathetic lessons do you read to a heart that is susceptible of exalted feelings! When oppressed humanity bent in timid silence throughout the globe beneath the galling yoke of slavery, it was you that proclaimed aloud the birthright of those truths which tyrants tremble at while they detect, and which, by sinking the loftiest head of the proudest potentate, with all his boasted pageantry, to the level of mortality with his meanest slave, confirmed and ratified by your unerring testimony the sacred and immortal doctrine of Equality. Musing within the precincts of your inviting scenes of philosophic solitude, whither the insatiate love of true-born Liberty had led me, I beheld her Genius ascending, not in the spurious character and habit of a blood-thirsty Fury, armed with daggers and instruments of murder, and followed by a frantic and intoxicated multitude, but under the placid and chaste aspect of Justice, holding with a pure and unsullied hand the sacred scales in which the actions of mortals are weighed on the brink of eternity. The first translation was made and published in London soon after the appearance of the work in French, and, by a late edition, is still adopted without alteration. Mr. Volney, when in this country in 1797, expressed his disapprobation of this translation, alleging that the translator must have been overawed by the government or clergy from rendering his ideas faithfully; and, accordingly, an English gentleman, then in Philadelphia, volunteered to correct this edition. But by his endeavors to give the true and full meaning of the author with great precision, he has so overloaded his composition with an exuberance of words, as in a great measure to dissipate the simple elegance and sublimity of the original. Mr. Volney, when he became better acquainted with the English language, perceived this defect; and with the aid of our countryman, Joel Barlow, made and published in Paris a new, correct, and elegant translation, of which the present edition is a faithful and correct copy. CONTENTS Publisher's Preface Translator's Preface Preface of London Edition Preface of the American Edition Advertisement of the American Edition The Life of Volney A List of Volney's Works Invocation Chap. I. The Journey II. The Reverie III. The Apparition IV. The Exposition V. Condition of Man in the Universe VI. The Primitive State of Man VII. Principles of Society VIII. Sources of the Evils of Societies IX. Origin of Governments and Laws X. General Causes of the Prosperity of Ancient States XI. General Causes of the Revolutions and Ruin of Ancient States XII. Lessons of Times Past repeated on the Present XIII. Will the Human Race Improve XIV. The Great Obstacle to Improvement XV. The New Age XVI. A Free and Legislative People XVII. Universal Basis of all Right and all Law XVIII. Consternation and Conspiracy of Tyrants XIX. General Assembly of the Nations XX. The Search of Truth XXI. Problem of Religious Contradictions XXII. Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas I. Origin of the Idea of God: Worship of the Elements and of the Physical Powers of Nature II. Second System. Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism III. Third System. Worship of Symbols, or Idolatry IV. Fourth System. Worship of two Principles, or Dualism V. Moral and Mystical Worship, or System of a Future State VI. Sixth System. The Animated World, or Worship of the Universe under diverse Emblems VII. Seventh System. Worship of the Soul of the World, that is to say, the Element of Fire, Vital Principle of the Universe VIII. Eighth System. The World Machine: Worship of the Demi- Ourgos, or Grand Artificer IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter) X. Religion of Zoroaster XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans XII. Brahmism, or Indian System XIII. Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun under the cabalistic names of Chrish-en or Christ and Yesus or Jesus XXIII. All Religions have the same Object XXIV. Solution of the Problem of Contradictions THE LAW OF NATURE. Chap. I. Of the Law of Nature II. Characters of the Law of Nature III. Principles of the Law of Nature relating to Man IV. Basis of Morality: of Good, of Evil, of Sin, of Crime, of Vice, and of Virtue V. Of Individual Virtues VI. On Temperance VII. On Continence VIII. On Courage and Activity IX. On Cleanliness X. On Domestic Virtues XI. The Social Virtues; Justice XII. Development of the Social Virtues Volney's Answer to Dr. Priestly. Appendix: The Zodiacal Signs and Constellations LIFE OF VOLNEY. By Count Daru. Constantine Francis Chassebeuf De Volney was born in 1757 at Craon, in that intermediate condition of life, which is of all the happiest, since it is deprived only of fortune's too dangerous favors, and can aspire to the social and intellectual advantages reserved for a laudable ambition. From his earliest youth, he devoted himself to the search after truth, without being disheartened by the serious studies which alone can initiate us into her secrets. After having become acquainted with the ancient languages, the natural sciences and history, and being admitted into the society of the most eminent literary characters, he submitted, at the age of twenty, to an illustrious academy, the solution of one of the most difficult problems that the history of antiquity has left open for discussion. This attempt received no encouragement from the learned men who were appointed his judges; and the author's only appeal from their sentence was to his courage and his efforts. Soon after, a small inheritance having fallen to his lot, the difficulty was how to spend it (these are his own words.) He resolved to employ it in acquiring, by a long voyage, a new fund of information, and determined to visit Egypt and Syria. But these countries could not be explored to advantage without a knowledge of the language. Our young traveller was not to be discouraged by this difficulty. Instead of learning Arabic in Europe, he withdrew to a convent of Copts, until he had made himself master of an idiom that is spoken by so many nations of the East. This resolution showed one of those undaunted spirits that remain unshaken amid the trials of life. Although, like other travellers, he might have amused us with an account of his hardships and the perils surmounted by his courage, he overcame the temptation of interrupting his narrative by personal adventures. He disdained the beaten track. He does not tell us the road he took, the accidents he met with, or the impressions he received. He carefully avoids appearing upon the stage; he is an inhabitant of the country, who has long and well observed it, and who describes its physical, political, and moral state. The allusion would be entire if an old Arab could be supposed to possess all the erudition, all the European philosophy, which are found united and in their maturity in a traveller of twenty-five. But though a master in all those artifices by which a narration is rendered interesting, the young man is not to be discerned in the pomp of labored descriptions. Although possessed of a lively and brilliant imagination, he is never found unwarily explaining by conjectural systems the physical or moral phenomena he describes. In his observations he unites prudence with science. With these two guides he judges with circumspection, and sometimes confesses himself unable to account for the effects he has made known to us. Thus his account has all the qualities that persuade--accuracy and candor. And when, ten years later, a vast military enterprise transported forty thousand travellers to the classic ground, which he had trod unattended, unarmed and unprotected, they all recognized a sure guide and an enlightened observer in the writer who had, as it seemed, only preceded them to remove or point out a part of the difficulties of the way. The unanimous testimony of all parties proved the accuracy of his account and the justness of his observations; and his Travels in Egypt and Syria were, by universal suffrage, recommended to the gratitude and the confidence of the public. Before the work had undergone this trial it had obtained in the learned world such a rapid and general success, that it found its way into Russia. The empress, then (in 1787) upon the throne, sent the author a medal, which he received with respect, as a mark of esteem for his talents, and with gratitude, as a proof of the approbation given to his principles. But when the empress declared against France, Volney sent back the honorable present, saying: "If I obtained it from her esteem, I can only preserve her esteem by returning it." The revolution of 1789, which had drawn upon France the menaces of Catharine, had opened to Volney a political career. As deputy in the assembly of the states-general, the first words he uttered there were in favor of the publicity of their deliberations. He also supported the organization of the national guards, and that of the communes and departments. At the period when the question of the sale of the domain lands was agitated (in 1790), he published an essay in which he lays down the following principles: "The force of a State is in proportion to its population; population is in proportion to plenty; plenty is in proportion to tillage; and tillage, to personal and immediate interest, that is to the spirit of property. Whence it follows, that the nearer the cultivator approaches the passive condition of a mercenary, the less industry and activity are to be expected from him; and, on the other hand, the nearer he is to the condition of a free and entire proprietor, the more extension he gives to his own forces, to the produce of his lands, and the general prosperity of the State." The author draws this conclusion, that a State is so much the more powerful as it includes a greater number of proprietors,--that is, a greater division of property. Conducted into Corsica by that spirit of observation which belongs only to men whose information is varied and extensive, he perceived at the first glance all that could be done for the improvement of agriculture in that country: but he knew that, for a people firmly attached to ancient customs, there can exist no other demonstration or means of persuasion than example. He purchased a considerable estate, and made experiments on those kinds of tillage that he hoped to naturalize in that climate. The sugar-cane, cotton, indigo and coffee soon demonstrated the success of his efforts. This success drew upon him the notice of the government. He was appointed director of agriculture and commerce in that island, where, through ignorance, all new methods are introduced with such difficulty. It is impossible to calculate all the good that might have resulted from this peaceable magistracy; and we know that neither instruction, zeal, nor a persevering courage was wanting to him who had undertaken it. Of this he had given convincing proofs. It was in obedience to another sentiment, no less respectable, that he voluntarily interrupted the course of his labors. When his fellow citizens of Angers appointed him their deputy in the constituent assembly, he resigned the employment he held under government, upon the principle that no man can represent the nation and be dependent for a salary upon those by whom it is administered. Through respect for the independence of his legislative functions, he had ceased to occupy the place he possessed in Corsica before his election, but he had not ceased to be a benefactor of that country. He returned thither after the session of the constituent assembly. Invited into that island by the principal inhabitants, who were anxious to put into practice his lessons, he spent there a part of the years 1792 and 1793. On his return he published a work entitled: An Account of the Present State of Corsica. This was an act of courage; for it was not a physical description, but a political review of the condition of a population divided into several factions and distracted by violent animosities. Volney unreservedly revealed the abuses, solicited the interest of France in favor of the Corsicans, without flattering them, and boldly denounced their defects and vices; so that the philosopher obtained the only recompense he could expect from his sincerity--he was accused by the Corsicans of heresy. To prove that he had not merited this reproach, he published soon after a short treatise entitled: The Law of Nature, or Physical Principles of Morality. He was soon exposed to a much more dangerous charge, and this, it must be confessed, he did merit. This philosopher, this worthy citizen, who in our first National assembly had seconded with his wishes and his talents the establishment of an order of things which he considered favorable to the happiness of his country, was accused of not being sincerely attached to that liberty for which he had contended; that is to say, of being averse to anarchy. An imprisonment of ten months, which only ended after the 9th of Thermidor, was a new trial reserved for his courage. The moment at which he recovered his liberty, was when the horror inspired by criminal excesses had recalled men to those noble sentiments which fortunately are one of the first necessaries of civilized life. They sought for consolations in study and literature after so many misfortunes, and organized a plan of public instruction. It was in the first place necessary to insure the aptitude of those to whom education should be confided; but as the systems were various, the best methods and a unity of doctrine were to be determined. It was not enough to interrogate the masters, they were to be formed, new ones were to be created, and for that purpose a school was opened in 1794, wherein the celebrity of the professors promised new instruction even to the best informed. This was not, as was objected, beginning the edifice at the roof, but creating architects, who were to superintend all the arts requisite for constructing the building. The more difficult their functions were, the greater care was to be taken in the choice of the professors; but France, though then accused of being plunged in barbarism, possessed men of transcendent talents, already enjoying the esteem of all Europe, and we may be bold to say, that by their labors, our literary glory had likewise extended its conquests. Their names were proclaimed by the public voice, and Volney's was associated with those of the men most illustrious in science and in literature.* * Lagrange, Laplace, Berthollet, Garat, Bernardin de Saint- Pierre, Daubenton, Hauy, Volney, Sicard, Monge, Thouin, La Harpe, Buache Mentelle. This institution, however, did not answer the expectations that had been formed of it, because the two thousand students that assembled from all parts of France were not equally prepared to receive these transcendent lessons, and because it had not been sufficiently ascertained how far the theory of education should be kept distinct from education itself. Volney's Lectures on History, which were attended by an immense concourse of auditors, became one of his chief claims to literary glory. When forced to interrupt them, by the suppression of the Normal school, he might have reasonably expected to enjoy in his retirement that consideration which his recent functions had added to his name. But, disgusted with the scenes he had witnessed in his native land, he felt that passion revive within him which, in his youth, had led him to visit Africa and Asia. America, civilized within a century, and free only within a few years, fixed his attention. There every thing was new,--the inhabitants, the constitution, the earth itself. These were objects worthy of his observation. When embarking for this voyage, however, he felt emotions very different from those which formerly accompanied him into Turkey. Then in the prime of life, he joyfully bid adieu to a land where peace and plenty reigned, to travel amongst barbarians; now, mature in years, but dismayed at the spectacle and experience of injustice and persecution, it was with diffidence, as we learn from himself, that he went to implore from a free people an asylum for a sincere friend of that liberty that had been so profaned. Our traveller had gone to seek for repose beyond the seas. He there found himself exposed to aggression from a celebrated philosopher, Dr. Priestley. Although the subject of this discussion was confined to the investigation of some speculative opinions, published by the French writer in his work entitled The Ruins, the naturalist in this attack employed a degree of violence which added nothing to the force of his arguments, and an acrimony of expression not to be expected from a philosopher. M. Volney, though accused of Hottentotism and ignorance, preserved in his defence, all the advantages that the scurrility of his adversary gave over him. He replied in English, and Priestley's countrymen could only recognize the Frenchman in the refinement and politeness of his answer. Whilst M. Volney was travelling in America, there had been formed in France a literary body which, under the name of Institute, had attained in a very few years a distinguished rank amongst the learned societies of Europe. The name of the illustrious traveller was inscribed in it at its formation, and he acquired new rights to the academical honors conferred on him during his absence, by the publication of his observations On the Climate and Soil of the United States. These rights were further augmented by the historical and physiological labors of the Academician. An examination and justification of The Chronology of Herodotus, with numerous and profound researches on The History of the most Ancient Nations, occupied for a long time him who had observed their monuments and traces in the countries they inhabited. The trial he had made of the utility of the Oriental languages inspired him with an ardent desire to propagate the knowledge of them; and to be propagated, he felt how necessary it was to render it less difficult. In this view he conceived the project of applying to the study of the idioms of Asia, a part of the grammatical notions we possess concerning the languages of Europe. It only appertains to those conversant with their relations of dissimilitude or conformity to appreciate the possibility of realizing this system. The author has, however, already received the most flattering encouragement and the most unequivocal appreciation, by the inscription of his name amongst the members of the learned and illustrious society founded by English commerce in the Indian peninsula. M. Volney developed his system in three works,* which prove that this idea of uniting nations separated by immense distances and such various idioms, had never ceased to occupy him for twenty-five years. Lest those essays, of the utility of which he was persuaded, should be interrupted by his death, with the clay-cold hand that corrected his last work, he drew up a will which institutes a premium for the prosecution of his labors. Thus he prolonged, beyond the term of a life entirely devoted to letters, the glorious services he had rendered to them. * On the Simplification of Oriental Languages, 1795. The European Alphabet Applied to the Languages of Asia, 1819. Hebrew Simplified, 1820. This is not the place, nor does it belong to me to appreciate the merit of the writings which render Volney's name illustrious. His name had been inscribed in the list of the Senate, and afterwards of the House of Peers. The philosopher who had travelled in the four quarters of the world, and observed their social state, had other titles to his admission into this body, than his literary glory. His public life, his conduct in the constituent assembly, his independent principles, the nobleness of his sentiments, the wisdom and fixity of his opinions, had gained him the esteem of those who can be depended upon, and with whom it is so agreeable to discuss political interests. Although no man had a better right to have an opinion, no one was more tolerant for the opinions of others. In State assemblies as well as in Academical meetings, the man whose counsels were so wise, voted according to his conscience, which nothing could bias; but the philosopher forgot his superiority to hear, to oppose with moderation, and sometimes to doubt. The extent and variety of his information, the force of his reason, the austerity of his manners, and the noble simplicity of his character, had procured him illustrious friends in both hemispheres; and now that this erudition is extinct in the tomb,* we may be allowed at least to predict that he was one of the very few whose memory shall never die. * He died in Paris on the 20th of April, 1820. A list of the Works Published by Count Volney. TRAVELS IN EGYPT AND SYRIA during the years 1783, 1784, and 1785: 2 vols. 8vo.--1787. CHRONOLOGY OF THE TWELVE CENTURIES that preceded the entrance of Xerxes into Greece. CONSIDERATIONS ON THE TURKISH WAR, in 1788. THE RUINS, or Meditations on the Revolutions of Empires--1791. ACCOUNT OF THE PRESENT STATE OF CORSICA--1793. THE LAW OF NATURE, or Physical Principles of Morality--1793. ON THE SIMPLIFICATION OF ORIENTAL LANGUAGES--1795. A LETTER TO DR. PRIESTLEY--1797. LECTURES ON HISTORY, delivered at the Normal School in the year 3--1800. ON THE CLIMATE AND SOIL OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, to which is added an account of Florida, of the French colony of Scioto, of some Canadian Colonies, and of the Savages--1803. REPORT MADE TO THE CELTIC ACADEMY ON THE RUSSIAN WORK OF PROFESSOR PALLAS, entitled "A Comparative Vocabulary of all the Languages in the World." THE CHRONOLOGY OF HERODOTUS conformable with his Text--1808 and 1809. NEW RESEARCHES ON ANCIENT HISTORY, 3 vols. 8vo.--1814 THE EUROPEAN ALPHABET Applied to the Languages of Asia--1819. A HISTORY OF SAMUEL--1819. HEBREW SIMPLIFIED--1820. INVOCATION. Hail solitary ruins, holy sepulchres and silent walls! you I invoke; to you I address my prayer. While your aspect averts, with secret terror, the vulgar regard, it excites in my heart the charm of delicious sentiments--sublime contemplations. What useful lessons, what affecting and profound reflections you suggest to him who knows how to consult you! When the whole earth, in chains and silence bowed the neck before its tyrants, you had already proclaimed the truths which they abhor; and confounding the dust of the king with that of the meanest slave, had announced to man the sacred dogma of Equality. Within your pale, in solitary adoration of Liberty, I saw her Genius arise from the mansions of the dead; not such as she is painted by the impassioned multitude, armed with fire and sword, but under the august aspect of Justice, poising in her hand the sacred balance wherein are weighed the actions of men at the gates of eternity! O Tombs! what virtues are yours! You appal the tyrant's heart, and poison with secret alarm his impious joys. He flies, with coward step, your incorruptible aspect, and erects afar his throne of insolence.* You punish the powerful oppressor; you wrest from avarice and extortion their ill-gotten gold, and you avenge the feeble whom they have despoiled; you compensate the miseries of the poor by the anxieties of the rich; you console the wretched, by opening to him a last asylum from distress; and you give to the soul that just equipoise of strength and sensibility which constitutes wisdom--the true science of life. Aware that all must return to you, the wise man loadeth not himself with the burdens of grandeur and of useless wealth: he restrains his desires within the limits of justice; yet, knowing that he must run his destined course of life, he fills with employment all its hours, and enjoys the comforts that fortune has allotted him. You thus impose on the impetuous sallies of cupidity a salutary rein! you calm the feverish ardor of enjoyments which disturb the senses; you free the soul from the fatiguing conflict of the passions; elevate it above the paltry interests which torment the crowd; and surveying, from your commanding position, the expanse of ages and nations, the mind is only accessible to the great affections--to the solid ideas of virtue and of glory. * The cathedral of St. Denis is the tomb of the kings of France; and it was because the towers of that edifice are seen from the Castle of St. Germain, that Louis XIV. quitted that admirable residence, and established a new one in the savage forests of Versailles. (This note, like many others, has been omitted from the American editions. It seems pertinent to the subject, and is explanatory of the text.--Pub.) Ah! when the dream of life is over, what will then avail all its agitations, if not one trace of utility remains behind? O Ruins! to your school I will return! I will seek again the calm of your solitudes; and there, far from the afflicting spectacle of the passions, I will cherish in remembrance the love of man, I will employ myself on the means of effecting good for him, and build my own happiness on the promotion of his. THE RUINS OF EMPIRES. CHAPTER I. THE JOURNEY. In the eleventh year of the reign of Abd-ul-Hamid, son of Ahmid, emperor of the Turks; when the Nogais-Tartars were driven from the Crimea, and a Mussulman prince of the blood of Gengis-Kahn became the vassal and guard of a Christian woman and queen,* I was travelling in the Ottoman dominions, and through those provinces which were anciently the kingdoms of Egypt and Syria. * In the eleventh year of Abd-ul-Hamid, that is 1784 of the Christian era, and 1198 of the Hegira. The emigration of the Tartars took place in March, immediately on the manifesto of the empress, declaring the Crimea to be incorporated with Russia. The Mussulman prince of the blood of Gengis-khan was Chahin-Guerai. Gengis-Khan was borne and served by the kings whom he conquered: Chahin, on the contrary, after selling his country for a pension of eighty thousand roubles, accepted the commission of captain of guards to Catherine II. He afterwards returned home, and according to custom was strangled by the Turks. My whole attention bent on whatever concerns the happiness of man in a social state, I visited cities, and studied the manners of their inhabitants; entered palaces, and observed the conduct of those who govern; wandered over fields, and examined the condition of those who cultivated them: and nowhere perceiving aught but robbery and devastation, tyranny and wretchedness, my heart was oppressed with sorrow and indignation. I saw daily on my road fields abandoned, villages deserted, and cities in ruin. Often I met with ancient monuments, wrecks of temples, palaces and fortresses, columns, aqueducts and tombs. This spectacle led me to meditate on times past, and filled my mind with contemplations the most serious and profound. Arrived at the city of Hems, on the border of the Orontes, and being in the neighborhood of Palmyra of the desert, I resolved to visit its celebrated ruins. After three days journeying through arid deserts, having traversed the Valley of Caves and Sepulchres, on issuing into the plain, I was suddenly struck with a scene of the most stupendous ruins--a countless multitude of superb columns, stretching in avenues beyond the reach of sight. Among them were magnificent edifices, some entire, others in ruins; the earth every where strewed with fragments of cornices, capitals, shafts, entablatures, pilasters, all of white marble, and of the most exquisite workmanship. After a walk of three-quarters of an hour along these ruins, I entered the enclosure of a vast edifice, formerly a temple dedicated to the Sun; and accepting the hospitality of some poor Arabian peasants, who had built their hovels on the area of the temple, I determined to devote some days to contemplate at leisure the beauty of these stupendous ruins. Daily I visited the monuments which covered the plain; and one evening, absorbed in reflection, I had advanced to the Valley of Sepulchres. I ascended the heights which surround it from whence the eye commands the whole group of ruins and the immensity of the desert. The sun had sunk below the horizon: a red border of light still marked his track behind the distant mountains of Syria; the full-orbed moon was rising in the east, on a blue ground, over the plains of the Euphrates; the sky was clear, the air calm and serene; the dying lamp of day still softened the horrors of approaching darkness; the refreshing night breezes attempered the sultry emanations from the heated earth; the herdsmen had given their camels to repose, the eye perceived no motion on the dusky and uniform plain; profound silence rested on the desert; the howlings only of the jackal,* and the solemn notes of the bird of night, were heard at distant intervals. Darkness now increased, and through the dusk could only be discerned the pale phantasms of columns and walls. The solitude of the place, the tranquillity of the hour, the majesty of the scene, impressed on my mind a religious pensiveness. The aspect of a great city deserted, the memory of times past, compared with its present state, all elevated my mind to high contemplations. I sat on the shaft of a column, my elbow reposing on my knee, and head reclining on my hand, my eyes fixed, sometimes on the desert, sometimes on the ruins, and fell into a profound reverie. * An animal resembling a dog and a fox. It preys on other small animals, and upon the bodies of the dead on the field of battle. It is the Canis aureus of Linnaeus. CHAPTER II. THE REVERIE. Here, said I, once flourished an opulent city; here was the seat of a powerful empire. Yes! these places now so wild and desolate, were once animated by a living multitude; a busy crowd thronged in these streets, now so solitary. Within these walls, where now reigns the silence of death, the noise of the arts, and the shouts of joy and festivity incessantly resounded; these piles of marble were regular palaces; these fallen columns adorned the majesty of temples; these ruined galleries surrounded public places. Here assembled a numerous people for the sacred duties of their religion, and the anxious cares of their subsistence; here industry, parent of enjoyments, collected the riches of all climes, and the purple of Tyre was exchanged for the precious thread of Serica;* the soft tissues of Cassimere for the sumptuous tapestry of Lydia; the amber of the Baltic for the pearls and perfumes of Arabia; the gold of Ophir for the tin of Thule. * The precious thread of Serica.--That is, the silk originally derived from the mountainous country where the great wall terminates, and which appears to have been the cradle of the Chinese empire. The tissues of Cassimere.-- The shawls which Ezekiel seems to have described under the appellation of Choud-choud. The gold of Ophir.--This country, which was one of the twelve Arab cantons, and which has so much and so unsuccessfully been sought for by the antiquarians, has left, however, some trace of itself in Ofor, in the province of Oman, upon the Persian Gulf, neighboring on one side to the Sabeans, who are celebrated by Strabo for their abundance of gold, and on the other to Aula or Hevila, where the pearl fishery was carried on. See the 27th chapter of Ezekiel, which gives a very curious and extensive picture of the commerce of Asia at that period. And now behold what remains of this powerful city: a miserable skeleton! What of its vast domination: a doubtful and obscure remembrance! To the noisy concourse which thronged under these porticoes, succeeds the solitude of death. The silence of the grave is substituted for the busy hum of public places; the affluence of a commercial city is changed into wretched poverty; the palaces of kings have become a den of wild beasts; flocks repose in the area of temples, and savage reptiles inhabit the sanctuary of the gods. Ah! how has so much glory been eclipsed? how have so many labors been annihilated? Do thus perish then the works of men--thus vanish empires and nations? And the history of former times revived in my mind; I remembered those ancient ages when many illustrious nations inhabited these countries; I figured to myself the Assyrian on the banks of the Tygris, the Chaldean on the banks of the Euphrates, the Persian reigning from the Indus to the Mediterranean. I enumerated the kingdoms of Damascus and Idumea, of Jerusalem and Samaria, the warlike states of the Philistines, and the commercial republics of Phoenicia. This Syria, said I, now so depopulated, then contained a hundred flourishing cities, and abounded with towns, villages, and hamlets.* In all parts were seen cultivated fields, frequented roads, and crowded habitations. Ah! whither have flown those ages of life and abundance?--whither vanished those brilliant creations of human industry? Where are those ramparts of Nineveh, those walls of Babylon, those palaces of Persepolis, those temples of Balbec and of Jerusalem? Where are those fleets of Tyre, those dock-yards of Arad, those work-shops of Sidon, and that multitude of sailors, of pilots, of merchants, and of soldiers? Where those husbandmen, harvests, flocks, and all the creation of living beings in which the face of the earth rejoiced? Alas! I have passed over this desolate land! I have visited the palaces, once the scene of so much splendor, and I beheld nothing but solitude and desolation. I sought the ancient inhabitants and their works, and found nothing but a trace, like the foot-prints of a traveller over the sand. The temples are fallen, the palaces overthrown, the ports filled up, the cities destroyed; and the earth, stripped of inhabitants, has become a place of sepulchres. Great God! whence proceed such fatal revolutions? What causes have so changed the fortunes of these countries? Wherefore are so many cities destroyed? Why has not this ancient population been reproduced and perpetuated? * According to Josephus and Strabo, there were in Syria twelve millions of souls, and the traces that remain of culture and habitation confirm the calculation. Thus absorbed in meditation, a crowd of new reflections continually poured in upon my mind. Every thing, continued I, bewilders my judgment, and fills my heart with trouble and uncertainty. When these countries enjoyed what constitutes the glory and happiness of man, they were inhabited by infidel nations: It was the Phoenician, offering human sacrifices to Moloch, who gathered into his stores the riches of all climates; it was the Chaldean, prostrate before his serpent-god,* who subjugated opulent cities, laid waste the palaces of kings, and despoiled the temples of the gods; it was the Persian, worshipper of fire, who received the tribute of a hundred nations; they were the inhabitants of this very city, adorers of the sun and stars, who erected so many monuments of prosperity and luxury. Numerous herds, fertile fields, abundant harvests--whatsoever should be the reward of piety--was in the hands of these idolaters. And now, when a people of saints and believers occupy these fields, all is become sterility and solitude. The earth, under these holy hands, produces only thorns and briers. Man soweth in anguish, and reapeth tears and cares. War, famine, pestilence, assail him by turns. And yet, are not these the children of the prophets? The Mussulman, Christian, Jew, are they not the elect children of God, loaded with favors and miracles? Why, then, do these privileged races no longer enjoy the same advantages? Why are these fields, sanctified by the blood of martyrs, deprived of their ancient fertility? Why have those blessings been banished hence, and transferred for so many ages to other nations and different climes? * The dragon Bell. At these words, revolving in my mind the vicissitudes which have transmitted the sceptre of the world to people so different in religion and manners from those in ancient Asia to the most recent of Europe, this name of a natal land revived in me the sentiment of my country; and turning my eyes towards France, I began to reflect on the situation in which I had left her.* * In the year 1782, at the close of the American war. I recalled her fields so richly cultivated, her roads so admirably constructed, her cities inhabited by a countless people, her fleets spread over every sea, her ports filled with the produce of both the Indies: and then comparing the activity of her commerce, the extent of her navigation, the magnificence of her buildings, the arts and industry of her inhabitants, with what Egypt and Syria had once possessed, I was gratified to find in modern Europe the departed splendor of Asia; but the charm of my reverie was soon dissolved by a last term of comparison. Reflecting that such had once been the activity of the places I was then contemplating, who knows, said I, but such may one day be the abandonment of our countries? Who knows if on the banks of the Seine, the Thames, the Zuyder-Zee, where now, in the tumult of so many enjoyments, the heart and the eye suffice not for the multitude of sensations,--who knows if some traveller, like myself, shall not one day sit on their silent ruins, and weep in solitude over the ashes of their inhabitants, and the memory of their former greatness. At these words, my eyes filled with tears: and covering my head with the fold of my mantle, I sank into gloomy meditations on all human affairs. Ah! hapless man, said I in my grief, a blind fatality sports with thy destiny!* A fatal necessity rules with the hand of chance the lot of mortals! But no: it is the justice of heaven fulfilling its decrees!--a God of mystery exercising his incomprehensible judgments! Doubtless he has pronounced a secret anathema against this land: blasting with maledictions the present, for the sins of past generations. Oh! who shall dare to fathom the depths of the Omnipotent? * Fatality is the universal and rooted prejudice of the East. "It was written," is there the answer to every thing. Hence result an unconcern and apathy, the most powerful impediments to instruction and civilization. And sunk in profound melancholy, I remained motionless. CHAPTER III. THE APPARITION. While thus absorbed, a sound struck my ear, like the agitation of a flowing robe, or that of slow footsteps on dry and rustling grass. Startled, I opened my mantle, and looking about with fear and trembling, suddenly, on my left, by the glimmering light of the moon, through the columns and ruins of a neighboring temple, I thought I saw an apparition, pale, clothed in large and flowing robes, such as spectres are painted rising from their tombs. I shuddered: and while agitated and hesitating whether to fly or to advance toward the object, a distinct voice, in solemn tones, pronounced these words: How long will man importune heaven with unjust complaint? How long, with vain clamors, will he accuse Fate as the author of his calamities? Will he forever shut his eyes to the light, and his heart to the admonitions of truth and reason? The light of truth meets him everywhere; yet he sees it not! The voice of reason strikes his ear; and he hears it not! Unjust man! if for a moment thou canst suspend the delusion which fascinates thy senses, if thy heart can comprehend the language of reason, interrogate these ruins! Read the lessons which they present to thee! And you, evidences of twenty centuries, holy temples! venerable tombs! walls once so glorious, appear in the cause of nature herself! Approach the tribunal of sound reason, and bear testimony against unjust accusations! Come and confound the declamations of a false wisdom or hypocritical piety, and avenge the heavens and the earth of man who calumniates them both! What is that blind fatality, which without order and without law, sports with the destiny of mortals? What is that unjust necessity, which confounds the effect of actions, whether of wisdom or of folly? In what consist the anathemas of heaven over this land? Where is that divine malediction which perpetuates the abandonment of these fields? Say, monuments of past ages! have the heavens changed their laws and the earth its motion? Are the fires of the sun extinct in the regions of space? Do the seas no longer emit their vapors? Are the rains and the dews suspended in the air? Do the mountains withhold their springs? Are the streams dried up? And do the plants no longer bear fruit and seed? Answer, generation of falsehood and iniquity, hath God deranged the primitive and settled order of things which he himself assigned to nature? Hath heaven denied to earth, and earth to its inhabitants, the blessings they formerly dispensed? If nothing hath changed in the creation, if the same means now exist which before existed, why then are not the present what former generations were? Ah! it is falsely that you accuse fate and heaven! it is unjustly that you accuse God as the cause of your evils! Say, perverse and hypocritical race! if these places are desolate, if these powerful cities are reduced to solitude, is it God who has caused their ruin? Is it his hand which has overthrown these walls, destroyed these temples, mutilated these columns, or is it the hand of man? Is it the arm of God which has carried the sword into your cities, and fire into your fields, which has slaughtered the people, burned the harvests, rooted up trees, and ravaged the pastures, or is it the hand of man? And when, after the destruction of crops, famine has ensued, is it the vengeance of God which has produced it, or the mad fury of mortals? When, sinking under famine, the people have fed on impure aliments, if pestilence ensues, is it the wrath of God which sends it, or the folly of man? When war, famine and pestilence, have swept away the inhabitants, if the earth remains a desert, is it God who has depopulated it? Is it his rapacity which robs the husbandman, ravages the fruitful fields, and wastes the earth, or is it the rapacity of those who govern? Is it his pride which excites murderous wars, or the pride of kings and their ministers? Is it the venality of his decisions which overthrows the fortunes of families, or the corruption of the organs of the law? Are they his passions which, under a thousand forms, torment individuals and nations, or are they the passions of man? And if, in the anguish of their miseries, they see not the remedies, is it the ignorance of God which is to blame, or their ignorance? Cease then, mortals, to accuse the decrees of Fate, or the judgments of the Divinity! If God is good, will he be the author of your misery? If he is just, will he be the accomplice of your crimes? No, the caprice of which man complains is not the caprice of fate; the darkness that misleads his reason is not the darkness of God; the source of his calamities is not in the distant heavens, it is beside him on the earth; it is not concealed in the bosom of the divinity; it dwells within himself, he bears it in his own heart. Thou murmurest and sayest: What! have an infidel people then enjoyed the blessings of heaven and earth? Are the holy people of God less fortunate than the races of impiety? Deluded man! where then is the contradiction which offends thee? Where is the inconsistency which thou imputest to the justice of heaven? Take into thine own hands the balance of rewards and punishments, of causes and effects. Say: when these infidels observed the laws of the heavens and the earth, when they regulated well-planned labors by the order of the seasons and the course of the stars, should the Almighty have disturbed the equilibrium of the universe to defeat their prudence? When their hands cultivated these fields with toil and care, should he have diverted the course of the rains, suspended the refreshing dews, and planted crops of thorns? When, to render these arid fields productive, their industry constructed aqueducts, dug canals, and led the distant waters across the desert, should he have dried up their sources in the mountains? Should he have blasted the harvests which art had nourished, wasted the plains which peace had peopled, overthrown cities which labor had created, or disturbed the order established by the wisdom of man? And what is that infidelity which founded empires by its prudence, defended them by its valor, and strengthened them by its justice--which built powerful cities, formed capacious ports, drained pestilential marshes, covered the ocean with ships, the earth with inhabitants; and, like the creative spirit, spread life and motion throughout the world? If such be infidelity, what then is the true faith? Doth sanctity consist in destruction? The God who peoples the air with birds, the earth with animals, the waters with fishes--the God who animates all nature--is he then a God of ruins and tombs? Demands he devastation for homage, and conflagration for sacrifice? Requires he groans for hymns, murderers for votaries, a ravaged and desolate earth for his temple? Behold then, holy and believing people, what are your works! behold the fruits of your piety! You have massacred the people, burned their cities, destroyed cultivation, reduced the earth to a solitude; and you ask the reward of your works! Miracles then must be performed! The people whom you extirpated must be recalled to life, the walls rebuilt which you have overthrown, the harvests reproduced which you have destroyed, the waters regathered which you have dispersed; the laws, in fine, of heaven and earth reversed; those laws, established by God himself, in demonstration of his magnificence and wisdom; those eternal laws, anterior to all codes, to all the prophets those immutable laws, which neither the passions nor the ignorance of man can pervert. But that passion which mistaketh, that ignorance which observeth neither causes nor effects, hath said in its folly: "All things flow from chance; a blind fatality poureth out good and evil upon the earth; success is not to the prudent, nor felicity to the wise;" or, assuming the language of hypocrisy, she hath said, "all things are from God; he taketh pleasure in deceiving wisdom and confounding reason." And Ignorance, applauding herself in her malice, hath said, "thus will I place myself on a par with that science which confounds me--thus will I excel that prudence which fatigues and torments me." And Avarice hath added: "I will oppress the weak, and devour the fruits of his labors; and I will say, it is fate which hath so ordained." But I! I swear by the laws of heaven and earth, and by the law which is written in the heart of man, that the hypocrite shall be deceived in his cunning--the oppressor in his rapacity! The sun shall change his course, before folly shall prevail over wisdom and knowledge, or ignorance surpass prudence, in the noble and sublime art of procuring to man his true enjoyments, and of building his happiness on an enduring foundation. CHAPTER IV. THE EXPOSITION Thus spoke the Phantom. Confused with this discourse, and my heart agitated with different reflections, I remained long in silence. At length, taking courage, I thus addressed him: Oh, Genius of tombs and ruins! Thy presence, thy severity, hath disordered my senses; but the justice of thy discourse restoreth confidence to my soul. Pardon my ignorance. Alas, if man is blind, shall his misfortune be also his crime? I may have mistaken the voice of reason; but never, knowingly, have I rejected its authority. Ah! if thou readest my heart, thou knowest with what enthusiasm it seeketh truth. Is it not in its pursuit that thou seest me in this sequestered spot? Alas! I have wandered over the earth, I have visited cities and countries; and seeing everywhere misery and desolation, a sense of the evils which afflict my fellow men hath deeply oppressed my soul. I have said, with a sigh: is man then born but for sorrow and anguish? And I have meditated upon human misery that I might discover a remedy. I have said, I will separate myself from the corruption of society; I will retire far from palaces where the mind is depraved by satiety and from the hovel where it is debased by misery. I will go into the desert and dwell among ruins; I will interrogate ancient monuments on the wisdom of past ages; I will invoke from the bosom of the tombs the spirit which once in Asia gave splendor to states, and glory to nations; I will ask of the ashes of legislators, by what secret causes do empires rise and fall; from what sources spring the Prosperity and misfortunes of nations, on what principles can the Peace of Society, and the happiness of man be established? I ceased, and with submissive look awaited the answer of the Genius. Peace and happiness, said he, attend those who practice justice! Since thy heart, O mortal, with sincerity seeketh truth; since thine eyes can still recognize her through the mist of prejudice, thy prayer shall not be in vain. I will unfold to thy view that truth thou invokest; I will teach thy reason that knowledge thou seekest; I will reveal to thee the science of ages and the wisdom of the tombs. Then approaching and laying his hand on my head, he said: Rise, mortal, and extricate thy senses from the dust in which thou movest. Suddenly a celestial flame seemed to dissolve the bands which held us to the earth; and, like a light vapor, borne on the wings of the Genius, I felt myself wafted to the regions above. Thence, from the aerial heights, looking down upon the earth, I perceived a scene altogether new. Under my feet, floating in the void, a globe like that of the moon, but smaller and less luminous, presented to me one of its phases; and that phase* had the aspect of a disk varigated with large spots, some white and nebulous, others brown, green or gray, and while I strained my sight to distinguish what they were, the Genius exclaimed: * See Plate representing half the terrestrial globe, opposite page 10. Disciple of Truth, knowest thou that object? O Genius, answered I, if I did not see the moon in another quarter of the heavens, I should have supposed that to be her globe. It has the appearance of that planet seen through the telescope during the obscuration of an eclipse. These varigated spots might be mistaken for seas and continents. They are seas and continents, said he, and those of the very hemisphere which you inhabit. What! said I, is that the earth--the habitation of man? Yes, replied he, that brown space which occupies irregularly a great portion of the disk, and envelops it almost on every side, is what you call the great ocean, which advancing from the south pole towards the equator, forms first the great gulf of India and Africa, then extends eastward across the Malay islands to the confines of Tartary, while towards the west it encircles the continents of Africa and of Europe, even to the north of Asia. That square peninsula under our feet is the arid country of the Arabs; the great continent on its left, almost as naked in its interior, with a little verdure only towards its borders, is the parched soil inhabited by black-men.* To the north, beyond a long, narrow and irregular sea,** are the countries of Europe, rich in meadows and cultivated fields. On its right, from the Caspian Sea, extend the snowy and naked plains of Tartary. Returning in this direction that white space is the vast and barren desert of Cobi, which separates China from the rest of the world. You see that empire in the furrowed plain which obliquely rounds itself off from our sight. On yonder coasts, those ragged tongues of land and scattered points are the peninsulas and islands of the Malays, the wretched possessors of the spices and perfumes. That triangle which advances so far into the sea, is the too famous peninsula of India.*** You see the winding course of the Ganges, the rough mountains of Thibet, the lovely valley of Cachemere, the briny deserts of Persia, the banks of the Euphrates and Tygris, the deep bed of the Jordan and the canals of the solitary Nile. * Africa. ** The Mediterranean. *** Of what real good has been the commerce of India to the mass of the people? On the contrary, how great the evil occasioned by the superstition of this country having been added the general superstition! O Genius, said I, interrupting him, the sight of a mortal reaches not to objects at such a distance. He touched my eyes, and immediately they became piercing as those of an eagle; nevertheless the rivers still appeared like waving lines, the mountains winding furrows, and the cities little compartments like the squares of a chess-board. And the Genius proceeded to enumerate and point out the objects to me: Those piles of ruins, said he, which you see in that narrow valley watered by the Nile, are the remains of opulent cities, the pride of the ancient kingdom of Ethiopia.* Behold the wrecks of her metropolis, of Thebes with her hundred palaces,** the parent of cities, and monument of the caprice of destiny. There a people, now forgotten, discovered, while others were yet barbarians, the elements of the arts and sciences. A race of men now rejected from society for their sable skin and frizzled hair, founded on the study of the laws of nature, those civil and religious systems which still govern the universe. Lower down, those dusky points are the pyramids whose masses have astonished you. Beyond that, the coast, hemmed in between the sea and a narrow ridge of mountains, was the habitation of the Phoenicians. These were the famous cities of Tyre, of Sidon, of Ascalon, of Gaza, and of Berytus. That thread of water with no outlet, is the river Jordan; and those naked rocks were once the theatre of events that have resounded throughout the world. Behold that desert of Horeb, and that Mount Sinai; where, by means beyond vulgar reach, a genius, profound and bold, established institutions which have weighed on the whole human race. On that dry shore which borders it, you perceive no longer any trace of splendor; yet there was an emporium of riches. There were those famous Ports of Idumea, whence the fleets of Phoenicia and Judea, coasting the Arabian peninsula, went into the Persian gulf, to seek there the pearls of Hevila, the gold of Saba and of Ophir. Yes, there on that coast of Oman and of Barhain was the seat of that commerce of luxuries, which, by its movements and revolutions, fixed the destinies of ancient nations.*** Thither came the spices and precious stones of Ceylon, the shawls of Cassimere, the diamonds of Golconda, the amber of Maldivia, the musk of Thibet, the aloes of Cochin, the apes and peacocks of the continent of India, the incense of Hadramaut, the myrrh, the silver, the gold dust and ivory of Africa; thence passing, sometimes by the Red Sea on the vessels of Egypt and Syria, these luxuries nourished successively the wealth of Thebes, of Sidon, of Memphis and of Jerusalem; sometimes, ascending the Tygris and Euphrates, they awakened the activity of the Assyrians, Medes, Chaldeans, and Persians; and that wealth, according to the use or abuse of it, raised or reversed by turns their domination. Hence sprung the magnificence of Persepolis, whose columns you still perceive; of Ecbatana, whose sevenfold wall is destroyed; of Babylon,**** now leveled with the earth; of Nineveh, of which scarce the name remains; of Thapsacus, of Anatho, of Gerra, and of desolated Palmyra. O names for ever glorious! fields of renown! countries of never-dying memory! what sublime lessons doth your aspect offer! what profound truths are written on the surface of your soil! remembrances of times past, return into my mind! places, witnesses of the life of man in so many different ages, retrace for me the revolutions of his fortune! say, what were their springs and secret causes! say, from what sources he derived success and disgrace! unveil to himself the causes of his evils! correct him by the spectacle of his errors! teach him the wisdom which belongeth to him, and let the experience of past ages become a means of instruction, and a germ of happiness to present and future generations. * In the new Encyclopedia 3rd vol. Antiquities is published a memoir, respecting the chronology of the twelve ages anterior to the passing of Xerxes into Greece, in which I conceive myself to have proved that upper Egypt formerly composed a distinct kingdom known to the Hebrews by the name of Kous and to which the appellation of Ethiopia was specially given. This kingdom preserved its independence to the time of Psammeticus; at which period, being united to the Lower Egypt, it lost its name of Ethiopia, which thenceforth was bestowed upon the nations of Nubia and upon the different tribes of blacks, including Thebes, their metropolis. ** The idea of a city with a hundred gates, in the common acceptation of the word, is so absurd, that I am astonished the equivoque has not before been felt. It has ever been the custom of the East to call palaces and houses of the great by the name of gates, because the principal luxury of these buildings consists in the singular gate leading from the street into the court, at the farthest extremity of which the palace is situated. It is under the vestibule of this gate that conversation is held with passengers, and a sort of audience and hospitality given. All this was doubtless known to Homer; but poets make no commentaries, and readers love the marvellous. This city of Thebes, now Lougsor, reduced to the condition of a miserable village, has left astonishing monuments of its magnificence. Particulars of this may be seen in the plates of Norden, in Pocock, and in the recent travels of Bruce. These monuments give credibility to all that Homer has related of its splendor, and lead us to infer its political power and external commerce. Its geographical position was favorable to this twofold object. For, on one side, the valley of the Nile, singularly fertile, must have early occasioned a numerous population; and, on the other, the Red Sea, giving communication with Arabia and India, and the Nile with Abyssinia and the Mediterranean, Thebes was thus naturally allied to the richest countries on the globe; an alliance that procured it an activity so much the greater, as Lower Egypt, at first a swamp, was nearly, if not totally, uninhabited. But when at length this country had been drained by the canals and dikes which Sesostris constructed, population was introduced there, and wars arose which proved fatal to the power of Thebes. Commerce then took another route, and descended to the point of the Red Sea, to the canals of Sesostris (see Strabo), and wealth and activity were transferred to Memphis. This is manifestly what Diodorus means when he tells us (lib. i. sect. 2), that as soon as Memphis was established and made a wholesome and delicious abode, kings abandoned Thebes to fix themselves there. Thus Thebes continued to decline, and Memphis to flourish, till the time of Alexander, who, building Alexandria on the border of the sea, caused Memphis to fall in its turn; so that prosperity and power seem to have descended historically step by step along the Nile; whence it results, both physically and historically, that the existence of Thebes was prior to that of the other cities. The testimony of writers is very positive in this respect. "The Thebans," says Diodorus, "consider themselves as the most ancient people of the earth, and assert, that with them originated philosophy and the science of the stars. Their situation, it is true, is infinitely favorable to astronomical observation, and they have a more accurate division of time into mouths and years than other nations" etc. What Diodorus says of the Thebans, every author, and himself elsewhere, repeat of the Ethiopians, which tends more firmly to establish the identity of this place of which I have spoken. "The Ethiopians conceive themselves," says he, lib. iii., "to be of greater antiquity than any other nation: and it is probable that, born under the sun's path, its warmth may have ripened them earlier than other men. They suppose themselves also to be the inventors of divine worship, of festivals, of solemn assemblies, of sacrifices, and every other religious practice. They affirm that the Egyptians are one of their colonies, and that the Delta, which was formerly sea, became land by the conglomeration of the earth of the higher country which was washed down by the Nile. They have, like the Egyptians, two species of letters, hieroglyphics, and the alphabet; but among the Egyptians the first was known only to the priests, and by them transmitted from father to son, whereas both species were common among the Ethiopians." "The Ethiopians," says Lucian, page 985, "were the first who invented the science of the stars, and gave names to the planets, not at random and without meaning, but descriptive of the qualities which they conceived them to possess; and it was from them that this art passed, still in an imperfect state, to the Egyptians." It would be easy to multiply citations upon this subject; from all which it follows, that we have the strongest reasons to believe that the country neighboring to the tropic was the cradle of the sciences, and of consequence that the first learned nation was a nation of Blacks; for it is incontrovertible, that, by the term Ethiopians, the ancients meant to represent a people of black complexion, thick lips, and woolly hair. I am therefore inclined to believe, that the inhabitants of Lower Egypt were originally a foreign colony imported from Syria and Arabia, a medley of different tribes of savages, originally shepherds and fishermen, who, by degrees formed themselves into a nation, and who, by nature and descent, were enemies of the Thebans, by whom they were no doubt despised and treated as barbarians. I have suggested the same ideas in my Travels into Syria, founded upon the black complexion of the Sphinx. I have since ascertained that the antique images of Thebias have the same characteristic; and Mr. Bruce has offered a multitude of analogous facts; but this traveller, of whom I heard some mention at Cairo, has so interwoven these facts with certain systematic opinions, that we should have recourse to his narratives with caution. It is singular that Africa, situated so near us, should be the least known country on the earth. The English are at this moment making explorations, the success of which ought to excite our emulation. *** Ailah (Eloth), and Atsiom-Gaber (Hesien-Geber.) The name of the first of these towns still subsists in its ruins, at the point of the gulf of the Red Sea, and in the route which the pilgrims take to Mecca. Hesion has at present no trace, any more than Quolzoum and Faran: it was, however, the harbor for the fleets of Solomon. The vessels of this prince conducted by the Tyrians, sailed along the coast of Arabia to Ophir, in the Persian Gulf, thus opening a communication with the merchants of India and Ceylon. That this navigation was entirely of Tyrian invention, appears both from the pilots and shipbuilders employed by the Jews, and the names that were given to the trading islands, viz. Tyrus and Aradus, now Barhain. The voyage was performed in two different modes, either in canoes of osier and rushes, covered on the outside with skins done over with pitch: (these vessels were unable to quit the Red Sea, or so much as to leave the shore.) The second mode of carrying on the trade was by means of vessels with decks of the size of our river boats, which were able to pass the strait and to weather the dangers of time ocean; but for this purpose it was necessary to bring the wood from Mount Libanus and Cilicia, where it is very fine and in great abundance. This wood was first conveyed in floats from Tarsus to Phoenicia, for which reason the vessels were called ships of Tarsus; from whence it has been ridiculously inferred, that they went round the promontory of Africa as far as Tortosa in Spain. From Phoenicia it was transported on the backs of camels to the Red Sea, which practice still continues, because the shores of this sea are absolutely unprovided with wood even for fuel. These vessels spent a complete year in their voyage, that is, sailed one year, sojourned another, and did not return till the third. This tediousness was owing first to their cruising from port to port, as they do at present; secondly, to their being detained by the Monsoon currents; and thirdly, because, according to the calculations of Pliny and Strabo, it was the ordinary practice among the ancients to spend three years in a voyage of twelve hundred leagues. Such a commerce must have been very expensive, particularly as they were obliged to carry with them their provisions, and even fresh water. For this reason Solomon made himself master of Palmyra, which was at that time inhabited, and was already the magazine and high road of merchants by the way of the Euphrates. This conquest brought Solomon much nearer to the country of gold and pearls. This alternative of a route either by the Red Sea or by the river Euphrates was to the ancients, what in later times has been the alternative in a voyage to the Indies, either by crossing the isthmus of Suez or doubling the cape of Good Hope. It appears that till the time of Moses, this trade was carried on across the desert of Syria and Thebais; that afterwards it fell into the hands of the Phoenicians, who fixed its site upon the Red Sea; and that it was mutual jealousy that induced the kings of Nineveh and Babylon to undertake the destruction of Tyre and Jerusalem. I insist the more upon these facts, because I have never seen any thing reasonable upon the subject. **** It appears that Babylon occupied on the eastern banks of the Euphrates a space of ground six leagues in length. Throughout this space bricks are found by means of which daily additions are made to the town of Helle. Upon many of these are characters written with a nail similar to those of Persepolis. I am indebted for these facts to M. de Beauchamp, grand vicar of Babylon, a traveller equally distinguished for his knowledge of astronomy and for his veracity. CHAPTER V. CONDITION OF MAN IN THE UNIVERSE. The Genius, after some moments of silence, resumed in these words: I have told thee already, O friend of truth! that man vainly ascribes his misfortunes to obscure and imaginary agents; in vain he seeks as the source of his evils mysterious and remote causes. In the general order of the universe his condition is, doubtless, subject to inconveniences, and his existence governed by superior powers; but those powers are neither the decrees of a blind fatality, nor the caprices of whimsical and fantastic beings. Like the world of which he forms a part, man is governed by natural laws, regular in their course, uniform in their effects, immutable in their essence; and those laws,--the common source of good and evil,--are not written among the distant stars, nor hidden in codes of mystery; inherent in the nature of terrestrial beings, interwoven with their existence, at all times and in all places, they are present to man; they act upon his senses, they warn his understanding, and give to every action its reward or punishment. Let man then know these laws! let him comprehend the nature of the elements which surround him, and also his own nature, and he will know the regulators of his destiny; he will know the causes of his evils and the remedies he should apply. When the hidden power which animates the universe, formed the globe which man inhabits, he implanted in the beings composing it, essential properties which became the law of their individual motion, the bond of their reciprocal relations, the cause of the harmony of the whole; he thereby established a regular order of causes and effects, of principles and consequences, which, under an appearance of chance, governs the universe, and maintains the equilibrium of the world. Thus, he gave to fire, motion and activity; to air, elasticity; weight and density to matter; he made air lighter than water, metal heavier than earth, wood less cohesive than steel; he decreed flame to ascend, stones to fall, plants to vegetate; to man, who was to be exposed to the action of so many different beings, and still to preserve his frail life, he gave the faculty of sensation. By this faculty all action hurtful to his existence gives him a feeling of pain and evil, and all which is salutary, of pleasure and happiness. By these sensations, man, sometimes averted from that which wounds his senses, sometimes allured towards that which soothes them, has been obliged to cherish and preserve his own life; thus, self-love, the desire of happiness, aversion to pain, become the essential and primary laws imposed on man by nature herself--the laws which the directing power, whatever it be, has established for his government--and which laws, like those of motion in the physical world, are the simple and fruitful principle of whatever happens in the moral world. Such, then, is the condition of man: on one side, exposed to the action of the elements which surround him, he is subject to many inevitable evils; and if, in this decree, nature has been severe, on the other hand, just and even indulgent she has not only tempered the evils with equivalent good, she has also enabled him to increase the good and alleviate the evil. She seems to say: "Feeble work of my hands, I owe thee nothing, and I give thee life; the world wherein I placed thee was not made for thee, yet I give thee the use of it; thou wilt find in it a mixture of good and evil; it is for thee to distinguish them; for thee to guide thy footsteps in a path containing thorns as well as roses. Be the arbiter of thine own fate; I put thy destiny into thine own hands!" Yes, man is made the architect of his own destiny; he, himself, hath been the cause of the successes or reverses of his own fortune; and if, on a review of all the pains with which he has tormented his own life, he finds reason to weep over his own weakness or imprudence yet, considering the beginnings from which he sat out, and the height attained, he has, perhaps, still reason to presume on his strength, and to pride himself on his genius. CHAPTER VI. THE PRIMITIVE STATE OF MAN. Formed naked in body and in mind, man at first found himself thrown, as it were by chance, on a rough and savage land: an orphan, abandoned by the unknown power which had produced him, he saw not by his side beings descended from heaven to warn him of those wants which arise only from his senses, nor to instruct him in those duties which spring only from his wants. Like to other animals, without experience of the past, without foresight of the future, he wandered in the bosom of the forest, guided only and governed by the affections of his nature. By the pain of hunger, he was led to seek food and provide for his subsistence; by the inclemency of the air, he was urged to cover his body, and he made him clothes; by the attraction of a powerful pleasure, he approached a being like himself, and he perpetuated his kind. Thus the impressions which he received from every object, awakening his faculties, developed by degrees his understanding, and began to instruct his profound ignorance: his wants excited industry, dangers formed his courage; he learned to distinguish useful from noxious plants, to combat the elements, to seize his prey, to defend his life; and thus he alleviated its miseries. Thus self-love, aversion to pain, the desire of happiness, were the simple and powerful excitements which drew man from the savage and barbarous condition in which nature had placed him. And now, when his life is replete with enjoyments, when he may count each day by the comforts it brings, he may applaud himself and say: "It is I who have produced the comforts which surround me; it is I who am the author of my own happiness; a safe dwelling, convenient clothing, abundant and wholesome nourishment, smiling fields, fertile hills, populous empires, all is my work; without me this earth, given up to disorder, would have been but a filthy fen, a wild wood, a dreary desert." Yes, creative man, receive my homage! Thou hast measured the span of the heavens, calculated the volume of the stars, arrested the lightning in its clouds, subdued seas and storms, subjected all the elements. Ah! how are so many sublime energies allied to so many errors? CHAPTER VII. PRINCIPLES OF SOCIETY. Wandering in the woods and on the banks of rivers in pursuit of game and fish, the first men, beset with dangers, assailed by enemies, tormented by hunger, by reptiles, by ravenous beasts, felt their own individual weakness; and, urged by a common need of safety, and a reciprocal sentiment of like evils, they united their resources and their strength; and when one incurred a danger, many aided and succored him; when one wanted subsistence, another shared his food with him. Thus men associated to secure their existence, to augment their powers, to protect their enjoyments; and self-love thus became the principle of society. Instructed afterwards by the experience of various and repeated accidents, by the fatigues of a wandering life, by the distress of frequent scarcity, men reasoned with themselves and said: "Why consume our days in seeking scattered fruits from a parsimonious soil? why exhaust ourselves in pursuing prey which eludes us in the woods or waters? why not collect under our hands the animals that nourish us? why not apply our cares in multiplying and preserving them? We will feed on their increase, be clothed in their skins, and live exempt from the fatigues of the day and solicitude for the morrow." And men, aiding one another, seized the nimble goat, the timid sheep; they tamed the patient camel, the fierce bull, the impetuous horse; and, applauding their own industry, they sat down in the joy of their souls, and began to taste repose and comfort: and self-love, the principle of all reasoning, became the incitement to every art, and every enjoyment. When, therefore, men could pass long days in leisure, and in communication of their thoughts, they began to contemplate the earth, the heavens, and their own existence as objects of curiosity and reflection; they remarked the course of the seasons, the action of the elements, the properties of fruits and plants; and applied their thoughts to the multiplication of their enjoyments. And in some countries, having observed that certain seeds contained a wholesome nourishment in a small volume, convenient for transportation and preservation, they imitated the process of nature; they confided to the earth rice, barley, and corn, which multiplied to the full measure of their hope; and having found the means of obtaining within a small compass and without removal, plentiful subsistence and durable stores, they established themselves in fixed habitations; they built houses, villages, and towns; formed societies and nations; and self-love produced all the developments of genius and of power. Thus by the aid of his own faculties, man has raised himself to the astonishing height of his present fortune. Too happy if, observing scrupulously the law of his being, he had faithfully fulfilled its only and true object! But, by a fatal imprudence, sometimes mistaking, sometimes transgressing its limits, he has launched forth into a labyrinth of errors and misfortunes; and self-love, sometimes unruly, sometimes blind, became a principle fruitful in calamities. CHAPTER VIII. SOURCES OF THE EVILS OF SOCIETY. In truth, scarcely were the faculties of men developed, when, inveigled by objects which gratify the senses, they gave themselves up to unbridled desires. The sweet sensations which nature had attached to their real wants, to endear to them their existence, no longer satisfied them. Not content with the abundance offered by the earth or produced by industry, they wished to accumulate enjoyments and coveted those possessed by their fellow men. The strong man rose up against the feeble, to take from him the fruit of his labor; the feeble invoked another feeble one to repel the violence. Two strong ones then said: "Why fatigue ourselves to produce enjoyments which we may find in the hands of the weak? Let us join and despoil them; they shall labor for us, and we will enjoy without labor." And the strong associating for oppression and the weak for resistance, men mutually afflicted each other; and a general and fatal discord spread over the earth, in which the passions, assuming a thousand new forms, have generated a continued chain of misfortunes. Thus the same self-love which, moderate and prudent, was a principle of happiness and perfection, becoming blind and disordered, was transformed into a corrupting poison; and cupidity, offspring and companion of ignorance, became the cause of all the evils that have desolated the earth. Yes, ignorance and cupidity! these are the twin sources of all the torments of man! Biased by these into false ideas of happiness, he has mistaken or broken the laws of nature in his own relation with external objects; and injuring his own existence, has violated individual morality; shutting through these his heart to compassion, and his mind to justice, he has injured and afflicted his equal, and violated social morality. From ignorance and cupidity, man has armed against man, family against family, tribe against tribe; and the earth is become a theatre of blood, of discord, and of rapine. By ignorance and cupidity, a secret war, fermenting in the bosom of every state, has separated citizen from citizen; and the same society has divided itself into oppressors and oppressed, into masters and slaves; by these, the heads of a nation, sometimes insolent and audacious, have forged its chains within its own bowels; and mercenary avarice has founded political despotism. Sometimes, hypocritical and cunning, they have called from heaven a lying power, and a sacrilegious yoke; and credulous cupidity has founded religious despotism. By these have been perverted the ideas of good and evil, just and unjust, vice and virtue; and nations have wandered in a labyrinth of errors and calamities. The cupidity of man and his ignorance,--these are the evil genii which have wasted the earth! These are the decrees of fate which have overthrown empires! These are the celestial anathemas which have smitten these walls once so glorious, and converted the splendor of a populous city into a solitude of mourning and of ruins! But as in the bosom of man have sprung all the evils which have afflicted his life, there he also is to seek and to find their remedies. CHAPTER IX. ORIGIN OF GOVERNMENT AND LAWS. In fact, it soon happened that men, fatigued with the evils they reciprocally inflicted, began to sigh for peace; and reflecting on their misfortunes and the causes of them, they said: "We are mutually injuring each other by our passions; and, aiming to grasp every thing, we hold nothing. What one seizes to-day, another takes to-morrow, and our cupidity reacts upon ourselves. Let us establish judges, who shall arbitrate our rights, and settle our differences! When the strong shall rise against the weak, the judge shall restrain him, and dispose of our force to suppress violence; and the life and property of each shall be under the guarantee and protection of all; and all shall enjoy the good things of nature." Conventions were thus formed in society, sometimes express, sometimes tacit, which became the rule for the action of individuals, the measure of their rights, the law of their reciprocal relations; and persons were appointed to superintend their observance, to whom the people confided the balance to weigh rights, and the sword to punish transgressions. Thus was established among individuals a happy equilibrium of force and action, which constituted the common security. The name of equity and of justice was recognized and revered over the earth; every one, assured of enjoying in peace, the fruits of his toil, pursued with energy the objects of his attention; and industry, excited and maintained by the reality or the hope of enjoyment, developed, all the riches of art and of nature. The fields were covered with harvests, the valleys with flocks, the hills with fruits, the sea with vessels, and man became happy and powerful on the earth. Thus did his own wisdom repair the disorder which his imprudence had occasioned; and that wisdom was only the effect of his own organization. He respected the enjoyments of others in order to secure his own; and cupidity found its corrective in the enlightened love of self. Thus the love of self, the moving principle of every individual, becomes the necessary foundation of every association; and on the observance of that law of our nature has depended the fate of nations. Have the factitious and conventional laws tended to that object and accomplished that aim? Every one, urged by a powerful instinct, has displayed all the faculties of his being; and the sum of individual felicities has constituted the general felicity. Have these laws, on the contrary, restrained the effort of man toward his own happiness? His heart, deprived of its exciting principle, has languished in inactivity, and from the oppression of individuals has resulted the weakness of the state. As self-love, impetuous and improvident, is ever urging man against his equal, and consequently tends to dissolve society, the art of legislation and the merit of administrators consists in attempering the conflict of individual cupidities, in maintaining an equilibrium of powers, and securing to every one his happiness, in order that, in the shock of society against society, all the members may have a common interest in the preservation and defence of the public welfare. The internal splendor and prosperity of empires then, have had for their efficient cause the equity of their laws and government; and their respective external powers have been in proportion to the number of persons interested, and their degree of interest in the public welfare. On the other hand, the multiplication of men, by complicating their relations, having rendered the precise limitation of their rights difficult, the perpetual play of the passions having produced incidents not foreseen--their conventions having been vicious, inadequate, or nugatory--in fine, the authors of the laws having sometimes mistaken, sometimes disguised their objects; and their ministers, instead of restraining the cupidity of others, having given themselves up to their own; all these causes have introduced disorder and trouble into societies; and the viciousness of laws and the injustice of governments, flowing from cupidity and ignorance, have become the causes of the misfortunes of nations, and the subversion of states. CHAPTER X. GENERAL CAUSES OF THE PROSPERITY OF ANCIENT STATES. Such, O man who seekest wisdom, such have been the causes of revolution in the ancient states of which thou contemplatest the ruins! To whatever spot I direct my view, to whatever period my thoughts recur, the same principles of growth or destruction, of rise or fall, present themselves to my mind. Wherever a people is powerful, or an empire prosperous, there the conventional laws are conformable with the laws of nature--the government there procures for its citizens a free use of their faculties, equal security for their persons and property. If, on the contrary, an empire goes to ruin, or dissolves, it is because its laws have been vicious, or imperfect, or trodden under foot by a corrupt government. If the laws and government, at first wise and just, become afterwards depraved, it is because the alternation of good and evil is inherent to the heart of man, to a change in his propensities, to his progress in knowledge, to a combination of circumstances and events; as is proved by the history of the species. In the infancy of nations, when men yet lived in the forest, subject to the same wants, endowed with the same faculties, all were nearly equal in strength; and that equality was a circumstance highly advantageous in the composition of society: as every individual, thus feeling himself sufficiently independent of every other, no one was the slave, none thought of being the master of another. Man, then a novice, knew neither servitude nor tyranny; furnished with resources sufficient for his existence, he thought not of borrowing from others; owning nothing, requiring nothing, he judged the rights of others by his own, and formed ideas of justice sufficiently exact. Ignorant, moreover, in the art of enjoyments, unable to produce more than his necessaries, possessing nothing superfluous, cupidity remained dormant; or if excited, man, attacked in his real wants, resisted it with energy, and the foresight of such resistance ensured a happy balance. Thus original equality, in default of compact, maintained freedom of person, security of property, good manners, and order. Every one labored by himself and for himself; and the mind of man, being occupied, wandered not to culpable desires. He had few enjoyments, but his wants were satisfied; and as indulgent nature had made them less than his resources, the labor of his hands soon produced abundance--abundance, population; the arts unfolded, culture extended, and the earth, covered with numerous inhabitants, was divided into different dominions. The relations of man becoming complicated, the internal order of societies became more difficult to maintain. Time and industry having generated riches, cupidity became more active; and because equality, practicable among individuals, could not subsist among families, the natural equilibrium was broken; it became necessary to supply it by a factitious equilibrium; to set up chiefs, to establish laws; and in the primitive inexperience, it necessarily happened that these laws, occasioned by cupidity, assumed its character. But different circumstances concurred to correct the disorder, and oblige governments to be just. States, in fact, being weak at first, and having foreign enemies to fear, the chiefs found it their interest not to oppress their subjects; for, by lessening the confidence of the citizens in their government, they would diminish their means of resistance--they would facilitate foreign invasion, and by exercising arbitrary power, have endangered their very existence. In the interior, the firmness of the people repelled tyranny; men had contracted too long habits of independence; they had too few wants, and too much consciousness of their own strength. States being of a moderate size, it was difficult to divide their citizens so as to make use of some for the oppression of others. Their communications were too easy, their interest too clear and simple: besides, every one being a proprietor and cultivator, no one needed to sell himself, and the despot could find no mercenaries. If, then, dissensions arose, they were between family and family, faction and faction, and they interested a great number. The troubles, indeed, were warmer; but fears from abroad pacified discord at home. If the oppression of a party prevailed, the earth being still unoccupied, and man, still in a state of simplicity, finding every where the same advantages, the oppressed party emigrated, and carried elsewhere their independence. The ancient states then enjoyed within themselves numerous means of prosperity and power. Every one finding his own well-being in the constitution of his country, took a lively interest in its preservation. If a stranger attacked it, having to defend his own field, his own house, he carried into combat all the passions of a personal quarrel; and, devoted to his own interests, he was devoted to his country. As every action useful to the public attracted its esteem and gratitude, every one became eager to be useful; and self-love multiplied talents and civic virtues. Every citizen contributing equally by his talents and person, armies and funds were inexhaustible, and nations displayed formidable masses of power. The earth being free, and its possession secure and easy, every one was a proprietor; and the division of property preserved morals, and rendered luxury impossible. Every one cultivating for himself, culture was more active, produce more abundant; and individual riches became public wealth. The abundance of produce rendering subsistence easy, population was rapid and numerous, and states attained quickly the term of their plenitude. Productions increasing beyond consumption, the necessity of commerce arose; and exchanges took place between people and people; which augmented their activity and reciprocal advantages. In fine, certain countries, at certain times, uniting the advantages of good government with a position on the route of the most active circulation, they became emporiums of flourishing commerce and seats of powerful domination. And on the shores of the Nile and Mediterranean, of the Tygris and Euphrates, the accumulated riches of India and of Europe raised in successive splendor a hundred different cities. The people, growing rich, applied their superfluity to works of common and public use; and this was in every state, the epoch of those works whose grandeur astonishes the mind; of those wells of Tyre, of those dykes of the Euphrates, of those subterranean conduits of Media,* of those fortresses of the desert, of those aqueducts of Palmyra, of those temples, of those porticoes. And such labors might be immense, without oppressing the nations; because they were the effect of an equal and common contribution of the force of individuals animated and free. * See respecting these monuments my Travels into Syria, vol. ii. p. 214. From the town or village of Samouat the course of the Euphrates is accompanied with a double bank, which descends as far as its junction with the Tygris, and from thence to the sea, being a length of about a hundred leagues, French measure. The height of these artificial banks is not uniform, but increases as you advance from the sea; it may be estimated at from twelve to fifteen feet. But for them, the inundation of the river would bury the country around, which is flat, to an extent of twenty or twenty-five leagues and even notwithstanding these banks, there has been in modern times an overflow, which has covered the whole triangle formed by the junction of this river to the Tygris, being a space of country of one hundred and thirty square leagues. By the stagnation of these waters an epidemical disease of the most fatal nature was occasioned. It follows from hence, 1. That all the flat country bordering upon these rivers, was originally a marsh; 2. That this marsh could not have been inhabited previously to the construction of the banks in question; 3. That these banks could not have been the work but of a population prior as to date; and the elevation of Babylon, therefore, must have been posterior to that of Nineveh, as I think I have chronologically demonstrated in the memoir above cited. See Encyclopedia, vol. xiii, of Antiquities. The modern Aderbidjan, which was a part of Medea, the mountains of Koulderstan, and those of Diarbekr, abound with subterranean canals, by means of which the ancient inhabitants conveyed water to their parched soil in order to fertilize it. It was regarded as a meritorious act and a religious duty prescribed by Zoroaster, who, instead of preaching celibacy, mortifications, and other pretended virtues of the monkish sort, repeats continually in the passages that are preserved respecting him in the Sad-der and the Zend-avesta: "That the action most pleasing to God is to plough and cultivate the earth, to water it with running streams, to multiply vegetation and living beings, to have numerous flocks, young and fruitful virgins, a multitude of children," etc., etc. Among the aqueducts of Palmyra it appears certain, that, besides those which conducted water from the neighboring hills, there was one which brought it even from the mountains of Syria. It is to be traced a long way into the Desert where it escapes our search by going under ground. Thus ancient states prospered, because their social institutions conformed to the true laws of nature; and because men, enjoying liberty and security for their persons and their property, might display all the extent of their faculties,--all the energies of their self-love. CHAPTER XI. GENERAL CAUSES OF THE REVOLUTIONS AND RUIN OF ANCIENT STATES. Cupidity had nevertheless excited among men a constant and universal conflict, which incessantly prompting individuals and societies to reciprocal invasions, occasioned successive revolutions, and returning agitations. And first, in the savage and barbarous state of the first men, this audacious and fierce cupidity produced rapine, violence, and murder, and retarded for a long time the progress of civilization. When afterwards societies began to be formed, the effect of bad habits, communicated to laws and governments, corrupted their institutions and objects, and established arbitrary and factitious rights, which depraved the ideas of justice, and the morality of the people. Thus one man being stronger than another, their inequality--an accident of nature--was taken for her law;* and the strong being able to take the life of the weak, and yet sparing him, arrogated over his person an abusive right of property; and the slavery of individuals prepared the way for the slavery of nations. *Almost all the ancient philosophers and politicians have laid it down as a principle that men are born unequal, that nature his created some to be free, and others to be slaves. Expressions of this kind are to be found in Aristotle, and even in Plato, called the divine, doubtless in the same sense as the mythological reveries which he promulgated. With all the people of antiquity, the Gauls, the Romans, the Athenians, the right of the strongest was the right of nations; and from the same principle are derived all the political disorders and public national crimes that at present exist. Because the head of a family could be absolute in his house, he made his own affections and desires the rule of his conduct; he gave or resumed his goods without equality, without justice; and paternal despotism laid the foundation of despotism in government.* * Upon this single expression it would be easy to write a long and important chapter. We might prove in it, beyond contradiction, that all the abuses of national governments, have sprung from those of domestic government, from that government called patriarchal, which superficial minds have extolled without having analyzed it. Numberless facts demonstrate, that with every infant people, in every savage and barbarous state, the father, the chief of the family, is a despot, and a cruel and insolent despot. The wife is his slave, the children his servants. This king sleeps or smokes his pipe, while his wife and daughters perform all the drudgery of the house, and even that of tillage and cultivation, as far as occupations of this nature are practised in such societies; and no sooner have the boys acquired strength then they are allowed to beat the females and make them serve and wait upon them as they do upon their fathers. Similar to this is the state of our own uncivilized peasants. In proportion as civilization spreads, the manners become milder, and the condition of the women improves, till, by a contrary excess, they arrive at dominion, and then a nation becomes effeminate and corrupt. It is remarkable that parental authority is great in proportion as the government is despotic. China, India, and Turkey are striking examples of this. One would suppose that tyrants gave themselves accomplices and interested subaltern despots to maintain their authority. In opposition to this the Romans will be cited, but it remains to be proved that the Romans were men truly free and their quick passage from their republican despotism to their abject servility under the emperors, gives room at least for considerable doubt as to that freedom. In societies formed on such foundations, when time and labor had developed riches, cupidity restrained by the laws, became more artful, but not less active. Under the mask of union and civil peace, it fomented in the bosom of every state an intestine war, in which the citizens, divided into contending corps of orders, classes, families, unremittingly struggled to appropriate to themselves, under the name of supreme power, the ability to plunder every thing, and render every thing subservient to the dictates of their passions; and this spirit of encroachment, disguised under all possible forms, but always the same in its object and motives, has never ceased to torment the nations. Sometimes, opposing itself to all social compact, or breaking that which already existed, it committed the inhabitants of a country to the tumultuous shock of all their discords; and states thus dissolved, and reduced to the condition of anarchy, were tormented by the passions of all their members. Sometimes a nation, jealous of its liberty, having appointed agents to administer its government, these agents appropriated the powers of which they had only the guardianship: they employed the public treasures in corrupting elections, gaining partisans, in dividing the people among themselves. By these means, from being temporary they became perpetual; from elective, hereditary; and the state, agitated by the intrigues of the ambitious, by largesses from the rich and factious, by the venality of the poor and idle, by the influence of orators, by the boldness of the wicked, and the weakness of the virtuous, was convulsed with all the inconveniences of democracy. The chiefs of some countries, equal in strength and mutually fearing each other, formed impious pacts, nefarious associations; and, apportioning among themselves all power, rank, and honor, unjustly arrogated privileges and immunities; erected themselves into separate orders and distinct classes; reduced the people to their control; and, under the name of aristocracy, the state was tormented by the passions of the wealthy and the great. Sacred impostors, in other countries, tending by other means to the same object, abused the credulity of the ignorant. In the gloom of their temples, behind the curtain of the altar, they made their gods act and speak; gave forth oracles, worked miracles, ordered sacrifices, levied offerings, prescribed endowments; and, under the names of theocracy and of religion, the state became tormented by the passions of the priests. Sometimes a nation, weary of its dissensions or of its tyrants, to lessen the sources of evil, submitted to a single master; but if it limited his powers, his sole aim was to enlarge them; if it left them indefinite, he abused the trust confided to him; and, under the name of monarchy, the state was tormented by the passions of kings and princes. Then the factions, availing themselves of the general discontent, flattered the people with the hope of a better master; dealt out gifts and promises, deposed the despot to take his place; and their contests for the succession, or its partition, tormented the state with the disorders and devastations of civil war. In fine, among these rivals, one more adroit, or more fortunate, gained the ascendency, and concentrated all power within himself. By a strange phenomenon, a single individual mastered millions of his equals, against their will and without their consent; and the art of tyranny sprung also from cupidity. In fact, observing the spirit of egotism which incessantly divides mankind, the ambitious man fomented it with dexterity, flattered the vanity of one, excited the jealousy of another, favored the avarice of this, inflamed the resentment of that, and irritated the passions of all; then, placing in opposition their interests and prejudices, he sowed divisions and hatreds, promised to the poor the spoils of the rich, to the rich the subjection of the poor; threatened one man by another, this class by that; and insulating all by distrust, created his strength out of their weakness, and imposed the yoke of opinion, which they mutually riveted on each other. With the army he levied contributions, and with contributions he disposed of the army: dealing out wealth and office on these principles, he enchained a whole people in indissoluble bonds, and they languished under the slow consumption of despotism. Thus the same principle, varying its action under every possible form, was forever attenuating the consistence of states, and an eternal circle of vicissitudes flowed from an eternal circle of passions. And this spirit of egotism and usurpation produced two effects equally operative and fatal: the one a division and subdivision of societies into their smallest fractions, inducing a debility which facilitated their dissolution; the other, a preserving tendency to concentrate power in a single hand,* which, engulfing successively societies and states, was fatal to their peace and social existence. * It is remarkable that this has in all instances been the constant progress of societies; beginning with a state of anarchy or democracy, that is, with a great division of power they have passed to aristocracy, and from aristocracy to monarchy. Does it not hence follow that those who constitute states under the democratic form, destine them to undergo all the intervening troubles between that and monarchy; but it should at the same time be proved that social experience is already exhausted for the human race, and that this spontaneous movement is not solely the effect of ignorance. Thus, as in a state, a party absorbed the nation, a family the party, and an individual the family; so a movement of absorption took place between state and state, and exhibited on a larger scale in the political order, all the particular evils of the civil order. Thus a state having subdued a state, held it in subjection in the form of a province; and two provinces being joined together formed a kingdom; two kingdoms being united by conquest, gave birth to empires of gigantic size; and in this conglomeration, the internal strength of states, instead of increasing, diminished; and the condition of the people, instead of ameliorating, became daily more abject and wretched, for causes derived from the nature of things. Because, in proportion as states increased in extent, their administration becoming more difficult and complicated, greater energies of power were necessary to move such masses; and there was no longer any proportion between the duties of sovereigns and their ability to perform their duties: Because despots, feeling their weakness, feared whatever might develop the strength of nations, and studied only how to enfeeble them: Because nations, divided by the prejudices of ignorance and hatred, seconded the wickedness of their governments; and availing themselves reciprocally of subordinate agents, aggravated their mutual slavery: Because, the balance between states being destroyed, the strong more easily oppressed the weak. Finally, because in proportion as states were concentrated, the people, despoiled of their laws, of their usages, and of the government of their choice, lost that spirit of personal identification with their government, which had caused their energy. And despots, considering empires as their private domains and the people as their property, gave themselves up to depredations, and to all the licentiousness of the most arbitrary authority. And all the strength and wealth of nations were diverted to private expense and personal caprice; and kings, fatigued with gratification, abandoned themselves to all the extravagancies of factitious and depraved taste.* They must have gardens mounted on arcades, rivers raised over mountains, fertile fields converted into haunts for wild beasts; lakes scooped in dry lands, rocks erected in lakes, palaces built of marble and porphyry, furniture of gold and diamonds. Under the cloak of religion, their pride founded temples, endowed indolent priests, built, for vain skeletons, extravagant tombs, mausoleums and pyramids;** millions of hands were employed in sterile labors; and the luxury of princes, imitated by their parasites, and transmitted from grade to grade to the lowest ranks, became a general source of corruption and impoverishment. * It is equally worthy of remark, that the conduct and manners of princes and kings of every country and every age, are found to be precisely the same at similar periods, whether of the formation or dissolution of empires. History every where presents the same pictures of luxury and folly; of parks, gardens, lakes, rocks, palaces, furniture, excess of the table, wine, women, concluding with brutality. The absurd rock in the garden of Versailles has alone cost three millions. I have sometimes calculated what might have been done with the expense of the three pyramids of Gizah, and I have found that it would easily have constructed from the Red Sea to Alexandria, a canal one hundred and fifty feet wide and thirty deep, completely covered in with cut stones and a parapet, together with a fortified and commercial town, consisting of four hundred houses, furnished with cisterns. What a difference in point of utility between such a canal and these pyramids! ** The learned Dupuis could not be persuaded that the pyramids were tombs; but besides the positive testimony of historians, read what Diodorus says of the religious and superstitious importance every Egyptian attached to building his dwelling eternal, b. 1. During twenty years, says Herodotus, a hundred thousand men labored every day to build the pyramid of the Egyptian Cheops. Supposing only three hundred days a year, on account of the sabbath, there will be 30 millions of days' work in a year, and 600 millions in twenty years; at 15 sous a day, this makes 450 millions of francs lost, without any further benefit. With this sum, if the king had shut the isthmus of Suez by a strong wall, like that of China, the destinies of Egypt might have been entirely changed. Foreign invasions would have been prevented, and the Arabs of the desert would neither have conquered nor harassed that country. Sterile labors! how many millions lost in putting one stone upon another, under the forms of temples and churches! Alchymists convert stones into gold; but architects change gold into stone. Woe to the kings (as well as subjects) who trust their purse to these two classes of empirics! And in the insatiable thirst of enjoyment, the ordinary revenues no longer sufficing, they were augmented; the cultivator, seeing his labors increase without compensation, lost all courage; the merchant, despoiled, was disgusted with industry; the multitude, condemned to perpetual poverty, restrained their labor to simple necessaries; and all productive industry vanished. The surcharge of taxes rendering lands a burdensome possession, the poor proprietor abandoned his field, or sold it to the powerful; and fortune became concentrated in a few hands. All the laws and institutions favoring this accumulation, the nation became divided into a group of wealthy drones, and a multitude of mercenary poor; the people were degraded with indigence, the great with satiety, and the number of those interested in the preservation of the state decreasing, its strength and existence became proportionally precarious. On the other hand, emulation finding no object, science no encouragement, the mind sunk into profound ignorance. The administration being secret and mysterious, there existed no means of reform or amelioration. The chiefs governing by force or fraud, the people viewed them as a faction of public enemies; and all harmony ceased between the governors and governed. And these vices having enervated the states of the wealthy part of Asia, the vagrant and indigent people of the adjacent deserts and mountains coveted the enjoyments of the fertile plains; and, urged by a cupidity common to all, attacked the polished empires, and overturned the thrones of their despots. These revolutions were rapid and easy; because the policy of tyrants had enfeebled the subjects, razed the fortresses, destroyed the warriors; and because the oppressed subjects remained without personal interest, and the mercenary soldiers without courage. And hordes of barbarians having reduced entire nations to slavery, the empires, formed of conquerors and conquered, united in their bosom two classes essentially opposite and hostile. All the principles of society were dissolved: there was no longer any common interest, no longer any public spirit; and there arose a distinction of casts and races, which reduced to a regular system the maintenance of disorder; and he who was born of this or that blood, was born a slave or a tyrant--property or proprietor. The oppressors being less numerous than the oppressed it was necessary to perfect the science of oppression, in order to support this false equilibrium. The art of governing became the art of subjecting the many to the few. To enforce an obedience so contrary to instinct, the severest punishments were established, and the cruelty of the laws rendered manners atrocious. The distinction of persons establishing in the state two codes, two orders of criminal justice, two sets of laws, the people, placed between the propensities of the heart and the oath uttered from the mouth, had two consciences in contradiction with each other; and the ideas of justice and injustice had no longer any foundation in the understanding. Under such a system, the people fell into dejection and despair; and the accidents of nature were added to the other evils which assailed them. Prostrated by so many calamities, they attributed their causes to superior and hidden powers; and, because they had tyrants on earth, they fancied others in heaven; and superstition aggravated the misfortunes of nations. Fatal doctrines and gloomy and misanthropic systems of religion arose, which painted their gods, like their despots, wicked and envious. To appease them, man offered up the sacrifice of all his enjoyments. He environed himself in privations, and reversed the order of nature. Conceiving his pleasures to be crimes, his sufferings expiations, he endeavored to love pain, and to abjure the love of self. He persecuted his senses, hated his life; and a self-denying and anti-social morality plunged nations into the apathy of death. But provident nature having endowed the heart of man with hope inexhaustible, when his desires of happiness were baffled on this earth, he pursued it into another world. By a sweet illusion he created for himself another country--an asylum where, far from tyrants, he should recover the rights of nature, and thence resulted new disorders. Smitten with an imaginary world, man despised that of nature. For chimerical hopes, he neglected realities. His life began to appear a troublesome journey--a painful dream; his body a prison, the obstacle to his felicity; and the earth, a place of exile and of pilgrimage, not worthy of culture. Then a holy indolence spread over the political world; the fields were deserted, empires depopulated, monuments neglected and deserts multiplied; ignorance, superstition and fanaticism, combining their operations, overwhelmed the earth with devastation and ruin. Thus agitated by their own passions, men, whether collectively or individually taken, always greedy and improvident, passing from slavery to tyranny, from pride to baseness, from presumption to despondency, have made themselves the perpetual instruments of their own misfortunes. These, then, are the principles, simple and natural, which regulated the destiny of ancient states. By this regular and connected series of causes and effects, they rose or fell, in proportion as the physical laws of the human heart were respected or violated; and in the course of their successive changes, a hundred different nations, a hundred different empires, by turns humbled, elevated, conquered, overthrown, have repeated for the earth their instructive lessons. Yet these lessons were lost for the generations which have followed! The disorders in times past have reappeared in the present age! The chiefs of the nations have continued to walk in the paths of falsehood and tyranny!--the people to wander in the darkness of superstition and ignorance! Since then, continued the Genius, with renewed energy, since the experience of past ages is lost for the living--since the errors of progenitors have not instructed their descendants, the ancient examples are about to reappear; the earth will see renewed the tremendous scenes it has forgotten. New revolutions will agitate nations and empires; powerful thrones will again be overturned, and terrible catastrophes will again teach mankind that the laws of nature and the precepts of wisdom and truth cannot be infringed with impunity. CHAPTER XII. LESSONS OF TIMES PAST REPEATED ON THE PRESENT. Thus spoke the Genius. Struck with the justice and coherence of his discourse, assailed with a crowd of ideas, repugnant to my habits yet convincing to my reason, I remained absorbed in profound silence. At length, while with serious and pensive mien, I kept my eyes fixed on Asia, suddenly in the north, on the shores of the Black sea, and in the fields of the Crimea, clouds of smoke and flame attracted my attention. They appeared to rise at the same time from all parts of the peninsula; and passing by the isthmus into the continent, they ran, as if driven by a westerly wind, along the oozy lake of Azof, and disappeared in the grassy plains of Couban; and following more attentively the course of these clouds, I observed that they were preceded or followed by swarms of moving creatures, which, like ants or grasshoppers disturbed by the foot of a passenger, agitated themselves with vivacity. Sometimes these swarms appeared to advance and rush against each other; and numbers, after the concussion, remained motionless. While disquieted at this spectacle, I strained my sight to distinguish the objects. Do you see, said the Genius, those flames which spread over the earth, and do you comprehend their causes and effects? Oh! Genius, I answered, I see those columns of flame and smoke, and something like insects, accompanying them; but, when I can scarcely discern the great masses of cities and monuments, how should I discover, such little creatures? I can just perceive that these insects mimic battle, for they advance, retreat, attack and pursue. It is no mimicry, said the Genius, these are real battles. And what, said I, are those mad animalculae, which destroy each other? Beings of a day! will they not perish soon enough? Then the Genius, touching my sight and hearing, again directed my eyes towards the same object. Look, said he, and listen! Ah! wretches, cried I, oppressed with grief, these columns of flame! these insects! oh! Genius, they are men. These are the ravages of war! These torrents of flame rise from towns and villages! I see the squadrons who kindle them, and who, sword in hand overrun the country: they drive before them crowds of old men, women, and children, fugitive and desolate: I perceive other horsemen, who with shouldered lances, accompany and guide them. I even recognize them to be Tartars by their led horses,* their kalpacks, and tufts of hair: and, doubtless, they who pursue, in triangular hats and green uniforms, are Muscovites. Ah! I now comprehend, a war is kindled between the empire of the Czars and that of the Sultans. * A Tartar horseman has always two horses, of which he leads one in hand. The Kalpeck is a bonnet made of the skin of a sheep or other animal. The part of the head covered by this bonnet is shaved, with the exception of a tuft, about the size of a crown piece, and which is suffered to grow to the length of seven or eight inches, precisely where our priests place their tonsure. It is by this tuft of hair, worn by the majority of Mussulmen, that the angel of the tomb is to take the elect and carry them into paradise. Not yet, replied the Genius; this is only a preliminary. These Tartars have been, and might still he troublesome neighbors. The Muscovites are driving them off, finding their country would be a convenient extension of their own limits; and as a prelude to another revolution, the throne of the Guerais is destroyed. And in fact, I saw the Russian standards floating over the Crimea: and soon after their flag waving on the Euxine. Meanwhile, at the cry of the flying Tartars, the Mussulman empire was in commotion. They are driving off our brethren, cried the children of Mahomet: the people of the prophet are outraged! infidels occupy a consecrated land and profane the temples of Islamism.* Let us arm; let us rush to combat, to avenge the glory of God and our own cause. * It is not in the power of the Sultan to cede to a foreign power a province inhabited by true believers. The people, instigated by the lawyers, would not fail to revolt. This is one reason which has led those who know the Turks, to regard as chimerical the ceding of Candia, Cyprus, and Egypt, projected by certain European potentates. And a general movement of war took place in both empires. In every part armed men assembled. Provisions, stores, and all the murderous apparatus of battle were displayed. The temples of both nations, besieged by an immense multitude, presented a spectacle which fixed all my attention. On one side, the Mussulmen gathered before their mosques, washed their hands and feet, pared their nails, and combed their beards; then spreading carpets upon the ground, and turning towards the south, with their arms sometimes crossed and sometimes extended, they made genuflexions and prostrations, and recollecting the disasters of the late war, they exclaimed: God of mercy and clemency! hast thou then abandoned thy faithful people? Thou who hast promised to thy Prophet dominion over nations, and stamped his religion by so many triumphs, dost thou deliver thy true believers to the swords of infidels? And the Imans and the Santons said to the people: It is in chastisement of your sins. You eat pork; you drink wine; you touch unclean things. God hath punished you. Do penance therefore; purify; repeat the profession of faith;* fast from the rising to the setting sun; give the tenth of your goods to the mosques; go to Mecca; and God will render you victorious. * There is but one God, and Mahomet is his prophet. And the people, recovering courage, uttered loud cries: There is but one God, said they transported with fury, and Mahomet is his prophet! Accursed be he who believeth not! God of goodness, grant us to exterminate these Christians; it is for thy glory we fight, and our death is a martyrdom for thy name. And then, offering victims, they prepared for battle. On the other side, the Russians, kneeling, said: We render thanks to God, and celebrate his power. He hath strengthened our arm to humble his enemies. Hear our prayers, thou God of mercy! To please thee, we will pass three days without eating either meat or eggs. Grant us to extirpate these impious Mahometans, and to overturn their empire. To thee we will consecrate the tenth of our spoil; to thee we will raise new temples. And the priests filled the churches with clouds of smoke, and said to the people: We pray for you, God accepteth our incense, and blesseth your arms. Continue to fast and to fight; confess to us your secret sins; give your wealth to the church; we will absolve you from your crimes, and you shall die in a state of grace. And they sprinkled water upon the people, dealt out to them, as amulets and charms, small relics of the dead, and the people breathed war and combat. Struck with this contrast of the same passions, and grieving for their fatal consequences, I was considering the difficulty with which the common judge could yield to prayers so contradictory; when the Genius, glowing with anger, spoke with vehemence: What accents of madness strike my ear? What blind and perverse delirium disorders the spirits of the nations? Sacrilegious prayers rise not from the earth! and you, oh Heavens, reject their homicidal vows and impious thanksgivings! Deluded mortals! is it thus you revere the Divinity? Say then; how should he, whom you style your common father, receive the homage of his children murdering one another? Ye victors! with what eye should he view your hands reeking in the blood he hath created? And, what do you expect, oh vanquished, from useless groans? Hath God the heart of a mortal, with passions ever changing? Is he, like you, agitated with vengeance or compassion, with wrath or repentance? What base conception of the most sublime of beings! According to them, it would seem, that God whimsical and capricious, is angered or appeased as a man: that he loves and hates alternately; that he punishes or favors; that, weak or wicked, he broods over his hatred; that, contradictory or perfidious, he lays snares to entrap; that he punishes the evils he permits; that he foresees but hinders not crimes; that, like a corrupt judge, he is bribed by offerings; like an ignorant despot, he makes laws and revokes them; that, like a savage tyrant, he grants or resumes favors without reason, and can only be appeased by servility. Ah! now I know the lying spirit of man! Contemplating the picture which he hath drawn of the Divinity: No, said I, it is not God who hath made man after the image of God; but man hath made God after the image of man; he hath given him his own mind, clothed him with his own propensities; ascribed to him his own judgments. And when in this medley he finds the contradiction of his own principles, with hypocritical humility, he imputes weakness to his reason, and names the absurdities of his own mind the mysteries of God. He hath said, God is immutable, yet he offers prayers to change him; he hath pronounced him incomprehensible, yet he interprets him without ceasing. Imposters have arisen on the earth who have called themselves the confidants of God; and, erecting themselves into teachers of the people, have opened the ways of falsehood and iniquity; they have ascribed merit to practices indifferent or ridiculous; they have supposed a virtue, in certain postures, in pronouncing certain words, articulating certain names; they have transformed into a crime the eating of certain meats, the drinking of certain liquors, on one day rather than another. The Jew would rather die than labor on the sabbath; the Persian would endure suffocation, before he would blow the fire with his breath; the Indian places supreme perfection in besmearing himself with cow-dung, and pronouncing mysteriously the word Aum;* the Mussulman believes he has expiated everything in washing his head and arms; and disputes, sword in hand, whether the ablution should commence at the elbow, or finger ends;** the Christian would think himself damned, if he ate flesh instead of milk or butter. Oh sublime doctrines! Doctrines truly from heaven! Oh perfect morals, and worthy of martyrdom or the apostolate! I will cross the seas to teach these admirable laws to the savage people--to distant nations; I will say unto them: * This word is, in the religion of the Hindoos, a sacred emblem of the Divinity. It is only to be pronounced in secret, without being heard by any one. It is formed of three letters, of which the first, a, signifies the principal of all, the creator, Brama; the second, u, the conservator, Vichenou; and the last, m, the destroyer, who puts an end to all, Chiven. It is pronounced like the monosyllable om, and expresses the unity of those three Gods. The idea is precisely that of the Alpha and Omega mentioned in the New Testament. ** This is one of the grand points of schism between the partisans of Omar and those of Ali. Suppose two Mahometans to meet on a journey, and to accost each other with brotherly affection: the hour of prayer arrives; one begins his ablution at his fingers, the other at the elbow, and instantly they are mortal enemies. O sublime importance of religious opinions! O profound philosophy of the authors of them! Children of nature, how long will you walk in the paths of ignorance? how long will you mistake the true principles of morality and religion? Come and learn its lessons from nations truly pious and learned, in civilized countries. They will inform you how, to gratify God, you must in certain months of the year, languish the whole day with hunger and thirst; how you may shed your neighbor's blood, and purify yourself from it by professions of faith and methodical ablutions; how you may steal his property and be absolved on sharing it with certain persons, who devote themselves to its consumption. Sovereign and invisible power of the universe! mysterious mover of nature! universal soul of beings! thou who art unknown, yet revered by mortals under so many names! being incomprehensible and infinite! God, who in the immensity of the heavens directest the movement of worlds, and peoplest the abyss of space with millions of suns! say what do these human insects, which my sight no longer discerns on the earth, appear in thy eyes? To thee, who art guiding stars in their orbits, what are those wormlings writhing themselves in the dust? Of what import to thy immensity, their distinctions of parties and sects? And of what concern the subtleties with which their folly torments itself? And you, credulous men, show me the effect of your practices! In so many centuries, during which you have been following or altering them, what changes have your prescriptions wrought in the laws of nature? Is the sun brighter? Is the course of the seasons varied? Is the earth more fruitful, or its inhabitants more happy? If God be good, can your penances please him? If infinite, can your homage add to his glory? If his decrees have been formed on foresight of every circumstance, can your prayers change them? Answer, O inconsistent mortals! Ye conquerors of the earth, who pretend you serve God! doth he need your aid? If he wishes to punish, hath he not earthquakes, volcanoes, and thunder? And cannot a merciful God correct without extermination? Ye Mussulmans, if God chastiseth you for violating the five precepts, how hath he raised up the Franks who ridicule them? If he governeth the earth by the Koran, by what did he govern it before the days of the prophet, when it was covered with so many nations who drank wine, ate pork, and went not to Mecca, whom he nevertheless permitted to raise powerful empires? How did he judge the Sabeans of Nineveh and of Babylon; the Persian, worshipper of fire; the Greek and Roman idolators; the ancient kingdoms of the Nile; and your own ancestors, the Arabians and Tartars? How doth he yet judge so many nations who deny, or know not your worship--the numerous castes of Indians, the vast empire of the Chinese, the sable race of Africa, the islanders of the ocean, the tribes of America? Presumptuous and ignorant men, who arrogate the earth to yourselves! if God were to gather all the generations past and present, what would be, in their ocean, the sects calling themselves universal, of Christians and Mussulmans? What would be the judgments of his equal and common justice over the real universality of mankind? Therein it is that your knowledge loseth itself in incoherent systems; it is there that truth shines with evidence; and there are manifested the powerful and simple laws of nature and reason--laws of a common and general mover--of a God impartial and just, who sheds rain on a country without asking who is its prophet; who causeth his sun to shine alike on all the races of men, on the white as on the black, on the Jew, on the Mussulman, the Christian, and the Idolater; who reareth the harvest wherever cultivated with diligence; who multiplieth every nation where industry and order prevaileth; who prospereth every empire where justice is practised, where the powerful are restrained, and the poor protected by the laws; where the weak live in safety, and all enjoy the rights given by nature and a compact formed in justice. These are the principles by which people are judged! this the true religion which regulates the destiny of empires, and which, O Ottomans, hath governed yours! Interrogate your ancestors, ask of them by what means they rose to greatness; when few, poor and idolaters, they came from the deserts of Tartary and encamped in these fertile countries; ask if it was by Islamism, till then unknown to them, that they conquered the Greeks and the Arabs, or was it by their courage, their prudence, moderation, spirit of union--the true powers of the social state? Then the Sultan himself dispensed justice, and maintained discipline. The prevaricating judge, the extortionate governor, were punished, and the multitude lived at ease. The cultivator was protected from the rapine of the janissary, and the fields prospered; the highways were safe, and commerce caused abundance. You were a band of plunderers, but just among yourselves. You subdued nations, but did not oppress them. Harassed by their own princes, they preferred being your tributaries. What matters it, said the Christian, whether my ruler breaks or adores images, if he renders justice to me? God will judge his doctrines in the heavens above. You were sober and hardy; your enemies timid and enervated; you were expert in battle, your enemies unskillful; your leaders were experienced, your soldiers warlike and disciplined. Booty excited ardor, bravery was rewarded, cowardice and insubordination punished, and all the springs of the human heart were in action. Thus you vanquished a hundred nations, and of a mass of conquered kingdoms compounded an immense empire. But other customs have succeeded; and in the reverses attending them, the laws of nature have still exerted their force. After devouring your enemies, your cupidity, still insatiable, has reacted on itself, and, concentrated in your own bowels, has consumed you. Having become rich, you have quarrelled for partition and enjoyment, and disorder hath arisen in every class of society. The Sultan, intoxicated with grandeur, has mistaken the object of his functions; and all the vices of arbitrary power have been developed. Meeting no obstacle to his appetites, he has become a depraved being; weak and arrogant, he has kept the people at a distance; and their voice has no longer instructed and guided him. Ignorant, yet flattered, neglecting all instruction, all study, he has fallen into imbecility; unfit for business, he has thrown its burdens on hirelings, and they have deceived him. To satisfy their own passions, they have stimulated and nourished his; they have multiplied his wants, and his enormous luxury has consumed everything. The frugal table, plain clothing, simple dwelling of his ancestors no longer sufficed. To supply his pomp, earth and sea have been exhausted. The rarest furs have been brought from the poles; the most costly tissues from the equator. He has devoured at a meal the tribute of a city, and in a day that of a province. He has surrounded himself with an army of women, eunuchs, and satellites. They have instilled into him that the virtue of kings is to be liberal, and the munificence and treasures of the people have been delivered into the hands of flatterers. In imitation of their master, his servants must also have splendid houses, the most exquisite furniture; carpets embroidered at great cost, vases of gold and silver for the lowest uses, and all the riches of the empire have been swallowed up in the Serai. To supply this inordinate luxury, the slaves and women have sold their influence, and venality has introduced a general depravation. The favor of the sovereign has been sold to his vizier, and the vizier has sold the empire. The law has been sold to the cadi, and the cadi has made sale of justice. The altar has been sold to the priest, and the priest has sold the kingdom of heaven. And gold obtaining everything, they have sacrificed everything to obtain gold. For gold, friend has betrayed friend, the child his parent, the servant his master, the wife her honor, the merchant his conscience; and good faith, morals, concord, and strength were banished from the state. The pacha, who had purchased the government of his province, farmed it out to others, who exercised every extortion. He sold in turn the collection of the taxes, the command of the troops, the administration of the villages; and as every employ has been transient, rapine, spread from rank to rank, has been greedy and implacable. The revenue officer has fleeced the merchant, and commerce was annihilated; the aga has plundered the husbandman, and culture has degenerated. The laborer, deprived of his stock, has been unable to sow; the tax was augmented, and he could not pay it; the bastinado has been threatened, and he has borrowed. Money, from want of security, being locked up from circulation, interest was therefore enormous, and the usury of the rich has aggravated the misery of the laborer. When excessive droughts and accidents of seasons have blasted the harvest, the government has admitted no delay, no indulgence for the tax; and distress bearing hard on the village, a part of its inhabitants have taken refuge in the cities; and their burdens falling on those who remained, has completed their ruin, and depopulated the country. If driven to extremity by tyranny and outrage, the villages have revolted, the pacha rejoices. He wages war on them, assails their homes, pillages their property, carries off their stock; and when the fields have become a desert, he exclaims: "What care I? I leave these fields to-morrow." The earth wanting laborers, the rain of heaven and overflowing of torrents have stagnated in marshes; and their putrid exhalations in a warm climate, have caused epidemics, plagues, and maladies of all sorts, whence have flowed additional suffering, penury, and ruin. Oh! who can enumerate all the calamities of tyrannical government? Sometimes the pachas declare war against each other, and for their personal quarrels the provinces of the same state are laid waste. Sometimes, fearing their masters, they attempt independence, and draw on their subjects the chastisement of their revolt. Sometimes dreading their subjects, they invite and subsidize strangers, and to insure their fidelity set no bounds to their depredations. Here they persecute the rich and despoil them under false pretences; there they suborn false witnesses, and impose penalties for suppositious offences; everywhere they excite the hatred of parties, encourage informations to obtain amercements, extort property, seize persons; and when their short-sighted avarice has accumulated into one mass all the riches of a country, the government, by an execrable perfidy, under pretence of avenging its oppressed people, takes to itself all their spoils, as if they were the culprits, and uselessly sheds the blood of its agents for a crime of which it is the accomplice. Oh wretches, monarchs or ministers, who sport with the lives and fortunes of the people! Is it you who gave breath to man, that you dare take it from him? Do you give growth to the plants of the earth, that you may waste them? Do you toil to furrow the field? Do you endure the ardor of the sun, and the torment of thirst, to reap the harvest or thrash the grain? Do you, like the shepherd, watch through the dews of the night? Do you traverse deserts, like the merchant? Ah! on beholding the pride and cruelty of the powerful, I have been transported with indignation, and have said in my wrath, will there never then arise on the earth men who will avenge the people and punish tyrants? A handful of brigands devour the multitude, and the multitude submits to be devoured! Oh! degenerate people! Know you not your rights? All authority is from you, all power is yours. Unlawfully do kings command you on the authority of God and of their lance--Soldiers be still; if God supports the Sultan he needs not your aid; if his sword suffices, he needs not yours; let us see what he can do alone. The soldiers grounded their arms; and behold these masters of the world, feeble as the meanest of their subjects! People! know that those who govern are your chiefs, not your masters; your agents, not your owners; that they have no authority over you, but by you, and for you; that your wealth is yours and they accountable for it; that, kings or subjects, God has made all men equal, and no mortal has the right to oppress his fellow-creatures. But this nation and its chiefs have mistaken these holy truths. They must abide then the consequences of their blindness. The decree is past; the day approaches when this colossus of power shall be crushed and crumbled under its own mass. Yes, I swear it, by the ruins of so many empires destroyed. The empire of the Crescent shall follow the fate of the despotism it has copied. A nation of strangers shall drive the Sultan from his metropolis. The throne of Orkhan shall be overturned. The last shoot of his trunk shall be broken off; and the horde of Oguzians,* deprived of their chief, shall disperse like that of the Nagois. In this dissolution, the people of the empire, loosened from the yoke which united them, shall resume their ancient distinctions, and a general anarchy shall follow, as happened in the empire of the Sophis;** until there shall arise among the Arabians, Armenians, or Greeks, legislators who may compose new states. * Before the Turks took the name of their chief, Othman I., they bore that of Oguzians; and it was under this appellation that they were driven out of Tartary by Gengis, and came from the borders of Giboun to settle themselves in Anatolia. ** In Persia, after the death of Thamas-Koulikan, each province had its chief, and for forty years these chiefs were in a constant state of war. In this view the Turks do not say without reason: "Ten years of a tyrant are less destructive than a single night of anarchy." Oh! if there were on earth men profound and bold! what elements for grandeur and glory! But the hour of destiny has already come; the cry of war strikes my ear; and the catastrophe begins. In vain the Sultan leads forth his armies; his ignorant warriors are beaten and dispersed. In vain he calls his subjects; their hearts are ice. Is it not written? say they, what matters who is our master? We cannot lose by the change. In vain the true believers invoke heaven and the prophet. The prophet is dead; and heaven without pity answers: Cease to invoke me. You have caused your own misfortunes; cure them yourselves. Nature has established laws; your part is to obey them. Observe, reason, and profit by experience. It is the folly of man which ruins him; let his wisdom save him. The people are ignorant; let them gain instruction. Their chiefs are wicked; let them correct and amend; for such is Nature's decree. Since the evils of society spring from cupidity and ignorance, men will never cease to be persecuted, till they become enlightened and wise; till they practise justice, founded on a knowledge of their relations and of the laws of their organization.* * A singular moral phenomenon made its appearance in Europe in the year 1788. A great nation, jealous of its liberty, contracted a fondness for a nation the enemy of liberty; a nation friendly to the arts, for a nation that detests them; a mild and tolerant nation, for a persecuting and fanatic one; a social and gay nation, for a nation whose characteristics are gloom and misanthropy; in a word, the French were smitten with a passion for the Turks: they were desirous of engaging in a war for them, and that at a time when revolution in their own country was just at its commencement. A man, who perceived the true nature of the situation, wrote a book to dissuade them from the war: it was immediately pretended that he was paid by the government, which in reality wished the war, and which was upon the point of shutting him up in a state prison. Another man wrote to recommend the war: he was applauded, and his word taken for the science, the politeness, and importance of the Turks. It is true that he believed in his own thesis, for he has found among them people who cast a nativity, and alchymists who ruined his fortune; as he found Martinists at Paris, who enabled him to sup with Sesostris, and Magnetizers who concluded with destroying his existence. Notwithstanding this, the Turks were beaten by the Russians, and the man who then predicted the fall of their empire, persists in the prediction. The result of this fall will be a complete change of the political system, as far as it relates to the coast of the Mediterranean. If, however, the French become important in proportion as they become free, and if they make use of the advantage they will obtain, their progress may easily prove of the most honorable sort; inasmuch as, by the wise decrees of fate, the true interest of mankind evermore accords with their true morality. CHAPTER XIII. WILL THE HUMAN RACE IMPROVE? At these words, oppressed with the painful sentiment with which their severity overwhelmed me: Woe to the nations! cried I, melting in tears; woe to myself! Ah! now it is that I despair of the happiness of man! Since his miseries proceed from his heart; since the remedy is in his own power, woe for ever to his existence! Who, indeed will ever be able to restrain the lust of wealth in the strong and powerful? Who can enlighten the ignorance of the weak? Who can teach the multitude to know their rights, and force their chiefs to perform their duties? Thus the race of man is always doomed to suffer! Thus the individual will not cease to oppress the individual, a nation to attack a nation; and days of prosperity, of glory, for these regions, shall never return. Alas! conquerors will come; they will drive out the oppressors, and fix themselves in their place; but, inheriting their power, they will inherit their rapacity; and the earth will have changed tyrants, without changing the tyranny. Then, turning to the Genius, I exclaimed: O Genius, despair hath settled on my soul. Knowing the nature of man, the perversity of those who govern, and the debasement of the governed--this knowledge hath disgusted me with life; and since there is no choice but to be the accomplice or the victim of oppression, what remains to the man of virtue but to mingle his ashes with those of the tomb? The Genius then gave me a look of severity, mingled with compassion; and after a few moments of silence, he replied: Virtue, then, consists in dying! The wicked man is indefatigable in consummating his crime, and the just is discouraged from doing good at the first obstacle he encounters! But such is the human heart. A little success intoxicates man with confidence; a reverse overturns and confounds him. Always given up to the sensation of the moment, he seldom judges things from their nature, but from the impulse of his passion. Mortal, who despairest of the human race, on what profound combination of facts hast thou established thy conclusion? Hast thou scrutinized the organization of sentient beings, to determine with precision whether the instinctive force which moves them on to happiness is essentially weaker than that which repels them from it? or, embracing in one glance the history of the species, and judging the future by the past, hast thou shown that all improvement is impossible? Say! hath human society, since its origin, made no progress toward knowledge and a better state? Are men still in their forests, destitute of everything, ignorant, stupid and ferocious? Are all the nations still in that age when nothing was seen upon the globe but brutal robbers and brutal slaves? If at any time, in any place, individuals have ameliorated, why shall not the whole mass ameliorate? If partial societies have made improvements, what shall hinder the improvement of society in general? And if the first obstacles are overcome, why should the others be insurmountable? Art thou disposed to think that the human race degenerates? Guard against the illusion and paradoxes of the misanthrope. Man, discontented with the present, imagines for the past a perfection which never existed, and which only serves to cover his chagrin. He praises the dead out of hatred to the living, and beats the children with the bones of their ancestors. To prove this pretended retrograde progress from perfection we must contradict the testimony of reason and of fact; and if the facts of history are in any measure uncertain, we must contradict the living fact of the organization of man; we must prove that he is born with the enlightened use of his senses; that, without experience, he can distinguish aliment from poison; that the child is wiser than the old man; that the blind walks with more safety than the clear-sighted; that the civilized man is more miserable than the savage; and, indeed, that there is no ascending scale in experience and instruction. Believe, young man, the testimony of monuments, and the voice of the tombs. Some countries have doubtless fallen from what they were at certain epochs; but if we weigh the wisdom and happiness of their inhabitants, even in those times, we shall find more of splendor than of reality in their glory; we shall find, in the most celebrated of ancient states, enormous vices and cruel abuses, the true causes of their decay; we shall find in general that the principles of government were atrocious; that insolent robberies, barbarous wars and implacable hatreds were raging from nation to nation;* that natural right was unknown; that morality was perverted by senseless fanaticism and deplorable superstition; that a dream, a vision, an oracle, were constantly the causes of vast commotions. Perhaps the nations are not yet entirely cured of all these evils; but their intensity at least is diminished, and the experience of the past has not been wholly lost. For the last three centuries, especially, knowledge has increased and been extended; civilization, favored by happy circumstances, has made a sensible progress; inconveniences and abuses have even turned to its advantage; for if states have been too much extended by conquest, the people, by uniting under the same yoke, have lost the spirit of estrangement and division which made them all enemies one to the other. If the powers of government have been more concentrated, there has been more system and harmony in their exercise. If wars have become more extensive in the mass, they are less bloody in detail. If men have gone to battle with less personality, less energy, their struggles have been less sanguinary and less ferocious; they have been less free, but less turbulent; more effeminate, but more pacific. Despotism itself has rendered them some service; for if governments have been more absolute, they have been more quiet and less tempestuous. If thrones have become a property and hereditary, they have excited less dissensions, and the people have suffered fewer convulsions; finally, if the despots, jealous and mysterious, have interdicted all knowledge of their administration, all concurrence in the management of public affairs, the passions of men, drawn aside from politics, have fixed upon the arts, and the sciences of nature; and the sphere of ideas in every direction has been enlarged; man, devoted to abstract studies, has better understood his place in the system of nature, and his relations in society; principles have been better discussed, final causes better explained, knowledge more extended, individuals better instructed, manners more social, and life more happy. The species at large, especially in certain countries, has gained considerably; and this amelioration cannot but increase in future, because its two principal obstacles, those even which, till then, had rendered it slow and sometimes retrograde,--the difficulty of transmitting ideas and of communicating them rapidly,--have been at last removed. * Read the history of the wars of Rome and Carthage, of Sparta and Messina, of Athens and Syracuse, of the Hebrews and the Phoenicians: yet these are the nations of which antiquity boasts as being most polished! Indeed, among the ancients, each canton, each city, being isolated from all others by the difference of its language, the consequence was favorable to ignorance and anarchy. There was no communication of ideas, no participation of discoveries, no harmony of interests or of wills, no unity of action or design; besides, the only means of transmitting and of propagating ideas being that of speech, fugitive and limited, and that of writing, tedious of execution, expensive and scarce, the consequence was a hindrance of present instruction, loss of experience from one generation to another, instability, retrogression of knowledge, and a perpetuity of confusion and childhood. But in the modern world, especially in Europe, great nations having allied themselves in language, and established vast communities of opinions, the minds of men are assimilated, and their affections extended; there is a sympathy of opinion and a unity of action; then that gift of heavenly Genius, the holy art of printing, having furnished the means of communicating in an instant the same idea to millions of men, and of fixing it in a durable manner, beyond the power of tyrants to arrest or annihilate, there arose a mass of progressive instruction, an expanding atmosphere of science, which assures to future ages a solid amelioration. This amelioration is a necessary effect of the laws of nature; for, by the law of sensibility, man as invincibly tends to render himself happy as the flame to mount, the stone to descend, or the water to find its level. His obstacle is his ignorance, which misleads him in the means, and deceives him in causes and effects. He will enlighten himself by experience; he will become right by dint of errors; he will grow wise and good because it is his interest so to be. Ideas being communicated through the nation, whole classes will gain instruction; science will become a vulgar possession, and all men will know what are the principles of individual happiness and of public prosperity. They will know the relations they bear to society, their duties and their rights; they will learn to guard against the illusions of the lust of gain; they will perceive that the science of morals is a physical science, composed, indeed, of elements complicated in their operation, but simple and invariable in their nature, since they are only the elements of the organization of man. They will see the propriety of being moderate and just, because in that is found the advantage and security of each; they will perceive that the wish to enjoy at the expense of another is a false calculation of ignorance, because it gives rise to reprisal, hatred, and vengeance, and that dishonesty is the never-failing offspring of folly. Individuals will feel that private happiness is allied to public good: The weak, that instead of dividing their interests, they ought to unite them, because equality constitutes their force: The rich, that the measure of enjoyment is bounded by the constitution of the organs, and that lassitude follows satiety: The poor, that the employment of time, and the peace of the heart, compose the highest happiness of man. And public opinion, reaching kings on their thrones, will force them to confine themselves to the limits of regular authority. Even chance itself, serving the cause of nations, will sometimes give them feeble chiefs, who, through weakness, will suffer them to become free; and sometimes enlightened chiefs, who, from a principle of virtue, will free them. And when nations, free and enlightened, shall become like great individuals, the whole species will have the same facilities as particular portions now have; the communication of knowledge will extend from one to another, and thus reach the whole. By the law of imitation, the example of one people will be followed by others, who will adopt its spirit and its laws. Even despots, perceiving that they can no longer maintain their authority without justice and beneficence, will soften their sway from necessity, from rivalship; and civilization will become universal. There will be established among the several nations an equilibrium of force, which, restraining them all within the bounds of the respect due to their reciprocal rights, shall put an end to the barbarous practice of war, and submit their disputes to civil arbitration.* The human race will become one great society, one individual family, governed by the same spirit, by common laws, and enjoying all the happiness of which their nature is susceptible. * What is a people? An individual of the society at large. What a war? A duel between two individual people. In what manner ought a society to act when two of its members fight? Interfere and reconcile, or repress them. In the days of the Abbe de Saint Pierre this was treated as a dream, but happily for the human race it begins to be realized. Doubtless this great work will be long accomplishing; because the same movement must be given to an immense body; the same leaven must assimilate an enormous mass of heterogeneous parts. But this movement shall be effected; its presages are already to be seen. Already the great society, assuming in its course the same characters as partial societies have done, is evidently tending to a like result. At first disconnected in all its parts, it saw its members for a long time without cohesion; and this general solitude of nations formed its first age of anarchy and childhood; divided afterwards by chance into irregular sections, called states and kingdoms, it has experienced the fatal effects of an extreme inequality of wealth and rank; and the aristocracy of great empires has formed its second age; then, these lordly states disputing for preeminence, have exhibited the period of the shock of factions. At present the contending parties, wearied with discord, feel the want of laws, and sigh for the age of order and of peace. Let but a virtuous chief arise! a just, a powerful people appear! and the earth will raise them to supreme power. The world is waiting for a legislative people; it wishes and demands it; and my heart attends the cry. Then turning towards the west: Yes, continued he, a hollow sound already strikes my ear; a cry of liberty, proceeding from far distant shores, resounds on the ancient continent. At this cry, a secret murmur against oppression is raised in a powerful nation; a salutary inquietude alarms her respecting her situation; she enquires what she is, and what she ought to be; while, surprised at her own weakness, she interrogates her rights, her resources, and what has been the conduct of her chiefs. Yet another day--a little more reflection--and an immense agitation will begin; a new-born age will open! an age of astonishment to vulgar minds, of terror to tyrants, of freedom to a great nation, and of hope to the human race! CHAPTER XIV. THE GREAT OBSTACLE TO IMPROVEMENT. The Genius ceased. But preoccupied with melancholy thoughts, my mind resisted persuasion; fearing, however, to shock him by my resistance, I remained silent. After a while, turning to me with a look which pierced my soul, he said: Thou art silent, and thy heart is agitated with thoughts which it dares not utter. At last, troubled and terrified, I replied: O Genius, pardon my weakness. Doubtless thy mouth can utter nothing but truth; but thy celestial intelligence can seize its rays, where my gross faculties can discern nothing but clouds. I confess it; conviction has not penetrated my soul, and I feared that my doubts might offend thee. And what is doubt, replied he, that it should be a crime? Can man feel otherwise than as he is affected? If a truth be palpable, and of importance in practice, let us pity him that misconceives it. His punishment will arise from his blindness. If it be uncertain or equivocal, how is he to find in it what it has not? To believe without evidence or proof, is an act of ignorance and folly. The credulous man loses himself in a labyrinth of contradictions; the man of sense examines and discusses, that he may be consistent in his opinions. The honest man will bear contradiction; because it gives rise to evidence. Violence is the argument of falsehood; and to impose a creed by authority is the act and indication of a tyrant. O Genius, said I, encouraged by these words, since my reason is free, I strive in vain to entertain the flattering hope with which you endeavor to console me. The sensible and virtuous soul is easily caught with dreams of happiness; but a cruel reality constantly awakens it to suffering and wretchedness. The more I meditate on the nature of man, the more I examine the present state of societies, the less possible it appears to realize a world of wisdom and felicity. I cast my eye over the whole of our hemisphere; I perceive in no place the germ, nor do I foresee the instinctive energy of a happy revolution. All Asia lies buried in profound darkness. The Chinese, governed by an insolent despotism,* by strokes of the bamboo and the cast of lots, restrained by an immutable code of gestures, and by the radical vices of an ill-constructed language,** appear to be in their abortive civilization nothing but a race of automatons. The Indian, borne down by prejudices, and enchained in the sacred fetters of his castes, vegetates in an incurable apathy. The Tartar, wandering or fixed, always ignorant and ferocious, lives in the savageness of his ancestors. The Arab, endowed with a happy genius, loses its force and the fruits of his virtue in the anarchy of his tribes and the jealousy of his families. The African, degraded from the rank of man, seems irrevocably doomed to servitude. In the North I see nothing but vilified serfs, herds of men with which landlords stock their estates. Ignorance, tyranny, and wretchedness have everywhere stupified the nations; and vicious habits, depraving the natural senses, have destroyed the very instinct of happiness and of truth. * The emperor of China calls himself the son of heaven; that is, of God: for in the opinion of the Chinese, the material of heaven, the arbiter of fatality, is the Deity himself. "The emperor only shows himself once in ten months, lest the people, accustomed to see him, might lose their respect; for he holds it as a maxim that power can only be supported by force, that the people have no idea of justice, and are not to be governed but by coercion." Narrative of two Mahometan travellers in 851 and 877, translated by the Abbe Renaudot in 1718. Notwithstanding what is asserted by the missionaries, this situation has undergone no change. The bamboo still reigns in China, and the son of heaven bastinades, for the most trivial fault, the Mandarin, who in his turn bastinades the people. The Jesuits may tell us that this is the best governed country in the world, and its inhabitants the happiest of men: but a single letter from Amyot has convinced me that China is a truly Turkish government, and the account of Sonnerat confirms it. See Vol. II. of Voyage aux Indes, in 4to. ** As long as the Chinese shall in writing make use of their present characters, they can be expected to make no progress in civilization. The necessary introductory step must be the giving them an alphabet like our own, or of substituting in the room of their language that of the Tartars. The improvement made in the latter by M. de Lengles, is calculated to introduce this change. See the Mantchou alphabet, the production of a mind truly learned in the formation of language. In some parts of Europe, indeed, reason has begun to dawn, but even there, do nations partake of the knowledge of individuals? Are the talents and genius of governors turned to the benefit of the people? And those nations which call themselves polished, are they not the same that for the last three centuries have filled the earth with their injustice? Are they not those who, under the pretext of commerce, have desolated India, depopulated a new continent, and, at present, subject Africa to the most barbarous slavery? Can liberty be born from the bosom of despots? and shall justice be rendered by the hands of piracy and avarice? O Genius, I have seen the civilized countries; and the mockery of their wisdom has vanished before my sight. I saw wealth accumulated in the hands of a few, and the multitude poor and destitute. I have seen all rights, all powers concentered in certain classes, and the mass of the people passive and dependent. I have seen families of princes, but no families of the nation. I have seen government interests, but no public interests or spirit. I have seen that all the science of government was to oppress prudently; and the refined servitude of polished nations appeared to me only the more irremediable. One obstacle above all has profoundly struck my mind. On looking over the world, I have seen it divided into twenty different systems of religion. Every nation has received, or formed, opposite opinions; and every one ascribing to itself the exclusive possession of the truth, must believe the other to be wrong. Now if, as must be the fact in this discordance of opinion, the greater part are in error, and are honest in it, then it follows that our mind embraces falsehood as it does truth; and if so, how is it to be enlightened? When prejudice has once seized the mind, how is it to be dissipated? How shall we remove the bandage from our eyes, when the first article in every creed, the first dogma in all religion, is the absolute proscription of doubt, the interdiction of examination, and the rejection of our own judgment? How is truth to make herself known?--If she resorts to arguments and proofs, the timid man stifles the voice of his own conscience; if she invokes the authority of celestial powers, he opposes it with another authority of the same origin, with which he is preoccupied; and he treats all innovation as blasphemy. Thus man in his blindness, has riveted his own chains, and surrendered himself forever, without defence, to the sport of his ignorance and his passions. To dissolve such fatal chains, a miraculous concurrence of happy events would be necessary. A whole nation, cured of the delirium of superstition, must be inaccessible to the impulse of fanaticism. Freed from the yoke of false doctrine, a whole people must impose upon itself that of true morality and reason. This people should be courageous and prudent, wise and docile. Each individual, knowing his rights, should not transgress them. The poor should know how to resist seduction, and the rich the allurements of avarice. There should be found leaders disinterested and just, and their tyrants should be seized with a spirit of madness and folly. This people, recovering its rights, should feel its inability to exercise them in person, and should name its representatives. Creator of its magistrates, it should know at once to respect them and to judge them. In the sudden reform of a whole nation, accustomed to live by abuses, each individual displaced should bear with patience his privations, and submit to a change of habits. This nation should have the courage to conquer its liberty; the power to defend it, the wisdom to establish it, and the generosity to extend it to others. And can we ever expect the union of so many circumstances? But suppose that chance in its infinite combinations should produce them, shall I see those fortunate days. Will not my ashes long ere then be mouldering in the tomb? Here, sunk in sorrow, my oppressed heart no longer found utterance. The Genius answered not, but I heard him whisper to himself: Let us revive the hope of this man; for if he who loves his fellow creatures be suffered to despair, what will become of nations? The past is perhaps too discouraging; I must anticipate futurity, and disclose to the eye of virtue the astonishing age that is ready to begin; that, on viewing the object she desires, she may be animated with new ardor, and redouble her efforts to attain it. CHAPTER XV. THE NEW AGE. Scarcely had he finished these words, when a great tumult arose in the west; and turning to that quarter, I perceived, at the extremity of the Mediterranean, in one of the nations of Europe, a prodigious movement--such as when a violent sedition arises in a vast city--a numberless people, rushing in all directions, pour through the streets and fluctuate like waves in the public places. My ear, struck with the cries which resounded to the heavens, distinguished these words: What is this new prodigy? What cruel and mysterious scourge is this? We are a numerous people and we want hands! We have an excellent soil, and we are in want of subsistence? We are active and laborious, and we live in indigence! We pay enormous tributes, and we are told they are not sufficient! We are at peace without, and our persons and property are not safe within. Who, then, is the secret enemy that devours us? Some voices from the midst of the multitude replied: Raise a discriminating standard; and let all those who maintain and nourish mankind by useful labors gather round it; and you will discover the enemy that preys upon you. The standard being raised, this nation divided itself at once into two bodies of unequal magnitude and contrasted appearance. The one, innumerable, and almost total, exhibited in the poverty of its clothing, in its emaciated appearance and sun-burnt faces, the marks of misery and labor; the other, a little group, an insignificant faction, presented in its rich attire embroidered with gold and silver, and in its sleek and ruddy faces, the signs of leisure and abundance. Considering these men more attentively, I found that the great body was composed of farmers, artificers, merchants, all professions useful to society; and that the little group was made up of priests of every order, of financiers, of nobles, of men in livery, of commanders of armies; in a word, of the civil, military, and religious agents of government. These two bodies being assembled face to face, and regarding each other with astonishment, I saw indignation and rage arising in one side, and a sort of panic in the other. And the large body said to the little one: Why are you separated from us? Are you not of our number? No, replied the group; you are the people; we are a privileged class, who have our laws, customs, and rights, peculiar to ourselves. PEOPLE.--And what labor do you perform in our society? PRIVILEGED CLASS.--None; we are not made to work. PEOPLE.--How, then, have you acquired these riches? PRIVILEGED CLASS.--By taking the pains to govern you. PEOPLE.--What! is this what you call governing? We toil and you enjoy! we produce and you dissipate! Wealth proceeds from us, and you absorb it. Privileged men! class who are not the people; form a nation apart, and govern yourselves.* * This dialogue between the people and the indolent classes, is applicable to every society; it contains the seeds of all the political vices and disorders that prevail, and which may thus be defined: Men who do nothing, and who devour the substance of others; and men who arrogate to themselves particular rights and exclusive privileges of wealth and indolence. Compare the Mamlouks of Egypt, the nobility of Europe, the Nairs of India, the Emirs of Arabia, the patricians of Rome, the Christian clergy, the Imans, the Bramins, the Bonzes, the Lamas, etc., etc., and you will find in all the same characteristic feature:--Men living in idleness at the expense of those who labor. Then the little group, deliberating on this new state of things, some of the most honorable among them said: We must join the people and partake of their labors and burdens, for they are men like us, and our riches come from them; but others arrogantly exclaimed: It would be a shame, an infamy, for us to mingle with the crowd; they are born to serve us. Are we not men of another race--the noble and pure descendants of the conquerors of this empire? This multitude must be reminded of our rights and its own origin. THE NOBLES.--People! know you not that our ancestors conquered this land, and that your race was spared only on condition of serving us? This is our social compact! this the government constituted by custom and prescribed by time. PEOPLE.--O conquerors, pure of blood! show us your genealogies! we shall then see if what in an individual is robbery and plunder, can be virtuous in a nation. And forthwith, voices were heard in every quarter calling out the nobles by their names; and relating their origin and parentage, they told how the grandfather, great-grandfather, or even father, born traders and mechanics, after acquiring wealth in every way, had purchased their nobility for money: so that but very few families were really of the original stock. See, said these voices, see these purse-proud commoners who deny their parents! see these plebian recruits who look upon themselves as illustrious veterans! and peals of laughter were heard. And the civil governors said: these people are mild, and naturally servile; speak to them of the king and of the law, and they will return to their duty. People! the king wills, the sovereign ordains! PEOPLE.--The king can will nothing but the good of the people; the sovereign can only ordain according to law. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--The law commands you to be submissive. PEOPLE.--The law is the general will; and we will a new order of things. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--You are then a rebel people. PEOPLE.--A nation cannot revolt; tyrants only are rebels. CIVIL GOVERNORS.--The king is on our side; he commands you to submit. PEOPLE.--Kings are inseparable from their nations. Our king cannot be with you; you possess only his phantom. And the military governors came forward. The people are timorous, said they; we must threaten them; they will submit only to force. Soldiers, chastise this insolent multitude. PEOPLE.--Soldiers, you are of our blood! Will you strike your brothers, your relatives? If the people perish who will nourish the army? And the soldiers, grounding their arms, said to the chiefs: We are likewise the people; show us the enemy! Then the ecclesiastical governors said: There is but one resource left. The people are superstitious; we must frighten them with the names of God and religion. Our dear brethren! our children! God has ordained us to govern you. PEOPLE.--Show us your credentials from God! PRIESTS.--You must have faith; reason leads astray. PEOPLE.--Do you govern without reason? PRIESTS.--God commands peace! Religion prescribes obedience. PEOPLE.--Peace supposes justice. Obedience implies conviction of a duty. PRIESTS.--Suffering is the business of this world. PEOPLE.--Show us the example. PRIESTS.--Would you live without gods or kings? PEOPLE.--We would live without oppressors. PRIESTS.--You must have mediators, intercessors. PEOPLE.--Mediators with God and with the king! courtiers and priests, your services are too expensive: we will henceforth manage our own affairs. And the little group said: We are lost! the multitude are enlightened. And the people answered: You are safe; since we are enlightened we will commit no violence; we only claim our rights. We feel resentments, but we will forget them. We were slaves, we might command; but we only wish to be free, and liberty is but justice. CHAPTER XVI. A FREE AND LEGISLATIVE PEOPLE. Considering that all public power was now suspended, and that the habitual restraint of the people had suddenly ceased, I shuddered with the apprehension that they would fall into the dissolution of anarchy. But, taking their affairs into immediate deliberation, they said: It is not enough that we have freed ourselves from tyrants and parasites; we must prevent their return. We are men, and experience has abundantly taught us that every man is fond of power, and wishes to enjoy it at the expense of others. It is necessary, then, to guard against a propensity which is the source of discord; we must establish certain rules of duty and of right. But the knowledge of our rights, and the estimation of our duties, are so abstract and difficult as to require all the time and all the faculties of a man. Occupied in our own affairs, we have not leisure for these studies; nor can we exercise these functions in our own persons. Let us choose, then, among ourselves, such persons as are capable of this employment. To them we will delegate our powers to institute our government and laws. They shall be the representatives of our wills and of our interests. And in order to attain the fairest representation possible of our wills and our interests, let it be numerous, and composed of men resembling ourselves. Having made the election of a numerous body of delegates, the people thus addressed them: We have hitherto lived in a society formed by chance, without fixed agreements, without free conventions, without a stipulation of rights, without reciprocal engagements,--and a multitude of disorders and evils have arisen from this precarious state. We are now determined on forming a regular compact; and we have chosen you to adjust the articles. Examine, then, with care what ought to be its basis and its conditions; consider what is the end and the principles of every association; recognize the rights which every member brings, the powers which he delegates, and those which he reserves to himself. Point out to us the rules of conduct--the basis of just and equitable laws. Prepare for us a new system of government; for we realize that the one which has hitherto guided us is corrupt. Our fathers have wandered in the paths of ignorance, and habit has taught us to follow in their footsteps. Everything has been done by fraud, violence, and delusion; and the true laws of morality and reason are still obscure. Clear up, then, their chaos; trace out their connection; publish their code, and we will adopt it. And the people raised a large throne, in the form of a pyramid, and seating on it the men they had chosen, said to them: We raise you to-day above us, that you may better discover the whole of our relations, and be above the reach of our passions. But remember that you are our fellow-citizens; that the power we confer on you is our own; that we deposit it with you, but not as a property or a heritage; that you must be the first to obey the laws you make; that to-morrow you redescend among us, and that you will have acquired no other right but that of our esteem and gratitude. And consider what a tribute of glory the world, which reveres so many apostles of error, will bestow on the first assembly of rational men, who shall have declared the unchangeable principles of justice, and consecrated, in the face of tyrants, the rights of nations. CHAPTER XVII. UNIVERSAL BASIS OF ALL RIGHT AND ALL LAW. The men chosen by the people to investigate the true principles of morals and of reason then proceeded in the sacred object of their mission; and, after a long examination, having discovered a fundamental and universal principle, a legislator arose and said to the people: Here is the primordial basis, the physical origin of all justice and of all right. Whatever be the active power, the moving cause, that governs the universe, since it has given to all men the same organs, the same sensations, and the same wants, it has thereby declared that it has given to all the same right to the use of its treasures, and that all men are equal in the order of nature. And, since this power has given to each man the necessary means of preserving his own existence, it is evident that it has constituted them all independent one of another; that it has created them free; that no one is subject to another; that each one is absolute proprietor of his own person. Equality and liberty are, therefore, two essential attributes of man, two laws of the Divinity, constitutional and unchangeable, like the physical properties of matter. Now, every individual being absolute master of his own person, it follows that a full and free consent is a condition indispensable to all contracts and all engagements. Again, since each individual is equal to another, it follows that the balance of what is received and of what is given, should be strictly in equilibrium; so that the idea of justice, of equity, necessarily imports that of equality.* * The etymology of the words themselves trace out to us this connection: equilibrium, equalitas, equitas, are all of one family, and the physical idea of equality, in the scales of a balance, is the source and type of all the rest. Equality and liberty are therefore the physical and unalterable basis of every union of men in society, and of course the necessary and generating principle of every law and of every system of regular government.* * In the Declaration of Rights, there is an inversion of ideas in the first article, liberty being placed before equality, from which it in reality springs. This defect is not to be wondered at; the science of the rights of man is a new science: it was invented yesterday by the Americans, to-day the French are perfecting it, but there yet remains a great deal to be done. In the ideas that constitute it there is a genealogical order which, from us basis, physical equality, to the minutest and most remote branches of government, ought to proceed in an uninterrupted series of inferences. A disregard of this basis has introduced in your nation, and in every other, those disorders which have finally roused you. It is by returning to this rule that you may reform them, and reorganize a happy order of society. But observe, this reorganization will occasion a violent shock in your habits, your fortunes, and your prejudices. Vicious contracts and abusive claims must be dissolved, unjust distinctions and ill founded property renounced; you must indeed recur for a moment to a state of nature. Consider whether you can consent to so many sacrifices. Then, reflecting on the cupidity inherent in the heart of man, I thought that this people would renounce all ideas of amelioration. But, in a moment, a great number of men, advancing toward the pyramid, made a solemn abjuration of all their distinctions and all their riches. Establish for us, said they, the laws of equality and liberty; we will possess nothing in future but on the title of justice. Equality, liberty, justice,--these shall be our code, and shall be written on our standards. And the people immediately raised a great standard, inscribed with these three words, in three different colors. They displayed it over the pyramid of the legislators, and for the first time the flag of universal justice floated on the face of the earth. And the people raised before the pyramid a new altar, on which they placed a golden balance, a sword, and a book with this inscription: TO EQUAL LAW, WHICH JUDGES AND PROTECTS. And having surrounded the pyramid and the altar with a vast amphitheatre, all the people took their seats to hear the publication of the law. And millions of men, raising at once their hands to heaven, took the solemn oath to live equal, free, and just; to respect their reciprocal properties and rights; to obey the law and its regularly chosen representatives. A spectacle so impressive and sublime, so replete with generous emotions, moved me to tears; and addressing myself to the Genius, I exclaimed: Let me now live, for in future I have everything to hope. CHAPTER XVIII. CONSTERNATION AND CONSPIRACY OF TYRANTS. But scarcely had the solemn voice of liberty and equality resounded through the earth, when a movement of confusion, of astonishment, arose in different nations. On the one hand, the people, warmed with desire, but wavering between hope and fear, between the sentiment of right and the habit of obedience, began to be in motion. The kings, on the other hand, suddenly awakened from the sleep of indolence and despotism, were alarmed for the safety of their thrones; while, on all sides, those clans of civil and religious tyrants, who deceive kings and oppress the people, were seized with rage and consternation; and, concerting their perfidious plans, they said: Woe to us, if this fatal cry of liberty comes to the ears of the multitude! Woe to us, if this pernicious spirit of justice be propagated! And, pointing to the floating banner, they continued: Consider what a swarm of evils are included in these three words! If all men are equal, where is our exclusive right to honors and to power? If all men are to be free, what becomes of our slaves, our vassals, our property? If all are equal in the civil state, where is our prerogative of birth, of inheritance? and what becomes of nobility? If they are all equal in the sight of God, what need of mediators?--where is the priesthood? Let us hasten, then, to destroy a germ so prolific, and so contagious. We must employ all our cunning against this innovation. We must frighten the kings, that they may join us in the cause. We must divide the people by national jealousies, and occupy them with commotions, wars, and conquests. They must be alarmed at the power of this free nation. Let us form a league against the common enemy, demolish that sacrilegious standard, overturn that throne of rebellion, and stifle in its birth the flame of revolution. And, indeed, the civil and religious tyrants of nations formed a general combination; and, multiplying their followers by force and seduction, they marched in hostile array against the free nation; and, surrounding the altar and the pyramid of natural law, they demanded with loud cries: What is this new and heretical doctrine? what this impious altar, this sacrilegious worship? True believers and loyal subjects! can you suppose that truth has been first discovered to-day, and that hitherto you have been walking in error? that those men, more fortunate than you, have the sole privilege of wisdom? And you, rebel and misguided nation, perceive you not that your new leaders are misleading you? that they destroy the principles of your faith, and overturn the religion of your ancestors? Ah, tremble! lest the wrath of heaven should kindle against you; and hasten by speedy repentance to retrieve your error. But, inaccessible to seduction as well as to fear, the free nation kept silence, and rising universally in arms, assumed an imposing attitude. And the legislator said to the chiefs of nations: If while we walked with a bandage on our eyes the light guided our steps, why, since we are no longer blindfold, should it fly from our search? If guides, who teach mankind to see for themselves, mislead and deceive them, what can be expected from those who profess to keep them in darkness? But hark, ye leaders of nations! If you possess the truth, show it to us, and we will receive it with gratitude, for we seek it with ardor, and have a great interest in finding it. We are men, and liable to be deceived; but you are also men, and equally fallible. Aid us then in this labyrinth, where the human race has wandered for so many ages; help us to dissipate the illusion of so many prejudices and vicious habits. Amid the shock of so many opinions which dispute for our acceptance, assist us in discovering the proper and distinctive character of truth. Let us this day terminate the long combat with error. Let us establish between it and truth a solemn contest, to which we will invite the opinions of men of all nations. Let us convoke a general assembly of the nations. Let them be judges in their own cause; and in the debate of all systems, let no champion, no argument, be wanting, either on the side of prejudice or of reason; and let the sentiment of a general and common mass of evidence give birth to a universal concord of opinions and of hearts. CHAPTER XIX. GENERAL ASSEMBLY OF THE NATIONS. Thus spoke the legislator; and the multitude, seized with those emotions which a reasonable proposition always inspires, expressed its applause; while the tyrants, left without support, were overwhelmed with confusion. A scene of a new and astonishing nature then opened to my view. All that the earth contains of people and of nations; men of every race and of every region, converging from their various climates, seemed to assemble in one allotted place; where, forming an immense congress, distinguished in groups by the vast variety of their dresses, features, and complexion, the numberless multitude presented a most unusual and affecting sight. On one side I saw the European, with his short close coat, pointed triangular hat, smooth chin, and powdered hair; on the other side the Asiatic, with a flowing robe, long beard, shaved head, and round turban. Here stood the nations of Africa, with their ebony skins, their woolly hair, their body girt with white and blue tissues of bark, adorned with bracelets and necklaces of coral, shells, and glass; there the tribes of the north, enveloped in their leathern bags; the Laplander, with his pointed bonnet and his snow-shoes; the Samoyede, with his feverish body and strong odor; the Tongouse, with his horned cap, and carrying his idols pendant from his neck; the Yakoute, with his freckled face; the Kalmuc, with his flat nose and little retorted eyes. Farther distant were the Chinese, attired in silk, with their hair hanging in tresses; the Japanese, of mingled race; the Malays, with wide-spreading ears, rings in their noses, and palm-leaf hats of vast circumference;* and the tattooed races of the isles of the southern ocean and of the continent of the antipodes.** The view of so many varieties of the same species, of so many extravagant inventions of the same understanding, and of so many modifications of the same organization, affected me with a thousand feelings and a thousand thoughts.*** I contemplated with astonishment this gradation of color, which, passing from a bright carnation to a light brown, a deeper brown, dusky, bronze, olive, leaden, copper, ends in the black of ebony and of jet. And finding the Cassimerian, with his rosy cheek, next to the sun-burnt Hindoo, and the Georgian by the side of the Tartar, I reflected on the effects of climate hot or cold, of soil high or low, marshy or dry, open or shaded. I compared the dwarf of the pole with the giant of the temperate zones, the slender body of the Arab with the ample chest of the Hollander; the squat figure of the Samoyede with the elegant form of the Greek and the Sclavonian; the greasy black wool of the Negro with the bright silken locks of the Dane; the broad face of the Kalmuc, his little angular eyes and flattened nose, with the oval prominent visage, large blue eyes, and aquiline nose of the Circassian and Abazan. I contrasted the brilliant calicoes of the Indian, the well-wrought stuffs of the European, the rich furs of the Siberian, with the tissues of bark, of osiers, leaves and feathers of savage nations; and the blue figures of serpents, flowers, and stars, with which they painted their bodies. Sometimes the variegated appearance of this multitude reminded me of the enamelled meadows of the Nile and the Euphrates, when, after rains or inundations, millions of flowers are rising on every side. Sometimes their murmurs and their motions called to mind the numberless swarms of locusts which, issuing from the desert, cover in the spring the plains of Hauran. * This species of the palm-tree is called Latanier. Its leaf, similar to a fan-mount, grows upon a stalk issuing directly from the earth. A specimen may be seen in the botanic garden. ** The country of the Papons of New Guinea. *** A hall of costumes in one of the galleries of the Louvre would, in every point of view, be an interesting establishment. It would furnish an admirable treat to the curiosity of a great number of persons, excellent models to the artist, and useful subjects of meditation to the physician, the philosopher and the legislator. Picture to yourself a collection of the various faces and figures of every country and nation, exhibiting accurately, color, features and form; what a field for investigation and enquiry as to the influence of climate, customs, food, etc. It might truly be called the science of man! Buffon has attempted a chapter of this nature, but it only serves to exhibit more strikingly our actual ignorance. Such a collection is said to have been begun at St. Petersburg, but it is also said at the same time to be as imperfect as the vocabulary of the three hundred languages. The enterprise would be worthy of the French nation. At the sight of so many rational beings, considering on the one hand the immensity of thoughts and sensations assembled in this place, and on the other hand, reflecting on the opposition of so many opinions, and the shock of so many passions of men so capricious, I struggled between astonishment, admiration, and secret dread--when the legislator commanded silence, and attracted all my attention. Inhabitants of earth! a free and powerful nation addresses you with words of justice and peace, and she offers you the sure pledges of her intentions in her own conviction and experience. Long afflicted with the same evils as yourselves, we sought for their source, and found them all derived from violence and injustice, erected into law by the inexperience of past ages, and maintained by the prejudices of the present. Then abolishing our artificial and arbitrary institutions, and recurring to the origin of all right and reason, we have found that there existed in the very order of nature and in the physical constitution of man, eternal and immutable laws, which only waited his observance to render him happy. O men! cast your eyes on the heavens that give you light, and on the earth that gives you bread! Since they offer the same bounties to you all--since from the power that gives them motion you have all received the same life, the same organs, have you not likewise all received the same right to enjoy its benefits? Has it not hereby declared you all equal and free? What mortal shall dare refuse to his fellow that which nature gives him? O nations! let us banish all tyranny and all discord; let us form but one society, one great family; and, since human nature has but one constitution, let there exist in future but one law, that of nature--but one code, that of reason--but one throne, that of justice--but one altar, that of union. He ceased; and an immense acclamation resounded to the skies. Ten thousand benedictions announced the transports of the multitude; and they made the earth re-echo JUSTICE, EQUALITY and UNION. But different emotions soon succeeded; soon the doctors and the chiefs of nations exciting a spirit of dispute, there was heard a sullen murmur, which growing louder, and spreading from group to group, became a vast disorder; and each nation setting up exclusive pretensions, claimed a preference for its own code and opinion. You are in error, said the parties, pointing one to the other. We alone are in possession of reason and truth. We alone have the true law, the real rule of right and justice, the only means of happiness and perfection. All other men are either blind or rebellious. And great agitation prevailed. Then the legislator, after enforcing silence, loudly exclaimed: What, O people! is this passionate emotion? Whither will this quarrel conduct you? What can you expect from this dissension? The earth has been for ages a field of disputation, and you have shed torrents of blood in your controversies. What have you gained by so many battles and tears? When the strong has subjected the weak to his opinion, has he thereby aided the cause of truth? O nations! take counsel of your own wisdom. When among yourselves disputes arise between families and individuals, how do you reconcile them? Do you not give them arbitrators? Yes, cried the whole multitude. Do so then to the authors of your present dissensions. Order those who call themselves your instructors, and who force their creeds upon you, to discuss before you their reasons. Since they appeal to your interests, inform yourselves how they support them. And you, chiefs and governors of the people! before dragging the masses into the quarrels resulting from your diverse opinions, let the reasons for and against your views be given. Let us establish one solemn controversy, one public scrutiny of truth--not before the tribunal of a corruptible individual, or of a prejudiced party, but in the grand forum of mankind--guarded by all their information and all their interests. Let the natural sense of the whole human race be our arbiter and judge. CHAPTER XX. THE SEARCH OF TRUTH. The people expressed their applause, and the legislator continued: To proceed with order, and avoid all confusion, let a spacious semicircle be left vacant in front of the altar of peace and union; let each system of religion, and each particular sect, erect its proper distinctive standard on the line of this semicircle; let its chiefs and doctors place themselves around the standard, and their followers form a column behind them. The semicircle being traced, and the order published, there instantly rose an innumerable multitude of standards, of all colors and of every form, like what we see in a great commercial port, when, on a day of rejoicing, a thousand different flags and streamers are floating from a forest of masts. At the sight of this prodigious diversity, I turned towards the Genius and said: I thought that the earth was divided only into eight or ten systems of faith, and I then despaired of a reconciliation; I now behold thousands of different sects, and how can I hope for concord? But these, replied the Genius, are not all; and yet they will be intolerant! Then, as the groups advanced to take their stations, he pointed out to me their distinctive marks, and thus began to explain their characters: That first group, said he, with a green banner bearing a crescent, a bandage, and a sabre, are the followers of the Arabian prophet. To say there is a God, without knowing what he is; to believe the words of a man, without understanding his language; to go into the desert to pray to God, who is everywhere; to wash the hands with water, and not abstain from blood; to fast all day, and eat all night; to give alms of their own goods, and to plunder those of others; such are the means of perfection instituted by Mahomet--such are the symbols of his followers; and whoever does not bear them is a reprobate, stricken with anathema, and devoted to the sword. A God of clemency, the author of life, has instituted these laws of oppression and murder: he made them for all the world, but has revealed them only to one man; he established them from all eternity, though he made them known but yesterday. These laws are abundantly sufficient for all purposes, and yet a volume is added to them. This volume was to diffuse light, to exhibit evidence, to lead men to perfection and happiness; and yet every page was so full of obscurities, ambiguities, and contradictions, that commentaries and explanations became necessary, even in the life-time of its apostle. Its interpreters, differing in opinion, divided into opposite and hostile sects. One maintains that Ali is the true successor; the other contends for Omar and Aboubekre. This denies the eternity of the Koran; that the necessity of ablutions and prayers. The Carmite forbids pilgrimages, and allows the use of wine; the Hakemite preaches the transmigration of souls. Thus they make up the number of seventy-two sects, whose banners are before you.* In this contestation, every one attributing the evidence of truth exclusively to himself, and taxing all others with heresy and rebellion, turns against them its sanguinary zeal. And their religion, which celebrates a mild and merciful God, the common father of all men,--changed to a torch of discord, a signal for war and murder, has not ceased for twelve hundred years to deluge the earth in blood, and to ravage and desolate the ancient hemisphere from centre to circumference.** * The Mussulmen enumerate in common seventy-two sects, but I read, while I resided among them, a work which gave an account of more than eighty,--all equally wise and important. ** Read the history of Islamism by its own writers, and you will be convinced that one of the principal causes of the wars which have desolated Asia and Africa, since the days of Mahomet, has been the apostolical fanaticism of its doctrine. Caesar has been supposed to have destroyed three millions of men: it would be interesting to make a similar calculation respecting every founder of a religious system. Those men, distinguished by their enormous white turbans, their broad sleeves, and their long rosaries, are the Imans, the Mollas, and the Muftis; and near them are the Dervishes with pointed bonnets, and the Santons with dishevelled hair. Behold with what vehemence they recite their professions of faith! They are now beginning a dispute about the greater and lesser impurities--about the matter and the manner of ablutions,--about the attributes of God and his perfections--about the Chaitan, and the good and wicked angels,--about death, the resurrection, the interrogatory in the tomb, the judgment, the passage of the narrow bridge not broader than a hair, the balance of works, the pains of hell, and the joys of paradise. Next to these, that second more numerous group, with white banners intersected with crosses, are the followers of Jesus. Acknowledging the same God with the Mussulmans, founding their belief on the same books, admitting, like them, a first man who lost the human race by eating an apple, they hold them, however, in a holy abhorrence; and, out of pure piety, they call each other impious blasphemers. The great point of their dissension consists in this, that after admitting a God one and indivisible the Christian divides him into three persons, each of which he believes to be a complete and entire God, without ceasing to constitute an identical whole, by the indivisibility of the three. And he adds, that this being, who fills the universe, has reduced himself to the body of a man; and has assumed material, perishable, and limited organs, without ceasing to be immaterial, infinite, and eternal. The Mussulman who does not comprehend these mysteries, rejects them as follies, and the visions of a distempered brain; though he conceives perfectly well the eternity of the Koran, and the mission of the prophet: hence their implacable hatreds. Again, the Christians, divided among themselves on many points, have formed parties not less violent than the Mussulmans; and their quarrels are so much the more obstinate, as the objects of them are inaccessible to the senses and incapable of demonstration: their opinions, therefore, have no other basis but the will and caprice of the parties. Thus, while they agree that God is a being incomprehensible and unknown, they dispute, nevertheless, about his essence, his mode of acting, and his attributes. While they agree that his pretended transformation into man is an enigma above the human understanding, they dispute on the junction or distinction of his two wills and his two natures, on his change of substance, on the real or fictitious presence, on the mode of incarnation, etc. Hence those innumerable sects, of which two or three hundred have already perished, and three or four hundred others, which still subsist, display those numberless banners which here distract your sight. The first in order, surrounded by a group in varied and fantastic dress, that confused mixture of violet, red, white, black and speckled garments--with heads shaved, or with tonsures, or with short hair--with red hats, square bonnets, pointed mitres, or long beards, is the standard of the Roman pontiff, who, uniting the civil government to the priesthood, has erected the supremacy of his city into a point of religion, and made of his pride an article of faith. On his right you see the Greek pontiff, who, proud of the rivalship of his metropolis, sets up equal pretensions, and supports them against the Western church by the priority of that of the East. On the left are the standards of two recent chiefs,* who, shaking off a yoke that had become tyrannical, have raised altar against altar in their reform, and wrested half of Europe from the pope. Behind these are the subaltern sects, subdivided from the principal divisions, the Nestorians, the Eutycheans, the Jacobites, the Iconoclasts, the Anabaptists, the Presbyterians, the Wicliffites, the Osiandrians, the Manicheans, the Pietists, the Adamites, the Contemplatives, the Quakers, the Weepers, and a hundred others,** all of distinct parties, persecuting when strong, tolerant when weak, hating each other in the name of a God of peace, forming each an exclusive heaven in a religion of universal charity, dooming each other to pains without end in a future state, and realizing in this world the imaginary hell of the other. * Luther and Calvin. ** Consult upon this subject Dictionnaire des Herseies par l'Abbe Pluquet, in two volumes 8vo.: a work admirably calculated to inspire the mind with philosophy, in the sense that the Lacedemonians taught the children temperance by showing to them the drunken Helots. After this group, observing a lonely standard of the color of hyacinth, round which were assembled men clad in all the different dresses of Europe and Asia: At least, said I, to the Genius, we shall find unanimity here. Yes, said he, at first sight and by a momentary accident. Dost thou not know that system of worship? Then, perceiving in Hebrew letters the monogram of the name of God, and the palms which the Rabbins held in their hands: True, said I, these are the children of Moses, dispersed even to this day, abhorring every nation, and abhorred and persecuted by all. Yes, he replied, and for this reason, that, having neither the time nor liberty to dispute, they have the appearance of unanimity. But no sooner will they come together, compare their principles, and reason on their opinions, than they will separate as formerly, at least into two principal sects;* one of which, taking advantage of the silence of their legislator, and adhering to the literal sense of his books, will deny everything that is not clearly expressed therein; and on this principle will reject as profane inventions, the immortality of the soul, its transmigration to places of pain or pleasure, its resurrection, the final judgment, the good and bad angels, the revolt of the evil Genius, and all the poetical belief of a world to come. And this highly-favored people, whose perfection consists in a slight mutilation of their persons,--this atom of a people, which forms but a small wave in the ocean of mankind, and which insists that God has made nothing but for them, will by its schism reduce to one-half, its present trifling weight in the scale of the universe. * The Sadducees and Pharisees. He then showed me a neighboring group, composed of men dressed in white robes, wearing a veil over their mouths, and ranged around a banner of the color of the morning sky, on which was painted a globe cleft in two hemispheres, black and white: The same thing will happen, said he, to these children of Zoroaster,* the obscure remnant of a people once so powerful. At present, persecuted like the Jews, and dispersed among all nations, they receive without discussion the precepts of the representative of their prophet. But as soon as the Mobed and the Destours** shall assemble, they will renew the controversy about the good and the bad principle; on the combats of Ormuzd, God of light, and Ahrimanes, God of darkness; on the direct and allegorical sense; on the good and evil Genii; on the worship of fire and the elements; on impurities and ablutions; on the resurrection of the soul and body, or only of the soul;*** on the renovation of the present world, and on that which is to take its place. And the Parses will divide into sects, so much the more numerous, as their families will have contracted, during their dispersion, the manners and opinions of different nations. * They are the Parses, better known by the opprobrious name of Gaures or Guebres, another word for infidels. They are in Asia what the Jews are in Europe. The name of their pope or high priest is Mobed. ** That is to say, their priests. See, respecting the rites of this religion, Henry Lord Hyde, and the Zendavesta. Their costume is a robe with a belt of four knots, and a veil over their mouth for fear of polluting the fire with their breath. *** The Zoroastrians are divided between two opinions; one party believing that both soul and body will rise, the other that it will be the soul only. The Christians and Mahometans have embraced the most solid of the two. Next to these, remark those banners of an azure ground, painted with monstrous figures of human bodies, double, triple, and quadruple, with heads of lions, boars, and elephants, and tails of fishes and tortoises; these are the ensigns of the sects of India, who find their gods in various animals, and the souls of their fathers in reptiles and insects. These men support hospitals for hawks, serpents, and rats, and they abhor their fellow creatures! They purify themselves with the dung and urine of cows, and think themselves defiled by the touch of a man! They wear a net over the mouth, lest, in a fly, they should swallow a soul in a state of penance,* and they can see a Pariah** perish with hunger! They acknowledge the same gods, but they separate into hostile bands. * According to the system of the Metempsychosis, a soul, to undergo purification, passes into the body of some insect or animal. It is of importance not to disturb this penance, as the work must in that case begin afresh. ** This is the name of a cast or tribe reputed unclean, because they eat of what has enjoyed life. The first standard, retired from the rest, bearing a figure with four heads, is that of Brama, who, though the creator of the universe, is without temples or followers; but, reduced to serve as a pedestal to the Lingam,* he contents himself with a little water which the Bramin throws every morning on his shoulder, reciting meanwhile an idle canticle in his praise. * See Sonnerat, Voyage aux Indes, vol. 1. The second, bearing a kite with a scarlet body and a white head, is that of Vichenou, who, though preserver of the world, has passed part of his life in wicked actions. You sometimes see him under the hideous form of a boar or a lion, tearing human entrails, or under that of a horse,* shortly to come armed with a sword to destroy the human race, blot out the stars, annihilate the planets, shake the earth, and force the great serpent to vomit a fire which shall consume the spheres. * These are the incarnations of Vichenou, or metamorphoses of the sun. He is to come at the end of the world, that is, at the expiration of the great period, in the form of a horse, like the four horses of the Apocalypse. The third is that of Chiven, God of destruction and desolation, who has, however, for his emblem the symbol of generation. He is the most wicked of the three, and he has the most followers. These men, proud of his character, express in their devotions to him their contempt for the other gods,* his equals and brothers; and, in imitation of his inconsistencies, while they profess great modesty and chastity, they publicly crown with flowers, and sprinkle with milk and honey, the obscene image of the Lingam. * When a sectary of Chiven hears the name of Vichenou pronounced, he stops his ears, runs, and purifies himself. In the rear of these, approach the smaller standards of a multitude of gods--male, female, and hermaphrodite. These are friends and relations of the principal gods, who have passed their lives in wars among themselves, and their followers imitate them. These gods have need of nothing, and they are constantly receiving presents; they are omnipotent and omnipresent, and a priest, by muttering a few words, shuts them up in an idol or a pitcher, to sell their favors for his own benefit. Beyond these, that cloud of standards, which, on a yellow ground, common to them all, bear various emblems, are those of the same god, who reins under different names in the nations of the East. The Chinese adores him in Fot,* the Japanese in Budso, the Ceylonese in Bedhou, the people of Laos in Chekia, of Pegu in Phta, of Siam in Sommona-Kodom, of Thibet in Budd and in La. Agreeing in some points of his history, they all celebrate his life of penitence, his mortifications, his fastings, his functions of mediator and expiator, the enmity between him and another god, his adversary, their battles, and his ascendency. But as they disagree on the means of pleasing him, they dispute about rites and ceremonies, and about the dogmas of interior doctrine and of public doctrine. That Japanese Bonze, with a yellow robe and naked head, preaches the eternity of souls, and their successive transmigrations into various bodies; near him, the Sintoist denies that souls can exist separate from the senses,** and maintains that they are only the effect of the organs to which they belong, and with which they must perish, as the sound of the flute perishes with the flute. Near him, the Siamese, with his eyebrows shaved, and a talipat screen*** in his hand, recommends alms, offerings, and expiations, at the same time that he preaches blind necessity and inexorable fate. The Chinese vo-chung sacrifices to the souls of his ancestors; and next him, the follower of Confucius interrogates his destiny in the cast of dice and the movement of the stars.**** That child, surrounded by a swarm of priests in yellow robes and hats, is the Grand Lama, in whom the god of Thibet has just become incarnate.*5 But a rival has arisen who partakes this benefit with him; and the Kalmouc on the banks of the Baikal, has a God similar to the inhabitant of Lasa. And they agree, also, in one important point--that god can inhabit only a human body. They both laugh at the stupidity of the Indian who pays homage to cow-dung, though they themselves consecrate the excrements of their high-priest.*6 * The original name of this god is Baits, which in Hebrew signifies an egg. The Arabs pronounce it Baidh, giving to the dh an emphatic sound which makes it approach to dz. Kempfer, an acurate traveler, writes it Budso, which must be pronounced Boudso, whence is derived the name of Budsoist and of Bonze, applied to the priests. Clement of Alexandria, in his Stromata, writes it Bedou, as it is pronounced also by the Chingulais; and Saint Jerome, Boudda and Boutta. At Thibet they call it Budd; and hence the name of the country called Boud-tan and Ti-budd: it was in this province that this system of religion was first inculcated in Upper Asia; La is a corruption of Allah, the name of God in the Syriac language, from which many of the eastern dialects appear to be derived. The Chinese having neither b nor d, have supplied their place by f and t, and have therefore said Fout. ** See in Kempfer the doctrine of the Sintoists, which is a mixture of that of Epicurus and of the Stoics. *** It is a leaf of the Latanier species of the palm-tree. Hence the bonzes of Siam take the appellation of Talapoin. The use of this screen is an exclusive privilege. **** The sectaries of Confucius are no less addicted to astrology than the bonzes. It is indeed the malady of every eastern nation. *5 The Delai-La-Ma, or immense high priest of La, is the same person whom we find mentioned in our old books of travels, by the name of Prester John, from a corruption of the Persian word Djehan, which signifies the world, to which has been prefixed the French word prestre or pretre, priest. Thus the priest world, and the god world are in the Persian idiom the same. *6 In a recent expedition the English have found certain idols of the Lamas filled in the inside with sacred pastils from the close stool of the high priest. Mr. Hastings, and Colonel Pollier, who is now at Lausanne, are living witnesses of this fact, and undoubtedly worthy of credit. It will be very extraordinary to observe, that this disgusting ceremony is connected with a profound philosophical system, to wit, that of the metempsychosis, admitted by the Lamas. When the Tartars swallow, the sacred relics, which they are accustomed to do, they imitate the laws of the universe, the parts of which are incessantly absorbed and pass into the substance of each other. It is upon the model of the serpent who devours his tail, and this serpent is Budd and the world. After these, a crowd of other banners, which no man could number, came forward into sight; and the genius exclaimed: I should never finish the detail of all the systems of faith which divide these nations. Here the hordes of Tartars adore, in the forms of beasts, birds, and insects, the good and evil Genii; who, under a principal, but indolent god, govern the universe. In their idolatry they call to mind the ancient paganism of the West. You observe the fantastical dress of the Chamans; who, under a robe of leather, hung round with bells and rattles, idols of iron, claws of birds, skins of snakes and heads of owls, invoke, with frantic cries and factitious convulsions, the dead to deceive the living. There, the black tribes of Africa exhibit the same opinions in the worship of their fetiches. See the inhabitant of Juida worship god in a great snake, which, unluckily, the swine delight to eat.* The Teleutean attires his god in a coat of several colors, like a Russian soldier.** The Kamchadale, observing that everything goes wrong in his frozen country, considers god as an old ill-natured man, smoking his pipe and hunting foxes and martins in his sledge.*** * It frequently happens that the swine devour the very species of serpents the negroes adore, which is a source of great desolation in the country. President de Brosses has given us, in his History of the Fetiche, a curious collection of absurdities of this nature. ** The Teleuteans, a Tartar nation, paint God as wearing a vesture of all colors, particularly red and green; and as these constitute the uniform of the Russian dragoons, they compare him to this description of soldiers. The Egyptians also dress the God World in a garment of every color. Eusebius Proep. Evang. p 115. The Teleuteans call God Bou, which is only an alteration of Boudd, the God Egg and World. *** Consult upon this subject a work entitled, Description des Peuples, soumis a la Russie, and it will be found that the picture is not overcharged. But you may still behold a hundred savage nations who have none of the ideas of civilized people respecting God, the soul, another world, and a future life; who have formed no system of worship; and who nevertheless enjoy the rich gifts of nature in the irreligion in which she has created them. CHAPTER XXI. PROBLEM OF RELIGIOUS CONTRADICTIONS. The various groups having taken their places, an unbounded silence succeeded to the murmurs of the multitude; and the legislator said: Chiefs and doctors of mankind! You remark how the nations, living apart, have hitherto followed different paths, each believing its own to be that of truth. If, however, truth is one, and opinions are various, it is evident that some are in error. If, then, such vast numbers of us are in the wrong, who shall dare to say, "I am in the right?" Begin, therefore, by being indulgent in your dissensions. Let us all seek truth as if no one possessed it. The opinions which to this day have governed the world, originating from chance, propagated in obscurity, admitted without discussion, accredited by a love of novelty and imitation, have usurped their empire in a clandestine manner. It is time, if they are well founded, to give a solemn stamp to their certainty, and legitimize their existence. Let us summon them this day to a general scrutiny, let each propound his creed, let the whole assembly be the judge, and let that alone be acknowledged as true which is so for the whole human race. Then, by order of position, the representative of the first standard on the left was allowed to speak: "You are not permitted to doubt," said their chief, "that our doctrine is the only true and infallible one. FIRST, it is revealed by God himself--" "So is ours," cried all the other standards, "and you are not permitted to doubt it." "But at least," said the legislator, "you must prove it, for we cannot believe what we do not know." "Our doctrine is proved," replied the first standard, "by numerous facts, by a multitude of miracles, by resurrections of the dead, by rivers dried up, by mountains removed--" "And we also have numberless miracles," cried all the others, and each began to recount the most incredible things. "THEIR miracles," said the first standard, "are imaginary, or the fictions of the evil spirit, who has deluded them." "They are yours," said the others, "that are imaginary;" and each group, speaking of itself, cried out: "None but ours are true, all the others are false." The legislator then asked: "Have you living witnesses of the facts?" "No," replied they all; "the facts are ancient, the witnesses are dead, but their writings remain." "Be it so," replied the legislator; "but if they contradict each other, who shall reconcile them?" "Just judge!" cried one of the standards, "the proof that our witnesses have seen the truth is, that they died to confirm it; and our faith is sealed by the blood of martyrs." "And ours too," said the other standards; "we have thousands of martyrs who have died in the most excruciating torments, without ever denying the truth." Then the Christians of every sect, the Mussulmans, the Indians, the Japanese, recited endless legends of confessors, martyrs, penitents, etc. And one of these parties, having denied the martyrology of the others: "Well," said they, "we will then die ourselves to prove the truth of our belief." And instantly a crowd of men, of every religion and of every sect, presented themselves to suffer the torments of death. Many even began to tear their arms, and to beat their heads and breasts, without discovering any symptom of pain. But the legislator, preventing them--"O men!" said he, "hear my words with patience. If you die to prove that two and two make four, will your death add any thing to this truth?" "No!" answered all. "And if you die to prove that they make five, will that make them five?" Again they all answered, "No." "What, then, is your persuasion to prove, if it changes not the existence of things? Truth is one--your persuasions are various; many of you, therefore, are in error. Now, if man, as is evident, can persuade himself of error, what is the persuasion of man to prove? "If error has its martyrs, what is the sure criterion of truth? "If the evil spirit works miracles, what is the distinctive character of God? "Besides, why resort forever to incomplete and insufficient miracles? Instead of changing the course of nature, why not rather change opinions? Why murder and terrify men, instead of instructing and correcting them? "O credulous, but opinionated mortals! none of us know what was done yesterday, what is doing to-day even under our eyes; and we swear to what was done two thousand years ago! "Oh, the weakness and yet the pride of men! The laws of nature are unchangeable and profound--our minds are full of illusion and frivolity--and yet we would comprehend every thing--determine every thing! Forgetting that it is easier for the whole human race to be in error, than to change the nature of the smallest atom." "Well, then," said one of the doctors, "let us lay aside the evidence of fact, since it is uncertain; let us come to argument--to the proofs inherent in the doctrine." Then came forward, with a look of confidence, an Iman of the law of Mahomet; and, having advanced into the circle, turned towards Mecca, and recited with great fervor his confession of faith. "Praise be to God," said he, with a solemn and imposing voice, "the light shines with full evidence, and the truth has no need of examination." Then, showing the Koran, he exclaimed: "Here is the light of truth in its proper essence. There is no doubt in this book. It conducts with safety him who walks in darkness, and who receives without discussion the divine word which descended on the prophet, to save the simple and confound the wise. God has established Mahomet his minister on earth; he has given him the world, that he may subdue with the sword whoever shall refuse to receive his law. Infidels dispute, and will not believe; their obduracy comes from God, who has hardened their hearts to deliver them to dreadful punishments."* * This passage contains the sense and nearly the very words of the first chapter of the Koran; and the reader will observe in general, that, in the pictures that follow, the writer has endeavored to give as accurately as possible the letter and spirit of the opinions of each party. At these words a violent murmur arose on all sides, and silenced the speaker. "Who is this man," cried all the groups, "who thus insults us without a cause? What right has he to impose his creed on us as conqueror and tyrant? Has not God endowed us, as well as him, with eyes, understanding, and reason? And have we not an equal right to use them, in choosing what to believe and what to reject? If he attacks us, shall we not defend ourselves? If he likes to believe without examination, must we therefore not examine before we believe? "And what is this luminous doctrine that fears the light? What is this apostle of a God of clemency, who preaches nothing but murder and carnage? What is this God of justice, who punishes blindness which he himself has made? If violence and persecution are the arguments of truth, are gentleness and charity the signs of falsehood?" A man then advancing from a neighboring group, said to the Iman: "Admitting that Mahomet is the apostle of the best doctrine,--the prophet of the true religion,--have the goodness at least to tell us whether, in the practice of his doctrine, we are to follow his son-in-law Ali, or his vicars Omar and Aboubekre?"* * These are the two grand parties into which the Mussulmans are divided. The Turks have embraced the second, the Persians the first. At the sound of these names a terrible schism arose among the Mussulmans themselves. The partisans of Ali and those of Omar, calling out heretics and blasphemers, loaded each other with execrations. The quarrel became so violent that neighboring groups were obliged to interfere, to prevent their coming to blows. At length, tranquillity being somewhat restored, the legislator said to the Imans: "See the consequences of your principles! If you yourselves were to carry them into practice, you would destroy each other to the last man. Is it not the first law of God that man should live?" Then, addressing himself to the other groups, he continued: "Doubtless this intolerant and exclusive spirit shocks every idea of justice, and overturns the whole foundation of morals and society; but before we totally reject this code of doctrine, is it not proper to hear some of its dogmas? Let us not pronounce on the forms, without having some knowledge of the substance." The groups having consented, the Iman began to expound how God, having sent to the nations lost in idolatry twenty-four thousand prophets, had finally sent the last, the seal and perfection of all, Mahomet; on whom be the salvation of peace: how, to prevent the divine word from being any longer perverted by infidels, the supreme goodness had itself written the pages of the Koran. Then, explaining the particular dogmas of Islamism, the Iman unfolded how the Koran, partaking of the divine nature, was uncreated and eternal, like its author: how it had been sent leaf by leaf, in twenty-four thousand nocturnal apparitions of the angel Gabriel: how the angel announced himself by a gentle knocking, which threw the prophet into a cold sweat: how in the vision of one night he had travelled over ninety heavens, riding on the beast Borack, half horse and half woman: how, endowed with the gift of miracles, he walked in the sunshine without a shadow, turned dry trees to green, filled wells and cisterns with water, and split in two the body of the moon: how, by divine command, Mahomet had propagated, sword in hand, the religion the most worthy of God by its sublimity, and the most proper for men by the simplicity of its practice; since it consisted in only eight or ten points:--To profess the unity of God; to acknowledge Mahomet as his only prophet; to pray five times a day; to fast one month in the year; to go to Mecca once in our life; to pay the tenth of all we possess; to drink no wine; to eat no pork; and to make war upon the infidels.* He taught that by these means every Mussulman becoming himself an apostle and martyr, should enjoy in this world many blessings; and at his death, his soul, weighed in the balance of works, and absolved by the two black angels, should pass the infernal pit on the bridge as narrow as a hair and as sharp as the edge of a sword, and should finally be received to a region of delight, which is watered with rivers of milk and honey, and embalmed in all the perfumes of India and Arabia; and where the celestial Houris--virgins always chaste--are eternally crowning with repeated favors the elect of God, who preserve an eternal youth. * Whatever the advocates for the philosophy and civilization of the Turks may assert, to make war upon infidels is considered by them as an obligatory precept and an act of religion. See Reland de Relig. Mahom. At these words an involuntary smile was seen on all their lips; and the various groups, reasoning on these articles of faith, exclaimed with one voice: "Is it possible that reasonable beings can admit such reveries? Would you not think it a chapter from The Thousand and One Nights?" A Samoyede advanced into the circle: "The paradise of Mahomet," said he, "appears to me very good; but one of the means of gaining it is embarrassing: for if we must neither eat nor drink between the rising and setting sun, as he has ordered, how are we to practise that fast in my country, where the sun continues above the horizon six months without setting?" "That is impossible," cried all the Mussulman doctors, to support the teaching of the prophet; but a hundred nations having attested the fact, the infallibility of Mahomet could not but receive a severe shock. "It is singular," said an European, "that God should be constantly revealing what takes place in heaven, without ever instructing us what is doing on the earth." "For my part," said an American, "I find a great difficulty in the pilgrimage. For suppose twenty-five years to a generation, and only a hundred millions of males on the globe,--each being obliged to go to Mecca once in his life,--there must be four millions a year on the journey; and as it would be impracticable for them to return the same year, the numbers would be doubled--that is, eight millions: where would you find provisions, lodgings, water, vessels, for this universal procession? Here must be miracles indeed!" "The proof," said a catholic doctor, "that the religion of Mahomet is not revealed, is that the greater part of the ideas which serve for its basis existed a long time before, and that it is only a confused mixture of truths disfigured and taken from our holy religion and from that of the Jews; which an ambitious man has made to serve his projects of domination, and his worldly views. Look through his book; you will see nothing there but the histories of the Bible and the Gospel travestied into absurd fables--into a tissue of vague and contradictory declamations, and ridiculous or dangerous precepts. "Analyze the spirit of these precepts, and the conduct of their apostle; you will find there an artful and audacious character, which, to obtain its end, works ably it is true, on the passions of the people it had to govern. It is speaking to simple men, and it entertains them with miracles; they are ignorant and jealous, and it flatters their vanity by despising science; they are poor and rapacious, and it excites their cupidity by the hope of pillage; having nothing at first to give them on earth, it tells them of treasures in heaven; it teaches them to desire death as a supreme good; it threatens cowards with hell; it rewards the brave with paradise; it sustains the weak with the opinion of fatality; in short, it produces the attachment it wants by all the allurements of sense, and all the power of the passions. "How different is the character of our religion! and how completely does its empire, founded on the counteraction of the natural temper, and the mortification of all our passions, prove its divine origin! How forcibly does its mild and compassionate morality, its affections altogether spiritual, attest its emanation from God! Many of its doctrines, it is true, soar above the reach of the understanding, and impose on reason a respectful silence; but this more fully demonstrates its revelation, since the human mind could never have imagined such mysteries." Then, holding the Bible in one hand and the four Gospels in the other, the doctor began to relate that, in the beginning, God, after passing an eternity in idleness, took the resolution, without any known cause, of making the world out of nothing; that having created the whole universe in six days, he found himself fatigued on the seventh; that having placed the first human pair in a garden of delights, to make them completely happy, he forbade their tasting a particular fruit which he placed within their reach; that these first parents, having yielded to the temptation, all their race (which were not yet born) had been condemned to bear the penalty of a fault which they had not committed; that, after having left the human race to damn themselves for four or five thousand years, this God of mercy ordered a well beloved son, whom he had engendered without a mother, and who was as old as himself, to go and be put to death on the earth; and this for the salvation of mankind; of whom much the greater portion, nevertheless, have ever since continued in the way of perdition; that to remedy this new difficulty, this same God, born of a virgin, having died and risen from the dead, assumes a new existence every day, and in the form of a piece of bread, multiplies himself by millions at the voice of one of the basest of men. Then, passing on to the doctrine of the sacraments, he was going to treat at large on the power of absolution and reprobation, of the means of purging all sins by a little water and a few words, when, uttering the words indulgence, power of the pope, sufficient grace, and efficacious grace, he was interrupted by a thousand cries. "It is a horrible abuse," cried the Lutherans, "to pretend to remit sins for money." "The notion of the real presence," cried the Calvinists, "is contrary to the text of the Gospel." "The pope has no right to decide anything of himself," cried the Jansenists; and thirty other sects rising up, and accusing each other of heresies and errors, it was no longer possible to hear anything distinctly. Silence being at last restored, the Mussulmans observed to the legislator: "Since you have rejected our doctrine as containing things incredible, can you admit that of the Christians? Is not theirs still more contrary to common sense and justice? A God, immaterial and infinite, to become a man! to have a son as old as himself! This god-man to become bread, to be eaten and digested! Have we any thing equal to that? Have the Christians an exclusive right of setting up a blind faith? And will you grant them privileges of belief to our detriment?" Some savage tribes then advanced: "What!" said they, "because a man and woman ate an apple six thousand years ago, all the human race are damned? And you call God just? What tyrant ever rendered children responsible for the faults of their fathers? What man can answer for the actions of another? Does not this overturn every idea of justice and of reason?" Others exclaimed: "Where are the proofs, the witnesses of these pretended facts? Can we receive them without examining the evidence? The least action in a court of justice requires two witnesses; and we are ordered to believe all this on mere tradition and hearsay!" A Jewish Rabbin then addressing the assembly, said: "As to the fundamental facts, we are sureties; but with regard to their form and their application, the case is different, and the Christians are here condemned by their own arguments. For they cannot deny that we are the original source from which they are derived--the primitive stock on which they are grafted; and hence the reasoning is very short: Either our law is from God, and then theirs is a heresy, since it differs from ours, or our law is not from God, and then theirs falls at the same time." "But you must make this distinction," replied the Christian: "Your law is from God as typical and preparative, but not as final and absolute: you are the image of which we are the substance." "We know," replied the Rabbin, "that such are your pretensions; but they are absolutely gratuitous and false. Your system turns altogether on mystical meanings, visionary and allegorical interpretations.* With violent distortions on the letter of our books, you substitute the most chimerical ideas for the true ones, and find in them whatever pleases you; as a roving imagination will find figures in the clouds. Thus you have made a spiritual Messiah of that which, in the spirit of our prophets, is only a temporal king. You have made a redemption of the human race out of the simple re-establishment of our nation. Your conception of the Virgin is founded on a single phrase, of which you have changed the meaning. Thus you make from our Scriptures whatever your fancy dictates; you even find there your trinity; though there is not a word that has the most distant allusion to such a thing; and it is an invention of profane writers, admitted into your system with a host of other opinions, of every religion and of every sect, during the anarchy of the first three centuries of your era." * When we read the Fathers of the church, and see upon what arguments they have built the edifice of religion, we are inexpressibly astonished with their credulity or their knavery: but allegory was the rage of that period; the Pagans employed it to explain the actions of their gods, and the Christians acted in the same spirit when they employed it after their fashion. At these words, the Christian doctors, crying sacrilege and blasphemy, sprang forward in a transport of fury to fall upon the Jew; and a troop of monks, in motley dresses of black and white, advanced with a standard on which were painted pincers, gridirons, lighted fagots, and the words Justice, Charity, Mercy.* "It is necessary," said they, "to make an example of these impious wretches, and burn them for the glory of God." They began even to prepare the pile, when a Mussulman answered in a strain of irony: "This, then, is that religion of peace, that meek and beneficent system which you so much extol! This is that evangelical charity which combats infidelity with persuasive mildness, and repays injuries with patience! Ye hypocrites! It is thus that you deceive mankind--thus that you propagate your accursed errors! When you were weak, you preached liberty, toleration, peace; when you are strong, you practise persecution and violence--" * This description answers exactly to the banner of the Inquisition of Spanish Jacobins. And he was going to begin the history of the wars and slaughters of Christianity, when the legislator, demanding silence, suspended this scene of discord. The monks, affecting a tone of meekness and humility, exclaimed: "It is not ourselves that we would avenge; it is the cause of God; it is the glory of God that we defend." "And what right have you, more than we," said the Imans, "to constitute yourselves the representatives of God? Have you privileges that we have not? Are you not men like us?" "To defend God," said another group, "to pretend to avenge him, is to insult his wisdom and his power. Does he not know, better than men, what befits his dignity?" "Yes," replied the monks, "but his ways are secret." "And it remains for you to prove," said the Rabbins, "that you have the exclusive privilege of understanding them." Then, proud of finding supporters to their cause, the Jews thought that the books of Moses were going to be triumphant, when the Mobed (high priest) of the Parses obtained leave to speak. "We have heard," said he, "the account of the Jews and Christians of the origin of the world; and, though greatly mutilated, we find in it some facts which we admit. But we deny that they are to be attributed to the legislator of the Hebrews. It was not he who made known to men these sublime truths, these celestial events. It was not to him that God revealed them, but to our holy prophet Zoroaster: and the proof of this is in the very books that they refer to. Examine with attention the laws, the ceremonies, the precepts established by Moses in those books; you will not find the slightest indication, either expressed or understood, of what constitutes the basis of the Jewish and Christian theology. You nowhere find the least trace of the immortality of the soul, or of a future life, or of heaven, or of hell, or of the revolt of the principal angel, author of the evils of the human race. These ideas were not known to Moses, and the reason is very obvious: it was not till four centuries afterwards that Zoroaster first evangelized them in Asia.* * See the Chronology of the Twelve Ages, in which I conceive myself to have clearly proved that Moses lived about 1,400 years before Jesus Christ, and Zoroaster about a thousand. "Thus," continued the Mobed, turning to the Rabbins, "it was not till after that epoch, that is to say, in the time of your first kings, that these ideas began to appear in your writers; and then their appearance was obscure and gradual, according to the progress of the political relations between your ancestors and ours. It was especially when, having been conquered by the kings of Nineveh and Babylon and transported to the banks of the Tygris and the Euphrates, where they resided for three successive generations, that they imbibed manners and opinions which had been rejected as contrary to their law. When our king Cyrus had delivered them from slavery, their heart was won to us by gratitude; they became our disciples and imitators; and they admitted our dogmas in the revision of their books;* for your Genesis, in particular, was never the work of Moses, but a compilation drawn up after the return from the Babylonian captivity, in which are inserted the Chaldean opinions of the origin of the world. * In the first periods of the Christian church, not only the most learned of those who have since been denominated heretics, but many of the orthodox conceived Moses to have written neither the law nor the Pentateuch, but that the work was a compilation made by the elders of the people and the Seventy, who, after the death of Moses, collected his scattered ordinances, and mixed with them things that were extraneous; similar to what happened as to the Koran of Mahomet. See Les Clementines, Homel. 2. sect. 51. and Homel. 3. sect. 42. Modern critics, more enlightened or more attentive than the ancients, have found in Genesis in particular, marks of its having been composed on the return from the captivity; but the principal proofs have escaped them. These I mean to exhibit in an analysis of the book of Genesis, in which I shall demonstrate that the tenth chapter, among others, which treats of the pretended generations of the man called Noah, is a real geographical picture of the world, as it was known to the Hebrews at the epoch of the captivity, which was bounded by Greece or Hellas at the West, mount Caucasus at the North, Persia at the East, and Arabia and Upper Egypt at the South. All the pretended personages from Adam to Abraham, or his father Terah, are mythological beings, stars, constellations, countries. Adam is Bootes: Noah is Osiris: Xisuthrus Janus, Saturn; that is to say Capricorn, or the celestial Genius that opened the year. The Alexandrian Chronicle says expressly, page 85, that Nimrod was supposed by the Persians to be their first king, as having invented the art of hunting, and that he was translated into heaven, where he appears under the name of Orion. "At first the pure followers of the law, opposing to the emigrants the letter of the text and the absolute silence of the prophet, endeavored to repel these innovations; but they ultimately prevailed, and our doctrine, modified by your ideas, gave rise to a new sect. "You expected a king to restore your political independence; we announced a God to regenerate and save mankind. From this combination of ideas, your Essenians laid the foundation of Christianity: and whatever your pretensions may be, Jews, Christians, Mussulmans, you are, in your system of spiritual beings, only the blundering followers of Zoroaster." The Mobed, then passing on to the details of his religion, quoting from the Zadder and the Zendavesta, recounted, in the same order as they are found in the book of Genesis, the creation of the world in six gahans,* the formation of a first man and a first woman, in a divine place, under the reign of perfect good; the introduction of evil into the world by the great snake, emblem of Ahrimanes; the revolt and battles of the Genius of evil and darkness against Ormuzd, God of good and of light; the division of the angels into white and black, or good and bad; their hierarchal orders, cherubim, seraphim, thrones, dominions, etc.; the end of the world at the close of six thousand years; the coming of the lamb, the regenerator of nature; the new world; the future life, and the regions of happiness and misery; the passage of souls over the bridge of the bottomless pit; the celebration of the mysteries of Mithras; the unleavened bread which the initiated eat; the baptism of new-born children; the unction of the dead; the confession of sins; and, in a word, he recited so many things analagous to those of the three preceding religions, that his discourse seemed like a commentary or a continuation of the Koran or the Apocalypse.** * Or periods, or in six gahan-bars, that is six periods of time. These periods are what Zoroaster calls the thousands of God or of light, meaning the six summer months. In the first, say the Persians, God created (arranged in order) the heavens; in the second the waters; in the third the earth; in the fourth trees; in the fifth animals; and in the sixth man; corresponding with the account in Genesis. For particulars see Hyde, ch. 9, and Henry Lord, ch. 2, on the religion of the ancient Persians. It is remarkable that the same tradition is found in the sacred books of the Etrurians, which relate that the fabricator of all things had comprised the duration of his work in a period of twelve thousand years, which period was distributed to the twelve houses of the sun. In the first thousand, God made heaven and earth; in the second the firmament; in the third the sea and the waters; in the fourth the sun, moon and stars; in the fifth the souls of animals, birds, and reptiles; in the sixth man. See Suidas, at the word Tyrrhena; which shows first the identity of their theological and astrological opinions; and, secondly, the identity, or rather confusion of ideas, between absolute and systematical creation; that is, the periods assigned for renewing the face of nature, which were at first the period of the year, and afterwards periods of 60, of 600, of 25,000, of 36,000 and of 432,000 years. ** The modern Parses and the ancient Mithriacs, who are the same sect, observe all the Christian sacraments, even the laying on of hands in confirmation. The priest of Mithra, says Tertullian, (de Proescriptione, ch. 40) promises absolution from sin on confession and baptism; and, if I rightly remember, Mithra marks his soldiers in the forehead, with the chrism called in the Egyptian Kouphi; he celebrates the sacrifice of bread, which is the resurrection, and presents the crown to his followers, menacing them at the same time with the sword, etc. In these mysteries they tried the courage of the initiated with a thousand terrors, presenting fire to his face, a sword to his breast, etc.; they also offered him a crown, which he refused, saying, God is my crown: and this crown is to be seen in the celestial sphere by the side of Bootes. The personages in these mysteries were distinguished by the names of the animal constellations. The ceremony of mass is nothing more than an imitation of these mysteries and those of Eleusis. The benediction, the Lord be with you, is a literal translation of the formula of admission chou-k, am, p-ka. See Beausob. Hist. Du Manicheisme, vol. ii. But the Jewish, Christian, and Mahometan doctors, crying out against this recital, and treating the Parses as idolaters and worshippers of fire, charged them with falsehood, interpolations, falsification of facts; and there arose a violent dispute as to the dates of the events, their order and succession, the origin of the doctrines, their transmission from nation to nation, the authenticity of the books on which they are founded, the epoch of their composition, the character of their compilers, and the validity of their testimony. And the various parties, pointing out reciprocally to each other, the contradictions, improbabilities, and forgeries, accused one another of having established their belief on popular rumors, vague traditions, and absurd fables, invented without discernment, and admitted without examination by unknown, partial, or ignorant writers, at uncertain or unknown epochs. A great murmur now arose from under the standards of the various Indian sects; and the Bramins, protesting against the pretensions of the Jews and the Parses, said: "What are these new and almost unheard of nations, who arrogantly set themselves up as the sources of the human race, and the depositaries of its archives? To hear their calculations of five or six thousand years, it would seem that the world was of yesterday; whereas our monuments prove a duration of many thousands of centuries. And for what reason are their books to be preferred to ours? Are then the Vedes, the Chastres, and the Pourans inferior to the Bibles, the Zendavestas, and the Zadders?* And is not the testimony of our fathers and our gods as valid as that of the fathers and the gods of the West? Ah! if it were permitted to reveal our mysteries to profane men! if a sacred veil did not justly conceal them from every eye!" These are the sacred volumes of the Hindoos; they are sometimes written Vedams, Pouranams, Chastrans, because the Hindoos, like the Persians, are accustomed to give a nasal sound to the terminations of their words, which we represent by the affixes on and an, and the Portuguese by the affixes om and am. Many of these books have been translated, thanks to the liberal spirit of Mr. Hastings, who has founded at Calcutta a literary society, and a printing press. At the same time, however, that we express our gratitude to this society, we must be permitted to complain of its exclusive spirit; the number of copies printed of each book being such as it is impossible to purchase them even in England; they are wholly in the hands of the East India proprietors. Scarcely even is the Asiatic Miscellany known in Europe; and a man must be very learned in oriental antiquity before he so much as hears of the Jones's, the Wilkins's, and the Halhed's, etc. As to the sacred books of the Hindoos, all that are yet in our hands are the Bhagvat Geeta, the Ezour-Vedam, the Bagavadam, and certain fragments of the Chastres printed at the end of the Bhagvat Geeta. These books are in Indostan what the Old and New Testament are in Christendom, the Koran in Turkey, the Zadder and the Zendavesta among the Parses, etc. When I have taken an extensive survey of their contents, I have sometimes asked myself, what would be the loss to the human race if a new Omar condemned them to the flames; and, unable to discover any mischief that would ensue, I call the imaginary chest that contains them, the box of Pandora. The Bramins stopping short at these words: "How can we admit your doctrine," said the legislator, "if you will not make it known? And how did its first authors propagate it, when, being alone possessed of it, their own people were to them profane? Did heaven reveal it to be kept a secret?"* * The Vedas or Vedams are the sacred volumes of the Hindoos, as the Bibles with us. They are three in number; the Rick Veda, the Yadjour Veda, and the Sama Veda; they are so scarce in India, that the English could with great difficulty find an original one, of which a copy is deposited in the British Museum; they who reckon four Vedas, include among them the Attar Veda, concerning ceremonies, but which is lost. There are besides commentaries named Upanishada, one of which was published by Anquetil du Peron, and entitled Oupnekhat, a curious work. The date of these books is more than twenty-five centuries prior to our era; their contents prove that all the reveries of the Greek metaphysicians come from India and Egypt. Since the year 1788, the learned men of England are working in India a mine of literature totally unknown in Europe, and which proves that the civilization of India ascends to a very remote antiquity. After the Vedas come the Chastras amounting to six. They treat of theology and the Sciences. Afterwards eighteen Pouranas, treating of Mythology and History. See the Bahgouet-guita, the Baga Vadam, and the Ezour-Vedam, etc. But the Bramins persisting in their silence: "Let them have the honor of the secret," said a European: "Their doctrine is now divulged; we have their books, and I can give you the substance of them." Then beginning with an abstract of the four Vedes, the eighteen Pourans, and the five or six Chastres, he recounted how a being, infinite, eternal, immaterial and round, after having passed an eternity in self-contemplation, and determining at last to manifest himself, separated the male and female faculties which were in him, and performed an act of generation, of which the Lingam remains an emblem; how that first act gave birth to three divine powers, Brama, Bichen or Vichenou, and Chib or Chiven;* whose functions were--the first to create, the second to preserve, and the third to destroy, or change the form of the universe. Then, detailing the history of their operations and adventures, he explained how Brama, proud of having created the world and the eight bobouns, or spheres of probation, thought himself superior to Chib, his equal; how his pride brought on a battle between them, in which these celestial globes were crushed like a basket of eggs; how Brama, vanquished in this conflict, was reduced to serve as a pedestal to Chib, metamorphosed into a Lingam; how Vichenou, the god mediator, has taken at different times to preserve the world, nine mortal forms of animals; how first, in shape of a fish, he saved from the universal deluge a family who repeopled the earth; how afterwards, in the form of a tortoise,** he drew from the sea of milk the mountain Mandreguiri (the pole); then, becoming a boar, he tore the belly of the giant Ereuniachessen, who was drowning the earth in the abyss of Djole, from whence he drew it out with his tusks; how, becoming incarnate in a black shepherd, and under the name of Christ-en, he delivered the world of the enormous serpent Calengem, and then crushed his head, after having been wounded by him in the heel. * These names are differently pronounced according to the different dialects; thus they say Birmah, Bremma, Brouma. Bichen has been turned into Vichen by the easy exchange of a B for a V, and into Vichenou by means of a grammatical affix. In the same manner Chib, which is synonymous with Satan, and signifies adversary, is frequently written Chiba and Chiv-en; he is called also Rouder and Routr-en, that is, the destroyer. ** This is the constellation testudo, or the lyre, which was at first a tortoise, on account of its slow motion round the Pole; then a lyre, because it is the shell of this reptile on which the strings of the lyre are mounted. See an excellent memoir of M. Dupuis sur l'Origine des Constellations. Then, passing on to the history of the secondary Genii, he related how the Eternal, to display his own glory, created various orders of angels, whose business it was to sing his praises and to direct the universe; how a part of these angels revolted under the guidance of an ambitious chief, who strove to usurp the power of God, and to govern all; how God plunged them into a world of darkness, there to undergo the punishment for their crimes; how at last, touched with compassion, he consented to release them, to receive them into favor, after they should undergo a long series of probations; how, after creating for this purpose fifteen orbits or regions of planets, and peopling them with bodies, he ordered these rebel angels to undergo in them eighty-seven transmigrations; he then explained how souls, thus purified, returned to the first source, to the ocean of life and animation from which they had proceeded; and since all living creatures contain portions of this universal soul, he taught how criminal it was to deprive them of it. He was finally proceeding to explain the rites and ceremonies, when, speaking of offerings and libations of milk and butter made to gods of copper and wood, and then of purifications by the dung and urine of cows, there arose a universal murmur, mixed with peals of laughter, which interrupted the orator. Each of the different groups began to reason on that religion: "They are idolators," said the Mussulmans; "and should be exterminated." "They are deranged in their intellect," said the followers of Confucius; "we must try to cure them." "What ridiculous gods," said others, "are these puppets, besmeared with grease and smoke! Are gods to be washed like dirty children, from whom you must brush away the flies, which, attracted by honey, are fouling them with their excrements!" But a Bramin exclaimed with indignation: "These are profound mysteries,--emblems of truth, which you are not worthy to hear." "And in what respect are you more worthy than we?" exclaimed a Lama of Tibet. "Is it because you pretend to have issued from the head of Brama, and the rest of the human race from the less noble parts of his body? But to support the pride of your distinctions of origin and castes, prove to us in the first place that you are different from other men; establish, in the next place, as historical facts, the allegories which you relate; show us, indeed, that you are the authors of all this doctrine; for we will demonstrate, if necessary, that you have only stolen and disfigured it; that you are only the imitators of the ancient paganism of the West; to which, by an ill assorted mixture, you have allied the pure and spiritual doctrine of our gods--a doctrine totally detached from the senses, and entirely unknown on earth till Beddou taught it to the nations."* * All the ancient opinions of the Egyptian and Grecian theologians are to be found in India, and they appear to have been introduced, by means of the commerce of Arabia and the vicinity of Persia, time immemorial. A number of groups having asked what was this doctrine, and who was this god, of whom the greater part had never heard the name, the Lama resumed and said: "In the beginning, a sole-existent and self-existent God, having passed an eternity in the contemplation of his own being, resolved to manifest his perfections out of himself, and created the matter of the world. The four elements being produced, but still in a state of confusion, he breathed on the face of the waters, which swelled like an immense bubble in form of an egg, which unfolding, became the vault or orb of heaven, enclosing the world.* Having made the earth, and the bodies of animals, this God, essence of motion, imparted to them a part of his own being to animate them; for this reason, the soul of everything that breathes being a portion of the universal soul, no one of them can perish; they only change their form and mould in passing successively into different bodies. Of all these forms, the one most pleasing to God is that of man, as most resembling his own perfections. When a man, by an absolute disengagement from his senses, is wholly absorbed in self-contemplation, he then discovers the divinity, and becomes himself God. Of all the incarnations of this kind that God has hitherto taken, the greatest and most solemn was that in which he appeared thirty centuries ago in Kachemire, under the name of Fot or Beddou, to preach the doctrines of self-denial and self-annihilation." * This cosmogony of the Lamas, the Bonzes, and even the Bramins, as Henry Lord asserts, is literally that of the ancient Egyptians. The Egyptians, says Porphyry, call Kneph, intelligence, or efficient cause of the universe. They relate that this God vomited an egg, from which was produced another God named Phtha or Vulcan, (igneous principle or the sun) and they add, that this egg is the world. Euseb. Proep. Evang. p. 115. They represent, says the same author in another place, the God Kneph, or efficient cause, under the form of a man in deep blue (the color of the sky) having in his hand a sceptre, a belt round his body, and a small bonnet royal of light feathers on his head, to denote how very subtile and fugacious the idea of that being is. Upon which I shall observe that Kneph in Hebrew signifies a wing, a feather, and that this color of sky-blue is to be found in the majority of the Indian Gods, and is, under the name of Narayan, one of their most distinguishing epithets. Then, pursuing the history of Fot, the Lama continued: "He was born from the right flank of a virgin of royal blood, who did not cease to be a virgin for having become a mother; that the king of the country, uneasy at his birth, wished to destroy him, and for this purpose ordered a massacre of all the males born at that period, that being saved by shepherds, Beddou lived in the desert till the age of thirty years, at which time he began his mission to enlighten men and cast out devils; that he performed a multitude of the most astonishing miracles; that he spent his life in fasting and severe penitence, and at his death, bequeathed to his disciples a book containing his doctrines." And the Lama began to read: "He that leaveth his father and mother to follow me," says Fot, "becomes a perfect Samanean (a heavenly man). "He that practices my precepts to the fourth degree of perfection, acquires the faculty of flying in the air, of moving heaven and earth, of prolonging or shortening his life (rising from the dead). "The Samanean despises riches, and uses only what is strictly necessary; he mortifies his body, silences his passions, desires nothing, forms no attachments, meditates my doctrines without ceasing, endures injuries with patience, and bears no malice to his neighbor. "Heaven and earth shall perish," says Fot: "despise therefore your bodies, which are composed of the four perishable elements, and think only of your immortal soul. "Listen not to the flesh: fear and sorrow spring from the passions: stifle the passions and you destroy fear and sorrow. "Whoever dies without having embraced my religion," says Fot, "returns among men, until he embraces it." The Lama was going on with his reading, when the Christians interrupted him, crying out that this was their own religion adulterated--that Fot was no other than Jesus himself disfigured, and that the Lamas were the Nestorians and the Manicheans disguised and bastardized.* * This is asserted by our missionaries, and among others by Georgi in his unfinished work of the Thibetan alphabet: but if it can be proved that the Manicheans were but plagiarists, and the ignorant echo of a doctrine that existed fifteen hundred years before them, what becomes of the declarations of Georgi? See upon this subject, Beausob. Hist. du Manicheisme. But the Lama, supported by the Chamans, Bonzes, Gonnis, Talapoins of Siam, of Ceylon, of Japan, and of China, proved to the Christians, even from their own authors, that the doctrine of the Samaneans was known through the East more than a thousand years before the Christian era; that their name was cited before the time of Alexander, and that Boutta, or Beddou, was known before Jesus.* * The eastern writers in general agree in placing the birth of Beddou 1027 years before Jesus Christ, which makes him the contemporary of Zoroaster, with whom, in my opinion, they confound him. It is certain that his doctrine notoriously existed at that epoch; it is found entire in that of Orpheus, Pythagoras, and the Indian gymnosophists. But the gymnosophists are cited at the time of Alexander as an ancient sect already divided into Brachmans and Samaneans. See Bardesanes en Saint Jerome, Epitre a Jovien. Pythagoras lived in the ninth century before Jesus Christ; See chronology of the twelve ages; and Orpheus is of still greater antiquity. If, as is the case, the doctrine of Pythagoras and that of Orpheus are of Egyptian origin, that of Beddou goes back to the common source; and in reality the Egyptian priests recite, that Hermes as he was dying said: "I have hitherto lived an exile from my country, to which I now return. Weep not for me, I ascend to the celestial abode where each of you will follow in his turn: there God is: this life is only death."--Chalcidius in Thinaeum. Such was the profession of faith of the Samaneans, the sectaries of Orpheus, and the Pythagoreans. Farther, Hermes is no other than Beddou himself; for among the Indians, Chinese, Lamas, etc., the planet Mercury and the corresponding day of the week (Wednesday) bear the name of Beddou, and this accounts for his being placed in the rank of mythological beings, and discovers the illusion of his pretended existence as a man; since it is evident that Mercury was not a human being, but the Genius or Decan, who, placed at the summer solstice, opened the Egyptian year; hence his attributes taken from the constellation Syrius, and his name of Anubis, as well as that of Esculapius, having the figure of a man and the head of a dog: hence his serpent, which is the Hydra, emblem of the Nile (Hydor, humidity); and from this serpent he seems to have derived his name of Hermes, as Remes (with a schin) in the oriental languages, signifies serpent. Now Beddou and Hermes being the same names, it is manifest of what antiquity is the system ascribed to the former. As to the name of Samanean, it is precisely that of Chaman, still preserved in Tartary, China, and India. The interpretation given to it is, man of the woods, a hermit mortifying the flesh, such being the characteristic of this sect; but its literal meaning is, celestial (Samaoui) and explains the system of those who are called by it.--The system is the same as that of the sectaries of Orpheus, of the Essenians, of the ancient Anchorets of Persia, and the whole eastern country. See Porphyry, de Abstin. Animal. These celestial and penitent men carried in India their insanity to such an extreme as to wish not to touch the earth, and they accordingly lived in cages suspended from the trees, where the people, whose admiration was not less absurd, brought them provisions. During the night there were frequent robberies, rapes and murders, and it was at length discovered that they were committed by those men, who, descending from their cages, thus indemnified themselves for their restraint during the day. The Bramins, their rivals, embraced the opportunity of exterminating them; and from that time their name in India has been synonymous with hypocrite. See Hist. de la Chine, in 5 vols. quarto, at the note page 30; Hist. de Huns, 2 vols. and preface to the Ezour-Vedam. Then, retorting the pretensions of the Christians against themselves: "Prove to us," said the Lama, "that you are not Samaneans degenerated, and that the man you make the author of your sect is not Fot himself disguised. Prove to us by historical facts that he even existed at the epoch you pretend; for, it being destitute of authentic testimony,* we absolutely deny it; and we maintain that your very gospels are only the books of some Mithriacs of Persia, and the Essenians of Syria, who were a branch of reformed Samaneans."** * There are absolutely no other monuments of the existence of Jesus Christ as a human being, than a passage in Josephus (Antiq. Jud. lib. 18, c.3,) a single phrase in Tacitus (Annal. lib. 15, c. 44), and the Gospels. But the passage in Josephus is unanimously acknowledged to be apocryphal, and to have been interpolated towards the close of the third century, (See Trad. de joseph, par M. Gillet); and that of Tacitus in so vague and so evidently taken from the deposition of the Christians before the tribunals, that it may be ranked in the class of evangelical records. It remains to enquire of what authority are these records. "All the world knows," says Faustus, who, though a Manichean, was one of the most learned men of the third century, "All the world knows that the gospels were neither written by Jesus Christ, nor his apostles, but by certain unknown persons, who rightly judging that they should not obtain belief respecting things which they had not seen, placed at the head of their recitals the names of contemporary apostles." See Beausob. vol. i. and Hist. des Apologistes de la Relig. Chret. par Burigni, a sagacious writer, who has demonstrated the absolute uncertainty of those foundations of the Christian religion; so that the existence of Jesus is no better proved than that of Osiris and Hercules, or that of Fot or Beddou, with whom, says M. de Guignes, the Chinese continually confound him, for they never call Jesus by any other name than Fot. Hist. de Huns. ** That is to say, from the pious romances formed out of the sacred legends of the mysteries of Mithra, Ceres, Isis, etc., from whence are equally derived the books of the Hindoos and the Bonzes. Our missionaries have long remarked a striking resemblance between those books and the gospels. M. Wilkins expressly mentions it in a note in the Bhagvat Geeta. All agree that Krisna, Fot, and Jesus have the same characteristic features: but religious prejudice has stood in the way of drawing from this circumstance the proper and natural inference. To time and reason must it be left to display the truth. At these words, the Christians set up a general cry, and a new dispute was about to begin; when a number of Chinese Chamans, and Talapoins of Siam, came forward and said that they would settle the whole controversy. And one of them speaking for the whole exclaimed: "It is time to put an end to these frivolous contests by drawing aside the veil from the interior doctrine that Fot himself revealed to his disciples on his death bed.* * The Budsoists have two doctrines, the one public and ostensible, the other interior and secret, precisely like the Egyptian priests. It may be asked, why this distinction? It is, that as the public doctrine recommends offerings, expiations, endowments, etc., the priests find their profit in preaching it to the people; whereas the other, teaching the vanity of worldly things, and attended with no lucre, it is thought proper to make it known only to adepts. Can the teachers and followers of this religion be better classed than under the heads of knavery and credulity? "All these theological opinions," continued he, "are but chimeras. All the stories of the nature of the gods, of their actions and their lives, are but allegories and mythological emblems, under which are enveloped ingenious ideas of morals, and the knowledge of the operations of nature in the action of the elements and the movement of the planets. "The truth is, that all is reduced to nothing--that all is illusion, appearance, dream; that the moral metempsychosis is only the figurative sense of the physical metempsychosis, or the successive movement of the elements of bodies which perish not, but which, having composed one body, pass when that is dissolved, into other mediums and form other combinations. The soul is but the vital principle which results from the properties of matter, and from the action of the elements in those bodies where they create a spontaneous movement. To suppose that this product of the play of the organs, born with them, matured with them, and which sleeps with them, can subsist when they cease, is the romance of a wandering imagination, perhaps agreeable enough, but really chimerical. "God itself is nothing more than the moving principle, the occult force inherent in all beings--the sum of their laws and properties--the animating principle; in a word, the soul of the universe; which on account of the infinite variety of its connections and its operations, sometimes simple, sometimes multiple, sometimes active, sometimes passive, has always presented to the human mind an unsolvable enigma. All that man can comprehend with certainty is, that matter does not perish; that it possesses essentially those properties by which the world is held together like a living and organized being; that the knowledge of these laws with respect to man is what constitutes wisdom; that virtue and merit consist in their observance; and evil, sin, and vice, in the ignorance and violation of them; that happiness and misery result from these by the same necessity which makes heavy bodies descend and light ones rise, and by a fatality of causes and effects, whose chain extends from the smallest atom to the greatest of the heavenly bodies."* * These are the very expressions of La Loubre, in his description of the kingdom of Siam and the theology of the Bronzes. Their dogmas, compared with those of the ancient philosophers of Greece and Italy, give a complete representation of the whole system of the Stoics and Epicureans, mixed with astrological superstitious, and some traits of Pythagorism. At these words, a crowd of theologians of every sect cried out that this doctrine was materialism, and that those who profess it were impious atheists, enemies to God and man, who must be exterminated. "Very well," replied the Chamans, "suppose we are in error, which is not impossible, since the first attribute of the human mind is to be subject to illusion; but what right have you to take away from men like yourselves, the life which Heaven has given them? If Heaven holds us guilty and in abhorrence, why does it impart to us the same blessings as to you? And if it treats us with forbearance, what authority have you to be less indulgent? Pious men! who speak of God with so much certainty and confidence, be so good as to tell us what it is; give us to comprehend what those abstract and metaphysical beings are, which you call God and soul, substance without matter, existence without body, life without organs or sensation. If you know those beings by your senses or their reflections, render them in like manner perceptible to us; or if you speak of them on testimony and tradition, show us a uniform account, and give a determinate basis to our creed." There now arose among the theologians a great controversy respecting God and his nature, his manner of acting, and of manifesting himself; on the nature of the soul and its union with the body; whether it exists before the organs, or only after they are formed; on the future life, and the other world. And every sect, every school, every individual, differing on all these points, and each assigning plausible reasons, and respectable though opposite authorities for his opinion, they fell into an inextricable labyrinth of contradictions. Then the legislator, having commanded silence and recalled the dispute to its true object, said: "Chiefs and instructors of nations; you came together in search of truth. At first, every one of you, thinking he possessed it, demanded of the others an implicit faith; but perceiving the contrariety of your opinions, you found it necessary to submit them to a common rule of evidence, and to bring them to one general term of comparison; and you agreed that each should exhibit the proofs of his doctrine. You began by alleging facts; but each religion and every sect, being equally furnished with miracles and martyrs, each producing an equal number of witnesses, and offering to support them by a voluntary death, the balance on this first point, by right of parity, remained equal. "You then passed to the trial of reasoning; but the same arguments applying equally to contrary positions--the same assertions, equally gratuitous, being advanced and repelled with equal force, and all having an equal right to refuse his assent, nothing was demonstrated. What is more, the confrontation of your systems has brought up more and extraordinary difficulties; for amid the apparent or adventitious diversities, you have discovered a fundamental resemblance, a common groundwork; and each of you pretending to be the inventor, and first depositary, have taxed each other with adulterations and plagiarisms; and thence arises a difficult question concerning the transmission of religious ideas from people to people. "Finally, to complete your embarrassment: when you endeavored to explain your doctrines to each other, they appeared confused and foreign, even to their adherents; they were founded on ideas inaccessible to your senses; you consequently had no means of judging of them, and you confessed yourselves in this respect to be only the echoes of your fathers. Hence follows this other question: how came they to the knowledge of your fathers, who themselves had no other means than you to conceive them? So that, on the one hand, the succession of these ideas being unknown, and on the other, their origin and existence being a mystery, all the edifice of your religious opinions becomes a complicated problem of metaphysics and history. "Since, however, these opinions, extraordinary as they may be, must have had some origin; since even the most abstract and fantastical ideas have some physical model, it may be useful to recur to this origin, and discover this model--in a word, to find out from what source the human understanding has drawn these ideas, at present so obscure, of God, of the soul, of all immaterial beings, which make the basis of so many systems; to unfold the filiation which they have followed, and the alterations which they have undergone in their transmissions and ramifications. If, then, there are any persons present who have made a study of these objects, let them come forward, and endeavor, in the face of nations, to dissipate the obscurity in which their opinions have so long remained." CHAPTER XXII. ORIGIN AND FILIATION OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS. At these words, a new group, formed in an instant by men from various standards, but not distinguished by any, came forward into the circle; and one of them spoke in the name of the whole: "Delegates, friends of evidence and virtue! It is not surprising that the subject in question should be enveloped in so many clouds, since, besides its inherent difficulties, thought itself has always been encumbered with superadded obstacles peculiar to this study, where all free enquiry and discussion have been interdicted by the intolerance of every system. But now that our views are permitted to expand, we will expose to open day, and submit to the judgment of nations, that which unprejudiced minds, after long researches, have found to be the most reasonable; and we do this, not with the pretension of imposing a new creed, but with the hope of provoking new lights, and obtaining better information. "Doctors and instructors of nations! You know what thick darkness covers the nature, the origin, the history of the dogmas which you teach. Imposed by authority, inculcated by education, and maintained by example, they pass from age to age, and strengthen their empire from habit and inattention. But if man, enlightened by reflection and experience, brings to mature examination the prejudices of his childhood, he soon discovers a multitude of incongruities and contradictions which awaken his sagacity and excite his reasoning powers. "At first, remarking the diversity and opposition of the creeds which divide the nations, he takes courage to question the infallibility which each of them claims, and arming himself with their reciprocal pretensions, he conceives that his senses and his reason, derived immediately from God, are a law not less holy, a guide not less sure, than the mediate and contradictory codes of the prophets. "If he then examines the texture of these codes themselves, he observes that their laws, pretended to be divine, that is, immutable and eternal, have arisen from circumstances of times, places, and persons; that they have issued one from the other, in a kind of genealogical order, borrowing from each other reciprocally a common and similar fund of ideas, which every lawgiver modifies according to his fancy. "If he ascends to the source of these ideas, he finds it involved in the night of time, in the infancy of nations, even to the origin of the world, to which they claim alliance; and there, placed in the darkness of chaos, in the empire of fables and traditions, they present themselves, accompanied with a state of things so full of prodigies, that it seems to forbid all access to the judgment: but this state itself excites a first effort of reason, which resolves the difficulty; for if the prodigies, found in the theological systems, have really existed--if, for instance, the metamorphoses, the apparitions, the conversations with one or many gods, recorded in the books of the Indians, the Hebrews, the Parses, are historical events, he must agree that nature in those times was totally different from what it is at present; that the present race of men are quite another species from those who then existed; and, therefore, he ought not to trouble his head about them. "If, on the contrary, these miraculous events have really not existed in the physical order of things, then he readily conceives that they are creatures of the human intellect; and this faculty being still capable of the most fantastical combinations, explains at once the phenomenon of these monsters in history. It only remains, then, to find how and wherefore they have been formed in the imagination. Now, if we examine with care the subjects of these intellectual creations, analyze the ideas which they combine and associate, and carefully weigh all the circumstances which they allege, we shall find that this first obscure and incredible state of things is explained by the laws of nature. We find that these stories of a fabulous kind have a figurative sense different from the apparent one; that these events, pretended to be marvellous, are simple and physical facts, which, being misconceived or misrepresented, have been disfigured by accidental causes dependent on the human mind, by the confusion of signs employed to represent the ideas, the want of precision in words, permanence in language, and perfection in writing; we find that these gods, for instance, who display such singular characters in every system, are only the physical agents of nature, the elements, the winds, the stars, and the meteors, which have been personified by the necessary mechanism of language and of the human understanding; that their lives, their manners, their actions, are only their mechanical operations and connections; and that all their pretended history is only the description of these phenomena, formed by the first naturalists who observed them, and misconceived by the vulgar who did not understand them, or by succeeding generations who forgot them. In a word, all the theological dogmas on the origin of the world, the nature of God, the revelation of his laws, the manifestation of his person, are known to be only the recital of astronomical facts, only figurative and emblematical accounts of the motion of the heavenly bodies. We are convinced that the very idea of a God, that idea at present so obscure, is, in its first origin, nothing but that of the physical powers of the universe, considered sometimes as a plurality by reason of their agencies and phenomena, sometimes as one simple and only being by reason of the universality of the machine and the connection of its parts; so that the being called God has been sometimes the wind, the fire, the water, all the elements; sometimes the sun, the stars, the planets, and their influence; sometimes the matter of the visible world, the totality of the universe; sometimes abstract and metaphysical qualities, such as space, duration, motion, intelligence; and we everywhere see this conclusion, that the idea of God has not been a miraculous revelation of invisible beings, but a natural offspring of the human intellect--an operation of the mind, whose progress it has followed and whose revolutions it has undergone, in all the progress that has been made in the knowledge of the physical world and its agents. "It is then in vain that nations attribute their religion to heavenly inspirations; it is in vain that their dogmas pretend to a primeval state of supernatural events: the original barbarity of the human race, attested by their own monuments,* belies these assertions at once. But there is one constant and indubitable fact which refutes beyond contradiction all these doubtful accounts of past ages. From this position, that man acquires and receives no ideas but through the medium of his senses,** it follows with certainty that every notion which claims to itself any other origin than that of sensation and experience, is the erroneous supposition of a posterior reasoning: now, it is sufficient to cast an eye upon the sacred systems of the origin of the world, and of the actions of the gods, to discover in every idea, in every word, the anticipation of an order of things which could not exist till a long time after. Reason, strengthened by these contradictions, rejecting everything that is not in the order of nature, and admitting no historical facts but those founded on probabilities, lays open its own system, and pronounces itself with assurance. * It is the unanimous testimony of history, and even of legends, that the first human beings were every where savages, and that it was to civilize them, and teach them to make bread, that the Gods manifested themselves. ** The rock on which all the ancients have split, and which has occasioned all their errors, has been their supposing the idea of God to be innate and co-eternal with the soul; and hence all the reveries developed in Plato and Jamblicus. See the Timoeus, the Phedon, and De Mysteriis Egyptiorum, sect. I, c. 3. "Before one nation had received from another nation dogmas already invented; before one generation had inherited ideas acquired by a preceding generation, none of these complicated systems could have existed in the world. The first men, being children of nature, anterior to all events, ignorant of all science, were born without any idea of the dogmas arising from scholastic disputes; of rites founded on the practice of arts not then known; of precepts framed after the development of passions; or of laws which suppose a language, a state of society not then in being; or of God, whose attributes all refer to physical objects, and his actions to a despotic state of government; or of the soul, or of any of those metaphysical beings, which we are told are not the objects of sense, and for which, however, there can be no other means of access to the understanding. To arrive at so many results, the necessary circle of preceding facts must have been observed; slow experience and repeated trials must have taught the rude man the use of his organs; the accumulated knowledge of successive generations must have invented and improved the means of living; and the mind, freed from the cares of the first wants of nature, must have raised itself to the complicated art of comparing ideas, of digesting arguments, and seizing abstract similitudes." I. Origin of the idea of God: Worship of the elements and of the physical powers of nature. "It was not till after having overcome these obstacles, and gone through a long career in the night of history, that man, reflecting on his condition, began to perceive that he was subjected to forces superior to his own, and independent of his will. The sun enlightened and warmed him, the fire burned him, the thunder terrified him, the wind beat upon him, the water overwhelmed him. All beings acted upon him powerfully and irresistibly. He sustained this action for a long time, like a machine, without enquiring the cause; but the moment he began his enquiries, he fell into astonishment; and, passing from the surprise of his first reflections to the reverie of curiosity, he began a chain of reasoning. "First, considering the action of the elements on him, he conceived an idea of weakness and subjection on his part, and of power and domination on theirs; and this idea of power was the primitive and fundamental type of every idea of God. "Secondly, the action of these natural existences excited in him sensations of pleasure or pain, of good or evil; and by a natural effect of his organization, he conceived for them love or aversion; he desired or dreaded their presence; and fear or hope gave rise to the first idea of religion. "Then, judging everything by comparison, and remarking in these beings a spontaneous movement like his own, he supposed this movement directed by a will,--an intelligence of the nature of his own; and hence, by induction, he formed a new reasoning. Having experienced that certain practices towards his fellow creatures had the effect to modify their affections and direct their conduct to his advantage, he resorted to the same practices towards these powerful beings of the universe. He reasoned thus with himself: When my fellow creature, stronger than I, is disposed to do me injury, I abase myself before him, and my prayer has the art to calm him. I will pray to these powerful beings who strike me. I will supplicate the intelligences of the winds, of the stars, of the waters, and they will hear me. I will conjure them to avert the evil and give me the good that is at their disposal; I will move them by my tears, I will soften them by offerings, and I shall be happy. "Thus simple man, in the infancy of his reason, spoke to the sun and to the moon; he animated with his own understanding and passions the great agents of nature; he thought by vain sounds, and vain actions, to change their inflexible laws. Fatal error! He prayed the stone to ascend, the water to mount above its level, the mountains to remove, and substituting a fantastical world for the real one, he peopled it with imaginary beings, to the terror of his mind and the torment of his race. "In this manner the ideas of God and religion have sprung, like all others, from physical objects; they were produced in the mind of man from his sensations, from his wants, from the circumstances of his life, and the progressive state of his knowledge. "Now, as the ideas of God had their first models in physical agents, it followed that God was at first varied and manifold, like the form under which he appeared to act. Every being was a Power, a Genius; and the first men conceived the universe filled with innumerable gods. "Again the ideas of God have been created by the affections of the human heart; they became necessarily divided into two classes, according to the sensations of pleasure or pain, love or hatred, which they inspired. "The forces of nature, the gods and genii, were divided into beneficent and malignant, good and evil powers; and hence the universality of these two characters in all the systems of religion. "These ideas, analogous to the condition of their inventors, were for a long time confused and ill-digested. Savage men, wandering in the woods, beset with wants and destitute of resources, had not the leisure to combine principles and draw conclusions; affected with more evils than they found pleasures, their most habitual sentiment was that of fear, their theology terror; their worship was confined to a few salutations and offerings to beings whom they conceived as greedy and ferocious as themselves. In their state of equality and independence, no man offered himself as mediator between men and gods as insubordinate and poor as himself. No one having superfluities to give, there existed no parasite by the name of priest, no tribute by the name of victim, no empire by the name of altar. Their dogmas and their morals were the same thing, it was only self-preservation; and religion, that arbitrary idea, without influence on the mutual relations of men, was a vain homage rendered to the visible powers of nature. "Such was the necessary and original idea of God." And the orator, addressing himself to the savage nations, continued: "We appeal to you, men who have received no foreign and factitious ideas; tell us, have you ever gone beyond what I have described? And you, learned doctors, we call you to witness; is not this the unanimous testimony of all ancient monuments?* * It clearly results, says Plutarch, from the verses of Orpheus and the sacred books of the Egyptians and Phrygians, that the ancient theology, not only of the Greeks, but of all nations, was nothing more than a system of physics, a picture of the operations of nature, wrapped up in mysterious allegories and enigmatical symbols, in a manner that the ignorant multitude attended rather to their apparent than to their hidden meaning, and even in what they understood of the latter, supposed there to be something more deep than what they perceived. Fragment of a work of Plutarch now lost, quoted by Eusebius, Proepar. Evang. lib. 3, ch. 1, p. 83. The majority of philosophers, says Porphyry, and among others Haeremon (who lived in Egypt in the first age of Christianity), imagine there never to have been any other world than the one we see, and acknowledged no other Gods of all those recognized by the Egyptians, than such as are commonly called planets, signs of the Zodiac, and constellations; whose aspects, that is, rising and setting, are supposed to influence the fortunes of men; to which they add their divisions of the signs into decans and dispensers of time, whom they style lords of the ascendant, whose names, virtues in relieving distempers, rising, setting, and presages of future events, are the subjects of almanacs (for be it observed, that the Egyptian priests had almanacs the exact counterpart of Matthew Lansberg's); for when the priests affirmed that the sun was the architect of the universe, Chaeremon presently concludes that all their narratives respecting Isis and Osiris, together with their other sacred fables, referred in part to the planets, the phases of the moon, and the revolution of the sun, and in part to the stars of the daily and nightly hemispheres and the river Nile; in a word, in all cases to physical and natural existences and never to such as might be immaterial and incorporeal. . . . All these philosophers believe that the acts of our will and the motion of our bodies depend on those of the stars to which they are subjected, and they refer every thing to the laws of physical necessity, which they call destiny or Fatum, supposing a chain of causes and effects which binds, by I know not what connection, all beings together, from the meanest atom to the supremest power and primary influence of the Gods; so that, whether in their temples or in their idols, the only subject of worship is the power of destiny. Porphyr. Epist. ad Janebonem. II. Second system: Worship of the Stars, or Sabeism. "But those same monuments present us likewise a system more methodical and more complicated--that of the worship of all the stars; adored sometimes in their proper forms, sometimes under figurative emblems and symbols; and this worship was the effect of the knowledge men had acquired in physics, and was derived immediately from the first causes of the social state; that is, from the necessities and arts of the first degree, which are among the elements of society. "Indeed, as soon as men began to unite in society, it became necessary for them to multiply the means of subsistence, and consequently to attend to agriculture: agriculture, to be carried on with success, requires the observation and knowledge of the heavens. It was necessary to know the periodical return of the same operations of nature, and the same phenomena in the skies; indeed to go so far as to ascertain the duration and succession of the seasons and the months of the year. It was indispensable to know, in the first place, the course of the sun, who, in his zodiacal revolution, shows himself the supreme agent of the whole creation; then, of the moon, who, by her phases and periods, regulates and distributes time; then, of the stars, and even of the planets, which by their appearance and disappearance on the horizon and nocturnal hemisphere, marked the minutest divisions. Finally, it was necessary to form a whole system of astronomy,* or a calendar; and from these works there naturally followed a new manner of considering these predominant and governing powers. Having observed that the productions of the earth had a regular and constant relation with the heavenly bodies; that the rise, growth, and decline of each plant kept pace with the appearance, elevation, and declination of the same star or the same group of stars; in short, that the languor or activity of vegetation seemed to depend on celestial influences, men drew from thence an idea of action, of power, in those beings, superior to earthly bodies; and the stars, dispensing plenty or scarcity, became powers, genii,** gods, authors of good and evil. * It continues to be repeated every day, on the indirect authority of the book of Genesis, that astronomy was the invention of the children of Noah. It has been gravely said, that while wandering shepherds in the plains of Shinar, they employed their leisure in composing a planetary system: as if shepherds had occasion to know more than the polar star; and if necessity was not the sole motive of every invention! If the ancient shepherds were so studious and sagacious, how does it happen that the modern ones are so stupid, ignorant, and inattentive? And it is a fact that the Arabs of the desert know not so many as six constellations, and understand not a word of astronomy. ** It appears that by the word genius, the ancients denoted a quality, a generative power; for the following words, which are all of one family, convey this meaning: generare, genos, genesis, genus, gens. "As the state of society had already introduced a regular hierarchy of ranks, employments and conditions, men, continuing to reason by comparison, carried their new notions into their theology, and formed a complicated system of divinities by gradation of rank, in which the sun, as first god,* was a military chief or a political king: the moon was his wife and queen; the planets were servants, bearers of commands, messengers; and the multitude of stars were a nation, an army of heroes, genii, whose office was to govern the world under the orders of their chiefs. All the individuals had names, functions, attributes, drawn from their relations and influences; and even sexes, from the gender of their appellations.** * The Sabeans, ancient and modern, says Maimonides, acknowledge a principal God, the maker and inhabitant of heaven; but on account of his great distance they conceive him to be inaccessible; and in imitation of the conduct of people towards their kings, they employ as mediators with him, the planets and their angels, whom they call princes and potentates, and whom they suppose to reside in those luminous bodies as in palaces or tabernacles, etc. More- Nebuchim. ** According as the gender of the object was in the language of the nation masculine or feminine, the Divinity who bore its name was male or female. Thus the Cappadocians called the moon God, and the sun Goddess: a circumstance which gives to the same beings a perpetual variety in ancient mythology. "And as the social state had introduced certain usages and ceremonies, religion, keeping pace with the social state, adopted similar ones; these ceremonies, at first simple and private, became public and solemn; the offerings became rich and more numerous, and the rites more methodical; they assigned certain places for the assemblies, and began to have chapels and temples; they instituted officers to administer them, and these became priests and pontiffs: they established liturgies, and sanctified certain days, and religion became a civil act, a political tie. "But in this arrangement, religion did not change its first principles; the idea of God was always that of physical beings, operating good or evil, that is, impressing sensations of pleasure or pain: the dogma was the knowledge of their laws, or their manner of acting; virtue and sin, the observance or infraction of these laws; and morality, in its native simplicity, was the judicious practice of whatever contributes to the preservation of existence, the well-being of one's self and his fellow creatures.* * We may add, says Plutarch, that these Egyptian priests always regarded the preservation of health as a point of the first importance, and as indispensably necessary to the practice of piety and the service of the gods. See his account of Isis and Osiris, towards the end. "Should it be asked at what epoch this system took its birth, we shall answer on the testimony of the monuments of astronomy itself; that its principles appear with certainty to have been established about seventeen thousand years ago,* and if it be asked to what people it is to be attributed, we shall answer that the same monuments, supported by unanimous traditions, attribute it to the first tribes of Egypt; and when reason finds in that country all the circumstances which could lead to such a system; when it finds there a zone of sky, bordering on the tropic, equally free from the rains of the equator and the fogs of the North;** when it finds there a central point of the sphere of the ancients, a salubrious climate, a great, but manageable river, a soil fertile without art or labor, inundated without morbid exhalations, and placed between two seas which communicate with the richest countries, it conceives that the inhabitant of the Nile, addicted to agriculture from the nature of his soil, to geometry from the annual necessity of measuring his lands, to commerce from the facility of communications, to astronomy from the state of his sky, always open to observation, must have been the first to pass from the savage to the social state; and consequently to attain the physical and moral sciences necessary to civilized life. * The historical orator follows here the opinion of M. Dupuis, who, in his learned memoirs concerning the Origin of the Constellations and Origin of all Worship, has assigned many plausible reasons to prove that Libra was formerly the sign of the vernal, and Aries of the autumnal equinox; that is, that since the origin of the actual astronomical system, the precession of the equinoxes has carried forward by seven signs the primitive order of the zodiac. Now estimating the precession at about seventy years and a half to a degree, that is, 2,115 years to each sign; and observing that Aries was in its fifteenth degree, 1,447 years before Christ, it follows that the first degree of Libra could not have coincided with the vernal equinox more lately than 15,194 years before Christ; now, if you add 1790 years since Christ, it appears that 16,984 years have elapsed since the origin of the Zodiac. The vernal equinox coincided with the first degree of Aries, 2,504 years before Christ, and with the first degree of Taurus 4,619 years before Christ. Now it is to be observed, that the worship of the Bull is the principal article in the theological creed of the Egyptians, Persians, Japanese, etc.; from whence it clearly follows, that some general revolution took place among these nations at that time. The chronology of five or six thousand years in Genesis is little agreeable to this hypothesis; but as the book of Genesis cannot claim to be considered as a history farther back than Abraham, we are at liberty to make what arrangements we please in the eternity that preceded. See on this subject the analysis of Genesis, in the first volume of New Researches on Ancient History; see also Origin of Constellatians, by Dupuis, 1781; the Origin of Worship, in 3 vols. 1794, and the Chronological Zodiac, 1806. ** M. Balli, in placing the first astronomers at Selingenakoy, near the Bailkal paid no attention to this twofold circumstance: it equally argues against their being placed at Axoum on account of the rains, and the Zimb fly of which Mr. Bruce speaks. "It was, then, on the borders of the upper Nile, among a black race of men, that was organized the complicated system of the worship of the stars, considered in relation to the productions of the earth and the labors of agriculture; and this first worship, characterized by their adoration under their own forms and natural attributes, was a simple proceeding of the human mind. But in a short time, the multiplicity of the objects of their relations, and their reciprocal influence, having complicated the ideas, and the signs that represented them, there followed a confusion as singular in its cause as pernicious in its effects." III. Third system. Worship of Symbols, or Idolatry. "As soon as this agricultural people began to observe the stars with attention, they found it necessary to individualize or group them; and to assign to each a proper name, in order to understand each other in their designation. A great difficulty must have presented itself in this business: First, the heavenly bodies, similar in form, offered no distinguishing characteristics by which to denominate them; and, secondly, the language in its infancy and poverty, had no expressions for so many new and metaphysical ideas. Necessity, the usual stimulus of genius, surmounted everything. Having remarked that in the annual revolution, the renewal and periodical appearance of terrestrial productions were constantly associated with the rising and setting of certain stars, and to their position as relative to the sun, the fundamental term of all comparison, the mind by a natural operation connected in thought these terrestrial and celestial objects, which were connected in fact; and applying to them a common sign, it gave to the stars, and their groups, the names of the terrestrial objects to which they answered.* * "The ancients," says Maimonides, "directing all their attention to agriculture, gave names to the stars derived from their occupation during the year." More Neb. pars 3. "Thus the Ethopian of Thebes named stars of inundation, or Aquarius, those stars under which the Nile began to overflow;* stars of the ox or the bull, those under which they began to plow; stars of the lion, those under which that animal, driven from the desert by thirst, appeared on the banks of the Nile; stars of the sheaf, or of the harvest virgin, those of the reaping season; stars of the lamb, stars of the two kids, those under which these precious animals were brought forth: and thus was resolved the first part of the difficulty. * This must have been June. "Moreover, man having remarked in the beings which surrounded him certain qualities distinctive and proper to each species, and having thence derived a name by which to designate them, he found in the same source an ingenious mode of generalizing his ideas; and transferring the name already invented to every thing which bore any resemblance or analogy, he enriched his language with a perpetual round of metaphors. "Thus the same Ethiopian having observed that the return of the inundation always corresponded with the rising of a beautiful star which appeared towards the source of the Nile, and seemed to warn the husbandman against the coming waters, he compared this action to that of the animal who, by his barking, gives notice of danger, and he called this star the dog, the barker (Sirius). In the same manner he named the stars of the crab, those where the sun, having arrived at the tropic, retreated by a slow retrograde motion like the crab or cancer. He named stars of the wild goat, or Capricorn, those where the sun, having reached the highest point in his annuary tract, rests at the summit of the horary gnomon, and imitates the goat, who delights to climb the summit of the rocks. He named stars of the balance, or libra, those where the days and nights, being equal, seemed in equilibrium, like that instrument; and stars of the scorpion, those where certain periodical winds bring vapors, burning like the venom of the scorpion. In the same manner he called by the name of rings and serpents the figured traces of the orbits of the stars and the planets, and such was the general mode of naming all the stars and even the planets, taken by groups or as individuals, according to their relations with husbandry and terrestrial objects, and according to the analogies which each nation found between them and the objects of its particular soil and climate.* * The ancients had verbs from the substantives crab, goat, tortoise, as the French have at present the verbs serpenter, coquetter. The history of all languages is nearly the same. "From this it appeared that abject and terrestrial beings became associated with the superior and powerful inhabitants of heaven; and this association became stronger every day by the mechanism of language and the constitution of the human mind. Men would say by a natural metaphor: The bull spreads over the earth the germs of fecundity (in spring) he restores vegetation and plenty: the lamb (or ram) delivers the skies from the maleficent powers of winter; he saves the world from the serpent (emblem of the humid season) and restores the empire of goodness (summer, joyful season): the scorpion pours out his poison on the earth, and scatters diseases and death. The same of all similar effects. "This language, understood by every one, was attended at first with no inconvenience; but in the course of time, when the calendar had been regulated, the people, who had no longer any need of observing the heavens, lost sight of the original meaning of these expressions; and the allegories remaining in common use became a fatal stumbling block to the understanding and to reason. Habituated to associate to the symbols the ideas of their archetypes, the mind at last confounded them: then the same animals, whom fancy had transported to the skies, returned again to the earth; but being thus returned, clothed in the livery of the stars, they claimed the stellary attributes, and imposed on their own authors. Then it was that the people, believing that they saw their gods among them, could pray to them with more convenience: they demanded from the ram of their flock the influences which might be expected from the heavenly ram; they prayed the scorpion not to pour out his venom upon nature; they revered the crab of the sea, the scarabeus of the mud, the fish of the river; and by a series of corrupt but inseparable analogies, they lost themselves in a labyrinth of well connected absurdities. "Such was the origin of that ancient whimsical worship of the animals; such is the train of ideas by which the character of the divinity became common to the vilest of brutes, and by which was formed that theological system, extremely comprehensive, complicated, and learned, which, rising on the borders of the Nile, propagated from country to country by commerce, war, and conquest, overspread the whole of the ancient world; and which, modified by time, circumstances and prejudices, is still seen entire among a hundred nations, and remains as the essential and secret basis of the theology of those even who despise and reject it." Some murmurs at these words being heard from various groups: "Yes!" continued the orator, "hence arose, for instance, among you, nations of Africa, the adoration of your fetiches, plants, animals, pebbles, pieces of wood, before which your ancestors would not have had the folly to bow, if they had not seen in them talismans endowed with the virtue of the stars.* * The ancient astrologers, says the most learned of the Jews (Maimonides), having sacredly assigned to each planet a color, an animal, a tree, a metal, a fruit, a plant, formed from them all a figure or representation of the star, taking care to select for the purpose a proper moment, a fortunate day, such as the conjunction of the star, or some other favorable aspect. They conceived that by their magic ceremonies they could introduce into those figures or idols the influences of the superior beings after which they were modeled. These were the idols that the Chaldean-Sabeans adored; and in the performance of their worship they were obliged to be dressed in the proper color. The astrologers, by their practices, thus introduced idolatry, desirous of being regarded as the dispensers of the favors of heaven; and as agriculture was the sole employment of the ancients, they succeeded in persuading them that the rain and other blessings of the seasons were at their disposal. Thus the whole art of agriculture was exercised by rules of astrology, and the priests made talismans or charms which were to drive away locusts, flies, etc. See Maimonides, More Nebuchim, pars 3, c. 29. The priests of Egypt, Persia, India, etc., pretended to bind the Gods to their idols, and to make them come from heaven at their pleasure. They threatened the sun and moon, if they were disobedient, to reveal the secret mysteries, to shake the skies, etc., etc. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 198, and Jamblicus de Mysteriis Aegypt. "Here, ye nations of Tartary, is the origin of your marmosets, and of all that train of animals with which your chamans ornament their magical robes. This is the origin of those figures of birds and of snakes which savage nations imprint upon their skins with sacred and mysterious ceremonies. "Ye inhabitants of India! in vain you cover yourselves with the veil of mystery: the hawk of your god Vichenou is but one of the thousand emblems of the sun in Egypt; and your incarnations of a god in the fish, the boar, the lion, the tortoise, and all his monstrous adventures, are only the metamorphoses of the sun, who, passing through the signs of the twelve animals (or the zodiac), was supposed to assume their figures, and perform their astronomical functions.* * These are the very words of Jamblicus de Symbolis Aegyptiorum, c. 2, sect. 7. The sun was the grand Proteus, the universal metamorphist. "People of Japan, your bull, which breaks the mundane egg, is only the bull of the zodiac, which in former times opened the seasons, the age of creation, the vernal equinox. It is the same bull Apis which Egypt adored, and which your ancestors, Jewish Rabbins, worshipped in the golden calf. This is still your bull, followers of Zoroaster, which, sacrificed in the symbolic mysteries of Mithra, poured out his blood which fertilized the earth. And ye Christians, your bull of the Apocalypse, with his wings, symbol of the air, has no other origin; and your lamb of God, sacrificed, like the bull of Mithra, for the salvation of the world, is only the same sun, in the sign of the celestial ram, which, in a later age, opening the equinox in his turn, was supposed to deliver the world from evil, that is to say, from the constellation of the serpent, from that great snake, the parent of winter, the emblem of the Ahrimanes, or Satan of the Persians, your school masters. Yes, in vain does your imprudent zeal consign idolaters to the torments of the Tartarus which they invented; the whole basis of your system is only the worship of the sun, with whose attributes you have decorated your principal personage. It is the sun which, under the name of Horus, was born, like your God, at the winter solstice, in the arms of the celestial virgin, and who passed a childhood of obscurity, indigence, and want, answering to the season of cold and frost. It is he that, under the name of Osiris, persecuted by Typhon and by the tyrants of the air, was put to death, shut up in a dark tomb, emblem of the hemisphere of winter, and afterwards, ascending from the inferior zone towards the zenith of heaven, arose again from the dead triumphant over the giants and the angels of destruction. "Ye priests! who murmur at this relation, you wear his emblems all over your bodies; your tonsure is the disk of the sun; your stole is his zodiac;* your rosaries are symbols of the stars and planets. Ye pontiffs and prelates! your mitre, your crozier, your mantle are those of Osiris; and that cross whose mystery you extol without comprehending it, is the cross of Serapis, traced by the hands of Egyptian priests on the plan of the figurative world; which, passing through the equinoxes and the tropics, became the emblem of the future life and of the resurrection, because it touched the gates of ivory and of horn, through which the soul passed to heaven." * "The Arabs," says Herodotus, "shave their heads in a circle and about the temples, in imitation of Bacchus (that is the sun), who shaves himself is this manner." Jeremiah speaks also of this custom. The tuft of hair which the Mahometans preserve, is taken also from the sun, who was painted by the Egyptians at the winter solstice, as having but a single hair upon his head. . . . The robes of the goddess of Syria and of Diana of Ephesus, from whence are borrowed the dress of the priests; have the twelve animals of the zodiac painted on them. . . . Rosaries are found upon all the Indian idols, constructed more than four thousand years ago, and their use in the East has been universal from time immemorial. . . . The crozier is precisely the staff of Bootes or Osiris. (See plate.) All the Lamas wear the mitre or cap in the shape of a cone, which was an emblem of the sun. At these words, the doctors of all the groups began to look at each other with astonishment; but no one breaking silence, the orator proceeded: "Three principal causes concur to produce this confusion of ideas: First, the figurative expressions under which an infant language was obliged to describe the relations of objects; expressions which, passing afterwards from a limited to a general sense, and from a physical to a moral one, caused, by their ambiguities and synonymes, a great number of mistakes. "Thus, it being first said that the sun had surmounted, or finished, twelve animals, it was thought afterwards that he had killed them, fought them, conquered them; and of this was composed the historical life of Hercules.* * See the memoir of Dupuis on the Origin of the Constellations, before cited. "It being said that he regulated the periods of rural labor, the seed time and the harvest, that he distributed the seasons and occupations, ran through the climates and ruled the earth, etc., he was taken for a legislative king, a conquering warrior; and they framed from this the history of Osiris, of Bacchus, and others of that description. "Having said that a planet entered into a sign, they made of this conjunction a marriage, an adultery, an incest.* Having said that the planet was hid or buried, when it came back to light, and ascended to its exaltation, they said that it had died, risen again, was carried into heaven, etc. * These are the very words of Plutarch in his account of Isis and Osiris. The Hebrews say, in speaking of the generations of the Patriarchs, et ingressus est in eam. From this continual equivoke of ancient language, proceeds every mistake. "A second cause of confusion was the material figures themselves, by which men first painted thoughts; and which, under the name of hieroglyphics, or sacred characters, were the first invention of the mind. Thus, to give warning of the inundation, and of the necessity of guarding against it, they painted a boat, the ship Argo; to express the wind, they painted the wing of a bird; to designate the season, or the month, they painted the bird of passage, the insect, or the animal which made its appearance at that period; to describe the winter, they painted a hog or a serpent, which delight in humid places, and the combination of these figures carried the known sense of words and phrases.* But as this sense could not be fixed with precision, as the number of these figures and their combinations became excessive, and overburdened the memory, the immediate consequence was confusion and false interpretations. Genius afterwards having invented the more simple art of applying signs to sounds, of which the number is limited, and painting words, instead of thoughts, alphabetical writing thus threw into disuetude hieroglyphical painting; and its signification, falling daily into oblivion, gave rise to a multitude of illusions, ambiguities, and errors. * The reader will doubtless see with pleasure some examples of ancient hieroglyphics. "The Egyptians (says Hor-appolo) represent eternity by the figures of the sun and moon. They designate the world by the blue serpent with yellow scales (stars, it is the Chinese Dragon). If they were desirous of expressing the year, they drew a picture of Isis, who is also in their language called Sothis, or dog-star, one of the first constellations, by the rising of which the year commences; its inscription at Sais was, It is I that rise in the constellation of the Dog. "They also represent the year by a palm tree, and the month by one of its branches, because it is the nature of this tree to produce a branch every month. They farther represent it by the fourth part of an acre of land." The whole acre divided into four denotes the bissextile period of four years. The abbreviation of this figure of a field in four divisions, is manifestly the letter ha or het, the seventh in the Samaritan alphabet; and in general all the letters of the alphabet are merely astronomical hieroglyphics; and it is for this reason that the mode of writing is from right to left, like the march of the stars. --"They denote a prophet by the image of a dog, because the dog star (Anoubis) by its rising gives notice of the inundation. Noubi, in Hebrew signifies prophet--They represent inundation by a lion, because it takes place under that sign: and hence, says Plutarch, the custom of placing at the gates of temples figures of lions with water issuing from their mouths.--They express the idea of God and destiny by a star. They also represent God, says Porphyry, by a black stone, because his nature is dark and obscure. All white things express the celestial and luminous Gods: all circular ones the world, the moon, the sun, the orbits; all semicircular ones, as bows and crescents are descriptive of the moon. Fire and the Gods of Olympus they represent by pyramids and obelisks (the name of the sun, Baal, is found in this latter word): the sun by a cone (the mitre of Osiris): the earth, by a cylinder (which revolves): the generative power of the air by the phalus, and that of the earth by a triangle, emblem of the female organ. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 98. "Clay, says Jamblicus de Symbolis, sect. 7, c. 2. denotes matter, the generative and nutrimental power, every thing which receives the warmth and fermentation of life." "A man sitting upon the Lotos or Nenuphar, represents the moving spirit (the sun) which, in like manner as that plant lives in the water without any communication with clay, exists equally distinct from matter, swimming in empty space, resting on itself: it is round also in all its parts, like the leaves, the flowers, and the fruit of the Lotos. (Brama has the eyes of the Lotos, says Chasler Nesdirsen, to denote his intelligence: his eye swims over every thing, like the flower of the Lotos on the waters.) A man at the helm of a ship, adds Jamblicus, is descriptive of the sun which governs all. And Porphyry tells us that the sun is also represented by a man in a ship resting upon an amphibious crocodile (emblem of air and water). "At Elephantine they worshipped the figure of a man in a sitting posture, painted blue, having the head of a ram, and the horns of a goat which encompassed a disk; all which represented the sun and moon's conjunction at the sign of the ram; the blue color denoting the power of the moon, at the period of junction, to raise water into the clouds. Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 116. "The hawk is an emblem of the sun and of light, on account of his rapid flight and his soaring into the highest regions of the air where light abounds. A fish is the emblem of aversion, and the Hippopotamus of violence, because it is said to kill its father and to ravish its mother. Hence, says Plutarch, the emblematical inscription of the temple of Sais, where we see painted on the vestibule, 1. A child, 2. An old man, 3. A hawk, 4. A fish, 5. A hippopotamus: which signify, 1. Entrance, into life, 2. Departure, 3. God, 4. Hates, 5. Injustice. See Isis and Osiris. "The Egyptians, adds he, represent the world by a Scarabeus, because this insect pushes, in a direction contrary to that in which it proceeds, a ball containing its eggs, just as the heaven of the fixed stars causes the revolution of the sun, (the yolk of an egg) in an opposite direction to its own. "They represent the world also by the number five, being that of the elements, which, says Diodorus, are earth, water, air, fire, and ether, or spiritus. The Indians have the same number of elements, and according to Macrobius's mystics, they are the supreme God, or primum mobile, the intelligence, or mens, born of him, the soul of the world which proceeds from him, the celestial spheres, and all things terrestrial. Hence, adds Plutarch, the analogy between the Greek pente, five, and pan all. "The ass," says he again, "is the emblem of Typhon, because like that animal he is of a reddish color. Now Typhon signifies whatever is of a mirey or clayey nature; (and in Hebrew I find the three words clay, red, and ass to be formed from the same root hamr). Jamblicus has farther told us that clay was the emblem of matter and he elsewhere adds, that all evil and corruption proceeded from matter; which compared with the phrase of Macrobius, all is perishable, liable to change in the celestial sphere, gives us the theory, first physical, then moral, of the system of good and evil of the ancients." "Finally, a third cause of confusion was the civil organization of ancient states. When the people began to apply themselves to agriculture, the formation of a rural calendar, requiring a continued series of astronomical observations, it became necessary to appoint certain individuals charged with the functions of watching the appearance and disappearance of certain stars, to foretell the return of the inundation, of certain winds, of the rainy season, the proper time to sow every kind of grain. These men, on account of their service, were exempt from common labor, and the society provided for their maintenance. With this provision, and wholly employed in their observations, they soon became acquainted with the great phenomena of nature, and even learned to penetrate the secret of many of her operations. They discovered the movement of the stars and planets, the coincidence of their phases and returns with the productions of the earth and the action of vegetation; the medicinal and nutritive properties of plants and fruits; the action of the elements, and their reciprocal affinities. Now, as there was no other method of communicating the knowledge of these discoveries but the laborious one of oral instruction, they transmitted it only to their relations and friends, it followed therefore that all science and instruction were confined to a few families, who, arrogating it to themselves as an exclusive privilege, assumed a professional distinction, a corporation spirit, fatal to the public welfare. This continued succession of the same researches and the same labors, hastened, it is true, the progress of knowledge; but by the mystery which accompanied it, the people were daily plunged in deeper shades, and became more superstitious and more enslaved. Seeing their fellow mortals produce certain phenomena, announce, as at pleasure, eclipses and comets, heal diseases, and handle venomous serpents, they thought them in alliance with celestial powers; and, to obtain the blessings and avert the evils which they expected from above, they took them for mediators and interpreters; and thus became established in the bosom of every state sacrilegious corporations of hypocritical and deceitful men, who centered all powers in themselves; and the priests, being at once astronomers, theologians, naturalists, physicians, magicians, interpreters of the gods, oracles of men, and rivals of kings, or their accomplices, established, under the name of religion, an empire of mystery and a monopoly of instruction, which to this day have ruined every nation. . . ." Here the priests of all the groups interrupted the orator, and with loud cries accused him of impiety, irreligion, blasphemy; and endeavored to cut short his discourse; but the legislator observing that this was only an exposition of historical facts, which, if false or forged, would be easily refuted; that hitherto the declaration of every opinion had been free, and without this it would be impossible to discover the truth, the orator proceeded: "Now, from all these causes, and from the continual associations of ill-assorted ideas, arose a mass of disorders in theology, in morals, and in traditions; first, because the animals represented the stars, the characters of the animals, their appetites, their sympathies, their aversions, passed over to the gods, and were supposed to be their actions; thus, the god Ichneumon made war against the god Crocodile; the god Wolf liked to eat the god Sheep; the god Ibis devoured the god Serpent; and the deity became a strange, capricious, and ferocious being, whose idea deranged the judgment of man, and corrupted his morals and his reason. "Again, because in the spirit of their worship every family, every nation, took for its special patron a star or a constellation, the affections or antipathies of the symbolic animal were transferred to its sectaries; and the partisans of the god Dog were enemies to those of the god Wolf;* those who adored the god Ox had an abhorrence to those who ate him; and religion became the source of hatred and hostility,--the senseless cause of frenzy and superstition. * These are properly the words of Plutarch, who relates that those various worships were given by a king of Egypt to the different towns to disunite and enslave them, and these kings had been taken from the cast of priests. See Isis and Osiris. "Besides, the names of those animal-stars having, for this same reason of patronage, been conferred on countries, nations, mountains, and rivers, these objects were taken for gods, and hence followed a mixture of geographical, historical, and mythological beings, which confounded all traditions. "Finally, by the analogy of actions which were ascribed to them, the god-stars, having been taken for men, for heroes, for kings, kings and heroes took in their turn the actions of gods for models, and by imitation became warriors, conquerors, proud, lascivious, indolent, sanguinary; and religion consecrated the crimes of despots, and perverted the principles of government." IV. Fourth system. Worship of two Principles, or Dualism. "In the mean time, the astronomical priests, enjoying peace and abundance in their temples, made every day new progress in the sciences, and the system of the world unfolding gradually to their view, they raised successively various hypotheses as to its agents and effects, which became so many theological systems. "The voyages of the maritime nations and the caravans of the nomads of Asia and Africa, having given them a knowledge of the earth from the Fortunate Islands to Serica, and from the Baltic to the sources of the Nile, the comparison of the phenomena of the various zones taught them the rotundity of the earth, and gave birth to a new theory. Having remarked that all the operations of nature during the annual period were reducible to two principal ones, that of producing and that of destroying; that on the greater part of the globe these two operations were performed in the intervals of the two equinoxes; that is to say, during the six months of summer every thing was procreating and multiplying, and that during winter everything languished and almost died; they supposed in Nature two contrary powers, which were in a continual state of contention and exertion; and considering the celestial sphere in this view, they divided the images which they figured upon it into two halves or hemispheres; so that the constellations which were on the summer heaven formed a direct and superior empire; and those which were on the winter heaven composed an antipode and inferior empire. Therefore, as the constellations of summer accompanied the season of long, warm, and unclouded days, and that of fruits and harvests, they were considered as the powers of light, fecundity, and creation; and, by a transition from a physical to a moral sense, they became genii, angels of science, of beneficence, of purity and virtue. And as the constellations of winter were connected with long nights and polar fogs, they were the genii of darkness, of destruction, of death; and by transition, angels of ignorance, of wickedness, of sin and vice. By this arrangement the heaven was divided into two domains, two factions; and the analogy of human ideas already opened a vast field to the errors of imagination; but the mistake and the illusion were determined, if not occasioned by a particular circumstance. (Observe plate Astrological Heaven of the Ancients.) "In the projection of the celestial sphere, as traced by the astronomical priests,* the zodiac and the constellations, disposed in circular order, presented their halves in diametrical opposition; the hemisphere of winter, antipode of that of summer, was adverse, contrary, opposed to it. By a continual metaphor, these words acquired a moral sense; and the adverse genii, or angels, became revolted enemies.** From that moment all the astronomical history of the constellations was changed into a political history; the heavens became a human state, where things happened as on the earth. Now, as the earthly states, the greater part despotic, had already their monarchs, and as the sun was apparently the monarch of the skies, the summer hemisphere (empire of light) and its constellations (a nation of white angels) had for king an enlightened God, a creator intelligent and good. And as every rebel faction must have its chief, the heaven of winter, the subterranean empire of darkness and woe, and its stars, a nation of black angels, giants and demons, had for their chief a malignant genius, whose character was applied by different people to the constellation which to them was the most remarkable. In Egypt it was at first the Scorpion, first zodiacal sign after Libra, and for a long time chief of the winter signs ; then it was the Bear, or the polar Ass, called Typhon, that is to say, deluge,** on account of the rains which deluge the earth during the dominion of that star. At a later period,*** in Persia,**** it was the Serpent, who, under the name of Abrimanes, formed the basis of the system of Zoroaster; and it is the same, O Christians and Jews! that has become your serpent of Eve (the celestial virgin,) and that of the cross; in both cases it is the emblem of Satan, the enemy and great adversary of the Ancient of Days, sung by Daniel. * The ancient priests had three kinds of spheres, which it may be useful to make known to the reader. "We read in Eusebius," says Porphyry, "that Zoroaster was the first who, having fixed upon a cavern pleasantly situated in the mountains adjacent to Persia, formed the idea of consecrating it to Mithra (the sun) creator and father of all things: that is to say, having made in this cavern several geometrical divisions, representing the seasons and the elements, he imitated on a small scale the order and disposition of the universe by Mithra. After Zoroaster, it became a custom to consecrate caverns for the celebration of mysteries: so that in like manner as temples were dedicated to the Gods, rural altars to heroes and terrestrial deities, etc., subterranean abodes to infernal deities, so caverns and grottoes were consecrated to the world, to the universe, and to the nymphs: and from hence Pythagoras and Plato borrowed the idea of calling the earth a cavern, a cave, de Antro Nympharum. Such was the first projection of the sphere in relief; though the Persians give the honor of the invention to Zoroaster, it is doubtless due to the Egyptians; for we may suppose from this projection being the most simple that it was the most ancient; the caverns of Thebes, full of similar pictures, tend to strengthen this opinion. The following was the second projection: "The prophets or hierophants," says Bishop Synnesius, "who had been initiated in the mysteries, do not permit the common workmen to form idols or images of the Gods; but they descend themselves into the sacred caves, where they have concealed coffers containing certain spheres upon which they construct those images secretly and without the knowledge of the people, who despise simple and natural things and wish for prodigies and fables." (Syn. in Calvit.) That is, the ancient priests had armillary spheres like ours; and this passage, which so well agrees with that of Chaeremon, gives us the key to all their theological astrology. Lastly, they had flat models of the nature of Plate V. with the difference that they were of a very complicated nature, having every fictitious division of decan and subdecan, with the hieroglyphic signs of their influence. Kircher has given us a copy of one of them in his Egyptian Oedipus, and Gybelin a figured fragment in his book of the calendar (under the name of the Egyptian Zodiac). The ancient Egyptians, says the astrologer Julius Firmicus, (Astron. lib. ii. and lib. iv., c. 16), divide each sign of the Zodiac into three sections; and each section was under the direction of an imaginary being whom they called decan or chief of ten; so that there were three decans a month, and thirty-six a year. Now these decans, who were also called Gods (Theoi), regulated the destinies of mankind--and they were placed particularly in certain stars. They afterwards imagined in every ten three other Gods, whom they called arbiters; so that there were nine for every month, and these were farther divided into an infinite number of powers. The Persians and Indians made their spheres on similar plans; and if a picture thereof were to be drawn from the description given by Scaliger at the end of Manilius, we should find in it a complete explanation of their hieroglyphics, for every article forms one. ** If it was for this reason the Persians always wrote the name of Ahrimanes inverted thus: ['Ahrimanes' upside down and backwards]. *** Typhon, pronounced Touphon by the Greeks, is precisely the touphan of the Arabs, which signifies deluge; and these deluges in mythology are nothing more than winter and the rains, or the overflowing of the Nile: as their pretended fires which are to destroy the world, are simply the summer season. And it is for this reason that Aristotle (De Meteor, lib. I. c. xiv), says, that the winter of the great cyclic year is a deluge; and its summer a conflagration. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry, "employ every year a talisman in remembrance of the world: at the summer solstice they mark their houses, flocks and trees with red, supposing that on that day the whole world had been set on fire. It was also at the same period that they celebrated the pyrric or fire dance." And this illustrates the origin of purification by fire and by water; for having denominated the tropic of Cancer the gate of heaven, and the genial heat of celestial fire, and that of Capricorn the gate of deluge or of water, it was imagined that the spirit or souls who passed through these gates in their way to and from heaven, were roasted or bathed: hence the baptism of Mithra; and the passage through flames, observed throughout the East long before Moses. **** That is when the ram became the equinoctial sign, or rather when the alteration of the skies showed that it was no longer the bull. "In Syria, it was the hog or wild boar, enemy of Adonis; because in that country the functions of the Northern Bear were performed by the animal whose inclination for mire and dirt was emblematic of winter. And this is the reason, followers of Moses and Mahomet! that you hold him in horror, in imitation of the priests of Memphis and Balbec, who detested him as the murderer of their God, the sun. This likewise, O Indians! is the type of your Chib-en; and it has been likewise the Pluto of your brethren, the Romans and Greeks; in like manner, your Brama, God the creator, is only the Persian Ormuzd, and the Egyptian Osiris, whose very name expresses creative power, producer of forms. And these gods received a worship analogous to their attributes, real or imaginary; which worship was divided into two branches, according to their characters. The good god receives a worship of love and joy, from which are derived all religious acts of gaiety, such as festivals, dances, banquets, offerings of flowers, milk, honey, perfumes; in a word, everything grateful to the senses and to the soul.* The evil god, on the contrary, received a worship of fear and pain; whence originated all religious acts of the gloomy sort,** tears, desolations, mournings, self-denials, bloody offerings, and cruel sacrifices. * All the ancient festivals respecting the return and exaltation of the sun were of this description: hence the hilaria of the Roman calendar at the period of the passage, Pascha, of the vernal equinox. The dances were imitations of the march of the planets. Those of the Dervises still represent it to this day. ** "Sacrifices of blood," says Porphyry, "were only offered to Demons and evil Genii to avert their wrath. Demons are fond of blood, humidity, stench." Apud. Euseb. Proep. Ev., p. 173. "The Egyptians," says Plutarch, "only offer bloody victims to Typhon. They sacrifice to him a red ox, and the animal immolated is held in execration and loaded with all the sins of the people." The goat of Moses. See Isis and Osiris. Strabo says, speaking of Moses, and the Jews, "Circumcision and the prohibition of certain kinds of meat sprung from superstition." And I observe, respecting the ceremony of circumcision, that its object was to take from the symbol of Osiris, (Phallus) the pretended obstacle to fecundity: an obstacle which bore the seal of Typhon, "whose nature," says Plutarch, "is made up of all that hinders, opposes, causes obstruction." "Hence arose that distinction of terrestrial beings into pure and impure, sacred and abominable, according as their species were of the number of the constellations of one of these two gods, and made part of his domain; and this produced, on the one hand, the superstitions concerning pollutions and purifications; and, on the other, the pretended efficacious virtues of amulets and talismans. "You conceive now," continued the orator, addressing himself to the Persians, the Indians, the Jews, the Christians, the Mussulmans, "you conceive the origin of those ideas of battles and rebellions, which equally abound in all your mythologies. You see what is meant by white and black angels, your cherubim and seraphim, with heads of eagles, of lions, or of bulls; your deus, devils, demons, with horns of goats and tails of serpents; your thrones and dominions, ranged in seven orders or gradations, like the seven spheres of the planets; all beings acting the same parts, and endowed with the same attributes in your Vedas, Bibles, and Zend-avestas, whether they have for chiefs Ormuzd or Brama, Typhon or Chiven, Michael or Satan;--whether they appear under the form of giants with a hundred arms and feet of serpents, or that of gods metamorphosed into lions, storks, bulls or cats, as they are in the sacred fables of the Greeks and Egyptians. You perceive the successive filiation of these ideas, and how, in proportion to their remoteness from their source, and as the minds of men became refined, their gross forms have been polished, and rendered less disgusting. "But in the same manner as you have seen the system of two opposite principles or gods arise from that of symbols, interwoven into its texture, your attention shall now be called to a new system which has grown out of this, and to which this has served in its turn as the basis and support. V. Moral and Mystical Worship, or System of a Future State. "Indeed, when the vulgar heard speak of a new heaven and another world, they soon gave a body to these fictions; they erected therein a real theatre of action, and their notions of astronomy and geography served to strengthen, if not to originate, this illusion. "On the one hand, the Phoenician navigators who passed the pillars of Hercules, to fetch the tin of Thule and the amber of the Baltic, related that at the extremity of the world, the end of the ocean (the Mediterranean), where the sun sets for the countries of Asia, were the Fortunate Islands, the abode of eternal spring; and beyond were the hyperborean regions, placed under the earth (relatively to the tropics) where reigned an eternal night.* From these stories, misunderstood, and no doubt confusedly related, the imagination of the people composed the Elysian fields,** regions of delight, placed in a world below, having their heaven, their sun, and their stars; and Tartarus, a place of darkness, humidity, mire, and frost. Now, as man, inquisitive of that which he knows not, and desirous of protracting his existence, had already interrogated himself concerning what was to become of him after his death, as he had early reasoned on the principle of life which animates his body, and which leaves it without deforming it, and as he had imagined airy substances, phantoms, and shades, he fondly believed that he should continue, in the subterranean world, that life which it was too painful for him to lose; and these lower regions seemed commodious for the reception of the beloved objects which he could not willingly resign. * Nights of six months duration. ** Aliz, in the Phoenician or Hebrew language signifies dancing and joyous. "On the other hand, the astrological and geological priests told such stories and made such descriptions of their heavens, as accorded perfectly well with these fictions. Having, in their metaphorical language, called the equinoxes and solstices the gates of heaven, the entrance of the seasons, they explained these terrestrial phenomena by saying, that through the gate of horn (first the bull, afterwards the ram) and through the gate of Cancer, descended the vivifying fires which give life to vegetation in the spring, and the aqueous spirits which bring, at the solstice, the inundation of the Nile; that through the gate of ivory (Libra, formerly Sagittarius, or the bowman) and that of Capricorn, or the urn, the emanations or influences of the heavens returned to their source, and reascended to their origin; and the Milky Way, which passed through the gates of the solstices, seemed to be placed there to serve them as a road or vehicle.* Besides, in their atlas, the celestial scene presented a river (the Nile, designated by the windings of the hydra), a boat, (the ship Argo) and the dog Sirius, both relative to this river, whose inundation they foretold. These circumstances, added to the preceding, and still further explaining them, increased their probability, and to arrive at Tartarus or Elysium, souls were obliged to cross the rivers Styx and Acheron in the boat of the ferryman Charon, and to pass through the gates of horn or ivory, guarded by the dog Cerberus. Finally, these inventions were applied to a civil use, and thence received a further consistency. *See Macrob. Som. Scrip. c. 12. "Having remarked that in their burning climate the putrefaction of dead bodies was a cause of pestilential diseases, the Egyptians, in many of their towns, had adopted the practice of burying their dead beyond the limits of the inhabited country, in the desert of the West. To go there, it was necessary to pass the channels of the river, and consequently to be received into a boat, and pay something to the ferryman, without which the body, deprived of sepulture, must have been the prey of wild beasts. This custom suggested to the civil and religious legislators the means of a powerful influence on manners; and, addressing uncultivated and ferocious men with the motives of filial piety and a reverence for the dead, they established, as a necessary condition, their undergoing a previous trial, which should decide whether the deceased merited to be admitted to the rank of the family in the black city. Such an idea accorded too well with all the others, not to be incorporated with them: the people soon adopted it; and hell had its Minos and its Rhadamanthus, with the wand, the bench, the ushers, and the urn, as in the earthly and civil state. It was then that God became a moral and political being, a lawgiver to men, and so much the more to be dreaded, as this supreme legislator, this final judge, was inaccessible and invisible. Then it was that this fabulous and mythological world, composed of such odd materials and disjointed parts, became a place of punishments and of rewards, where divine justice was supposed to correct what was vicious and erroneous in the judgment of men. This spiritual and mystical system acquired the more credit, as it took possession of man by all his natural inclinations. The oppressed found in it the hope of indemnity, and the consolation of future vengeance; the oppressor, expecting by rich offerings to purchase his impunity, formed out of the errors of the vulgar an additional weapon of oppression; the chiefs of nations, the kings and priests, found in this a new instrument of domination by the privilege which they reserved to themselves of distributing the favors and punishments of the great judge, according to the merit or demerit of actions, which they took care to characterize as best suited their system. "This, then, is the manner in which an invisible and imaginary world has been introduced into the real and visible one; this is the origin of those regions of pleasure and pain, of which you Persians have made your regenerated earth, your city of resurrection, placed under the equator, with this singular attribute, that in it the blessed cast no shade.* Of these materials, Jews and Christians, disciples of the Persians, have you formed your New Jerusalem of the Apocalypse, your paradise, your heaven, copied in all its parts from the astrological heaven of Hermes: and your hell, ye Mussulmans, your bottomless pit, surmounted by a bridge, your balance for weighing souls and good works, your last judgment by the angels Monkir and Nekir, are likewise modeled from the mysterious ceremonies of the cave of Mithras** and your heaven differs not in the least from that of Osiris, of Ormuzd, and of Brama. * There is on this subject a passage in Plutarch, so interesting and explanatory of the whole of this system, that we shall cite it entire. Having observed that the theory of good and evil had at all times occupied the attention of philosophers and theologians, he adds: "Many suppose there to be two gods of opposite inclinations, one delighting in good, the other in evil; the first of these is called particularly by the name of God, the second by that of Genius or Demon. Zoroaster has denominated them Oromaze and Ahrimanes, and has said that of whatever falls under the cognizance of our senses, light is the best representation of the one, and darkness and ignorance of the other. He adds, that Mithra is an intermediate being, and it is for this reason the Persians call Mithra the mediator or intermediator. Each of these Gods has distinct plants and animals consecrated to him: for example, dogs, birds and hedge-hogs belong to the good Genius, and all aquatic animals to the evil one. "The Persians also say, that Oromaze was born or formed out of the purest light; Ahrimanes, on the contrary, out of the thickest darkness: that Oromaze made six gods as good as himself, and Ahrimanes opposed to them six wicked ones: that Oromaze afterwards multiplied himself threefold (Hermes trismegistus) and removed to a distance as remote from the sun as the sun is remote from the earth that he there formed stars, and, among others, Sirius, which he placed in the heavens as a guard and sentinel. He made also twenty-four other Gods, which he inclosed in an egg; but Ahrimanes created an equal number on his part, who broke the egg, and from that moment good and evil were mixed (in the universe). But Ahrimanes is one day to be conquered, and the earth to be made equal and smooth, that all men may live happy. "Theopompus adds, from the books of the Magi, that one of these Gods reigns in turn every three thousand years during which the other is kept in subjection; that they afterwards contend with equal weapons during a similar portion of time, but that in the end the evil Genius will fall (never to rise again). Then men will become happy, and their bodies cast no shade. The God who mediates all these things reclines at present in repose, waiting till he shall be pleased to execute them." See Isis and Osiris. There is an apparent allegory through the whole of this passage. The egg is the fixed sphere, the world: the six Gods of Oromaze are the six signs of summer, those of Ahrimanes the six signs of winter. The forty-eight other Gods are the forty-eight constellations of the ancient sphere, divided equally between Ahrimanes and Oronmze. The office of Sirius, as guard and sentinel, tells us that the origin of these ideas was Egyptian: finally, the expression that the earth is to become equal and smooth, and that the bodies of happy beings are to cast no shade, proves that the equator was considered as their true paradise. ** In the caves which priests every where constructed, they celebrated mysteries which consisted (says Origen against Celsus) in imitating the motion of the stars, the planets and the heavens. The initiated took the name of constellations, and assumed the figures of animals. One was a lion, another a raven, and a third a ram. Hence the use of masks in the first representation of the drama. See Ant. Devoile, vol. iii., p. 244. "In the mysteries of Ceres the chief in the procession called himself the creator; the bearer of the torch was denominated the sun; the person nearest to the altar, the moon; the herald or deacon, Mercury. In Egypt there was a festival in which the men and women represented the year, the age, the seasons, the different parts of the day, and they walked in precession after Bacchus. Athen. lib. v., ch. 7. In the cave of Mithra was a ladder with seven steps, representing the seven spheres of the planets, by means of which souls ascended and descended. This is precisely the ladder in Jacob's vision, which shows that at that epoch a the whole system was formed. There is in the French king's library a superb volume of pictures of the Indian Gods, in which the ladder is represented with the souls of men mounting it." VI. Sixth System. The Animated World, or Worship of the Universe under diverse Emblems. "While the nations were wandering in the dark labyrinth of mythology and fables, the physical priests, pursuing their studies and enquiries into the order and disposition of the universe, came to new conclusions, and formed new systems concerning powers and first causes. "Long confined to simple appearances, they saw nothing in the movement of the stars but an unknown play of luminous bodies rolling round the earth, which they believed the central point of all the spheres; but as soon as they discovered the rotundity of our planet, the consequences of this first fact led them to new considerations; and from induction to induction they rose to the highest conceptions in astronomy and physics. "Indeed, after having conceived this luminous idea, that the terrestrial globe is a little circle inscribed in the greater circle of the heavens, the theory of concentric circles came naturally into their hypothesis, to determine the unknown circle of the terrestrial globe by certain known portions of the celestial circle; and the measurement of one or more degrees of the meridian gave with precision the whole circumference. Then, taking for a compass the known diameter of the earth, some fortunate genius applied it with a bold hand to the boundless orbits of the heavens; and man, the inhabitant of a grain of sand, embracing the infinite distances of the stars, launches into the immensity of space and the eternity of time: there he is presented with a new order of the universe of which the atom-globe which he inhabited appeared no longer to be the centre; this important post was reserved to the enormous mass of the sun; and that body became the flaming pivot of eight surrounding spheres, whose movements were henceforth subjected to precise calculations. "It was indeed a great effort for the human mind to have undertaken to determine the disposition and order of the great engines of nature; but not content with this first effort, it still endeavored to develop the mechanism, and discover the origin and the instinctive principle. Hence, engaged in the abstract and metaphysical nature of motion and its first cause, of the inherent or incidental properties of matter, its successive forms and its extension, that is to say, of time and space unbounded, the physical theologians lost themselves in a chaos of subtile reasoning and scholastic controversy.* * Consult the Ancient Astronomy of M. Bailly, and you will find our assertions respecting the knowledge of the priests amply proved. "In the first place, the action of the sun on terrestrial bodies, teaching them to regard his substance as a pure and elementary fire, they made it the focus and reservoir of an ocean of igneous and luminous fluid, which, under the name of ether, filled the universe and nourished all beings. Afterwards, having discovered, by a physical and attentive analysis, this same fire, or another perfectly resembling it, in the composition of all bodies, and having perceived it to be the essential agent of that spontaneous movement which is called life in animals and vegetation in plants, they conceived the mechanism and harmony of the universe, as of a homogeneous whole, of one identical body, whose parts, though distant, had nevertheless an intimate relation;* and the world was a living being, animated by the organic circulation of an igneous and even electrical fluid,** which, by a term of comparison borrowed first from men and animals, had the sun for a heart and a focus.*** * These are the very words of Jamblicus. De Myst. Egypt. ** The more I consider what the ancients understood by ether and spirit, and what the Indians call akache, the stronger do I find the analogy between it and the electrial fluid. A luminous fluid, principle of warmth and motion, pervading the universe, forming the matter of the stars, having small round particles, which insinuate themselves into bodies, and fill them by dilating itself, be their extent what it will. What can more strongly resemble electricity? *** Natural philosophers, says Macrobius, call the sun the heart of the world. Som. Scrip. c. 20. The Egyptians, says Plutarch, call the East the face, the North the right side, and the South the left side of the world, because there the heart is placed. They continually compare the universe to a man; and hence the celebrated microcosm of the Alchymists. We observe, by the bye, that the Alchymists, Cabalists, Free-masons, Magnetisers, Martinists, and every other such sort of visionaries, are but the mistaken disciples of this ancient school: we say mistaken, because, in spite of their pretensions, the thread of the occult science is broken. "From this time the physical theologians seem to have divided into several classes; one class, grounding itself on these principles resulting from observation; that nothing can be annihilated in the world; that the elements are indestructible; that they change their combinations but not their nature; that the life and death of beings are but the different modifications of the same atoms; that matter itself possesses properties which give rise to all its modes of existence; that the world is eternal,* or unlimited in space and duration; said that the whole universe was God; and, according to them, God was a being, effect and cause, agent and patient, moving principle and thing moved, having for laws the invariable properties that constitute fatality; and this class conveyed their idea by the emblem of Pan (the great whole); or of Jupiter, with a forehead of stars, body of planets, and feet of animals; or of the Orphic Egg,** whose yolk, suspended in the center of a liquid, surrounded by a vault, represented the globe of the sun, swimming in ether in the midst of the vault of heaven;*** sometimes by a great round serpent, representing the heavens where they placed the moving principle, and for that reason of an azure color, studded with spots of gold, (the stars) devouring his tail--that is, folding and unfolding himself eternally, like the revolutions of the spheres; sometimes by that of a man, having his feet joined together and tied, to signify immutable existence, wrapped in a cloak of all colors, like the face of nature, and bearing on his head a sphere of gold,**** emblem of the sphere of the stars; or by that of another man, sometimes seated on the flower of the lotos borne on the abyss of waters, sometimes lying on a pile of twelve cushions, denoting the twelve celestial signs. And here, Indians, Japanese, Siamese, Tibetans, and Chinese, is the theology, which, founded by the Egyptians and transmitted to you, is preserved in the pictures which you compose of Brama, of Beddou, of Somona-Kodom of Omito. This, ye Jews and Christians, is likewise the opinion of which you have preserved a part in your God moving on the face of the waters, by an allusion to the wind*5 which, at the beginning of the world, that is, the departure of the sun from the sign of Cancer, announced the inundation of the Nile, and seemed to prepare the creation." * See the Pythagorean, Ocellus Lacunus. ** Vide Oedip. Aegypt. Tome II., page 205. *** This comparison of the sun with the yolk of an egg refers: 1. To its round and yellow figure; 2. To its central situation; 3. To the germ or principle of life contained in the yolk. May not the oval form of the egg allude to the elipsis of the orbs? I am inclined to this opinion. The word Orphic offers a farther observation. Macrobius says (Som. Scrip. c. 14. and c. 20), that the sun is the brain of the universe, and that it is from analogy that the skull of a human being is round, like the planet, the seat of intelligence. Now the word Oerph signifies in Hebrew the brain and its seat (cervix): Orpheus, then, is the same as Bedou or Baits; and the Bonzes are those very Orphics which Plutarch represents as quacks, who ate no meat, vended talismans and little stones, and deceived individuals, and even governments themselves. See a learned memoir of Freret sur les Orphiques, Acad. des Inscrp. vol. 25, in quarto. **** See Porphyry in Eusebus. Proep. Evang., lib. 3, p. 115. *5 The Northern or Etesian wind, which commences regularly at the solstice, with the inundation. VII. Seventh System. Worship of the SOUL of the WORLD, that is to say, the Element of Fire, vital Principle of the Universe. "But others, disgusted at the idea of a being at once effect and cause, agent and patient, and uniting contrary natures in the same nature, distinguished the moving principle from the thing moved; and premising that matter in itself was inert they pretended that its properties were communicated to it by a distinct agent, of which itself was only the cover or the case. This agent was called by some the igneous principle, known to be the author of all motion; by others it was supposed to be the fluid called ether, which was thought more active and subtile; and, as in animals the vital and moving principle was called a soul, a spirit, and as they reasoned constantly by comparisons, especially those drawn from human beings, they gave to the moving principle of the universe the name of soul, intelligence, spirit; and God was the vital spirit, which extended through all beings and animated the vast body of the world. And this class conveyed their idea sometimes by Youpiter,* essence of motion and animation, principle of existence, or rather existence itself; sometimes by Vulcan or Phtha, elementary principle of fire; or by the altar of Vesta, placed in the center of her temple like the sun in the heavens; sometimes by Kneph, a human figure, dressed in dark blue, having in one hand a sceptre and a girdle (the zodiac), with a cap of feathers to express the fugacity of thought, and producing from his mouth the great egg. * This is the true pronunciation of the Jupiter of the Latins. . . . Existence itself. This is the signification of the word You. "Now, as a consequence of this system, every being containing in itself a portion of the igneous and etherial fluid, common and universal mover, and this fluid soul of the world being God, it followed that the souls of all beings were portions of God himself partaking of all his attributes, that is, being a substance indivisible, simple, and immortal; and hence the whole system of the immortality of the soul, which at first was eternity.* * In the system of the first spiritualists, the soul was not created with, or at the same time as the body, in order to be inserted in it: its existence was supposed to be anterior and from all eternity. Such, in a few words, is the doctrine of Macrobius on this head. Som. Seip. passim. "There exists a luminous, igneous, subtile fluid, which under the name of ether and spiritus, fills the universe. It is the essential principle and agent of motion and life, it is the Deity. When an earthly body is to be animated, a small round particle of this fluid gravitates through the milky way towards the lunar sphere; where, when it arrives, it unites with a grosser air, and becomes fit to associate with matter: it then enters and entirely fills the body, animates it, suffers, grows, increases, and diminishes with it; lastly, when the body dies, and its gross elements dissolve, this incorruptible particle takes its leave of it, and returns to the grand ocean of ether, if not retained by its union with the lunar air: it is this air or gas, which, retaining the shape of the body, becomes a phantom or ghost, the perfect representation of the deceased. The Greeks called this phantom the image or idol of the soul; the Pythagoreans, its chariot, its frame; and the Rabbinical school, its vessel, or boat. When a man had conducted himself well in this world, his whole soul, that is its chariot and ether, ascended to the moon, where a separation took place: the chariot lived in the lunar Elysium, and the ether returned to the fixed sphere, that is, to God: for the fixed heaven, says Macrobius, was by many called by the name of God (c. 14). If a man had not lived virtuously, the soul remained on earth to undergo purification, and was to wander to and fro, like the ghosts of Homer, to whom this doctrine must have been known, since he wrote after the time of Pherecydes and Pythagoras, who were its promulgators in Greece. Herodotus upon this occasion says, that the whole romance of the soul and its transmigrations was invented by the Egyptians, and propagated in Greece by men, who pretended to be its authors. I know their names, adds he, but shall not mention them (lib. 2). Cicero, however, has positively informed us, that it was Pherecydes, master of Pythagoras. Tuscul. lib. 1, sect. 16. Now admitting that this system was at that period a novelty, it accounts for Solomon's treating it as a fable, who lived 130 years before Pherecydes. 'Who knoweth,' said he, 'the spirit of a man that it goeth upwards? I said in my heart concerning the estate of the sons of men, that God might manifest them and that they might see that they themselves are beasts. For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea they have all one breath, so that a man hath no pre-eminence above a beast: for all is vanity.'" Eccles. c. iii: v. 18. And such had been the opinion of Moses, as a translator of Herodotus (M. Archer of the Academy of Inscriptions) justly observes in note 389 of the second book; where he says also that the immortality of the soul was not introduced among the Hebrews till their intercourse with the Assyrians. In other respects, the whole Pythagorean system, properly analysed, appears to be merely a system of physics badly understood. "Hence, also its transmigrations, known by the name of metempsychosis, that is, the passage of the vital principle from one body to another; an idea which arose from the real transmigration of the material elements. And behold, ye Indians, ye Boudhists, ye Christians, ye Mussulmans! whence are derived all your opinions on the spirituality of the soul; behold what was the source of the dreams of Pythagoras and Plato, your masters, who were themselves but the echoes of another, the last sect of visionary philosophers, which we will proceed to examine. VIII. Eighth system. The WORLD-MACHINE: Worship of the Demi-Ourgos, or Grand Artificer. "Hitherto the theologians, employing themselves in examining the fine and subtile substances of ether or the generating fire, had not, however, ceased to treat of beings palpable and perceptible to the senses; and theology continued to be the theory of physical powers, placed sometimes exclusively in the stars, and sometimes disseminated through the universe; but at this period, certain superficial minds, losing the chain of ideas which had directed them in their profound studies, or ignorant of the facts on which they were founded, distorted all the conclusions that flowed from them by the introduction of a strange and novel chimera. They pretended that this universe, these heavens, these stars, this sun, differed in no respect from an ordinary machine; and applying to this first hypothesis a comparison drawn from the works of art, they raised an edifice of the most whimsical sophisms. A machine, said they, does not make itself; it has had an anterior workman; its very existence proves it. The world is a machine; therefore it had an artificer.* * All the arguments of the spiritualists are founded on this. See Macrobius, at the end of the second book, and Plato, with the comments of Marcilius Ficinus. "Here, then, is the Demi-Ourgos or grand artificer, constituted God autocratical and supreme. In vain the ancient philosophy objected to this by saying that the artificer himself must have had parents and progenitors; and that they only added another step to the ladder by taking eternity from the world, and giving it to its supposed author. The innovators, not content with this first paradox, passed on to a second; and, applying to their artificer the theory of the human understanding, they pretended that the Demi-Ourgos had framed his machine on a plan already existing in his understanding. Now, as their masters, the naturalists, had placed in the regions of the fixed stars the great primum mobile, under the name of intelligence and reason, so their mimics, the spiritualists, seizing this idea, applied it to their Demi-Ourgos, and making it a substance distinct and self-existent, they called it mens or logos (reason or word). And, as they likewise admitted the existence of the soul of the world, or solar principle, they found themselves obliged to compose three grades of divine beings, which were: first, the Demi-Ourgos, or working god; secondly, the logos, word or reason; thirdly, the spirit or soul (of the world).* And here, Christians! is the romance on which you have founded your trinity; here is the system which, born a heretic in the temples of Egypt, transported a pagan into the schools of Greece and Italy, is now found to be good, catholic, and orthodox, by the conversion of its partisans, the disciples of Pythagoras and Plato, to Christianity. * These are the real types of the Christian Trinity. "It is thus that God, after having been, First, The visible and various action of the meteors and the elements; "Secondly, The combined powers of the stars, considered in their relations to terrestrial beings; Thirdly, These terrestrial beings themselves, by confounding the symbols with their archetypes; Fourthly, The double power of nature in its two principal operations of producing and destroying; "Fifthly, The animated world, with distinction of agent and patient, of effect and cause; "Sixthly, The solar principle, or the element of fire considered as the only mover; "Has thus become, finally, in the last resort, a chimerical and abstract being, a scholastic subtilty, of substance without form, a body without a figure, a very delirium of the mind, beyond the power of reason to comprehend. But vainly does it seek in this last transformation to elude the senses; the seal of its origin is imprinted upon it too deep to be effaced; and its attributes, all borrowed from the physical attributes of the universe, such as immensity, eternity, indivisibility, incomprehensibility; or on the moral affections of man, such as goodness, justice, majesty; its names* even, all derived from the physical beings which were its types, and especially from the sun, from the planets, and from the world, constantly bring to mind, in spite of its corrupters, indelible marks of its real nature. * In our last analysis we found all the names of the Deity to be derived from some material object in which it was supposed to reside. We have given a considerable number of instances; let us add one more relative to our word God. This is known to be the Deus of the Latins, and the Theos of the Greeks. Now by the confession of Plato (in Cratylo), of Macrobius (Saturn, lib. 1, c. 24,) and of Plutarch (Isis and Osiris) its root is thein, which signifies to wander, like planein, that is to say, it is synonymous with planets; because, add our authors, both the ancient Greeks and Barbarians particularly worshipped the planets. I know that such enquiries into etymologies have been much decried: but if, as is the case, words are the representative signs of ideas, the genealogy of the one becomes that of the other, and a good etymological dictionary would be the most perfect history of the human understanding. It would only be necessary in this enquiry to observe certain precautions, which have hitherto been neglected, and particularly to make an exact comparison of the value of the letters of the different alphabets. But, to continue our subject, we shall add, that in the Phoenician language, the word thah (with ain) signifies also to wander, and appears to be the derivation of thein. If we suppose Deus to be derived from the Greek Zeus, a proper name of You-piter, having zaw, I live, for its root, its sense will be precisely that of you, and will mean soul of the world, igneous principle. (See note p. 143). Div-us, which only signifies Genius, God of the second order, appears to me to come from the oriental word div substituted for dib, wolf and chacal, one of the emblems of the sun. At Thebes, says Macrobius, the sun was painted under the form of a wolf or chacal, for there are no wolves in Egypt. The reason of this emblem, doubtless, is that the chacal, like the cock announces by its cries the sun's rising; and this reason is confirmed by the analogy of the words lykos, wolf, and lyke, light of the morning, whence comes lux. Dius, which is to be understood also of the sun, must be derived from dih, a hawk. "The Egyptians," says Porphyry (Euseb. Proecep. Evang. p. 92,) "represent the sun under the emblem of a hawk, because this bird soars to the highest regions of air where light abounds." And in reality we continually see at Cairo large flights of these birds, hovering in the air, from whence they descend not but to stun us with their shrieks, which are like the monosyllable dih: and here, as in the preceding example, we find an analogy between the word dies, day, light, and dius, god, sun. "Such is the chain of ideas which the human mind had already run through at an epoch previous to the records of history; and since their continuity proves that they were the produce of the same series of studies and labors, we have every reason to place their origin in Egypt, the cradle of their first elements. This progress there may have been rapid; because the physical priests had no other food, in the retirement of the temples, but the enigma of the universe, always present to their minds; and because in the political districts into which that country was for a long time divided, every state had its college of priests, who, being by turns auxiliaries or rivals, hastened by their disputes the progress of science and discovery.* * One of the proofs that all these systems were invented in Egypt, is that this is the only country where we see a complete body of doctrine formed from the remotest antiquity. Clemens Alexandrinus has transmitted to us (Stromat. lib. 6,) a curious detail of the forty-two volumes which were borne in the procession of Isis. "The priest," says he, "or chanter, carries one of the symbolic instruments of music, and two of the books of Mercury; one containing hymns of the gods, the other the list of kings. Next to him the horoscope (the regulator of time,) carries a palm and a dial, symbols of astrology; he must know by heart the four books of Mercury which treat of astrology: the first on the order of the planets, the second on the risings of the sun and moon, and the two last on the rising and aspect of the stars. Then comes the sacred author, with feathers on his head (like Kneph) and a book in his hand, together with ink, and a reed to write with, (as is still the practice among the Arabs). He must be versed in hieroglyphics, must understand the description of the universe, the course of the sun, moon, stars, and planets, be acquainted with the division of Egypt into thirty-six nomes, with the course of the Nile, with instruments, measures, sacred ornaments, and sacred places. Next comes the stole bearer, who carries the cubit of justice, or measure of the Nile, and a cup for the libations; he bears also in the procession ten volumes on the subject of sacrifices, hymns, prayers, offerings, ceremonies, festivals. Lastly arrives the prophet, bearing in his bosom a pitcher, so as to be exposed to view; he is followed by persons carrying bread (as at the marriage of Cana.) This prophet, as president of the mysteries, learns ten other sacred volumes, which treat of the laws, the gods, and the discipline of the priests. Now there are in all forty-two volumes, thirty-six of which are studied and got by heart by these personages, and the remaining six are set apart to be consulted by the pastophores; they treat of medicine, the construction of the human body (anatomy), diseases, remedies, instruments, etc., etc." We leave the reader to deduce all the consequences of an Encyclopedia. It is ascribed to Mercury; but Jamblicus tells us that each book, composed by priests, was dedicated to that god, who, on account of his title of genius or decan opening the zodiac, presided over every enterprise. He is the Janus of the Romans, and the Guianesa of the Indians, and it is remarkable that Yanus and Guianes are homonymous. In short it appears that these books are the source of all that has been transmitted to us by the Greeks and Latins in every science, even in alchymy, necromancy, etc. What is most to be regretted in their loss is that part which related to the principles of medicine and diet, in which the Egyptians appear to have made a considerable progress, and to have delivered many useful observations. "There happened early on the borders of the Nile, what has since been repeated in every country; as soon as a new system was formed its novelty excited quarrels and schisms; then, gaining credit by persecution itself, sometimes it effaced antecedent ideas, sometimes it modified and incorporated them; then, by the intervention of political revolutions, the aggregation of states and the mixture of nations confused all opinions; and the filiation of ideas being lost, theology fell into a chaos, and became a mere logogriph of old traditions no longer understood. Religion, having strayed from its object was now nothing more than a political engine to conduct the credulous vulgar; and it was used for this purpose, sometimes by men credulous themselves and dupes of their own visions, and sometimes by bold and energetic spirits in pursuit of great objects of ambition. IX. Religion of Moses, or Worship of the Soul of the World (You-piter). "Such was the legislator of the Hebrews; who, wishing to separate his nation from all others, and to form a distinct and solitary empire, conceived the design of establishing its basis on religious prejudices, and of raising around it a sacred rampart of opinions and of rites. But in vain did he prescribe the worship of the symbols which prevailed in lower Egypt and in Phoenicia;* for his god was nevertheless an Egyptian god, invented by those priests of whom Moses had been the disciple; and Yahouh,** betrayed by its very name, essence (of beings), and by its symbol, the burning bush, is only the soul of the world, the moving principle which the Greeks soon after adopted under the same denomination in their you-piter, regenerating being, and under that of Ei, existence,*** which the Thebans consecrated by the name of Kneph, which Sais worshipped under the emblem of Isis veiled, with this inscription: I am al that has been, all that is, and all that is to come, and no mortal has raised my veil; which Pythagoras honored under the name of Vesta, and which the stoic philosophy defined precisely by calling it the principle of fire. In vain did Moses wish to blot from his religion every thing which had relation to the stars; many traits call them to mind in spite of all he has done. The seven planetary luminaries of the great candlestick; the twelve stones, or signs in the Urim of the high priests; the feast of the two equinoxes, (entrances and gates of the two hemispheres); the ceremony of the lamb, (the celestial ram then in his fifteenth degree); lastly, the name even of Osiris preserved in his song,**** and the ark, or coffer, an imitation of the tomb in which that God was laid, all remain as so many witnesses of the filiation of his ideas, and of their extraction from the common source. * "At a certain period," says Plutarch (de Iside) "all the Egyptians have their animal gods painted. The Thebans are the only people who do not employ painters, because they worship a god whose form comes not under the senses, and cannot be represented." And this is the god whom Moses, educated at Heliopolis, adopted; but the idea was not of his invention. ** Such is the true pronunciation of the Jehovah of the moderns, who violate, in this respect, every rule of criticism; since it is evident that the ancients, particularly the eastern Syrians and Phoenicians, were acquainted neither with the J nor the P which are of Tartar origin. The subsisting usage of the Arabs, which we have re-established here, is confirmed by Diodorus, who calls the god of Moses Iaw, (lib. 1), and Iaw and Yahouh are manifestly the same word: the identity continues in that of You-piter; but in order to render it more complete, we shall demonstrate the signification to be the same. In Hebrew, that is to say, in one of the dialects of the common language of lower Asia, Yahouh is the participle of the verb hih, to exist, to be, and signifies existing: in other words, the principle of life, the mover or even motion (the universal soul of beings). Now what is Jupiter? Let us hear the Greeks and Latins explain their theology. "The Egyptians," says Diodorus, after Manatho, priest of Memphis, "in giving names to the five elements, called spirit, or ether, You-piter, on account of the true meaning of that word: for spirit is the source of life, author of the vital principle in animals; and for this reason they considered him as the father, the generator of beings." For the same reason Homer says, father, and king of men and gods. (Diod. lib. 1, sect 1). "Theologians," says Macrobius, "consider You-piter as the soul of the world." Hence the words of Virgil: " Muses let us begin with You-piter; the world is full of You-piter." (Somn. Scrip., ch. 17). And in the Saturnalia, he says, "Jupiter is the sun himself." It was this also which made Virgil say, "The spirit nourishes the life (of beings), and the soul diffused through the vast members (of the universe), agitates the whole mass, and forms but one immense body." "Ioupiter," says the ancient verses of the Orphic sect, which originated in Egypt; verses collected by Onomacritus in the days of Pisistratus, "Ioupiter, represented with the thunder in his hand, is the beginning, origin, end, and middle of all things: a single and universal power, he governs every thing; heaven, earth, fire, water, the elements, day, and night. These are what constitute his immense body: his eyes are the sun and moon: he is space and eternity: in fine," adds Porphyry. "Jupiter is the world, the universe, that which constitutes the essence and life of all beings. Now," continues the same author, "as philosophers differed in opinion respecting the nature and constituent parts of this god, and as they could invent no figure that should represent all his attributes, they painted him in the form of a man. He is in a sitting posture, in allusion to his immutable essence; the upper part of his body is uncovered, because it is in the upper regions of the universe (the stars) that he most conspicuously displays himself. He is covered from the waist downwards, because respecting terrestrial things he is more secret and concealed. He holds a scepter in his left hand, because on the left side is the heart, and the heart is the seat of the understanding, which, (in human beings) regulates every action." Euseb. Proeper. Evang., p 100. The following passage of the geographer and philosopher, Strabo, removes every doubt as to the identity of the ideas of Moses and those of the heathen theologians. "Moses, who was one of the Egyptian priests, taught his followers that it was an egregious error to represent the Deity under the form of animals, as the Egyptians did, or in the shape of man, as was the practice of the Greeks and Africans. That alone is the Deity, said he, which constitutes heaven, earth, and every living thing; that which we call the world, the sum of all things, nature; and no reasonable person will think of representing such a being by the image of any one of the objects around us. It is for this reason, that, rejecting every species of images or idols, Moses wished the Deity to be worshipped without emblems, and according to his proper nature; and he accordingly ordered a temple worthy of him to be erected, etc. Geograph. lib. 16, p. 1104, edition of 1707. The theology of Moses has, then, differed in no respect from that of his followers, that is to say, from that of the Stoics and Epicureans, who consider the Deity as the soul of the world. This philosophy appears to have taken birth, or to have been disseminated when Abraham came into Egypt (200 years before Moses), since he quitted his system of idols for that of the god Yahouh; so that we may place its promulgation about the seventeenth or eighteenth century before Christ; which corresponds with what we have said before. As to the history of Moses, Diodorus properly represents it when he says, lib. 34 and 40, "That the Jews were driven out of Egypt at a time of dearth, when the country was full of foreigners, and that Moses, a man of extraordinary prudence seized this opportunity of establishing his religion in the mountains of Judea." It will seem paradoxical to assert, that the 600,000 armed men whom he conducted thither ought to be reduced to 6,000; but I can confirm the assertion by so many proofs drawn from the books themselves, that it will be necessary to correct an error which appears to have arisen from the mistake of the transcribers. *** This was the monosyllable written on the gates of the temple of Delphos. Plutarch has made it the subject of a dissertation. **** These are the literal expressions of the book of Deuteronomy, chap. XXXII. "The works of Tsour are perfect." Now Tsour has been translated by the word creator; its proper signification is to give forms, and this is one of the definitions of Osiris in Plutarch. X. Religion of Zoroaster. "Such also was Zoroaster; who, five centuries after Moses, and in the time of David, revived and moralized among the Medes and Bactrians, the whole Egyptian system of Osiris and Typhon, under the names Ormuzd and Ahrimanes; who called the reign of summer, virtue and good; the reign of winter, sin and evil; the renewal of nature in spring, creation of the world; the conjunction of the spheres at secular periods, resurrection; and the Tartarus and Elysium of the astrologers and geographers were named future life, hell and paradise. In a word, he did nothing but consecrate the existing dreams of the mystical system. XI. Budsoism, or Religion of the Samaneans. "Such again are the propagators of the dismal doctrine of the Samaneans; who, on the basis of the Metempsychosis, have erected the misanthropic system of self-denial, and of privations; who, laying it down as a principle that the body is only a prison where the soul lives in an impure confinement, that life is only a dream, an illusion, and the world only a passage to another country, to a life without end, placed virtue and perfection in absolute immobility, in the destruction of all sentiment, in the abnegation of physical organs, in the annihilation of all our being; whence resulted fasts, penances, macerations, solitude, contemplations, and all the practices of the deplorable delirium of the Anchorites. XII. Brahmism, or Indian System. "And such, too, were the founders of the Indian System; who, refining after Zoroaster on the two principles of creation and destruction, introduced an intermediary principle, that of preservation, and on their trinity in unity, of Brama, Chiven, and Vichenou, accumulated the allegories of their ancient traditions, and the alembicated subtilities of their metaphysics. "These are the materials which existed in a scattered state for many centuries in Asia; when a fortuitous concourse of events and circumstances, on the borders of the Euphrates and the Mediterranean, served to form them into new combinations. XIII. Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun, under the cabalistical names of Chrish-en, or Christ, and Ye-sus or Jesus. "In constituting a separate nation, Moses strove in vain to defend it against the invasion of foreign ideas. An invisible inclination, founded on the affinity of their origin, had constantly brought back the Hebrews towards the worship of the neighboring nations; and the commercial and political relations which necessarily existed between them, strengthened this propensity from day to day. As long as the constitution of the state remained entire, the coercive force of the government and the laws opposed these innovations, and retarded their progress; nevertheless the high places were full of idols; and the god Sun had his chariot and horses painted in the palaces of the kings, and even in the temples of Yahouh; but when the conquests of the sultans of Nineveh and Babylon had dissolved the bands of civil power, the people, left to themselves and solicited by their conquerors, restrained no longer their inclination for profane opinions, and they were publicly established in Judea. First, the Assyrian colonies, which came and occupied the lands of the tribes, filled the kingdom of Samaria with dogmas of the Magi, which very soon penetrated into the kingdom of Judea. Afterwards, Jerusalem being subjugated, the Egyptians, the Syrians, the Arabs, entering this defenceless country, introduced their opinions; and the religion of Moses was doubly mutilated. Besides the priests and great men, being transported to Babylon and educated in the sciences of the Chaldeans, imbibed, during a residence of seventy years, the whole of their theology; and from that moment the dogmas of the hostile Genius (Satan), the archangel Michael,* the ancient of days (Ormuzd), the rebel angels, the battles in heaven, the immortality of the soul, and the resurrection, all unknown to Moses, or rejected by his total silence respecting them, were introduced and naturalized among the Jews. * "The names of the angels and of the months, such as Gabriel, Michael, Yar, Nisan, etc., came from Babylon with the Jews:" says expressly the Talmud of Jerusalem. See Beousob. Hist. du Manich. Vol. II, p. 624, where he proves that the saints of the Almanac are an imitation of the 365 angels of the Persians; and Jamblicus in his Egyptian Mysteries, sect. 2, c. 3, speaks of angels, archangels, seraphims, etc., like a true Christian. "The emigrants returned to their country with these ideas; and their innovation at first excited disputes between their partisans the Pharisees, and their opponents the Saducees, who maintained the ancient national worship; but the former, aided by the propensities of the people and their habits already contracted, and supported by the Persians, their deliverers and masters, gained the ascendant over the latter; and the Sons of Moses consecrated the theology of Zoroaster.* * "The whole philosophy of the gymnosophists," says Diogenes Laertius on the authority of an ancient writer, "is derived from that of the Magi, and many assert that of the Jews to have the same origin." Lib. 1. c. 9. Megasthenes, an historian of repute in the days of Seleucus Nicanor, and who wrote particularly upon India, speaking of the philosophy of the ancients respecting natural things, puts the Brachmans and the Jews precisely on the same footing. "A fortuitous analogy between two leading ideas was highly favorable to this coalition, and became the basis of a last system, not less surprising in the fortune it has had in the world, than in the causes of its formation. "After the Assyrians had destroyed the kingdom of Samaria, some judicious men foresaw the same destiny for Jerusalem, which they did not fail to predict and publish; and their predictions had the particular turn of being terminated by prayers for a re-establishment and regeneration, uttered in the form of prophecies. The Hierophants, in their enthusiasm, had painted a king as a deliverer, who was to re-establish the nation in its ancient glory; the Hebrews were to become once more a powerful, a conquering nation, and Jerusalem the capital of an empire extended over the whole earth. "Events having realized the first part of these predictions, the ruin of Jerusalem, the people adhered to the second with a firmness of belief in proportion to their misfortunes; and the afflicted Jews expected, with the impatience of want and desire, this victorious king and deliverer, who was to come and save the nation of Moses, and restore the empire of David. "On the other hand, the sacred and mythological traditions of preceding times had spread through all Asia a dogma perfectly analogous. The cry there was a great mediator, a final judge, a future saviour, a king, god, conqueror and legislator, who was to restore the golden age upon earth,* to deliver it from the dominion of evil, and restore men to the empire of good, peace, and happiness. The people seized and cherished these ideas with so much the more avidity, as they found in them a consolation under that deplorable state of suffering into which they had been plunged by the devastations of successive conquests, and the barbarous despotism of their governments. This conformity between the oracles of different nations, and those of the prophets, excited the attention of the Jews; and doubtless the prophets had the art to compose their descriptions after the style and genius of the sacred books employed in the Pagan mysteries. There was therefore a general expectation in Judea of a great ambassador, a final Saviour; when a singular circumstance determined the epoch of his coming. * This is the reason of the application of the many Pagan oracles to Jesus, and particularly the fourth eclogue of Virgil, and the Sybilline verses so celebrated among the ancients. "It is found in the sacred books of the Persians and Chaldeans, that the world, composed of a total revolution of twelve thousand, was divided into two partial revolutions; one of which, the age and reign of good, terminated in six thousand; the other, the age and reign of evil, was to terminate in six thousand more. "By these records, the first authors had understood the annual revolution of the great celestial orb called the world, (a revolution composed of twelve months or signs, divided each into a thousand parts), and the two systematic periods, of winter and summer, composed each of six thousand. These expressions, wholly equivocal and badly explained, having received an absolute and moral, instead of a physical and astrological sense, it happened that the annual world was taken for the secular world, the thousand of the zodiacal divisions, for a thousand of years; and supposing, from the state of things, that they lived in the age of evil, they inferred that it would end with the six thousand pretended years.* * We have already seen this tradition current among the Tuscans; it was disseminated through most nations, and shows us what we ought to think of all the pretended creations and terminations of the world, which are merely the beginnings and endings of astronomical periods invented by astrologers. That of the year or solar revolution, being the most simple and perceptible, served as a model to the rest, and its comparison gave rise to the most whimsical ideas. Of this description is the idea of the four ages of the world among the Indians. Originally these four ages were merely the four seasons; and as each season was under the supposed influence of a planet, it bore the name of the metal appropriated to that planet; thus spring was the age of the sun, or of gold; summer the age of the moon, or of silver; autumn the age of Venus, or of brass; and winter the age of Mars, or of iron. Afterwards when astronomers invented the great year of 25 and 36 thousand common years, which had for its object the bringing back all the stars to one point of departure and a general conjunction, the ambiguity of the terms introduced a similar ambiguity of ideas; and the myriads of celestial signs and periods of duration which were thus measured were easily converted into so many revolutions of the sun. Thus the different periods of creation which have been so great a source of difficulty and misapprehension to curious enquirers, were in reality nothing more than hypothetical calculations of astronomical periods. In the same manner the creation of the world has been attributed to different seasons of the year, just as these different seasons have served for the fictitious period of these conjunctions; and of consequence has been adopted by different nations for the commencement of an ordinary year. Among the Egyptians this period fell upon the summer solstice, which was the commencement of their year; and the departure of the spheres, according to their conjectures, fell in like manner upon the period when the sun enters cancer. Among the Persians the year commenced at first in the spring, or when the sun enters Aries; and from thence the first Christians were led to suppose that God created the world in the spring: this opinion is also favored by the book of Genesis; and it is farther remarkable, that the world is not there said to be created by the God of Moses (Yahouh), but by the Elohim or gods in the plural, that is by the angels or genii, for so the word constantly means in the Hebrew books. If we farther observe that the root of the word Elohim signifies strong or powerful, and that the Egyptians called their decans strong and powerful leaders, attributing to them the creation of the world, we shall presently perceive that the book of Genesis affirms neither more nor less than that the world was created by the decans, by those very genii whom, according to Sanchoniathon, Mercury excited against Saturn, and who were called Elohim. It may be farther asked why the plural substantive Elohim is made to agree with the singular verb bara (the Elohim creates). The reason is that after the Babylonish captivity the unity of the Supreme Being was the prevailing opinion of the Jews; it was therefore thought proper to introduce a pious solecism in language, which it is evident had no existence before Moses; thus in the names of the children of Jacob many of them are compounded of a plural verb, to which Elohim is the nominative case understood, as Raouben (Reuben), they have looked upon me, and Samaonni (Simeon), they have granted me my prayer; to wit, the Elohim. The reason of this etymology is to be found in the religious creeds of the wives of Jacob, whose gods were the taraphim of Laban, that is, the angels of the Persians, and Egyptian decans. "Now, according to calculations admitted by the Jews, they began to reckon near six thousand years since the supposed creation of the world.* This coincidence caused a fermentation in the public mind. Nothing was thought of but the approaching end. They consulted the hierophants and the mystical books, which differed as to the term; the great mediator, the final judge, was expected and desired, to put an end to so many calamities. This being was so much spoken of, that some person finally was said to have seen him; and a first rumor of this sort was sufficient to establish a general certainty. Popular report became an established fact: the imaginary being was realized; and all the circumstances of mythological tradition, being assembled around this phantom, produced a regular history, of which it was no longer permitted to doubt. * According to the computation of the Seventy, the period elapsed consisted of about 5,600 years, and this computation was principally followed. It is well known how much, in the first ages of the church, this opinion of the end of the world agitated the minds of men. In the sequel, the general councils encouraged by finding that the general conflagration did not come, pronounced the expectation that prevailed heretical, and its believers were called Millenarians; a circumstance curious enough, since it is evident from the history of the gospels that Jesus Christ was a Millenarian, and of consequence a heretic. "These mythological traditions recounted that, in the beginning, a woman and a man had by their fall introduced sin and misery into the world. (Consult plate of the Astrological Heaven of the Ancients.) "By this was denoted the astronomical fact, that the celestial virgin and the herdsman (Bootes), by setting heliacally at the autumnal equinox, delivered the world to the wintry constellations, and seemed, on falling below the horizon, to introduce into the world the genius of evil, Ahrimanes, represented by the constellation of the Serpent.* * "The Persians," says Chardin, "call the constellation of the serpent Ophiucus, serpent of Eve: and this serpent Ophiucas or Ophioneus plays a similar part in the theology of the Phoenicians," for Pherecydes, their disciple and the master of Pythagoras, said "that Ophioneus Serpentinus had been chief of the rebels against Jupiter." See Mars. Ficin. Apol. Socrat. p. m. 797, col. 2. I shall add that ephah (with ain) signifies in Hebrew, serpent. These traditions related that the woman had decoyed and seduced the man.* * In a physical sense to seduce, seducere, means only to attract, to draw after us. "And in fact, the virgin, setting first, seems to draw the herdsman after her. "That the woman tempted him by offering him fruit fair to the sight and good to eat, which gave the knowledge of good and evil. "And in fact, the Virgin holds in her hand a branch of fruit, which she seems to offer to the Herdsman; and the branch, emblem of autumn, placed in the picture of Mithra* between winter and summer, seems to open the door and give knowledge, the key of good and evil. * See this picture in Hyde, page 111, edition of 1760. That this couple had been driven from the celestial garden, and that a cherub with a flaming sword had been placed at the gate to guard it. "And in fact, when the virgin and the herdsman fall beneath the horizon, Perseus rises on the other side;* and this Genius, with a sword in his hand, seems to drive them from the summer heaven, the garden and dominion of fruits and flowers. * Rather the head of Medusa; that head of a woman once so beautiful, which Perseus cut off and which beholds in his hand, is only that of the virgin, whose head sinks below the horizon at the very moment that Perseus rises; and the serpents which surround it are Orphiucus and the Polar Dragon, who then occupy the zenith. This shows us in what manner the ancients composed all their figures and fables. They took such constellations as they found at the same time on the circle of the horizon, and collecting the different parts, they formed groups which served them as an almanac in hieroglyphic characters. Such is the secret of all their pictures, and the solution of all their mythological monsters. The virgin is also Andromeda, delivered by Perseus from the whale that pursues her (pro-sequitor). That of this virgin should be born, spring up, an offspring, a child, who should bruise the head of the serpent, and deliver the world from sin. "This denotes the son, which, at the moment of the winter solstice, precisely when the Persian Magi drew the horoscope of the new year, was placed on the bosom of the Virgin, rising heliacally in the eastern horizon; on this account he was figured in their astrological pictures under the form of a child suckled by a chaste virgin,* and became afterwards, at the vernal equinox, the ram, or the lamb, triumphant over the constellation of the Serpent, which disappeared from the skies. * Such was the picture of the Persian sphere, cited by Aben Ezra in the Coelam Poeticum of Blaeu, p. 71. "The picture of the first decan of the Virgin," says that writer. "represents a beautiful virgin with flowing hair; sitting in a chair, with two ears of corn in her hand, and suckling an infant, called Jesus by some nations, and Christ in Greek." In the library of the king of France is a manuscript in Arabic, marked 1165, in which is a picture of the twelve signs; and that of the Virgin represents a young woman with an infant by her side: the whole scene indeed of the birth of Jesus is to be found in the adjacent part of the heavens. The stable is the constellation of the charioteer and the goat, formerly Capricorn: a constellation called proesepe Jovis Heniochi, stable of Iou; and the word Iou is found in the name Iou-seph (Joseph). At no great distance is the ass of Typhon (the great she-bear), and the ox or bull, the ancient attendants of the manger. Peter the porter, is Janus with his keys and bald forehead: the twelve apostles are the genii of the twelve months, etc. This Virgin has acted very different parts in the various systems of mythology: she has been the Isis of the Egyptians, who said of her in one of their inscriptions cited by Julian, the fruit I have brought forth is the sun. The majority of traits drawn by Plutarch apply to her, in the same manner as those of Osiris apply to Bootes: also the seven principal stars of the she-bear, called David's chariot, were called the chariot of Osiris (See Kirker); and the crown that is situated behind, formed of ivy, was called Chen-Osiris, the tree of Osiris. The Virgin has likewise been Ceres, whose mysteries were the same with those of Isis and Mithra; she has been the Diana of the Ephesians; the great goddess of Syria, Cybele, drawn by lions; Minerva, the mother of Bacchus; Astraea, a chaste virgin taken up into heaven at the end of a golden age; Themis at whose feet is the balance that was put in her hands; the Sybil of Virgil, who descends into hell, or sinks below the hemisphere with a branch in her hand, etc. That, in his infancy, this restorer of divine and celestial nature would live abased, humble, obscure and indigent. "And this, because the winter sun is abased below the horizon; and that this first period of his four ages or seasons, is a time of obscurity, scarcity, fasting, and want. "That, being put to death by the wicked, he had risen gloriously; that he had reascended from hell to heaven, where he would reign forever "This is a sketch of the life of the sun; who, finishing his career at the winter solstice, when Typhon and the rebel angels gain the dominion, seems to be put to death by them; but who soon after is born again, and rises* into the vault of heaven, where he reigns. * Resurgere, to rise a second time, cannot signify to return to life, but in a metaphorical sense; but we see continually mistakes of this kind result from the ambiguous meaning of the words made use of in ancient tradition. "Finally, these traditions went so far as to mention even his astrological and mythological names, and inform us that he was called sometimes Chris, that is to say, preserver,* and from that, ye Indians, you have made your god Chrish-en or Chrish-na; and, ye Greek and Western Christians, your Chris-tos, son of Mary, is the same; sometimes he is called Yes, by the union of three letters, which by their numerical value form the number 608, one of the solar periods.** And this, Europeans, is the name which, with the Latin termination, is become your Yes-us or Jesus, the ancient and cabalistic name attributed to young Bacchus, the clandestine son (nocturnal) of the Virgin Minerva, who, in the history of his whole life, and even of his death, brings to mind the history of the god of the Christians, that is, of the star of day, of which they are each of them the emblems." * The Greeks used to express by X, or Spanish iota, the aspirated ha of the Orientals, who said haris. In Hebrew heres signifies the sun, but in Arabic the meaning of the radical word is, to guard, to preserve, and of haris, guardian, preserver. It is the proper epithet of Vichenou, which demonstrates at once the identity of the Indian and Christian Trinities, and their common origin. It is manifestly but one system, which divided into two branches, one extending to the east, and the other to the west, assumed two different forms: Its principal trunk is the Pythagorean system of the soul of the world, or Iou-piter. The epithet piter, or father, having been applied to the demi-ourgos of Plato, gave rise to an ambiguity which caused an enquiry to be made respecting the son of this father. In the opinion of the philosophers the son was understanding, Nous and Logos, from which the Latins made their Verbum. And thus we clearly perceive the origin of the eternal father and of the Verbum his son, proceeding from him (Mens Ex Deo nata, says Macrobius): the oenima or spiritus mundi, was the Holy Ghost; and it is for this reason that Manes, Pasilides, Valentinius, and other pretended heretics of the first ages, who traced things to their source, said, that God the Father was the supreme inaccessible light (that of the heaven, the primum mobile, or the aplanes); the Son the secondary light resident in the sun, and the Holy Ghost the atmosphere of the earth (See Beausob. vol. II, p. 586): hence, among the Syrians, the representation of the Holy Ghost by a dove, the bird of Venus Urania, that is of the air. The Syrians (says Nigidius de Germaico) assert that a dove sat for a certain number of days on the egg of a fish, and that from this incubation Venus was born: Sextus Empiricus also observes (Inst. Pyrrh. lib. 3, c. 23) that the Syrians abstain from eating doves; which intimates to us a period commencing in the sign Pisces, in the winter solstice. We may farther observe, that if Chris comes from Harisch by a chin, it will signify artificer, an epithet belonging to the sun. These variations, which must have embarrassed the ancients, prove it to be the real type of Jesus, as had been already remarked in the time of Tertullian. "Many, says this writer, suppose with greater probability that the sun is our God, and they refer us to the religion of the Persians." Apologet. c. 16. ** See a curious ode to the sun, by Martianus Capella, translated by Gebelin. Here a great murmur having arisen among all the Christian groups, the Lamas, the Mussulmans and the Indians called them to order, and the orator went on to finish his discourse: "You know at present," said he, "how the rest of this system was composed in the chaos and anarchy of the three first centuries; what a multitude of singular opinions divided the minds of men, and armed them with an enthusiasm and a reciprocal obstinacy; because, being equally founded on ancient tradition, they were equally sacred. You know how the government, after three centuries, having embraced one of these sects, made it the orthodox, that is to say, the pre-dominant religion, to the exclusion of the rest; which, being less in number, became heretics; you know how and by what means of violence and seduction this religion was propagated, extended, divided, and enfeebled; how, six hundred years after the Christian innovation, another system was formed from it and from that of the Jews; and how Mahomet found the means of composing a political and theological empire at the expense of those of Moses and the vicars of Jesus. "Now, if you take a review of the whole history of the spirit of all religion, you will see that in its origin it has had no other author than the sensations and wants of man; that the idea of God has had no other type and model than those of physical powers, material beings, producing either good or evil, by impressions of pleasure or pain on sensitive beings; that in the formation of all these systems the spirit of religion has always followed the same course, and been uniform in its proceedings; that in all of them the dogma has never failed to represent, under the name of gods, the operations of nature, and passions and prejudices of men; that the moral of them all has had for its object the desire of happiness and the aversion to pain; but that the people, and the greater part of legislators, not knowing the route to be pursued, have formed false, and therefore discordant, ideas of virtue and vice of good and evil, that is to say, of what renders man happy or miserable; that in every instance, the means and the causes of propagating and establishing systems have exhibited the same scenes of passion and the same events; everywhere disputes about words, pretexts for zeal, revolutions and wars excited by the ambition of princes, the knavery of apostles, the credulity of proselytes, the ignorance of the vulgar, the exclusive cupidity and intolerant arrogance of all. Indeed, you will see that the whole history of the spirit of religion is only the history of the errors of the human mind, which, placed in a world that it does not comprehend, endeavors nevertheless to solve the enigma; and which, beholding with astonishment this mysterious and visible prodigy, imagines causes, supposes reasons, builds systems; then, finding one defective, destroys it for another not less so; hates the error that it abandons, misconceives the one that it embraces, rejects the truth that it is seeking, composes chimeras of discordant beings; and thus, while always dreaming of wisdom and happiness, wanders blindly in a labyrinth of illusion and doubt." CHAPTER XXIII. ALL RELIGIONS HAVE THE SAME OBJECT. Thus spoke the orator in the name of those men who had studied the origin and succession of religious ideas. The theologians of various systems, reasoning on this discourse: "It is an impious representation," said some, "whose tendency is nothing less than to overturn all belief, to destroy subordination in the minds of men, and annihilate our ministry and power." "It is a romance," said others, "a tissue of conjectures, composed with art, but without foundation." The moderate and prudent men added: "Supposing all this to be true, why reveal these mysteries? Doubtless our opinions are full of errors; but these errors are a necessary restraint on the multitude. The world has gone thus for two thousand years; why change it now?" A murmur of disapprobation, which never fails to rise at every innovation, now began to increase; when a numerous group of the common classes of people, and of untaught men of all countries and of every nation, without prophets, without doctors, and without doctrine, advancing in the circle, drew the attention of the whole assembly; and one of them, in the name of all, thus addressed the multitude: "Mediators and arbiters of nations! the strange relations which have occupied the present debate were unknown to us until this day. Our understanding, confounded and amazed at so many statements, some of them learned, others absurd and all incomprehensible, remains in uncertainty and doubt. One only reflection has struck us: on reviewing so many prodigious facts, so many contradictory assertions, we ask ourselves: What are all these discussions to us? What need have we of knowing what passed five or six thousand years ago, in countries we never heard of, and among men who will ever be unknown to us? True or false, what interest have we in knowing whether the world has existed six thousand, or twenty-five thousand years? Whether it was made of nothing, or of something; by itself, or by a maker, who in his turn would require another maker? What! we are not sure of what happens near us, and shall we answer for what happens in the sun, in the moon, or in imaginary regions of space? We have forgotten our own infancy, and shall we know the infancy of the world? And who will attest what no one has seen? who will certify what no man comprehends? "Besides, what addition or diminution will it make to our existence, to answer yes or no to all these chimeras? Hitherto neither our fathers nor ourselves have had the least knowledge or notion of them, and we do not perceive that we have had on this account either more or less of the sun, more or less of subsistence, more or less of good or of evil. "If the knowledge of these things is so necessary, why have we lived as well without it as those who have taken so much trouble concerning it? If this knowledge is superfluous, why should we burden ourselves with it to-day?" Then addressing himself to the doctors and theologians: "What!" said he, "is it necessary that we, poor and ignorant men, whose every moment is scarcely sufficient for the cares of life, and the labors of which you take the profit,--is it necessary for us to learn the numberless histories that you have recounted, to read the quantity of books that you have cited, and to study the various languages in which they are composed! A thousand years of life would not suffice--" "It is not necessary," replied the doctors, "that you should acquire all this science; we have it for you--" "But even you," replied the simple men, "with all your science, you are not agreed; of what advantage, then, is your science? Besides, how can you answer for us? If the faith of one man is applicable to many, what need have even you to believe? your fathers may have believed for you; and this would be reasonable, since they have seen for you. "Farther, what is believing, if believing influences no action? And what action is influenced by believing, for instance, that the world is or is not eternal?" "The latter would be offensive to God," said the doctors. "How prove you that?" replied the simple men. "In our books," answered the doctors. "We do not understand them," returned the simple men. "We understand them for you," said the doctors. "That is the difficulty," replied the simple men. "By what right do you constitute yourselves mediators between God and us?" "By his orders," said the doctors. "Where is the proof of these orders?" said the simple men. "In our books," said the doctors. "We understand them not," said the simple men; "and how came this just God to give you this privilege over us? Why did this common father oblige us to believe on a less degree of evidence than you? He has spoken to you; be it so; he is infallible, and deceives you not. But it is you who speak to us! And who shall assure us that you are not in error yourselves, or that you will not lead us into error? And if we should be deceived, how will that just God save us contrary to law, or condemn us on a law which we have not known?" "He has given you the natural law," said the doctors. "And what is the natural law?" replied the simple men. "If that law is sufficient, why has he given any other? If it is not sufficient, why did he make it imperfect?" "His judgments are mysteries," said the doctors, "and his justice is not like that of men." "If his justice," replied the simple men, "is not like ours, by what rule are we to judge of it? And, moreover, why all these laws, and what is the object proposed by them?" "To render you more happy," replied a doctor, "by rendering you better and more virtuous. It is to teach man to enjoy his benefits, and not injure his fellows, that God has manifested himself by so many oracles and prodigies." "In that case," said the simple men, "there is no necessity for so many studies, nor of such a variety of arguments; only tell us which is the religion that best answers the end which they all propose." Immediately, on this, every group, extolling its own morality above that of all others, there arose among the different sects a new and most violent dispute. "It is we," said the Mussulmans, "who possess the most excellent morals, who teach all the virtues useful to men and agreeable to God. We profess justice, disinterestedness, resignation to providence, charity to our brethren, alms-giving, and devotion; we torment not the soul with superstitious fears; we live without alarm, and die without remorse." "How dare you speak of morals," answered the Christian priests, "you, whose chief lived in licentiousness and preached impurity? You, whose first precept is homicide and war? For this we appeal to experience: for these twelve hundred years your fanatical zeal has not ceased to spread commotion and carnage among the nations. If Asia, so flourishing in former times, is now languishing in barbarity and depopulation, it is in your doctrine that we find the cause; in that doctrine, the enemy of all instruction, which sanctifies ignorance, which consecrates the most absolute despotism in the governors, imposes the most blind and passive obedience in the people, that has stupefied the faculties of man, and brutalized the nations. "It is not so with our sublime and celestial morals; it was they which raised the world from its primitive barbarity, from the senseless and cruel superstitions of idolatry, from human sacrifices,* from the shameful orgies of pagan mysteries; they it was that purified manners, proscribed incest and adultery, polished savage nations, banished slavery, and introduced new and unknown virtues, charity for men, their equality in the sight of God, forgiveness and forgetfulness of injuries, the restraint of all the passions, the contempt of worldly greatness, a life completely spiritual and completely holy!" * Read the cold declaration of Eusebius (Proep. Evang. lib. I, p. 11,), who pretends that, since the coming of Christ, there have been neither wars, nor tyrants, nor cannibals, nor sodomites, nor persons committing incest, nor savages destroying their parents, etc. When we read these fathers of the church we are astonished at their insincerity or infatuation. "We admire," said the Mussulmans, "the ease with which you reconcile that evangelical meekness, of which you are so ostentatious, with the injuries and outrages with which you are constantly galling your neighbors. When you criminate so severely the great man whom we revere, we might fairly retort on the conduct of him whom you adore; but we scorn such advantages, and confining ourselves to the real object in question, we maintain that the morals of your gospel have by no means that perfection which you ascribe to them; it is not true that they have introduced into the world new and unknown virtues: for example, the equality of men in the sight of God,--that fraternity and that benevolence which follow from it, were formal doctrines of the sect of the Hermatics or Samaneans,* from whom you descend. As to the forgiveness of injuries, the Pagans themselves had taught it; but in the extent that you give it, far from being a virtue, it becomes an immorality, a vice. Your so much boasted precept of turning one cheek after the other, is not only contrary to every sentiment of man, but is opposed to all ideas of justice. It emboldens the wicked by impunity, debases the virtuous by servility, delivers up the world to despotism and tyranny, and dissolves all society. Such is the true spirit of your doctrines. Your gospels in their precepts and their parables, never represent God but as a despot without any rules of equity; a partial father treating a debauched and prodigal son with more favor than his respectful and virtuous children; a capricious master, who gives the same wages to workmen who had wrought but one hour, as to those who had labored through the whole day; one who prefers the last comers to the first. The moral is everywhere misanthropic and antisocial; it disgusts men with life and with society; and tends only to encourage hermitism and celibacy. * The equality of mankind in a state of nature and in the eyes of God was one of the principal tenets of the Samaneans, and they appear to be the only ancients that entertained this opinion. "As to the manner in which you have practised these morals, we appeal in our turn to the testimony of facts. We ask whether it is this evangelical meekness which has excited your interminable wars between your sects, your atrocious persecutions of pretended heretics, your crusades against Arianism, Manicheism, Protestantism, without speaking of your crusades against us, and of those sacrilegious associations, still subsisting, of men who take an oath to continue them?* We ask you whether it be gospel charity which has made you exterminate whole nations in America, to annihilate the empires of Mexico and Peru; which makes you continue to dispeople Africa and sell its inhabitants like cattle, notwithstanding your abolition of slavery; which makes you ravage India and usurp its dominions; and whether it be the same charity which, for three centuries past, has led you to harrass the habitations of the people of three continents, of whom the most prudent, the Chinese and Japanese, were constrained to drive you off, that they might escape your chains and recover their internal peace?" * The oath taken by the knights of the Order of Malta, is to kill, or make the Mahometans prisoners, for the glory of God. Here the Bramins, the Rabbins, the Bonzes, the Chamans, the Priests of the Molucca islands, and the coasts of Guinea, loading the Christian doctors with reproaches: "Yes!" cried they, "these men are robbers and hypocrites, who preach simplicity, to surprise confidence; humility, to enslave with more ease; poverty, to appropriate all riches to themselves. They promise another world, the better to usurp the present; and while they speak to you of tolerance and charity, they burn, in the name of God, the men who do not worship him in their manner." "Lying priests," retorted the missionaries, "it is you who abuse the credulity of ignorant nations to subjugate them. It is you who have made of your ministry an art of cheating and imposture; you have converted religion into a traffic of cupidity and avarice. You pretend to hold communications with spirits, and they give for oracles nothing but your wills. You feign to read the stars, and destiny decrees only your desires. You cause idols to speak, and the gods are but the instruments of your passions. You have invented sacrifices and libations, to collect for your own profit the milk of flocks, and the flesh and fat of victims; and under the cloak of piety you devour the offerings of the gods, who cannot eat, and the substance of the people who are forced to labor." "And you," replied the Bramins, the Bonzes, the Chamans, "you sell to the credulous living, your vain prayers for the souls of the dead. With your indulgences and your absolutions you have usurped the power of God himself; and making a traffic of his favors and pardons, you have put heaven at auction; and by your system of expiations you have formed a tariff of crimes, which has perverted all consciences."* * As long as it shall be possible to obtain purification from crimes and exemption from punishment by means of money or other frivolous practices; as long as kings and great men shall suppose that building temples or instituting foundations, will absolve them from the guilt of oppression and homicide; as long as individuals shall imagine that they may rob and cheat, provided they observe fast during Lent, go to confession, and receive extreme unction, it is impossible there should exist in society any morality or virtue; and it is from a deep conviction of truth, that a modern philosopher has called the doctrine of expiations la verola des societes. "Add to this," said the Imans, "that these men have invented the most insidious of all systems of wickedness,--the absurd and impious obligation of recounting to them the most intimate secrets of actions and of thoughts (confessions); so their insolent curiosity has carried their inquisition even into the sanctuary of the marriage bed,* and the inviolable recesses of the heart." * Confession is a very ancient invention of the priests, who did not fail to avail themselves of that means of governing. It was practised in the Egyptian, Greek, Phrygian, Persian mysteries, etc. Plutarch has transmitted us the remarkable answer of a Spartan whom a priest wanted to confess. "Is it to you or to God I am to confess?" "To God," answered the priest: "In that case," replied the Spartan, "man, begone!" (Remarkable Savings of the Lacedemonians.) The first Christians confessed their faults publicly, like the Essenians. Afterwards, priests began to be established, with power of absolution from the sin of idolatry. In the time of Theodosius, a woman having publicly confessed an intrigue with a deacon, bishop Necterius, and his successor Chrysostom, granted communion without confession. It was not until the seventh century that the abbots of convents exacted from monks and nuns confession twice a year; and it was at a still later period that bishops of Rome generalized it. The Mussulmen, who suppose women to have no souls, are shocked at the idea of confession; and say; How can an honest man think of listening to the recital of the actions or the secret thoughts of a woman? May we not also ask, on the other hand, how can an honest woman consent to reveal them? Thus by mutual reproaches the doctors of the different sects began to reveal all the crimes of their ministry--all the vices of their craft; and it was found that among all nations the spirit of the priesthood, their system of conduct, their actions their morals, were absolutely the same: That they had everywhere formed secret associations and corporations at enmity with the rest of society:* * That we may understand the general feelings of priests respecting the rest of mankind, whom they always call by the name of the people, let us hear one of the doctors of the church. "The people," says Bishop Synnesius, in Calvit. page 315, "are desirous of being deceived, we cannot act otherwise respecting them. The case was similar with the ancient priests of Egypt, and for this reason they shut themselves up in their temples, and there composed their mysteries, out of the reach of the eye of the people." And forgetting what he has before just said, he adds: "for had the people been in the secret they might have been offended at the deception played upon them. In the mean time how is it possible to conduct one's self otherwise with the people so long as they are people? For my own part, to myself I shall always be a philosopher, but in dealing with the mass of mankind, I shall be a priest." "A little jargon," says Geogory Nazianzen to St. Jerome (Hieron. ad. Nep.) "is all that is necessary to impose on the people. The less they comprehend, the more they admire. Our forefathers and doctors of the church have often said, not what they thought, but what circumstances and necessity dictated to them." "We endeavor," says Sanchoniaton, "to excite admiration by means of the marvellous." (Proep. Evang. lib. 3.) Such was the conduct of all the priests of antiquity, and is still that of the Bramins and Lamas who are the exact counterpart of the Egyptian priests. Such was the practice of the Jesuits, who marched with hasty strides in the same career. It is useless to point out the whole depravity of such a doctrine. In general every association which has mystery for its basis, or an oath of secrecy, is a league of robbers against society, a league divided in its very bosom into knaves and dupes, or in other words agents and instruments. It is thus we ought to judge of those modern clubs, which, under the name of Illuminatists, Martinists, Cagliostronists, and Mesmerites, infest Europe. These societies are the follies and deceptions of the ancient Cabalists, Magicians, Orphies, etc., "who," says Plutarch, "led into errors of considerable magnitude, not only individuals, but kings and nations." That they had everywhere attributed to themselves prerogatives and immunities, by means of which they lived exempt from the burdens of other classes: That they everywhere avoided the toils of the laborer, the dangers of the soldier, and the disappointments of the merchant: That they lived everywhere in celibacy, to shun even the cares of a family: That, under the cloak of poverty, they found everywhere the secret of procuring wealth and all sorts of enjoyments: That under the name of mendicity they raised taxes to a greater amount than princes: That in the form of gifts and offerings they had established fixed and certain revenues exempt from charges: That under pretence of retirement and devotion they lived in idleness and licentiousness: That they had made a virtue of alms-giving, to live quietly on the labors of others: That they had invented the ceremonies of worship, as a means of attracting the reverence of the people, while they were playing the parts of gods, of whom they styled themselves the interpreters and mediators, to assume all their powers; that, with this design, they had (according to the degree of ignorance or information of their people) assumed by turns the character of astrologers, drawers of horoscopes, fortune-tellers, magicians,* necromancers, quacks, physicians, courtiers, confessors of princes, always aiming at the great object to govern for their own advantage: * What is a magician, in the sense in which people understand the word? A man who by words and gestures pretends to act on supernatural beings, and compel them to descend at his call and obey his orders. Such was the conduct of the ancient priests, and such is still that of all priests in idolatrous nations; for which reason we have given them the denomination of Magicians. And when a Christian priest pretends to make God descend from heaven, to fix him to a morsel of leaven, and render, by means of this talisman, souls pure and in a state of grace, what is this but a trick of magic? And where is the difference between a Chaman of Tartary who invokes the Genii, or an Indian Bramin, who makes Vichenou descend in a vessel of water to drive away evil spirits? Yes, the identity of the spirit of priests in every age and country is fully established! Every where it is the assumption of an exclusive privilege, the pretended faculty of moving at will the powers of nature; and this assumption is so direct a violation of the right of equality, that whenever the people shall regain their importance, they will forever abolish this sacrilegious kind of nobility, which has been the type and parent stock of the other species of nobility. That sometimes they had exalted the power of kings and consecrated their persons, to monopolize their favors, or participate their sway: That sometimes they had preached up the murder of tyrants (reserving it to themselves to define tyranny), to avenge themselves of their contempt or their disobedience: And that they always stigmatised with impiety whatever crossed their interests; that they hindered all public instruction, to exercise the monopoly of science; that finally, at all times and in all places, they had found the secret of living in peace in the midst of the anarchy they created, in safety under the despotism that they favored, in idleness amidst the industry they preached, and in abundance while surrounded with scarcity; and all this by carrying on the singular trade of selling words and gestures to credulous people, who purchase them as commodities of the greatest value.* * A curious work would be the comparative history of the agnuses of the pope and the pastils of the grand Lama. It would be worth while to extend this idea to religions ceremonies in general, and to confront column by column, the analogous or contrasting points of faith and superstitious practices in all nations. There is one more species of superstition which it would be equally salutary to cure, blind veneration for the great; and for this purpose it would be alone sufficient to write a minute detail of the private life of kings and princes. No work could be so philosophical as this; and accordingly we have seen what a general outcry was excited among kings and the panders of kings, when the Anecdotes of the Court of Berlin first appeared. What would be the alarm were the public put in possession of the sequel of this work? Were the people fairly acquainted with all the absurdities of this species of idol, they would no longer be exposed to covet their specious pleasures of which the plausible and hollow appearance disturbs their peace, and hinders them from enjoying the much more solid happiness of their own condition. Then the different nations, in a transport of fury, were going to tear in pieces the men who had thus abused them; but the legislator, arresting this movement of violence, addressed the chiefs and doctors: "What!" said he, "instructors of nations, is it thus that you have deceived them?" And the terrified priests replied. "O legislator! we are men. The people are so superstitious! they have themselves encouraged these errors."* * Consider in this view the Brabanters. And the kings said: "O legislator! the people are so servile and so ignorant! they prostrated themselves before the yoke, which we scarcely dared to show them."* * The inhabitants of Vienna, for example, who harnessed themselves like cattle and drew the chariot of Leopold. Then the legislator, turning to the people--"People!" said he, "remember what you have just heard; they are two indelible truths. Yes, you yourselves cause the evils of which you complain; yourselves encourage the tyrants, by a base adulation of their power, by an imprudent admiration of their false beneficence, by servility in obedience, by licentiousness in liberty, and by a credulous reception of every imposition. On whom shall you wreak vengeance for the faults committed by your own ignorance and cupidity?" And the people, struck with confusion, remained in mournful silence. CHAPTER XXIV. SOLUTION OF THE PROBLEM OF CONTRADICTIONS. The legislator then resumed his discourse: "O nations!" said he, "we have heard the discussion of your opinions. The different sentiments which divide you have given rise to many reflections, and furnished several questions which we shall propose to you to solve. "First, considering the diversity and opposition of the creeds to which you are attached, we ask on what motives you found your persuasion? Is it from a deliberate choice that you follow the standard of one prophet rather than another? Before adopting this doctrine, rather than that, did you first compare? did you carefully examine them? Or have you received them only from the chance of birth, from the empire of education and habit? Are you not born Christians on the borders of the Tiber, Mussulmans on those of the Euphrates, Idolaters on the Indus, just as you are born fair in cold climates, and sable under the scorching sun of Africa? And if your opinions are the effect of your fortuitous position on the earth, of consanguinity, of imitation, how is it that such a hazard should be a ground of conviction, an argument of truth? "Secondly, when we reflect on the mutual proscriptions and arbitrary intolerance of your pretensions, we are frightened at the consequences that flow from your own principles. Nations! who reciprocally devote each other to the bolts of heavenly wrath, suppose that the universal Being, whom you revere, should this moment descend from heaven on this multitude; and, clothed with all his power, should sit on this throne to judge you; suppose that he should say to you: Mortals! it is your own justice that I am going to exercise upon you. Yes, of all the religious systems that divide you, one alone shall this day be preferred; all the others, all this multitude of standards, of nations, of prophets, shall be condemned to eternal destruction. This is not enough: among the particular sects of the chosen system, one only can be favored; all the others must be condemned: neither is this enough;--from this little remnant of a group I must exclude all those who have not fulfilled the conditions enjoined by its precepts. O men! to what a small number of elect have you limited your race! to what a penury of beneficence do you reduce the immensity of my goodness! to what a solitude of beholders do you condemn my greatness and my glory! "But," said the legislator rising, "no matter you have willed it so. Nations! here is an urn in which all your names are placed: one only is a prize: approach, and draw this tremendous lottery!" And the nations, seized with terror cried: "No, no; we are all brothers, all equal; we cannot condemn each other." "Then," said the legislator, resuming his seat: "O men! who dispute on so many subjects, lend an attentive ear to one problem which you exhibit, and which you ought to decide yourselves." And the people, giving great attention, he lifted an arm towards heaven, and, pointing to the sun, said: "Nations, does that sun, which enlightens you, appear square or triangular?" "No," answered they with one voice, "it is round." Then, taking the golden balance that was on the altar: "This gold," said the legislator, "that you handle every day, is it heavier than the same volume of copper?" "Yes," answered all the people, "gold is heavier than Copper." Then, taking the sword: "Is this iron," said the legislator, "softer than lead?" "No," said the people. "Is sugar sweet, and gall bitter?" "Yes." "Do you love pleasure and hate pain?" "Yes." "Thus, then, you are agreed in these points, and many others of the same nature. "Now, tell us, is there a cavern in the centre of the earth, or inhabitants in the moon?" This question caused a universal murmur. Every one answered differently--some yes, others no; one said it was probable, another said it was an idle and ridiculous question; some, that it was worth knowing. And the discord was universal. After some time the legislator, having obtained silence, said: "Explain to us, O Nations! this problem: we have put to you several questions which you have answered with one voice, without distinction of race or of sect: white men, black men, followers of Mahomet and of Moses, worshippers of Boudha and of Jesus, all have returned the same answer. We then proposed another question, and you have all disagreed! Why this unanimity in one case, and this discordance in the other?" And the group of simple men and savages answered and said: "The reason of this is plain. In the first case we see and feel the objects, and we speak from sensation; in the second, they are beyond the reach of our senses--we speak of them only from conjecture." "You have resolved the problem," said the legislator; "and your own consent has established this first truth: "That whenever objects can be examined and judged of by your senses, you are agreed in opinion; and that you only differ when the objects are absent and beyond your reach. "From this first truth flows another equally clear and worthy of notice. Since you agree on things which you know with certainty, it follows that you disagree only on those which you know not with certainty, and about which you are not sure; that is to say, you dispute, you quarrel, you fight, for that which is uncertain, that of which you doubt. O men! is this wisdom? "Is it not, then, demonstrated that truth is not the object of your contests? that it is not her cause which you defend, but that of your affections, and your prejudices? that it is not the object, as it really is in itself, that you would verify, but the object as you would have it; that is to say, it is not the evidence of the thing that you would enforce, but your own personal opinion, your particular manner of seeing and judging? It is a power that you wish to exercise, an interest that you wish to satisfy, a prerogative that you arrogate to yourself; it is a contest of vanity. Now, as each of you, on comparing himself to every other, finds himself his equal and his fellow, he resists by a feeling of the same right. And your disputes, your combats, your intolerance, are the effect of this right which you deny each other, and of the intimate conviction of your equality. "Now, the only means of establishing harmony is to return to nature, and to take for a guide and regulator the order of things which she has founded; and then your accord will prove this other truth: "That real beings have in themselves an identical, constant and uniform mode of existence; and that there is in your organs a like mode of being affected by them. "But at the same time, by reason of the mobility of these organs as subject to your will, you may conceive different affections, and find yourselves in different relations with the same objects; so that you are to them like a mirror, capable of reflecting them truly as they are, or of distorting and disfiguring them. "Hence it follows, that whenever you perceive objects as they are, you agree among yourselves, and with the objects; and this similitude between your sensations and their manner of existence, is what constitutes their truth with respect to you; and, on the contrary, whenever you differ in opinion, your disagreement is a proof that you do not represent them such as they are,--that you change them. "Hence, also, it follows, that the causes of your disagreement exist not in the objects themselves, but in your minds, in your manner of perceiving or judging. "To establish, therefore, a uniformity of opinion, it is necessary first to establish the certainty, completely verified, that the portraits which the mind forms are perfectly like the originals; that it reflects the objects correctly as they exist. Now, this result cannot be obtained but in those cases where the objects can be brought to the test, and submitted to the examination of the senses. Everything which cannot be brought to this trial is, for that reason alone, impossible to be determined; there exists no rule, no term of comparison, no means of certainty, respecting it. "From this we conclude, that, to live in harmony and peace, we must agree never to decide on such subjects, and to attach to them no importance; in a word, we must trace a line of distinction between those that are capable of verification, and those that are not; and separate by an inviolable barrier the world of fantastical beings from the world of realities; that is to say, all civil effect must be taken away from theological and religious opinions. "This, O ye people of the earth! is the object proposed by a great nation freed from her fetters and her prejudices; this is the work which, under her eye and by her orders, we had undertaken, when your kings and your priests came to interrupt it. O kings and priests! you may suspend, yet for a while, the solemn publication of the laws of nature; but it is no longer in your power to annihilate or to subvert them." A general shout then arose from every part of the assembly; and the nations universally, and with one voice, testified their assent to the proposals of the delegates: "Resume," said they, "your holy and sublime labors, and bring them to perfection. Investigate the laws which nature, for our guidance, has implanted in our breasts, and collect from them an authentic and immutable code; nor let this code be any longer for one family only, but for us all without exception. Be the legislators of the whole human race, as you are the interpreters of nature herself. Show us the line of partition between the world of chimeras and that of realities; and teach us, after so many religions of error and delusion, the religion of evidence and truth!" Then the delegates, having resumed their enquiries into the physical and constituent attributes of man, and examined the motives and affections which govern him in his individual and social state, unfolded in these words the laws on which nature herself has founded his happiness. THE LAW OF NATURE. CHAPTER 1. OF THE LAW OF NATURE. Q. What is the law of nature? A. It is the constant and regular order of events, by which God governs the universe; an order which his wisdom presents to the senses and reason of men, as an equal and common rule for their actions, to guide them, without distinction of country or sect, towards perfection and happiness. Q. Give a clear definition of the word law. A. The word law, taken literary, signifies lecture,* because originally, ordinances and regulations were the lectures, preferably to all others, made to the people, in order that they might observe them, and not incur the penalties attached to their infraction: whence follows the original custom explaining the true idea. The definition of law is, "An order or prohibition to act with the express clause of a penalty attached to the infraction, or of a recompense attached to the observance of that order." * From the Latin word lex, lectio. Alcoran likewise signifies lecture and is only a literal translation of the word law. Q. Do such orders exist in nature? A. Yes. Q. What does the word nature signify? A. The word nature bears three different significations. 1. It signifies the universe, the material world: in this first sense we say the beauties of nature, the riches of nature, that is to say, the objects in the heavens and on the earth exposed to our sight; 2. It signifies the power that animates, that moves the universe, considering it as a distinct being, such as the soul is to the body; in this second sense we say, "The intentions of nature, the incomprehensible secrets of nature." 3. It signifies the partial operations of that power on each being, or on each class of beings; and in this third sense we say, "The nature of man is an enigma; every being acts according to its nature." Wherefore, as the actions of each being, or of each species of beings, are subjected to constant and general rules, which cannot be infringed without interrupting and troubling the general or particular order, those rules of action and of motion are called natural laws, or laws of nature. Q. Give me examples of those laws. A. It is a law of nature, that the sun illuminates successively the surface of the terrestrial globe;--that its presence causes both light and heat;--that heat acting upon water, produces vapors;--that those vapors rising in clouds into the regions of the air, dissolve into rain or snow, and renew incessantly the waters of fountains and rivers. It is a law of nature, that water flows downwards; that it endeavors to find its level; that it is heavier than air; that all bodies tend towards the earth; that flame ascends towards the heavens;--that it disorganizes vegetables and animals; that air is essential to the life of certain animals; that, in certain circumstances, water suffocates and kills them; that certain juices of plants, certain minerals attack their organs, and destroy their life, and so on in a multitude of other instances. Wherefore, as all those and similar facts are immutable, constant, and regular, so many real orders result from them for man to conform himself to, with the express clause of punishment attending the infraction of them, or of welfare attending their observance. So that if man pretends to see clear in darkness, if he goes in contradiction to the course of the seasons, or the action of the elements; if he pretends to remain under water without being drowned, to touch fire without burning himself, to deprive himself of air without being suffocated, to swallow poison without destroying himself, he receives from each of those infractions of the laws of nature a corporeal punishment proportionate to his fault; but if on the contrary, he observes and practises each of those laws according to the regular and exact relations they have to him he preserves his existence, and renders it as happy as it can be: and as the only and common end of all those laws, considered relatively to mankind, is to preserve, and render them happy, it has been agreed upon to reduce the idea to one simple expression, and to call them collectively the law of nature. CHAPTER II. CHARACTERS OF THE LAW OF NATURE. Q. What are the characters of the law of nature? A. There can be assigned ten principal ones. Q. Which is the first? A. To be inherent to the existence of things, and, consequently, primitive and anterior to every other law: so that all those which man has received, are only imitations of it, and their perfection is ascertained by the resemblance they bear to this primordial model. Q. Which is the second? A. To be derived immediately from God, and presented by him to each man, whereas all other laws are presented to us by men, who may be either deceived or deceivers. Q. Which is the third? A. To be common to all times, and to all countries, that is to say, one and universal. Q. Is no other law universal? A. No: for no other is agreeable or applicable to all the people of the earth; they are all local and accidental, originating from circumstances of places and of persons; so that if such a man had not existed, or such an event happened, such a law would never have been enacted. Q. Which is the fourth character? A. To be uniform and invariable. Q. Is no other law uniform and invariable? A. No: for what is good and virtue according to one, is evil and vice according to another; and what one and the same law approves of at one time, it often condemns at another. Q. Which is the fifth character? A. To be evident and palpable, because it consists entirely of facts incessantly present to the senses, and to demonstration. Q. Are not other laws evident? A. No: for they are founded on past and doubtful facts, on equivocal and suspicious testimonies, and on proofs inaccessible to the senses. Q. Which is the sixth character? A. To be reasonable, because its precepts and entire doctrine are conformable to reason, and to the human understanding. Q. Is no other law reasonable? A. No: for all are in contradiction to the reason and the understanding of men, and tyrannically impose on him a blind and impracticable belief. Q. Which is the seventh character? A. To be just, because in that law, the penalties are proportionate to the infractions. Q. Are not other laws just? A. No: for they often exceed bounds, either in rewarding deserts, or in punishing delinquencies, and consider as meritorious or criminal, null or indifferent actions. Q. Which is the eighth character? A. To be pacific and tolerant, because in the law of nature, all men being brothers and equal in rights, it recommends to them only peace and toleration, even for errors. Q. Are not other laws pacific? A. No: for all preach dissension, discord, and war, and divide mankind by exclusive pretensions of truth and domination. Q. Which is the ninth character? A. To be equally beneficent to all men, in teaching them the true means of becoming better and happier. Q. Are not other laws beneficent likewise? A. No: for none of them teach the real means of attaining happiness; all are confined to pernicious or futile practices; and this is evident from facts, since after so many laws, so many religions, so many legislators and prophets, men are still as unhappy and ignorant, as they were six thousand years ago. Q. Which is the last character of the law of nature? A. That it is alone sufficient to render men happier and better, because it comprises all that is good and useful in other laws, either civil or religious, that is to say, it constitutes essentially the moral part of them; so that if other laws were divested of it, they would be reduced to chimerical and imaginary opinions devoid of any practical utility. Q. Recapitulate all those characters. A. We have said that the law of nature is, 1. Primitive; 6. Reasonable; 2. Immediate; 7. Just; 3. Universal; 8. Pacific; 4. Invariable; 9. Beneficent: and 5. Evident; 10. Alone sufficient. And such is the power of all these attributes of perfection and truth, that when in their disputes the theologians can agree upon no article of belief, they recur to the law of nature, the neglect of which, say they, forced God to send from time to time prophets to proclaim new laws; as if God enacted laws for particular circumstances, as men do; especially when the first subsists in such force, that we may assert it to have been at all times and in all countries the rule of conscience for every man of sense or understanding. Q. If, as you say, it emanates immediately from God, does it teach his existence? A. Yes, most positively: for, to any man whatever, who observes with reflection the astonishing spectacle of the universe, the more he meditates on the properties and attributes of each being, on the admirable order and harmony of their motions, the more it is demonstrated that there exists a supreme agent, a universal and identic mover, designated by the appellation of God; and so true it is that the law of nature suffices to elevate him to the knowledge of God, that all which men have pretended to know by supernatural means, has constantly turned out ridiculous and absurd, and that they have ever been obliged to recur to the immutable conceptions of natural reason. Q. Then it is not true that the followers of the law of nature are atheists? A. No; it is not true; on the contrary, they entertain stronger and nobler ideas of the Divinity than most other men; for they do not sully him with the foul ingredients of all the weaknesses and passions entailed on humanity. Q. What worship do they pay to him? A. A worship wholly of action; the practice and observance of all the rules which the supreme wisdom has imposed on the motion of each being; eternal and unalterable rules, by which it maintains the order and harmony of the universe, and which, in their relations to man, constitute the law of nature. Q. Was the law of nature known before this period: A. It has been at all times spoken of: most legislators pretend to adopt it as the basis of their laws; but they only quote some of its precepts, and have only vague ideas of its totality. Q. Why. A. Because, though simple in its basis, it forms in its developements and consequences, a complicated whole which requires an extensive knowledge of facts, joined to all the sagacity of reasoning. Q. Does not instinct alone teach the law of nature? A. No; for by instinct is meant nothing more than that blind sentiment by which we are actuated indiscriminately towards everything that flatters the senses. Q. Why, then, is it said that the law of nature is engraved in the hearts of all men. A. It is said for two reasons: first, because it has been remarked, that there are acts and sentiments common to all men, and this proceeds from their common organization; secondly, because the first philosophers believed that men were born with ideas already formed, which is now demonstrated to be erroneous. Q. Philosophers, then, are fallible? A. Yes, sometimes. Q. Why so? A. First, because they are men; secondly, because the ignorant call all those who reason, right or wrong, philosophers; thirdly, because those who reason on many subjects, and who are the first to reason on them, are liable to be deceived. Q. If the law of nature be not written, must it not become arbitrary and ideal? A. No: because it consists entirely in facts, the demonstration of which can be incessantly renewed to the senses, and constitutes a science as accurate and precise as geometry and mathematics; and it is because the law of nature forms an exact science, that men, born ignorant and living inattentive and heedless, have had hitherto only a superficial knowledge of it. CHAPTER III. PRINCIPLES OF THE LAW OF NATURE RELATING TO MAN. Q. Explain the principles of the law of nature with relation to man. A. They are simple; all of them are comprised in one fundamental and single precept. Q. What is that precept? A. It is self-preservation. Q. Is not happiness also a precept of the law of nature? A. Yes: but as happiness is an accidental state, resulting only from the development of man's faculties and his social system, it is not the immediate and direct object of nature; it is in some measure, a superfluity annexed to the necessary and fundamental object of preservation. Q. How does nature order man to preserve himself? A. By two powerful and involuntary sensations, which it has attached, as two guides, two guardian Geniuses to all his actions: the one a sensation of pain, by which it admonishes him of, and deters him from, everything that tends to destroy him; the other, a sensation of pleasure, by which it attracts and carries him towards everything that tends to his preservation and the development of his existence. Q. Pleasure, then, is not an evil, a sin, as casuists pretend? A. No, only inasmuch as it tends to destroy life and health which, by the avowal of those same casuists, we derive from God himself. Q. Is pleasure the principal object of our existence, as some philosophers have asserted? A. No; not more than pain; pleasure is an incitement to live as pain is a repulsion from death. Q. How do you prove this assertion? A. By two palpable facts: One, that pleasure, when taken immoderately, leads to destruction; for instance, a man who abuses the pleasure of eating or drinking, attacks his health, and injures his life. The other, that pain sometimes leads to self-preservation; for instance, a man who permits a mortified member to be cut off, suffers pain in order not to perish totally. Q. But does not even this prove that our sensations can deceive us respecting the end of our preservation? A. Yes; they can momentarily. Q. How do our sensations deceive us? A. In two ways: by ignorance, and by passion. Q. When do they deceive us by ignorance? A. When we act without knowing the action and effect of objects on our senses: for example, when a man touches nettles without knowing their stinging quality, or when he swallows opium without knowing its soporiferous effects. Q. When do they deceive us by passion? A. When, conscious of the pernicious action of objects, we abandon ourselves, nevertheless, to the impetuosity of our desires and appetites: for example, when a man who knows that wine intoxicates, does nevertheless drink it to excess. Q. What is the result? A. That the ignorance in which we are born, and the unbridled appetites to which we abandon ourselves, are contrary to our preservation; that, therefore, the instruction of our minds and the moderation of our passions are two obligations, two laws, which spring directly from the first law of preservation. Q. But being born ignorant, is not ignorance a law of nature? A. No more than to remain in the naked and feeble state of infancy. Far from being a law of nature, ignorance is an obstacle to the practice of all its laws. It is the real original sin. Q. Why, then, have there been moralists who have looked upon it as a virtue and perfection? A. Because, from a strange or perverted disposition, they confounded the abuse of knowledge with knowledge itself; as if, because men abuse the power of speech, their tongues should be cut out; as if perfection and virtue consisted in the nullity, and not in the proper development of our faculties. Q. Instruction, then, is indispensable to man's existence? A. Yes, so indispensable, that without it he is every instant assailed and wounded by all that surrounds him; for if he does not know the effects of fire, he burns himself; those of water he drowns himself; those of opium, he poisons himself; if, in the savage state, he does not know the wiles of animals, and the art of seizing game, he perishes through hunger; if in the social state, he does not know the course of the seasons, he can neither cultivate the ground, nor procure nourishment; and so on, of all his actions, respecting all his wants. Q. But can man individually acquire this knowledge necessary to his existence, and to the development of his faculties? A. No; not without the assistance of his fellow men, and by living in society. Q. But is not society to man a state against nature? A. No: it is on the contrary a necessity, a law that nature imposed on him by the very act of his organization; for, first, nature has so constituted man, that he cannot see his species of another sex without feeling emotions and an attraction which induce him to live in a family, which is already a state of society; secondly, by endowing him with sensibility, she organized him so that the sensations of others reflect within him, and excite reciprocal sentiments of pleasure and of grief, which are attractions, and indissoluble ties of society; thirdly, and finally, the state of society, founded on the wants of man, is only a further means of fulfilling the law of preservation: and to pretend that this state is out of nature, because it is more perfect, is the same as to say, that a bitter and wild fruit of the forest, is no longer the production of nature, when rendered sweet and delicious by cultivation in our gardens. Q. Why, then, have philosophers called the savage state the state of perfection? A. Because, as I have told you, the vulgar have often given the name of philosophers to whimsical geniuses, who, from moroseness, from wounded vanity, or from a disgust to the vices of society, have conceived chimerical ideas of the savage state, in contradiction with their own system of a perfect man. Q. What is the true meaning of the word philosopher? A. The word philosopher signifies a lover of wisdom; and as wisdom consists in the practice of the laws of nature, the true philosopher is he who knows those laws, and conforms the whole tenor of his conduct to them. Q. What is man in the savage state? A. A brutal, ignorant animal, a wicked and ferocious beast. Q. Is he happy in that state? A. No; for he only feels momentary sensations, which are habitually of violent wants which he cannot satisfy, since he is ignorant by nature, and weak by being isolated from his race. Q. Is he free? A. No; he is the most abject slave that exists; for his life depends on everything that surrounds him: he is not free to eat when hungry, to rest when tired, to warm himself when cold; he is every instant in danger of perishing; wherefore nature offers but fortuitous examples of such beings; and we see that all the efforts of the human species, since its origin, sorely tends to emerge from that violent state by the pressing necessity of self-preservation. Q. But does not this necessity of preservation engender in individuals egotism, that is to say self-love? and is not egotism contrary to the social state? A. No; for if by egotism you mean a propensity to hurt our neighbor, it is no longer self-love, but the hatred of others. Self-love, taken in its true sense, not only is not contrary to society, but is its firmest support, by the necessity we lie under of not injuring others, lest in return they should injure us. Thus mans preservation, and the unfolding of his faculties, directed towards this end, teach the true law of nature in the production of the human being; and it is from this essential principle that are derived, are referred, and in its scale are weighed, all ideas of good and evil, of vice and virtue, of just and unjust, of truth or error, of lawful or forbidden, on which is founded the morality of individual, or of social man. CHAPTER IV. BASIS OF MORALITY; OF GOOD, OF EVIL, OF SIN, OF CRIME, OF VICE AND OF VIRTUE. Q. What is good, according to the law of nature? A. It is everything that tends to preserve and perfect man. Q. What is evil? A. That which tends to man's destruction or deterioration. Q. What is meant by physical good and evil, and by moral good and evil? A. By the word physical is understood, whatever acts immediately on the body. Health is a physical good; and sickness a physical evil. By moral, is meant what acts by consequences more or less remote. Calumny is a moral evil; a fair reputation is a moral good, because both one and the other occasion towards us, on the part of other men, dispositions and habitudes,* which are useful or hurtful to our preservation, and which attack or favor our means of existence. * It is from this word habitudes, (reiterated actions,) in Latin mores, that the word moral, and all its family, are derived. Q. Everything that tends to preserve, or to produce is therefore a good? A. Yes; and it is for that reason that certain legislators have classed among the works agreeable to the divinity, the cultivation of a field and the fecundity of a woman. Q. Whatever tends to cause death is, therefore, an evil? A. Yes; and it is for that reason some legislators have extended the idea of evil and of sin even to the killing of animals. Q. The murdering of a man is, therefore, a crime in the law of nature? A. Yes, and the greatest that can be committed; for every other evil can be repaired, but murder alone is irreparable. Q. What is a sin in the law of nature? A. Whatever tends to disturb the order established by nature for the preservation and perfection of man and of society. Q. Can intention be a merit or a crime? A. No, for it is only an idea void of reality: but it is a commencement of sin and evil, by the impulse it gives to action. Q. What is virtue according to the law of nature? A. It is the practice of actions useful to the individual and to society. Q. What is meant by the word individual? A. It means a man considered separately from every other. Q. What is vice according to the law of nature? A. It is the practice of actions prejudicial to the individual and to society. Q. Have not virtue and vice an object purely spiritual and abstracted from the senses? A. No; it is always to a physical end that they finally relate, and that end is always to destroy or preserve the body. Q. Have vice and virtue degrees of strength and intensity? A. Yes: according to the importance of the faculties, which they attack or which they favor; and according to the number of persons in whom those faculties are favored or injured. Q. Give me some examples? A. The action of saving a man's life is more virtuous than that of saving his property; the action of saving the lives of ten men, than that of saving only the life of one, and an action useful to the whole human race is more virtuous than an action that is only useful to one single nation. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe the practice of good and virtue, and forbid that of evil and vice? A. By the advantages resulting from the practice of good and virtue for the preservation of our body, and by the losses which result to our existence from the practice of evil and vice. Q. Its precepts are then in action? A. Yes: they are action itself, considered in its present effect and in its future consequences. Q. How do you divide the virtues? A. We divide them in three classes, first, individual virtues, as relative to man alone; secondly, domestic virtues, as relative to a family; thirdly, social virtues, as relative to society. CHAPTER V. OF INDIVIDUAL VIRTUES. Q. Which are the individual virtues? A. There are five principal ones, to wit: first, science, which comprises prudence and wisdom; secondly, temperance, comprising sobriety and chastity; thirdly, courage, or strength of body and mind; fourthly, activity, that is to say, love of labor and employment of time; fifthly, and finally, cleanliness, or purity of body, as well in dress as in habitation. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe science? A. Because the man acquainted with the causes and effects of things attends in a careful and sure manner to his preservation, and to the development of his faculties. Science is to him the eye and the light, which enable him to discern clearly and accurately all the objects with which he is conversant, and hence by an enlightened man is meant a learned and well-informed man. With science and instruction a man never wants for resources and means of subsistence; and upon this principle a philosopher, who had been shipwrecked, said to his companions, that were inconsolable for the loss of their wealth: "For my part, I carry all my wealth within me." Q. Which is the vice contrary to science? A. It is ignorance. Q. How does the law of nature forbid ignorance? A. By the grievous detriments resulting from it to our existence; for the ignorant man who knows neither causes nor effects, commits every instant errors most pernicious to himself and to others; he resembles a blind man groping his way at random, and who, at every step, jostles or is jostled by every one he meets. Q. What difference is there between an ignorant and a silly man? A. The same difference as between him who frankly avows his blindness and the blind man who pretends to sight; silliness is the reality of ignorance, to which is superadded the vanity of knowledge. Q. Are ignorance and silliness common? A. Yes, very common; they are the usual and general distempers of mankind: more than three thousand years ago the wisest of men said: "The number of fools is infinite;" and the world has not changed. Q. What is the reason of it? A. Because much labor and time are necessary to acquire instruction, and because men, born ignorant and indolent, find it more convenient to remain blind, and pretend to see clear. Q. What difference is there between a learned and a wise man? A. The learned knows, and the wise man practices. Q. What is prudence? A. It is the anticipated perception, the foresight of the effects and consequences of every action; by means of which foresight, man avoids the dangers which threaten him, while he seizes on and creates opportunities favorable to him: he thereby provides for his present and future safety in a certain and secure manner, whereas the imprudent man, who calculates neither his steps nor his conduct, nor efforts, nor resistance, falls every instant into difficulties and dangers, which sooner or later impair his faculties and destroy his existence. Q. When the Gospel says, "Happy are the poor of spirit," does it mean the ignorant and imprudent? A. No; for, at the same time that it recommends the simplicity of doves, it adds the prudent cunning of serpents. By simplicity of mind is meant uprightness, and the precept of the Gospel is that of nature. CHAPTER VI. ON TEMPERANCE. Q. What is temperance? A. It is a regular use of our faculties, which makes us never exceed in our sensations the end of nature to preserve us; it is the moderation of the passions. Q. Which is the vice contrary to temperance? A. The disorder of the passions, the avidity of all kind of enjoyments, in a word, cupidity. Q. Which are the principal branches of temperance? A. Sobriety, and continence or chastity. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe sobriety? A. By its powerful influence over our health. The sober man digests with comfort; he is not overpowered by the weight of aliments; his ideas are clear and easy; he fulfills all his functions properly; he conducts his business with intelligence; his old age is exempt from infirmity; he does not spend his money in remedies, and he enjoys, in mirth and gladness, the wealth which chance and his own prudence have procured him. Thus, from one virtue alone, generous nature derives innumerable recompenses. Q. How does it prohibit gluttony? A. By the numerous evils that are attached to it. The glutton, oppressed with aliments, digests with anxiety; his head, troubled by the fumes of indigestion, is incapable of conceiving clear and distinct ideas; he abandons himself with violence to the disorderly impulse of lust and anger, which impair his health; his body becomes bloated, heavy, and unfit for labor; he endures painful and expensive distempers; he seldom lives to be old; and his age is replete with infirmities and sorrow. Q. Should abstinence and fasting be considered as virtuous actions? A. Yes, when one has eaten too much; for then abstinence and fasting are simple and efficacious remedies; but when the body is in want of aliment, to refuse it any, and let it suffer from hunger or thirst, is delirium and a real sin against the law of nature. Q. How is drunkenness considered in the law of nature? A. As a most vile and pernicious vice. The drunkard, deprived of the sense and reason given us by God, profanes the donations of the divinity: he debases himself to the condition of brutes; unable even to guide his steps, he staggers and falls as if he were epileptic; he hurts and even risks killing himself; his debility in this state exposes him to the ridicule and contempt of every person that sees him; he makes in his drunkenness, prejudicial and ruinous bargains, and injures his fortune; he makes use of opprobrious language, which creates him enemies and repentance; he fills his house with trouble and sorrow, and ends by a premature death or by a cacochymical old age. Q. Does the law of nature interdict absolutely the use of wine? A. No; it only forbids the abuse; but as the transition from the use to the abuse is easy and prompt among the generality of men, perhaps the legislators, who have proscribed the use of wine, have rendered a service to humanity. Q. Does the law of nature forbid the use of certain kinds of meat, or of certain vegetables, on particular days, during certain seasons? A. No; it absolutely forbids only whatever is injurious to health; its precepts, in this respect, vary according to persons, and even constitute a very delicate and important science for the quality, the quantity, and the combination of aliments have the greatest influence, not only over the momentary affections of the soul, but even over its habitual disposition. A man is not the same when fasting as after a meal, even if he were sober. A glass of spirituous liquor, or a dish of coffee, gives degrees of vivacity, of mobility, of disposition to anger, sadness, or gaiety; such a meat, because it lies heavy on the stomach, engenders moroseness and melancholy; such another, because it facilitates digestion, creates sprightliness, and an inclination to oblige and to love. The use of vegetables, because they have little nourishment, enfeebles the body, and gives a disposition to repose, indolence, and ease; the use of meat, because it is full of nourishment, and of spirituous liquors, because they stimulate the nerves, creates vivacity, uneasiness, and audacity. Now from those habitudes of aliment result habits of constitution and of the organs, which form afterwards different kinds of temperaments, each of which is distinguished by a peculiar characteristic. And it is for this reason that, in hot countries especially, legislators have made laws respecting regimen or food. The ancients were taught by long experience that the dietetic science constituted a considerable part of morality; among the Egyptians, the ancient Persians, and even among the Greeks, at the Areopagus, important affairs were examined fasting; and it has been remarked that, among those people, where public affairs were discussed during the heat of meals, and the fumes of digestion, deliberations were hasty and violent, and the results of them frequently unreasonable, and productive of turbulence and confusion. CHAPTER VII. ON CONTINENCE. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe continence? A. Yes: because a moderate use of the most lively of pleasures is not only useful, but indispensable, to the support of strength and health: and because a simple calculation proves that, for some minutes of privation, you increase the number of your days, both in vigor of body and of mind. Q. How does it forbid libertinism? A. By the numerous evils which result from it to the physical and the moral existence. He who carries it to an excess enervates and pines away; he can no longer attend to study or labor; he contracts idle and expensive habits, which destroy his means of existence, his public consideration, and his credit; his intrigues occasion continual embarrassment, cares, quarrels and lawsuits, without mentioning the grievous deep-rooted distempers, and the loss of his strength by an inward and slow poison; the stupid dullness of his mind, by the exhaustion of the nervous system; and, in fine, a premature and infirm old age. Q. Does the law of nature look on that absolute chastity so recommended in monastical institutions, as a virtue? A. No: for that chastity is of no use either to the society that witnesses, or the individual who practises it; it is even prejudicial to both. First, it injures society by depriving it of population, which is one of its principal sources of wealth and power; and as bachelors confine all their views and affections to the term of their lives, they have in general an egotism unfavorable to the interests of society. In the second place, it injures the individuals who practise it, because it deprives them of a number of affections and relations which are the springs of most domestic and social virtues; and besides, it often happens, from circumstances of age, regimen, or temperament, that absolute continence injures the constitution and causes severe diseases, because it is contrary to the physical laws on which nature has founded the system of the reproduction of beings; and they who recommend so strongly chastity, even supposing them to be sincere, are in contradiction with their own doctrine, which consecrates the law of nature by the well known commandment: increase and multiply. Q. Why is chastity considered a greater virtue in women than in men? A. Because a want of chastity in women is attended with inconveniences much more serious and dangerous for them and for society; for, without taking into account the pains and diseases they have in common with men, they are further exposed to all the disadvantages and perils that precede, attend, and follow child-birth. When pregnant contrary to law, they become an object of public scandal and contempt, and spend the remainder of their lives in bitterness and misery. Moreover, all the expense of maintaining and educating their fatherless children falls on them: which expense impoverishes them, and is every way prejudicial to their physical and moral existence. In this situation, deprived of the freshness and health that constitute their charm, carrying with them an extraneous and expensive burden, they are less prized by men, they find no solid establishment, they fall into poverty, misery, and wretchedness, and thus drag on in sorrow their unhappy existence. Q. Does the law of nature extend so far as the scruples of desires and thoughts. A. Yes; because, in the physical laws of the human body, thoughts and desires inflame the senses, and soon provoke to action: now, by another law of nature in the organization of our body, those actions become mechanical wants which recur at certain periods of days or of weeks, so that, at such a time, the want is renewed of such an action and such a secretion; if this action and this secretion be injurious to health, the habitude of them becomes destructive of life itself. Thus thoughts and desires have a true and natural importance. Q. Should modesty be considered as a virtue? A. Yes; because modesty, inasmuch as it is a shame of certain actions, maintains the soul and body in all those habits useful to good order, and to self-preservation. The modest woman is esteemed, courted, and established, with advantages of fortune which ensure her existence, and render it agreeable to her, while the immodest and prostitute are despised, repulsed, and abandoned to misery and infamy. CHAPTER VIII. ON COURAGE AND ACTIVITY. Q. Are courage and strength of body and mind virtues in the law of nature? A. Yes, and most important virtues; for they are the efficacious and indispensable means of attending to our preservation and welfare. The courageous and strong man repulses oppression, defends his life, his liberty, and his property; by his labor he procures himself an abundant subsistence, which he enjoys in tranquillity and peace of mind. If he falls into misfortunes, from which his prudence could not protect him, he supports them with fortitude and resignation; and it is for this reason that the ancient moralists have reckoned strength and courage among the four principal virtues. Q. Should weakness and cowardice be considered as vices? A. Yes, since it is certain that they produce innumerable calamities. The weak or cowardly man lives in perpetual cares and agonies; he undermines his health by the dread, oftentimes ill founded, of attacks and dangers: and this dread which is an evil, is not a remedy; it renders him, on the contrary, the slave of him who wishes to oppress him; and by the servitude and debasement of all his faculties, it degrades and diminishes his means of existence, so far as the seeing his life depend on the will and caprice of another man. Q. But, after what you have said on the influence of aliments, are not courage and force, as well as many other virtues, in a great measure the effect of our physical constitution and temperament? A. Yes, it is true; and so far, that those qualities are transmitted by generation and blood, with the elements on which they depend: the most reiterated and constant facts prove that in the breed of animals of every kind, we see certain physical and moral qualities, attached to the individuals of those species, increase or decay according to the combinations and mixtures they make with other breeds. Q. But, then, as our will is not sufficient to procure us those qualities, is it a crime to be destitute of them? A. No, it is not a crime, but a misfortune; it is what the ancients call an unlucky fatality; but even then we have it yet in our power to acquire them; for, as soon as we know on what physical elements such or such a quality is founded, we can promote its growth, and hasten its developments, by a skillful management of those elements; and in this consists the science of education, which, according as it is directed, meliorates or degrades individuals, or the whole race, to such a pitch as totally to change their nature and inclinations; for which reason it is of the greatest importance to be acquainted with the laws of nature by which those operations and changes are certainly and necessarily effected. Q. Why do you say that activity is a virtue according to the law of nature? A. Because the man who works and employs his time usefully, derives from it a thousand precious advantages to his existence. If he is born poor, his labor furnishes him with subsistence; and still more so, if he is sober, continent, and prudent, for he soon acquires a competency, and enjoys the sweets of life; his very labor gives him virtues; for, while he occupies his body and mind, he is not affected with unruly desires, time does not lie heavy on him, he contracts mild habits, he augments his strength and health, and attains a peaceful and happy old age. Q. Are idleness and sloth vices in the law of nature? A. Yes, and the most pernicious of all vices, for they lead to all the others. By idleness and sloth man remains ignorant, he forgets even the science he had acquired, and falls into all the misfortunes which accompany ignorance and folly; by idleness and sloth man, devoured with disquietude, in order to dissipate it, abandons himself to all the desires of his senses, which, becoming every day more inordinate, render him intemperate, gluttonous, lascivious, enervated, cowardly, vile, and contemptible. By the certain effect of all those vices, he ruins his fortune, consumes his health, and terminates his life in all the agonies of sickness and of poverty. Q. From what you say, one would think that poverty was a vice? A. No, it is not a vice; but it is still less a virtue, for it is by far more ready to injure than to be useful; it is even commonly the result, or the beginning of vice, for the effect of all individual vices is to lead to indigence, and to the privation of the necessaries of life; and when a man is in want of necessaries, he is tempted to procure them by vicious means, that is to say, by means injurious to society. All the individual virtues tend, on the contrary, to procure to a man an abundant subsistence; and when he has more than he can consume, it is much easier for him to give to others, and to practice the actions useful to society. Q. Do you look upon opulence as a virtue? A. No; but still less as a vice: it is the use alone of wealth that can be called virtuous or vicious, according as it is serviceable or prejudicial to man and to society. Wealth is an instrument, the use and employment alone of which determine its virtue or vice. CHAPTER IX. ON CLEANLINESS. Q. Why is cleanliness included among the virtues? A. Because it is, in reality, one of the most important among them, on account of its powerful influence over the health and preservation of the body. Cleanliness, as well in dress as in residence, obviates the pernicious effects of the humidity, baneful odors, and contagious exhalations, proceeding from all things abandoned to putrefaction. Cleanliness, maintains free transpiration; it renews the air, refreshes the blood, and disposes even the mind to cheerfulness. From this it appears that persons attentive to the cleanliness of their bodies and habitations are, in general, more healthy, and less subject to disease, than those who live in filth and nastiness; and it is further remarked, that cleanliness carries with it, throughout all the branches of domestic administration, habits of order and arrangement, which are the chief means and first elements of happiness. Q. Uncleanliness or filthiness is, then, a real vice? A. Yes, as real a one as drunkenness, or as idleness, from which in a great measure it is derived. Uncleanliness is the second, and often the first, cause of many inconveniences, and even of grievous disorders; it is a fact in medicine, that it brings on the itch, the scurf, tetters, leprosies, as much as the use of tainted or sour aliments; that it favors the contagious influence of the plague and malignant fevers, that it even produces them in hospitals and prisons; that it occasions rheumatisms, by incrusting the skin with dirt, and thereby preventing transpiration; without reckoning the shameful inconvenience of being devoured by vermin--the foul appendage of misery and depravity. Most ancient legislators, therefore, considered cleanliness, which they called purity, as one of the essential dogmas of their religions. It was for this reason that they expelled from society, and even punished corporeally those who were infected with distempers produced by uncleanliness; that they instituted and consecrated ceremonies of ablutions baths, baptisms, and of purifications, even by fire and the aromatic fumes of incense, myrrh, benjamin, etc., so that the entire system of pollutions, all those rites of clean and unclean things, degenerated since into abuses and prejudices, were only founded originally on the judicious observation, which wise and learned men had made, of the extreme influence that cleanliness in dress and abode exercises over the health of the body, and by an immediate consequence over that of the mind and moral faculties. Thus all the individual virtues have for their object, more or less direct, more or less near, the preservation of the man who practises them and by the preservation of each man, they lead to that of families and society, which are composed of the united sum of individuals. CHAPTER X. ON DOMESTIC VIRTUES. Q. What do you mean be domestic virtues? A. I mean the practice of actions useful to a family, supposed to live in the same house.* * Domestic is derived from the Latin word domus, a house. Q. What are those virtues? A. They are economy, paternal love, filial love, conjugal love, fraternal love, and the accomplishment of the duties of master and servant. Q. What is economy? A. It is, according to the most extensive meaning of the word, the proper administration of every thing that concerns the existence of the family or house; and as subsistence holds the first rank, the word economy in confined to the employment of money for the wants of life. Q. Why is economy a virtue? A. Because a man who makes no useless expenses acquires a superabundancy, which is true wealth, and by means of which he procures for himself and his family everything that is really convenient and useful; without mentioning his securing thereby resources against accidental and unforeseen losses, so that he and his family enjoy an agreeable and undisturbed competency, which is the basis of human felicity. Q. Dissipation and prodigality, therefore, are vices? A. Yes, for by them man, in the end, is deprived of the necessaries of life; he falls into poverty and wretchedness; and his very friends, fearing to be obliged to restore to him what he has spent with or for them, avoid him as a debtor does his creditor, and he remains abandoned by the whole world. Q. What is paternal love? A. It is the assiduous care taken by parents to make their children contract the habit of every action useful to themselves and to society. Q. Why is paternal tenderness a virtue in parents? A. Because parents, who rear their children in those habits, procure for themselves, during the course of their lives, enjoyments and helps that give a sensible satisfaction at every instant, and which assure to them, when advanced in years, supports and consolations against the wants and calamities of all kinds with which old age is beset. Q. Is paternal love a common virtue? A. No; notwithstanding the ostentation made of it by parents, it is a rare virtue. They do not love their children, they caress and spoil them. In them they love only the agents of their will, the instruments of their power, the trophies of their vanity, the pastime of their idleness. It is not so much the welfare of their children that they propose to themselves, as their submission and obedience; and if among children so many are seen ungrateful for benefits received, it is because there are among parents as many despotic and ignorant benefactors. Q. Why do you say that conjugal love is a virtue? A. Because the concord and union resulting from the love of the married, establish in the heart of the family a multitude of habits useful to its prosperity and preservation. The united pair are attached to, and seldom quit their home; they superintend each particular direction of it; they attend to the education of their children; they maintain the respect and fidelity of domestics; they prevent all disorder and dissipation; and from the whole of their good conduct, they live in ease and consideration; while married persons who do not love one another, fill their house with quarrels and troubles, create dissension between their children and the servants, leaving both indiscriminately to all kinds of vicious habits; every one in turn spoils, robs, and plunders the house; the revenues are absorbed without profit; debts accumulate; the married pair avoid each other, or contend in lawsuits; and the whole family falls into disorder, ruin, disgrace and want. Q. Is adultery an offence in the law of nature? A. Yes; for it is attended with a number of habits injurious to the married and to their families. The wife or husband, whose affections are estranged, neglect their house, avoid it, and deprive it, as much as they can, of its revenues or income, to expend them with the object of their affections; hence arise quarrels, scandal, lawsuits, the neglect of their children and servants, and at last the plundering and ruin of the whole family; without reckoning that the adulterous woman commits a most grievous theft, in giving to her husband heirs of foreign blood, who deprive his real children of their legitimate portion. Q. What is filial love? A. It is, on the side of children, the practice of those actions useful to themselves and to their parents. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe filial love? A. By three principal motives: 1. By sentiment; for the affectionate care of parents inspires, from the most tender age, mild habits of attachment. 2. By justice; for children owe to their parents a return and indemnity for the cares, and even for the expenses, they have caused them. 3. By personal interest; for, if they use them ill, they give to their own children examples of revolt and ingratitude, which authorize them, at a future day, to behave to themselves in a similar manner. Q. Are we to understand by filial love a passive and blind submission? A. No; but a reasonable submission, founded on the knowledge of the mutual rights and duties of parents and children; rights and duties, without the observance of which their mutual conduct is nothing but disorder. Q. Why is fraternal love a virtue? A. Because the concord and union, which result from the love of brothers, establish the strength, security, and conservation of the family: brothers united defend themselves against all oppression, they aid one another in their wants, they help one another in their misfortunes, and thus secure their common existence; while brothers disunited, abandoned each to his own personal strength, fall into all the inconveniences attendant on an insulated state and individual weakness. This is what a certain Scythian king ingeniously expressed when, on his death-bed, calling his children to him, he ordered them to break a bundle of arrows. The young men, though strong, being unable to effect it, he took them in his turn, and untieing them, broke each of the arrows separately with his fingers. "Behold," said he, "the effects of union; united together, you will be invincible; taken separately, you will be broken like reeds." Q. What are the reciprocal duties of masters and of servants? A. They consist in the practice of the actions which are respectively and justly useful to them; and here begin the relations of society; for the rule and measure of those respective actions is the equilibrium or equality between the service and the recompense, between what the one returns and the other gives; which is the fundamental basis of all society. Thus all the domestic and individual virtues refer, more or less mediately, but always with certitude, to the physical object of the amelioration and preservation of man, and are thereby precepts resulting from the fundamental law of nature in his formation. CHAPTER XI. THE SOCIAL VIRTUES; JUSTICE. Q. What is society? A. It is every reunion of men living together under the clauses of an expressed or tacit contract, which has for its end their common preservation. Q. Are the social virtues numerous? A. Yes; they are in as great number as the kinds of actions useful to society; but all may be reduced to one principle. Q. What is that fundamental principle? A. It is justice, which alone comprises all the virtues of society. Q. Why do you say that justice is the fundamental and almost only virtue of society? A. Because it alone embraces the practice of all the actions useful to it; and because all the other virtues, under the denominations of charity, humanity, probity, love of one's country, sincerity, generosity, simplicity of manners, and modesty, are only varied forms and diversified applications of the axiom, "Do not to another what you do not wish to be done to yourself," which is the definition of justice. Q. How does the law of nature prescribe justice? A. By three physical attributes, inherent in the organization of man. Q. What are those attributes? A. They are equality, liberty, and property. Q. How is equality a physical attribute of man? A. Because all men, having equally eyes, hands, mouths, ears, and the necessity of making use of them, in order to live, have, by this reason alone, an equal right to life, and to the use of the aliments which maintain it; they are all equal before God. Q. Do you suppose that all men hear equally, see equally, feel equally, have equal wants, and equal passions? A. No; for it is evident, and daily demonstrated, that one is short, and another long-sighted; that one eats much, another little; that one has mild, another violent passions; in a word, that one is weak in body and mind, while another is strong in both. Q. They are, therefore, really unequal? A. Yes, in the development of their means, but not in the nature and essence of those means. They are made of the same stuff, but not in the same dimensions; nor are the weight and value equal. Our language possesses no one word capable of expressing the identity of nature, and the diversity of its form and employment. It is a proportional equality; and it is for this reason I have said, equal before God, and in the order of nature. Q. How is liberty a physical attribute of man? A. Because all men having senses sufficient for their preservation--no one wanting the eye of another to see, his ear to hear, his mouth to eat, his feet to walk--they are all, by this very reason, constituted naturally independent and free; no man is necessarily subjected to another, nor has he a right to dominate over him. Q. But if a man is born strong, has he a natural right to master the weak man? A. No; for it is neither a necessity for him, nor a convention between them; it is an abusive extension of his strength; and here an abuse is made of the word right, which in its true meaning implies, justice or reciprocal faculty. Q. How is property a physical attribute of man? A. Inasmuch as all men being constituted equal or similar to one another, and consequently independent and free, each is the absolute master, the full proprietor of his body and of the produce of his labor. Q. How is justice derived from these three attributes? A. In this, that men being equal and free, owing nothing to each other, have no right to require anything from one another only inasmuch as they return an equal value for it; or inasmuch as the balance of what is given is in equilibrium with what is returned: and it is this equality, this equilibrium which is called justice, equity;* that is to say that equality and justice are but one and the same word, the same law of nature, of which the social virtues are only applications and derivatives. * Aequitas, aequilibrium, aequalitas, are all of the same family. CHAPTER XII. DEVELOPMENT OF THE SOCIAL VIRTUES. Q. Explain how the social virtues are derived from the law of nature. How is charity or the love of one's neighbor a precept and application of it? A. By reason of equality and reciprocity; for when we injure another, we give him a right to injure us in return; thus, by attacking the existence of our neighbor, we endanger our own, from the effect of reciprocity; on the other hand, by doing good to others, we have room and right to expect an equivalent exchange; and such is the character of all social virtues, that they are useful to the man who practises them, by the right of reciprocity which they give him over those who are benefited by them. Q. Charity is then nothing but justice? A. No: it is only justice; with this slight difference, that strict justice confines itself to saying, "Do not to another the harm you would not wish he should do to you;" and that charity, or the love of one's neighbor, extends so far as to say, "Do to another the good which you would wish to receive from him." Thus when the gospel said, that this precept contained the whole of the law and the prophets, it announced nothing more than the precept of the law of nature. Q. Does it enjoin forgiveness of injuries? A. Yes, when that forgiveness implies self-preservation. Q. Does it prescribe to us, after having received a blow on one cheek, to hold out the other? A. No; for it is, in the first place, contrary to the precept of loving our neighbor as ourselves, since thereby we should love, more than ourselves, him who makes an attack on our preservation. Secondly, such a precept in its literal sense, encourages the wicked to oppression and injustice. The law of nature has been more wise in prescribing a calculated proportion of courage and moderation, which induces us to forget a first or unpremediated injury, but which punishes every act tending to oppression. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe to do good to others beyond the bounds of reason and measure? A. No; for it is a sure way of leading them to ingratitude. Such is the force of sentiment and justice implanted in the heart of man, that he is not even grateful for benefits conferred without discretion. There is only one measure with them, and that is to be just. Q. Is alms-giving a virtuous action? A. Yes, when it is practised according to the rule first mentioned; without which it degenerates into imprudence and vice, inasmuch as it encourages laziness, which is hurtful to the beggar and to society; no one has a right to partake of the property and fruits of another's labor, without rendering an equivalent of his own industry. Q. Does the law of nature consider as virtues faith and hope, which are often joined with charity? A. No; for they are ideas without reality; and if any effects result from them, they turn rather to the profit of those who have not those ideas, than of those who have them; so that faith and hope may be called the virtues of dupes for the benefit of knaves. Q. Does the law of nature prescribe probity? A. Yes, for probity is nothing more than respect for one's own rights in those of another; a respect founded on a prudent and well combined calculation of our interests compared to those of others. Q. But does not this calculation, which embraces the complicated interests and rights of the social state, require an enlightened understanding and knowledge, which make it a difficult science? A. Yes, and a science so much the more delicate as the honest man pronounces in his own cause. Q. Probity, then, shows an extension and justice in the mind? A. Yes, for an honest man almost always neglects a present interest, in order not to destroy a future one; whereas the knave does the contrary, and loses a great future interest for a present smaller one. Q. Improbity, therefore, is a sign of false judgment and a narrow mind? A. Yes, and rogues may be defined ignorant and silly calculators; for they do not understand their true interest, and they pretend to cunning: nevertheless, their cunning only ends in making known what they are--in losing all confidence and esteem, and the good services resulting from them for their physical and social existence. They neither live in peace with others, nor with themselves; and incessantly menaced by their conscience and their enemies, they enjoy no other real happiness but that of not being hanged. Q. Does the law of nature forbid robbery? A. Yes, for the man who robs another gives him a right to rob him; from that moment there is no security in his property, nor in his means of preservation: thus in injuring others, he, by a counterblow, injures himself. Q. Does it interdict even an inclination to rob? A. Yes; for that inclination leads naturally to action, and it is for this reason that envy is considered a sin? Q. How does it forbid murder? A. By the most powerful motives of self-preservation; for, first, the man who attacks exposes himself to the risk of being killed, by the right of defence; secondly, if he kills, he gives to the relations and friends of the deceased, and to society at large, an equal right of killing him; so that his life is no longer in safety. Q. How can we, by the law of nature, repair the evil we have done? A. By rendering a proportionate good to those whom we have injured. Q. Does it allow us to repair it by prayers, vows, offerings to God, fasting and mortifications? A. No: for all those things are foreign to the action we wish to repair: they neither restore the ox to him from whom it has been stolen, honor to him whom we have deprived of it, nor life to him from whom it has been taken away; consequently they miss the end of justice; they are only perverse contracts by which a man sells to another goods which do not belong to him; they are a real depravation of morality, inasmuch as they embolden to commit crimes through the hope of expiating them; wherefore, they have been the real cause of all the evils by which the people among whom those expiatory practices were used, have been continually tormented. Q. Does the law of nature order sincerity? A. Yes; for lying, perfidy, and perjury create distrust, quarrels, hatred, revenge, and a crowd of evils among men, which tend to their common destruction; while sincerity and fidelity establish confidence, concord, and peace, besides the infinite good resulting from such a state of things to society. Q. Does it prescribe mildness and modesty? A. Yes; for harshness and obduracy, by alienating from us the hearts of other men, give them an inclination to hurt us; ostentation and vanity, by wounding their self-love and jealousy, occasion us to miss the end of a real utility. Q. Does it prescribe humility as a virtue? A. No; for it is a propensity in the human heart to despise secretly everything that presents to it the idea of weakness; and self-debasement encourages pride and oppression in others; the balance must be kept in equipoise. Q. You have reckoned simplicity of manners among the social virtues; what do you understand by that word? A. I mean the restricting our wants and desires to what is truly useful to the existence of the citizen and his family; that is to say, the man of simple manners has but few wants, and lives content with a little. Q. How is this virtue prescribed to us? A. By the numerous advantages which the practice of it procures to the individual and to society; for the man whose wants are few, is free at once from a crowd of cares, perplexities, and labors; he avoids many quarrels and contests arising from avidity and a desire of gain; he spares himself the anxiety of ambition, the inquietudes of possession, and the uneasiness of losses; finding superfluity everywhere, he is the real rich man; always content with what he has, he is happy at little expense; and other men, not fearing any competition from him, leave him in quiet, and are disposed to render him the services he should stand in need of. And if this virtue of simplicity extends to a whole people, they insure to themselves abundance; rich in everything they do not consume, they acquire immense means of exchange and commerce; they work, fabricate, and sell at a lower price than others, and attain to all kinds of prosperity, both at home and abroad. Q. What is the vice contrary to this virtue? A. It is cupidity and luxury. Q. Is luxury a vice in the individual and in society? A. Yes, and to that degree, that it may be said to include all the others; for the man who stands in need of many things, imposes thereby on himself all the anxiety, and submits to all the means just or unjust of acquiring them. Does he possess an enjoyment, he covets another; and in the bosom of superfluity, he is never rich; a commodious dwelling is not sufficient for him, he must have a beautiful hotel; not content with a plenteous table, he must have rare and costly viands: he must have splendid furniture, expensive clothes, a train of attendants, horses, carriages, women, theatrical representations and games. Now, to supply so many expenses, much money must be had; and he looks on every method of procuring it as good and even necessary; at first he borrows, afterwards he steals, robs, plunders, turns bankrupt, is at war with every one, ruins and is ruined. Should a nation be involved in luxury, it occasions on a larger scale the same devastations; by reason that it consumes its entire produce, it finds itself poor even with abundance; it has nothing to sell to foreigners; its manufactures are carried on at a great expense, and are sold too dear; it becomes tributary for everything it imports; it attacks externally its consideration, power, strength, and means of defence and preservation, while internally it undermines and falls into the dissolution of its members. All its citizens being covetous of enjoyments, are engaged in a perpetual struggle to obtain them; all injure or are near injuring themselves; and hence arise those habits and actions of usurpation, which constitute what is denominated moral corruption, intestine war between citizen and citizen. From luxury arises avidity, from avidity, invasion by violence and perfidy; from luxury arises the iniquity of the judge, the venality of the witness, the improbity of the husband, the prostitution of the wife, the obduracy of parents, the ingratitude of children, the avarice of the master, the dishonesty of the servant, the dilapidation of the administrator, the perversity of the legislator, lying, perfidy, perjury, assassination, and all the disorders of the social state; so that it was with a profound sense of truth, that ancient moralists have laid the basis of the social virtues on simplicity of manners, restriction of wants, and contentment with a little; and a sure way of knowing the extent of a man's virtues and vices is, to find out if his expenses are proportionate to his fortune, and calculate, from his want of money, his probity, his integrity in fulfilling his engagements, his devotion to the public weal, and his sincere or pretended love of his country. Q. What do you mean by the word country? A. I mean the community of citizens who, united by fraternal sentiments, and reciprocal wants, make of their respective strength one common force, the reaction of which on each of them assumes the noble and beneficent character of paternity. In society, citizens form a bank of interest; in our country we form a family of endearing attachments; it is charity, the love of one's neighbor extended to a whole nation. Now as charity cannot be separated from justice, no member of the family can pretend to the enjoyment of its advantages, except in proportion to his labor; if he consumes more than it produces, he necessarily encroaches on his fellow-citizens; and it is only by consuming less than what he produces or possesses, that he can acquire the means of making sacrifices and being generous. Q. What do you conclude from all this? A. I conclude from it that all the social virtues are only the habitude of actions useful to society and to the individual who practices them; That they refer to the physical object of man's preservation; That nature having implanted in us the want of that preservation, has made a law to us of all its consequences, and a crime of everything that deviates from it; That we carry in us the seed of every virtue, and of every perfection; That it only requires to be developed; That we are only happy inasmuch as we observe the rules established by nature for the end of our preservation; And that all wisdom, all perfection, all law, all virtue, all philosophy, consist in the practice of these axioms founded on our own organization: Preserve thyself; Instruct thyself; Moderate thyself; Live for thy fellow citizens, that they may live for thee. VOLNEY'S ANSWER TO DR. PRIESTLY.* * In 1797, Dr. Priestly published a pamphlet, entitled, "Observation on the increase of infidelity, with animadversions upon the writings of several modern unbelievers, and especially the Ruins of Mr. Volney." The motto to this tract was: "Minds of little penetration rest naturally on the surface of things. They do not like to pierce deep into them, for fear of labor and trouble; sometimes still more for fear of truth." This Letter is an answer from Volney, taken from the Anti-Jacobin Review of March and April, 1799. SIR.--I received in due time your pamphlet on the increase of infidelity, together with the note without date which accompanied it.* My answer has been delayed by the incidents of business, and even by ill health, which you will surely excuse: this delay has, besides, no inconvenience in it. The question between us is not of a very urgent nature: the world would not go on less well with or without my answer as with or without your book. I might, indeed, have dispensed with returning you any answer at all; and I should have been warranted in so doing, by the manner in which you have stated the debate, and by the opinion pretty generally received that, on certain occasions, and with certain persons, the most noble reply is silence. You seem to have been aware of this yourself, considering the extreme precautions you have taken to deprive me of this resource; but as according to our French customs, any answer is an act of civility, I am not willing to concede the advantage of politeness--besides, although silence is sometimes very significant, its eloquence is not understood by every one, and the public which has not leisure to analyze disputes (often of little interest) has a reasonable right to require at least some preliminary explanations; reserving to itself, should the discussion degenerate into the recriminative clamors of an irritated self-love, to allow the right of silence to him in whom it becomes the virtue of moderation. * Dr. Priestly sent his pamphlet to Volney, desiring his answer to the strictures on his opinions in his Ruins of Empires. I have read, therefore, your animadversions on my Ruins, which you are pleased to class among the writings of modern unbelievers, and since you absolutely insist on my expressing my opinion before the public, I shall now fulfill this rather disagreeable task with all possible brevity, for the sake of economizing the time of our readers. In the first place, sir, it appears evidently, from your pamphlet, that your design is less to attack my book than my personal and moral character; and in order that the public may pronounce with accuracy on this point, I submit several passages fitted to throw light on the subject. You say, in the preface of your discourses, p. 12, "There are, however, unbelievers more ignorant than Mr. Paine, Mr. Volney, Lequino, and others in France say," &c. Also in the preface of your present observations, p. 20. "I can truly say that in the writings of Hume, Mr. Gibbon, Voltaire, Mr. Volney--there is nothing of solid argument: all abound in gross mistakes and misrepresentations." Idem, p. 38--"Whereas had he (Mr. Volney) given attention to the history of the times in which Christianity was promulgated . . . he could have no more doubt . . . &c., it is as much in vain to argue with such a person as this, as with a Chinese or even a Hottentot." Idem, p. 119--"Mr. Volney, if we may judge from his numerous quotations of ancient writers in all the learned languages, oriental as well as occidental, must be acquainted with all; for he makes no mention of any translation, and yet if we judge from this specimen of his knowledge of them, he cannot have the smallest tincture of that of the Hebrew or even of the Greek." And, at last, after having published and posted me in your very title page, as an unbeliever and an infidel; after having pointed me out in your motto as one of those superficial spirits who know not how to find out, and are unwilling to encounter, truth; you add, p. 124, immediately after an article in which you speak of me under all these denominations-- "The progress of infidelity, in the present age, is attended with a circumstance which did not so frequently accompany it in any former period, at least, in England, which is, that unbelievers in revelation generally proceed to the disbelief of the being and providence of God so as to become properly Atheists." So that, according to you, I am a Chinese, a Hottentot, an unbeliever, an Atheist, an ignoramus, a man of no sincerity; whose writings are full of nothing but gross mistakes and misrepresentations. Now I ask you, sir, What has all this to do with the main question? What has my book in common with my person? And how can you hold any converse with a man of such bad connexions? In the second place, your invitation, or rather, your summons to me, to point out the mistakes which I think you have made with respect to my opinions, suggest to me several observations. First. You suppose that the public attaches a high importance to your mistakes and to my opinions: but I cannot act upon a supposition. Am I not an unbeliever? Secondly. You say, p. 18, that the public will expect it from me: Where are the powers by which you make the public speak and act? Is this also a revelation? Thirdly. You require me to point out your mistakes. I do not know that I am under any such obligation: I have not reproached you with them; it is not, indeed, very correct to ascribe to me, by selection or indiscriminately, as you have done, all the opinions scattered through my book, since, having introduced many different persons, I was under the necessity of making them deliver different sentiments, according to their different characters. The part which belongs to me is that of a traveler, resting upon the ruins and meditating on the causes of the misfortunes of the human race. To be consistent with yourself you ought to have assigned to me that of the Hottentot or Samoyde savage, who argues with the Doctors, chap. xxiii, and I should have accepted it; you have preferred that of the erudite historian, chap. xxii, nor do I look upon this as a mistake; I discover on the contrary, an insidious design to engage me in a duel of self-love before the public, wherein you would excite the exclusive interest of the spectators by supporting the cause which they approve; while the task which you would impose on me, would only, in the event of success, be attended with sentiments of disapprobation. Such is your artful purpose, that, in attacking me as doubting the existence of Jesus, you might secure to yourself, by surprise, the favor of every Christian sect, although your own incredulity in his divine nature is not less subversive of Christianity than the profane opinion, which does not find in history the proof required by the English law to establish a fact: to say nothing of the extraordinary kind of pride assumed in the silent, but palpable, comparison of yourself to Paul and to Christ, by likening your labors to theirs as tending to the same object, p. 10, preface. Nevertheless, as the first impression of an attack always confers an advantage, you have some ground for expecting you may obtain the apostolic crown; unfortunately for your purpose I entertain no disposition to that of martrydom: and however glorious it might be to me to fall under the arm of him who has overcome Hume, Gibbon, Voltaire and even Frederick II., I find myself under the necessity of declining your theological challenge, for a number of substantial reasons. 1. Because, to religious quarrels there is no end, since the prejudices of infancy and education almost unavoidably exclude impartial reasoning, and besides, the vanity of the champions becomes committed by the very publicity of the contest, never to give up a first assertion, whence result a spirit of sectarism and faction. 2. Because no one has a right to ask of me an account of my religious opinions. Every inquisition of this kind is a pretension to sovereignty, a first step towards persecution; and the tolerant spirit of this country, which you invoke, has much less in view to engage men to speak, than to invite them to be silent. 3. Because, supposing I do hold the opinions you attribute to me, I wish not to engage my vanity so as never to retract, nor to deprive myself of the resource of a conversion on some future day after more ample information. 4. And because, reverend sir, if, in the support of your own thesis, you should happen to be discomfited before the Christian audience, it would be a dreadful scandal; and I will not be a cause for scandal, even for the sake of good. 5. Because in this metaphysical contest our arms are too unequal; you speaking in your mother tongue, which I scarcely lisp, might bring forth huge volumes, while I could hardly oppose pages; and the public, who would read neither production, might take the weight of the books for that of reasoning. 6. And because, being endowed with the gift of faith in a pretty sufficient quantity, you might swallow in a quarter of an hour more articles than my logic would digest in a week. 7. Because again, if you were to oblige me to attend your sermons, as you have compelled me to read your pamphlet, the congregation would never believe that a man powdered and adorned like any worldling, could be in the right against a man dressed out in a large hat, with straight hair,* and a mortified countenance, although the gospel, speaking of the pharisees of other times, who were unpowdered, says that when one fasts he must anoint his head and wash his face.** * Dr. Priestly has discarded his wig since he went to America, and wears his own hair. Editor A. J. Reveiw. ** St. Matthew, Chapter VI. verses 16 and 17. 8. Because, finally, a dispute to one having nothing else to do would be a gratification, while to me, who can employ my time better, it would be an absolute loss. I shall not then, reverend sir, make you my confessor in matters of religion, but I will disclose to you my opinion, as a man of letters, on the composition of your book. Having in former days, read many works of theology, I was curious to learn whether by any chemical process you had discovered real beings in that world of invisibles. Unfortunately, I am obliged to declare to the public, which, according to your expression, p. 19, "hopes to be instructed, to be led into truth, and not into error by me," that I have not found in your book a single new argument, but the mere repetition of what is told over and over in thousands of volumes, the whole fruit of which has been to procure for their authors a cursory mention in the dictionary of heresies. You everywhere lay down that as proved which remains to be proved; with this peculiarity, that, as Gibbon says, firing away your double battery against those who believe too much, and those who believe too little, you hold out your own peculiar sensations, as to the precise criterion of truth; so that we must all be just of your size in order to pass the gate of that New Jerusalem which you are building. After this, your reputation as a divine might have become problematical with me; but recollecting the principle of the association of ideas so well developed by Locke, whom you hold in estimation, and whom, for that reason I am happy to cite to you, although to him I owe that pernicious use of my understanding which makes me disbelieve what I do not comprehend--I perceive why the public having originally attached the idea of talents to the name of Mr. Priestly, doctor in chemistry, continued by habit to associate it with the name of Mr. Priestly, doctor in divinity; which, however, is not the same thing: an association of ideas the more vicious as it is liable to be moved inversely.* Happily you have yourself raised a bar of separation between your admirers, by advising us in the first page of your preface, that your present book is especially destined for believers. To cooperate, however, with you, sir, in this judicious design, I must observe that it is necessary to retrench two passages, seeing they afford the greatest support to the arguments of unbelievers. * Mr. Blair, doctor of divinity, and Mr. Black, doctor in chemistry, met at the coffee house in Edinburg: a new theological pamphlet written by doctor Priestly was thrown upon the table, "Really," said Dr. Blair, "this man had better confine himself to chemistry, for he is absolutely ignorant in theology:"--"I beg your pardon," answered Dr. Black, "he is in the right, he is a minister of the gospel, he ought to adhere to his profession, for in truth he knows nothing of chemistry." You say, p. 15, "What is manifestly contrary to natural reason cannot be received by it;"--and p. 62, "With respect to intellect, men and brute animals are born in the same state, having the same external senses, which are the only inlets to all ideas, and consequently the source of all the knowledge and of all the mental habits they ever acquire." Now if you admit, with Locke, and with us infidels, that every one has the right of rejecting whatever is contrary to his natural reason, and that all our ideas and all our knowledge are acquired only by the inlets of our external senses; What becomes of the system of revelation, and of that order of things in times past, which is so contradictory to that of the time present? unless we consider it as a dream of the human brain during the state of superstitious ignorance. With these two single phrases, I could overturn the whole edifice of your faith. Dread not, however, sir, in me such overflowing zeal. For the same reason that I have not the frenzy of martyrdom, I have not that of making proselytes. It becomes those ardent, or rather acrimonious tempers, who mistake the violence of their sentiments for the enthusiasm of truth; the ambition of noise and rumor, for the love of glory; and for the love of their neighbor, the detestation of his opinions, and the secret desire of dominion. As for me, who have not received from nature the turbulent qualities of an apostle, and never sustained in Europe the character of a dissenter, I am come to America neither to agitate the conscience of men, nor to form a sect, nor to establish a colony, in which, under the pretext of religion, I might erect a little empire to myself. I have never been seen evangelizing my ideas, either in temples or in public meetings. I have never likewise practiced that quackery of beneficence, by which a certain divine, imposing a tax upon the generosity of the public, procures for himself the honors of a more numerous audience, and the merit of distributing at his pleasure a bounty which costs him nothing, and for which he receives grateful thanks dexterously stolen from the original donors. Either in the capacity of a stranger, or in that of a citizen, a sincere friend to peace, I carry into society neither the spirit of dissension, nor the desire of commotion; and because I respect in every one what I wish him to respect in me, the name of liberty is in my mind nothing else but the synonyma of justice. As a man, whether from moderation or indolence, a spectator of the world rather than an actor in it, I am every day less tempted to take on me the management of the minds or bodies of men: it is sufficient for an individual to govern his own passions and caprices. If by one of these caprices, I am induced to think it may be useful, sometimes, to publish my reflections, I do it without obstinacy or pretension to that implicit faith, the ridicule of which you desire to impart to me, p. 123. My whole book of the Ruins which you treat so ungratefully, since you thought it amusing, p. 122, evidently bears this character. By means of the contrasted opinions I have scattered through it, it breathes that spirit of doubt and uncertainty which appears to me the best suited to the weakness of the human mind, and the most adapted to its improvement, inasmuch as it always leaves a door open to new truths; while the spirit of dogmatism and immovable belief, limiting our progress to a first received opinion, binds us at hazard, and without resource, to the yoke of error or falsehood, and occasions the most serious mischiefs to society; since by combining with the passions, it engenders fanaticism, which, sometimes misled and sometimes misleading, though always intolerant and despotic, attacks whatever is not of its own nature; drawing upon itself persecution when it is weak, and practising persecution when it is powerful; establishing a religion of terror, which annihilates the faculties, and vitiates the conscience: so that, whether under a political or a religious aspect, the spirit of doubt is friendly to all ideas of liberty, truth, or genius, while a spirit of confidence is connected with the ideas of tyranny, servility, and ignorance. If, as is the fact, our own experience and that of others daily teaches us that what at one time appeared true, afterwards appeared demonstrably false, how can we connect with our judgments that blind and presumptuous confidence which pursues those of others with so much hatred? No doubt it is reasonable, and even honest, to act according to our present feelings and conviction: but if these feelings and their causes do vary by the very nature of things, how dare we impose upon ourselves or others an invariable conviction? How, above all, dare we require this conviction in cases where there is really no sensation, as happens in purely speculative questions, in which no palpable fact can be presented? Therefore, when opening the book of nature, (a more authentic one and more easy to be read than leaves of paper blackened over with Greek or Hebrew,) and when I reflected that the slightest change in the material world has not been in times past, nor is at present effected by the difference of so many religions and sects which have appeared and still exist on the globe, and that the course of the seasons, the path of the sun, the return of rain and drought, are the same for the inhabitants of each country, whether Christians, Mussulmans, Idolaters, Catholics, Protestants, etc., I am induced to believe that the universe is governed by laws of wisdom and justice, very different from those which human ignorance and intolerance would enact. And as in living with men of very opposite religious persuasions, I have had occasion to remark that their manners were, nevertheless, very analogous; that is to say, among the different Christian sects, among the Mahometans, and even among those people who were of no sect, I have found men who practise all the virtues, public and private, and that too without affectation; while others, who were incessantly declaiming of God and religion, abandoned themselves to every vicious habit which their belief condemned, I thereby became convinced that Ethics, the doctrines of morality, are the only essential, as they are only demonstrable, part of religion. And as, by your own avowal, the only end of religion is to render men better, in order to add to their happiness, p. 62, I have concluded that there are but two great systems of religion in the world, that of good sense and beneficence, and that of malice and hypocrisy. In closing this letter, I find myself embarrassed by the nature of the sentiment which I ought to express to you, for in declaring as you have done, p. 123, that you do not care for the contempt of such as me* (ignorant as you were of my opinion), you tell me plainly that you do not care for their esteem. I leave, therefore, to your discernment and taste to determine the sentiment most congenial to my situation and your desert. * "And what does it do for me here, except, perhaps, expose me to the contempt of such men as Mr. Volney, which, however, I feel myself pretty well able to bear?" p. 124. This language is the more surprising, as Dr. Priestly never received anything from me but civilities. In the year 1791 I sent him a dissertation of mine on the Chronology of the Ancients, in consequence of some charts which he had himself published. His only answer was to abuse me in a pamphlet in 1792. After this first abuse, on meeting me here last winter, he procured me an invitation to dine with his friend Mr. Russell, at whose house he lodged; after having shown me polite attention at that dinner, he abuses me in his new pamphlet. After this second abuse he meets me in Spruce Street, and takes me by the hand as a friend, and speaks of me in a large company under that denomination. Now I ask the public, what kind of a man is Dr. Priestly? C. F. VOLNEY. Philadelphia, March 10, 1797. P. S. I do not accompany this public letter with a private note to Dr. Priestly, because communications of that nature carry an appearance of bravado, which, even in exercising the right of a necessary defence, appear to me imcompatible with decency and politeness. THE ZODIACAL SIGNS AND CONSTELLATIONS. (Compiled by the publisher from recognized authorities.) The Zodiac is an imaginary girdle or belt in the celestial sphere, which extends about eight degrees on each side of the Ecliptic. It is divided into twelve portions, called the signs of the Zodiac, within which all the planets make their revolutions. The Zodiac is so called from the animals represented upon it, and is supposed to have originated in remote ages and in latitudes where the camel and elephant were comparatively unknown. This pictorial representation of the zodiac was probably the origin, as M. Dupuis suggests, of the Arabian and Egyptian adoration of animals and birds, and has led in the natural progress of events to the adoration of images by both Christians and pagans. "The Signs of the Zodiac, (says Godfrey Higgins in The Anacalypsis) with the exception of the Scorpion, which was exchanged by Dan for the Eagle, were carried by the different tribes of the Israelites on their standards; and Taurus, Leo, Aquarius, and Scorpio or the Eagle--the four signs of Reuben, Judah, Ephriam, and Dan--were placed at the four corners, (the four cardinal points), of their encampment, evidently in allusion to the cardinal points of the sphere, the equinoxes and solstices, when the equinox was in Taurus. (See Parkhurst's Lexicon.) These coincidences prove that this religious system had its origin before the bull ceased to be an equinoctial sign, and prove also, that the religion of Moses was originally the same in its secret mysteries as that of the Heathen, or, if my reader likes it better, that the Heathen secret mysteries were the same as those of Moses." The Ecliptic, a great circle of the sphere, (shown on the preceding map by two parallel lines), is supposed to be drawn through the middle of the Zodiac, cutting the Equator at two points, (called the Equinoctial points), at an angle with the equinoctial of 23 degrees 28 minutes, (the sun's greatest declination), and is the path which the earth is supposed to describe amidst the fixed stars in performing its annual circuit around the sun. It is called the Ecliptic because the eclipses of the sun and moon always occur under it. The Signs are each the twelfth part of the Ecliptic or Zodiac, (30 degrees,) and are reckoned from the point of intersection of the ecliptic and equator at the vernal equinox. They are named respectively Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius, Capricornus, Aquarius, Pisces. These names are borrowed from the constellations of the zodiac of the same denomination, which corresponded when these divisions were originally made; but in consequence of the precession, recession, or retrocession of the equinoxes, (about 50 1/10" yearly, at the rate of about 72 years to a degree, displacing an entire sign in about 2152 years, and making an entire revolution of the equinoctial in about 25,868 years), the positions of these constellations in the heavens no longer correspond with the divisions of the ecliptic of the same name, but are in advance of them. Thus, the constellation Aries is now in that part of the ecliptic called Taurus, and the stars of Taurus are in Gemini, those of Gemini in Cancer, and so on throughout the ecliptic. The relative positions of the signs and constellations in the zodiac and ecliptic seem thus to have gradually changed with the revolving years; and the worship of the three constellations, Taurus, Aries, and Pisces, with which Christianity is so intimately connected, seems to have changed in a corresponding degree. The worship of the bull of Egypt--the celestial Taurus--has given place to that of the lamb of Palestine--the celestial Aries; and under the astronomical emblem Pisces--the twelfth sign of the zodiac--the dominant faith of to-day was appropriately taught by the twelve apostolic fishermen. It is from one of these chosen fishermen, St. Peter, that the Pope of Rome claims to have derived his arbitrary power for binding and loosing on earth those who are to be bound and loosed in heaven. (Matt. xvi, 19.) The grave responsibility of wielding with justice and equity this tremendous power over the future destiny of mankind, seems never to have disconcerted any of the successors of St. Peter. They have all proved to be equally arrogant and intolerant, zealous for both temporal and spiritual domination, and merciless to those who have opposed their pretensions. The present incumbent of the papal chair, who modestly claims the attribute of infallibility, seems proud of his inherited title, The Great Fisherman! and hopes in the progress of time, with the assistance of his monks, bishops, and cardinals, to entangle all nations in his net of faith, and to dictate with unquestioned authority the religious worship of the entire human race. As the precession of the equinoxes still continues as of yore, and as the masses still continue credulous and devout, they may in succeeding ages be again called upon to worship the god Apis, when the sign of Taurus shall again coincide in the zodiac and the ecliptic; and Aries, "the lamb of God," may again be offered in the "fullness of time" as a sacrifice for mankind, again be crucified, and again shed his redeeming blood to wash away the sins of a believing world. M. Dupuis has satisfactorily shown in The History of all Religions that the twelve labors of the god and saviour Hercules were astronomical allegories--the history of the passage of the sun through the twelve signs of the zodiac--and these labors are so similar to the sufferings of Jesus, that the Rev. Mr. Parkhurst has been obliged, much against his inclination, to acknowledge that they "were types of what the real Saviour was to do and suffer." (Parkhurst, p.47.) An intimate connection, if not identity, is thus shown between ancient and modern belief--between the paganism of the past and the orthodoxy of the present. THE ZODIACAL SIGNS. ARIES, the Ram: (marked [symbol for ARIES])--A northern constellation, usually named as the first sign in the zodiac, into which, when the sun enters at the vernal equinox in March, the days and nights are of equal length. Aries has been regarded by the devout during many ages as the celestial representative, visible in the heavens, of "the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world." TAURUS, the Bull:(marked thus, [symbol for TAURUS])--The second sign in the zodiac, which by the Arabians is called Ataur. This constellation was worshipped for ages by the idolatrous Egyptians as the heavenly representative of their god Osiris; and derives its name, according to Grecian fable, from the bull into which Jupiter transformed himself in order to carry Europa over into Crete; but the constellation was probably so named by the Egyptians to designate that period of the year, (April), in which cows mostly bring forth their young. "The Rev. Mr. Maurice in his work on the antiquities of India, has shown that the May-day festival and the May-pole of Great Britain with its garlands, etc., are the remains of an ancient festival of Egypt and India, and probably of Phoenicia, when these nations, in countries very distant, and from times very remote, have all, with one consent, celebrated the entrance of the sun into the sign of Taurus at the vernal equinox." GEMINI, the Twins: (marked thus, [symbol for GEMINI])--A zodiacal constellation, visible in May, containing the two bright stars Castor and Pollux, the fabled sons of Leda and Jupiter, who during their lives had cleared the Hellespont and neighboring seas of pirates, and were therefore deemed the protectors of navigators and sailors. CANCER, the Crab: (marked thus, [symbol for CANCER])--Is the fourth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters on the 21st day of June, and is thence called the summer solstice. According to Grecian fable, the crab was transported to heaven at the request of Juno, after it had been slain by Hercules during his battle with the serpent Python, but the evident design of the name is to represent the apparent backward motion of the sun in June, which is said to resemble the motions of a crab. LEO, the Lion: ([symbol for LEO]).--Is the fifth sign in the zodiac, and contains one star of the first magnitude, called Regulus, or Cor Leonis--the Lion's Heart. The fervid heat of July, when the sun has attained its greatest power, is now symbolized in our almanacs by the figure of an enraged lion; and the feasts or sacrifices formerly celebrated among the ancients during this month, in honor of the sun, (which they also represented under the form of a lion,) were called Leonitica. The priests who performed the sacred rites were called Leones. This feast was sometimes called Mithriaca, because Mithra was the name of the sun among the Persians. The sacred writings abound with references to the "king of beasts;" among the most interesting of which is the story of the battle between the lion and Samson, the Jewish Herculus; while the most wonderful example of animal evolution on record is found in the sixty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, where we are gravely informed that "the lion shall eat straw like the bullock." VIRGO, Virgin Mother, Venus, Eve, Isis, &c.--([symbol for VIRGO]).--Is the sixth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters about the 21st of August. The myths and fables regarding the virgin which abound among all nations and all religions, are both various and voluminous, and we may add somewhat improbable. They all agree, however, in this, that the female, shown on the preceding diagram, holding in her right hand a branch of ripened fruit,--the apples of Paradise,--was intended to represent the reproductive powers of nature,--the abundance, satisfaction and contentment which mortals enjoy during the happy period of harvest. LIBRA, the Balance.--The seventh sign of the zodiac, directly opposite to Aries, from which it is distant 180 degrees. It is marked thus [symbol for LIBRA], after the manner of a pair of scales; to denote, probably, that when the sun arrives at this part of the ecliptic, the days and nights are equal, as if weighed in a balance. Hence the period when the sun enters Libra, (about September 21st,) is called the Autumnal equinox. On the 25th of September was born John the Baptist, the forerunner of his cousin Jesus, who came to his exaltation of glory on the 25th of March, the Vernal equinox. "The equinoxes and solstices," says Higgins, "equally marked the births and deaths of John and Jesus." The one preceded and prepared the way for the other, who receded. One advanced, the other declined. Jesus ascended, John descended. Astrologically speaking, "He must increase, but I must decrease." (John iii, 30.) SCORPIO, the Scorpion.--The eighth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters on the 23d of October, is marked thus [symbol for SCORPIO]. Scorpio is fabled to have killed the great hunter Orion, and for that exploit to have been placed among the constellations. For this reason it is also said that when Scorpio rises Orion sets. SAGITTARIUS, the Archer: (marked thus, [symbol for SAGITTARIUS]) is the ninth zodiacal sign, and corresponds with the month of November. This sign is represented like a centaur and was fabled to be Crotus, the son of Eupheme, the nurse of the Muses. CAPRICORNUS, the Goat.([symbol for CAPRICORNUS])--The tenth sign of the zodiac, which the sun enters the 21st of December, (the longest night in the year,) called the winter solstice. This sign is drawn to represent the horns of a goat, and is fabled to have been Pan, who in the war of the giants was taken to heaven in the shape of a goat. Others claim that it was the goat of Amalthaea, which fed Jupiter with her milk. Macrobius, who calls Cancer and Capricorn the gates of the sun, makes the latter sign to represent his motion, after the manner of a goat climbing the mountains. AQUARIUS, the Water Bearer.--A constellation in the heavens so called, because during its rising there is usually an abundance of rain. It is the eleventh sign in the zodiac, reckoned from Aries, and is marked thus, [symbol for AQUARIUS]. It rises in January and sets in February, and is supposed by the poets to be Ganymede. PISCES, the Fishes, [symbol for PISCES].--The twelfth sign of the zodiac, rises in February and is represented by two fishes tied together by the tails. These fishes are fabled by the Greeks to be those into which Venus and Cupid were changed to escape from the giant Typhon. This fable may not be true, but that wonderful miracles were once performed with two small fishes is stated in the ninth chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, where it is said that 5000 hungry mortals were cheaply, if not sumptuously regaled with two small fishes and five loaves of bread; while a large surplus of this piscatory diet, larger indeed than the original stock, still remained intact. In the vestibule or approaches to catholic churches is usually found a vase filled with water, (called Piscina,) and this water is considered holy. The Fish-days are observed as holy days, or fast days, in which Fish may be eaten and meat is forbidden; and learned writers have asserted that in the worship of Pisces may be found the true secret of the origin of the rite of baptism. The Fish-god Oannes, is said to have come out of the Erythraean Sea and taught the Babylonians all kinds of useful knowledge. Ionnes or Jonas went headlong into the sea and into a fish, and has kindly recorded for our instruction his remarkable adventures. The miraculous draughts of fishes in the apostolic age still excite the emulation of modern fishermen, who cannot even hope to rival the wonders that have been recorded. St. Peter is said to have secured ready money from the mouth of a fish that he caught with a hook and line in the sea of Galilee. (Matthew xvii, 27.) His success was justly rewarded, and to him was delegated the power of ruling the infant church. Pisces thus displaced Aries. The fisherman succeeded the shepherd. The precession of the equinoxes produced a new avatar; a new sign arose in the heavens; and a new saviour was born to save mankind. THE CONSTELLATIONS. SIRIUS, the Dog Star.--A bright star of the first magnitude in the mouth of the constellation Canis Major. This is the brightest star that appears in our firmament, and is supposed by some to be the nearest. LEPUS.--One of the southern constellations, placed near Orion, according to Grecian fable, because it was one of the animals which he hunted. ERIDANUS.--A winding southern constellation, near the Cetus, containing the bright star Achemar. CETUS, the Whale.--A southern constellation, and one of the forty-eight old asterisms. It is fabled to have been the sea monster sent by Neptune to devour Andromeda, which was killed by Perseus. CRATER, the Cup.--A southern constellation, near Hydra. This is supposed by Hyainus to be the cup which Apollo gave to the Corvus, or Raven. CORVUS.--One of the old constellations in the southern hemisphere, near Sagittarius. This bird is fabled to have been translated to heaven by Apollo for discovering to him the infidelity of the nymph Coronis. ARGO NAVIS, the Ship.--A constellation near to the Canis Major, and the name of the ship which carried Jason and his fifty-four companions to Colchis in quest of the golden fleece, and was said to have been translated into the heavens. CANOPUS.--The name formerly given to a star in the second bend of Eridanus. A bright star of the first magnitude in the rudder of the ship Argo, which, according to Pliny, was visible at Alexandria in Egypt. CENTAURUS.--One of the forty-eight old constellations in the southern hemisphere, represented in the form of half man and half horse, who was fabled by the Greeks to have been Chiron, the tutor of Achilles. AVA, or ALTAR.--One of the old constellations, and fabled to have been that at which the giants entered into their conspiracy against the gods; wherefore Jupiter, in commemoration of the event, transplanted the altar into the heavens. PEGASUS.--One of the forty-eight old constellations of the northern hemisphere, figured in the form of a flying horse. DELPHINUS, or DOLPHIN.--A northern constellation, near Pegasus. The Dolphin is fabled to have been translated to heaven by Neptune. AQUILA, the Eagle.--In the Arabic Altair, but in the Persian tables the Flying Vulture. This is one of the old constellations, situated near Delphinus in the northern hemisphere. According to Grecian fable, Aquila represented Ganymede or Hebe, who was transported to heaven and made cup-bearer to Jupiter. SAGITTA--the Dart or Arrow, called by the Arabians Schahan. One of the old constellations in the northern hemisphere, near Aquila and Delphinus. It is fabled to have been the arrow with which Hercules slew the vulture that was devouring the liver of Prometheus who was, like Jesus, crucified for loving mankind. CYGNUS, the Swan.--An old constellation in the milky-way, between Equus and the Dragon. This is fabled to be the swan into which Jupiter transformed himself in order to deceive the virtuous Leda, wife of Tyndareus, king of Sparta. The Grecian matron, like the Jewish virgin, thus became the mother of a God. LYRA.--A northern constellation between Hercules and Cygnus, containing a white star of the first magnitude. MILKY-WAY.--Galaxy, or Via Lactia.--A broad luminous path or circle encompassing the heavens, which is easily discernible by its white appearance, from which it derives its name. It is supposed to be the blended light of innumerable fixed stars, which are not distinguishable with ordinary telescopes. HYDRA, the Serpent.--A southern constellation of great length, which is drawn to represent a serpent. The Hydra is fabled to have been placed in the heavens by Apollo, to frighten the Raven from drinking. ORION, the hunter.--A constellation of the southern hemisphere with respect to the ecliptic, but half southern and half northern with respect to the equinoctial. It is placed near the feet of the bull, and is composed of seventeen stars in the form of a sword, which has given occasion to the poets to speak of Orion's sword. He was described by the Greeks as a "mighty hunter," who for his exploits was placed in the heavens by Jupiter, between the Canis and the Lepus. He is believed by many to have been the "mighty hunter" spoken of in the bible, under the name of Nimrod. (See Gen. x: 8, 9; 1 Chron. i: 10; Micha v: 6, Job ix, 9; Amos v, 8.) PERSEUS.--This constellation is named from Perseus, the son of Jupiter by Danae, who was translated into the heavens by the assistance of Minerva, for having released Andromeda from her confinement on the rock to which she was chained. He is represented in the preceding illustration holding a drawn sword in his right hand and in his left the head of Medusa, the Gorgon, whose terrifying appearance changed all who beheld her into stone, and whom he had destroyed with the assistance of the wings he had borrowed from Mercury, the helmet from Pluto, the sword from Vulcan, and the shield from Minerva. JOSEPH'S STABLE; AURIGA, the Wagoner:--A northern constellation between Perseus and Gemini, represented by the figure of an old man supporting a goat. He is said to have been taken to heaven by Jupiter after the invention of wagons. URSA MAJOR, the Bear.--One of the prominent northern constellations, situated near the north pole. It contains the stars called the Dipper. Ursa Minor contains the pole-star, which is shown in the extremity of the tail of the bear. ANDROMEDA.--A northern constellation, represented by a woman chained; as, according to Grecian fable, Andromeda, the daughter of Cassiopia, was bound to a rock by the Nereides, and afterwards released by Perseus. Minerva changed her into a constellation after her death, and placed her in the heavens. DRACO OR DRAGON.--A northern constellation, supposed to represent the Dragon that guarded the Hesperian fruit, and was killed by Hercules. It is said that Juno took it up to heaven and placed it among the constellations. BOOTIS, the Ox driver: so called because this constellation seems to follow the Great Bear as the driver follows his oxen. Bootis is represented as grasping in his right hand a sickle and in his left a club, and is fabled to have been Icarius, who was transported to heaven because he was a great cultivator of the vine; for when Bootes rises the works of ploughing and cultivation go forward. CORONA BOREALIS. Northern Crown.--One of the old northern constellations, between Hercules and Bootes. CORONA AUSTRALIS--Southern Crown.--One of the old constellations in the southern hemisphere, between Sagittarius and Scorpio. The Corona were fabled to be Menippe and Metioche, two daughters of Orion, who sacrificed themselves at the suggestion of an oracle, to protect Boeotia, their native country, from the ravages of a pestilence: it being the belief of idolatrous nations that an angry god could be propitiated by human sacrifices, and that the death of the innocent might atone for the sins of the guilty. The deities of Hades were astonished, it is said, at the patriotism and devotion of these Grecian maidens, who had so generously and uselessly sacrificed their lives. After their death two stars were seen to issue from the altars that still smoked with their blood, and these stars were placed in the heavens in the form of a crown or coronet. CEPHEUS AND CASSIOPIA.--One of the old asterism in the northern hemisphere, near the pole. According to Grecian fables, Cassiopia and her husband Cepheus, king of Etheopia, were placed among the constellations to witness the punishment inflicted on their daughter, Andromeda. TRIANGULARIUM.--A name for both one of the old and new constellations in the northern hemisphere, between Andromeda and Aries. SERPENTARIUS, called Ophiucus, is a constellation in the northern hemisphere, between Scorpio and Hercules. HERCULES, one of the old northern constellations. In Grecian mythology it was taught and believed that Hercules, the Theban, was born of a human mother and an immortal father, like other so-called saviours of mankind. His mother, the fair Alcmena, wife of Amphitryon, having found favor in the eyes of the god Jupiter, soon fell an unwilling victim to his celestial wiles. The life of the infant Hercules, born of this unnatural union, was threatened by the jealous Juno, the same as the life of the infant Jesus was threatened by the tyrant Herod. Like Jesus, Hercules devoted his life to the benefit of the human race, and like Jesus he was also worshipped after his death as a God in heaven. He is shown in the astrological chart, enveloped in the skin of the lion he has slain, with his club upraised, and his foot placed threateningly above the head of the Dragon, as if about to fulfill the scriptural prophecy, that "the seed of the woman shall bruise the serpent's head." 
38982	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) WORKERS PARTY LIBRARY, Vol. I DICTATORSHIP vs. DEMOCRACY (_TERRORISM AND COMMUNISM_) A Reply to Karl Kautsky by LEON TROTSKY With a Preface by H. N. BRAILSFORD and Foreword by Max Bedact [Illustration: WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA. WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.] Published 1922 by WORKERS PARTY OF AMERICA 799 Broadway, Room 405 New York City CONTENTS FOREWORD V PREFACE XI INTRODUCTION 5 THE BALANCE OF POWER 12 THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT 20 DEMOCRACY 28 TERRORISM 48 THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA 69 MARX AND ... KAUTSKY 91 THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY 98 PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR 128 KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK 177 IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE 188 Foreword By MAX BEDACT In a land where "democracy" is so deeply entrenched as in our United States of America it may seem futile to try to make friends for a dictatorship, by a close comparison of the principles of the two--Dictatorship versus Democracy. But then, confiding in the inviting gesture of the Goddess of Liberty many of our friends and fellow citizens have tested that sacred principle of democracy, freedom of speech, a little too freely--and landed in the penitentiary for it. Others again, relying on the not less sacred principle of democracy, freedom of assembly, have come in unpleasant contact with a substantial stick of hardwood, wielded by an unwieldily guardian of the law, and awoke from the immediate effects of this collision in some jail. Again others, leaning a little too heavily against the democratic principle of freedom of press broke down that pasteboard pillar of democracy, and incidentally into prison. Looking at this side of the bright shining medal of our beloved democracy it seems that there is not the slightest bit of difference between the democracy of capitalist America and the dictatorship of Soviet Russia. But there is a great difference. The dictatorship in Russia is bold and upright class rule, which has as its ultimate object the abolition of all class rule and all dictatorships. Our democracy, on the other hand, is a Pecksniffian Dictatorship, is hypocrisy incarnate, promising all liberty in phrases, but in reality even penalizing free thinking, consistently working only for one object: to perpetuate the rule of the capitalist class, the capitalist dictatorship. "Dictatorship versus Democracy" is, therefore, enough of an open question even in our own country to deserve some consideration. To give food for thought on this subject is the object of the publication of Trotsky's book. This book is an answer to a book by Karl Kautsky, "Terrorism and Communism." It is polemical in character. Polemical writings are, as a rule, only thoroughly understood if one reads both sides of the question. But even if we could not take for granted that the proletarian reader is fully familiar with the question at issue we could not conscientiously advise a worker to get Kautsky's book. It is really asking our readers to undertake the superhuman task of reading a book which in the guise of a scientific treatise is foully hitting him below the belt, and then expect him to pay two dollars for it in the bargain. Anyhow, to read Kautsky's book is an ordeal for any revolutionist. Kautsky, in his book, tries to prove that the humanitarian instincts of the masses must defeat any attempt to overpower and suppress the bourgeoisie by terrorist means. But to read his book must kill in the proletarian reader the last remnants of those instincts on which Kautsky's hope for the safety of the bourgeoisie is based. There would even not be enough of those instincts left to save Kautsky from the utter contempt of the proletarian masses, a fate he so richly deserves. Mr. Kautsky was once the foremost exponent of Marxism. Many of those fighting to-day in the front ranks of the proletarian army revered Kautsky as their teacher. But even in his most glorious days as a Marxist his was the musty pedantry of the German professor, which was hardly ever penetrated by a live spark of revolutionary spirit. Still, the Russian revolution of 1905 found a friend in him. That revolution did not commit the unpardonable sin of being successful. But when the tornado of the first victorious proletarian revolution swept over Russia and destroyed in its fury some of the tormentors and exploiters of the working class--then Kautsky's "humanitarianism" killed the last remnant of revolutionary spirit and instinct in him and left only a pitiful wreck of an apologist for capitalism, that was once Kautsky, the Marxist. July, 1914. The echoes of the shots fired in Sarajewo threaten to set the world in flames. Will it come, the seeming inevitable? No!--A thousand times no! Had not the forces of a future order, had not the International of Labor--the Second International--solemnly declared in 1907 in Stuttgart, in 1911 in Copenhagen and in 1912 in Basel: "We will fight war by all means at our disposal. Let the exploiters start a war. It will begin as a war of capitalist governments against each other; it will end--it must end--as a war of the working class of the world against world capitalism; it must end in the proletarian revolution." We, the socialists of the world, comrades from England and Russia, from America and Germany, from France and Austria; we comrades from all over the world, had solemnly promised ourselves: "War against war!" We had promised ourselves and our cause to answer the call of capitalism for a world war with a call on the proletariat for a world revolution. Days passed. July disappeared in the ocean of time. The first days of August brought the booming of the cannon to our ears, messengers of the grim reality of war. And then the news of the collapse of the Second International; reports of betrayal by the socialists; betrayal in London and Vienna; betrayal in Berlin and Brussels; betrayal in Paris; betrayal everywhere. What would Kautsky say to this rank betrayal, Kautsky, the foremost disciple of Marx, Kautsky, the foremost theoretician of the Second International? Will he at least speak up? He did not speak up. Commenting on the betrayal he wrote in "Die Neue Zeit": "Die Kritik der Waffen hat eingesetzt; jetzt hat die Waffe der Kritik zu schweigen."[1] With this one sentence Kautsky replaced Marxism as the basis of his science with rank and undisguised hypocrisy. From then on although trying to retain the toga of a Marxist scholar on his shoulders, with thousands of "if's" and "when's" and "but's" he became the apologist for the betrayal of the German Social-Democracy, and the betrayal of the Second International. [1] The arbitrament of arms is on; now the weapon of criticism must rest. It is true that his "if's" and "when's" and "but's" did not satisfy the Executive Committee of the Social-Democratic Party. They hoped for a victory of the imperial army and wanted to secure a full and unmitigated share of the glory of "His Majesty's" victory. That is why they did not appreciate Kautsky's excellent service. So they helped the renegade to a cheap martyrdom by removing him from the editorship of "Die Neue Zeit." After 1918 it may have dawned upon Scheidemann and Ebert how much better Kautsky served the capitalist cause by couching his betrayal in words that did not lose him outright all the confidence of the proletariat. And Kautsky himself is now exhausting every effort to prove to Noske and Scheidemann how cruelly he was mistreated and how well he deserves to be taken back to their bosom. Kautsky's book "Terrorism and Communism" is dictated by hatred of the Russian revolution. It is influenced by fear of a like revolution in Germany. It is written with tears for the counter-revolutionary bourgeoisie and its pseudo-"socialist" henchmen who have been sacrificed on the altar of revolution by the proletarian dictatorship in Russia. Kautsky prefers to sacrifice the revolution and the revolutionists on the altar of "humanitarianism." The author of "Ethics and the Materialist Conception of History" knows--must know--that humanitarianism under capitalism is capitalist humanitarianism. This humanitarianism mints gold out of the bones, the blood, the health and the suffering of the whole working class while it sheds tears about an individual case of cruelty to one human being. This humanitarianism punishes murder with death and beats to death the pacifist who protests against war as an act of mass murder. Under the cloak of "humanitarian instincts" Kautsky only hides the enemy of the proletarian revolution. The question at issue is not _terrorism_. It is the _dictatorship_; it is _revolution_ itself. If the Russian proletariat was justified in taking over power it was in duty bound to use _all_ means necessary to keep it. If it is a crime for them to use terrorist means then it was a crime to take a power which they could maintain only by terrorist means. And that is really Kautsky's point. The crime of the Bolsheviki is that they took power. If Kautsky were a mere sentimentalist and yet a revolutionist he could shed tears over the unwillingness of the bourgeoisie to give up power without a struggle. But not being a revolutionist he condemns the proletariat for having taken and maintained power by the only means possible, by _force_. Kautsky would much prefer to shed crocodile tears over tens of thousands of proletarian revolutionists slaughtered by a successful counter-revolution. He scorns the Russian Communists because they robbed him of the opportunity to parade his petit bourgeois and consequently pro-capitalist "humanitarian" sentiments in a pro-revolutionary cloak. But he must parade them at any cost. So he parades them without disguise as a mourner for the suppressed bourgeoisie in Russia. Trotsky's answer to Kautsky is not only one side of a controversy. It is one of the literary fruits of the revolution itself. It breathes the breath of revolution. It conquers the gray scholastic theory of the renegade with the irresistible weapon of the revolutionary experience of the Russian proletariat. It refuses to shed tears over the victims of Gallifet and shows what alone saved the Russian revolution from the Russian Gallifets, the Kolchaks, Wrangels, etc. Trotsky's book is not only an answer to Karl Kautsky; it is an answer to the thousands of Kautskys in the socialist movement the world over who want the proletariat to drown the memory of seas of proletarian blood shed by their treachery in an ocean of tears shed for the suppressed bourgeoisie of Russia. Trotsky's book is one of the most effective weapons in the literary arsenal of the revolutionary proletariat in its fight against the social traitors for leadership of the proletarian masses. PREFACE By H. N. BRAILSFORD It has been said of the Bolsheviks that they are more interesting than Bolshevism. To those who hold to the economic interpretation of history that may seem a heresy. None the less, I believe that the personality not merely of the leaders but also of their party goes far to explain the making and survival of the Russian Revolution. To us in the West they seem a wholly foreign type. With Socialist leaders and organizations we and our fathers have been familiar for three-quarters of a century. There has been no lack of talent and even of genius among them. The movement has produced its great theorist in Marx, its orator in Jaurès, its powerful tacticians like Bebel, and it has influenced literature in Morris, Anatole France and Shaw. It bred, however, no considerable man of action, and it was left for the Russians to do what generations of Western Socialists had spent their lives in discussing. There was in this Russian achievement an almost barbaric simplicity and directness. Here were man who really believed the formulæ of our theorists and the resolutions of our Congresses. What had become for us a sterilized and almost respectable orthodoxy rang to their ears as a trumpet call to action. The older generation has found it difficult to pardon their sincerity. The rest of us want to understand the miracle. The real audacity of the Bolsheviks lay in this, that they made a proletarian revolution precisely in that country which, of all portions of the civilized world, seemed the least prepared for it by its economic development. For an agrarian revolt, for the subdivision of the soil, even for the overthrow of the old governing class, Russia was certainly ready. But any spontaneous revolution, with its foundations laid in the masses of the peasantry, would have been individualistic and not communistic. The daring of the Bolsheviks lay in their belief that the minute minority of the urban working class could, by its concentration, its greater intelligence and its relative capacity for organization, dominate the inert peasant mass, and give to their outbreak of land-hunger the character and form of a constructive proletarian revolution. The bitter struggle among Russian parties which lasted from March, 1917, down to the defeat of Wrangel in November, 1920, was really an internecine competition among them for the leadership of the peasants. Which of these several groups could enlist their confidence, to the extent of inducing them not merely to fight, but to accept the discipline, military and civilian, necessary for victory? At the start the Bolsheviks had everything against them. They are nearly all townsmen. They talked in terms of a foreign and very German doctrine. Few of them, save Lenin, grasped the problems of rural life at all. The landed class should at least have known the peasant better. Their chief rivals were the Social Revolutionaries, a party which from its first beginnings had made a cult of the Russian peasant, studied him, idealized him and courted him, which even seemed in 1917 to have won him. Many circumstances explain the success of the Bolsheviks, who proved once again in history the capacity of the town, even when its population is relatively minute, for swift and concentrated action. They also had the luck to deal with opponents who committed the supreme mistake of invoking foreign aid. But none of these advantages would have availed without an immense superiority of character. The Slav temperament, dreamy, emotional, undisciplined, showed itself at its worst in the incorrigible self-indulgence of the more aristocratic "Whites," while the "intellectuals" of the moderate Socialist and Liberal groups have been ruined for action by their exclusively literary and æsthetic education. The Bolsheviks may be a less cultivated group, but, in their underground life of conspiracy, they had learned sobriety, discipline, obedience, and mutual confidence. Their rigid dogmatic Marxist faith gives to them the power of action which belongs only to those who believe without criticism or question. Their ability to lead depends much less than most Englishmen suppose, on their ruthlessness and their readiness to practise the arts of intimidation and suppression. Their chief asset is their self-confidence. In every emergency they are always sure that they have the only workable plan. They stand before the rest of Russia as one man. They never doubt or despair, and even when they compromise, they do it with an air of truculence. Their survival amid invasion, famine, blockade, and economic collapse has been from first to last a triumph of the unflinching will and the fanatical faith. They have spurred a lazy and demoralized people to notable feats of arms and to still more astonishing feats of endurance. To hypnotize a nation in this fashion is, perhaps, the most remarkable feat of the human will in modern times. This book is, so far, by far the most typical expression of the Bolshevik temperament which the revolution has produced. Characteristically it is a polemic, and not a constructive essay. Its self-confidence, its dash, even its insolence, are a true expression of the movement. Its author bears a world-famous name. Everyone can visualize the powerful head, the singularly handsome features, the athletic figure of the man. He makes in private talk an impression of decision and definiteness. He is not rapid or expansive in speech, for everything that he says is calculated and clear cut. One has the sense that one is in the presence of abounding yet disciplined vitality. The background is an office which by its military order and punctuality rebukes the habitual slovenliness of Russia. On the platform his manner was much quieter than I expected. He spoke rather slowly, in a pleasant tenor voice, walking to and fro across the stage and choosing his words, obviously anxious to express his thoughts forcibly but also exactly. A flash of wit and a striking phrase came frequently, but the manner was emphatically not that of a demagogue. The man, indeed, is a natural aristocrat, and his tendency, which Lenin, the aristocrat by birth, corrects, is towards military discipline and authoritative regimentation. There is nothing surprising to-day in the note of authority which one hears in Trotsky's voice and detects in his writing, for he is the chief of a considerable army, which owes everything to his talent for organization. It was at Brest-Litovsk that he displayed the audacity which is genius. Up to that moment there was little in his career to distinguish him from his comrades of the revolutionary under-world--a university course cut short by prison, an apprenticeship to agitation in Russia, some years of exile spent in Vienna, Paris, and New York, the distinction which he shares with Tchitcherin of "sitting" in a British prison, a ready wit, a gift of trenchant speech, but as yet neither the solid achievement nor the legend which gives confidence. Yet this obscure agitator, handicapped in such a task by his Jewish birth, faced the diplomatist and soldiers of the Central Empires, flushed as they were with victory and the insolence of their kind, forced them into public debate, staggered them by talking of first principles as though the defeat and impotence of Russia counted for nothing, and actually used the negotiations to shout across their heads his summons to their own subjects to revolt. He showed in this astonishing performance the grace and audacity of a "matador." This unique bit of drama revealed the persistent belief of the Bolsheviks in the power of the defiant challenge, the magnetic effect of sheer will. Since this episode his services to the revolution have been more solid but not less brilliant. He had no military knowledge or experience, yet he took in hand the almost desperate task of creating an army. He has often been compared to Carnot. But, save that both had lost officers, there was little in common between the French and the Russian armies in the early stages of the two revolutions. The French army had not been demoralized by defeat, or wearied by long inaction, or sapped by destructive propaganda. Trotsky had to create his Red Army from the foundations. He imposed firm discipline, and yet contrived to preserve the élan of the revolutionary spirit. Hampered by the inconceivable difficulties that arose from ruined railways and decayed industries, he none the less contrived to make a military machine which overthrew the armies of Kolchak, Denikin and Wrangel, with the flower of the old professional officers at their head. As a feat of organization under inordinate difficulties, his work ranks as the most remarkable performance of the revolution. It is not the business of a preface to anticipate the argument of a book, still less to obtrude personal opinions. Kautsky's labored essay, to which this book is the brilliant reply, has been translated into English, and is widely known. The case against the possibility of political democracy in a capitalist society could hardly be better put than in these pages, and the polemic against purely evolutionary methods is formidable. The English reader of to-day is aware, however, that the Russian revolution has not stood still since Trotsky wrote. We have to realize that, even in the view of the Bolsheviks themselves, the evolution towards Communism is in Russia only in its early stages. The recent compromises imply, at the best, a very long period of transition, through controlled capitalist production, to Socialism. Experience has proved that catastrophic revolution and the seizure of political power do not in themselves avail to make a Socialist society. The economic development in that direction has actually been retarded, and Russia, under the stress of civil war, has retrograded into a primitive village system of production and exchange. To every reader's mind the question will be present whether the peculiar temperament of the Bolsheviks has led them to over-estimate the importance of political power, to underestimate the inert resistance of the majority, and to risk too much for the illusion of dictating. To that question history has not yet given the decisive answer. The dæmonic will that made the revolution and defended it by achieving the impossible, may yet vindicate itself against the dull trend of impersonal forces. Dictatorship vs. Democracy Introduction The origin of this book was the learned brochure by Kautsky with the same name. My work was begun at the most intense period of the struggle with Denikin and Yudenich, and more than once was interrupted by events at the front. In the most difficult days, when the first chapters were being written, all the attention of Soviet Russia was concentrated on purely military problems. We were obliged to defend first of all the very possibility of Socialist economic reconstruction. We could busy ourselves little with industry, further than was necessary to maintain the front. We were obliged to expose Kautsky's economic slanders mainly by analogy with his political slanders. The monstrous assertions of Kautsky--to the effect that the Russian workers were incapable of labor discipline and economic self-control--could, at the beginning of this work, nearly a year ago, be combatted chiefly by pointing to the high state of discipline and heroism in battle of the Russian workers at the front created by the civil war. That experience was more than enough to explode these bourgeois slanders. But now a few months have gone by, and we can turn to facts and conclusions drawn directly from the economic life of Soviet Russia. As soon as the military pressure relaxed after the defeat of Kolchak and Yudenich and the infliction of decisive blows on Denikin, after the conclusion of peace with Esthonia and the beginning of negotiations with Lithuania and Poland, the whole country turned its mind to things economic. And this one fact, of a swift and concentrated transference of attention and energy from one set of problems to another--very different, but requiring not less sacrifice--is incontrovertible evidence of the mighty vigor of the Soviet order. In spite of political tortures, physical sufferings and horrors, the laboring masses are infinitely distant from political decomposition, from moral collapse, or from apathy. Thanks to a regime which, though it has inflicted great hardships upon them, has given their life a purpose and a high goal, they preserve an extraordinary moral stubbornness and ability unexampled in history, and concentrate their attention and will on collective problems. To-day, in all branches of industry, there is going on an energetic struggle for the establishment of strict labor discipline, and for the increase of the productivity of labor. The party organizations, the trade unions, the factory and workshop administrative committees, rival one another in this respect, with the undivided support of the public opinion of the working class as a whole. Factory after factory willingly, by resolution at its general meeting, increases its working day. Petrograd and Moscow set the example, and the provinces emulate Petrograd. Communist Saturdays and Sundays--that is to say, voluntary and unpaid work in hours appointed for rest--spread ever wider and wider, drawing into their reach many, many hundreds of thousands of working men and women. The industry and productivity of labor at the Communist Saturdays and Sundays, according to the report of experts and the evidence of figures, is of a remarkably high standard. Voluntary mobilizations for labor problems in the party and in the Young Communist League are carried out with just as much enthusiasm as hitherto for military tasks. Voluntarism supplements and gives life to universal labor service. The Committees for universal labor service recently set up have spread all over the country. The attraction of the population to work on a mass scale (clearing snow from the roads, repairing railway lines, cutting timber, chopping and bringing up of wood to the towns, the simplest building operations, the cutting of slate and of peat) become more and more widespread and organized every day. The ever-increasing employment of military formations on the labor front would be quite impossible in the absence of elevated enthusiasm for labor. True, we live in the midst of a very difficult period of economic depression--exhausted, poverty-stricken, and hungry. But this is no argument against the Soviet regime. All periods of transition have been characterized by just such tragic features. Every class society (serf, feudal, capitalist), having exhausted its vitality, does not simply leave the arena, but is violently swept off by an intense struggle, which immediately brings to its participants even greater privations and sufferings than those against which they rose. The transition from feudal economy to bourgeois society--a step of gigantic importance from the point of view of progress--gave us a terrifying list of martyrs. However the masses of serfs suffered under feudalism, however difficult it has been, and is, for the proletariat to live under capitalism, never have the sufferings of the workers reached such a pitch as at the epochs when the old feudal order was being violently shattered, and was yielding place to the new. The French Revolution of the eighteenth century, which attained its titanic dimensions under the pressure of the masses exhausted with suffering, itself deepened and rendered more acute their misfortunes for a prolonged period and to an extraordinary extent. Can it be otherwise? Palace revolutions, which end merely by personal reshufflings at the top, can take place in a short space of time, having practically no effect on the economic life of the country. Quite another matter are revolutions which drag into their whirlpool millions of workers. Whatever be the form of society, it rests on the foundation of labor. Dragging the mass of the people away from labor, drawing them for a prolonged period into the struggle, thereby destroying their connection with production, the revolution in all these ways strikes deadly blows at economic life, and inevitably lowers the standard which it found at its birth. The more perfect the revolution, the greater are the masses it draws in; and the longer it is prolonged, the greater is the destruction it achieves in the apparatus of production, and the more terrible inroads does it make upon public resources. From this there follows merely the conclusion which did not require proof--that a civil war is harmful to economic life. But to lay this at the door of the Soviet economic system is like accusing a new-born human being of the birth-pangs of the mother who brought him into the world. The problem is to make a civil war a short one; and this is attained only by resoluteness in action. But it is just against revolutionary resoluteness that Kautsky's whole book is directed. * * * * * Since the time that the book under examination appeared, not only in Russia, but throughout the world--and first of all in Europe--the greatest events have taken place, or processes of great importance have developed, undermining the last buttresses of Kautskianism. In Germany, the civil war has been adopting an ever fiercer character. The external strength in organization of the old party and trade union democracy of the working class has not only not created conditions for a more peaceful and "humane" transition to Socialism--as follows from the present theory of Kautsky--but, on the contrary, has served as one of the principal reasons for the long-drawn-out character of the struggle, and its constantly growing ferocity. The more German Social-Democracy became a conservative, retarding force, the more energy, lives, and blood have had to be spent by the German proletariat, devoted to it, in a series of systematic attacks on the foundation of bourgeois society, in order, in the process of the struggle itself, to create an actually revolutionary organization, capable of guiding the proletariat to final victory. The conspiracy of the German generals, their fleeting seizure of power, and the bloody events which followed, have again shown what a worthless and wretched masquerade is so-called democracy, during the collapse of imperialism and a civil war. This democracy that has outlived itself has not decided one question, has not reconciled one contradiction, has not healed one wound, has not warded off risings either of the Right or of the Left; it is helpless, worthless, fraudulent, and serves only to confuse the backward sections of the people, especially the lower middle-classes. The hope expressed by Kautsky, in the conclusion of his book, that the Western countries, the "old democracies" of France and England--crowned as they are with victory--will afford us a picture of a healthy, normal, peaceful, truly Kautskian development of Socialism, is one of the most puerile illusions possible. The so-called Republican democracy of victorious France, at the present moment, is nothing but the most reactionary, grasping government that has ever existed in the world. Its internal policy is built upon fear, greed, and violence, in just as great a measure as its external policy. On the other hand, the French proletariat, misled more than any other class has ever been misled, is more and more entering on the path of direct action. The repressions which the government of the Republic has hurled upon the General Confederation of Labor show that even syndicalist Kautskianism--_i.e._, hypocritical compromise--has no legal place within the framework of bourgeois democracy. The revolutionizing of the masses, the growing ferocity of the propertied classes, and the disintegration of intermediate groups--three parallel processes which determine the character and herald the coming of a cruel civil war--have been going on before our eyes in full blast during the last few months in France. In Great Britain, events, different in form, are moving along the self-same fundamental road. In that country, the ruling class of which is oppressing and plundering the whole world more than ever before, the formulæ of democracy have lost their meaning even as weapons of parliamentary swindling. The specialist best qualified in this sphere, Lloyd George, appeals now not to democracy, but to a union of Conservative and Liberal property holders against the working class. In his arguments there remains not a trace of the vague democracy of the "Marxist" Kautsky. Lloyd George stands on the ground of class realities, and for this very reason speaks in the language of civil war. The British working class, with that ponderous learning by experience which is its distinguishing feature, is approaching that stage of its struggle before which the most heroic pages of Chartism will fade, just as the Paris Commune will grow pale before the coming victorious revolt of the French proletariat. Precisely because historical events have, with stern energy, been developing in these last months their revolutionary logic, the author of this present work asks himself: Does it still require to be published? Is it still necessary to confute Kautsky theoretically? Is there still theoretical necessity to justify revolutionary terrorism? Unfortunately, yes. Ideology, by its very essence, plays in the Socialist movement an enormous part. Even for practical England the period has arrived when the working class must exhibit an ever-increasing demand for a theoretical statement of its experiences and its problems. On the other hand, even the proletarian psychology includes in itself a terrible inertia of conservatism--the more that, in the present case, there is a question of nothing less than the traditional ideology of the parties of the Second International which first roused the proletariat, and recently were so powerful. After the collapse of official social-patriotism (Scheidemann, Victor Adler, Renaudel, Vandervelde, Henderson, Plekhanov, etc.), international Kautskianism (the staff of the German Independents, Friedrich Adler, Longuet, a considerable section of the Italians, the British Independent Labor Party, the Martov group, etc.) has become the chief political factor on which the unstable equilibrium of capitalist society depends. It may be said that the will of the working masses of the whole of the civilized world, directly influenced by the course of events, is at the present moment incomparably more revolutionary than their consciousness, which is still dominated by the prejudices of parliamentarism and compromise. The struggle for the dictatorship of the working class means, at the present moment, an embittered struggle with Kautskianism within the working class. The lies and prejudices of the policy of compromise, still poisoning the atmosphere even in parties tending towards the Third International, must be thrown aside. This book must serve the ends of an irreconcilable struggle against the cowardice, half-measures, and hypocrisy of Kautskianism in all countries. * * * * * P.S.--To-day (May, 1920) the clouds have again gathered over Soviet Russia. Bourgeois Poland, by its attack on the Ukraine, has opened the new offensive of world imperialism against the Soviet Republic. The gigantic perils again growing up before the revolution, and the great sacrifices again imposed on the laboring masses by the war, are once again pushing Russian Kautskianism on to the path of open opposition to the Soviet Government--_i.e._, in reality, on to the path of assistance to the world murderers of Soviet Russia. It is the fate of Kautskianism to try to help the proletarian revolution when it is in satisfactory circumstances, and to raise all kinds of obstacles in its way when it is particularly in need of help. Kautsky has more than once foretold our destruction, which must serve as the best proof of his, Kautsky's, theoretical rectitude. In his fall, this "successor of Marx" has reached a stage at which his sole serious political programme consists in speculations on the collapse of the proletarian dictatorship. He will be once again mistaken. The destruction of bourgeois Poland by the Red Army, guided by Communist working men, will appear as a new manifestation of the power of the proletarian dictatorship, and will thereby inflict a crushing blow on bourgeois scepticism (Kautskianism) in the working class movement. In spite of mad confusion of external forms, watchwords, and appearances, history has extremely simplified the fundamental meaning of its own process, reducing it to a struggle of imperialism against Communism. Pilsudsky is fighting, not only for the lands of the Polish magnates in the Ukraine and in White Russia, not only for capitalist property and for the Catholic Church, but also for parliamentary democracy and for evolutionary Socialism, for the Second International, and for the right of Kautsky to remain a critical hanger-on of the bourgeoisie. We are fighting for the Communist International, and for the international proletarian revolution. The stakes are great on either side. The struggle will be obstinate and painful. We hope for the victory, for we have every historical right to it. L. TROTSKY. Moscow, May 29, 1920. Dictatorship vs. Democracy _A Reply to Karl Kautsky_ _By_ LEON TROTSKY 1 THE BALANCE OF POWER The argument which is repeated again and again in criticisms of the Soviet system in Russia, and particularly in criticisms of revolutionary attempts to set up a similar structure in other countries, is the argument based on the balance of power. The Soviet regime in Russia is utopian--"because it does not correspond to the balance of power." Backward Russia cannot put objects before itself which would be appropriate to advanced Germany. And for the proletariat of Germany it would be madness to take political power into its own hands, as this "at the present moment" would disturb the balance of power. The League of Nations is imperfect, but still corresponds to the balance of power. The struggle for the overthrow of imperialist supremacy is utopian--the balance of power only requires a revision of the Versailles Treaty. When Longuet hobbled after Wilson this took place, not because of the political decomposition of Longuet, but in honor of the law of the balance of power. The Austrian president, Seitz, and the chancellor, Renner, must, in the opinion of Friedrich Adler, exercise their bourgeois impotence at the central posts of the bourgeois republic, for otherwise the balance of power would be infringed. Two years before the world war, Karl Renner, then not a chancellor, but a "Marxist" advocate of opportunism, explained to me that the regime of June 3--that is, the union of landlords and capitalists crowned by the monarchy--must inevitably maintain itself in Russia during a whole historical period, as it answered to the balance of power. What is this balance of power after all--that sacramental formula which is to define, direct, and explain the whole course of history, wholesale and retail? Why exactly is it that the formula of the balance of power, in the mouth of Kautsky and his present school, inevitably appears as a justification of indecision, stagnation, cowardice and treachery? By the balance of power they understand everything you please: the level of production attained, the degree of differentiation of classes, the number of organized workers, the total funds at the disposal of the trade unions, sometimes the results of the last parliamentary elections, frequently the degree of readiness for compromise on the part of the ministry, or the degree of effrontery of the financial oligarchy. Most frequently, it means that summary political impression which exists in the mind of a half-blind pedant, or a so-called realist politician, who, though he has absorbed the phraseology of Marxism, in reality is guided by the most shallow manoeuvres, bourgeois prejudices, and parliamentary "tactics." After a whispered conversation with the director of the police department, an Austrian Social-Democratic politician in the good, and not so far off, old times always knew exactly whether the balance of power permitted a peaceful street demonstration in Vienna on May Day. In the case of the Eberts, Scheidemanns and Davids, the balance of power was, not so very long ago, calculated exactly by the number of fingers which were extended to them at their meeting in the Reichstag with Bethmann-Hollweg, or with Ludendorff himself. According to Friedrich Adler, the establishment of a Soviet dictatorship in Austria would be a fatal infraction of the balance of power; the Entente would condemn Austria to starvation. In proof of this, Friedrich Adler, at the July congress of Soviets, pointed to Hungary, where at that time the Hungarian Renners had not yet, with the help of the Hungarian Adlers, overthrown the dictatorship of the Soviets. At the first glance, it might really seem that Friedrich Adler was right in the case of Hungary. The proletarian dictatorship was overthrown there soon afterwards, and its place was filled by the ministry of the reactionary Friedrich. But it is quite justifiable to ask: Did the latter correspond to the balance of power? At all events, Friedrich and his Huszar might not even temporarily have seized power had it not been for the Roumanian army. Hence, it is clear that, when discussing the fate of the Soviet Government in Hungary, it is necessary to take account of the "balance of power," at all events in two countries--in Hungary itself, and in its neighbor, Roumania. But it is not difficult to grasp that we cannot stop at this. If the dictatorship of the Soviets had been set up in Austria before the maturing of the Hungarian crisis, the overthrow of the Soviet regime in Budapest would have been an infinitely more difficult task. Consequently, we have to include Austria also, together with the treacherous policy of Friedrich Adler, in that balance of power which determined the temporary fall of the Soviet Government in Hungary. Friedrich Adler himself, however, seeks the key to the balance of power, not in Russia and Hungary, but in the West, in the countries of Clemenceau and Lloyd George. They have in their hands bread and coal--and really bread and coal, especially in our time, are just as foremost factors in the mechanism of the balance of power as cannon in the constitution of Lassalle. Brought down from the heights, Adler's idea consists, consequently, in this: that the Austrian proletariat must not seize power until such time, as it is permitted to do so by Clemenceau (or Millerand--_i.e._, a Clemenceau of the second order). However, even here it is permissible to ask: Does the policy of Clemenceau himself really correspond to the balance of power? At the first glance it may appear that it corresponds well enough, and, if it cannot be proved, it is, at least, guaranteed by Clemenceau's gendarmes, who break up working-class meetings, and arrest and shoot Communists. But here we cannot but remember that the terrorist measures of the Soviet Government--that is, the same searches, arrests, and executions, only directed against the counter-revolutionaries--are considered by some people as a proof that the Soviet Government does _not_ correspond to the balance of power. In vain would we, however, begin to seek in our time, anywhere in the world, a regime which, to preserve itself, did not have recourse to measures of stern mass repression. This means that hostile class forces, having broken through the framework of every kind of law--including that of "democracy"--are striving to find their new balance by means of a merciless struggle. When the Soviet system was being instituted in Russia, not only the capitalist politicians, but also the Socialist opportunists of all countries proclaimed it an insolent challenge to the balance of forces. On this score, there was no quarrel between Kautsky, the Austrian Count Czernin, and the Bulgarian Premier, Radoslavov. Since that time, the Austro-Hungarian and German monarchies have collapsed, and the most powerful militarism in the world has fallen into dust. The Soviet regime has held out. The victorious countries of the Entente have mobilized and hurled against it all they could. The Soviet Government has stood firm. Had Kautsky, Friedrich Adler, and Otto Bauer been told that the system of the dictatorship of the proletariat would hold out in Russia--first against the attack of German militarism, and then in a ceaseless war with the militarism of the Entente countries--the sages of the Second International would have considered such a prophecy a laughable misunderstanding of the "balance of power." The balance of political power at any given moment is determined under the influence of fundamental and secondary factors of differing degrees of effectiveness, and only in its most fundamental quality is it determined by the stage of the development of production. The social structure of a people is extraordinarily behind the development of its productive forces. The lower middle-classes, and particularly the peasantry, retain their existence long after their economic methods have been made obsolete, and have been condemned, by the technical development of the productive powers of society. The consciousness of the masses, in its turn, is extraordinarily behind the development of their social relations, the consciousness of the old Socialist parties is a whole epoch behind the state of mind of the masses, and the consciousness of the old parliamentary and trade union leaders, more reactionary than the consciousness of their party, represents a petrified mass which history has been unable hitherto either to digest or reject. In the parliamentary epoch, during the period of stability of social relations, the psychological factor--without great error--was the foundation upon which all current calculations were based. It was considered that parliamentary elections reflected the balance of power with sufficient exactness. The imperialist war, which upset all bourgeois society, displayed the complete uselessness of the old criteria. The latter completely ignored those profound historical factors which had gradually been accumulating in the preceding period, and have now, all at once, appeared on the surface, and have begun to determine the course of history. The political worshippers of routine, incapable of surveying the historical process in its complexity, in its internal clashes and contradictions, imagined to themselves that history was preparing the way for the Socialist order simultaneously and systematically on all sides, so that concentration of production and the development of a Communist morality in the producer and the consumer mature simultaneously with the electric plough and a parliamentary majority. Hence the purely mechanical attitude towards parliamentarism, which, in the eyes of the majority of the statesmen of the Second International, indicated the degree to which society was prepared for Socialism as accurately as the manometer indicates the pressure of steam. Yet there is nothing more senseless than this mechanized representation of the development of social relations. If, beginning with the productive bases of society, we ascend the stages of the superstructure--classes, the State, laws, parties, and so on--it may be established that the weight of each additional part of the superstructure is not simply to be added to, but in many cases to be multiplied by, the weight of all the preceding stages. As a result, the political consciousness of groups which long imagined themselves to be among the most advanced, displays itself, at a moment of change, as a colossal obstacle in the path of historical development. To-day it is quite beyond doubt that the parties of the Second International, standing at the head of the proletariat, which dared not, could not, and would not take power into their hands at the most critical moment of human history, and which led the proletariat along the road of mutual destruction in the interests of imperialism, proved a _decisive factor_ of the counter-revolution. The great forces of production--that shock factor in historical development--were choked in those obsolete institutions of the superstructure (private property and the national State) in which they found themselves locked by all preceding development. Engendered by capitalism, the forces of production were knocking at all the walls of the bourgeois national State, demanding their emancipation by means of the Socialist organization of economic life on a world scale. The stagnation of social groupings, the stagnation of political forces, which proved themselves incapable of destroying the old class groupings, the stagnation, stupidity and treachery of the directing Socialist parties, which had assumed to themselves in reality the defense of bourgeois society--all these factors led to an elemental revolt of the forces of production, in the shape of the imperialist war. Human technical skill, the most revolutionary factor in history, arose with the might accumulated during scores of years against the disgusting conservatism and criminal stupidity of the Scheidemanns, Kautskies, Renaudels, Vanderveldes and Longuets, and, by means of its howitzers, machine-guns, dreadnoughts and aeroplanes, it began a furious pogrom of human culture. In this way the cause of the misfortunes at present experienced by humanity is precisely that the development of the technical command of men over nature has _long ago_ grown ripe for the socialization of economic life. The proletariat has occupied a place in production which completely guarantees its dictatorship, while the most intelligent forces in history--the parties and their leaders--have been discovered to be still wholly under the yoke of the old prejudices, and only fostered a lack of faith among the masses in their own power. In quite recent years Kautsky used to understand this. "The proletariat at the present time has grown so strong," wrote Kautsky in his pamphlet, _The Path to Power_, "that it can calmly await the coming war. There can be no more talk of a _premature revolution_, now that the proletariat has drawn from the present structure of the State such strength as could be drawn therefrom, and now that its reconstruction has become a condition of the proletariat's further progress." From the moment that the development of productive forces, outgrowing the framework of the bourgeois national State, drew mankind into an epoch of crises and convulsions, the consciousness of the masses was shaken by dread shocks out of the comparative equilibrium of the preceding epoch. The routine and stagnation of its mode of living, the hypnotic suggestion of peaceful legality, had already ceased to dominate the proletariat. But it had not yet stepped, consciously and courageously, on to the path of open revolutionary struggle. It wavered, passing through the last moment of unstable equilibrium. At such a moment of psychological change, the part played by the summit--the State, on the one hand, and the revolutionary Party on the other--acquires a colossal importance. A determined push from left or right is sufficient to move the proletariat, for a certain period, to one or the other side. We saw this in 1914, when, under the united pressure of imperialist governments and Socialist patriotic parties, the working class was all at once thrown out of its equilibrium and hurled on to the path of imperialism. We have since seen how the experience of the war, the contrasts between its results and its first objects, is shaking the masses in a revolutionary sense, making them more and more capable of an open revolt against capitalism. In such conditions, the presence of a revolutionary party, which renders to itself a clear account of the motive forces of the present epoch, and understands the exceptional role amongst them of a revolutionary class; which knows its inexhaustible, but unrevealed, powers; which believes in that class and believes in itself; which knows the power of revolutionary method in an epoch of instability of all social relations; which is ready to employ that method and carry it through to the end--the presence of such a party represents a factor of incalculable historical importance. And, on the other hand, the Socialist party, enjoying traditional influence, which does _not_ render itself an account of what is going on around it, which does _not_ understand the revolutionary situation, and, therefore, finds no key to it, which does _not_ believe in either the proletariat or itself--such a party in our time is the most mischievous stumbling block in history, and a source of confusion and inevitable chaos. Such is now the role of Kautsky and his sympathizers. They teach the proletariat not to believe in itself, but to believe its reflection in the crooked mirror of democracy which has been shattered by the jack-boot of militarism into a thousand fragments. The decisive factor in the revolutionary policy of the working class must be, in their view, not the international situation, not the actual collapse of capitalism, not that social collapse which is generated thereby, not that concrete necessity of the supremacy of the working class for which the cry arises from the smoking ruins of capitalist civilization--not all this must determine the policy of the revolutionary party of the proletariat--but that counting of votes which is carried out by the capitalist tellers of parliamentarism. Only a few years ago, we repeat, Kautsky seemed to understand the real inner meaning of the problem of revolution. "Yes, the proletariat represents the sole revolutionary class of the nation," wrote Kautsky in his pamphlet, _The Path to Power_. It follows that every collapse of the capitalist order, whether it be of a moral, financial, or military character, implies the bankruptcy of all the bourgeois parties responsible for it, and signifies that the sole way out of the blind alley is the establishment of the power of the _proletariat_. And to-day the party of prostration and cowardice, the party of Kautsky, says to the working class: "The question is not whether you to-day are the sole creative force in history; whether you are capable of throwing aside that ruling band of robbers into which the propertied classes have developed; the question is not whether anyone else can accomplish this task on your behalf; the question is not whether history allows you any postponement (for the present condition of bloody chaos threatens to bury you yourself, in the near future, under the last ruins of capitalism). The problem is for the ruling imperialist bandits to succeed--yesterday or to-day--to deceive, violate, and swindle public opinion, by collecting 51 per cent. of the votes against your 49. Perish the world, but long live the parliamentary majority!" 2 THE DICTATORSHIP OF THE PROLETARIAT "Marx and Engels hammered out the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which Engels stubbornly defended in 1891, shortly before his death--the idea that the political autocracy of the proletariat is the sole form in which it can realize its control of the state." That is what Kautsky wrote about ten years ago. The sole form of power for the proletariat he considered to be not a Socialist majority in a democratic parliament, but the political autocracy of the proletariat, its dictatorship. And it is quite clear that, if our problem is the abolition of private property in the means of production, the only road to its solution lies through the concentration of State power in its entirety in the hands of the proletariat, and the setting up for the transitional period of an exceptional regime--a regime in which the ruling class is guided, not by general principles calculated for a prolonged period, but by considerations of revolutionary policy. The dictatorship is necessary because it is a case, not of partial changes, but of the very existence of the bourgeoisie. No agreement is possible on this ground. Only force can be the deciding factor. The dictatorship of the proletariat does not exclude, of course, either separate agreements, or considerable concessions, especially in connection with the lower middle-class and the peasantry. But the proletariat can only conclude these agreements after having gained possession of the apparatus of power, and having guaranteed to itself the possibility of independently deciding on which points to yield and on which to stand firm, in the interests of the general Socialist task. Kautsky now repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat at the very outset, as the "tyranny of the minority over the majority." That is, he discerns in the revolutionary regime of the proletariat those very features by which the honest Socialists of all countries invariably describe the dictatorship of the exploiters, albeit masked by the forms of democracy. Abandoning the idea of a revolutionary dictatorship, Kautsky transforms the question of the conquest of power by the proletariat into a question of the conquest of a majority of votes by the Social-Democratic Party in one of the electoral campaigns of the future. Universal suffrage, according to the legal fiction of parliamentarism, expresses the will of the citizens of all classes in the nation, and, consequently, gives a possibility of attracting a majority to the side of Socialism. While the theoretical possibility has not been realized, the Socialist minority must submit to the bourgeois majority. This fetishism of the parliamentary majority represents a brutal repudiation, not only of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but of Marxism and of the revolution altogether. If, in principle, we are to subordinate Socialist policy to the parliamentary mystery of majority and minority, it follows that, in countries where formal democracy prevails, there is no place at all for the revolutionary struggle. If the majority elected on the basis of universal suffrage in Switzerland pass draconian legislation against strikers, or if the executive elected by the will of a formal majority in Northern America shoots workers, have the Swiss and American workers the "right" of protest by organizing a general strike? Obviously, no. The political strike is a form of extra-parliamentary pressure on the "national will," as it has expressed itself through universal suffrage. True, Kautsky himself, apparently, is ashamed to go as far as the logic of his new position demands. Bound by some sort of remnant of the past, he is obliged to acknowledge the possibility of correcting universal suffrage by action. Parliamentary elections, at all events in principle, never took the place, in the eyes of the Social-Democrats, of the real class struggle, of its conflicts, repulses, attacks, revolts; they were considered merely as a contributory fact in this struggle, playing a greater part at one period, a smaller at another, and no part at all in the period of dictatorship. In 1891, that is, not long before his death, Engels, as we just heard, obstinately defended the dictatorship of the proletariat as the only possible form of its control of the State. Kautsky himself more than once repeated this definition. Hence, by the way, we can see what an unworthy forgery is Kautsky's present attempt to throw back the dictatorship of the proletariat at us as a purely Russian invention. Who aims at the end cannot reject the means. The struggle must be carried on with such intensity as actually to guarantee the supremacy of the proletariat. If the Socialist revolution requires a dictatorship--"the sole form in which the proletariat can achieve control of the State"--it follows that the dictatorship must be guaranteed at all cost. To write a pamphlet about dictatorship one needs an ink-pot and a pile of paper, and possibly, in addition, a certain number of ideas in one's head. But in order to establish and consolidate the dictatorship, one has to prevent the bourgeoisie from undermining the State power of the proletariat. Kautsky apparently thinks that this can be achieved by tearful pamphlets. But his own experience ought to have shown him that it is not sufficient to have lost all influence with the proletariat, to acquire influence with the bourgeoisie. It is only possible to safeguard the supremacy of the working class by forcing the bourgeoisie accustomed to rule, to realize that it is too dangerous an undertaking for it to revolt against the dictatorship of the proletariat, to undermine it by conspiracies, sabotage, insurrections, or the calling in of foreign troops. The bourgeoisie, hurled from power, must be forced to obey. In what way? The priests used to terrify the people with future penalties. We have no such resources at our disposal. But even the priests' hell never stood alone, but was always bracketed with the material fire of the Holy Inquisition, and with the scorpions of the democratic State. Is it possible that Kautsky is leaning to the idea that the bourgeoisie can be held down with the help of the categorical imperative, which in his last writings plays the part of the Holy Ghost? We, on our part, can only promise him our material assistance if he decides to equip a Kantian-humanitarian mission to the realms of Denikin and Kolchak. At all events, there he would have the possibility of convincing himself that the counter-revolutionaries are not naturally devoid of character, and that, thanks to their six years' existence in the fire and smoke of war, their character has managed to become thoroughly hardened. Every White Guard has long ago acquired the simple truth that it is easier to hang a Communist to the branch of a tree than to convert him with a book of Kautsky's. These gentlemen have no superstitious fear, either of the principles of democracy or of the flames of hell--the more so because the priests of the church and of official learning act in collusion with them, and pour their combined thunders exclusively on the heads of the Bolsheviks. The Russian White Guards resemble the German and all other White Guards in this respect--that they cannot be convinced or shamed, but only terrorized or crushed. The man who repudiates terrorism in principle--_i.e._, repudiates measures of suppression and intimidation towards determined and armed counter-revolution, must reject all idea of the political supremacy of the working class and its revolutionary dictatorship. The man who repudiates the dictatorship of the proletariat repudiates the Socialist revolution, and digs the grave of Socialism. * * * * * At the present time, Kautsky has no theory of the social revolution. Every time he tries to generalize his slanders against the revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat, he produces merely a réchauffé of the prejudices of Jaurèsism and Bernsteinism. "The revolution of 1789," writes Kautsky, "itself put an end to the most important causes which gave it its harsh and violent character, and prepared the way for milder forms of the future revolution." (Page 140.)[2] Let us admit this, though to do so we have to forget the June days of 1848 and the horrors of the suppression of the Commune. Let us admit that the great revolution of the eighteenth century, which by measures of merciless terror destroyed the rule of absolutism, of feudalism, and of clericalism, really prepared the way for more peaceful and milder solutions of social problems. But, even if we admit this purely liberal standpoint, even here our accuser will prove to be completely in the wrong; for the Russian Revolution, which culminated in the dictatorship of the proletariat, began with just that work which was done in France at the end of the eighteenth century. Our forefathers, in centuries gone by, did not take the trouble to prepare the democratic way--by means of revolutionary terrorism--for milder manners in our revolution. The ethical mandarin, Kautsky, ought to take these circumstances into account, and accuse our forefathers, not us. [2] Translator's Note--For convenience sake, the references throughout have been altered to fall in the English translation of Kautsky's book. Mr. Kerridge's translation, however, has not been adhered to. Kautsky, however, seems to make a little concession in this direction. "True," he says, "no man of insight could doubt that a military monarchy like the German, the Austrian, or the Russian could be overthrown only by violent methods. But in this connection there was always less thought" (amongst whom?), "of the bloody use of arms, and more of the working class weapon peculiar to the proletariat--the mass strike. And that a considerable portion of the proletariat, after seizing power, would again--as at the end of the eighteenth century--give vent to its rage and revenge in bloodshed could not be expected. This would have meant a complete negation of all progress." (Page 147.) As we see, the war and a series of revolutions were required to enable us to get a proper view of what was going on in reality in the heads of some of our most learned theoreticians. It turns out that Kautsky did not think that a Romanoff or a Hohenzollern could be put away by means of conversations; but at the same time he seriously imagined that a military monarchy could be overthrown by a general strike--_i.e._, by a peaceful demonstration of folded arms. In spite of the Russian revolution, and the world discussion of this question, Kautsky, it turns out, retains the anarcho-reformist view of the general strike. We might point out to him that, in the pages of its own journal, the _Neue Zeit_, it was explained twelve years ago that the general strike is only a mobilization of the proletariat and its setting up against its enemy, the State; but that the strike in itself cannot produce the solution of the problem, because it exhausts the forces of the proletariat sooner than those of its enemies, and this, sooner or later, forces the workers to return to the factories. The general strike acquires a decisive importance only as a preliminary to a conflict between the proletariat and the armed forces of the opposition--_i.e._, to the open revolutionary rising of the workers. Only by breaking the will of the armies thrown against it can the revolutionary class solve the problem of power--the root problem of every revolution. The general strike produces the mobilization of both sides, and gives the first serious estimate of the powers of resistance of the counter-revolution. But only in the further stages of the struggle, after the transition to the path of armed insurrection, can that bloody price be fixed which the revolutionary class has to pay for power. But that it will have to pay with blood, that, in the struggle for the conquest of power and for its consolidation, the proletariat will have not only to be killed, but also to kill--of this no serious revolutionary ever had any doubt. To announce that the existence of a determined life-and-death struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie "is a complete negation of all progress," means simply that the heads of some of our most reverend theoreticians take the form of a camera-obscura, in which objects are represented upside down. But, even when applied to more advanced and cultured countries with established democratic traditions, there is absolutely no proof of the justice of Kautsky's historical argument. As a matter of fact, the argument itself is not new. Once upon a time the Revisionists gave it a character more based on principle. They strove to prove that the growth of proletarian organizations under democratic conditions guaranteed the gradual and imperceptible--reformist and evolutionary--transition to Socialist society--without general strikes and risings, without the dictatorship of the proletariat. Kautsky, at that culminating period of his activity, showed that, in spite of the forms of democracy, the class contradictions of capitalist society grew deeper, and that this process must inevitably lead to a revolution and the conquest of power by the proletariat. No one, of course, attempted to reckon up beforehand the number of victims that will be called for by the revolutionary insurrection of the proletariat, and by the regime of its dictatorship. But it was clear to all that the number of victims will vary with the strength of resistance of the propertied classes. If Kautsky desires to say in his book that a democratic upbringing has not weakened the class egoism of the bourgeoisie, this can be admitted without further parley. If he wishes to add that the imperialist war, which broke out and continued for four years, _in spite of_ democracy, brought about a degradation of morals and accustomed men to violent methods and action, and completely stripped the bourgeoisie of the last vestige of awkwardness in ordering the destruction of masses of humanity--here also he will be right. All this is true on the face of it. But one has to struggle in real conditions. The contending forces are not proletarian and bourgeois manikins produced in the retort of Wagner-Kautsky, but a real proletariat against a real bourgeoisie, as they have emerged from the last imperialist slaughter. In this fact of merciless civil war that is spreading over the whole world, Kautsky sees only the result of a fatal lapse from the "experienced tactics" of the Second International. "In reality, since the time," he writes, "that Marxism has dominated the Socialist movement, the latter, up to the world war, was, in spite of its great activities, preserved from great defeats. And the idea of insuring victory by means of terrorist domination had completely disappeared from its ranks. "Much was contributed in this connection by the fact that, at the time when Marxism was the dominating Socialist teaching, democracy threw out firm roots in Western Europe, and began there to change from an end of the struggle to a trustworthy basis of political life." (Page 145.) In this "formula of progress" there is not one atom of Marxism. The real process of the struggle of classes and their material conflicts has been lost in Marxist propaganda, which, thanks to the conditions of democracy, guarantees, forsooth, a painless transition to a new and "wiser" order. This is the most vulgar liberalism, a belated piece of rationalism in the spirit of the eighteenth century--with the difference that the ideas of Condorcet are replaced by a vulgarisation of the Communist Manifesto. All history resolves itself into an endless sheet of printed paper, and the centre of this "humane" process proves to be the well-worn writing table of Kautsky. We are given as an example the working-class movement in the period of the Second International, which, going forward under the banner of Marxism, never sustained great defeats whenever it deliberately challenged them. But did not the whole working-class movement, the proletariat of the whole world, and with it the whole of human culture, sustain an incalculable defeat in August, 1914, when history cast up the accounts of all the forces and possibilities of the Socialist parties, amongst whom, we are told, the guiding role belonged to Marxism, "on the firm footing of democracy"? _Those parties proved bankrupt._ Those features of their previous work which Kautsky now wishes to render permanent--self-adaptation, repudiation of "illegal" activity, repudiation of the open fight, hopes placed in democracy as the road to a painless revolution--all these fell into dust. In their fear of defeat, holding back the masses from open conflict, dissolving the general strike discussions, the parties of the Second International were preparing their own terrifying defeat; for they were not able to move one finger to avert the greatest catastrophe in world history, the four years' imperialist slaughter, which foreshadowed the violent character of the civil war. Truly, one has to put a wadded night-cap not only over one's eyes, but over one's nose and ears, to be able to-day, after the inglorious collapse of the Second International, after the disgraceful bankruptcy of its leading party--the German Social-Democracy--after the bloody lunacy of the world slaughter and the gigantic sweep of the civil war, to set up in contrast to us, the profundity, the loyalty, the peacefulness and the sobriety of the Second International, the heritage of which we are still liquidating. 3 DEMOCRACY "EITHER DEMOCRACY, OR CIVIL WAR" Kautsky has a clear and solitary path to salvation: _democracy_. All that is necessary is that every one should acknowledge it and bind himself to support it. The Right Socialists must renounce the sanguinary slaughter with which they have been carrying out the will of the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie itself must abandon the idea of using its Noskes and Lieutenant Vogels to defend its privileges to the last breath. Finally, the proletariat must once and for all reject the idea of overthrowing the bourgeoisie by means other than those laid down in the Constitution. If the conditions enumerated are observed, the social revolution will painlessly melt into democracy. In order to succeed it is sufficient, as we see, for our stormy history to draw a nightcap over its head, and take a pinch of wisdom out of Kautsky's snuffbox. "There exist only two possibilities," says our sage, "either democracy, or civil war." (Page 220.) Yet, in Germany, where the formal elements of "democracy" are present before our eyes, the civil war does not cease for a moment. "Unquestionably," agrees Kautsky, "under the present National Assembly Germany cannot arrive at a healthy condition. But that process of recovery will not be assisted, but hindered, if we transform the struggle against the present Assembly into a struggle against the democratic franchise." (Page 230.) As if the question in Germany really did reduce itself to one of electoral forms and not to one of the real possession of power! The present National Assembly, as Kautsky admits, cannot "bring the country to a healthy condition." Therefore let us begin the game again at the beginning. But will the partners agree? It is doubtful. If the rubber is not favorable to us, obviously it is so to them. The National Assembly which "is incapable of bringing the country to a healthy condition," is quite capable, through the mediocre dictatorship of Noske, of preparing the way for the dictatorship of Ludendorff. So it was with the Constituent Assembly which prepared the way for Kolchak. The historical mission of Kautsky consists precisely in having waited for the revolution to write his (n + 1th) book, which should explain the collapse of the revolution by all the previous course of history, from the ape to Noske, and from Noske to Ludendorff. The problem before the revolutionary party is a difficult one: its problem is to foresee the peril in good time, and to forestall it by _action_. And for this there is no other way at present than to tear the power out of the hands of its real possessors, the agrarian and capitalist magnates, who are only temporarily hiding behind Messrs. Ebert and Noske. Thus, from the present National Assembly, the path divides into two: either the dictatorship of the imperialist clique, or the dictatorship of the proletariat. On neither side does the path lead to "democracy." Kautsky does not see this. He explains at great length that democracy is of great importance for its political development and its education in organization of the masses, and that through it the proletariat can come to complete emancipation. One might imagine that, since the day on which the Erfurt Programme was written, nothing worthy of notice had ever happened in the world! Yet meanwhile, for decades, the proletariat of France, Germany, and the other most important countries has been struggling and developing, making the widest possible use of the institutions of democracy, and building up on that basis powerful political organizations. This path of the education of the proletariat through democracy to Socialism proved, however, to be interrupted by an event of no inconsiderable importance--the world imperialist war. The class state at the moment when, thanks to its machinations, the war broke out succeeded in enlisting the assistance of the guiding organizations of Social-Democracy to deceive the proletariat and draw it into the whirlpool. So that, taken as they stand, the methods of democracy, in spite of the incontestable benefits which they afford at a certain period, displayed an extremely limited power of action; with the result that two generations of the proletariat, educated under conditions of democracy, by no means guaranteed the necessary political preparation for judging accurately an event like the world imperialist war. That experience gives us no reasons for affirming that, if the war had broken out ten or fifteen years later, the proletariat would have been more prepared for it. The bourgeois democratic state not only creates more favorable conditions for the political education of the workers, as compared with absolutism, but also sets a limit to that development in the shape of bourgeois legality, which skilfully accumulates and builds on the upper strata of the proletariat opportunist habits and law-abiding prejudices. The school of democracy proved quite insufficient to rouse the German proletariat to revolution when the catastrophe of the war was at hand. The barbarous school of the war, social-imperialist ambitions, colossal military victories, and unparalleled defeats were required. After these events, which made a certain amount of difference in the universe, and even in the Erfurt Programme, to come out with common-places as to meaning of democratic parliamentarism for the education of the proletariat signifies a fall into political childhood. This is just the misfortune which has overtaken Kautsky. "Profound disbelief in the political struggle of the proletariat," he writes, "and in its participation in politics, was the characteristic of Proudhonism. To-day there arises a similar (!!) view, and it is recommended to us as the new gospel of Socialist thought, as the result of an experience which Marx did not, and could not, know. In reality, it is only a variation of an idea which half a century ago Marx was fighting, and which he in the end defeated." (Page 79.) Bolshevism proves to be warmed-up Proudhonism! From a purely theoretical point of view, this is one of the most brazen remarks in the pamphlet. The Proudhonists repudiated democracy for the same reason that they repudiated the political struggle generally. They stood for the economic organization of the workers without the interference of the State, without revolutionary outbreaks--for self-help of the workers on the basis of production for profit. As far as they were driven by the course of events on to the path of the political struggle, they, as lower middle-class theoreticians, preferred democracy, not only to plutocracy, but to revolutionary dictatorship. What thoughts have they in common with us? While we repudiate democracy in the name of the concentrated power of the proletariat, the Proudhonists, on the other hand, were prepared to make their peace with democracy, diluted by a federal basis, in order to avoid the revolutionary monopoly of power by the proletariat. With more foundation Kautsky might have compared us with the opponents of the Proudhonists, the _Blanquists_, who understood the meaning of a revolutionary government, but did not superstitiously make the question of seizing it depend on the formal signs of democracy. But in order to put the comparison of the Communists with the Blanquists on a reasonable footing, it would have to be added that, in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils, we had at our disposal such an organization for revolution as the Blanquists could not even dream of; in our party we had, and have, an invaluable organization of political leadership with a perfected programme of the social revolution. Finally, we had, and have, a powerful apparatus of economic transformation in our trade unions, which stand as a whole under the banner of Communism, and support the Soviet Government. Under such conditions, to talk of the renaissance of Proudhonist prejudices in the shape of Bolshevism can only take place when one has lost all traces of theoretical honesty and historical understanding. THE IMPERIALIST TRANSFORMATION OF DEMOCRACY It is not for nothing that the word "democracy" has a double meaning in the political vocabulary. On the one hand, it means a state system founded on universal suffrage and the other attributes of formal "popular government." On the other hand, by the word "democracy" is understood the mass of the people itself, in so far as it leads a political existence. In the second sense, as in the first, the meaning of democracy rises above class distinctions. This peculiarity of terminology has its profound political significance. Democracy as a political system is the more perfect and unshakable the greater is the part played in the life of the country by the intermediate and less differentiated mass of the population--the lower middle-class of the town and the country. Democracy achieved its highest expression in the nineteenth century in Switzerland and the United States of North America. On the other side of the ocean the democratic organization of power in a federal republic was based on the agrarian democracy of the farmers. In the small Helvetian Republic, the lower middle-classes of the towns and the rich peasantry constituted the basis of the conservative democracy of the united cantons. Born of the struggle of the Third Estate against the powers of feudalism, the democratic State very soon becomes the weapon of defence against the class antagonisms generated within bourgeois society. Bourgeois society succeeds in this the more, the wider beneath it is the layer of the lower middle-class, the greater is the importance of the latter in the economic life of the country, and the less advanced, consequently, is the development of class antagonism. However, the intermediate classes become ever more and more helplessly behind historical development, and, thereby, become ever more and more incapable of speaking in the name of the nation. True, the lower middle-class doctrinaires (Bernstein and Company) used to demonstrate with satisfaction that the disappearance of the middle-classes was not taking place with that swiftness that was expected by the Marxian school. And, in reality, one might agree that, numerically, the middle-class elements in the town, and especially in the country, still maintain an extremely prominent position. But the chief meaning of evolution has shown itself in the decline in importance on the part of the middle-classes from the point of view of production: the amount of values which this class brings to the general income of the nation has fallen incomparably more rapidly than the numerical strength of the middle-classes. Correspondingly, falls their social, political, and cultural importance. Historical development has been relying more and more, not on these conservative elements inherited from the past, but on the polar classes of society--_i.e._, the capitalist bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The more the middle-classes lost their social importance, the less they proved capable of playing the part of an authoritative arbitral judge in the historical conflict between capital and labor. Yet the very considerable numerical proportion of the town middle-classes, and still more of the peasantry, continues to find direct expression in the electoral statistics of parliamentarism. The formal equality of all citizens as electors thereby only gives more open indication of the incapacity of democratic parliamentarism to settle the root questions of historical evolution. An "equal" vote for the proletariat, the peasant, and the manager of a trust formally placed the peasant in the position of a mediator between the two antagonists; but, in reality, the peasantry, socially and culturally backward and politically helpless, has in all countries always provided support for the most reactionary, filibustering, and mercenary parties which, in the long run, always supported capital against labor. Absolutely contrary to all the prophecies of Bernstein, Sombart, Tugan-Baranovsky, and others, the continued existence of the middle classes has not softened, but has rendered to the last degree acute, the revolutionary crisis of bourgeois society. If the proletarianization of the lower middle-classes and the peasantry had been proceeding in a chemically purified form, the peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat through the democratic parliamentary apparatus would have been much more probable than we can imagine at present. Just the fact that was seized upon by the partisans of the lower middle-class--its longevity--has proved fatal even for the external forms of political democracy, now that capitalism has undermined its essential foundations. Occupying in parliamentary politics a place which it has lost in production, the middle-class has finally compromised parliamentarism, and has transformed it into an institution of confused chatter and legislative obstruction. From this fact alone, there grew up before the proletariat the problem of seizing the apparatus of state power as such, independently of the middle-class, and even against it--not against its interests, but against its stupidity and its policy, impossible to follow in its helpless contortions. "Imperialism," wrote Marx of the Empire of Napoleon III, "is the most prostituted, and, at the same time, perfected form of the state which the bourgeoisie, having attained its fullest development, transforms into a weapon for the enslavement of labor by capital." This definition has a wider significance than for the French Empire alone, and includes the latest form of imperialism, born of the world conflict between the national capitalisms of the great powers. In the economic sphere, imperialism pre-supposed the final collapse of the rule of the middle-class; in the political sphere, it signified the complete destruction of democracy by means of an internal molecular transformation, and a universal subordination of all democracy's resources to its own ends. Seizing upon all countries, independently of their previous political history, imperialism showed that all political prejudices were foreign to it, and that it was equally ready and capable of making use, after their transformation and subjection, of the monarchy of Nicholas Romanoff or Wilhelm Hohenzollern, of the presidential autocracy of the United States of North America, and of the helplessness of a few hundred chocolate legislators in the French parliament. The last great slaughter--the bloody font in which the bourgeois world attempted to be re-baptised--presented to us a picture, unparalleled in history, of the mobilization of all state forms, systems of government, political tendencies, religious, and schools of philosophy, in the service of imperialism. Even many of those pedants who slept through the preparatory period of imperialist development during the last decades, and continued to maintain a traditional attitude towards ideas of democracy and universal suffrage, began to feel during the war that their accustomed ideas had become fraught with some new meaning. Absolutism, parliamentary monarchy, democracy--in the presence of imperialism (and, consequently, in the presence of the revolution rising to take its place), all the state forms of bourgeois supremacy, from Russian Tsarism to North American quasi-democratic federalism, have been given equal rights, bound up in such combinations as to supplement one another in an indivisible whole. Imperialism succeeded by means of all the resources it had at its disposal, including parliamentarism, irrespective of the electoral arithmetic of voting, to subordinate for its own purposes at the critical moment the lower middle-classes of the towns and country and even the upper layers of the proletariat. The national idea, under the watchword of which the Third Estate rose to power, found in the imperialist war its rebirth in the watchword of national defence. With unexpected clearness, national ideology flamed up for the last time at the expense of class ideology. The collapse of imperialist illusions, not only amongst the vanquished, but--after a certain delay--amongst the victorious also, finally laid low what was once national democracy, and, with it, its main weapon, the democratic parliament. The flabbiness, rottenness, and helplessness of the middle-classes and their parties everywhere became evident with terrifying clearness. In all countries the question of the control of the State assumed first-class importance as a question of an open measuring of forces between the capitalist clique, openly or secretly supreme and disposing of hundreds of thousands of mobilized and hardened officers, devoid of all scruple, and the revolting, revolutionary proletariat; while the intermediate classes were living in a state of terror, confusion, and prostration. Under such conditions, what pitiful nonsense are speeches about the peaceful conquest of power by the proletariat by means of democratic parliamentarism! The scheme of the political situation on a world scale is quite clear. The bourgeoisie, which has brought the nations, exhausted and bleeding to death, to the brink of destruction--particularly the victorious bourgeoisie--has displayed its complete inability to bring them out of their terrible situation, and, thereby, its incompatibility with the future development of humanity. All the intermediate political groups, including here first and foremost the social-patriotic parties, are rotting alive. The proletariat they have deceived is turning against them more and more every day, and is becoming strengthened in its revolutionary convictions as the only power that can save the peoples from savagery and destruction. However, history has not at all secured, just at this moment, a formal parliamentary majority on the side of the party of the social revolution. In other words, history has not transformed the nation into a debating society solemnly voting the transition to the social revolution by a majority of votes. On the contrary, the violent revolution has become a necessity precisely because the imminent requirements of history are helpless to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy. The capitalist bourgeois calculates: "while I have in my hands lands, factories, workshops, banks; while I possess newspapers, universities, schools; while--and this most important of all--I retain control of the army: the apparatus of democracy, however you reconstruct it, will remain obedient to my will. I subordinate to my interests spiritually the stupid, conservative, characterless lower middle-class, just as it is subjected to me materially. I oppress, and will oppress, its imagination by the gigantic scale of my buildings, my transactions, my plans, and my crimes. For moments when it is dissatisfied and murmurs, I have created scores of safety-valves and lightning-conductors. At the right moment I will bring into existence opposition parties, which will disappear to-morrow, but which to-day accomplish their mission by affording the possibility of the lower middle-class expressing their indignation without hurt therefrom for capitalism. I shall hold the masses of the people, under cover of compulsory general education, on the verge of complete ignorance, giving them no opportunity of rising above the level which my experts in spiritual slavery consider safe. I will corrupt, deceive, and terrorize the more privileged or the more backward of the proletariat itself. By means of these measures, I shall not allow the vanguard of the working class to gain the ear of the majority of the working class, while the necessary weapons of mastery and terrorism remain in my hands." To this the revolutionary proletarian replies: "Consequently, the first condition of salvation is to tear the weapons of domination out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. It is hopeless to think of a peaceful arrival to power while the bourgeoisie retains in its hands all the apparatus of power. Three times over hopeless is the idea of coming to power by the path which the bourgeoisie itself indicates and, at the same time, barricades--the path of parliamentary democracy. There is only one way: to seize power, taking away from the bourgeoisie the material apparatus of government. Independently of the superficial balance of forces in parliament, I shall take over for social administration the chief forces and resources of production. I shall free the mind of the lower middle-class from their capitalist hypnosis. I shall show them in practice what is the meaning of Socialist production. Then even the most backward, the most ignorant, or most terrorized sections of the nation will support me, and willingly and intelligently will join in the work of social construction." When the Russian Soviet Government dissolved the Constituent Assembly, that fact seemed to the leading Social-Democrats of Western Europe, if not the beginning of the end of the world, at all events a rude and arbitrary break with all the previous developments of Socialism. In reality, it was only the inevitable outcome of the new position resulting from imperialism and the war. If Russian Communism was the first to enter the path of casting up theoretical and practical accounts, this was due to the same historical reasons which forced the Russian proletariat to be the first to enter the path of the struggle for power. All that has happened since then in Europe bears witness to the fact that we drew the right conclusion. To imagine that democracy can be restored in its general purity means that one is living in a pitiful, reactionary utopia. THE METAPHYSICS OF DEMOCRACY Feeling the historical ground shaking under his feet on the question of democracy, Kautsky crosses to the ground of metaphysics. Instead of inquiring into what is, he deliberates about what ought to be. The principles of democracy--the sovereignty of the people, universal and equal suffrage, personal liberties--appear, as presented to him, in a halo of moral duty. They are turned from their historical meaning and presented as unalterable and sacred things-in-themselves. This metaphysical fall from grace is not accidental. It is instructive that the late Plekhanov, a merciless enemy of Kantism at the best period of his activity, attempted at the end of his life, when the wave of patriotism had washed over him, to clutch at the straw of the categorical imperative. That real democracy with which the German people is now making practical acquaintance Kautsky confronts with a kind of ideal democracy, as he would confront a common phenomenon with the thing-in-itself. Kautsky indicates with certitude not one country in which democracy is really capable of guaranteeing a painless transition to Socialism. But he does know, and firmly, that such democracy ought to exist. The present German National Assembly, that organ of helplessness, reactionary malice, and degraded solicitations, is confronted by Kautsky with a different, real, true National Assembly, which possesses all virtues--excepting the small virtue of reality. The doctrine of formal democracy is not scientific Socialism, but the theory of so-called natural law. The essence of the latter consists in the recognition of eternal and unchanging standards of law, which among different peoples and at different periods find a different, more or less limited and distorted expression. The natural law of the latest history--_i.e._, as it emerged from the middle ages--included first of all a protest against class privileges, the abuse of despotic legislation, and the other "artificial" products of feudal positive law. The theoreticians of the, as yet, weak Third Estate expressed its class interests in a few ideal standards, which later on developed into the teaching of democracy, acquiring at the same time an individualist character. The individual is absolute; all persons have the right of expressing their thoughts in speech and print; every man must enjoy equal electoral rights. As a battle cry against feudalism, the demand for democracy had a progressive character. As time went on, however, the metaphysics of natural law (the theory of formal democracy) began to show its reactionary side--the establishment of an ideal standard to control the real demands of the laboring masses and the revolutionary parties. If we look back to the historical sequence of world concepts, the theory of natural law will prove to be a paraphrase of Christian spiritualism freed from its crude mysticism. The Gospels proclaimed to the slave that he had just the same soul as the slave-owner, and in this way established the equality of all men before the heavenly tribunal. In reality, the slave remained a slave, and obedience became for him a religious duty. In the teaching of Christianity, the slave found an expression for his own ignorant protest against his degraded condition. Side by side with the protest was also the consolation. Christianity told him:--"You have an immortal soul, although you resemble a pack-horse." Here sounded the note of indignation. But the same Christianity said:--"Although you are like a pack-horse, yet your immortal soul has in store for it an eternal reward." Here is the voice of consolation. These two notes were found in historical Christianity in different proportions at different periods and amongst different classes. But as a whole, Christianity, like all other religions, became a method of deadening the consciousness of the oppressed masses. Natural law, which developed into the theory of democracy, said to the worker: "all men are equal before the law, independently of their origin, their property, and their position; every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the people." This ideal criterion revolutionized the consciousness of the masses in so far as it was a condemnation of absolutism, aristocratic privileges, and the property qualification. But the longer it went on, the more it sent the consciousness to sleep, legalizing poverty, slavery and degradation: for how could one revolt against slavery when every man has an equal right in determining the fate of the nation? Rothschild, who has coined the blood and tears of the world into the gold napoleons of his income, has one vote at the parliamentary elections. The ignorant tiller of the soil who cannot sign his name, sleeps all his life without taking his clothes off, and wanders through society like an underground mole, plays his part, however, as a trustee of the nation's sovereignty, and is equal to Rothschild in the courts and at the elections. In the real conditions of life, in the economic process, in social relations, in their way of life, people became more and more unequal; dazzling luxury was accumulated at one pole, poverty and hopelessness at the other. But in the sphere of the legal edifice of the State, these glaring contradictions disappeared, and there penetrated thither only unsubstantial legal shadows. The landlord, the laborer, the capitalist, the proletarian, the minister, the bootblack--all are equal as "citizens" and as "legislators." The mystic equality of Christianity has taken one step down from the heavens in the shape of the "natural," "legal" equality of democracy. But it has not yet reached earth, where lie the economic foundations of society. For the ignorant day-laborer, who all his life remains a beast of burden in the service of the bourgeoisie, the ideal right to influence the fate of the nations by means of the parliamentary elections remained little more real than the palace which he was promised in the kingdom of heaven. In the practical interests of the development of the working class, the Socialist Party took its stand at a certain period on the path of parliamentarism. But this did not mean in the slightest that it accepted in principle the metaphysical theory of democracy, based on extra-historical, super-class rights. The proletarian doctrines examined democracy as the instrument of bourgeois society entirely adapted to the problems and requirements of the ruling classes; but as bourgeois society lived by the labor of the proletariat and could not deny it the legalization of a certain part of its class struggle without destroying itself, this gave the Socialist Party the possibility of utilizing, at a certain period, and within certain limits, the mechanism of democracy, without taking an oath to do so as an unshakable principle. The root problem of the party, at all periods of its struggle, was to create the conditions for real, economic, living equality for mankind as members of a united human commonwealth. It was just for this reason that the theoreticians of the proletariat had to expose the metaphysics of democracy as a philosophic mask for political mystification. The democratic party at the period of its revolutionary enthusiasm, when exposing the enslaving and stupefying lie of church dogma, preached to the masses:--"You are lulled to sleep by promises of eternal bliss at the end of your life, while here you have no rights and you are bound with the chains of tyranny." The Socialist Party, a few decades later, said to the same masses with no less right:--"You are lulled to sleep with the fiction of civic equality and political rights, but you are deprived of the possibility of realizing those rights. Conditional and shadowy legal equality has been transformed into the convicts' chain with which each of you is fastened to the chariot of capitalism." In the name of its fundamental task, the Socialist Party mobilized the masses on the parliamentary ground as well as on others; but nowhere and at no time did any party bind itself to bring the masses to Socialism only through the gates of democracy. In adapting ourselves to the parliamentary regime, we stopped at a theoretical exposure of democracy, because we were still too weak to overcome it in practice. But the path of Socialist ideas which is visible through all deviations, and even betrayals, foreshadows no other outcome but this: to throw democracy aside and replace it by the mechanism of the proletariat, at the moment when the latter is strong enough to carry out such a task. We shall bring one piece of evidence, albeit a sufficiently striking one. "Parliamentarism," wrote Paul Lafargue in the Russian review, _Sozialdemokrat_, in 1888, "is a system of government in which the people acquires the illusion that it is controlling the forces of the country itself, when, in reality, the actual power is concentrated in the hands of the bourgeoisie--and not even of the whole bourgeoisie, but only of certain sections of that class. In the first period of its supremacy the bourgeoisie does not understand, or, more correctly, does not feel, the necessity for making the people believe in the illusion of self-government. Hence it was that all the parliamentary countries of Europe began with a limited franchise. Everywhere the right of influencing the policy of the country by means of the election of deputies belonged at first only to more or less large property holders, and was only gradually extended to less substantial citizens, until finally in some countries it became from a privilege the universal right of all and sundry. "In bourgeois society, the more considerable becomes the amount of social wealth, the smaller becomes the number of individuals by whom it is appropriated. The same takes place with power: in proportion as the mass of citizens who possess political rights increases, and the number of elected rulers increases, the actual power is concentrated and becomes the monopoly of a smaller and smaller group of individuals." Such is the secret of the majority. For the Marxist, Lafargue, parliamentarism remains as long as the supremacy of the bourgeoisie remains. "On the day," writes Lafargue, "when the proletariat of Europe and America seizes the State, it will have to organize a revolutionary government, and govern society as a dictatorship, until the bourgeoisie has disappeared as a class." Kautsky in his time knew this Marxist estimate of parliamentarism, and more than once repeated it himself, although with no such Gallic sharpness and lucidity. The theoretical apostasy of Kautsky lies just in this point: having recognized the principle of democracy as absolute and eternal, he has stepped back from materialist dialectics to natural law. That which was exposed by Marxism as the passing mechanism of the bourgeoisie, and was subjected only to temporary utilization with the object of preparing the proletarian revolution, has been newly sanctified by Kautsky as the supreme principle standing above classes, and unconditionally subordinating to itself the methods of the proletarian struggle. The counter-revolutionary degeneration of parliamentarism finds its most perfect expression in the deification of democracy by the decaying theoreticians of the Second International. THE CONSTITUENT ASSEMBLY Speaking generally, the attainment of a majority in a democratic parliament by the party of the proletariat is not an absolute impossibility. But such a fact, even if it were realized, would not introduce any new principle into the course of events. The intermediate elements of the intelligentsia, under the influence of the parliamentary victory of the proletariat, might possibly display less resistance to the new regime. But the fundamental resistance of the bourgeoisie would be decided by such facts as the attitude of the army, the degree to which the workers were armed, the situation in the neighboring states: and the civil war would develop under the pressure of these most real circumstances, and not by the mobile arithmetic of parliamentarism. Our party has never refused to lead the way for proletarian dictatorship through the gates of democracy, having clearly summed up in its mind certain agitational and political advantages of such a "legalized" transition to the new regime. Hence, our attempt to call the Constituent Assembly. The Russian peasant, only just awakened by the revolution to political life, found himself face to face with half a dozen parties, each of which apparently had made up its mind to confuse his mind. The Constituent Assembly placed itself across the path of the revolutionary movement, and was swept aside. The opportunist majority in the Constituent Assembly represented only the political reflection of the mental confusion and indecision which reigned amidst the middle-classes in the town and country and amidst the more backward elements of the proletariat. If we take the viewpoint of isolated historical possibilities, one might say that it would have been more painless if the Constituent Assembly had worked for a year or two, had finally discredited the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks by their connection with the Cadets, and had thereby led to the formal majority of the Bolsheviks, showing the masses that in reality only two forces existed: the revolutionary proletariat, led by the Communists, and the counter-revolutionary democracy, headed by the generals and the admirals. But the point is that the pulse of the internal relations of the revolution was beating not at all in time with the pulse of the development of its external relations. If our party had thrown all responsibility on to the objective formula of "the course of events" the development of military operations might have forestalled us. German imperialism might have seized Petrograd, the evacuation of which the Kerensky Government had already begun. The fall of Petrograd would at that time have meant a death-blow to the proletariat, for all the best forces of the revolution were concentrated there, in the Baltic Fleet and in the Red capital. * * * * * Our party may be accused, therefore, not of going against the course of historical development, but of having taken at a stride several political steps. It stepped over the heads of the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, in order not to allow German imperialism to step across the head of the Russian proletariat and conclude peace with the Entente on the back of the revolution before it was able to spread its wings over the whole world. From the above it will not be difficult to deduce the answers to the two questions with which Kautsky pestered us. Firstly: Why did we summon the Constituent Assembly when we had in view the dictatorship of the proletariat? Secondly: If the first Constituent Assembly which we summoned proved backward and not in harmony with the interests of the revolution, why did we reject the idea of a new Assembly? The thought at the back of Kautsky's mind is that we repudiated democracy, not on the ground of principle, but only because it proved against us. In order to seize this insinuation by its long ears, let us establish the facts. The watchword, "All power to the Soviets," was put forward by our Party at the very beginning of the revolution--_i.e._, long before, not merely the decree as to the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, but the decree as to its convocation. True, we did not set up the Soviets in opposition to the future Constituent Assembly, the summoning of which was constantly postponed by the Government of Kerensky, and consequently became more and more problematical. But in any case, we did not consider the Constituent Assembly, after the manner of the democrats, as the future master of the Russian land, who would come and settle everything. We explained to the masses that the Soviets, the revolutionary organizations of the laboring masses themselves, can and must become the true masters. If we did not formally repudiate the Constituent Assembly beforehand, it was only because it stood in contrast, not to the power of the Soviets, but to the power of Kerensky himself, who, in his turn, was only a screen for the bourgeoisie. At the same time we did decide beforehand that, if, in the Constituent Assembly, the majority proved in our favor, that body must dissolve itself and hand over the power to the Soviets--as later on the Petrograd Town Council did, elected as it was on the basis of the most democratic electoral franchise. In my book on the October Revolution, I tried to explain the reasons which made the Constituent Assembly the out-of-date reflection of an epoch through which the revolution had already passed. As we saw the organization of revolutionary power only in the Soviets, and at the moment of the summoning of the Constituent Assembly the Soviets were already the de facto power, the question was inevitably decided for us in the sense of the violent dissolution of the Constituent Assembly, since it would not dissolve itself in favor of the Government of the Soviets. "But why," asks Kautsky, "did you not summon a new Constituent Assembly?" Because we saw no need for it. If the first Constituent Assembly could still play a fleeting progressive part, conferring a sanction upon the Soviet regime in its first days, convincing for the middle-class elements, now, after two years of victorious proletarian dictatorship and the complete collapse of all democratic attempts in Siberia, on the shores of the White Sea, in the Ukraine, and in the Caucasus, the power of the Soviets truly does not need the blessing of the faded authority of the Constituent Assembly. "Are we not right in that case to conclude," asks Kautsky in the tone of Lloyd George, "that the Soviet Government rules by the will of the minority, since it avoids testing its supremacy by universal suffrage?" Here is a blow that misses its mark. If the parliamentary regime, even in the period of "peaceful," stable development, was a rather crude method of discovering the opinion of the country, and in the epoch of revolutionary storm completely lost its capacity to follow the course of the struggle and the development of revolutionary consciousness, the Soviet regime, which is more closely, straightly, honestly bound up with the toiling majority of the people, does achieve meaning, not in statically reflecting a majority, but in dynamically creating it. Having taken its stand on the path of revolutionary dictatorship, the working class of Russia has thereby declared that it builds its policy in the period of transition, not on the shadowy art of rivalry with chameleon-hued parties in the chase for peasant votes, but on the actual attraction of the peasant masses, side by side with the proletariat, into the work of ruling the country in the real interests of the laboring masses. Such democracy goes a little deeper down than parliamentarism. To-day, when the main problem--the question of life and death--of the revolution consists in the military repulse of the various attacks of the White Guard bands, does Kautsky imagine that any form of parliamentary "majority" is capable of guaranteeing a more energetic, devoted, and successful organization of revolutionary defence? The conditions of the struggle are so defined, in a revolutionary country throttled by the criminal ring of the blockade, that all the middle-class groups are confronted only with the alternative of Denikin or the Soviet Government. What further proof is needed when even parties, which stand for compromise in principle, like the Mensheviks and the Socialist-Revolutionaries, have split along that very line? When suggesting to us the election of a Constituent Assembly, does Kautsky propose the stopping of the civil war for the purpose of the elections? By whose decision? If he intends for this purpose to bring into motion the authority of the Second International, we hasten to inform him that that institution enjoys in Denikin's camp only a little more authority than it does in ours. But to the extent that the civil war between the Workers' and Peasants' Army and the imperialist bands is still going on, the elections must of necessity be limited to Soviet territory. Does Kautsky desire to insist that we should allow the parties which support Denikin to come out into the open? Empty and contemptible chatter! There is not one government, at any time and under any conditions, which would allow its enemies to mobilize hostile forces in the rear of its armies. A not unimportant place in the discussion of the question is occupied by the fact that the flower of the laboring population is at present on active service. The foremost workers and the most class-conscious peasants, who take the first place at all elections, as in all important political activities, directing the public opinion of the workers, are at present fighting and dying as commanders, commissars, or rank and file in the Red Army. If the most "democratic" governments in the bourgeois states, whose regime is founded on parliamentarism, consider it impossible to carry on elections to parliament in wartime, it is all the more senseless to demand such elections during the war of the Soviet Republic, the regime of which is not for one moment founded on parliamentarism. It is quite sufficient that the revolutionary government of Russia, in the most difficult months and times, never stood in the way of periodic re-elections of its _own_ elective institutions--the local and central Soviets. Finally, as a last argument--the last and the least--we have to present to the notice of Kautsky that even the Russian Kautskians, the Mensheviks like Martov and Dan, do not consider it possible to put forward at the present moment a demand for a Constituent Assembly, postponing it to better times in the future. Will there be any need of it then? Of this one may be permitted to doubt. When the civil war is over, the dictatorship of the working class will disclose all its creative energy, and will, in practice, show the most backward masses what it can give them. By means of a systematically applied universal labor service, and a centralized organization of distribution, the whole population of the country will be drawn into the general Soviet system of economic arrangement and self-government. The Soviets themselves, at present the organs of government, will gradually melt into purely economic organizations. Under such conditions it is doubtful whether any one will think of erecting, over the real fabric of Socialist society, an archaic crown in the shape of the Constituent Assembly, which would only have to register the fact that everything necessary has already been "constituted" before it and without it.[3] [3] In order to charm us in favor of a Constituent Assembly Kautsky brings forward an argument based on the rate of exchange to the assistance of his argument, based on the categorical imperative. "Russia requires," he writes, "the help of foreign capital, but this help will not come to the Soviet Republic if the latter does not summon a Constituent Assembly, and does not give freedom of the Press; not because the capitalists are democratic idealists--to Tsarism they gave without any hesitation many milliards--but because they have no business faith in a revolutionary government." (Page 218.) There are scraps of truth in this rubbish. The Stock Exchange did really support the government of Kolchak when it relied for support on the Constituent Assembly. From its experience of Kolchak the Stock Exchange became confirmed in its conviction that the mechanism of bourgeois democracy can be utilized in capitalist interests, and then thrown aside like a worn-out pair of puttees. It is quite possible that the Stock Exchange would again give a parliamentary loan on the guarantee of a Constituent Assembly, believing, on the basis of its former experience, that such a body would prove only an intermediate step to capitalist dictatorship. We do not propose to buy the "business faith" of the Stock Exchange at such a price, and decidedly prefer the "faith" which is aroused in the realist Stock Exchange by the weapon of the Red Army. 4 TERRORISM The chief theme of Kautsky's book is terrorism. The view that terrorism is of the essence of revolution Kautsky proclaims to be a widespread delusion. It is untrue that he who desires revolution must put up with terrorism. As far as he, Kautsky, is concerned, he is, generally speaking, for revolution, but decidedly against terrorism. From there, however, complications begin. "The revolution brings us," Kautsky complains, "a bloody terrorism carried out by Socialist governments. The Bolsheviks in Russia first stepped on to this path, and were, consequently, sternly condemned by all Socialists who had not adopted the Bolshevik point of view, including the Socialists of the German Majority. But as soon as the latter found themselves threatened in their supremacy, they had recourse to the methods of the same terrorist regime which they attacked in the East." (Page 9.) It would seem that from this follows the conclusion that terrorism is much more profoundly bound up with the nature of revolution than certain sages think. But Kautsky makes an absolutely opposite conclusion. The gigantic development of White and Red terrorism in all the last revolutions--the Russian, the German, the Austrian, and the Hungarian--is evidence to him that these revolutions turned aside from their true path and turned out to be not the revolution they ought to have been according to the theoretical visions of Kautsky. Without going into the question whether terrorism "as such" is "immanent" to the revolution "as such," let us consider a few of the revolutions as they pass before us in the living history of mankind. Let us first regard the religious Reformation, which proved the watershed between the Middle Ages and modern history: the deeper were the interests of the masses that it involved, the wider was its sweep, the more fiercely did the civil war develop under the religious banner, and the more merciless did the terror become on the other side. In the seventeenth century England carried out two revolutions. The first, which brought forth great social upheavals and wars, brought amongst other things the execution of King Charles I, while the second ended happily with the accession of a new dynasty. The British bourgeoisie and its historians maintain quite different attitudes to these two revolutions: the first is for them a rising of the mob--the "Great Rebellion"; the second has been handed down under the title of the "Glorious Revolution." The reason for this difference in estimates was explained by the French historian, Augustin Thierry. In the first English revolution, in the "Great Rebellion," the active force was the people; while in the second it was almost "silent." Hence, it follows that, in surroundings of class slavery, it is difficult to teach the oppressed masses good manners. When provoked to fury they use clubs, stones, fire, and the rope. The court historians of the exploiters are offended at this. But the great event in modern "bourgeois" history is, none the less, not the "Glorious Revolution," but the "Great Rebellion." The greatest event in modern history after the Reformation and the "Great Rebellion," and far surpassing its two predecessors in significance, was the great French Revolution of the eighteenth century. To this classical revolution there was a corresponding classical terrorism. Kautsky is ready to forgive the terrorism of the Jacobins, acknowledging that they had no other way of saving the republic. But by this justification after the event no one is either helped or hindered. The Kautskies of the end of the eighteenth century (the leaders of the French Girondists) saw in the Jacobins the personification of evil. Here is a comparison, sufficiently instructive in its banality, between the Jacobins and the Girondists from the pen of one of the bourgeois French historians: "Both one side and the other desired the republic." But the Girondists "desired a free, legal, and merciful republic. The Montagnards desired a despotic and terrorist republic. Both stood for the supreme power of the people; but the Girondist justly understood all by the people, while the Montagnards considered only the working class to be the people. That was why only to such persons, in the opinion of the Montagnards, did the supremacy belong." The antithesis between the noble champions of the Constituent Assembly and the bloodthirsty agents of the revolutionary dictatorship is here outlined fairly clearly, although in the political terms of the epoch. The iron dictatorship of the Jacobins was evoked by the monstrously difficult position of revolutionary France. Here is what the bourgeois historian says of this period: "Foreign troops had entered French territory from four sides. In the north, the British and the Austrians, in Alsace, the Prussians, in Dauphine and up to Lyons, the Piedmontese, in Roussillon the Spaniards. And this at a time, when civil war was raging at four different points: in Normandy, in the Vendée, at Lyons, and at Toulon." (Page 176). To this we must add internal enemies in the form of numerous secret supporters of the old regime, ready by all methods to assist the enemy. The severity of the proletarian dictatorship in Russia, let us point out here, was conditioned by no less difficult circumstances. There was one continuous front, on the north and south, in the east and west. Besides the Russian White Guard armies of Kolchak, Denikin and others, there are attacking Soviet Russia, simultaneously or in turn: Germans, Austrians, Czecho-Slovaks, Serbs, Poles, Ukrainians, Roumanians, French, British, Americans, Japanese, Finns, Esthonians, Lithuanians.... In a country throttled by a blockade and strangled by hunger, there are conspiracies, risings, terrorist acts, and destruction of roads and bridges. "The government which had taken on itself the struggle with countless external and internal enemies had neither money, nor sufficient troops, nor anything except boundless energy, enthusiastic support on the part of the revolutionary elements of the country, and the gigantic courage to take all measures necessary for the safety of the country, however arbitrary and severe they were." In such words did once upon a time Plekhanov describe the government of the--Jacobins. (_Sozial-demokrat_, a quarterly review of literature and politics. Book I, February, 1890, London. The article on "The Centenary of the Great Revolution," pages 6-7). Let us now turn to the revolution which took place in the second half of the nineteenth century, in the country of "democracy"--in the United States of North America. Although the question was not the abolition of property altogether, but only of the abolition of property in negroes, nevertheless, the institutions of democracy proved absolutely powerless to decide the argument in a peaceful way. The southern states, defeated at the presidential elections in 1860, decided by all possible means to regain the influence they had hitherto exerted in the question of slave-owning; and uttering, as was right, the proper sounding words about freedom and independence, rose in a slave-owners' insurrection. Hence inevitably followed all the later consequences of civil war. At the very beginning of the struggle, the military government in Baltimore imprisoned in Fort MacHenry a few citizens, sympathizers with the slave-holding South, in spite of Habeas Corpus. The question of the lawfulness or the unlawfulness of such action became the object of fierce disputes between so-called "high authorities." The judge of the Supreme Court, decided that the President had neither the right to arrest the operation of Habeas Corpus nor to give plenipotentiary powers to that end to the military authorities. "Such, in all probability, is the correct Constitutional solution of the question," says one of the first historians of the American Civil War. "But the state of affairs was to such a degree critical, and the necessity of taking decisive measures against the population of Baltimore so great, that not only the Government but the people of the United States also supported the most energetic measures."[4] [4] (The History of the American War, by Fletcher, Lieut.-Colonel in the Scots Guards, St. Petersburg, 1867, page 95.) Some goods that the rebellious South required were secretly supplied by the merchants of the North. Naturally, the Northerners had no other course but to introduce methods of repression. On August 6, 1861, the President confirmed a resolution of Congress as to "the confiscation of property used for insurrectionary purposes." The people, in the shape of the most democratic elements, were in favor of extreme measures. The Republican Party had a decided majority in the North, and persons suspected of secessionism, _i.e._, of sympathizing with the rebellious Southern states, were subjected to violence. In some northern towns, and even in the states of New England, famous for their order, the people frequently burst into the offices of newspapers which supported the revolting slave-owners and smashed their printing presses. It occasionally happened that reactionary publishers were smeared with tar, decorated with feathers, and carried in such array through the public squares until they swore an oath of loyalty to the Union. The personality of a planter smeared in tar bore little resemblance to the "end-in-itself;" so that the categorical imperative of Kautsky suffered in the civil war of the states a considerable blow. But this is not all. "The government, on its part," the historian tells us, "adopted repressive measures of various kinds against publications holding views opposed to its own: and in a short time the hitherto free American press was reduced to a condition _scarcely superior to that prevailing in the autocratic European States_." The same fate overtook the freedom of speech. "In this way," Lieut.-Colonel Fletcher continues, "the American people at this time denied itself the greater part of its freedom. It should be observed," he moralizes, "that _the majority of the people_ was to such an extent occupied with the war, and to such a degree imbued with the readiness for any kind of sacrifice to attain its end, that it not only did not regret its vanished liberties, but scarcely even noticed their disappearance."[5] [5] Fletcher's History of the American War, pages 162-164. Infinitely more ruthlessly did the bloodthirsty slave-owners of the South employ their uncontrollable hordes. "Wherever there was a majority in favor of slavery," writes the Count of Paris, "public opinion behaved despotically to the minority. All who expressed pity for the national banner ... were forced to be silent. But soon this itself became insufficient; as in all revolutions, the indifferent were forced to express their loyalty to the new order of things.... Those who did not agree to this were given up as a sacrifice to the hatred and violence of the mass of the people.... In each centre of growing civilization (South-Western states) vigilance committees were formed, composed of all those who had been distinguished by their extreme views in the electoral struggle.... A tavern was the usual place of their sessions, and a noisy orgy was mingled with a contemptible parody of public forms of justice. A few madmen sitting around a desk on which gin and whisky flowed judged their present and absent fellow citizens. The accused, even before having been questioned, could see the rope being prepared. He who did not appear at the court learned his sentence when falling under the bullets of the executioner concealed in the forest...." This picture is extremely reminiscent of the scenes which day by day took place in the camps of Denikin, Kolchak, Yudenich, and the other heroes of Anglo-Franco-American "democracy." We shall see later how the question of terrorism stood in regard to the Paris Commune of 1871. In any case, the attempts of Kautsky to contrast the Commune with us are false at their very root, and only bring the author to a juggling with words of the most petty character. The institution of hostages apparently must be recognized as "immanent" in the terrorism of the civil war. Kautsky is against terrorism and against the institution of hostages, but in favor of the Paris Commune. (N.B.--The Commune existed fifty years ago.) Yet the Commune took hostages. A difficulty arises. But what does the art of exegesis exist for? The decree of the Commune concerning hostages and their execution in reply to the atrocities of the Versaillese arose, according to the profound explanation of Kautsky, "from a striving to preserve human life, not to destroy it." A marvellous discovery! It only requires to be developed. It could, and must, be explained that in the civil war we destroyed White Guards in order that they should not destroy the workers. Consequently, our problem is not the destruction of human life, but its preservation. But as we have to struggle for the preservation of human life with arms in our hands, it leads to the destruction of human life--a puzzle the dialectical secret of which was explained by old Hegel, without reckoning other still more ancient sages. The Commune could maintain itself and consolidate its position only by a determined struggle with the Versaillese. The latter, on the other hand, had a large number of agents in Paris. Fighting with the agents of Thiers, the Commune could not abstain from destroying the Versaillese at the front and in the rear. If its rule had crossed the bounds of Paris, in the provinces it would have found--during the process of the civil war with the Army of the National Assembly--still more determined foes in the midst of the peaceful population. The Commune when fighting the royalists could not allow freedom of speech to royalist agents in the rear. Kautsky, in spite of all the happenings in the world to-day, completely fails to realize what war is in general, and the civil war in particular. He does not understand that every, or nearly every, sympathizer with Thiers in Paris was not merely an "opponent" of the Communards in ideas, but an agent and spy of Thiers, a ferocious enemy ready to shoot one in the back. The enemy must be made harmless, and in wartime this means that he must be destroyed. The problem of revolution, as of war, consists in breaking the will of the foe, forcing him to capitulate and to accept the conditions of the conqueror. The will, of course, is a fact of the physical world, but in contradistinction to a meeting, a dispute, or a congress, the revolution carries out its object by means of the employment of material resources--though to a less degree than war. The bourgeoisie itself conquered power by means of revolts, and consolidated it by the civil war. In the peaceful period, it retains power by means of a system of repression. As long as class society, founded on the most deep-rooted antagonisms, continues to exist, repression remains a necessary means of breaking the will of the opposing side. Even if, in one country or another, the dictatorship of the proletariat grew up within the external framework of democracy, this would by no means avert the civil war. The question as to who is to rule the country, _i.e._, of the life or death of the bourgeoisie, will be decided on either side, not by references to the paragraphs of the constitution, but by the employment of all forms of violence. However deeply Kautsky goes into the question of the food of the anthropopithecus (see page 122 et seq. of his book) and other immediate and remote conditions which determine the cause of human cruelty, he will find in history no other way of breaking the class will of the enemy except the systematic and energetic use of violence. The degree of ferocity of the struggle depends on a series of internal and international circumstances. The more ferocious and dangerous is the resistance of the class enemy who have been overthrown, the more inevitably does the system of repression take the form of a system of terror. But here Kautsky unexpectedly takes up a new position in his struggle with Soviet terrorism. He simply waves aside all reference to the ferocity of the counter-revolutionary opposition of the Russian bourgeoisie. "Such ferocity," he says, "could not be noticed in November, 1917, in Petrograd and Moscow, and still less more recently in Budapest." (Page 149.) With such a happy formulation of the question, revolutionary terrorism merely proves to be a product of the blood-thirstiness of the Bolsheviks, who simultaneously abandoned the traditions of the vegetarian anthropopithecus and the moral lessons of Kautsky. The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November, 1917 (new style), was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any resistance. In Petrograd the power of Kerensky was overthrown almost without a fight. In Moscow its resistance was dragged out, mainly owing to the indecisive character of our own actions. In the majority of the provincial towns, power was transferred to the Soviet on the mere receipt of a telegram from Petrograd or Moscow. If the matter had ended there, there would have been no word of the Red Terror. But in November, 1917, there was already evidence of the beginning of the resistance of the propertied classes. True, there was required the intervention of the imperialist governments of the West in order to give the Russian counter-revolution faith in itself, and to add ever-increasing power to its resistance. This can be shown from facts, both important and insignificant, day by day during the whole epoch of the Soviet revolution. Kerensky's "Staff" felt no support forthcoming from the mass of the soldiery, and was inclined to recognize the Soviet Government, which had begun negotiations for an armistice with the Germans. But there followed the protest of the military missions of the Entente, followed by open threats. The Staff was frightened; incited by "Allied" officers, it entered the path of opposition. This led to armed conflict and to the murder of the chief of the field staff, General Dukhonin, by a group of revolutionary sailors. In Petrograd, the official agents of the Entente, especially the French Military Mission, hand in hand with the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, openly organized the opposition, mobilizing, arming, inciting against us the cadets, and the bourgeois youth generally, from the second day of the Soviet revolution. The rising of the junkers on November 10 brought about a hundred times more victims than the revolution of November 7. The campaign of the adventurers Kerensky and Krasnov against Petrograd, organized at the same time by the Entente, naturally introduced into the struggle the first elements of savagery. Nevertheless, General Krasnov was set free on his word of honor. The Yaroslav rising (in the summer of 1918) which involved so many victims, was organized by Savinkov on the instructions of the French Embassy, and with its resources. Archangel was captured according to the plans of British naval agents, with the help of British warships and aeroplanes. The beginning of the empire of Kolchak, the nominee of the American Stock Exchange, was brought about by the foreign Czecho-Slovak Corps maintained by the resources of the French Government. Kaledin and Krasnov (liberated by us), the first leaders of the counter-revolution on the Don, could enjoy partial success only thanks to the open military and financial aid of Germany. In the Ukraine the Soviet power was overthrown in the beginning of 1918 by German militarism. The Volunteer Army of Denikin was created with the financial and technical help of Great Britain and France. Only in the hope of British intervention and of British military support was Yudenich's army created. The politicians, the diplomats, and the journalists of the Entente have for two years on end been debating with complete frankness the question of whether the financing of the civil war in Russia is a sufficiently profitable enterprise. In such circumstances, one needs truly a brazen forehead to seek the reason for the sanguinary character of the civil war in Russia in the malevolence of the Bolsheviks, and not in the international situation. The Russian proletariat was the first to enter the path of the social revolution, and the Russian bourgeoisie, politically helpless, was emboldened to struggle against its political and economic expropriation only because it saw its elder sister in all countries still in power, and still maintaining economic, political, and, to a certain extent, military supremacy. If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few weeks, after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in Germany, France, and England, there can be no doubt that our revolution would have been the most "peaceful," the most "bloodless" of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth. But this historical sequence--the most "natural" at the first glance, and, in any case, the most beneficial for the Russian working class--found itself infringed--not through our fault, but through the will of events. Instead of being the last, the Russian proletariat proved to be the first. It was just this circumstance, after the first period of confusion, that imparted desperation to the character of the resistance of the classes which had ruled in Russia previously, and forced the Russian proletariat, in a moment of the greatest peril, foreign attacks, and internal plots and insurrections, to have recourse to severe measures of State terror. No one will now say that those measures proved futile. But, perhaps, we are expected to consider them "intolerable"? The working class, which seized power in battle, had as its object and its duty to establish that power unshakeably, to guarantee its own supremacy beyond question, to destroy its enemies' hankering for a new revolution, and thereby to make sure of carrying out Socialist reforms. Otherwise there would be no point in seizing power. The revolution "logically" does not demand terrorism, just as "logically" it does not demand an armed insurrection. What a profound commonplace! But the revolution does require of the revolutionary class that it should attain its end by all methods at its disposal--if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by terrorism. A revolutionary class which has conquered power with arms in its hands is bound to, and will, suppress, rifle in hand, all attempts to tear the power out of its hands. Where it has against it a hostile army, it will oppose to it its own army. Where it is confronted with armed conspiracy, attempt at murder, or rising, it will hurl at the heads of its enemies an unsparing penalty. Perhaps Kautsky has invented other methods? Or does he reduce the whole question to the _degree_ of repression, and recommend in all circumstances imprisonment instead of execution? The question of the form of repression, or of its degree, of course, is not one of "principle." It is a question of expediency. In a revolutionary period, the party which has been thrown from power, which does not reconcile itself with the stability of the ruling class, and which proves this by its desperate struggle against the latter, cannot be terrorized by the threat of imprisonment, as it does not believe in its duration. It is just this simple but decisive fact that explains the widespread recourse to shooting in a civil war. Or, perhaps, Kautsky wishes to say that execution is not expedient, that "classes cannot be cowed." This is untrue. Terror is helpless--and then only "in the long run"--if it is employed by reaction against a historically rising class. But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. _Intimidation_ is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents. The State terror of a revolutionary class can be condemned "morally" only by a man who, as a principle, rejects (in words) every form of violence whatsoever--consequently, every war and every rising. For this one has to be merely and simply a hypocritical Quaker. "But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?" we are asked, by the high priests of Liberalism and Kautskianism. You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient. "FREEDOM OF THE PRESS" One point particularly worries Kautsky, the author of a great many books and articles--the freedom of the Press. Is it permissible to suppress newspapers? During war all institutions and organs of the State and of public opinion become, directly or indirectly, weapons of warfare. This is particularly true of the Press. No government carrying on a serious war will allow publications to exist on its territory which, openly or indirectly, support the enemy. Still more so in a civil war. The nature of the latter is such that each of the struggling sides has in the rear of its armies considerable circles of the population on the side of the enemy. In war, where both success and failure are repaid by death, hostile agents who penetrate into the rear are subject to execution. This is inhumane, but no one ever considered war a school of humanity--still less civil war. Can it be seriously demanded that, during a civil war with the White Guards of Denikin, the publications of parties supporting Denikin should come out unhindered in Moscow and Petrograd? To propose this in the name of the "freedom" of the Press is just the same as, in the name of open dealing, to demand the publication of military secrets. "A besieged city," wrote a Communard, Arthur Arnould of Paris, "cannot permit within its midst that hopes for its fall should openly be expressed, that the fighters defending it should be incited to treason, that the movements of its troops should be communicated to the enemy. Such was the position of Paris under the Commune." Such is the position of the Soviet Republic during the two years of its existence. Let us, however, listen to what Kautsky has to say in this connection. "The justification of this system (_i.e._, repressions in connection with the Press) is reduced to the naive idea that an absolute truth (!) exists, and that only the Communists possess it (!). Similarly," continues Kautsky, "it reduces itself to another point of view, that all writers are by nature liars (!) and that only Communists are fanatics for truth (!). In reality, liars and fanatics for what they consider truth are to be found in all camps." And so on, and so on, and so on. (Page 176.) In this way, in Kautsky's eyes, the revolution, in its most acute phase, when it is a question of the life and death of classes, continues as hitherto to be a literary discussion with the object of establishing ... the truth. What profundity!... Our "truth," of course, is not absolute. But as in its name we are, at the present moment, shedding our blood, we have neither cause nor possibility to carry on a literary discussion as to the relativity of truth with those who "criticize" us with the help of all forms of arms. Similarly, our problem is not to punish liars and to encourage just men amongst journalists of all shades of opinion, but to throttle the class lie of the bourgeoisie and to achieve the class truth of the proletariat, irrespective of the fact that in both camps there are fanatics and liars. "The Soviet Government," Kautsky thunders, "has destroyed the sole remedy that might militate against corruption: the freedom of the Press. Control by means of unlimited freedom of the Press alone could have restrained those bandits and adventurers who will inevitably cling like leeches to every unlimited, uncontrolled power." (Page 188.) And so on. The Press as a trusty weapon of the struggle with corruption! This liberal recipe sounds particularly pitiful when one remembers the two countries with the greatest "freedom" of the Press--North America and France--which, at the same time, are countries of the most highly developed stage of capitalist corruption. Feeding on the old scandal of the political ante-rooms of the Russian revolution, Kautsky imagines that without Cadet and Menshevik freedom the Soviet apparatus is honey-combed with "bandits" and "adventurers." Such was the voice of the Mensheviks a year or eighteen months ago. Now even they will not dare to repeat this. With the help of Soviet control and party selection, the Soviet Government, in the intense atmosphere of the struggle, has dealt with the bandits and adventurers who appeared on the surface at the moment of the revolution incomparably better than any government whatsoever, at any time whatsoever. We are fighting. We are fighting a life-and-death struggle. The Press is a weapon not of an abstract society, but of two irreconcilable, armed and contending sides. We are destroying the Press of the counter-revolution, just as we destroyed its fortified positions, its stores, its communications, and its intelligence system. Are we depriving ourselves of Cadet and Menshevik criticisms of the corruption of the working class? In return we are victoriously destroying the very foundations of capitalist corruption. But Kautsky goes further to develop his theme. He complains that we suppress the newspapers of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, and even--such things have been known--arrest their leaders. Are we not dealing here with "shades of opinion" in the proletarian or the Socialist movement? The scholastic pedant does not see facts beyond his accustomed words. The Mensheviks and S.R.s for him are simply tendencies in Socialism, whereas, in the course of the revolution, they have been transformed into an organization which works in active co-operation with the counter-revolution and carries on against us an open war. The army of Kolchak was organized by Socialist Revolutionaries (how that name savours to-day of the charlatan!), and was supported by Mensheviks. Both carried on--and carry on--against us, for a year and a half, a war on the Northern front. The Mensheviks who rule the Caucasus, formerly the allies of Hohenzollern, and to-day the allies of Lloyd George, arrested and shot Bolsheviks hand in hand with German and British officers. The Mensheviks and S.R.s of the Kuban Rada organized the army of Denikin. The Esthonian Mensheviks who participate in their government were directly concerned in the last advance of Yudenich against Petrograd. Such are these "tendencies" in the Socialist movement. Kautsky considers that one can be in a state of open and civil war with the Mensheviks and S.R.s, who, with the help of the troops they themselves have organized for Yudenich, Kolchak and Denikin, are fighting for their "shade of opinions" in Socialism, and at the same time to allow those innocent "shades of opinion" freedom of the Press in our rear. If the dispute with the S.R.s and the Mensheviks could be settled by means of persuasion and voting--that is, if there were not behind their backs the Russian and foreign imperialists--there would be no civil war. Kautsky, of course, is ready to "condemn"--an extra drop of ink--the blockade, and the Entente support of Denikin, and the White Terror. But in his high impartiality he cannot refuse the latter certain extenuating circumstances. The White Terror, you see, does not infringe their own principles, while the Bolsheviks, making use of the Red Terror, betray the principle of "the sacredness of human life which they themselves proclaimed." (Page 210.) What is the meaning of the principle of the sacredness of human life in practice, and in what does it differ from the commandment, "Thou shalt not kill," Kautsky does not explain. When a murderer raises his knife over a child, may one kill the murderer to save the child? Will not thereby the principle of the "sacredness of human life" be infringed? May one kill the murderer to save oneself? Is an insurrection of oppressed slaves against their masters permissible? Is it permissible to purchase one's freedom at the cost of the life of one's jailers? If human life in general is sacred and inviolable, we must deny ourselves not only the use of terror, not only war, but also revolution itself. Kautsky simply does not realize the counter-revolutionary meaning of the "principle" which he attempts to force upon us. Elsewhere we shall see that Kautsky accuses us of concluding the Brest-Litovsk peace: in his opinion we ought to have continued war. But what then becomes of the sacredness of human life? Does life cease to be sacred when it is a question of people talking another language, or does Kautsky consider that mass murders organized on principles of strategy and tactics are not murders at all? Truly it is difficult to put forward in our age a principle more hypocritical and more stupid. As long as human labor-power, and, consequently, life itself, remain articles of sale and purchase, of exploitation and robbery, the principle of the "sacredness of human life" remains a shameful lie, uttered with the object of keeping the oppressed slaves in their chains. We used to fight against the death penalty introduced by Kerensky, because that penalty was inflicted by the courts-martial of the old army on soldiers who refused to continue the imperialist war. We tore this weapon out of the hands of the old courts-martial, destroyed the courts-martial themselves, and demobilized the old army which had brought them forth. Destroying in the Red Army, and generally throughout the country, counter-revolutionary conspirators who strive by means of insurrections, murders, and disorganization, to restore the old regime, we are acting in accordance with the iron laws of a war in which we desire to guarantee our victory. If it is a question of seeking formal contradictions, then obviously we must do so on the side of the White Terror, which is the weapon of classes which consider themselves "Christian," patronize idealist philosophy, and are firmly convinced that the individuality (their own) is an end-in-itself. As for us, we were never concerned with the Kantian-priestly and vegetarian-Quaker prattle about the "sacredness of human life." We were revolutionaries in opposition, and have remained revolutionaries in power. To make the individual sacred we must destroy the social order which crucifies him. And this problem can only be solved by blood and iron. There is another difference between the White Terror and the Red, which Kautsky to-day ignores, but which in the eyes of a Marxist is of decisive significance. The White Terror is the weapon of the historically reactionary class. When we exposed the futility of the repressions of the bourgeois State against the proletariat, we never denied that by arrests and executions the ruling class, under certain conditions, might temporarily retard the development of the social revolution. But we were convinced that they would not be able to bring it to a halt. We relied on the fact that the proletariat is the historically rising class, and that bourgeois society could not develop without increasing the forces of the proletariat. The bourgeoisie to-day is a falling class. It not only no longer plays an essential part in production, but by its imperialist methods of appropriation is destroying the economic structure of the world and human culture generally. Nevertheless, the historical persistence of the bourgeoisie is colossal. It holds to power, and does not wish to abandon it. Thereby it threatens to drag after it into the abyss the whole of society. We are forced to tear it off, to chop it away. The Red Terror is a weapon utilized against a class, doomed to destruction, which does not wish to perish. If the White Terror can only retard the historical rise of the proletariat, the Red Terror hastens the destruction of the bourgeoisie. This hastening--a pure question of acceleration--is at certain periods of decisive importance. Without the Red Terror, the Russian bourgeoisie, together with the world bourgeoisie, would throttle us long before the coming of the revolution in Europe. One must be blind not to see this, or a swindler to deny it. The man who recognizes the revolutionary historic importance of the very fact of the existence of the Soviet system must also sanction the Red Terror. Kautsky, who, during the last two years, has covered mountains of paper with polemics against Communism and Terrorism, is obliged, at the end of his pamphlet, to recognize the facts, and unexpectedly to admit that the Russian Soviet Government is to-day the most important factor in the world revolution. "However one regards the Bolshevik methods," he writes, "the fact that a proletarian government in a large country has not only reached power, but has retained it for two years up to the present time, amidst great difficulties, extraordinarily increases the sense of power amongst the proletariat of all countries. For the actual revolution the Bolsheviks have thereby accomplished a great work--_grosses geleistet_." (Page 233.) This announcement stuns us as a completely unexpected recognition of historical truth from a quarter whence we had long since ceased to await it. The Bolsheviks have accomplished a great historical task by existing for two years against the united capitalist world. But the Bolsheviks held out not only by ideas, but by the sword. Kautsky's admission is an involuntary sanctioning of the methods of the Red Terror, and at the same time the most effective condemnation of his own critical concoction. THE INFLUENCE OF THE WAR Kautsky sees one of the reasons for the extremely bloody character of the revolution in the war and in its hardening influence on manners. Quite undeniable. That influence, with all the consequences that follow from it, might have been foreseen earlier--approximately in the period when Kautsky was not certain whether one ought to vote for the war credits or against them. "Imperialism has violently torn society out of its condition of unstable equilibrium," he wrote five years ago in our German book--_The War and the International_. "It has blown up the sluices with which Social-Democracy held back the current of the revolutionary energy of the proletariat, and has directed that current into its own channels. This monstrous historical experiment, which at one blow has broken the back of the Socialist International, represents a deadly danger for bourgeoisie society itself. The hammer has been taken from the hand of the worker, and has been replaced by the sword. The worker, bound hand and foot by the mechanism of capitalist society, has suddenly burst out of its midst, and is learning to put the aims of the community higher than his own domestic happiness and than life itself. "With this weapon, which he himself has forged, in his hand, the worker is placed in a position in which the political destiny of the State depends directly on him. Those who in former times oppressed and despised him now flatter and caress him. At the same time he is entering into intimate relations with those same guns which, according to Lassalle, constitute the most important integral part of the constitution. He crosses the boundaries of states, participates in violent requisitions, and under his blows towns pass from hand to hand. Changes take place such as the last generation did not dream of. "If the most advanced workers were aware that force was the mother of law, their political thought still remained saturated with the spirit of opportunism and self-adaptation to bourgeois legality. To-day the worker has learned in practice to despise that legality, and violently to destroy it. The static moments in his psychology are giving place to the dynamic. Heavy guns are knocking into his head the idea that, in cases where it is impossible to avoid an obstacle, there remains the possibility of destroying it. Nearly the whole adult male population is passing through this school of war, terrible in its social realism, which is bringing forth a new type of humanity. "Over all the criteria of bourgeois society--its law, its morality, its religion--is now raised the fist of iron necessity. 'Necessity knows no law' was the declaration of the German Chancellor (August 4, 1914). Monarchs come out into the market-place to accuse one another of lying in the language of fishwives; governments break promises they have solemnly made, while the national church binds its Lord God like a convict to the national cannon. Is it not obvious that these circumstances must create important alterations in the psychology of the working class, radically curing it of that hypnosis of legality which was created by the period of political stagnation? The propertied classes will soon, to their sorrow, have to be convinced of this. The proletariat, after passing through the school of war, at the first serious obstacle within its own country will feel the necessity of speaking with the language of force. 'Necessity knows no law,' he will throw in the face of those who attempt to stop him by laws of bourgeois legality. And the terrible economic necessity which will arise during the course of this war, and particularly at its end, will drive the masses to spurn very many laws." (Page 56-57.) All this is undeniable. But to what is said above one must add that the war has exercised no less influence on the psychology of the ruling classes. As the masses become more insistent in their demands, so the bourgeoisie has become more unyielding. In times of peace, the capitalists used to guarantee their interests by means of the "peaceful" robbery of hired labor. During the war they served those same interests by means of the destruction of countless human lives. This has imparted to their consciousness as a master class a new "Napoleonic" trait. The capitalists during the war became accustomed to send to their death millions of slaves--fellow-countrymen and colonials--for the sake of coal, railway, and other profits. During the war there emerged from the ranks of the bourgeoisie--large, middle, and small--hundreds of thousands of officers, professional fighters, men whose character has received the hardening of battle, and has become freed from all external restraints: qualified soldiers, ready and able to defend the privileged position of the bourgeoisie which produced them with a ferocity which, in its way, borders on heroism. The revolution would probably be more humane if the proletariat had the possibility of "buying off all this band," as Marx once put it. But capitalism during the war has imposed upon the toilers too great a load of debt, and has too deeply undermined the foundations of production, for us to be able seriously to contemplate a ransom in return for which the bourgeoisie would silently make its peace with the revolution. The masses have lost too much blood, have suffered too much, have become too savage, to accept a decision which economically would be beyond their capacity. To this there must be added other circumstances working in the same direction. The bourgeoisie of the conquered countries has been embittered by defeat, the responsibility for which it is inclined to throw on the rank and file--on the workers and peasants who proved incapable of carrying on "the great national war" to a victorious conclusion. From this point of view, one finds very instructive those explanations, unparalleled for their effrontery, which Ludendorff gave to the Commission of the National Assembly. The bands of Ludendorff are burning with the desire to take revenge for their humiliation abroad on the blood of their own proletariat. As for the bourgeoisie of the victorious countries, it has become inflated with arrogance, and is more than ever ready to defend its social position with the help of the bestial methods which guaranteed its victory. We have seen that the bourgeoisie is incapable of organizing the division of the booty amongst its own ranks without war and destruction. Can it, without a fight, abandon its booty altogether? The experience of the last five years leaves no doubt whatsoever on this score: if even previously it was absolutely utopian to expect that the expropriation of the propertied classes--thanks to "democracy"--would take place imperceptibly and painlessly, without insurrections, armed conflicts, attempts at counter-revolution, and severe repression, the state of affairs we have inherited from the imperialist war predetermines, doubly and trebly, the tense character of the civil war and the dictatorship of the proletariat. 5 THE PARIS COMMUNE AND SOVIET RUSSIA _"The short episode of the first revolution carried out by the proletariat for the proletariat ended in the triumph of its enemy. This episode--from March 18 to May 28--lasted seventy-two days."--"The Paris Commune" of March 18, 1871, P. L. Lavrov, Petrograd. 'Kolos' Publishing House, 1919, pp. 160._ THE IMMATURITY OF THE SOCIALIST PARTIES IN THE COMMUNE. The Paris Commune of 1871 was the first, as yet weak, historic attempt of the working class to impose its supremacy. We cherished the memory of the Commune in spite of the extremely limited character of its experience, the immaturity of its participants, the confusion of its programme, the lack of unity amongst its leaders, the indecision of their plans, the hopeless panic of its executive organs, and the terrifying defeat fatally precipitated by all these. We cherish in the Commune, in the words of Lavrov, "the first, though still pale, dawn of the proletarian republic." Quite otherwise with Kautsky. Devoting a considerable part of his book to a crudely tendencious contrast between the Commune and the Soviet power, he sees the main advantages of the Commune in features that we find are its misfortune and its fault. Kautsky laboriously proves that the Paris Commune of 1871 was not "artificially" prepared, but emerged unexpectedly, taking the revolutionaries by surprise--in contrast to the November revolution, which was carefully prepared by our party. This is incontestable. Not daring clearly to formulate his profoundly reactionary ideas, Kautsky does not say outright whether the Paris revolutionaries of 1871 deserve praise for not having foreseen the proletarian insurrection, and for not having foreseen the inevitable and consciously gone to meet it. However, all Kautsky's picture was built up in such a way as to produce in the reader just this idea: the Communards were simply overtaken by misfortune (the Bavarian philistine, Vollmar, once expressed his regret that the Communards had not gone to bed instead of taking power into their hands), and, therefore, deserve pity. The Bolsheviks consciously went to meet misfortune (the conquest of power), and, therefore, there is no forgiveness for them either in this or the future world. Such a formulation of the question may seem incredible in its internal inconsistency. None the less, it follows quite inevitably from the position of the Kautskian "Independents," who draw their heads into their shoulders in order to see and foresee nothing; and, if they do move forward, it is only after having received a preliminary stout blow in the rear. "To humiliate Paris," writes Kautsky, "not to give it self-government, to deprive it of its position as capital, to disarm it in order afterwards to attempt with greater confidence a monarchist _coup d'état_--such was the most important task of the National Assembly and the chief of the executive power it elected, Thiers. Out of this situation arose the conflict which led to the Paris insurrection. "It is clear how different from this was the character of the _coup d'état_ carried out by the Bolsheviks, which drew its strength from the yearning for peace; which had the peasantry behind it; which had in the National Assembly against it, not monarchists, but S.R.s and Menshevik Social-Democrats. "The Bolsheviks came to power by means of a well-prepared _coup d'état_; which at one blow handed over to them the whole machinery of the State--immediately utilized in the most energetic and merciless manner for the purpose of suppressing their opponents, amongst them their proletarian opponents. "No one, on the other hand, was more surprised by the insurrection of the Commune than the revolutionaries themselves, and for a considerable number amongst them the conflict was in the highest degree undesirable." (Page 56.) In order more clearly to realize the actual sense of what Kautsky has written here of the Communards, let us bring forward the following evidence. "On March 1, 1871," writes Lavrov, in his very instructive book on the Commune, "six months after the fall of the Empire, and a few days before the explosion of the Commune, the guiding personalities in the Paris International still had no definite political programme." (Pages 64-65.) "After March 18," writes the same author, "Paris was in the hands of the proletariat, but its leaders, overwhelmed by their unexpected power, did not take the most elementary measures." (Page 71.) "'Your part is too big for you to play, and your sole aim is to get rid of responsibility,' said one member of the Central Committee of the National Guard. In this was a great deal of truth," writes the Communard and historian of the Commune, Lissagaray. "But at the moment of action itself the absence of preliminary organization and preparation is very often a reason why parts are assigned to men which are too big for them to play." (Brussels, 1876; page 106.) From this one can already see (later on it will become still more obvious) that the absence of a direct struggle for power on the part of the Paris Socialists was explained by their theoretical shapelessness and political helplessness, and not at all by higher considerations of tactics. We have no doubt that Kautsky's own loyalty to the traditions of the Commune will be expressed mainly in that extraordinary surprise with which he will greet the proletarian revolution in Germany as "a conflict in the highest degree undesirable." We doubt, however, whether this will be ascribed by posterity to his credit. In reality, one must describe his historical analogy as a combination of confusion, omission, and fraudulent suggestion. The intentions which were entertained by Thiers towards Paris were entertained by Miliukov, who was openly supported by Tseretelli and Chernov, towards Petrograd. All of them, from Kornilov to Potressov, affirmed day after day that Petrograd had alienated itself from the country, had nothing in common with it, was completely corrupted, and was attempting to impose its will upon the community. To overthrow and humiliate Petrograd was the first task of Miliukov and his assistants. And this took place at a period when Petrograd was the true centre of the revolution, which had not yet been able to consolidate its position in the rest of the country. The former president of the Duma, Rodzianko, openly talked about handing over Petrograd to the Germans for educative purposes, as Riga had been handed over. Rodzianko only called by its name what Miliukov was trying to carry out, and what Kerensky assisted by his whole policy. Miliukov, like Thiers, wished to disarm the proletariat. More than that, thanks to Kerensky, Chernov, and Tseretelli, the Petrograd proletariat was to a considerable extent disarmed in July, 1917. It was partially re-armed during Kornilov's march on Petrograd in August. And this new arming was a serious element in the preparation of the November insurrection. In this way, it is just the points in which Kautsky contrasts our November revolution to the March revolt of the Paris workers that, to a very large extent, coincide. In what, however, lies the difference between them? First of all, in the fact that Thiers' criminal plans succeeded: Paris was throttled by him, and tens of thousands of workers were destroyed. Miliukov, on the other hand, had a complete fiasco: Petrograd remained an impregnable fortress of the proletariat, and the leader of the bourgeoisie went to the Ukraine to petition that the Kaiser's troops should occupy Russia. For this difference we were to a considerable extent responsible--and we are ready to bear the responsibility. There is a capital difference also in the fact--that this told more than once in the further course of events--that, while the Communards began mainly with considerations of patriotism, we were invariably guided by the point of view of the international revolution. The defeat of the Commune led to the practical collapse of the First International. The victory of the Soviet power has led to the creation of the Third International. But Marx--on the eve of the insurrection--advised the Communards not to revolt, but to create an organization! One might understand Kautsky if he adduced this evidence in order to show that Marx had insufficiently gauged the acuteness of the situation in Paris. But Kautsky attempts to exploit Marx's advice as a proof of his condemnation of insurrection in general. Like all the mandarins of German Social-Democracy, Kautsky sees in organization first and foremost a method of hindering revolutionary action. But limiting ourselves to the question of organization as such, we must not forget that the November revolution was preceded by nine months of Kerensky's Government, during which our party, not without success, devoted itself not only to agitation, but also to organization. The November revolution took place after we had achieved a crushing majority in the Workers' and Soldiers' Councils of Petrograd, Moscow, and all the industrial centres in the country, and had transformed the Soviets into powerful organizations directed by our party. The Communards did nothing of the kind. Finally, we had behind us the heroic Commune of Paris, from the defeat of which we had drawn the deduction that revolutionaries must foresee events and prepare for them. For this also we are to blame. Kautsky requires his extensive comparison of the Commune and Soviet Russia only in order to slander and humiliate a living and victorious dictatorship of the proletariat in the interests of an attempted dictatorship, in the already fairly distant past. Kautsky quotes with extreme satisfaction the statement of the Central Committee of the National Guard on March 19 in connection with the murder of the two generals by the soldiery. "We say indignantly: the bloody filth with the help of which it is hoped to stain our honor is a pitiful slander. We never organized murder, and never did the National Guard take part in the execution of crime." Naturally, the Central Committee had no cause to assume responsibility for murders with which it had no concern. But the sentimental, pathetic tone of the statement very clearly characterises the political timorousness of these men in the face of bourgeois public opinion. Nor is this surprising. The representatives of the National Guard were men in most cases with a very modest revolutionary past. "Not one well-known name," writes Lissagaray. "They were petty bourgeois shop-keepers, strangers to all but limited circles, and, in most cases, strangers hitherto to politics." (Page 70.) "The modest and, to some extent, fearful sense of terrible historical responsibility, and the desire to get rid of it as soon as possible," writes Lavrov of them, "is evident in all the proclamations of this Central Committee, into the hands of which the destiny of Paris had fallen." (Page 77.) After bringing forward, to our confusion, the declamation concerning bloodshed, Kautsky later on follows Marx and Engels in criticizing the indecision of the Commune. "If the Parisians (_i.e._, the Communards) had persistently followed up the tracts of Thiers, they would, perhaps, have managed to seize the government. The troops falling back from Paris would not have shown the least resistance ... but they let Thiers go without hindrance. They allowed him to lead away his troops and reorganize them at Versailles, to inspire a new spirit in, and strengthen, them." (Page 49.) Kautsky cannot understand that it was the same men, and for the very same reasons, who published the statement of March 19 quoted above, who allowed Thiers to leave Paris with impunity and gather his forces. If the Communards had _conquered_ with the help of resources of a purely moral character, their statement would have acquired great weight. But this did not take place. In reality, their sentimental humaneness was simply the obverse of their revolutionary passivity. The men who, by the will of fate, had received power in Paris, could not understand the necessity of immediately utilizing that power to the end, of hurling themselves after Thiers, and, before he recovered his grasp of the situation, of crushing him, of concentrating the troops in their hands, of carrying out the necessary weeding-out of the officer class, of seizing the provinces. Such men, of course, were not inclined to severe measures with counter-revolutionary elements. The one was closely bound up with the other. Thiers could not be followed up without arresting Thiers' agents in Paris and shooting conspirators and spies. When one considered the execution of counter-revolutionary generals as an indelible "crime," one could not develop energy in following up troops who were under the direction of counter-revolutionary generals. In the revolution in the highest degree of energy is the highest degree of humanity. "Just the men," Lavrov justly remarks, "who hold human life and human blood dear must strive to organize the possibility for a swift and decisive victory, and then to act with the greatest swiftness and energy, in order to crush the enemy. For only in this way can we achieve the minimum of inevitable sacrifice and the minimum of bloodshed." (Page 225.) The statement of March 19 will, however, be considered with more justice if we examine it, not as an unconditional confession of faith, but as the expression of transient moods the day after an unexpected and bloodless victory. Being an absolute stranger to the understanding of the dynamics of revolution, and the internal limitations of its swiftly-developing moods, Kautsky thinks in lifeless schemes, and distorts the perspective of events by arbitrarily selected analogies. He does not understand that soft-hearted indecision is generally characteristic of the masses in the first period of the revolution. The workers pursue the offensive only under the pressure of iron necessity, just as they have recourse to the Red Terror only under the threat of destruction by the White Guards. That which Kautsky represents as the result of the peculiarly elevated moral feeling of the Parisian proletariat in 1871 is, in reality, merely a characteristic of the first stage of the civil war. A similar phenomenon could have been witnessed in our case. In Petrograd we conquered power in November, 1917, almost without bloodshed, and even without arrests. The ministers of Kerensky's Government were set free very soon after the revolution. More, the Cossack General, Krasnov, who had advanced on Petrograd together with Kerensky after the power had passed to the Soviet, and who had been made prisoner by us at Gatchina, was set free on his word of honor the next day. This was "generosity" quite in the spirit of the first measures of the Commune. But it was a mistake. Afterwards, General Krasnov, after fighting against us for about a year in the South, and destroying many thousands of Communists, again advanced on Petrograd, this time in the ranks of Yudenich's army. The proletarian revolution assumed a more severe character only after the rising of the junkers in Petrograd, and particularly after the rising of the Czecho-Slovaks on the Volga organized by the Cadets, the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks, after their mass executions of Communists, the attempt on Lenin's life, the murder of Uritsky, etc., etc. The same tendencies, only in an embryonic form, we see in the history of the Commune. Driven by the logic of the struggle, it took its stand in principle on the path of intimidation. The creation of the Committee of Public Safety was dictated, in the case of many of its supporters, by the idea of the Red Terror. The Committee was appointed "to cut off the heads of traitors" (Journal Officiel No. 123), "to avenge treachery" (No. 124). Under the head of "intimidatory" decrees we must class the order to seize the property of Thiers and of his ministers, to destroy Thiers' house, to destroy the Vendome column, and especially the decree on hostages. For every captured Communard or sympathizer with the Commune shot by the Versaillese, three hostages were to be shot. The activity of the Prefecture of Paris controlled by Raoul Rigault had a purely terroristic, though not always a useful, purpose. The effect of all these measures of intimidation was paralyzed by the helpless opportunism of the guiding elements in the Commune, by their striving to reconcile the bourgeoisie with the _fait accompli_ by the help of pitiful phrases, by their vacillations between the fiction of democracy and the reality of dictatorship. The late Lavrov expresses the latter idea splendidly in his book on the Commune. "The Paris of the rich bourgeois and the poor proletarians, as a political community of different classes, demanded, in the name of liberal principles, complete freedom of speech, of assembly, of criticism of the government, etc. The Paris which had accomplished the revolution in the interests of the proletariat, and had before it the task of realizing this revolution in the shape of institutions, Paris, as the community of the emancipated working-class proletariat, demanded revolutionary--_i.e._, dictatorial, measures against the enemies of the new order." (Pages 143-144.) If the Paris Commune had not fallen, but had continued to exist in the midst of a ceaseless struggle, there can be no doubt that it would have been obliged to have recourse to more and more severe measures for the suppression of the counter-revolution. True, Kautsky would not then have had the possibility of contrasting the humane Communards with the inhumane Bolsheviks. But in return, probably, Thiers, would not have had the possibility of inflicting his monstrous bloodletting upon the proletariat of Paris. History, possibly, would not have been the loser. THE IRRESPONSIBLE CENTRAL COMMITTEE AND THE "DEMOCRATIC" COMMUNE "On March 19," Kautsky informs us, "in the Central Committee of the National Guard, some demanded a march on Versailles, others an appeal to the electors, and a third party the adoption first of all of revolutionary measures; as if every one of these steps," he proceeds very learnedly to inform us, "were not equally necessary, and as if one excluded the other." (Page 72.) Further on, Kautsky, in connection with these disputes in the Commune, presents us with various warmed-up platitudes as to the mutual relations of reform and revolution. In reality, the following was the situation. If it were decided to march on Versailles, and to do this without losing an hour it was necessary immediately to reorganize the National Guard, to place at its head the best fighting elements of the Paris proletariat, and thereby temporarily to weaken Paris from the revolutionary point of view. But to organize elections in Paris, while at the same time sending out of its walls the flower of the working class, would have been senseless from the point of view of the revolutionary party. Theoretically, a march on Versailles and elections to the Commune, of course, did not exclude each other in the slightest degree, but in practice they did exclude each other: for the success of the elections, it was necessary to postpone the attack; for the attack to succeed, the elections must be put off. Finally, leading the proletariat out to the field and thereby temporarily weakening Paris, it was essential to obtain some guarantee against the possibility of counter-revolutionary attempts in the capital; for Thiers would not have hesitated at any measures to raise a white revolt in the rear of the Communards. It was essential to establish a more military--_i.e._, a more stringent regime in the capital. "They had to fight," writes Lavrov, "against many internal foes with whom Paris was full, who only yesterday had been rioting around the Exchange and the Vendome Square, who had their representatives in the administration and in the National Guard, who possessed their press, and their meetings, who almost openly maintained contact with the Versaillese, and who became more determined and more audacious at every piece of carelessness, at every check of the Commune." (Page 87.) It was necessary, side by side with this, to carry out revolutionary measures of a financial and generally of an economic character: first and foremost, for the equipment of the revolutionary army. All these most necessary measures of revolutionary dictatorship could with difficulty be reconciled with an extensive electoral campaign. But Kautsky has not the least idea of what a revolution is in practice. He thinks that theoretically to reconcile is the same as practically to accomplish. The Central Committee appointed March 22 as the day of elections for the Commune; but, not sure of itself, frightened at its own illegality, striving to act in unison with more "legal" institutions, entered into ridiculous and endless negotiations with a quite helpless assembly of mayors and deputies of Paris, showing its readiness to divide power with them if only an agreement could be arrived at. Meanwhile precious time was slipping by. Marx, on whom Kautsky, through old habit, tries to rely, did not under any circumstances propose that, at one and the same time, the Commune should be elected and the workers should be led out into the field for the war. In his letter to Kugelmann, Marx wrote, on April 12, 1871, that the Central Committee of the National Guard had too soon given up its power in favor of the Commune. Kautsky, in his own words, "does not understand" this opinion of Marx. It is quite simple. Marx at any rate understood that the problem was not one of chasing legality, but of inflicting a fatal blow upon the enemy. "If the Central Committee had consisted of real revolutionaries," says Lavrov, and rightly, "it ought to have acted differently. It would have been quite unforgivable for it to have given the enemy ten days' respite before the election and assembly of the Commune, while the leaders of the proletariat refused to carry out their duty and did not recognize that they had the right immediately to _lead_ the proletariat. As it was, the feeble immaturity of the popular parties created a Committee which considered those ten days of inaction incumbent upon it." (Page 78.) The yearning of the Central Committee to hand over power as soon as possible to a "legal" Government was dictated, not so much by the superstitions of former democracy, of which, by the way, there was no lack, as by fear of responsibility. Under the plea that it was a temporary institution, the Central Committee avoided the taking of the most necessary and absolutely pressing measures, in spite of the fact that all the material apparatus of power was centred in its hands. But the Commune itself did not take over political power in full from the Central Committee, and the latter continued to interfere in all business quite unceremoniously. This created a dual Government, which was extremely dangerous, particularly under military conditions. On May 3 the Central Committee sent deputies to the Commune demanding that the Ministry for War should be placed under its control. Again there arose, as Lissagaray writes, the question as to whether "the Central Committee should be dissolved, or arrested, or entrusted with the administration of the Ministry for War." Here was a question, not of the principles of democracy, but of the absence, in the case of both parties, of a clear programme of action, and of the readiness, both of the irresponsible revolutionary organizations in the shape of the Central Committee and of the "democratic" organization of the Commune, to shift the responsibility on to the other's shoulders, while at the same time not entirely renouncing power. These were political relations which it might seem no one could call worthy of imitation. "But the Central Committee," Kautsky consoles himself, "never attempted to infringe the principle in virtue of which the supreme power must belong to the delegates elected by universal suffrage." In this respect the "Paris Commune was the direct antithesis of the Soviet Republic." (Page 74.) There was no unity of government, there was no revolutionary decision, there existed a division of power, and, as a result, there came swift and terrible destruction. But to counter-balance this--is it not comforting?--there was no infringement of the "principle" of democracy. THE DEMOCRATIC COMMUNE AND THE REVOLUTIONARY DICTATORSHIP Comrade Lenin has already pointed out to Kautsky that attempts to depict the Commune as the expression of formal democracy constitute a piece of absolute theoretical swindling. The Commune, in its tradition and in the conception of its leading political party--the Blanquists--was the expression of _the dictatorship of the revolutionary city over the country_. So it was in the great French Revolution; so it would have been in the revolution of 1871 if the Commune had not fallen in the first days. The fact that in Paris itself a Government was elected on the basis of universal suffrage does not exclude a much more significant fact--namely, that of the military operations carried on by the Commune, one city, against peasant France, that is the whole country. To satisfy the great democrat, Kautsky, the revolutionaries of the Commune ought, as a preliminary, to have consulted, by means of universal suffrage, the whole population of France as to whether it permitted them to carry on a war with Thiers' bands. Finally, in Paris itself the elections took place after the bourgeoisie, or at least its most active elements, had fled, and after Thiers' troops had been evacuated. The bourgeoisie that remained in Paris, in spite of all its impudence, was still afraid of the revolutionary battalions, and the elections took place under the auspices of that fear, which was the forerunner of what in the future would have been inevitable--namely, of the Red Terror. But to console oneself with the thought that the Central Committee of the National Guard, under the dictatorship of which--unfortunately a very feeble and formalist dictatorship--the elections to the Commune were held, did not infringe the principle of universal suffrage, is truly to brush with the shadow of a broom. Amusing himself by barren analogies, Kautsky benefits by the circumstance that his reader is not acquainted with the facts. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, we also elected a Commune (Town Council) on the basis of the most "democratic" voting, without limitations for the bourgeoisie. These elections, being boycotted by the bourgeoisie parties, gave us a crushing majority. The "democratically" elected Council voluntarily submitted to the Petrograd Soviet--_i.e._, placed the fact of the dictatorship of the proletariat higher than the "principle" of universal suffrage, and, after a short time, dissolved itself altogether by its own act, in favor of one of the sections of the Petrograd Soviet. Thus the Petrograd Soviet--that true father of the Soviet regime--has upon itself the seal of a formal "democratic" benediction in no way less than the Paris Commune.[6] [6] It is not without interest to observe that in the Communal elections of 1871 in Paris there participated 230,000 electors. At the Town elections of November, 1917, in Petrograd, in spite of the boycott of the election on the part of all parties except ourselves and the Left Social Revolutionaries, who had no influence in the capital, there participated 390,000 electors. In Paris, in 1871, the population numbered two millions. In Petrograd, in November, 1917, there were not more than two millions. It must be noticed that our electoral system was infinitely more democratic. The Central Committee of the National Guard carried out the elections on the basis of the electoral law of the empire. "At the elections of March 26, eighty members were elected to the Commune. Of these, fifteen were members of the government party (Thiers), and six were bourgeois radicals who were in opposition to the Government, but condemned the rising (of the Paris workers). "The Soviet Republic," Kautsky teaches us, "would never have allowed such counter-revolutionary elements to stand as candidates, let alone be elected. The Commune, on the other hand, out of respect for democracy, did not place the least obstacle in the way of the election of its bourgeois opponents." (Page 74.) We have already seen above that here Kautsky completely misses the mark. First of all, at a similar stage of development of the Russian Revolution, there did not take place democratic elections to the Petrograd Commune, in which the Soviet Government placed no obstacle in the way of the bourgeois parties; and if the Cadets, the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, who had their press which was openly calling for the overthrow of the Soviet Government, boycotted the elections, it was only because at that time they still hoped soon to make an end of us with the help of armed force. Secondly, no democracy expressing all classes was actually to be found in the Paris Commune. The bourgeois deputies--Conservatives, Liberals, Gambettists--found no place in it. "Nearly all these individuals," says Lavrov, "either immediately or very soon, left the Council of the Commune. They might have been representatives of Paris as a free city under the rule of the bourgeoisie, but were quite out of place in the Council of the Commune, which, willy-nilly, consistently or inconsistently, completely or incompletely, did represent the revolution of the proletariat, and an attempt, feeble though it might be, of building up forms of society corresponding to that revolution." (Pages 111-112.) If the Petrograd bourgeoisie had not boycotted the municipal elections, its representatives would have entered the Petrograd Council. They would have remained there up to the first Social Revolutionary and Cadet rising, after which--with the permission or without the permission of Kautsky--they would probably have been arrested if they did not leave the Council in good time, as at a certain moment did the bourgeois members of the Paris Commune. The course of events would have remained the same: only on their surface would certain episodes have worked out differently. In supporting the democracy of the Commune, and at the same time accusing it of an insufficiently decisive note in its attitude to Versailles, Kautsky does not understand that the Communal elections, carried out with the ambiguous help of the "lawful" mayors and deputies, reflected the hope of a peaceful agreement with Versailles. This is the whole point. The leaders were anxious for a compromise, not for a struggle. The masses had not yet outlived their illusions. Undeserved revolutionary reputations had not yet had time to be exposed. Everything taken together was called democracy. "We must rise above our enemies by moral force...." preached Vermorel. "We must not infringe liberty and individual life...." Striving to avoid fratricidal war, Vermorel called upon the liberal bourgeoisie, whom hitherto he had so mercilessly exposed, to set up "a lawful Government, recognized and respected by the whole population of Paris." The _Journal Officiel_, published under the editorship of the Internationalist Longuet, wrote: "The sad misunderstanding, which in the June days (1848) armed two classes of society against each other, cannot be renewed.... Class antagonism has ceased to exist...." (March 30.) And, further: "Now all conflicts will be appeased, because all are inspired with a feeling of solidarity, because never yet was there so little social hatred and social antagonism." (April 3.) At the session of the Commune of April 25, Jourdé, and not without foundation, congratulated himself on the fact that the Commune had "never yet infringed the principle of private property." By this means they hoped to win over bourgeois public opinion and find the path to compromise. "Such a doctrine," says Lavrov, and rightly, "did not in the least disarm the enemies of the proletariat, who understood excellently with what its success threatened them, and only sapped the proletarian energy and, as it were, deliberately blinded it in the face of its irreconcilable enemies." (Page 137.) But this enfeebling doctrine was inextricably bound up with the fiction of democracy. The form of mock legality it was that allowed them to think that the problem would be solved without a struggle. "As far as the mass of the population is concerned," writes Arthur Arnould, a member of the Commune, "it was to a certain extent justified in the belief in the existence of, at the very least, a hidden agreement with the Government." Unable to attract the bourgeoisie, the compromisers, as always, deceived the proletariat. The clearest evidence of all that, in the conditions of the inevitable and already beginning civil war, democratic parliamentarism expressed only the compromising helplessness of the leading groups, was the senseless procedure of the supplementary elections to the Commune of April 6. At this moment, "it was no longer a question of voting," writes Arthur Arnould. "The situation had become so tragic that there was not either the time or the calmness necessary for the correct functioning of the elections.... All persons devoted to the Commune were on the fortifications, in the forts, in the foremost detachments.... The people attributed no importance whatever to these supplementary elections. The elections were in reality merely parliamentarism. What was required was not to count voters, but to have soldiers: not to discover whether we had lost or gained in the Commune of Paris, but to defend Paris from the Versaillese." From these words Kautsky might have observed why in practice it is not so simple to combine class war with interclass democracy. "The Commune is not a Constituent Assembly," wrote in his book, Millière, one of the best brains of the Commune. "It is a military Council. It must have one aim, victory; one weapon, force; one law, the law of social salvation." "They could never understand," Lissagaray accuses the leaders, "that the Commune was a barricade, and not an administration." They began to understand it in the end, when it was too late. Kautsky has not understood it to this day. There is no reason to believe that he will ever understand it. * * * * * The Commune was the living negation of formal democracy, for in its development it signified the dictatorship of working class Paris over the peasant country. It is this fact that dominates all the rest. However much the political doctrinaires, in the midst of the Commune itself, clung to the appearances of democratic legality, every action of the Commune, though insufficient for victory, was sufficient to reveal its illegal nature. The Commune--that is to say, the Paris City Council--repealed the national law concerning conscription. It called its official organ _The Official Journal of the French Republic_. Though cautiously, it still laid hands on the State Bank. It proclaimed the separation of Church and State, and abolished the Church Budgets. It entered into relations with various embassies. And so on, and so on. It did all this in virtue of the revolutionary dictatorship. But Clemenceau, young democrat as he was then, would not recognize that virtue. At a conference with the Central Committee, Clemenceau said: "The rising had an unlawful beginning.... Soon the Committee will become ridiculous, and its decrees will be despised. Besides, Paris has not the right to rise against France, and must unconditionally accept the authority of the Assembly." The problem of the Commune was to dissolve the National Assembly. Unfortunately it did not succeed in doing so. To-day Kautsky seeks to discover for its criminal intentions some mitigating circumstances. He points out that the Communards had as their opponents in the National Assembly the monarchists, while we in the Constituent Assembly had against us ... Socialists, in the persons of the S.R.s, and the Mensheviks. A complete mental eclipse! Kautsky talks about the Mensheviks and the S.R.s, but forgets our sole serious foe--the Cadets. It was they who represented our Russian Thiers party--_i.e._, a bloc of property owners in the name of property: and Professor Miliukov did his utmost to imitate the "little great man." Very soon indeed--long before the October Revolution--Miliukov began to seek his Gallifet in the generals Kornilov, Alexeiev, then Kaledin, Krasnov, in turn. And after Kolchak had thrown aside all political parties, and had dissolved the Constituent Assembly, the Cadet Party, the sole serious bourgeois party, in its essence monarchist through and through, not only did not refuse to support him, but on the contrary devoted more sympathy to him than before. The Mensheviks and the S.R.s played no independent role amongst us--just like Kautsky's party during the revolutionary events in Germany. They based their whole policy upon a coalition with the Cadets, and thereby put the Cadets in a position to dictate quite irrespective of the balance of political forces. The Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik Parties were only an intermediary apparatus for the purpose of collecting, at meetings and elections, the political confidence of the masses awakened by the revolution, and for handing it over for disposal by the counter-revolutionary imperialist party of the Cadets--independently of the issue of the elections. The purely vassal-like dependence of the S.R.s and Menshevik _majority_ on the Cadet _minority_ itself represented a very thinly-veiled insult to the idea of "democracy." But this is not all. In all districts of the country where the regime of "democracy" lived too long, it inevitably ended in an open _coup d'etat_ of the counter-revolution. So it was in the Ukraine, where the democratic Rada, having sold the Soviet Government to German imperialism, found itself overthrown by the monarchist Skoropadsky. So it was in the Kuban, where the democratic Rada found itself under the heel of Denikin. So it was--and this was the most important experiment of our "democracy"--in Siberia, where the Constituent Assembly, with the formal supremacy of the S.R.s and the Mensheviks, in the absence of the Bolsheviks, and the _de facto_ guidance of the Cadets, led in the end to the dictatorship of the Tsarist Admiral Kolchak. So it was, finally, in the north, where the Constituent Assembly government of the Socialist-Revolutionary Chaikovsky became merely a tinsel decoration for the rule of counter-revolutionary generals, Russian and British. So it was, or is, in all the small Border States--in Finland, Esthonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Georgia, Armenia--where, under the formal banner of "democracy," there is being consolidated the supremacy of the landlords, the capitalists, and the foreign militarists. THE PARIS WORKER OF 1871 AND THE PETROGRAD PROLETARIAN OF 1917 One of the most coarse, unfounded, and politically disgraceful comparisons which Kautsky makes between the Commune and Soviet Russia is touching the character of the Paris worker in 1871 and the Russian proletarian of 1917-19. The first Kautsky depicts as a revolutionary enthusiast capable of a high measure of self-sacrifice; the second, as an egoist and a coward, an irresponsible anarchist. The Parisian worker has behind him too definite a past to need revolutionary recommendations--or protection from the praises of the present Kautsky. None the less, the Petrograd proletarian has not, and cannot have, any reason for avoiding a comparison with his heroic elder brother. The continuous three years' struggle of the Petrograd workers--first for the conquest of power, and then for its maintenance and consolidation--represents an exceptional story of collective heroism and self-sacrifice, amidst unprecedented tortures in the shape of hunger, cold, and constant perils. Kautsky, as we can discover in another connection, takes for contrast with the flower of the Communards the most sinister elements of the Russian proletariat. In this respect also he is in no way different from the bourgeois sycophants, to whom dead Communards always appear infinitely more attractive than the living. The Petrograd proletariat seized power four and a half decades after the Parisian. This period has told enormously in our favor. The petty bourgeois craft character of old and partly of new Paris is quite foreign to Petrograd, the centre of the most concentrated industry in the world. The latter circumstances has extremely facilitated our tasks of agitation and organization, as well as the setting up of the Soviet system. Our proletariat did not have even a faint measure of the rich revolutionary traditions of the French proletariat. But, instead, there was still very fresh in the memory of the older generation of our workers, at the beginning of the present revolution, the great experiment of 1905, its failure, and the duty of vengeance it had handed down. The Russian workers had not, like the French, passed through a long school of democracy and parliamentarism, which at a certain epoch represented an important factor in the political education of the proletariat. But, on the other hand, the Russian working class had not had seared into its soul the bitterness of dissolution and the poison of scepticism, which up to a certain, and--let us hope--not very distant moment, still restrain the revolutionary will of the French proletariat. The Paris Commune suffered a military defeat before economic problems had arisen before it in their full magnitude. In spite of the splendid fighting qualities of the Paris workers, the military fate of the Commune was at once determined as hopeless. Indecision and compromise-mongering above brought about collapse below. The pay of the National Guard was issued on the basis of the existence of 162,000 rank and file and 6,500 officers; the number of those who actually went into battle, especially after the unsuccessful sortie of April 3, varied between twenty and thirty thousand. These facts do not in the least compromise the Paris workers, and do not give us the right to consider them cowards and deserters--although, of course, there was no lack of desertion. For a fighting army there must be, first of all, a centralized and accurate apparatus of administration. Of this the Commune had not even a trace. The War Department of the Commune, was, in the expression of one writer, as it were a dark room, in which all collided. The office of the Ministry was filled with officers and ordinary Guards, who demanded military supplies and food, and complained that they were not relieved. They were sent to the garrison.... "One battalion remained in the trenches for 20 and 30 days, while others were constantly in reserve.... This carelessness soon killed any discipline. Courageous men soon determined to rely only on themselves; others avoided service. In the same way did officers behave. One would leave his post to go to the help of a neighbor who was under fire; others went away to the city...." (Lavrov, page 100.) Such a regime could not remain unpunished; the Commune was drowned in blood. But in this connection Kautsky has a marvelous solution. "The waging of war," he says, sagely shaking his head, "is, after all, not a strong side of the proletariat." (Page 76.) This aphorism, worthy of Pangloss, is fully on a level with the other great remark of Kautsky, namely, that the International is not a suitable weapon to use in wartime, being in its essence an "instrument of peace." In these two aphorisms, in reality, may be found the present Kautsky, complete, in his entirety--_i.e._, just a little over a round zero. The waging of war, do you see, is on the whole, not a strong side of the proletariat, the more that the International itself was not created for wartime. Kautsky's ship was built for lakes and quiet harbors, not at all for the open sea, and not for a period of storms. If that ship has sprung a leak, and has begun to fill, and is now comfortably going to the bottom, we must throw all the blame upon the storm, the unnecessary mass of water, the extraordinary size of the waves, and a series of other unforeseen circumstances for which Kautsky did not build his marvelous instrument. The international proletariat put before itself as its problem the conquest of power. Independently of whether civil war, "generally," belongs to the inevitable attributes of revolution, "generally," this fact remains unquestioned--that the advance of the proletariat, at any rate in Russia, Germany, and parts of former Austro-Hungary, took the form of an intense civil war not only on internal but also on external fronts. If the waging of war is not the strong side of the proletariat, while the workers' International is suited only for peaceful epochs, then we may as well erect a cross over the revolution and over Socialism; for the waging of war is a fairly _strong_ side of the capitalist State, which _without_ a war will not admit the workers to supremacy. In that case there remains only to proclaim the so-called "Socialist" democracy to be merely the accompanying feature of capitalist society and bourgeois parliamentarism--_i.e._, openly to sanction what the Eberts, Schneidermanns, Renaudels, carry out in practice and what Kautsky still, it seems, protests against in words. The waging of war was not a strong side of the Commune. Quite so; that was why it was crushed. And how mercilessly crushed! "We have to recall the proscriptions of Sulla, Antony, and Octavius," wrote in his time the very moderate liberal, Fiaux, "to meet such massacres in the history of civilized nations. The religious wars under the last Valois, the night of St. Bartholomew, the Reign of Terror were, in comparison with it, child's play. In the last week of May alone, in Paris, 17,000 corpses of the insurgent Federals were picked up ... the killing was still going on about June 15." "The waging of war, after all, is not the strong side of the proletariat." It is not true! The Russian workers have shown that they are capable of wielding the "instrument of war" as well. We see here a gigantic step forward in comparison with the Commune. It is not a renunciation of the Commune--for the traditions of the Commune consist not at all in its helplessness--but the continuation of its work. The Commune was weak. To complete its work we have become strong. The Commune was crushed. We are inflicting blow after blow upon the executioners of the Commune. We are taking vengeance for the Commune, and we shall avenge it. * * * * * Out of 167,000 National Guards who received pay, only twenty or thirty thousand went into battle. These figures serve as interesting material for conclusions as to the role of formal democracy in a revolutionary epoch. The vote of the Paris Commune was decided, not at the elections, but in the battles with the troops of Thiers. One hundred and sixty-seven thousand National Guards represented the great mass of the electorate. But in reality, in the battles, the fate of the Commune was decided by twenty or thirty thousand persons; the most devoted fighting minority. This minority did not stand alone: it simply expressed, in a more courageous and self-sacrificing manner, the will of the majority. But none the less it was a minority. The others who hid at the critical moment were not hostile to the Commune; on the contrary, they actively or passively supported it, but they were less politically conscious, less decisive. On the arena of political democracy, their lower level of political consciousness afforded the possibility of their being deceived by adventurers, swindlers, middle-class cheats, and honest dullards who really deceived themselves. But, at the moment of open class war, they, to a greater or lesser degree, followed the self-sacrificing minority. It was this that found its expression in the organization of the National Guard. If the existence of the Commune had been prolonged, this relationship between the advance guard and the mass of the proletariat would have grown more and more firm. The organization which would have been formed and consolidated in the process of the open struggle, as the organization of the laboring masses, would have become the organization of their dictatorship--the Council of Deputies of the armed proletariat. 6 MARX AND ... KAUTSKY. Kautsky loftily sweeps aside Marx's views on terror, expressed by him in the _Neue Rheinische Zeitung_--as at that time, do you see, Marx was still very "young," and consequently his views had not yet had time to arrive at that condition of complete enfeeblement which is so clearly to be observed in the case of certain theoreticians in the seventh decade of their life. As a contrast to the green Marx of 1848-49 (the author of the _Communist Manifesto_!) Kautsky quotes the mature Marx of the epoch of the Paris Commune--and the latter, under the pen of Kautsky, loses his great lion's mane, and appears before us as an extremely respectable reasoner, bowing before the holy places of democracy, declaiming on the sacredness of human life, and filled with all due reverence for the political charms of Schneidermann, Vandervelde, and particularly of his own physical grandson, Jean Longuet. In a word, Marx, instructed by the experience of life, proves to be a well-behaved Kautskian. From the deathless _Civil War in France_, the pages of which have been filled with a new and intense life in our own epoch, Kautsky has quoted only those lines in which the mighty theoretician of the social revolution contrasted the generosity of the Communards with the bourgeois ferocity of the Versaillese. Kautsky has devastated these lines and made them commonplace. Marx, as the preacher of detached humanity, as the apostle of general love of mankind! Just as if we were talking about Buddha or Leo Tolstoy.... It is more than natural that, against the international campaign which represented the Communards as _souteneurs_ and the women of the Commune as prostitutes, against the vile slanders which attributed to the conquered fighters ferocious features drawn from the degenerate imagination of the victorious bourgeoisie, Marx should emphasize and underline those features of tenderness and nobility which not infrequently were merely the reverse side of indecision. Marx was Marx. He was neither an empty pedant, nor, all the more, the legal defender of the revolution: he combined a scientific analysis of the Commune with its revolutionary apology. He not only explained and criticised--he defended and struggled. But, emphasizing the mildness of the Commune which failed, Marx left no doubt possible concerning the measures which the Commune ought to have taken in order not to fail. The author of the _Civil War_ accuses the Central Committee--_i.e._, the then Council of National Guards' Deputies, of having too soon given up its place to the elective Commune. Kautsky "does not understand" the reason for such a reproach. This conscientious non-understanding is one of the symptoms of Kautsky's mental decline in connection with questions of the revolution generally. The first place, according to Marx, ought to have been filled by a purely fighting organ, a centre of the insurrection and of military operations against Versailles, and not the organized self-government of the labor democracy. For the latter the turn would come later. Marx accuses the Commune of not having at once begun an attack against the Versailles, and of having entered upon the defensive, which always appears "more humane," and gives more possibilities of appealing to moral law and the sacredness of human life, but in conditions of civil war never leads to victory. Marx, on the other hand, first and foremost wanted a revolutionary victory. Nowhere, by one word, does he put forward the principle of democracy as something standing above the class struggle. On the contrary, with the concentrated contempt of the revolutionary and the Communist, Marx--not the young editor of the _Rhine Paper_, but the mature author of _Capital_: our genuine Marx with the mighty leonine mane, not as yet fallen under the hands of the hairdressers of the Kautsky school--with what concentrated contempt he speaks about the "artificial atmosphere of parliamentarism" in which physical and spiritual dwarfs like Thiers seem giants! The _Civil War_, after the barren and pedantic pamphlet of Kautsky, acts like a storm that clears the air. In spite of Kautsky's slanders, Marx had nothing in common with the view of democracy as the last, absolute, supreme product of history. The development of bourgeois society itself, out of which contemporary democracy grew up, in no way represents that process of gradual democratization which figured before the war in the dreams of the greatest Socialist illusionist of democracy--Jean Jaurès--and now in those of the most learned of pedants, Karl Kautsky. In the empire of Napoleon III, Marx sees "the only possible form of government in the epoch in which the bourgeoisie has already lost the possibility of governing the people, while the working class has not yet acquired it." In this way, not democracy, but Bonapartism, appears in Marx's eyes as the final form of bourgeois power. Learned men may say that Marx was mistaken, as the Bonapartist empire gave way for half a century to the "Democratic Republic." But Marx was not mistaken. In essence he was right. The Third Republic has been the period of the complete decay of democracy. Bonapartism has found in the Stock Exchange Republic of Poincaré-Clémenceau, a more finished expression than in the Second Empire. True, the Third Republic was not crowned by the imperial diadem; but in return there loomed over it the shadow of the Russian Tsar. In his estimate of the Commune, Marx carefully avoids using the worn currency of democratic terminology. "The Commune was," he writes, "not a parliament, but a working institution, and united in itself both executive and legislative power." In the first place, Marx puts forward, not the particular democratic form of the Commune, but its class essence. The Commune, as is known, abolished the regular army and the police, and decreed the confiscation of Church property. It did this in the right of the revolutionary dictatorship of Paris, without the permission of the general democracy of the State, which at that moment formally had found a much more "lawful" expression in the National Assembly of Thiers. But a revolution is not decided by votes. "The National Assembly," says Marx, "was nothing more nor less than one of the episodes of that revolution, the true embodiment of which was, nevertheless, armed Paris." How far this is from formal democracy! "It only required that the Communal order of things," says Marx, "should be set up in Paris and in the secondary centres, and the old central government would in the provinces also have yielded to the _self-government of the producers_." Marx, consequently, sees the problem of revolutionary Paris, not in appealing from its victory to the frail will of the Constituent Assembly, but in covering the whole of France with a centralized organization of Communes, built up not on the external principles of democracy but on the genuine self-government of the producers. Kautsky has cited as an argument against the Soviet Constitution the indirectness of elections, which contradicts the fixed laws of bourgeois democracy. Marx characterizes the proposed structure of labor France in the following words:--"The management of the general affairs of the village communes of every district was to devolve on the Assembly of plenipotentiary delegates meeting in the chief town of the district; while the district assemblies were in turn to send delegates to the National Assembly sitting in Paris." Marx, as we can see, was not in the least degree disturbed by the many degrees of indirect election, in so far as it was a question of the State organization of the proletariat itself. In the framework of bourgeois democracy, indirectness of election confuses the demarcation line of parties and classes; but in the "self-government of the producers"--_i.e._, in the class proletarian State, indirectness of election is a question not of politics, but of the technical requirements of self-government, and within certain limits may present the same advantages as in the realm of trade union organization. The Philistines of democracy are indignant at the inequality in representation of the workers and peasants which, in the Soviet Constitution, reflects the difference in the revolutionary roles of the town and the country. Marx writes: "The Commune desired to bring the rural producers under the intellectual leadership of the central towns of their districts, and there to secure to them, in the workmen of the towns, the natural guardians of their interests." The question was not one of making the peasant equal to the worker on paper, but of spiritually raising the peasant to the level of the worker. All questions of the proletarian State Marx decides according to the revolutionary dynamics of living forces, and not according to the play of shadows upon the market-place screen of parliamentarism. In order to reach the last confines of mental collapse, Kautsky denies the universal authority of the Workers' Councils on the ground that there is no legal boundary between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In the indeterminate nature of the social divisions Kautsky sees the source of the arbitrary authority of the Soviet dictatorship. Marx sees directly the contrary. "The Commune was an extremely elastic form of the State, while all former forms of government had suffered from narrowness. Its secret consists in this, that in its very essence it was the government of the working class, the result of the struggle between the class of producers and the class of appropriators, the political form, long sought, under which there could be accomplished the economic emancipation of labor." The secret of the Commune consisted in the fact that by its very essence it was a government of the working class. This secret, explained by Marx, has remained, for Kautsky, even to this day, a mystery sealed with seven seals. The Pharisees of democracy speak with indignation of the repressive measures of the Soviet Government, of the closing of newspapers, of arrests and shooting. Marx replies to "the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press" and to the reproaches of the "well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaries," in connection with the repressive measures of the Commune in the following words:--"Not satisfied with their open waging of a most bloodthirsty war against Paris, the Versaillese strove secretly to gain an entry by corruption and conspiracy. Could the Commune at such a time _without shamefully betraying its trust_, have observed the customary forms of liberalism, just as if profound peace reigned around it? Had the government of the Commune been akin in spirit to that of Thiers, there would have been no more occasion to suppress newspapers of the party of order in Paris than there was to suppress newspapers of the Commune at Versailles." In this way, what Kautsky demands in the name of the sacred foundations of democracy Marx brands as a shameful betrayal of trust. Concerning the destruction of which the Commune is accused, and of which now the Soviet Government is accused, Marx speaks as of "an inevitable and comparatively insignificant episode in the titanic struggle of the new-born order with the old in its collapse." Destruction and cruelty are inevitable in any war. Only sycophants can consider them a crime "in the war of the slaves against their oppressors, _the only just war in history_." (Marx.) Yet our dread accuser Kautsky, in his whole book, does not breathe a word of the fact that we are in a condition of perpetual revolutionary self-defence, that we are waging an intensive war against the oppressors of the world, the "only just war in history." Kautsky yet again tears his hair because the Soviet Government, during the Civil War, has made use of the severe method of taking hostages. He once again brings forward pointless and dishonest comparisons between the fierce Soviet Government and the humane Commune. Clear and definite in this connection sounds the opinion of Marx. "When Thiers, from the very beginning of the conflict, had enforced the humane practice of shooting down captured Communards, the Commune, to protect the lives of those prisoners, _had nothing left for it_ but to resort to the Prussian custom of taking hostages. The lives of the hostages had been forfeited over and over again by the continued shooting of the prisoners on the part of the Versaillese. _How could their lives be spared any longer_ after the blood-bath with which MacMahon's Pretorians celebrated their entry into Paris?" How otherwise we shall ask together with Marx, can one act in conditions of civil war, when the counter-revolution, occupying a considerable portion of the national territory, seizes wherever it can the unarmed workers, their wives, their mothers, and shoots or hangs them: how otherwise can one act than to seize as hostages the beloved or the trusted of the bourgeoisie, thus placing the whole bourgeois class under the Damocles' sword of mutual responsibility? It would not be difficult to show, day by day through the history of the civil war, that all the severe measures of the Soviet Government were forced upon it as measures of revolutionary self-defense. We shall not here enter into details. But, to give though it be but a partial criterion for valuing the conditions of the struggle, let us remind the reader that, at the moment when the White Guards, in company with their Anglo-French allies, shoot every Communist without exception who falls into their hands, the Red Army spares all prisoners without exception, including even officers of high rank. "Fully grasping its historical task, filled with the heroic decision to remain equal to that task," Marx wrote, "the working class may reply with a smile of calm contempt to the vile abuse of the lackeys of the Press and to the learned patronage of well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires, who utter their ignorant stereotyped common-places, their characteristic nonsense, with the profound tone of oracles of scientific immaculateness." If the well-intentioned bourgeois doctrinaires sometimes appear in the guise of retired theoreticians of the Second International, this in no way deprives their characteristic nonsense of the right of remaining nonsense. 7 THE WORKING CLASS AND ITS SOVIET POLICY THE RUSSIAN PROLETARIAT The initiative in the social revolution proved, by the force of events, to be imposed, not upon the old proletariat of Western Europe, with its mighty economic and political organization, with its ponderous traditions of parliamentarism and trade unionism, but upon the young working-class of a backward country. History, as always, moved along the line of least resistance. The revolutionary epoch burst upon us through the least barricaded door. Those extraordinary, truly superhuman, difficulties which were thus flung upon the Russian proletariat have prepared, hastened, and to a considerable extent assisted the revolutionary work of the West European proletariat which still lies before us. Instead of examining the Russian Revolution in the light of the revolutionary epoch that has arrived throughout the world, Kautsky discusses the theme of whether or no the Russian proletariat has taken power into its hands too soon. "For Socialism," he explains, "there is necessary a high development of the people, a high morale amongst the masses, strongly-developed social instincts, sentiments of solidarity, etc. Such a form of morale," Kautsky further informs us, "was very highly developed amongst the proletariat of the Paris Commune. It is absent amongst the masses which at the present time set the tone amongst the Bolshevik proletariat." (Page 177.) For Kautsky's purpose, it is not sufficient to fling mud at the Bolsheviks as a political party before the eyes of his readers. Knowing that Bolshevism has become amalgamated with the Russian proletariat, Kautsky makes an attempt to fling mud at the Russian proletariat as a whole, representing it as an ignorant, greedy mass, without any ideals, which is guided only by the instincts and impulses of the moment. Throughout his booklet Kautsky returns many times to the question of the intellectual and moral level of the Russian workers, and every time only to deepen his characterization of them as ignorant, stupid and barbarous. To bring about the most striking contrasts, Kautsky adduces the example of how a workshop committee in one of the war industries during the Commune decided upon compulsory night duty in the works for _one_ worker so that it might be possible to distribute repaired arms by night. "As under present circumstances it is absolutely necessary to be extremely economical with the resources of the Commune," the regulation read, "the night duty will be rendered without payment...." "Truly," Kautsky concludes, "these working men did not regard the period of their dictatorship as an opportune moment for the satisfaction of their personal interests." (Page 90.) Quite otherwise is the case with the Russian working class. That class has no intelligence, no stability, no ideals, no steadfastness, no readiness for self-sacrifice, and so on. "It is just as little capable of choosing suitable plenipotentiary leaders for itself," Kautsky jeers, "as Munchausen was able to drag himself from the swamp by means of his own hair." This comparison of the Russian proletariat with the impostor Munchausen dragging himself from the swamp is a striking example of the brazen tone in which Kautsky speaks of the Russian working class. He brings extracts from various speeches and articles of ours in which undesirable phenomena amongst the working class are shown up, and attempts to represent matters in such a way as if the life of the Russian proletariat between 1917-20--_i.e._, in the greatest of revolutionary epochs--is fully described by passivity, ignorance, and egotism. Kautsky, forsooth, does not know, has never heard, cannot guess, may not imagine, that during the civil war the Russian proletariat had more than one occasion of freely giving its labour, and even of establishing "unpaid" guard duties--not of _one_ worker for the space of _one_ night, but of tens of thousands of workers for the space of a long series of disturbed nights. In the days and weeks of Yudenich's advance on Petrograd, one telephonogram of the Soviet was sufficient to ensure that many thousands of workers should spring to their posts in all the factories, in all the wards of the city. And this not in the first days of the Petrograd Commune, but after a two years' struggle in cold and hunger. Two or three times a year our party mobilizes a high proportion of its numbers for the front. Scattered over a distance of 8,000 versts, they die and teach others to die. And when, in hungry and cold Moscow, which has given the flower of its workers to the front, a Party Week is proclaimed, there pour into our ranks from the proletarian masses, in the space of seven days, 15,000 persons. And at what moment? At the moment when the danger of the destruction of the Soviet Government had reached its most acute point. At the moment when Orel had been taken, and Denikin was approaching Tula and Moscow, when Yudenich was threatening Petrograd. At that most painful moment, the Moscow proletariat, in the course of a week, gave to the ranks of our party 15,000 men, who only waited a new mobilization for the front. And it can be said with certainty that never yet, with the exception of the week of the November rising in 1917, was the Moscow proletariat so single-minded in its revolutionary enthusiasm, and in its readiness for devoted struggle, as in those most difficult days of peril and self-sacrifice. When our party proclaimed the watchword of Subbotniks and Voskresniks (Communist Saturdays and Sundays), the revolutionary idealism of the proletariat found for itself a striking expression in the shape of voluntary labor. At first tens and hundreds, later thousands, and now tens and hundreds of thousands of workers every week give up several hours of their labor without reward, for the sake of the economic reconstruction of the country. And this is done by half-starved people, in torn boots, in dirty linen--because the country has neither boots nor soap. Such, in reality, is that Bolshevik proletariat to whom Kautsky recommends a course of self-sacrifice. The facts of the situation, and their relative importance, will appear still more vividly before us if we recall that all the egoist, bourgeois, coarsely selfish elements of the proletariat--all those who avoid service at the front and in the Subbotniks, who engage in speculation and in weeks of starvation incite the workers to strikes--all of them vote at the Soviet elections for the Mensheviks; that is, for the Russian Kautskies. Kautsky quotes our words to the effect that, even before the November Revolution, we clearly realized the defects in education of the Russian proletariat, but, recognizing the inevitability of the transference of power to the working class, we considered ourselves justified in hoping that during the struggle itself, during its experience, and with the ever-increasing support of the proletariat of other countries, we should deal adequately with our difficulties, and be able to guarantee the transition of Russia to the Socialist order. In this connection, Kautsky asks: "Would Trotsky undertake to get on a locomotive and set it going, in the conviction that he would during the journey have time to learn and to arrange everything? One must preliminarily have acquired the qualities necessary to drive a locomotive before deciding to set it going. Similarly the proletariat ought beforehand to have acquired those necessary qualities which make it capable of administering industry, once it had to take it over." (Page 173.) This instructive comparison would have done honor to any village clergyman. None the less, it is stupid. With infinitely more foundation one could say: "Will Kautsky dare to mount a horse before he has learned to sit firmly in the saddle, and to guide the animal in all its steps?" We have foundations for believing that Kautsky would not make up his mind to such a dangerous purely Bolshevik experiment. On the other hand, we fear that, through not risking to mount the horse, Kautsky would have considerable difficulty in learning the secrets of riding on horse-back. For the fundamental Bolshevik prejudice is precisely this: that one learns to ride on horse-back only when sitting on the horse. Concerning the driving of the locomotive, this principle is at first sight not so evident; but none the less it is there. No one yet has learned to drive a locomotive sitting in his study. One has to get up on to the engine, to take one's stand in the tender, to take into one's hands the regulator, and to turn it. True, the engine allows training manoeuvres only under the guidance of an old driver. The horse allows of instructions in the riding school only under the guidance of experienced trainers. But in the sphere of State administration such artificial conditions cannot be created. The bourgeoisie does not build for the proletariat academies of State administration, and does not place at its disposal, for preliminary practice, the helm of the State. And besides, the workers and peasants learn even to ride on horse-back not in the riding school, and without the assistance of trainers. To this we must add another consideration, perhaps the most important. No one gives the proletariat the opportunity of choosing whether it will or will not mount the horse, whether it will take power immediately or postpone the moment. Under certain conditions the working class is bound to take power, under the threat of political self-annihilation for a whole historical period. Once having taken power, it is impossible to accept one set of consequences at will and refuse to accept others. If the capitalist bourgeoisie consciously and malignantly transforms the disorganization of production into a method of political struggle, with the object of restoring power to itself, the proletariat is _obliged_ to resort to Socialization, independently of whether this is beneficial or otherwise at the _given moment_. And, once having taken over production, the proletariat is obliged, under the pressure of iron necessity, to learn by its own experience a most difficult art--that of organizing Socialist economy. Having mounted the saddle, the rider is obliged to guide the horse--on the peril of breaking his neck. * * * * * To give his high-souled supporters, male and female, a complete picture of the moral level of the Russian proletariat, Kautsky adduces, on page 172 of his book, the following mandate, issued, it is alleged, by the Murzilovka Soviet: "The Soviet hereby empowers Comrade Gregory Sareiev, in accordance with his choice and instructions, to requisition and lead to the barracks, for the use of the Artillery Division stationed in Murzilovka, Briansk County, sixty women and girls from the bourgeois and speculating class, September 16, 1918." (_What are the Bolshevists doing?_ Published by Dr. Nath. Wintch-Malejeff. Lausanne, 1919. Page 10.) Without having the least doubt of the forged character of this document and the lying nature of the whole communication, I gave instructions, however, that careful inquiry should be made, in order to discover what facts and episodes lay at the root of this invention. A carefully carried out investigation showed the following:-- (1) In the Briansk County there is absolutely no village by the name of Murzilovka. There is no such village in the neighboring counties either. The most similar in name is the village of Muraviovka, Briansk County; but no artillery division has ever been stationed there, and altogether nothing ever took place which might be in any way connected with the above "document." (2) The investigation was also carried on along the line of the artillery units. Absolutely nowhere were we able to discover even an indirect allusion to a fact similar to that adduced by Kautsky from the words of his inspirer. (3) Finally the investigation dealt with the question of whether there had been any rumors of this kind on the spot. Here, too, absolutely nothing was discovered; and no wonder. The very contents of the forgery are in too brutal a contrast with the morals and public opinion of the foremost workers and peasants who direct the work of the Soviets, even in the most backward regions. In this way, the document must be described as a pitiful forgery, which might be circulated only by the most malignant sycophants in the most yellow of the gutter press. While the investigation described above was going on, Comrade Zinovieff showed me a number of a Swedish paper (_Svenska Dagbladet_) of November 9, 1919, in which was printed the facsimile of a mandate running as follows:-- "_Mandate._ The bearer of this, Comrade Karaseiev, has the right of socializing in the town of Ekaterinodar (obliterated) girls aged from 16 to 36 at his pleasure.--GLAVKOM IVASHCHEFF." This document is even more stupid and impudent than that quoted by Kautsky. The town of Ekaterinodar--the centre of the Kuban--was, as is well known, for only a very short time in the hands of the Soviet Government. Apparently the author of the forgery, not very well up in his revolutionary chronology, rubbed out the date on this document, lest by some chance it should appear that "Glavkom Ivashcheff" socialized the Ekaterinodar women during the reign of Denikin's militarism there. That the document might lead into error the thick-witted Swedish bourgeois is not at all amazing. But for the Russian reader it is only too clear that the document is not merely a forgery, but drawn up by a _foreigner, dictionary in hand_. It is extremely curious that the names of both the socializers of women, "Gregory Sareiev" and "Karaseiev" sound absolutely non-Russia. The ending "eiev" in Russian names is found rarely, and only in definite combinations. But the accuser of the Bolsheviks himself, the author of the English pamphlet on whom Kautsky bases his evidence, has a name that does actually end in "eiev." It seems obvious that this Anglo-Bulgarian police agent, sitting in Lausanne, creates socializers of women, in the fullest sense of the word, after his own likeness and image. Kautsky, at any rate, has original inspirers and assistants! SOVIETS, TRADE UNIONS, AND THE PARTY The Soviets, as a form of the organization of the working class, represents for Kautsky, "in relation to the party and professional organizations of more developed countries, not a higher form of organization, but first and foremost a substitute (Notbehelf), arising out of the absence of political organizations." (Page 68.) Let us grant that this is true in connection with Russia. But then, why have Soviets sprung up in Germany? Ought one not absolutely to repudiate them in the Ebert Republic? We note, however, that Hilferding, the nearest sympathizer of Kautsky, proposes to include the Soviets in the Constitution. Kautsky is silent. The estimate of Soviets as a "primitive" organization is true to the extent that the open revolutionary struggle is "more primitive" than parliamentarism. But the artificial complexity of the latter embraces only the upper strata, insignificant in their size. On the other hand, revolution is only possible where the masses have their vital interests at stake. The November Revolution raised on to their feet such deep layers as the pre-revolutionary Social-Democracy could not even dream of. However wide were the organizations of the party and the trade unions in Germany, the revolution immediately proved incomparably wider than they. The revolutionary masses found their direct representation in the most simple and generally comprehensive delegate organization--in the Soviet. One may admit that the Council of Deputies falls behind both the party and the trade union in the sense of the clearness of its programme, or the exactness of its organization. But it is far and away in front of the party and the trade unions in the size of the masses drawn by it into the organized struggle; and this superiority in quality gives the Soviet undeniable revolutionary preponderance. The Soviet embraces workers of all undertakings, of all professions, of all stages of cultural development, all stages of political consciousness--and thereby objectively is forced to formulate the general interests of the proletariat. The _Communist Manifesto_ viewed the problem of the Communist just in this sense--namely, the formulating of the general historical interests of the working class as a whole. "The Communists are only distinguished from other proletarian parties," in the words of the _Manifesto_, "by this: that in the different national struggles of the proletariat they point out, and bring to the fore, the common interests of the proletariat, independently of nationality; and again that, in the different stages of evolution through which the struggle between the proletariat and bourgeoisie passes, they constantly represent the interests of the movement taken as a whole." In the form of the all-embracing class organization of the Soviets, the movement takes itself "as a whole." Hence it is clear why the Communists could and had to become the guiding party in the Soviets. But hence also is seen all the narrowness of the estimate of Soviets as "substitutes for the party" (Kautsky), and all the stupidity of the attempt to include the Soviets, in the form of an auxiliary lever, in the mechanism of bourgeois democracy. (Hilferding.) The Soviets are the organization of the proletarian revolution, and have purpose either as an organ of the struggle for power or as the apparatus of power of the working class. Unable to grasp the revolutionary role of the Soviets, Kautsky sees their root defects in that which constitutes their greatest merit. "The demarcation of the bourgeois from the worker," he writes, "can never be actually drawn. There will always be something arbitrary in such demarcation, which fact transforms the Soviet idea into a particularly suitable foundation for dictatorial and arbitrary rule, but renders it unfitted for the creation of a clear, systematically built-up constitution." (Page 170.) Class dictatorship, according to Kautsky, cannot create for itself institutions answering to its nature, because there do not exist lines of demarcation between the classes. But in that case, what happens to the class struggle altogether? Surely it was just, in the existence of numerous transitional stages between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that the lower middle-class theoreticians always found their principal argument against the "principle" of the class struggle? For Kautsky, however, doubts as to principle begin just at the point where the proletariat, having overcome the shapelessness and unsteadiness of the intermediate class, having brought one part of them over to its side and thrown the remainder into the camp of the bourgeoisie, has actually organized its dictatorship in the Soviet Constitution. The very reason why the Soviets an absolutely irreplaceable apparatus in the proletarian State is that their framework is elastic and yielding, with the result that not only social but political changes in the relationship of classes and sections can immediately find their expression in the Soviet apparatus. Beginning with the largest factories and works, the Soviets then draw into their organization the workers of private workshops and shop-assistants, proceed to enter the village, organize the peasants against the landowners, and finally the lower and middle-class sections of the peasantry against the richest. The Labor State collects numerous staffs of employees, to a considerable extent from the ranks of the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois educated classes. To the extent that they become disciplined under the Soviet regime, they find representation in the Soviet system. Expanding--and at certain moments contracting--in harmony with the expansion and contraction of the social positions conquered by the proletariat, the Soviet system remains the State apparatus of the social revolution, in its internal dynamics, its ebbs and flows, its mistakes and successes. With the final triumph of the social revolution, the Soviet system will expand and include the whole population, in order thereby to lose the characteristics of a form of State, and melt away into a mighty system of producing and consuming co-operation. If the party and the trade unions were organizations of preparation for the revolution, the Soviets are the weapon of the revolution itself. After its victory, the Soviets become the organs of power. The role of the party and the unions, without decreasing is nevertheless essentially altered. In the hands of the party is concentrated the general control. It does not immediately administer, since its apparatus is not adapted for this purpose. But it has the final word in all fundamental questions. Further, our practice has led to the result that, in all moot questions, generally--conflicts between departments and personal conflicts within departments--the last word belongs to the Central Committee of the party. This affords extreme economy of time and energy, and in the most difficult and complicated circumstances gives a guarantee for the necessary unity of action. Such a regime is possible only in the presence of the unquestioned authority of the party, and the faultlessness of its discipline. Happily for the revolution, our party does possess in an equal measure both of these qualities. Whether in other countries which have not received from their past a strong revolutionary organization, with a great hardening in conflict, there will be created just as authoritative a Communist Party by the time of the proletarian revolution, it is difficult to foretell; but it is quite obvious that on this question, to a very large extent, depends the progress of the Socialist revolution in each country. The exclusive role of the Communist Party under the conditions of a victorious proletarian revolution is quite comprehensible. The question is of the dictatorship of a class. In the composition of that class there enter various elements, heterogeneous moods, different levels of development. Yet the dictatorship pre-supposes unity of will, unity of direction, unity of action. By what other path then can it be attained? The revolutionary supremacy of the proletariat pre-supposes within the proletariat itself the political supremacy of a party, with a clear programme of action and a faultless internal discipline. The policy of coalitions contradicts internally the regime of the revolutionary dictatorship. We have in view, not coalitions with bourgeois parties, of which of course there can be no talk, but a coalition of Communists with other "Socialist" organizations, representing different stages of backwardness and prejudice of the laboring masses. The revolution swiftly reveals all that is unstable, wears out all that is artificial; the contradictions glossed over in a coalition are swiftly revealed under the pressure of revolutionary events. We have had an example of this in Hungary, where the dictatorship of the proletariat assumed the political form of the coalition of the Communists with disguised Opportunists. The coalition soon broke up. The Communist Party paid heavily for the revolutionary instability and the political treachery of its companions. It is quite obvious that for the Hungarian Communists it would have been more profitable to have come to power later, after having afforded to the Left Opportunists the possibility of compromising themselves once and for all. It is quite another question as to how far this was possible. In any case, a coalition with the Opportunists, only temporarily hiding the relative weakness of the Hungarian Communists, at the same time prevented them from growing stronger at the expense of the Opportunists; and brought them to disaster. The same idea is sufficiently illustrated by the example of the Russian revolution. The coalition of the Bolsheviks with the Left Socialist Revolutionists, which lasted for several months, ended with a bloody conflict. True, the reckoning for the coalition had to be paid, not so much by us Communists as by our disloyal companions. Apparently, such a coalition, in which we were the stronger side and, therefore, were not taking too many risks in the attempt, at one definite stage in history, to make use of the extreme Left-wing of the bourgeois democracy, tactically must be completely justified. But, none the less, the Left S.R. episode quite clearly shows that the regime of compromises, agreements, mutual concessions--for that is the meaning of the regime of coalition--cannot last long in an epoch in which situations alter with extreme rapidity, and in which supreme unity in point of view is necessary in order to render possible unity of action. We have more than once been accused of having substituted for the dictatorship of the Soviets the dictatorship of our party. Yet it can be said with complete justice that the dictatorship of the Soviets became possible only by means of the dictatorship of the party. It is thanks to the clarity of its theoretical vision and its strong revolutionary organization that the party has afforded to the Soviets the possibility of becoming transformed from shapeless parliaments of labor into the apparatus of the supremacy of labor. In this "substitution" of the power of the party for the power of the working class there is nothing accidental, and in reality there is no substitution at all. The Communists express the fundamental interests of the working class. It is quite natural that, in the period in which history brings up those interests, in all their magnitude, on to the order of the day, the Communists have become the recognized representatives of the working class as a whole. But where is your guarantee, certain wise men ask us, that it is just your party that expresses the interests of historical development? Destroying or driving underground the other parties, you have thereby prevented their political competition with you, and consequently you have deprived yourselves of the possibility of testing your line of action. This idea is dictated by a purely liberal conception of the course of the revolution. In a period in which all antagonisms assume an open character, and the political struggle swiftly passes into a civil war, the ruling party has sufficient material standard by which to test its line of action, without the possible circulation of Menshevik papers. Noske crushes the Communists, but they grow. We have suppressed the Mensheviks and the S.R.s--and they have disappeared. This criterion is sufficient for us. At all events, our problem is not at every given moment statistically to measure the grouping of tendencies; but to render victory for our tendency secure. For that tendency is the tendency of the revolutionary dictatorship; and in the course of the latter, in its internal friction, we must find a sufficient criterion for self-examination. The continuous "independence" of the trade union movement, in the period of the proletarian revolution, is just as much an impossibility as the policy of coalition. The trade unions become the most important economic organs of the proletariat in power. Thereby they fall under the leadership of the Communist Party. Not only questions of principle in the trade union movement, but serious conflicts of organization within it, are decided by the Central Committee of our party. The Kautskians attack the Soviet Government as the dictatorship of a "section" of the working class. "If only," they say, "the dictatorship was carried out by the _whole_ class!" It is not easy to understand what actually they imagine when they say this. The dictatorship of the proletariat, in its very essence, signifies the immediate supremacy of the revolutionary vanguard, which relies upon the heavy masses, and, where necessary, obliges the backward tail to dress by the head. This refers also to the trade unions. After the conquest of power by the proletariat, they acquire a compulsory character. They must include all industrial workers. The party, on the other hand, as before, includes in its ranks only the most class-conscious and devoted; and only in a process of careful selection does it widen its ranks. Hence follows the guiding role of the Communist minority in the trade unions, which answers to the supremacy of the Communist Party in the Soviets, and represents the political expression of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The trade unions become the direct organizers of social production. They express not only the interests of the industrial workers, but the interests of industry itself. During the first period, the old currents in trade unionism more than once raised their head, urging the unions to haggle with the Soviet State, lay down conditions for it, and demand from it guarantees. The further we go, however, the more do the unions recognize that they are organs of production of the Soviet State, and assume responsibility for its fortunes--not opposing themselves to it, but identifying themselves with it. The unions become the organizers of labor discipline. They demand from the workers intensive labor under the most difficult conditions, to the extent that the Labor State is not yet able to alter those conditions. The unions become the apparatus of revolutionary repression against undisciplined, anarchical, parasitic elements in the working class. From the old policy of trade unionism, which at a certain stage is inseparable from the industrial movement within the framework of capitalist society, the unions pass along the whole line on to the new path of the policy of revolutionary Communism. THE PEASANT POLICY The Bolsheviks "hoped," Kautsky thunders, "to overcome the substantial peasants in the villages by granting political rights exclusively to the poorest peasants. They then again granted representation to the substantial peasantry." (Page 216.) Kautsky enumerates the external "contradictions" of our peasant policy, not dreaming to inquire into its general direction, and into the internal contradictions visible in the economic and political situation of the country. In the Russian peasantry as it entered the Soviet order there were three elements: the poor, living to a considerable extent by the sale of their labor-power, and forced to buy additional food for their requirements; the middle peasants, whose requirements were covered by the products of their farms, and who were able to a limited extent to sell their surplus; and the upper layer--_i.e._, the rich peasants, the vulture (kulak) class, which systematically bought labor-power and sold their agricultural produce on a large scale. It is quite unnecessary to point out that these groups are not distinguished by definite symptoms or by homogeneousness throughout the country. Still, on the whole, and generally speaking, the peasant poor represented the natural and undeniable allies of the town proletariat, whilst the vulture class represented its just as undeniable and irreconcilable enemies. The most hesitation was principally to be observed amongst the widest, the _middle_ section of the peasantry. Had not the country been so exhausted, and if the proletariat had had the possibility of offering to the peasant masses the necessary quantity of commodities and cultural requirements, the adaptation of the toiling majority of the peasantry to the new regime would have taken place much less painfully. But the economic disorder of the country, which was not the result of our land or food policy, but was generated by the causes which preceded the appearance of that policy, robbed the town for a prolonged period of any possibility of giving the village the products of the textile and metal-working industries, imported goods, and so on. At the same time, industry could not entirely cease drawing from the village all, albeit the smallest quantity, of its food resources. The proletariat demanded of the peasantry the granting of food credits, economic subsidies in respect of values which it is only now about to create. The symbol of those future values was the credit symbol, now finally deprived of all value. But the peasant mass is not very capable of historical detachment. Bound up with the Soviet Government by the abolition of landlordism, and seeing in it a guarantee against the restoration of Tsarism, the peasantry at the same time not infrequently opposes the collection of corn, considering it a bad bargain so long as it does not itself receive printed calico, nails, and kerosine. The Soviet Government naturally strove to impose the chief weight of the food tax upon the upper strata of the village. But, in the unformed social conditions of the village, the influential peasantry, accustomed to lead the middle peasants in its train, found scores of methods of passing on the food tax from itself to the wide masses of the peasantry, thereby placing them in a position of hostility and opposition to the Soviet power. It was necessary to awaken in the lower ranks of the peasantry suspicion and hostility towards the speculating upper strata. This purpose was served by the Committees of Poverty. They were built up of the rank and file, of elements who in the last epoch were oppressed, driven into a dark corner, deprived of their rights. Of course, in their midst there turned out to be a certain number of semi-parasitic elements. This served as the chief text for the demagogues amongst the populist "Socialists," whose speeches found a grateful echo in the hearts of the village vultures. But the mere fact of the transference of power to the village poor had an immeasurable revolutionary significance. For the guidance of the village semi-proletarians, there were despatched from the towns parties from amongst the foremost workers, who accomplished invaluable work in the villages. The Committees of Poverty became shock battalions against the vulture class. Enjoying the support of the State, they thereby obliged the middle section of the peasantry to choose, not only between the Soviet power and the power of the landlords, but between the dictatorship of the proletariat and the semi-proletarian elements of the village on the one hand, and the yoke of the rich speculators on the other. By a series of lessons, some of which were very severe, the middle peasantry was obliged to become convinced that the Soviet regime, which had driven away the landlords and bailiffs, in its turn imposes new duties upon the peasantry, and demands sacrifices from them. The political education of tens of millions of the middle peasantry did not take place as easily and smoothly as in the school-room, and it did not give immediate and unquestionable results. There were risings of the middle peasants, uniting with the speculators, and always in such cases falling under the leadership of White Guard landlords; there were abuses committed by local agents of the Soviet Government, particularly by those of the Committees of Poverty. But the fundamental political end was attained. The powerful class of rich peasantry, if it was not finally annihilated, proved to be shaken to its foundations, with its self-reliance undermined. The middle peasantry, remaining politically shapeless, just as it is economically shapeless, began to learn to find its representative in the foremost worker, as before it found it in the noisy village speculator. Once this fundamental result was achieved, the Committees of Poverty, as temporary institutions, as a sharp wedge driven into the village masses, had to yield their place to the Soviets, in which the village poor are represented side by side with the middle peasantry. The Committees of Poverty existed about six months, from June to December, 1918. In their institution, as in their abolition, Kautsky sees nothing but the "waverings" of Soviet policy. Yet at the same time he himself has not even a suspicion of any practical lessons to be drawn. And after all, how should he think of them? Experience such as we are acquiring in this respect knows no precedent; and questions and problems such as the Soviet Government is now solving in practice have no solution in books. What Kautsky calls contradictions in policy are, in reality, the _active manoeuvring_ of the proletariat in the spongy, undivided, peasant mass. The sailing ship has to manoeuvre before the wind; yet no one will see contradictions in the manoeuvres which finally bring the ship to harbor. In questions as to agricultural communes and Soviet farms, there could also be found not a few "contradictions," in which, side by side with individual mistakes, there are expressed various stages of the revolution. What quantity of land shall the Soviet State leave for itself in the Ukraine, and what quantity shall it hand over to the peasants; what policy shall it lay down for the agricultural communes; in what form shall it give them support, so as not to make them the nursery for parasitism; in what form is control to be organized over them--all these are absolutely new problems of Socialist economic construction, which have been settled beforehand neither theoretically nor practically, and in the settling of which the general principles of our programme have even yet to find their actual application and their testing in practice, by means of inevitable temporary deviations to right or left. But even the very fact that the Russian proletariat has found support in the peasantry Kautsky turns against us. "This has introduced into the Soviet regime an economically reactionary element which was spared (!) the Paris Commune, as its dictatorship did not rely on peasant Soviets." As if in reality we could accept the heritage of the feudal and bourgeois order with the possibility of excluding from it at will "an economically reactionary element"! Nor is this all. Having poisoned the Soviet regime by its "reactionary element," the peasantry has deprived us of its support. To-day it "hates" the Bolsheviks. All this Kautsky knows very certainly from the radios of Clémenceau and the squibs of the Mensheviks. In reality, what is true is that wide masses of the peasantry are suffering from the absence of the essential products of industry. But it is just as true that every other regime--and there were not a few of them, in various parts of Russia, during the last three years--proved infinitely more oppressive for the shoulders of the peasantry. Neither monarchical nor democratic governments were able to increase their stores of manufactured goods. Both of them found themselves in need of the peasant's corn and the peasant's horses. To carry out their policy, the bourgeois governments--including the Kautskian-Menshevik variety--made use of a purely bureaucratic apparatus, which reckons with the requirements of the peasant's farm to an infinitely less degree than the Soviet apparatus, which consists of workers and peasants. As a result, the middle peasant, in spite of his waverings, his dissatisfaction, and even his risings, ultimately always comes to the conclusion that, however difficult it is for him at present under the Bolsheviks, under every other regime it would be infinitely more difficult for him. It is quite true that the Commune was "spared" peasant support. But in return the Commune was not spared annihilation by the peasant armies of Thiers! Whereas our army, four-fifths of whom are peasants, is fighting with enthusiasm and with success for the Soviet Republic. And this one fact, controverting Kautsky and those inspiring him, gives the best possible verdict on the peasant policy of the Soviet Government. THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND THE EXPERTS "The Bolsheviks at first thought they could manage without the intelligentsia, without the experts," Kautsky narrates to us. (Page 191.) But then, becoming convinced of the necessity of the intelligentsia, they abandoned their severe repressions, and attempted to attract them to work by all sorts of measures, incidentally by giving them extremely high salaries. "In this way," Kautsky says ironically, "the true path, the true method of attracting experts consists in first of all giving them a thorough good hiding." ( Page 192.) Quite so. With all due respect to all philistines, the dictatorship of the proletariat does just consist in "giving a hiding" to the classes that were previously supreme, before forcing them to recognize the new order and to submit to it. The professional intelligentsia, brought up with a prejudice about the omnipotence of the bourgeoisie, long would not, could not, and did not believe that the working class is really capable of governing the country; that it seized power not by accident; and that the dictatorship of the proletariat is an insurmountable fact. Consequently, the bourgeois intelligentsia treated its duties to the Labor State extremely lightly, even when it entered its service; and it considered that to receive money from Wilson, Clémenceau or Mirbach for anti-Soviet agitation, or to hand over military secrets and technical resources to White Guards and foreign imperialists, is a quite natural and obvious course under the regime of the proletariat. It became necessary to show it in practice, and to show it severely, that the proletariat had not seized power in order to allow such jokes to be played off at its expense. In the severe penalties adopted in the case of the intelligentsia, our bourgeois idealist sees the "consequence of a policy which strove to attract the educated classes, not by means of persuasion, but by means of kicks from before and behind." (Page 193.) In this way, Kautsky seriously imagines that it is possible to attract the bourgeois intelligentsia to the work of Socialist construction by means of mere persuasion--and this in conditions when, in all other countries, there is still supreme the bourgeoisie which hesitates at no methods of terrifying, flattering, or buying over the Russian intelligentsia and making it a weapon for the transformation of Russia into a colony of slaves. Instead of analyzing the course of the struggle, Kautsky, when dealing with the intelligentsia, gives once again merely academical recipes. It is absolutely false that our party had the idea of managing without the intelligentsia, not realizing to the full its importance for the economic and cultural work that lay before us. On the contrary. When the struggle for the conquest and consolidation of power was in full blast, and the majority of the intelligentsia was playing the part of a shock battalion of the bourgeoisie, fighting against us openly or sabotaging our institutions, the Soviet power fought mercilessly with the experts, precisely because it knew their enormous importance from the point of view of organization so long as they do not attempt to carry on an independent "democratic" policy and execute the orders of one of the fundamental classes of society. Only after the opposition of the intelligentsia had been broken by a severe struggle did the possibility open before us of enlisting the assistance of the experts. We immediately entered that path. It proved not as simple as it might have seemed at first. The relations which existed under capitalist conditions between the working man and the director, the clerk and the manager, the soldier and the officer, left behind a very deep class distrust of the experts; and that distrust had become still more acute during the first period of the civil war, when the intelligentsia did its utmost to break the labor revolution by hunger and cold. It was not easy to outlive this frame of mind, and to pass from the first violent antagonism to peaceful collaboration. The laboring masses had gradually to become accustomed to see in the engineer, the agricultural expert, the officer, not the oppressor of yesterday but the useful worker of to-day--a necessary expert, entirely under the orders of the Workers' and Peasants' Government. We have already said that Kautsky is wrong when he attributes to the Soviet Government the desire to replace experts by proletarians. But that such a desire was bound to spring up in wide circles of the proletariat cannot be denied. A young class which had proved to its own satisfaction that it was capable of overcoming the greatest obstacles in its path, which had torn to pieces the veil of mystery which had hitherto surrounded the power of the propertied classes, which had realized that all good things on the earth were not the direct gift of heaven--that a revolutionary class was naturally inclined, in the person of the less mature of its elements, at first to over-estimate its capacity for solving each and every problem, without having recourse to the aid of experts educated by the bourgeoisie. It was not merely yesterday that we began the struggle with such tendencies, in so far as they assumed a definite character. "To-day, when the power of the Soviets has been set on a firm footing," we said at the Moscow City Conference on March 28, 1918, "the struggle with sabotage must express itself in the form of transforming the saboteurs of yesterday into the servants, executive officials, technical guides, of the new regime, wherever it requires them. If we do not grapple with this, if we do not attract all the forces necessary to us and enlist them in the Soviet service, our struggle of yesterday with sabotage would thereby be condemned as an absolutely vain and fruitless struggle. "Just as in dead machines, so into those technical experts, engineers, doctors, teachers, former officers, there is sunk a certain portion of our national capital, which we are obliged to exploit and utilize if we want to solve the root problems standing before us. "Democratization does not at all consist--as every Marxist learns in his A B C--in abolishing the meaning of skilled forces, the meaning of persons possessing special knowledge, and in replacing them everywhere and anywhere by elective boards. "Elective boards, consisting of the best representatives of the working class, but not equipped with the necessary technical knowledge, cannot replace one expert who has passed through the technical school, and who knows how to carry out the given technical work. That flood-tide of the collegiate principle which is at present to be observed in all spheres is the quite natural reaction of a young, revolutionary, only yesterday oppressed class, which is throwing out the one-man principle of its rulers of yesterday--the landlords and the generals--and everywhere is appointing its elected representatives. This, I say, is quite a natural and, in its origin, quite a healthy revolutionary reaction; but it is not the last word in the economic constructive work of the proletatarian proletarian class. "The next step must consist in the self-limitation of the collegiate principle, in a healthy and necessary act of self-limitation by the working class, which knows where the decisive word can be spoken by the elected representatives of the workers themselves, and where it is necessary to give way to a technical specialist, who is equipped with certain knowledge, on whom a great measure of responsibility must be laid, and who must be kept under careful political control. But it is necessary to allow the expert freedom to act, freedom to create; because no expert, be he ever so little gifted or capable, can work in his department when subordinate in his own technical work to a board of men who do not know that department. Political, collegiate and Soviet control everywhere and anywhere; but for the executive functions, we must appoint technical experts, put them in responsible positions, and impose responsibility upon them. "Those who fear this are quite unconsciously adopting an attitude of profound internal distrust towards the Soviet regime. Those who think that the enlisting of the saboteurs of yesterday in the administration of technically expert posts threatens the very foundations of the Soviet regime, do not realize that it is not through the work of some engineer or of some general of yesterday that the Soviet regime may stumble--in the political, in the revolutionary, in the military sense, the Soviet regime is unconquerable. But it may stumble through its own incapacity to grapple with the problems of creative organization. The Soviet regime is bound to draw from the old institutions all that was vital and valuable in them, and harness it on to the new work. If, comrades, we do not accomplish this, we shall not deal successfully with our principal problems; for it would be absolutely impossible for us to bring forth from our masses, in the shortest possible time, all the necessary experts, and throw aside all that was accumulated in the past. "As a matter of fact, it would be just the same as if we said that all the machines which hitherto had served to exploit the workers were now to be thrown aside. It would be madness. The enlisting of scientific experts is for us just as essential as the administration of the resources of production and transport, and all the wealth of the country generally. We must, and in addition we must immediately, bring under our control all the technical experts we possess, and introduce in practice for them the principle of compulsory labor; at the same time leaving them a wide margin of activity, and maintaining over them careful political control."[7] [7] Labor, Discipline, and Order will save the Socialist Soviet Republic (Moscow, 1918). Kautsky knows this pamphlet, as he quotes from it several times. This, however, does not prevent him passing over the passage quoted above, which makes clear the attitude of the Soviet Government to the intelligentsia. The question of experts was particularly acute, from the very beginning, in the War Department. Here, under the pressure of iron necessity, it was solved first. In the sphere of administration of industry and transport, the necessary forms of organization are very far from being attained, even to this day. We must seek the reason in the fact that during the first two years we were obliged to sacrifice the interests of industry and transport to the requirements of military defence. The extremely changeable course of the civil war, in its turn, threw obstacles in the way of the establishment of regular relations with the experts. Qualified technicians of industry and transport, doctors, teachers, professors, either went away with the retreating armies of Kolchak and Denikin, or were compulsorily evacuated by them. Only now, when the civil war is approaching its conclusion, is the intelligentsia in its mass making its peace with the Soviet Government, or bowing before it. Economic problems have acquired first-class importance. One of the most important amongst them is the problem of the scientific organization of production. Before the experts there opens a boundless field of activity. They are being accorded the independence necessary for creative work. The general control of industry on a national scale is concentrated in the hands of the Party of the proletariat. THE INTERNAL POLICY OF THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT "The Bolsheviks," Kautsky mediates, "acquired the force necessary for the seizure of political power through the fact that, amongst the political parties in Russia, they were the most energetic in their demands for peace--peace at any price, a separate peace--without interesting themselves as to the influence this would have on the general international situation, as to whether this would assist the victory and world domination of the German military monarchy, under the protection of which they remained for a long time, just like Indian or Irish rebels or Italian anarchists." (Page 53.) Of the reasons for our victory, Kautsky knows only the one that we stood for peace. He does not explain the Soviet Government has continued to exist now that it has again mobilized a most important proportion of the soldiers of the imperial army, in order for two years successfully to combat its political enemies. The watchword of peace undoubtedly played an enormous part in our struggle; but precisely because it was directed against the _imperialist_ war. The idea of peace was supported most strongly of all, not by the tired soldiers, but by the foremost workers, for whom it had the import, not for a rest, but of a pitiless struggle against the exploiters. It was those same workers who, under the watchword of peace, later laid down their lives on the Soviet fronts. The affirmation that we demanded peace without reckoning on the effect it would have on the international situation is a belated echo of Cadet and Menshevik slanders. The comparison of us with the Germanophile nationalists of India and Ireland seeks its justification in the fact that German imperialism did actually _attempt_ to make use of us as it did the Indians and the Irish. But the chauvinists of France spared no efforts to make use of Liebknecht and Luxemburg--even of Kautsky and Bernstein--in their own interests. The whole question is, did we allow ourselves to be utilized? Did we, by our conduct, give the European workers even the shadow of a ground to place us in the same category as German imperialism? It is sufficient to remember the course of the Brest negotiations, their breakdown, and the German advance of February, 1918, to reveal all the cynicism of Kautsky's accusation. In reality, there was no peace for a single day between ourselves and German imperialism. On the Ukrainian and Caucasian fronts, we, in the measure of our then extremely feeble energies, continued to wage war without openly calling it such. We were too weak to organize war along the whole Russo-German front. We maintained persistently the fiction of peace, utilizing the fact that the chief German forces were drawn away to the west. If German imperialism did prove sufficiently powerful, in 1917-18, to impose upon us the Brest Peace, after all our efforts to tear that noose from our necks, one of the principal reasons was the disgraceful behavior of the German Social-Democratic Party, of which Kautsky remained an integral and essential part. The Brest Peace was pre-determined on August 4, 1914. At that moment, Kautsky not only did not declare war against German militarism, as he later demanded from the Soviet Government, which was in 1918 still powerless from a military point of view; Kautsky actually proposed voting for the War Credits, "under certain conditions"; and generally behaved in such a way that for months it was impossible to discover whether he stood for the War or against it. And this political coward, who at the decisive moment gave up the principal positions of Socialism, dares to accuse us of having found ourselves obliged, at a certain moment, to retreat--not in principle, but materially. And why? Because we were betrayed by the German Social-Democracy, corrupted by Kautskianism--_i.e._, by political prostitution disguised by theories. We did concern ourselves with the international situation! In reality, we had a much more profound criterion by which to judge the international situation; and it did not deceive us. Already before the February Revolution the Russian Army no longer existed as a fighting force. Its final collapse was pre-determined. If the February Revolution had not taken place, Tsarism would have come to an agreement with the German monarchy. But the February Revolution which prevented that finally destroyed the army built on a monarchist basis, precisely because it was a revolution. A month sooner or later the army was bound to fall to pieces. The military policy of Kerensky was the policy of an ostrich. He closed his eyes to the decomposition of the army, talked sounding phrases, and uttered verbal threats against German imperialism. In such conditions, we had only one way out: to take our stand on the platform of peace, as the inevitable conclusion from the military powerlessness of the revolution, and to transform that watchword into the weapon of revolutionary influence on all the peoples of Europe. That is, instead of, together with Kerensky, peacefully awaiting the final military catastrophe--which might bury the revolution in its ruins--we proposed to take possession of the watchword of peace and to lead after it the proletariat of Europe--and first and foremost the workers of Austro-Germany. It was in the light of this view that we carried on our peace negotiations with the Central Empires, and it was in the light of this that we drew up our Notes to the governments of the Entente. We drew out the negotiations as long as we could, in order to give the European working masses the possibility of realizing the meaning of the Soviet Government and its policy. The January strike of 1918 in Germany and Austria showed that our efforts had not been in vain. That strike was the first serious premonition of the German Revolution. The German Imperialists understood then that it was just we who represented for them a deadly danger. This is very strikingly shown in Ludendorff's book. True, they could not risk any longer coming out against us in an open crusade. But wherever they could fight against us secretly deceiving the German workers with the help of the German Social-Democracy, they did so; in the Ukraine, on the Don, in the Caucasus. In Central Russia, in Moscow, Count Mirbach from the very first day of his arrival stood as the centre of counter-revolutionary plots against the Soviet Government--just as Comrade Yoffe in Berlin was in the closest possible touch with the revolution. The Extreme Left group of the German revolutionary movement, the party of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg, all the time went hand in hand with us. The German revolution at once took on the form of Soviets, and the German proletariat, in spite of the Brest Peace, did not for a moment entertain any doubts as to whether we were with Liebknecht or Ludendorff. In his evidence before the Reichstag Commission in November, 1919, Ludendorff explained how "the High Command demanded the creation of an institution with the object of disclosing the connection of revolutionary tendencies in Germany with Russia. Yoffe arrived in Berlin, and in various towns there were set up Russian consulates. This had the most painful consequences in the army and navy." Kautsky, however, has the audacity to write that "if matters did come to a German revolution, truly it is not the Bolsheviks who are responsible for it." (Page 162.) Even if we had had the possibility in 1917-18, by means of revolutionary abstention, of supporting the old Imperial Army instead of hastening its destruction, we should have merely been assisting the Entente, and would have covered up by our aid its brigands' peace with Germany, Austria, and all the countries of the world generally. With such a policy we should at the decisive moment have proved absolutely disarmed in the face of the Entente--still more disarmed than Germany is to-day. Whereas, thanks to the November Revolution and the Brest Peace we are to-day the only country which opposes the Entente rifle in hand. By our international policy, we not only did not assist the Hohenzollern to assume a position of world domination; on the contrary, by our November Revolution we did more than anyone else to prepare his overthrow. At the same time, we gained a military breathing-space, in the course of which we created a large and strong army, the first army of the proletariat in history, with which to-day not all the unleashed hounds of the Entente can cope. The most critical moment in our international situation arose in the autumn of 1918, after the destruction of the German armies. In the place of two mighty camps, more or less neutralizing each other, there stood before us the victorious Entente, at the summit of its world power, and there lay broken Germany, whose Junker blackguards would have considered it a happiness and an honor to spring at the throat of the Russian proletariat for a bone from the kitchen of Clemenceau. We proposed peace to the Entente, and were again ready--for we were obliged--to sign the most painful conditions. But Clemenceau, in whose imperialist rapacity there have remained in their full force all the characteristics of lower-middle-class thick-headedness, refused the Junkers their bone, and at the same time decided at all costs to decorate the Invalides with the scalps of the leaders of the Soviet Republic. By this policy Clemenceau did us not a small service. We defended ourselves successfully, and held out. What, then, was the guiding principle of our external policy, once the first months of existence of the Soviet Government had made clear the considerable vitality as yet of the capitalist governments of Europe? Just that which Kautsky accepts to-day uncomprehendingly as an accidental result--_to hold out_! We realized too clearly that the very fact of the existence of the Soviet Government is an event of the greatest revolutionary importance; and this realization dictated to us our concessions and our temporary retirements--not in principle but in practical conclusions from a sober estimate of our own forces. We retreated like an army which gives up to the enemy a town, and even a fortress, in order, having retreated, to concentrate its forces not only for defence but for an advance. We retreated like strikers amongst whom to-day energies and resources have been exhausted, but who, clenching their teeth, are preparing for a new struggle. If we were not filled with an unconquerable belief in the world significance of the Soviet dictatorship, we should not have accepted the most painful sacrifices at Brest-Litovsk. If our faith had proved to be contradicted by the actual course of events, the Brest Peace would have gone down to history as the futile capitulation of a doomed regime. That is how the situation was judged _then_, not only by the Kühlmanns, but also by the Kautskies of all countries. But we proved right in our estimate, as of our weakness then, so of our strength in the future. The existence of the Ebert Republic, with its universal suffrage, its parliamentary swindling, its "freedom" of the Press, and its murder of labor leaders, is merely a necessary link in the historical chain of slavery and scoundrelism. The existence of the Soviet Government is a fact of immeasurable revolutionary significance. It was necessary to retain it, utilizing the conflict of the capitalist nations, the as yet unfinished imperialist war, the self-confident effrontery of the Hohenzollern bands, the thick-wittedness of the world-bourgeoisie as far as the fundamental questions of the revolution were concerned, the antagonism of America and Europe, the complication of relations within the Entente. We had to lead our yet unfinished Soviet ship over the stormy waves, amid rocks and reefs, completing its building and armament en route. Kautsky has the audacity to repeat the accusation that we did not, at the beginning of 1918, hurl ourselves unarmed against our mighty foe. Had we done this we would have been crushed.[8] The first great attempt of the proletariat to seize power would have suffered defeat. The revolutionary wing of the European proletariat would have been dealt the severest possible blow. The Entente would have made peace with the Hohenzollern over the corpse of the Russian Revolution, and the world capitalist reaction would have received a respite for a number of years. When Kautsky says that, concluding the Brest Peace, we did not think of its influence on the fate of the German Revolution, he is uttering a disgraceful slander. We considered the question from all sides, and our _sole criterion_ was the interests of the international revolution. [8] The Vienna Arbeiterzeitung opposes, as is fitting, the wise Russian Communists to the foolish Austrians. "Did not Trotsky," the paper writes, "with a clear view and understanding of possibilities, sign the Brest-Litovsk peace of violence, notwithstanding that it served for the consolidation of German imperialism? The Brest Peace was just as harsh and shameful as is the Versailles Peace. But does this mean that Trotsky had to be rash enough to continue the war against Germany? Would not the fate of the Russian Revolution long ago have been sealed? Trotsky bowed before the unalterable necessity of signing the shameful treaty in anticipation of the German revolution." The honor of having foreseen all the consequences of the Brest Peace belongs to Lenin. But this, of course, alters nothing in the argument of the organ of the Viennese Kautskians. We came to the conclusion that those interests demanded that the only Soviet Government in the world should be preserved. And we proved right. Whereas Kautsky awaited our fall, if not with impatience, at least with certainty; and on this expected fall built up his whole international policy. The minutes of the session of the Coalition Government of November 19, 1918, published by the Bauer Ministry, run:--"First, a continuation of the discussion as to the relations of Germany and the Soviet Republic. Haase advises a policy of procrastination. Kautsky agrees with Haase: _decision must be postponed_. _The Soviet Government will not last long. It will inevitably fall in the course of a few weeks_...." In this way, at the time when the situation of the Soviet Government was really extremely difficult--for the destruction of German militarism had given the Entente, it seemed, the full possibility of finishing with us "in the course of a few weeks"--at that moment Kautsky not only does not hasten to our aid, and even does not merely wash his hands of the whole affair; he participates in active treachery against revolutionary Russia. To aid Scheidemann in his role of _watch-dog_ of the bourgeoisie, instead of the "programme" role assigned to him of its "_grave-digger_," Kautsky himself hastens to become the grave-digger of the Soviet Government. But the Soviet Government is alive. It will outlive all its grave-diggers. 8 PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR THE SOVIET GOVERNMENT AND INDUSTRY If, in the first period of the Soviet revolution, the principal accusation of the bourgeois world was directed against our savagery and blood-thirstiness, later, when that argument, from frequent use, had become blunted, and had lost its force, we were made responsible chiefly for the economic disorganization of the country. In harmony with his present mission, Kautsky methodically translates into the language of pseudo-Marxism all the bourgeois charges against the Soviet Government of destroying the industrial life of Russia. The Bolsheviks began socialization without a plan. They socialized what was not ready for socialization. The Russian working class, altogether, is not yet prepared for the administration of industry; and so on, and so on. Repeating and combining these accusations, Kautsky, with dull obstinacy, hides the real cause for our economic disorganization: the imperialist slaughter, the civil war, and the blockade. Soviet Russia, from the first months of its existence, found itself deprived of coal, oil, metal, and cotton. First the Austro-German and then the Entente imperialisms, with the assistance of the Russian White Guards, tore away from Soviet Russia the Donetz coal and metal-working region, the oil districts of the Caucasus, Turkestan with its cotton, Ural with its richest deposits of metals, Siberia with its bread and meat. The Donetz area had usually supplied our industry with 94 per cent. of its coal and 74 per cent. of its crude ore. The Ural supplied the remaining 20 per cent. of the ore and 4 per cent. of the coal. Both these regions, during the civil war, were cut off from us. We were deprived of half a milliard poods of coal imported from abroad. Simultaneously, we were left without oil: the oilfields, one and all, passed into the hands of our enemies. One needs to have a truly brazen forehead to speak, in face of these facts, of the destructive influence of "premature," "barbarous," etc., socialization. An industry which is completely deprived of fuel and raw materials--whether that industry belongs to a capitalist trust or to the Labor State, whether its factories be socialized or not--its chimneys will not smoke in either case without coal or oil. Something might be learned about this, say, in Austria; and for that matter in Germany itself. A weaving factory administered according to the best Kautskian methods--if we admit that anything at all can be administered by Kautskian methods, except one's own inkstand--will not produce prints if it is not supplied with cotton. And we were simultaneously deprived both of Turkestan and American cotton. In addition, as has been pointed out, we had no fuel. Of course, the blockade and the civil war came as the result of the proletarian revolution in Russia. But it does not at all follow from this that the terrible devastation caused by the Anglo-American-French blockade and the robber campaigns of Kolchak and Denikin have to be put down to the discredit of the Soviet methods of economic organization. The imperialist war that preceded the revolution, with its all-devouring material and technical demands, imposed a much greater strain on our young industry than on the industry of more powerful capitalist countries. Our transport suffered particularly severely. The exploitation of the railways increased considerably; the wear and tear correspondingly; while repairs were reduced to a strict minimum. The inevitable hour of Nemesis was brought nearer by the fuel crisis. Our almost simultaneous loss of the Donetz coal, foreign coal, and the oil of the Caucasus, obliged us in the sphere of transport to have recourse to wood. And, as the supplies of wood fuel were not in the least calculated with a view to this, we had to stoke our boilers with recently stored raw wood, which has an extremely destructive effect on the mechanism of locomotives that are already worn out. We see, in consequence, that the chief reasons for the collapse of transport preceded November, 1917. But even those reasons which are directly or indirectly bound up with the November Revolution fall under the heading of political consequences of the revolution; and in no circumstances do they affect Socialist economic methods. The influence of political disturbances in the economic sphere was not limited only to questions of transport and fuel. If world industry, during the last decade, was more and more becoming a single organism, the more directly does this apply to national industry. On the other hand, the war and the revolution were mechanically breaking up and tearing asunder Russian industry in every direction. The industrial ruin of Poland, the Baltic fringe, and later of Petrograd, began under Tsarism and continued under Kerensky, embracing ever new and newer regions. Endless evacuations simultaneous with the destruction of industry, of necessity meant the destruction of transport also. During the civil war, with its changing fronts, evacuations assumed a more feverish and consequently a still more destructive character. Each side temporarily or permanently evacuated this or that industrial centre, and took all possible steps to ensure that the most important industrial enterprises could not be utilized by the enemy: all valuable machines were carried off, or at any rate their most delicate parts, together with the technical and best workers. The evacuation was followed by a re-evacuation, which not infrequently completed the destruction both of the property transferred and of the railways. Some most important industrial areas--especially in the Ukraine and in the Urals--changed hands several times. To this it must be added that, at the time when the destruction of technical equipment was being accomplished on an unprecedented scale, the supply of machines from abroad, which hitherto played a decisive part in our industry, had completely ceased. But not only did the dead elements of production--buildings, machines, rails, fuel, and raw material--suffer terrible losses under the combined blows of the war and the revolution. Not less, if not more, did the chief factor of industry, its living creative force--the proletariat--suffer. The proletariat was consolidating the November revolution, building and defending the apparatus of Soviet power, and carrying on a ceaseless struggle with the White Guards. The skilled workers are, as a rule, at the same time the most advanced. The civil war tore away many tens of thousands of the best workers for a long time from productive labor, swallowing up many thousands of them for ever. The Socialist revolution placed the chief burden of its sacrifices upon the proletarian vanguard, and consequently on industry. All the attention of the Soviet State has been directed, for the two and a half years of its existence, to the problem of military defence. The best forces and its principal resources were given to the front. In any case, the class struggle inflicts blows upon industry. That accusation, long before Kautsky, was levelled at it by all the philosophers of the social harmony. During simple economic strikes the workers consume, and do not produce. Still more powerful, therefore, are the blows inflicted upon economic life by the class struggle in its severest form--in the form of armed conflicts. But it is quite clear that the civil war cannot be classified under the heading of Socialist economic methods. The reasons enumerated above are more than sufficient to explain the difficult economic situation of Soviet Russia. There is no fuel, there is no metal, there is no cotton, transport is destroyed, technical equipment is in disorder, living labor-power is scattered over the face of the country, and a high percentage of it has been lost to the front--is there any need to seek supplementary reasons in the economic Utopianism of the Bolsheviks in order to explain the fall of our industry? On the contrary, each of the reasons quoted alone is sufficient to evoke the question: how is it possible at all that, under such conditions, factories and workshops should continue to function? And yet they do continue principally in the shape of war industry, which is at present living at the expense of the rest. The Soviet Government was obliged to re-create it, just like the army, out of fragments. War industry, set up again under these conditions of unprecedented difficulty, has fulfilled and is fulfilling its duty: the Red Army is clothed, shod, equipped with its rifle, its machine gun, its cannon, its bullet, its shell, its aeroplane, and all else that it requires. As soon as the dawn of peace made its appearance--after the destruction of Kolchak, Yudenich, and Denikin--we placed before ourselves the problem of economic organization in the fullest possible way. And already, in the course of three or four months of intensive work in this sphere, it has become clear beyond all possibility of doubt that, thanks to its most intimate connection with the popular masses, the elasticity of its apparatus, and its own revolutionary initiative, the Soviet Government disposes of such resources and methods for economic reconstruction as no other government ever had or has to-day. True, before us there arose quite new questions and new difficulties in the sphere of the organization of labor. Socialist theory had no answers to these questions, and could not have them. We had to find the solution in practice, and test it in practice. Kautskianism is a whole epoch behind the gigantic economic problems being solved at present by the Soviet Government. In the form of Menshevism, it constantly throws obstacles in our way, opposing the practical measures of our economic reconstruction by bourgeois prejudices and bureaucratic-intellectual scepticism. To introduce the reader to the very essence of the questions of the organization of labor, as they stand at present before us, we quote below the report of the author of this book at the Third All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions. With the object of the fullest possible elucidation of the question, the text of the speech is supplemented by considerable extracts from the author's reports at the All-Russian Congress of Economic Councils and at the Ninth Congress of the Communist Party. REPORT ON THE ORGANIZATION OF LABOR Comrades, the internal civil war is coming to an end. On the western front, the situation remains undecided. It is possible that the Polish bourgeoisie will hurl a challenge at its fate.... But even in this case--we do not seek it--the war will not demand of us that all-devouring concentration of forces which the simultaneous struggle on four fronts imposed upon us. The frightful pressure of the war is becoming weaker. Economic requirements and problems are more and more coming to the fore. History is bringing us, along the whole line, to our fundamental problem--the organization of labor on new social foundations. The organization of labor is in its essence the organization of the new society: every historical form of society is in its foundation a form of organization of labor. While every previous form of society was an organization of labor in the interests of a minority, which organized its State apparatus for the oppression of the overwhelming majority of the workers, we are making the first attempt in world history to organize labor in the interests of the laboring majority itself. This, however, does not exclude the element of compulsion in all its forms, both the most gentle and the extremely severe. The element of State compulsion not only does not disappear from the historical arena, but on the contrary will still play, for a considerable period, an extremely prominent part. As a general rule, man strives to avoid labor. Love for work is not at all an inborn characteristic: it is created by economic pressure and social education. One may even say that man is a fairly lazy animal. It is on this quality, in reality, that is founded to a considerable extent all human progress; because if man did not strive to expend his energy economically, did not seek to receive the largest possible quantity of products in return for a small quantity of energy, there would have been no technical development or social culture. It would appear, then, from this point of view that human laziness is a progressive force, Old Antonio Labriola, the Italian Marxist, even used to picture the man of the future as a "happy and lazy genius." We must not, however, draw the conclusion from this that the party and the trade unions must propagate this quality in their agitation as a moral duty. No, no! We have sufficient of it as it is. The problem before the social organization is just to bring "laziness" within a definite framework, to discipline it, and to pull mankind together with the help of methods and measures invented by mankind itself. COMPULSORY LABOR SERVICE The key to economic organization is labor-power, skilled, elementarily trained, semi-trained, untrained, or unskilled. To work out methods for its accurate registration, mobilization, distribution, productive application, means practically to solve the problem of economic construction. This is a problem for a whole epoch--a gigantic problem. Its difficulty is intensified by the fact that we have to reconstruct labor on Socialist foundations in conditions of hitherto unknown poverty and terrifying misery. The more our machine equipment is worn out, the more disordered our railways grow, the less hope there is for us of receiving machines to any significant extent from abroad in the near future, the greater is the importance acquired by the question of living labor-power. At first sight it would seem that there is plenty of it. But how are we to get at it? How are we to apply it? How are we productively to organize it? Even with the cleaning of snow drifts from the railway tracks, we were brought face to face with very big difficulties. It was absolutely impossible to meet those difficulties by means of buying labor-power on the market, with the present insignificant purchasing power of money, and in the most complete absence of manufactured products. Our fuel requirements cannot be satisfied, even partially, without a mass application, on a scale hitherto unknown, of labor-power to work on wood, fuel, peat, and combustible slate. The civil war has played havoc with our railways, our bridges, our buildings, our stations. We require at once tens and hundreds of thousands of hands to restore order to all this. For production on a large scale in our timber, peat, and other enterprises, we require housing for our workers, if they be only temporary huts. Hence, again, the necessity of devoting a considerable amount of labor-power to building work. Many workers are required to organize river navigation; and so on, and so forth.... Capitalist industry utilizes auxiliary labor-power on a large scale, in the shape of peasants employed on industry for only part of the year. The village, throttled by the grip of landlessness, always threw a certain surplus of labor-power on to the market. The State obliged it to do this by its demand for taxes. The market offered the peasant manufactured goods. To-day, we have none of this. The village has acquired more land; there is not sufficient agricultural machinery; workers are required for the land; industry can at present give practically nothing to the village; and the market no longer has an attractive influence on labor-power. Yet labor-power is required--required more than at any time before. Not only the worker, but the peasant also, must give to the Soviet State his energy, in order to ensure that laboring Russia, and with it the laboring masses, should not be crushed. The only way to attract the labor-power necessary for our economic problems is to introduce _compulsory labor service_. The very principle of compulsory labor service is for the Communist quite unquestionable. "He who works not, neither shall he eat." And as all must eat, all are obliged to work. Compulsory labor service is sketched in our Constitution and in our Labor Code. But hitherto it has always remained a mere principle. Its application has always had an accidental, impartial, episodic character. Only now, when along the whole line we have reached the question of the economic rebirth of the country, have problems of compulsory labor service arisen before us in the most concrete way possible. The only solution of economic difficulties that is correct from the point of view both of principle and of practice is to treat the population of the whole country as the reservoir of the necessary labor-power--an almost inexhaustible reservoir--and to introduce strict order into the work of its registration, mobilization, and utilization. How are we practically to begin the utilization of labor-power on the basis of compulsory military service? Hitherto only the War Department has had any experience in the sphere of the registration, mobilization, formation, and transference from one place to another of large masses. These technical methods and principles were inherited by our War Department, to a considerable extent, from the past. In the economic sphere there is no such heritage; since in that sphere there existed the principle of private property, and labor-power entered each factory separately from the market. It is consequently natural that we should be obliged, at any rate during the first period, to make use of the apparatus of the War Department on a large scale for labor mobilizations. We have set up special organizations for the application of the principle of compulsory labor service in the centre and in the districts: in the provinces, the counties, and the rural districts, we have already compulsory labor committees at work. They rely for the most part on the central and local organs of the War Department. Our economic centres--the Supreme Economic Council, the People's Commissariat for Agriculture, the People's Commissariat for Ways and Communications, the People's Commissariat for Food--work out estimates of the labor-power they require. The Chief Committee for Compulsory Labor Service receives these estimates, co-ordinates them, brings them into agreement with the local resources of labor-power, gives corresponding directions to its local organs, and through them carries out labor mobilizations. Within the boundaries of regions, provinces, and counties, the local bodies carry out this work independently, with the object of satisfying local economic requirements. All this organization is at present only in the embryo stage. It is still very imperfect. But the course we have adopted is unquestionably the right one. If the organization of the new society can be reduced fundamentally to the reorganization of labor, the organization of labor signifies in its turn the correct introduction of general labor service. This problem is in no way met by measures of a purely departmental and administrative character. It touches the very foundations of economic life and the social structure. It finds itself in conflict with the most powerful psychological habits and prejudices. The introduction of compulsory labor service pre-supposes, on the one hand, a colossal work of education, and, on the other, the greatest possible care in the practical method adopted. The utilization of labor-power must be to the last degree economical. In our labor mobilizations we have to reckon with the economic and social conditions of every region, and with the requirements of the principal occupation of the local population--_i.e._, of agriculture. We have, if possible, to make use of the previous auxiliary occupations and part-time industries of the local population. We have to see that the transference of mobilized labor-power should take place over the shortest possible distances--_i.e._, to the nearest sectors of the labor front. We must see that the number of workers mobilized correspond to the breadth of our economic problem. We must see that the workers mobilized be supplied in good time with the necessary implements of production, and with food. We must see that at their head be placed experienced and business-like instructors. We must see that the workers mobilized become convinced on the spot that their labor-power is being made use of cautiously and economically and is not being expended haphazard. Wherever it is possible, direct mobilization must be replaced by the labor task--_i.e._, by the imposition on the rural district of an obligation to supply, for example, in such a time such a number of cubic sazhens of wood, or to bring up by carting to such a station so many poods of cast-iron, etc. In this sphere, it is essential to study experience as it accumulates with particular care, to allow a great measure of elasticity to the economic apparatus, to show more attention to local interests and social peculiarities of tradition. In a word, we have to complete, ameliorate, perfect, the system, methods, and organs for the mobilization of labor-power. But at the same time it is necessary once for all to make clear to ourselves that the principle itself of compulsory labor service has just so radically and permanently replaced the principle of free hiring as the socialization of the means of production has replaced capitalist property. THE MILITARIZATION OF LABOR The introduction of compulsory labor service is unthinkable without the application, to a greater or less degree, of the methods of militarization of labor. This term at once brings us into the region of the greatest possible superstitions and outcries from the opposition. To understand what militarization of labor in the Workers' State means, and what its methods are, one has to make clear to oneself in what way the army itself was militarized--for, as we all know, in its first days the army did not at all possess the necessary "military" qualities. During these two years we mobilized for the Red Army nearly as many soldiers as there are members in our trade unions. But the members of the trade unions are workers, while in the army the workers constitute about 15 per cent., the remainder being a peasant mass. And, none the less, we can have no doubt that the true builder and "militarizer" of the Red Army has been the foremost worker, pushed forward by the party and the trade union organization. Whenever the situation at the front was difficult, whenever the recently-mobilized peasant mass did not display sufficient stability, we turned on the one hand to the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and on the other to the All-Russian Council of Trade Unions. From both these sources the foremost workers were sent to the front, and there built the Red Army after their own likeness and image--educating, hardening, and militarizing the peasant mass. This fact must be kept in mind to-day with all possible clearness because it throws the best possible light on the meaning of militarization in the workers' and peasants' State. The militarization of labor has more than once been put forward as a watchword and realized in separate branches of economic life in the bourgeois countries, both in the West and in Russia under Tsarism. But our militarization is distinguished from those experiments by its aims and methods, just as much as the class-conscious proletariat organized for emancipation is distinguished from the class-conscious bourgeoisie organized for exploitation. From the confusion, semi-unconscious and semi-deliberate, of two different historical forms of militarization--the proletarian or Socialist and the bourgeois--there spring the greater part of the prejudices, mistakes, protests, and outcries on this subject. It is on such a confusion of meanings that the whole position of the Mensheviks, our Russian Kautskies, is founded, as it was expressed in their theoretical resolution moved at the present Congress of Trade Unions. The Mensheviks attacked not only the militarization of labor, but general labor service also. They reject these methods as "compulsory." They preach that general labor service means a low productivity of labor, while militarization means senseless scattering of labor-power. "Compulsory labor always is unproductive labor,"--such is the exact phrase in the Menshevik resolution. This affirmation brings us right up to the very essence of the question. For, as we see, the question is not at all whether it is wise or unwise to proclaim this or that factory militarized, or whether it is helpful or otherwise to give the military revolutionary tribunal powers to punish corrupt workers who steal materials and instruments, so precious to us, or who sabotage their work. No, the Mensheviks have gone much further into the question. Affirming that compulsory labor is _always_ unproductive, they thereby attempt to cut the ground from under the feet of our economic reconstruction in the present transitional epoch. For it is beyond question that to step from bourgeois anarchy to Socialist economy without a revolutionary dictatorship, and without compulsory forms of economic organization, is impossible. In the first paragraph of the Menshevik resolution we are told that we are living in the period of transition from the capitalist method of production to the Socialist. What does this mean? And, first of all, whence does this come? Since what time has this been admitted by our Kautskians? They accused us--and this formed the foundation of our differences--of Socialist Utopianism; they declared--and this constituted the essence of their political teaching--that there can be no talk about the transition to Socialism in our epoch, and that our revolution is a bourgeois revolution, and that we Communists are only destroying capitalist economy, and that we are not leading the country forward but are throwing it back. This was the root difference--the most profound, the most irreconcilable--from which all the others followed. Now the Mensheviks tell us incidentally, in the introductory paragraph of their resolution, as something that does not require proof, that we are in the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism. And this quite unexpected admission, which, one might think, is extremely like a complete capitulation, is made the more lightly and carelessly that, as the whole resolution shows, it imposes no revolutionary obligations on the Mensheviks. They remain entirely captive to the bourgeois ideology. After recognizing that we are on the road to Socialism, the Mensheviks with all the greater ferocity attack those methods without which, in the harsh and difficult conditions of the present day, the transition to Socialism cannot be accomplished. Compulsory labor, we are told, is always unproductive. We ask what does compulsory labor mean here, that is, to what kind of labor is it opposed? Obviously, to free labor. What are we to understand, in that case, by free labor? That phrase was formulated by the progressive philosophers of the bourgeoisie, in the struggle against unfree, _i.e._, against the serf labor of peasants, and against the standardized and regulated labor of the craft guilds. Free labor meant labor which might be "freely" bought in the market; freedom was reduced to a legal fiction, on the basis of freely-hired slavery. We know of no other form of free labor in history. Let the very few representatives of the Mensheviks at this Congress explain to us what they mean by free, non-compulsory labor, if not the market of labor-power. History has known slave labor. History has known serf labor. History has known the regulated labor of the mediæval craft guilds. Throughout the world there now prevails hired labor, which the yellow journalists of all countries oppose, as the highest possible form of liberty, to Soviet "slavery." We, on the other hand, oppose capitalist slavery by socially-regulated labor on the basis of an economic plan, obligatory for the whole people and consequently compulsory for each worker in the country. Without this we cannot even dream of a transition to Socialism. The element of material, physical, compulsion may be greater or less; that depends on many conditions--on the degree of wealth or poverty of the country, on the heritage of the past, on the general level of culture, on the condition of transport, on the administrative apparatus, etc., etc. But obligation, and, consequently, compulsion, are essential conditions in order to bind down the bourgeois anarchy, to secure socialization of the means of production and labor, and to reconstruct economic life on the basis of a single plan. For the Liberal, freedom in the long run means the market. Can or cannot the capitalist buy labor-power at a moderate price--that is for him the sole measure of the freedom of labor. That measure is false, not only in relation to the future but also in connection with the past. It would be absurd to imagine that, during the time of bondage-right, work was carried entirely under the stick of physical compulsion, as if an overseer stood with a whip behind the back of every peasant. Mediæval forms of economic life grew up out of definite conditions of production, and created definite forms of social life, with which the peasant grew accustomed, and which he at certain periods considered just, or at any rate unalterable. Whenever he, under the influence of a change in material conditions, displayed hostility, the State descended upon him with its material force, thereby displaying the compulsory character of the organization of labor. The foundations of the militarization of labor are those forms of State compulsion without which the replacement of capitalist economy by the Socialist will for ever remain an empty sound. Why do we speak of _militarization_? Of course, this is only an analogy--but an analogy very rich in content. No social organization except the army has ever considered itself justified in subordinating citizens to itself in such a measure, and to control them by its will on all sides to such a degree, as the State of the proletarian dictatorship considers itself justified in doing, and does. Only the army--just because in its way it used to decide questions of the life or death of nations, States, and ruling classes--was endowed with powers of demanding from each and all complete submission to its problems, aims, regulations, and orders. And it achieved this to the greater degree, the more the problems of military organization coincided with the requirements of social development. The question of the life or death of Soviet Russia is at present being settled on the labor front; our economic, and together with them our professional and productive organizations, have the right to demand from their members all that devotion, discipline, and executive thoroughness, which hitherto only the army required. On the other hand, the relation of the capitalist to the worker, is not at all founded merely on the "free" contract, but includes the very powerful elements of State regulation and material compulsion. The competition of capitalist with capitalist imparted a certain very limited reality to the fiction of freedom of labor; but this competition, reduced to a minimum by trusts and syndicates, we have finally eliminated by destroying private property in the means of production. The transition to Socialism, verbally acknowledged by the Mensheviks, means the transition from anarchical distribution of labor-power--by means of the game of buying and selling, the movement of market prices and wages--to systematic distribution of the workers by the economic organizations of the county, the province, and the whole country. Such a form of planned distribution pre-supposes the subordination of those distributed to the economic plan of the State. And this is the essence of _compulsory labor service_, which inevitably enters into the programme of the Socialist organization of labor, as its fundamental element. If organized economic life is unthinkable without compulsory labor service, the latter is not to be realized without the abolition of fiction of the freedom of labor, and without the substitution for it of the obligatory principle, which is supplemented by real compulsion. That free labor is more productive than compulsory labor is quite true when it refers to the period of transition from feudal society to bourgeois society. But one needs to be a Liberal or--at the present day--a Kautskian, to make that truth permanent, and to transfer its application to the period of transition from the bourgeois to the Socialist order. If it were true that compulsory labor is unproductive always and under every condition, as the Menshevik resolution says, all our constructive work would be doomed to failure. For we can have no way to Socialism except by the authoritative regulation of the economic forces and resources of the country, and the centralized distribution of labor-power in harmony with the general State plan. The Labor State considers itself empowered to send every worker to the place where his work is necessary. And not one serious Socialist will begin to deny to the Labor State the right to lay its hand upon the worker who refuses to execute his labor duty. But the whole point is that the Menshevik path of transition to "Socialism" is a milky way, without the bread monopoly, without the abolition of the market, without the revolutionary dictatorship, and without the militarization of labor. Without general labor service, without the right to order and demand fulfilment of orders, the trade unions will be transformed into a mere form without a reality; for the young Socialist State requires trade unions, not for a struggle for better conditions of labor--that is the task of the social and State organizations as a whole--but to organize the working class for the ends of production, to educate, discipline, distribute, group, retain certain categories and certain workers at their posts for fixed periods--in a word, hand in hand with the State to exercise their authority in order to lead the workers into the framework of a single economic plan. To defend, under such conditions, the "freedom" of labor means to defend fruitless, helpless, absolutely unregulated searches for better conditions, unsystematic, chaotic changes from factory to factory, in a hungry country, in conditions of terrible disorganization of the transport and food apparatus.... What except the complete collapse of the working-class and complete economic anarchy could be the result of the stupid attempt to reconcile bourgeois freedom of labor with proletarian socialization of the means of production? Consequently, comrades, militarization of labor, in the root sense indicated by me, is not the invention of individual politicians or an invention of our War Department, but represents the inevitable method of organization and disciplining of labor-power during the period of transition from capitalism to Socialism. And if the compulsory distribution of labor-power, its brief or prolonged retention at particular industries and factories, its regulation within the framework of the general State economic plan--if these forms of compulsion lead always and everywhere, as the Menshevik resolution states, to the lowering of productivity, then you can erect a monument over the grave of Socialism. For we cannot build Socialism on decreased production. Every social organization is in its foundation an organization of labor, and if our new organization of labor leads to a lowering of its productivity, it thereby most fatally leads to the destruction of the Socialist society we are building, whichever way we twist and turn, whatever measures of salvation we invent. That is why I stated at the very beginning that the Menshevik argument against militarization leads us to the root question of general labor service and its influence on the productivity of labor. It is true that compulsory labor is always unproductive? We have to reply that that is the most pitiful and worthless Liberal prejudice. The whole question is: who applies the principle of compulsion, over whom, and for what purpose? What State, what class, in what conditions, by what methods? Even the serf organization was in certain conditions a step forward, and led to the increase in the productivity of labor. Production has grown extremely under capitalism, that is, in the epoch of the free buying and selling of labor-power on the market. But free labor, together with the whole of capitalism, entered the stage of imperialism and blew itself up in the imperialist war. The whole economic life of the world entered a period of bloody anarchy, monstrous perturbations, the impoverishment, dying out, and destruction of masses of the people. Can we, under such conditions, talk about the productivity of free labor, when the fruits of that labor are destroyed ten times more quickly than they are created? The imperialistic war, and that which followed it, displayed the impossibility of society existing any longer on the foundation of free labor. Or perhaps someone possesses the secret of how to separate free labor from the delirium tremens of imperialism, that is, of turning back the clock of social development half a century or a century? If it were to turn out that the planned, and consequently compulsory, organization of labor which is arising to replace imperialism led to the lowering of economic life, it would mean the destruction of all our culture, and a retrograde movement of humanity back to barbarism and savagery. Happily, not only for Soviet Russia but for the whole of humanity, the philosophy of the low productivity of compulsory labor--"everywhere and under all conditions"--is only a belated echo of ancient Liberal melodies. The productivity of labor is the total productive meaning of the most complex combination of social conditions, and is not in the least measured or pre-determined by the legal form of labor. The whole of human history is the history of the organization and education of collective man for labor, with the object of attaining a higher level of productivity. Man, as I have already permitted myself to point out, is lazy; that is, he instinctively strives to receive the largest possible quantity of products for the least possible expenditure of energy. Without such a striving, there would have been no economic development. The growth of civilization is measured by the productivity of human labor, and each new form of social relations must pass through a test on such lines. "Free," that is, freely-hired labor, did not appear all at once upon the world, with all the attributes of productivity. It acquired a high level of productivity only gradually, as a result of a prolonged application of methods of labor organization and labor education. Into that education there entered the most varying methods and practices, which in addition changed from one epoch to another. First of all the bourgeoisie drove the peasant from the village to the high road with its club, having preliminarily robbed him of his land, and when he would not work in the factory it branded his forehead with red-hot irons, hung him, sent him to the gallows; and in the long run it taught the tramp who had been shaken out of his village to stand at the lathe in the factory. At this stage, as we see, "free" labor is little different as yet from convict labor, both in its material conditions and in its legal aspect. At different times the bourgeoisie combined the red-hot irons of repression in different proportions with methods of moral influence, and, first of all, the teaching of the priest. As early as the sixteenth century, it reformed the old religion of Catholicism, which defended the feudal order, and adapted for itself a new religion in the form of the Reformation, which combined the free soul with free trade and free labor. It found for itself new priests, who became the spiritual shop-assistants, pious counter-jumpers of the bourgeoisie. The school, the press, the market-place, and parliament were adapted by the bourgeoisie for the moral fashioning of the working-class. Different forms of wages--day-wages, piece wages, contract and collective bargaining--all these are merely changing methods in the hands of the bourgeoisie for the labor mobilization of the proletariat. To this there are added all sorts of forms for encouraging labor and exciting ambition. Finally, the bourgeoisie learned how to gain possession even of the trade unions--_i.e._, the organizations of the working class itself; and it made use of them on a large scale, particularly in Great Britain, to discipline the workers. It domesticated the leaders, and with their help inoculated the workers with the fiction of the necessity for peaceful organic labor, for a faultless attitude to their duties, and for a strict execution of the laws of the bourgeois State. The crown of all this work is Taylorism, in which the elements of the scientific organization of the process of production are combined with the most concentrated methods of the system of sweating. From all that has been said above, it is clear that the productivity of freely-hired labor is not something that appeared all at once, perfected, presented by history on a salver. No, it was the result of a long and stubborn policy of repression, education, organization, and encouragement, applied by the bourgeoisie in its relations with the working class. Step by step it learned to squeeze out of the workers ever more and more of the products of labor; and one of the most powerful weapons in its hand turned out to be the proclamation of free hiring as the sole free, normal, healthy, productive, and saving form of labor. A legal form of labor which would of its own virtue guarantee its productivity has not been known in history, and cannot be known. The legal superstructure of labor corresponds to the relations and current ideas of the epoch. The productivity of labor is developed, on the basis of the development of technical forces, by labor education, by the gradual adaptation of the workers to the changed methods of production and the new form of social relations. The creation of Socialist society means the organization of the workers on new foundations, their adaptation to those foundations, and their labor re-education, with the one unchanging end of the increase in the productivity of labor. The working class, under the leadership of its vanguard, must itself re-educate itself on the foundations of Socialism. Whoever has not understood this is ignorant of the A B C of Socialist construction. What methods have we, then, for the re-education of the workers? Infinitely wider than the bourgeoisie has--and, in addition, honest, direct, open methods, infected neither by hypocrisy nor by lies. The bourgeoisie had to have recourse to deception, representing its labor as free, when in reality it was not merely socially-imposed, but actually slave labor. For it was the labor of the majority in the interests of the minority. We, on the other hand, organize labor in the interests of the workers themselves, and therefore we can have no motives for hiding or masking the socially compulsory character of our labor organization. We need the fairy stories neither of the priests, nor of the Liberals, nor of the Kautskians. We say directly and openly to the masses that they can save, rebuild, and bring to a flourishing condition a Socialist country only by means of hard work, unquestioning discipline and exactness in execution on the part of every worker. The chief of our resources is moral influence--propaganda not only in word but in deed. General labor service has an obligatory character; but this does not mean at all that it represents violence done to the working class. If compulsory labor came up against the opposition of the majority of the workers it would turn out a broken reed, and with it the whole of the Soviet order. The militarization of labor, when the workers are opposed to it, is the State slavery of Arakcheyev. The militarization of labor by the will of the workers themselves is the Socialist dictatorship. That compulsory labor service and the militarization of labor do not force the will of the workers, as "free" labor used to do, is best shown by the flourishing, unprecedented in the history of humanity, of labor voluntarism in the form of "Subbotniks" (Communist Saturdays). Such a phenomenon there never was before, anywhere or at any time. By their own voluntary labor, freely given--once a week and oftener--the workers clearly demonstrate not only their readiness to bear the yoke of "compulsory" labor but their eagerness to give the State besides that a certain quantity of additional labor. The "Subbotniks" are not only a splendid demonstration of Communist solidarity, but also the best possible guarantee for the successful introduction of general labor service. Such truly Communist tendencies must be shown up in their true light, extended, and developed with the help of propaganda. The chief spiritual weapon of the bourgeoisie is religion; ours is the open explanation to the masses of the exact position of things, the extension of scientific and technical knowledge, and the initiation of the masses into the general economic plan of the State, on the basis of which there must be brought to bear all the labor-power at the disposal of the Soviet regime. Political economy provided us with the principal substance of our agitation in the period we have just left: the capitalist social order was a riddle, and we explained that riddle to the masses. To-day, social riddles are explained to the masses by the very mechanism of the Soviet order, which draws the masses into all branches of administration. Political economy will more and more pass into the realms of history. There move forward into the foreground the sciences which study nature and the methods of subordinating it to man. The trade unions must organize scientific and technical educational work on the widest possible scale, so that every worker in his own branch of industry should find the impulses for theoretical work of the brain, while the latter should again return him to labor, perfecting it and making him more productive. The press as a whole must fall into line with the economic problems of the country--not in that sense alone in which this is being done at present--_i.e._, not in the sense of a mere general agitation in favor of a revival of labor--but in the sense of the discussion and the weighing of concrete economic problems and plans, ways and means of their solution, and, most important of all, the testing and criticism of results already achieved. The newspapers must from day to day follow the production of the most important factories and other enterprises, registering their successes and failures encouraging some and pillorying others.... Russian capitalism, in consequence of its lateness, its lack of independence, and its resulting parasitic features, has had much less time than European capitalism technically to educate the laboring masses, to train and discipline them for production. That problem is now in its entirety imposed upon the industrial organizations of the proletariat. A good engineer, a good mechanic, and a good carpenter, must have in the Soviet Republic the same publicity and fame as hitherto was enjoyed by prominent agitators, revolutionary fighters, and, in the most recent period, the most courageous and capable commanders and commissaries. Greater and lesser leaders of technical development must occupy the central position in the public eye. Bad workers must be made ashamed of doing their work badly. We still retain, and for a long time will retain, the system of wages. The further we go, the more will its importance become simply to guarantee to all members of society all the necessaries of life; and thereby it will cease to be a system of wages. But at present we are not sufficiently rich for this. Our main problem is to raise the quantity of products turned out, and to this problem all the remainder must be subordinated. In the present difficult period the system of wages is for us, first and foremost, not a method for guaranteeing the personal existence of any separate worker, but a method of estimating what that individual worker brings by his labor to the Labor Republic. Consequently, wages, in the form both of money and of goods, must be brought into the closest possible touch with the productivity of individual labor. Under capitalism, the system of piece-work and of grading, the application of the Taylor system, etc., have as their object to increase the exploitation of the workers by the squeezing-out of surplus value. Under Socialist production, piece-work, bonuses, etc., have as their problem to increase the volume of social product, and consequently to raise the general well-being. Those workers who do more for the general interest than others receive the right to a greater quantity of the social product than the lazy, the careless, and the disorganizers. Finally, when it rewards some, the Labor State cannot but punish others--those who are clearly infringing labor solidarity, undermining the common work, and seriously impairing the Socialist renaissance of the country. Repression for the attainment of economic ends is a necessary weapon of the Socialist dictatorship. All the measures enumerated above--and together with them a number of others--must assist the development of rivalry in the sphere of production. Without this we shall never rise above the average, which is a very unsatisfactory level. At the bottom of rivalry lies the vital instinct--the struggle for existence--which in the bourgeois order assumes the character of competition. Rivalry will not disappear even in the developed Socialist society; but with the growing guarantee of the necessary requirements of life rivalry will acquire an ever less selfish and purely idealist character. It will express itself in a striving to perform the greatest possible service for one's village, county, town, or the whole of society, and to receive in return renown, gratitude, sympathy, or, finally, just internal satisfaction from the consciousness of work well done. But in the difficult period of transition, in conditions of the extreme shortage of material goods, and the as yet insufficiently developed state of social solidarity, rivalry must inevitably be to a greater or less degree bound up with a striving to guarantee for oneself one's own requirements. This, comrades, is the sum of resources at the disposal of the Labor State in order to raise the productivity of labor. As we see, there is no ready-made solution here. We shall find it written in no book. For there could not be such a book. We are now only beginning, together with you, to write that book in the sweat and the blood of the workers. We say: working men and women, you have crossed to the path of regulated labor. Only along that road will you build the Socialist society. Before you there lies a problem which no one will settle for you: the problem of increasing production on new social foundations. Unless you solve that problem, you will perish. If you solve it, you will raise humanity by a whole head. LABOR ARMIES The question of the application of armies to labor purposes, which has acquired amongst us an enormous importance from the point of view of principle, was approached by us by the path of practice, not at all on the foundations of theoretical consideration. On certain borders of Soviet Russia, circumstances had arisen which had left considerable military forces free for an indefinite period. To transfer them to other active fronts, especially in the winter, was difficult in consequence of the disorder of railway transport. Such, for example, proved the position of the Third Army, distributed over the provinces of the Ural and the Ural area. The leading workers of that army, understanding that as yet it could not be demobilized, themselves raised the question of its transference to labor work. They sent to the centre a more or less worked-out draft decree for a labor army. The problem was novel and difficult. Would the Red soldiers work? Would their work be sufficiently productive? Would it pay for itself? In this connection there were doubts even in our own ranks. Needless to say, the Mensheviks struck up a chorus of opposition. The same Abramovich, at the Congress of Economic Councils called in January or the beginning of February--that is to say, when the whole affair was still in draft stage--foretold that we should suffer an inevitable failure, for the whole undertaking was senseless, an Arakcheyev Utopia, etc., etc. We considered the matter otherwise. Of course the difficulties were great, but they were not distinguishable in principle from many other difficulties of Soviet constructive work. Let us consider in fact what was the organism of the Third Army. Taken all in all, one rifle division and one cavalry division--a total of fifteen regiments--and, in addition, special units. The remaining military formations had already been transformed to other armies and fronts. But the apparatus of military administration had remained untouched as yet, and we considered it probable that in the spring we should have to transfer it along the Volga to the Caucasus front, against Denikin, if by that time he were not finally broken. On the whole, in the Third Army there remained about 120,000 Red soldiers in administrative posts, institutions, military units, hospitals, etc. In this general mass, mainly peasant in its composition, there were reckoned about 16,000 Communists and members of the organization of sympathizers--to a considerable extent workers of the Ural. In this way, in its composition and structure, the Third Army represented a peasant mass bound together into a military organization under the leadership of the foremost workers. In the army there worked a considerable number of military specialists, who carried out important military functions while remaining under the general control of the Communists. If we consider the Third Army from this general point of view, we shall see that it represents in miniature the whole of Soviet Russia. Whether we take the Red Army as a whole, or the organization of the Soviet regime in the county, province, or the whole Republic, including the economic organs, we shall find everywhere the same scheme of organization: millions of peasants drawn into new forms of political, economic, and social life by the organized workers, who occupy a controlling position in all spheres of Soviet construction. To posts requiring special knowledge, we send experts of the bourgeois school. They are given the necessary independence, but control over their work remains in the hands of the working class, in the person of its Communist Party. The introduction of general labor service is again only conceivable for us as the mobilization of mainly peasant labor-power under the guidance of the most advanced workers. In this way there were not, and could not, be any obstacles in principle in the way of application of the army to labor. In other words, the opposition in principle to labor armies, on the part of those same Mensheviks, was in reality opposition to "compulsory" labor generally, and consequently against general labor service and against Soviet methods of economic reconstruction as a whole. This opposition did not trouble us a great deal. Naturally, the military apparatus as such is not adapted directly to the process of labor. But we had no illusions about that. Control had to remain in the hands of the appropriate economic organs; the army supplied the necessary labor-power in the form of organized, compact units, suitable in the mass for the execution of the simplest homogeneous types of work: the freeing of roads from snow, the storage of fuel, building work, organization of cartage, etc., etc. To-day we have already had considerable experience in the work of the labor application of the army, and can give not merely a preliminary or hypothetical estimate. What are the conclusions to be drawn from that experience? The Mensheviks have hastened to draw them. The same Abramovich, again, announced at the Miners' Congress that we had become bankrupt, that the labor armies represent parasitic formations, in which there are 100 officials for every ten workers. Is this true? No. This is the irresponsible and malignant criticism of men who stand on one side, do not know the facts, collect only fragments and rubbish, and are concerned in any way and every way either to declare our bankruptcy or to prophecy it. In reality, the labor armies have not only not gone bankrupt, but, on the contrary, have had important successes, have displayed their fidelity, are developing and are becoming stronger and stronger. Just those prophets have gone bankrupt who foretold that nothing would come of the whole plan, that nobody would begin to work, and that the Red soldiers would not go to the labor front but would simply scatter to their homes. These criticisms were dictated by a philistine scepticism, lack of faith in the masses, lack of faith in bold initiative, and organization. But did we not hear exactly the same criticism, at bottom, when we had recourse to extensive mobilizations for military problems? Then too we were frightened, we were terrified by stories of mass desertion, which was absolutely inevitable, it was alleged, after the imperialist war. Naturally, desertion there was, but considered by the test of experience it proved not at all on such a mass scale as was foretold; it did not destroy the army; the bond of morale and organization--Communist voluntarism and State compulsion combined--allowed us to carry out mobilizations of millions to carry through numerous formations and redistributions, and to solve the most difficult military problems. In the long run, the army was victorious. In relation to labor problems, on the foundation of our military experience, we awaited the same results; and we were not mistaken. The Red soldiers did not scatter when they were transformed from military to labor service, as the sceptics prophesied. Thanks to our splendidly-organized agitation, the transference itself took place amidst great enthusiasm. True, a certain portion of the soldiers tried to leave the army, but this always happens when a large military formation is transferred from one front to another, or is sent from the rear to the front--in general when it is shaken up--and when potential desertion becomes active. But immediately the political sections, the press, the organs of struggle with desertion, etc., entered into their rights; and to-day the percentage of deserters from our labor armies is in no way higher than in our armies on active service. The statement that the armies, in view of their internal structure, can produce only a small percentage of workers, is true only to a certain extent. As far as the Third Army is concerned, I have already pointed out that it retained its complete apparatus of administration side by side with an extremely insignificant number of military units. While we--owing to military and not economic considerations--retained untouched the staff of the army and its administrative apparatus, the percentage of workers produced by the army was actually extremely low. From the general number of 120,000 Red soldiers, 21% proved to be employed in administrative and economic work; 16% were engaged in daily detail work (guards, etc.) in connection with the large number of army institutions and stores; the number of sick, mainly typhus cases, together with the medico-sanitary personnel, was about 13%; about 25% were not available for various reasons (detachment, leave, absence without leave, etc.). In this way, the total personnel available for work constitutes no more than 23%; this is the maximum of what can be drawn for labor from the given army. Actually, at first, there worked only about 14%, mainly drawn from the two divisions, rifle and cavalry, which still remained with the army. But as soon as it was clear that Denikin had been crushed, and that we should not have to send the Third Army down the Volga in the spring to assist the forces on the Caucasus front, we immediately entered upon the disbanding of the clumsy army apparatus and a more regular adaptation of the army institutions to problems of labor. Although this work is not yet complete, it has already had time to give some very significant results. At the present moment (March, 1920), the former Third Army gives about 38% of its total composition as workers. As for the military units of the Ural military area working side by side with it, they already provide 49% of their number as workers. This result is not so bad, if we compare it with the amount of work done in factories and workshops, amongst which in the case of many quite recently, in the case of some even to-day, absence from work for legal and illegal reasons reached 50% and over.[9] To this one must add that workers in factories and workshops are not infrequently assisted by the adult members of their family, while the Red soldiers have no auxiliary force but themselves. [9] Since that time this percentage has been considerably lowered (June, 1920). If we take the case of the 19-year-olds, who have been mobilized in the Ural with the help of the military apparatus--principally for wood fuel work--we shall find that, out of their general number of over 30,000, over 75% attend work. This is already a very great step forward. It shows that, using the military apparatus for mobilization and formation, we can introduce such alterations in the construction of purely labor units as guarantee an enormous increase in the percentage of those who participate directly in the material process of production. Finally, in connection with the productivity of military labor, we can also now judge on the basis of experience. During the first days, the productivity of labor in the principal departments of work, in spite of the great moral enthusiasm, was in reality very low, and might seem completely discouraging when one reads the first labor communiqués. Thus, for the preparation of a cubic sazhen of wood, at first, one had to reckon thirteen to fifteen labor days; whereas the standard--true, rarely attained at the present day--is reckoned at three days. One must add, in addition, that artistes in this sphere are capable, under favorable conditions, of producing one cubic sazhen per day per man. What happened in reality? The military units were quartered far from the forest to be felled. In many cases it was necessary to march to and from work 6 to 8 versts, which swallowed up a considerable portion of the working day. There were not sufficient axes and saws on the spot. Many Red soldiers, born in the plains, did not know the forests, had never felled trees, had never chopped or sawed them up. The provincial and county Timber Committees were very far from knowing at first how to use the military units, how to direct them where they were required, how to equip them as they should be equipped. It is not wonderful that all this had as its result an extremely low level of productivity. But after the most crying defects in organization were eliminated, results were achieved that were much more satisfactory. Thus, according to the most recent data, in that same First Labor Army, four and a half working days are now devoted to one sazhen of wood, which is not so far from the present standard. What is most comforting, however, is the fact that the productivity of labor systematically increases, in the measure of the improvement of its conditions. While as to what can be achieved in this respect, we have a brief but very rich experience in the Moscow Engineer Regiment. The Chief Board of Military Engineers, which controlled this experiment, began with fixing the standard of production as three working days for a cubic sazhen of wood. This standard soon proved to be surpassed. In January there were spent on a cubic sazhen of wood two and one-third working days; in February, 2.1; in March, 1.5; which represents an exclusively high level of productivity. This result was achieved by moral influence, by the exact registration of the individual work of each man, by the awakening of labor pride, by the distribution of bonuses to the workers who produced more than the average result--or, to speak in the language of the trade unions, by a sliding scale adaptable to all individual changes in the productivity of labor. This experiment, carried out almost under laboratory conditions, clearly indicates the path along which we have to go in future. At present we have functioning a series of labor armies--the First, the Petrograd, the Ukrainian, the Caucasian, the South Volga, the Reserve. The latter, as is known, assisted considerably to raise the traffic capacity of the Kazan-Ekaterinburg Railway; and, wherever the experiment of the adaptation of military units for labor problems was carried out with any intelligence at all, the results showed that this method is unquestionably live and correct. The prejudice concerning the inevitably parasitic nature of military organization--under each and every condition--proves to be shattered. The Soviet Army reproduces within itself the tendencies of the Soviet social order. We must not think in the petrifying terms of the last epoch: "militarism," "military organization," "the unproductiveness of compulsory labor." We must approach the phenomena of the new epoch without any prejudices, and with eyes wide open; and we must remember that Saturday exists for man, and not vice versa; that all forms of organization, including the military, are only weapons in the hands of the working class in power, which has both the right and the possibility of adapting, altering, refashioning, those weapons, until it has achieved the requisite result. THE SINGLE ECONOMIC PLAN The widest possible application of the principle of general labor service, together with measures for the militarization of labor, can play a decisive part only in case they are applied on the basis of a single economic plan covering the whole country and all branches of productive activity. This plan must be drawn up for a number of years, for the whole epoch that lies before us. It is naturally broken up into separate periods or stages, corresponding to the inevitable stages in the economic rebirth of the country. We shall have to begin with the most simple and at the same time most fundamental problems. We have first of all to afford the working class the very possibility of living--though it be in the most difficult conditions--and thereby to preserve our industrial centres and save the towns. This is the point of departure. If we do not wish to melt the town into agriculture, and transform the whole country into a peasant State, we must support our transport, even at the minimum level, and secure bread for the towns, fuel and raw materials for industry, fodder for the cattle. Without this we shall not make one step forward. Consequently, the first part of the plan comprises the improvement of transport, or, in any case, the prevention of its further deterioration and the preparation of the most necessary supplies of food, raw materials, and fuel. The whole of the next period will be in its entirety filled with the concentration and straining of labor-power to solve these root problems; and only in this way shall we lay the foundations for all that is to come. It was such a problem, incidentally, that we put before our labor armies. Whether the first or the following periods will be measured by months or by years, it is fruitless at present to guess. This depends on many reasons, beginning with the international situation and ending with the degree of single-mindedness and steadfastness of the working class. The second period is the period of machine-building in the interests of transport and the storage of raw material and fuel. Here the core is in the locomotive. At the present time the repairing of locomotives is carried on in too haphazard a fashion, swallowing up energies and resources beyond all measure. We must reorganize the repairing of our rolling-stock, on the basis of the mass production of spare parts. To-day, when the whole network of the railways and the factories is in the hands of one master, the Labor State, we can and must fix single types of locomotives and trucks for the whole country, standardize their constituent parts, draw all the necessary factories into the work of the mass production of spare parts, reduce repairing to the simple replacing of worn-out parts by new, and thereby make it possible to build new locomotives on a mass scale out of spare parts. Now that the sources of fuel and raw material are again open to us, we must concentrate our exclusive attention on the building of locomotives. The third period will be one of machine-building in the interests of the production of articles of primary necessity. Finally, the fourth period, reposing on the conquests of the first three, will allow us to begin the production of articles of personal or secondary significance on the widest possible scale. This plan has great significance, not only as a general guide for the practical work of our economic organs, but also as a line along which propaganda amongst the laboring masses in connection with our economic problems is to proceed. Our labor mobilization will not enter into real life, will not take root, if we do not excite the living interest of all that is honest, class-conscious, and inspired in the working class. We must explain to the masses the whole truth as to our situation and as to our views for the future; we must tell them openly that our economic plan, with the maximum of exertion on the part of the workers, will neither to-morrow nor the day after give us a land flowing with milk and honey: for during the first period our chief work will consist in preparing the conditions for the production of the means of production. Only after we have secured, though on the smallest possible scale, the possibility of rebuilding the means of transport and production, shall we pass on to the production of articles for general consumption. In this way the fruit of their labor, which is the direct object of the workers, in the shape of articles for personal consumption, will arrive only in the last, the fourth, stage of our economic plan; and only then shall we have a serious improvement in our life. The masses, who for a prolonged period will still bear all the weight of labor and of privation, must realize to the full the inevitable internal logic of this economic plan if they are to prove capable of carrying it out. The sequence of the four economic periods outlined above must not be understood too absolutely. We do not, of course, propose to bring completely to a standstill our textile industry: we could not do this for military considerations alone. But in order that our attention and our forces should not be distracted under the pressure of requirements and needs crying to us from all quarters, it is essential to make use of the economic plan as the fundamental criterion, and separate the important and the fundamental from the auxiliary and secondary. Needless to say, under no circumstances are we striving for a narrow "national" Communism: the raising of the blockade, and the European revolution all the more, would introduce the most radical alterations in our economic plan, cutting down the stages of its development and bringing them together. But we do not know when these events will take place; and we must act in such a way that we can hold out and become stronger under the most unfavorable circumstances--that is to say, in face of the slowest conceivable development of the European and the world revolution. In case we are able actually to establish trading relations with the capitalist countries, we shall again be guided by the economic plan sketched above. We shall exchange part of our raw material for locomotives or for necessary machines, but under no circumstances for clothing, boots, or colonial products: our first item is not articles of consumption, but the implements of transport and production. We should be short-sighted sceptics, and the most typical bourgeois curmudgeons, if we imagined that the rebirth of our economic life will take the form of a gradual transition from the present economic collapse to the conditions that preceded that collapse, _i.e._, that we shall reascend the same steps by which we descended, and only after a certain, quite prolonged, period will be able to raise our Socialist economy to the level at which it stood on the eve of the imperialist war. Such a conception would not only be not consoling, but absolutely incorrect. Economic collapse, which destroyed and broke up in its path an incalculable quantity of values, also destroyed a great deal that was poor and rotten, that was absolutely senseless; and thereby it cleared the path for a new method of reconstruction, corresponding to that technical equipment which world economy now possesses. If Russian capitalism developed not from stage to stage, but leaping over a series of stages, and instituted American factories in the midst of primitive steppes, the more is such a forced march possible for Socialist economy. After we have conquered our terrible misery, have accumulated small supplies of raw material and food, and have improved our transport, we shall be able to leap over a whole series of intermediate stages, benefiting by the fact that we are not bound by the chains of private property, and that therefore we are able to subordinate all undertakings and all the elements of economic life to a single State plan. Thus, for example, we shall undoubtedly be able to enter the period of electrification, in all the chief branches of industry and in the sphere of personal consumption, without passing through "the age of steam." The programme of electrification is already drawn up in a series of logically consequent stages, corresponding to the fundamental stages of the general economic plan. A new war may slow down the realization of our economic intentions; our energy and persistence can and must hasten the process of our economic rebirth. But, whatever be the rate at which economic events unfold themselves in the future, it is clear that at the foundation of all our work--labor mobilization, militarization of labor, Subbotniks, and other forms of Communist labor voluntarism--there must lie the _single economic plan_. And the period that is upon us requires from us the complete concentration of all our energies on the first elementary problems: food, fuel, raw material, transport. _Not to allow our attention to be distracted, not to dissipate our forces, not to waste our energies._ Such is the sole road to salvation. COLLEGIATE AND ONE-MAN MANAGEMENT The Mensheviks attempt to dwell on yet another question which seems favorable to their desire once again to ally themselves with the working class. This is the question of the method of administration of industrial enterprises--the question of the collegiate (board) or the one-man principle. We are told that the transference of factories to single directors instead of to a board is a crime against the working class and the Socialist revolution. It is remarkable that the most zealous defenders of the Socialist revolution against the principle of one-man management are those same Mensheviks who quite recently still considered that the idea of a Socialist revolution was an insult to history and a crime against the working class. The first who must plead guilty in the face of the Socialist revolution is our Party Congress, which expressed itself in favor of the principle of one-man management in the administration of industry, and above all in the lowest grades, in the factories and plants. It would be the greatest possible mistake, however, to consider this decision as a blow to the independence of the working class. The independence of the workers is determined and measured not by whether three workers or one are placed at the head of a factory, but by factors and phenomena of a such more profound character--the construction of the economic organs with the active assistance of the trade unions; the building up of all Soviet organs by means of the Soviet congresses, representing tens of millions of workers; the attraction into the work of administration, or control of administration, of those who are administered. It is in such things that the independence of the working class can be expressed. And if the working class, on the foundation of its existence, comes through its congresses, Soviet party and trade union, to the conclusion that it is better to place one person at the head of a factory, and not a board, it is making a decision dictated by the independence of the working class. It may be correct or incorrect from the point of view of the technique of administration, but it is not imposed upon the proletariat, it is dictated by its own will and pleasure. It would consequently be a most crying error to confuse the question as to the supremacy of the proletariat with the question of boards of workers at the head of factories. The dictatorship of the proletariat is expressed in the abolition of private property in the means of production, in the supremacy over the whole Soviet mechanism of the collective will of the workers, and not at all in the form in which individual economic enterprises are administered. Here it is necessary to reply to another accusation directed against the defenders of the one-man principle. Our opponents say: "This is the attempt of the Soviet militarists to transfer their experience in the military sphere to the sphere of economics. Possibly in the army the one-man principle is satisfactory, but it does not suit economical work." Such a criticism is incorrect in every way. It is untrue that in the army we began with the one-man principle: even now we are far from having completely adopted it. It is also untrue that in defence of one-man forms of administration of our economic enterprises with the attraction of experts, we took our stand only on the foundation of our military experience. In reality, in this question we took our stand, and continue to do so on purely Marxist views of the revolutionary problems and creative duties of the proletariat when it has taken power into its own hands. The necessity of making use of technical knowledge and methods accumulated in the past, the necessity of attracting experts and of making use of them on a wide scale, in such a way that our technique should go not backwards but forwards--all this was understood and recognized by us, not only from the very beginning of the revolution, but even long before October. I consider that if the civil war had not plundered our economic organs of all that was strongest, most independent, most endowed with initiative, we should undoubtedly have entered the path of one-man management in the sphere of economic administration much sooner, and much less painfully. Some comrades look on the apparatus of industrial administration first and foremost as on a school. This is, of course, absolutely erroneous. The task of administration is to administer. If a man desires and is able to learn administration, let him go to school, to the special courses of instruction: let him go as an assistant, watching and acquiring experience: but a man who is appointed to control a factory is not going to school, but to a responsible post of economic administration. And, even if we look at this question in the limited, and therefore incorrect light of a "school," I will say that when the one-man principle prevails the school is ten times better: because just as you cannot replace one good worker by three immature workers, similarly, having placed a board of three immature workers in a responsible post, you deprive them of the possibility of realizing their own defects. Each looks to the others when decisions are being made, and blames the others when success is not forthcoming. That this is not a question of principle for the opponents of the one-man principle is shown best of all by their not demanding the collegiate principle for the actual workshops, jobs, and pits. They even say with indignation that only a madman can demand that a board of three or five should manage a workshop. There must be one manager, and one only. Why? If collegiate administration is a "school," why do we not require an elementary school? Why should we not introduce boards into the workshops? And, if the collegiate principle is not a sacred gospel for the workshops, why is it compulsory for the factories? Abramovich said here that, as we have few experts--thanks to the Bolsheviks, he repeats after Kautsky--we shall replace them by boards of workers. That is nonsense. No board of persons who do not know the given business can replace one man who knows it. A board of lawyers will not replace one switchman. A board of patients will not replace the doctor. The very idea is incorrect. A board in itself does not give knowledge to the ignorant. It can only hide the ignorance of the ignorant. If a person is appointed to a responsible administrative post, he is under the watch, not only of others but of himself, and sees clearly what he knows and what he does not know. But there is nothing worse than a board of ignorant, badly-prepared workers appointed to a purely practical post, demanding expert knowledge. The members of the board are in a state of perpetual panic and mutual dissatisfaction, and by their helplessness introduce hesitation and chaos into all their work. The working class is very deeply interested in raising its capacity for administration, that is, in being educated; but this is attained in the sphere of industry by the periodical report of the administrative body of a factory before the whole factory, and the discussion of the economic plan for the year or for the current month. All the workers who display serious interest in the work of industrial organization are registered by the directors of the undertaking, or by special commissions; are taken through appropriate courses closely bound up with the practical work of the factory itself; and are then appointed, first to less responsible, and then to more responsible posts. In such a way we shall embrace many thousands, and, in the future, tens of thousands. But the question of "threes" and "fives" interests, not the laboring masses, but the more backward, weaker, less fitted for independent work, section of the Soviet labor bureaucracy. The foremost, intelligent, determined administrator naturally strives to take the factory into his hands as a whole, and to show both to himself and to others that he can carry out his work. While if that administrator is a weakling, who does not stand very steadily on his feet, he attempts to associate another with himself, for in the company of another his own weakness will be unnoticed. In such a collegiate principle there is a very dangerous foundation--the extinction of personal responsibility. If a worker is capable but not experienced, he naturally requires a guide: under his control he will learn, and to-morrow we shall appoint him the foreman of a little factory. That is the way by which he will go forward. In an accidental board, in which the strength and the weakness of each are not clear, the feeling of responsibility inevitably disappears. Our resolution speaks of a systematic _approach_ to the one-man principle--naturally, not by one stroke of the pen. Variants and combinations are possible here. Where the worker can manage alone, let us put him in charge of the factory and give him an expert as an assistant. Where there is a good expert, let us put him in charge and give him as assistants two or three of the workers. Finally, where a "board" has in practice shown its capacity for work, let us preserve it. This is the sole serious attitude to take up, and only in such a way shall we reach the correct organization of production. There is another consideration of a social and educational character which seems to me most important. Our guiding layer of the working class is too thin. That layer which knew underground work, which long carried on the revolutionary struggle, which was abroad, which read much in prisons and in exile, which had political experience and a broad outlook, is the most precious section of the working class. Then there is a younger generation which has consciously been making the revolution, beginning with 1917. This is a very valuable section of the working class. Wherever we cast our eye--on Soviet construction, on the trade unions, on the front of the civil war--everywhere we find the principal part being played by this upper layer of the proletariat. The chief work of the Soviet Government during these two and a half years consisted in manoeuvring and throwing the foremost section of the workers from one front to another. The deeper layers of the working class, which emerged from the peasant mass, are revolutionarily inclined, but are still too poor in initiative. The disease of our Russian peasant is the herd instinct, the absence of personality: in other words, the same quality that used to be extolled by our reactionary Populists, and that Leo Tolstoy extolled in the character of Platon Karatayev: the peasant melting into his village community, subjecting himself to the land. It is quite clear that Socialist economy is founded not on Platon Karatayev, but on the thinking worker endowed with initiative. That personal initiative it is necessary to develop in the worker. The personal basis under the bourgeoisie meant selfish individualism and competition. The personal basis under the working class is in contradiction neither to solidarity nor to brotherly co-operation. Socialist solidarity can rely neither on absence of personality nor on the herd instinct. And it is just absence of personality that is frequently hidden behind the collegiate principle. In the working class there are many forces, gifts, and talents. They must be brought out and displayed in rivalry. The one-man principle in the administrative and technical sphere assists this. That is why it is higher and more fruitful than the collegiate principle. CONCLUSION OF THE REPORT Comrades, the arguments of the Menshevik orators, particularly of Abramovich, reflect first of all their complete detachment from life and its problems. An observer stands on the bank of a river which he has to swim over, and deliberates on the qualities of the water and on the strength of the current. He has to swim over: that is his task! But our Kautskian stands first on one foot and then on the other. "We do not deny," he says, "the necessity of swimming over, but at the same time, as realists, we see the danger--and not only one, but several: the current is swift, there are submerged stones, people are tired, etc., etc. But when they tell you that we deny the very necessity of swimming over, that is not true--no, not under any circumstances. Twenty-three years ago we did not deny the necessity of swimming over...." And on this is built all, from beginning to end. First, say the Mensheviks, we do not deny, and never did deny, the necessity of self-defence: consequently we do not repudiate the army. Secondly, we do not repudiate in principle general labor service. But, after all, where is there anyone in the world, with the exception of small religious sects, who denies self-defence "in principle"! Nevertheless, the matter does not move one step forward as a result of your abstract admission. When it came to a real struggle, and to the creation of a real army against the real enemies of the working class, what did you do then? You opposed, you sabotaged--while not repudiating self-defence in principle. You said and wrote in your papers: "Down with the civil war!" at the time when we were surrounded by White Guards, and the knife was at our throat. Now you, approving our victorious self-defence after the event, transfer your critical gaze to new problems, and attempt to teach us. "In general, we do not repudiate the principle of general labor service," you say, "but ... without legal compulsion." Yet in these very words there is a monstrous internal contradiction! The idea of "obligatory service" itself includes the element of compulsion. A man is _obliged_, he is bound to do something. If he does not do it, obviously he will suffer compulsion, a penalty. Here we approach the question of what penalty. Abramovich says: "Economic pressure, yes; but not legal compulsion." Comrade Holtzman, the representative of the Metal Workers' Union, excellently demonstrated all the scholasticism of this idea. Even under the capitalism, that is to say under the regime of "free" labor, economic pressure is inseparable from legal compulsion. Still more so now. In my report I attempted to explain that the adaptation of the workers on new social foundations to new forms of labor, and the attainment of a higher level of productivity of labor, are possible only by means of the simultaneous application of various methods--economic interest, legal compulsion, the influence of an internally co-ordinated economic organization, the power of repression, and, first and last, moral influence, agitation, propaganda, and the general raising of the cultural level. Only by the combination of all these methods can we attain a high level of Socialist economy. If even under capitalism economic interest is inevitably combined with legal compulsion, behind which stands the material force of the State, in the Soviet State--that is, the State of transition to Socialism--we can draw no water-tight compartment at all between economic and legal compulsion. All our most important industries are in the hands of the State. When we say to the turner Ivanov, "You are bound at once to work at the Sormovo factory; if you refuse, you will not receive your ration," what are we to call it? Economic pressure or legal compulsion? He cannot go to another factory, for all factories are in the hands of the State, which will not allow such a change. Consequently, economic pressure melts here into the pressure of State compulsion. Abramovich apparently would like us, as regulators of the distribution of labor-power, to make use only of such means as the raising of wages, bonuses, etc., in order to attract the necessary workers to our most important factories. Apparently that comprises all his thoughts on the subject. But if we put the question in this way, every serious worker in the trade union movement will understand it is pure utopia. We cannot hope for a free influx of labor-power from the market, for to achieve this the State would need to have in its hands sufficiently extensive "reserves of manoeuvre," in the form of food, housing, and transport, _i.e._, precisely those conditions which we have yet only to create. Without systematically-organized transference of labor-power on a mass scale, according to the demands of the economic organization, we shall achieve nothing. Here the moment of compulsion arises before us in all its force of economic necessity. I read you a telegram from Ekaterinburg dealing with the work of the First Labor Army. It says that there have passed through the Ural Committee for Labor Service over 4,000 workers. Whence have they appeared? Mainly from the former Third Army. They were not allowed to go to their homes, but were sent where they were required. From the army they were handed over to the Committee for Labor Service, which distributed them according to their categories and sent them to the factories. This, from the Liberal point of view, is "violence" to the freedom of the individual. Yet an overwhelming majority of the workers went willingly to the labor front, as hitherto to the military, realizing that the common interest demanded this. Part went against their will. These were compelled. Naturally, it is quite clear that the State must, by means of the bonus system, give the better workers better conditions of existence. But this not only does not exclude, but on the contrary pre-supposes, that the State and the trade unions--without which the Soviet State will not build up industry--acquire new rights of some kind over the worker. The worker does not merely bargain with the Soviet State: no, he is subordinated to the Soviet State, under its orders in every direction--for it is _his_ State. "If," Abramovich says, "we were simply told that it is a question of industrial discipline, there would be nothing to quarrel about; but why introduce militarization?" Of course, to a considerable extent, the question is one of the discipline of the trade unions; but of the new discipline of new, _Productional_, trade unions. We live in a Soviet country, where the working class is in power--a fact which our Kautskians do not understand. When the Menshevik Rubtzov said that there remained only the fragment of the trade union movement in my report, there was a certain amount of truth in it. Of the trade unions, as he understands them--that is to say, trade unions of the old craft type--there in reality has remained very little; but the industrial productional organization of the working class, in the conditions of Soviet Russia, has the very greatest tasks before it. What tasks? Of course, not the tasks involved in a struggle with the State, in the name of the interests of labor; but tasks involved in the construction, side by side with the State, of Socialist economy. Such a form of union is in principle a new organization, which is distinct, not only from the trade unions, but also from the revolutionary industrial unions in bourgeois society, just as the supremacy of the proletariat is distinct from the supremacy of the bourgeoisie. The productional union of the ruling working class no longer has the problems, the methods, the discipline, of the union for struggle of an oppressed class. All our workers are _obliged_ to enter the unions. The Mensheviks are against this. This is quite comprehensible, because in reality they are against the _dictatorship of the proletariat_. It is to this, in the long run, that the whole question is reduced. The Kautskians are against the dictatorship of the proletariat, and are thereby against all its consequences. Both economic and political compulsion are only forms of the expression of the dictatorship of the working class in two closely connected regions. True, Abramovich demonstrated to us most learnedly that under Socialism there will be no compulsion, that the principle of compulsion contradicts Socialism, that under Socialism we shall be moved by the feeling of duty, the habit of working, the attractiveness of labor, etc., etc. This is unquestionable. Only this unquestionable truth must be a little extended. In point of fact, under Socialism there will not exist the apparatus of compulsion itself, namely, the State: for it will have melted away entirely into a producing and consuming commune. None the less, the road to Socialism lies through a period of the highest possible intensification of the principle of the State. And you and I are just passing through that period. Just as a lamp, before going out, shoots up in a brilliant flame, so the State, before disappearing, assumes the form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, _i.e._, the most ruthless form of State, which embraces the life of the citizens authoritatively in every direction. Now just that insignificant little fact--that historical step of the State dictatorship--Abramovich, and in his person the whole of Menshevism, did not notice; and consequently, he has fallen over it. No organization except the army has ever controlled man with such severe compulsion as does the State organization of the working class in the most difficult period of transition. It is just for this reason that we speak of the militarization of labor. The fate of the Mensheviks is to drag along at the tail of events, and to recognize those parts of the revolutionary programme which have already had time to lose all practical significance. To-day the Mensheviks, albeit with reservations, do not deny the lawfulness of stern measures with the White Guards and with deserters from the Red Army: they have been forced to recognize this after their own lamentable experiments with "democracy." They have to all appearances understood--very late in the day--that, when one is face to face with the counter-revolutionary bands, one cannot live by phrases about the great truth that under Socialism we shall need no Red Terror. But in the economic sphere, the Mensheviks still attempt to refer us to our sons, and particularly to our grandsons. None the less, we have to rebuild our economic life to-day, without waiting, under circumstances of a very painful heritage from bourgeois society and a yet unfinished civil war. Menshevism, like all Kautskianism generally, is drowned in democratic analogies and Socialist abstractions. Again and again it has been shown that for it there do not exist the problems of the transitional period, _i.e._, of the proletarian revolution. Hence the lifelessness of its criticism, its advice, its plans, and its recipes. The question is not what is going to happen in twenty or thirty years' time--at that date, of course, things will be much better--but of how to-day to struggle out of our ruins, how immediately to distribute labor-power, how to-day to raise the productivity of labor, and how, in particular, to act in the case of those 4,000 skilled workers whom we combed out of the army in the Ural. To dismiss them to the four corners of the earth, saying "seek for better conditions where you can find them, comrades"? No, we could not act in this way. We put them into military echelons, and distributed them amongst the factories and the works. "Wherein, then, does your Socialism," Abramovich cries, "differ from Egyptian slavery? It was just by similar methods that the Pharaohs built the pyramids, forcing the masses to labor." Truly an inimitable analogy for a "Socialist"! Once again the little insignificant fact has been forgotten--the class nature of the government! Abramovich sees no difference between the Egyptian regime and our own. He has forgotten that in Egypt there were Pharaohs, there were slave-owners and slaves. It was not the Egyptian peasants who decided through their Soviets to build the pyramids; there existed a social order based upon hierarchial caste; and the workers were obliged to toil by a class that was hostile to them. Our compulsion is applied by a workers' and peasants' government, in the name of the interests of the laboring masses. That is what Abramovich has not observed. We learn in the school of Socialism that all social evolution is founded on classes and their struggle, and all the course of human life is determined by the fact of what class stands at the head of affairs, and in the name of what caste is applying its policy. That is what Abramovich has not grasped. Perhaps he is well acquainted with the Old Testament, but Socialism is for him a book sealed with seven seals. Going along the path of shallow Liberal analogies, which do not reckon with the class nature of the State, Abramovich might (and in the past the Mensheviks did more than once) identify the Red and the White Armies. Both here and there went on mobilizations, principally of the peasant masses. Both here and there the element of compulsion has its place. Both here and there there were not a few officers who had passed through one and the same school of Tsarism. The same rifles, the same cartridges in both camps. Where is the difference? There is a difference, gentlemen, and it is defined by a fundamental test: who is in power? The working class or the landlord class, Pharaohs or peasants, White Guards or the Petrograd proletariat? There is a difference, and evidence on the subject is furnished by the fate of Yudenich, Kolchak, and Denikin. Our peasants were mobilized by the workers; in Kolchak's camp, by the White Guard officer class. Our army has pulled itself together, and has grown strong; the White Army has fallen asunder in dust. Yes, there is a difference between the Soviet regime and the regime of the Pharaohs. And it is not in vain that the Petrograd proletarians began their revolution by shooting the Pharaohs on the steeples of Petrograd.[10] [10] This was the name given to the imperial police, whom the Minister for Home Affairs, Protopopoff, distributed at the end of February, 1917, over the roofs of houses and in the belfries. One of the Menshevik orators attempted incidentally to represent me as a defender of militarism in general. According to his information, it appears, do you see, that I am defending nothing more or less than German militarism. I proved, you must understand, that the German N.C.O. was a marvel of nature, and all that he does is above criticism. What did I say in reality? Only that militarism, in which all the features of social evolution find their most finished, sharp, and clear expression, could be examined from two points of view. First from the political or Socialist--and here it depends entirely on the question of what class is in power; and secondly, from the point of view of organization, as a system of the strict distribution of duties, exact mutual relations, unquestioning responsibility, and harsh insistence on execution. The bourgeois army is the apparatus of savage oppression and repression of the workers; the Socialist army is a weapon for the liberation and defence of the workers. But the unquestioning subordination of the parts to the whole is a characteristic common to every army. A severe internal regime is inseparable from the military organization. In war every piece of slackness, every lack of thoroughness, and even a simple mistake, not infrequently bring in their train the most heavy sacrifices. Hence the striving of the military organization to bring clearness, definiteness, exactness of relations and responsibilities, to the highest degree of development. "Military" qualities in this connection are valued in every sphere. It was in this sense that I said that every class prefers to have in its service those of its members who, other things being equal, have passed through the military school. The German peasant, for example, who has passed out of the barracks in the capacity of an N.C.O. was for the German monarchy, and remains for the Ebert Republic, much dearer and more valuable than the same peasant who has not passed through military training. The apparatus of the German railways was splendidly organized, thanks to a considerable degree to the employment of N.C.O.'s and officers in administrative posts in the transport department. In this sense we also have something to learn from militarism. Comrade Tsiperovich, one of our foremost trade union leaders, admitted here that the trade union worker who has passed through military training--who has, for example, occupied the responsible post of regimental commissary for a year--does not become worse from the point of view of trade union work as a result. He is returned to the union the same proletarian from head to foot, for he was fighting for the proletariat; but he has returned a veteran--hardened, more independent, more decisive--for he has been in very responsible positions. He had occasions to control several thousands of Red soldiers of different degrees of class-consciousness--most of them peasants. Together with them he has lived through victories and reverses, he has advanced and retreated. There were cases of treachery on the part of the command personnel, of peasant risings, of panic--but he remained at his post, he held together the less class-conscious mass, directed it, inspired it with his example, punished traitors and cowards. This experience is a great and valuable experience. And when a former regimental commissary returns to his trade union, he becomes not a bad organizer. On the question of the _collegiate principle_, the arguments of Abramovich are just as lifeless as on all other questions--the arguments of a detached observer standing on the bank of a river. Abramovich explained to us that a good board is better than a bad manager, that into a good board there must enter a good expert. All this is splendid--only why do not the Mensheviks offer us several hundred boards? I think that the Supreme Economic Council will find sufficient use for them. But we--not observers, but workers--must build from the material at our disposal. We have specialists, we have experts, of whom, shall we say, one-third are conscientious and educated, another third only half-conscientious and half-educated, and the last third are no use at all. In the working class there are many talented, devoted, and energetic people. Some--unfortunately few--have already the necessary knowledge and experience. Some have character and capacity, but have not knowledge or experience. Others have neither one nor the other. Out of this material we have to create our factory and other administrative bodies; and here we cannot be satisfied with general phrases. First of all, we must select all the workers who have already in experience shown that they can direct enterprises, and give such men the possibility of standing on their own feet. Such men themselves ask for one-man management, because the work of controlling a factory is not a school for the backward. A worker who knows his business thoroughly desires to _control_. If he has decided and ordered, his decision must be accomplished. He may be replaced--that is another matter; but while he is the master--the Soviet, proletarian master--he controls the undertaking entirely and completely. If he has to be included in a board of weaker men, who interfere in the administration, nothing will come of it. Such a working-class administrator must be given an expert assistant, one or two according to the enterprise. If there is no suitable working-class administrator, but there is a conscientious and trained expert, we shall put him at the head of an enterprise, and attach to him two or three prominent workers in the capacity of assistants, in such a way that every decision of the expert should be known to the assistants, but that they should not have the right to reverse that decision. They will, step by step, follow the specialist in his work, will learn something, and in six months or a year will thus be able to occupy independent posts. Abramovich quoted from my own speech the example of the hairdresser who has commanded a division and an army. True! But what, however, Abramovich does not know is that, if our Communist comrades have begun to command regiments, divisions, and armies, it is because previously they were commissaries attached to expert commanders. The responsibility fell on the expert, who knew that, if he made a mistake, he would bear the full brunt, and would not be able to say that he was only an "adviser" or a "member of the board." To-day in our army the majority of the posts of command, particularly in the lower--_i.e._, politically the most important--grades, are filled by workers and foremost peasants. But with what did we begin? We put officers in the posts of command, and attached to them workers as commissaries; and they learned, and learned with success, and learned to beat the enemy. Comrades, we stand face to face with a very difficult period, perhaps the most difficult of all. To difficult periods in the life of peoples and classes there correspond harsh measures. The further we go the easier things will become, the freer every citizen will feel, the more imperceptible will become the compelling force of the proletarian State. Perhaps we shall then even allow the Mensheviks to have papers, if only the Mensheviks remain in existence until that time. But to-day we are living in the period of dictatorship, political and economic. And the Mensheviks continue to undermine that dictatorship. When we are fighting on the civil front, preserving the revolution from its enemies, and the Menshevik paper writes: "Down with the civil war," we cannot permit this. A dictatorship is a dictatorship, and war is war. And now that we have crossed to the path of the greatest concentration of forces on the field of the economic rebirth of the country, the Russian Kautskies, the Mensheviks, remain true to their counter-revolutionary calling. Their voice, as hitherto, sounds as the voice of doubt and decomposition, of disorganization and undermining, of distrust and collapse. Is it not monstrous and grotesque that, at this Congress, at which 1,500 representatives of the Russian working class are present, where the Mensheviks constitute less than 5%, and the Communists about 90%, Abramovich should say to us: "Do not be attracted by methods which result in a little band taking the place of the people." "All through the people," says the representative of the Mensheviks, "no guardians of the laboring masses! All through the laboring masses, through their independent activity!" And, further, "It is impossible to convince a class by arguments." Yet look at this very hall: here is that class! The working class is here before you, and with us; and it is just you, an insignificant band of Mensheviks, who are attempting to convince it by bourgeois arguments! It is you who wish to be the guardians of that class. And yet it has its own high degree of independence, and that independence, it has displayed, incidentally, in having overthrown you and gone forward along its own path! 9 KARL KAUTSKY, HIS SCHOOL AND HIS BOOK. The Austro-Marxian school (Bauer, Renner, Hilferding, Max Adler, Friedrich Adler) in the past more than once was contrasted with the school of Kautsky, as veiled opportunism might be contrasted with true Marxism. This has proved to be a pure historical misunderstanding, which deceived some for a long time, some for a lesser period, but which in the end was revealed with all possible clearness. Kautsky is the founder and the most perfect representative of the Austrian forgery of Marxism. While the real teaching of Marx is the theoretical formula of action, of attack, of the development of revolutionary energy, and of the carrying of the class blow to its logical conclusion, the Austrian school was transformed into an academy of passivity and evasiveness, because of a vulgar historical and conservative school, and reduced its work to explaining and justifying, not guiding and overthrowing. It lowered itself to the position of a hand-maid to the current demands of parliamentarism and opportunism, replaced dialectic by swindling sophistries, and, in the end, in spite of its great play with ritual revolutionary phraseology, became transformed into the most secure buttress of the capitalist State, together with the altar and throne that rose above it. If the latter was engulfed in the abyss, no blame for this can be laid upon the Austro-Marxian school. What characterizes Austro-Marxism is repulsion and fear in the face of revolutionary action. The Austro-Marxist is capable of displaying a perfect gulf of profundity in the explanation of yesterday, and considerable daring in prophesying concerning to-morrow--but for to-day he never has a great thought or capacity for great action. To-day for him always disappears before the wave of little opportunist worries, which later are explained as the most inevitable link between the past and the future. The Austro-Marxist is inexhaustible when it is a question of discovering reasons to prevent initiative and render difficult revolutionary action. Austro-Marxism is a learned and boastful theory of passivity and capitulation. Naturally, it is not by accident that it was just in Austria, in that Babylon torn by fruitless national antagonisms, in that State which represented the personified impossibility to exist and develop, that there arose and was consolidated the pseudo-Marxian philosophy of the impossibility of revolutionary action. The foremost Austrian Marxists represent, each in his own way, a certain "individuality." On various questions they more than once did not see eye to eye. They even had political differences. But in general they are fingers of the same hand. _Karl Renner_ is the most pompous, solid, and conceited representative of this type. The gift of literary imitation, or, more simply, of stylist forgery, is granted to him to an exceptional extent. His May Day article represented a charming combination of the most revolutionary words. And, as both words and their combinations live, within certain limits, with their own independent life, Renner's articles awakened in the hearts of many workers a revolutionary fire which their author apparently never knew. The tinsel of Austro-Viennese culture, the chase of the external, of title of rank, was more characteristic of Renner than of his other colleagues. In essence he always remained merely an imperial and royal officer, who commanded Marxist phraseology to perfection. The transformation of the author of the jubilee article on Karl Marx, famous for its revolutionary pathos, into a comic-opera-Chancellor, who expresses his feelings of respect and thanks to the Scandinavian monarchs, is in reality one of the most instructive paradoxes of history. _Otto Bauer_ is more learned and prosaic, more serious and more boring, than Renner. He cannot be denied the capacity to read books, collect facts, and draw conclusions adapted to the tasks imposed upon him by practical politics, which in turn are guided by others. Bauer has no political will. His chief art is to reply to all acute practical questions by commonplaces. His political thought always lives a parallel life to his will--it is deprived of all courage. His words are always merely the scientific compilation of the talented student of a University seminar. The most disgraceful actions of Austrian opportunism, the meanest servility before the power of the possessing classes on the part of the Austro-German Social-Democracy, found in Bauer their grave elucidator, who sometimes expressed himself with dignity against the form, but always agreed in the essence. If it ever occurred to Bauer to display anything like temperament and political energy, it was exclusively in the struggle against the revolutionary wing--in the accumulation of arguments, facts, quotations, _against_ revolutionary action. His highest period was that (after 1907) in which, being as yet too young to be a deputy, he played the part of secretary of the Social-Democratic group, supplied it with materials, figures, substitutes for ideas, instructed it, drew up memoranda, and appeared almost to be the inspirer of great actions, when in reality he was only supplying substitutes, and adulterated substitutes, for the parliamentary opportunists. _Max Adler_ represents a fairly ingenuous variety of the Austro-Marxian type. He is a lyric poet, a philosopher, a mystic--a philosophical lyric poet of passivity, as Renner is its publicist and legal expert, as Hilferding is its economist, as Bauer is its sociologist. Max Adler is cramped in a world of three dimensions, although he had found a very comfortable place for himself with the framework of Viennese bourgeois Socialism and the Hapsburg State. The combination of the petty business activity of an attorney and of political humiliation, together with barren philosophical efforts and the cheap tinsel flowers of idealism, have imbued that variety which Max Adler represented with a sickening and repulsive quality. _Rudolf Hilferding_, a Viennese like the rest, entered the German Social-Democratic Party almost as a mutineer, but as a mutineer of the Austrian stamp, _i.e._, always ready to capitulate without a fight. Hilferding took the external mobility and bustle of the Austrian policy which brought him up for revolutionary initiative; and for a round dozen of months he demanded--true, in the most moderate terms--a more intelligent policy on the part of the leaders of the German Social-Democracy. But the Austro-Viennese bustle swiftly disappeared from his own nature. He soon became subjected to the mechanical rhythm of Berlin and the automatic spiritual life of the German Social-Democracy. He devoted his intellectual energy to the purely theoretical sphere, where he did not say a great deal, true--no Austro-Marxist has ever said a great deal in any sphere--but in which he did, at any rate, write a serious book. With this book on his back, like a porter with a heavy load, he entered the revolutionary epoch. But the most scientific book cannot replace the absence of will, of initiative, of revolutionary instinct and political decision, without which action is inconceivable. A doctor by training, Hilferding is inclined to sobriety, and, in spite of his theoretical education, he represents the most primitive type of empiricist in questions of policy. The chief problem of to-day is for him not to leave the lines laid down for him by yesterday, and to find for this conservative and bourgeois apathy a scientific, economic explanation. _Friedrich Adler_ is the most balanced representative of the Austro-Marxian type. He has inherited from his father the latter's political temperament. In the petty exhausting struggle with the disorder of Austrian conditions, Friedrich Adler allowed his ironical scepticism finally to destroy the revolutionary foundations of his world outlook. The temperament inherited from his father more than once drove him into opposition to the school created by his father. At certain moments Friedrich Adler might seem the very revolutionary negation of the Austrian school. In reality, he was and remains its necessary coping-stone. His explosive revolutionism foreshadowed acute attacks of despair amidst Austrian opportunism, which from time to time became terrified at its own insignificance. Friedrich Adler is a sceptic from head to foot: he does not believe in the masses, or in their capacity for action. At the time when Karl Liebknecht, in the hour of supreme triumph of German militarism, went out to the Potsdamerplatz to call the oppressed masses to the open struggle, Friedrich Adler went into a bourgeois restaurant to assassinate there the Austrian Premier. By his solitary shot, Friedrich Adler vainly attempted to put an end to his own scepticism. After that hysterical strain, he fell into still more complete prostration. The black-and-yellow crew of social-patriotism (Austerlitz, Leitner, etc.) hurled at Adler the terrorist all the abuse of which the cowardly sentiments were capable. But when the acute period was passed, and the prodigal son returned from his convict prison into his father's house with the halo of a martyr, he proved to be doubly and trebly valuable in that form for the Austrian Social-Democracy. The golden halo of the terrorist was transformed by the experienced counterfeiters of the party into the sounding coin of the demagogue. Friedrich Adler became a trusted surety for the Austerlitzes and Renners in face of the masses. Happily, the Austrian workers are coming less and less to distinguish the sentimental lyrical prostration of Friedrich Adler from the pompous shallowness of Renner, the erudite impotence of Max Adler, or the analytical self-satisfaction of Otto Bauer. The cowardice in thought of the theoreticians of the Austro-Marxian school has completely and wholly been revealed when faced with the great problems of a revolutionary epoch. In his immortal attempt to include the Soviet system in the Ebert-Noske Constitution, Hilferding gave voice not only to his own spirit but to the spirit of the whole Austro-Marxian school, which, with the approach of the revolutionary epoch, made an attempt to become exactly as much more Left than Kautsky as before the revolution it was more Right. From this point of view, Max Adler's view of the Soviet system is extremely instructive. The Viennese eclectic philosopher admits the significance of the Soviets. His courage goes so far that he adopts them. He even proclaims them the apparatus of the Social Revolution. Max Adler, of course, is for a social revolution. But not for a stormy, barricaded, terrorist, bloody revolution, but for a sane, economically balanced, legally canonized, and philosophically approved revolution. Max Adler is not even terrified by the fact that the Soviets infringe the "principle" of the constitutional separation of powers (in the Austrian Social-Democracy there are many fools who see in such an infringement a great defect of the Soviet System!). On the contrary, Max Adler, the trade union lawyer and legal adviser of the social revolution, sees in the concentration of powers even an advantage, which allows the direct expression of the proletarian will. Max Adler is in favor of the direct expression of the proletarian will; but only not by means of the direct seizure of power through the Soviets. He proposes a more solid method. In each town, borough, and ward, the Workers' Councils must "control" the police and other officials, imposing upon them the "proletarian will." What, however, will be the "constitutional" position of the Soviets in the republic of Zeiz, Renner and company? To this our philosopher replies: "The Workers' Councils in the long run will receive as much constitutional power as they acquire by means of their own activity." (_Arbeiterzeitung_, No. 179, July 1, 1919.) The proletarian Soviets must gradually _grow up_ into the political power of the proletariat, just as previously, in the theories of reformism, all the proletarian organizations had to grow up into Socialism; which consummation, however, was a little hindered by the unforeseen misunderstandings, lasting four years, between the Central Powers and the Entente--and all that followed. It was found necessary to reject the economical programme of a gradual development into Socialism without a social revolution. But, as a reward, there opened the perspective of the gradual development of the Soviets into the social revolution, without an armed rising and a seizure of power. In order that the Soviets should not sink entirely under the burden of borough and ward problems, our daring legal adviser proposes the propaganda of social-democratic ideas! Political power remains as before in the hands of the bourgeoisie and its assistants. But in the wards and the boroughs the Soviets control the policemen and their assistants. And, to console the working class and at the same time to centralize its thought and will, Max Adler on Sunday afternoons will read lectures on the constitutional position of the Soviets, as in the past he read lectures on the constitutional position of the trade unions. "In this way," Max Adler promises, "the constitutional regulation of the position of the Workers Councils, and their power and importance, would be guaranteed along the whole line of public and social life; and--without the dictatorship of the Soviets--the Soviet system would acquire as large an influence as it could possibly have even in a Soviet republic. At the same time we should not have to pay for that influence by political storms and economic destruction" (idem). As we see, in addition to all his other qualities, Max Adler remains still in agreement with the Austrian tradition: to make a revolution without quarrelling with his Excellency the Public Prosecutor. * * * * * The founder of this school, and its highest authority, is Kautsky. Carefully protecting, particularly after the Dresden party congress and the first Russian Revolution, his reputation as the keeper of the shrine of Marxist orthodoxy, Kautsky from time to time would shake his head in disapproval of the more compromising outbursts of his Austrian school. And, following the example of the late Victor Adler, Bauer, Renner, Hilferding--altogether and each separately--considered Kautsky too pedantic, too inert, but a very reverend and a very useful father and teacher of the church of quietism. Kautsky began to cause serious mistrust in his own school during the period of his revolutionary culmination, at the time of the first Russian Revolution, when he recognized as necessary the seizure of power by the Russian Social-Democracy, and attempted to inoculate the German working class with his theoretical conclusions from the experience of the general strike in Russia. The collapse of the first Russian Revolution at once broke off Kautsky's evolution along the path of radicalism. The more plainly was the question of mass action in Germany itself put forward by the course of events, the more evasive became Kautsky's attitude. He marked time, retreated, lost his confidence; and the pedantic and scholastic features of his thought more and more became apparent. The imperialist war, which killed every form of vagueness and brought mankind face to face with the most fundamental questions, exposed all the political bankruptcy of Kautsky. He immediately became confused beyond all hope of extrication, in the most simple question of voting the War Credits. All his writings after that period represent variations of one and the same theme: "I and my muddle." The Russian Revolution finally slew Kautsky. By all his previous development he was placed in a hostile attitude towards the November victory of the proletariat. This unavoidably threw him into the camp of the counter-revolution. He lost the last traces of historical instinct. His further writings have become more and more like the yellow literature of the bourgeois market. Kautsky's book, examined by us, bears in its external characteristics all the attributes of a so-called objective scientific study. To examine the extent of the Red Terror, Kautsky acts with all the circumstantial method peculiar to him. He begins with the study of the social conditions which prepared the great French Revolution, and also the physiological and social conditions which assisted the development of cruelty and humanity throughout the history of the human race. In a book devoted to Bolshevism, in which the whole question is examined in 234 pages, Kautsky describes in detail on what our most remote human ancestor fed, and hazards the guess that, while living mainly on vegetable products, he devoured also insects and possibly a few birds. (See page 122.) In a word, there was nothing to lead us to expect that from such an entirely respectable ancestor--one obviously inclined to vegetarianism--there should spring such descendants as the Bolsheviks. That is the solid scientific basis on which Kautsky builds the question!... But, as is not infrequent with productions of this nature, there is hidden behind the academic and scholastic cloak a malignant political pamphlet. This book is one of the most lying and conscienceless of its kind. Is it not incredible, at first glance, that Kautsky should gather up the most contemptible stories about the Bolsheviks from the rich table of Havas, Reuter and Wolff, thereby displaying from under his learned night-cap the ears of the sycophant? Yet these disreputable details are only mosaic decorations on the fundamental background of solid, scientific lying about the Soviet Republic and its guiding party. Kautsky depicts in the most sinister colors our savagery towards the bourgeoisie, which "displayed no tendency to resist." Kautsky attacks our ruthlessness in connection with the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Mensheviks, who represent "shades" of Socialism. KAUTSKY DEPICTS THE SOVIET ECONOMY AS THE CHAOS OF COLLAPSE Kautsky represents the Soviet workers, and the Russian working class as a whole, as a conglomeration of egoists, loafers, and cowards. He does not say one word about the conduct of the Russian bourgeoisie, unprecedented in history for the magnitude of its scoundrelism; about its national treachery; about the surrender of Riga to the Germans, with "educational" aims; about the preparations for a similar surrender of Petrograd; about its appeals to foreign armies--Czecho-Slovakian, German, Roumanian, British, Japanese, French, Arab and Negro--against the Russian workers and peasants; about its conspiracies and assassinations, paid for by Entente money; about its utilization of the blockade, not only to starve our children to death, but systematically, tirelessly, persistently to spread over the whole world an unheard-of web of lies and slander. He does not say one word about the most disgraceful misrepresentations of and violence to our party on the part of the government of the S.R.s and Mensheviks before the November Revolution; about the criminal persecution of several thousand responsible workers of the party on the charge of espionage in favor of Hohenzollern Germany; about the participation of the Mensheviks and S.R.s in all the plots of the bourgeoisie; about their collaboration with the imperial generals and admirals, Kolchak, Denikin and Yudenich; about the terrorist acts carried out by the S.R.s at the order of the Entente; about the risings organized by the S.R.s with the money of the foreign missions in our army, which was pouring out its blood in the struggle against the monarchical bands of imperialism. Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that we not only repeated more than once, but proved in reality our readiness to give peace to the country, even at the cost of sacrifices and concessions, and that, in spite of this, we were obliged to carry on an intensive struggle on all fronts to defend the very existence of our country, and to prevent its transformation into a colony of Anglo-French imperialism. Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in this heroic struggle, in which we are defending the future of world Socialism, the Russian proletariat is obliged to expend its principal energies, its best and most valuable forces, taking them away from economic and cultural reconstruction. In all his book, Kautsky does not even mention the fact that first of all German militarism, with the help of its Scheidemanns and the apathy of its Kautskies, and then the militarism of the Entente countries with the help of its Renaudels and the apathy of its Longuets, surrounded us with an iron blockade; seized all our ports; cut us off from the whole of the world; occupied, with the help of hired White bands, enormous territories, rich in raw materials; and separated us for a long period from the Baku oil, the Donetz coal, the Don and Siberian corn, the Turkestan cotton. Kautsky does not say one word about the fact that in these conditions, unprecedented for their difficulty, the Russian working class for nearly three years has been carrying on a heroic struggle against its enemies on a front of 8,000 versts; that the Russian working class learned how to exchange its hammer for the sword, and created a mighty army; that for this army it mobilized its exhausted industry and, in spite of the ruin of the country, which the executioners of the whole world had condemned to blockade and civil war, for three years with its own forces and resources it has been clothing, feeding, arming, transporting an army of millions--an army which has learned how to conquer. About all these conditions Kautsky is silent, in a book devoted to Russian Communism. And his silence is the fundamental, capital, principal lie--true, a passive lie, but more criminal and more repulsive than the active lie of all the scoundrels of the international bourgeois Press taken together. Slandering the policy of the Communist Party, Kautsky says nowhere what he himself wants and what he proposes. The Bolsheviks were not alone in the arena of the Russian Revolution. We saw and see in it--now in power, now in opposition--S.R.s (not less than five groups and tendencies), Mensheviks (not less than three tendencies), Plekhanovists, Maximalists, Anarchists.... Absolutely all the "shades of Socialism" (to speak in Kautsky's language) tried their hand, and showed what they would and what they could. There are so many of these "shades" that it is difficult now to pass the blade of a knife between them. The very origin of these "shades" is not accidental: they represent, so to speak, different degrees in the adaptation of the pre-revolutionary Socialist parties and groups to the conditions of the greater revolutionary epoch. It would seem that Kautsky had a sufficiently complete political keyboard before him to be able to strike the note which would give a true Marxian key to the Russian Revolution. But Kautsky is silent. He repudiates the Bolshevik melody that is unpleasant to his ear, but does not seek another. The solution is simple: _the old musician refuses altogether to play on the instrument of the revolution_. 10 IN PLACE OF AN EPILOGUE This book appears at the moment of the Second Congress of the Communist International. The revolutionary movement of the proletariat has made, during the months that have passed since the First Congress, a great step forward. The positions of the official, open social-patriots have everywhere been undermined. The ideas of Communism acquire an ever wider extension. Official dogmatized Kautskianism has been gradually compromised. Kautsky himself, within that "Independent" Party which he created, represents to-day a not very authoritative and a fairly ridiculous figure. None the less, the intellectual struggle in the ranks of the international working class is only now blazing up as it should. If, as we just said, dogmatized Kautskianism is breathing its last days, and the leaders of the intermediate Socialist parties are hastening to renounce it, still Kautskianism as a bourgeois attitude, as a tradition of passivity, as political cowardice, still plays an enormous part in the upper ranks of the working-class organizations of the world, in no way excluding parties tending to the Third International, and even formally adhering to it. The Independent Party in Germany, which has written on its banner the watchword of the dictatorship of the proletariat, tolerates in its ranks the Kautsky group, all the efforts of which are devoted theoretically to compromise and misrepresent the dictatorship of the proletariat in the shape of its living expression--the Soviet regime. In conditions of civil war, such a form of co-habitation is conceivable only and to such an extent as far and as long as the dictatorship of the proletariat represents for the leaders of the "Independent" Social-Democracy a noble aspiration, a vague protest against the open and disgraceful treachery of Noske, Ebert, Scheidemann and others, and--last but not least--a weapon of electoral and parliamentary demagogy. The vitality of vague Kautskianism is most clearly seen in the example of the French Longuetists. Jean Longuet himself has most sincerely convinced himself, and has for long been attempting to convince others, that he is marching in step with us, and that only Clemenceau's censorship and the calumnies of our French friends Loriot, Monatte, Rosmer, and others hinder our comradship in arms. Yet is it sufficient to make oneself acquainted with any parliamentary speech of Longuet's to realize that the gulf separating him from us at the present moment is possibly still wider than at the first period of the imperialist war? The revolutionary problems now arising before the international proletariat have become more serious, more immediate, more gigantic, more direct, more definite, than five or six years ago; and the politically reactionary character of the Longuetists, the parliamentary representatives of eternal passivity, has become more impressive than ever before, in spite of the fact that formally they have returned to the fold of parliamentary opposition. The Italian Party, which is within the Third International, is not at all free from Kautskianism. As far as the leaders are concerned, a very considerable part of them bear their internationalist honors only as a duty and as an imposition from below. In 1914-1915, the Italian Socialist Party found it infinitely more easy than did the other European parties to maintain an attitude of opposition to the war, both because Italy entered the war nine months later than other countries, and particularly because the international position of Italy created in it even a powerful bourgeois group (Giolittians in the widest sense of the word) which remained to the very last moment hostile to Italian intervention in the war. These conditions allowed the Italian Socialist Party, without the fear of a very profound internal crisis to refuse war credits to the Government, and generally to remain outside the interventionist block. But by this very fact the process of internal cleansing of the party proved to be unquestionably delayed. Although an integral part of the Third International, the Italian Socialist Party to this very day can put up with Turati and his supporters in its ranks. This very powerful group--unfortunately we find it difficult to define to any extent of accuracy its numerical significance in the parliamentary group, in the press, in the party, and in the trade union organizations--represents a less pedantic, not so demagogic, more declamatory and lyrical, but none the less malignant opportunism--a form of romantic Kautskianism. A passive attitude to the Kautskian, Longuetist, Turatist groups is usually cloaked by the argument that the time for revolutionary activity in the respective countries has not yet arrived. But such a formulation of the question is absolutely false. Nobody demands from Socialists striving for Communism that they should appoint a revolutionary outbreak for a definite week or month in the near future. What the Third International demands of its supporters is a recognition, not in words but in deeds, that civilized humanity has entered a revolutionary epoch; that all the capitalist countries are speeding towards colossal disturbances and an open class war; and that the task of the revolutionary representatives of the proletariat is to prepare for that inevitable and approaching war the necessary spiritual armory and buttress of organization. The internationalists who consider it possible at the present time to collaborate with Kautsky, Longuet and Turati, to appear side by side with them before the working masses, by that very act renounce in practice the work of preparing in ideas and organization for the revolutionary rising of the proletariat, independently of whether it comes a month or a year sooner or later. In order that the open rising of the proletarian masses should not fritter itself away in belated searches for paths and leadership, we must see to it to-day that wide circles of the proletariat should even now learn to grasp all the immensity of the tasks before them, and of their irreconcilability with all variations of Kautskianism and opportunism. A truly revolutionary, _i.e._, a Communist wing, must set itself up in opposition, in face of the masses, to all the indecisive, half-hearted groups of doctrinaires, advocates, and panegyrists of passivity, strengthening its positions first of all spiritually and then in the sphere of organization--open, half-open, and purely conspirative. The moment of formal split with the open and disguised Kautskians, or the moment of their expulsion from the ranks of the working-class party, is, of course, to be determined by considerations of usefulness from the point of view of circumstances; but all the policy of real Communists must turn in that direction. That is why it seems to me that this book is still not out of date--to my great regret, if not as an author, at any rate as a Communist. _June 17, 1920._ 
403	----	SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE BY RICHARD HARDING DAVIS TO IRENE AND DANA GIBSON SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE I "It is so good of you to come early," said Mrs. Porter, as Alice Langham entered the drawing-room. "I want to ask a favor of you. I'm sure you won't mind. I would ask one of the debutantes, except that they're always so cross if one puts them next to men they don't know and who can't help them, and so I thought I'd just ask you, you're so good-natured. You don't mind, do you?" "I mind being called good-natured," said Miss Langham, smiling. "Mind what, Mrs. Porter?" she asked. "He is a friend of George's," Mrs. Porter explained, vaguely. "He's a cowboy. It seems he was very civil to George when he was out there shooting in New Mexico, or Old Mexico, I don't remember which. He took George to his hut and gave him things to shoot, and all that, and now he is in New York with a letter of introduction. It's just like George. He may be a most impossible sort of man, but, as I said to Mr. Porter, the people I've asked can't complain, because I don't know anything more about him than they do. He called to-day when I was out and left his card and George's letter of introduction, and as a man had failed me for to-night, I just thought I would kill two birds with one stone, and ask him to fill his place, and he's here. And, oh, yes," Mrs. Porter added, "I'm going to put him next to you, do you mind?" "Unless he wears leather leggings and long spurs I shall mind very much," said Miss Langham. "Well, that's very nice of you," purred Mrs. Porter, as she moved away. "He may not be so bad, after all; and I'll put Reginald King on your other side, shall I?" she asked, pausing and glancing back. The look on Miss Langham's face, which had been one of amusement, changed consciously, and she smiled with polite acquiescence. "As you please, Mrs. Porter," she answered. She raised her eyebrows slightly. "I am, as the politicians say, 'in the hands of my friends.'" "Entirely too much in the hands of my friends," she repeated, as she turned away. This was the twelfth time during that same winter that she and Mr. King had been placed next to one another at dinner, and it had passed beyond the point when she could say that it did not matter what people thought as long as she and he understood. It had now reached that stage when she was not quite sure that she understood either him or herself. They had known each other for a very long time; too long, she sometimes thought, for them ever to grow to know each other any better. But there was always the chance that he had another side, one that had not disclosed itself, and which she could not discover in the strict social environment in which they both lived. And she was the surer of this because she had once seen him when he did not know that she was near, and he had been so different that it had puzzled her and made her wonder if she knew the real Reggie King at all. It was at a dance at a studio, and some French pantomimists gave a little play. When it was over, King sat in the corner talking to one of the Frenchwomen, and while he waited on her he was laughing at her and at her efforts to speak English. He was telling her how to say certain phrases and not telling her correctly, and she suspected this and was accusing him of it, and they were rhapsodizing and exclaiming over certain delightful places and dishes of which they both knew in Paris with the enthusiasm of two children. Miss Langham saw him off his guard for the first time and instead of a somewhat bored and clever man of the world, he appeared as sincere and interested as a boy. When he joined her, later, the same evening, he was as entertaining as usual, and as polite and attentive as he had been to the Frenchwoman, but he was not greatly interested, and his laugh was modulated and not spontaneous. She had wondered that night, and frequently since then, if, in the event of his asking her to marry him, which was possible, and of her accepting him, which was also possible, whether she would find him, in the closer knowledge of married life, as keen and lighthearted with her as he had been with the French dancer. If he would but treat her more like a comrade and equal, and less like a prime minister conferring with his queen! She wanted something more intimate than the deference that he showed her, and she did not like his taking it as an accepted fact that she was as worldly-wise as himself, even though it were true. She was a woman and wanted to be loved, in spite of the fact that she had been loved by many men--at least it was so supposed--and had rejected them. Each had offered her position, or had wanted her because she was fitted to match his own great state, or because he was ambitious, or because she was rich. The man who could love her as she once believed men could love, and who could give her something else besides approval of her beauty and her mind, had not disclosed himself. She had begun to think that he never would, that he did not exist, that he was an imagination of the playhouse and the novel. The men whom she knew were careful to show her that they appreciated how distinguished was her position, and how inaccessible she was to them. They seemed to think that by so humbling themselves, and by emphasizing her position they pleased her best, when it was what she wanted them to forget. Each of them would draw away backward, bowing and protesting that he was unworthy to raise his eyes to such a prize, but that if she would only stoop to him, how happy his life would be. Sometimes they meant it sincerely; sometimes they were gentlemanly adventurers of title, from whom it was a business proposition, and in either case she turned restlessly away and asked herself how long it would be before the man would come who would pick her up on his saddle and gallop off with her, with his arm around her waist and his horse's hoofs clattering beneath them, and echoing the tumult in their hearts. She had known too many great people in the world to feel impressed with her own position at home in America; but she sometimes compared herself to the Queen in "In a Balcony," and repeated to herself, with mock seriousness:-- "And you the marble statue all the time They praise and point at as preferred to life, Yet leave for the first breathing woman's cheek, First dancer's, gypsy's or street balladine's!" And if it were true, she asked herself, that the man she had imagined was only an ideal and an illusion, was not King the best of the others, the unideal and ever-present others? Every one else seemed to think so. The society they knew put them constantly together and approved. Her people approved. Her own mind approved, and as her heart was not apparently ever to be considered, who could say that it did not approve as well? He was certainly a very charming fellow, a manly, clever companion, and one who bore about him the evidences of distinction and thorough breeding. As far as family went, the Kings were as old as a young country could expect, and Reggie King was, moreover, in spite of his wealth, a man of action and ability. His yacht journeyed from continent to continent, and not merely up the Sound to Newport, and he was as well known and welcome to the consuls along the coasts of Africa and South America as he was at Cowes or Nice. His books of voyages were recognized by geographical societies and other serious bodies, who had given him permission to put long disarrangements of the alphabet after his name. She liked him because she had grown to be at home with him, because it was good to know that there was some one who would not misunderstand her, and who, should she so indulge herself, would not take advantage of any appeal she might make to his sympathy, who would always be sure to do the tactful thing and the courteous thing, and who, while he might never do a great thing, could not do an unkind one. Miss Langham had entered the Porters' drawing-room after the greater number of the guests had arrived, and she turned from her hostess to listen to an old gentleman with a passion for golf, a passion in which he had for a long time been endeavoring to interest her. She answered him and his enthusiasm in kind, and with as much apparent interest as she would have shown in a matter of state. It was her principle to be all things to all men, whether they were great artists, great diplomats, or great bores. If a man had been pleading with her to leave the conservatory and run away with him, and another had come up innocently and announced that it was his dance, she would have said: "Oh, is it?" with as much apparent delight as though his coming had been the one bright hope in her life. She was growing enthusiastic over the delights of golf and unconsciously making a very beautiful picture of herself in her interest and forced vivacity, when she became conscious for the first time of a strange young man who was standing alone before the fireplace looking at her, and frankly listening to all the nonsense she was talking. She guessed that he had been listening for some time, and she also saw, before he turned his eyes quickly away, that he was distinctly amused. Miss Langham stopped gesticulating and lowered her voice, but continued to keep her eyes on the face of the stranger, whose own eyes were wandering around the room, to give her, so she guessed, the idea that he had not been listening, but that she had caught him at it in the moment he had first looked at her. He was a tall, broad-shouldered youth, with a handsome face, tanned and dyed, either by the sun or by exposure to the wind, to a deep ruddy brown, which contrasted strangely with his yellow hair and mustache, and with the pallor of the other faces about him. He was a stranger apparently to every one present, and his bearing suggested, in consequence, that ease of manner which comes to a person who is not only sure of himself, but who has no knowledge of the claims and pretensions to social distinction of those about him. His most attractive feature was his eyes, which seemed to observe all that was going on, not only what was on the surface, but beneath the surface, and that not rudely or covertly but with the frank, quick look of the trained observer. Miss Langham found it an interesting face to watch, and she did not look away from it. She was acquainted with every one else in the room, and hence she knew this must be the cowboy of whom Mrs. Porter had spoken, and she wondered how any one who had lived the rough life of the West could still retain the look when in formal clothes of one who was in the habit of doing informal things in them. Mrs. Porter presented her cowboy simply as "Mr. Clay, of whom I spoke to you," with a significant raising of the eyebrows, and the cowboy made way for King, who took Miss Langham in. He looked frankly pleased, however, when he found himself next to her again, but did not take advantage of it throughout the first part of the dinner, during which time he talked to the young married woman on his right, and Miss Langham and King continued where they had left off at their last meeting. They knew each other well enough to joke of the way in which they were thrown into each other's society, and, as she said, they tried to make the best of it. But while she spoke, Miss Langham was continually conscious of the presence of her neighbor, who piqued her interest and her curiosity in different ways. He seemed to be at his ease, and yet from the manner in which he glanced up and down the table and listened to snatches of talk on either side of him he had the appearance of one to whom it was all new, and who was seeing it for the first time. There was a jolly group at one end of the long table, and they wished to emphasize the fact by laughing a little more hysterically at their remarks than the humor of those witticisms seemed to justify. A daughter-in-law of Mrs. Porter was their leader in this, and at one point she stopped in the middle of a story and waving her hand at the double row of faces turned in her direction, which had been attracted by the loudness of her voice, cried, gayly, "Don't listen. This is for private circulation. It is not a jeune-fille story." The debutantes at the table continued talking again in steady, even tones, as though they had not heard the remark or the first of the story, and the men next to them appeared equally unconscious. But the cowboy, Miss Langham noted out of the corner of her eye, after a look of polite surprise, beamed with amusement and continued to stare up and down the table as though he had discovered a new trait in a peculiar and interesting animal. For some reason, she could not tell why, she felt annoyed with herself and with her friends, and resented the attitude which the new-comer assumed toward them. "Mrs. Porter tells me that you know her son George?" she said. He did not answer her at once, but bowed his head in assent, with a look of interrogation, as though, so it seemed to her, he had expected her, when she did speak, to say something less conventional. "Yes," he replied, after a pause, "he joined us at Ayutla. It was the terminus of the Jalisco and Mexican Railroad then. He came out over the road and went in from there with an outfit after mountain lions. I believe he had very good sport." "That is a very wonderful road, I am told," said King, bending forward and introducing himself into the conversation with a nod of the head toward Clay; "quite a remarkable feat of engineering." "It will open up the country, I believe," assented the other, indifferently. "I know something of it," continued King, "because I met the men who were putting it through at Pariqua, when we touched there in the yacht. They shipped most of their plant to that port, and we saw a good deal of them. They were a very jolly lot, and they gave me a most interesting account of their work and its difficulties." Clay was looking at the other closely, as though he was trying to find something back of what he was saying, but as his glance seemed only to embarrass King he smiled freely again in assent, and gave him his full attention. "There are no men to-day, Miss Langham," King exclaimed, suddenly, turning toward her, "to my mind, who lead as picturesque lives as do civil engineers. And there are no men whose work is as little appreciated." "Really?" said Miss Langham, encouragingly. "Now those men I met," continued King, settling himself with his side to the table, "were all young fellows of thirty or thereabouts, but they were leading the lives of pioneers and martyrs--at least that's what I'd call it. They were marching through an almost unknown part of Mexico, fighting Nature at every step and carrying civilization with them. They were doing better work than soldiers, because soldiers destroy things, and these chaps were creating, and making the way straight. They had no banners either, nor brass bands. They fought mountains and rivers, and they were attacked on every side by fever and the lack of food and severe exposure. They had to sit down around a camp-fire at night and calculate whether they were to tunnel a mountain, or turn the bed of a river or bridge it. And they knew all the time that whatever they decided to do out there in the wilderness meant thousands of dollars to the stockholders somewhere up in God's country, who would some day hold them to account for them. They dragged their chains through miles and miles of jungle, and over flat alkali beds and cactus, and they reared bridges across roaring canons. We know nothing about them and we care less. When their work is done we ride over the road in an observation-car and look down thousands and thousands of feet into the depths they have bridged, and we never give them a thought. They are the bravest soldiers of the present day, and they are the least recognized. I have forgotten their names, and you never heard them. But it seems to me the civil engineer, for all that, is the chief civilizer of our century." Miss Langham was looking ahead of her with her eyes half-closed, as though she were going over in her mind the situation King had described. "I never thought of that," she said. "It sounds very fine. As you say, the reward is so inglorious. But that is what makes it fine." The cowboy was looking down at the table and pulling at a flower in the centre-piece. He had ceased to smile. Miss Langham turned on him somewhat sharply, resenting his silence, and said, with a slight challenge in her voice:-- "Do you agree, Mr. Clay," she asked, "or do you prefer the chocolate-cream soldiers, in red coats and gold lace?" "Oh, I don't know," the young man answered, with some slight hesitation. "It's a trade for each of them. The engineer's work is all the more absorbing, I imagine, when the difficulties are greatest. He has the fun of overcoming them." "You see nothing in it then," she asked, "but a source of amusement?" "Oh, yes, a good deal more," he replied. "A livelihood, for one thing. I--I have been an engineer all my life. I built that road Mr. King is talking about." An hour later, when Mrs. Porter made the move to go, Miss Langham rose with a protesting sigh. "I am so sorry," she said, "it has been most interesting. I never met two men who had visited so many inaccessible places and come out whole. You have quite inspired Mr. King, he was never so amusing. But I should like to hear the end of that adventure; won't you tell it to me in the other room?" Clay bowed. "If I haven't thought of something more interesting in the meantime," he said. "What I can't understand," said King, as he moved up into Miss Langham's place, "is how you had time to learn so much of the rest of the world. You don't act like a man who had spent his life in the brush." "How do you mean?" asked Clay, smiling--"that I don't use the wrong forks?" "No," laughed King, "but you told us that this was your first visit East, and yet you're talking about England and Vienna and Voisin's. How is it you've been there, while you have never been in New York?" "Well, that's partly due to accident and partly to design," Clay answered. "You see I've worked for English and German and French companies, as well as for those in the States, and I go abroad to make reports and to receive instructions. And then I'm what you call a self-made man; that is, I've never been to college. I've always had to educate myself, and whenever I did get a holiday it seemed to me that I ought to put it to the best advantage, and to spend it where civilization was the furthest advanced--advanced, at least, in years. When I settle down and become an expert, and demand large sums for just looking at the work other fellows have done, then I hope to live in New York, but until then I go where the art galleries are biggest and where they have got the science of enjoying themselves down to the very finest point. I have enough rough work eight months of the year to make me appreciate that. So whenever I get a few months to myself I take the Royal Mail to London, and from there to Paris or Vienna. I think I like Vienna the best. The directors are generally important people in their own cities, and they ask one about, and so, though I hope I am a good American, it happens that I've more friends on the Continent than in the United States." "And how does this strike you?" asked King, with a movement of his shoulder toward the men about the dismantled table. "Oh, I don't know," laughed Clay. "You've lived abroad yourself; how does it strike you?" Clay was the first man to enter the drawing-room. He walked directly away from the others and over to Miss Langham, and, taking her fan out of her hands as though to assure himself of some hold upon her, seated himself with his back to every one else. "You have come to finish that story?" she said, smiling. Miss Langham was a careful young person, and would not have encouraged a man she knew even as well as she knew King, to talk to her through dinner, and after it as well. She fully recognized that because she was conspicuous certain innocent pleasures were denied her which other girls could enjoy without attracting attention or comment. But Clay interested her beyond her usual self, and the look in his eyes was a tribute which she had no wish to put away from her. "I've thought of something more interesting to talk about," said Clay. "I'm going to talk about you. You see I've known you a long time." "Since eight o'clock?" asked Miss Langham. "Oh, no, since your coming out, four years ago." "It's not polite to remember so far back," she said. "Were you one of those who assisted at that important function? There were so many there I don't remember." "No, I only read about it. I remember it very well; I had ridden over twelve miles for the mail that day, and I stopped half-way back to the ranch and camped out in the shade of a rock and read all the papers and magazines through at one sitting, until the sun went down and I couldn't see the print. One of the papers had an account of your coming out in it, and a picture of you, and I wrote East to the photographer for the original. It knocked about the West for three months and then reached me at Laredo, on the border between Texas and Mexico, and I have had it with me ever since." Miss Langham looked at Clay for a moment in silent dismay and with a perplexed smile. "Where is it now?" she asked at last. "In my trunk at the hotel." "Oh," she said, slowly. She was still in doubt as to how to treat this act of unconventionality. "Not in your watch?" she said, to cover up the pause. "That would have been more in keeping with the rest of the story." The young man smiled grimly, and pulling out his watch pried back the lid and turned it to her so that she could see a photograph inside. The face in the watch was that of a young girl in the dress of a fashion of several years ago. It was a lovely, frank face, looking out of the picture into the world kindly and questioningly, and without fear. "Was I once like that?" she said, lightly. "Well, go on." "Well," he said, with a little sigh of relief, "I became greatly interested in Miss Alice Langham, and in her comings out and goings in, and in her gowns. Thanks to our having a press in the States that makes a specialty of personalities, I was able to follow you pretty closely, for, wherever I go, I have my papers sent after me. I can get along without a compass or a medicine-chest, but I can't do without the newspapers and the magazines. There was a time when I thought you were going to marry that Austrian chap, and I didn't approve of that. I knew things about him in Vienna. And then I read of your engagement to others--well--several others; some of them I thought worthy, and others not. Once I even thought of writing you about it, and once I saw you in Paris. You were passing on a coach. The man with me told me it was you, and I wanted to follow the coach in a fiacre, but he said he knew at what hotel you were stopping, and so I let you go, but you were not at that hotel, or at any other--at least, I couldn't find you." "What would you have done--?" asked Miss Langham. "Never mind," she interrupted, "go on." "Well, that's all," said Clay, smiling. "That's all, at least, that concerns you. That is the romance of this poor young man." "But not the only one," she said, for the sake of saying something. "Perhaps not," answered Clay, "but the only one that counts. I always knew I was going to meet you some day. And now I have met you." "Well, and now that you have met me," said Miss Langham, looking at him in some amusement, "are you sorry?" "No--" said Clay, but so slowly and with such consideration that Miss Langham laughed and held her head a little higher. "Not sorry to meet you, but to meet you in such surroundings." "What fault do you find with my surroundings?" "Well, these people," answered Clay, "they are so foolish, so futile. You shouldn't be here. There must be something else better than this. You can't make me believe that you choose it. In Europe you could have a salon, or you could influence statesmen. There surely must be something here for you to turn to as well. Something better than golf-sticks and salted almonds." "What do you know of me?" said Miss Langham, steadily. "Only what you have read of me in impertinent paragraphs. How do you know I am fitted for anything else but just this? You never spoke with me before to-night." "That has nothing to do with it," said Clay, quickly. "Time is made for ordinary people. When people who amount to anything meet they don't have to waste months in finding each other out. It is only the doubtful ones who have to be tested again and again. When I was a kid in the diamond mines in Kimberley, I have seen the experts pick out a perfect diamond from the heap at the first glance, and without a moment's hesitation. It was the cheap stones they spent most of the afternoon over. Suppose I HAVE only seen you to-night for the first time; suppose I shall not see you again, which is quite likely, for I sail tomorrow for South America--what of that? I am just as sure of what you are as though I had known you for years." Miss Langham looked at him for a moment in silence. Her beauty was so great that she could take her time to speak. She was not afraid of losing any one's attention. "And have you come out of the West, knowing me so well, just to tell me that I am wasting myself?" she said. "Is that all?" "That is all," answered Clay. "You know the things I would like to tell you," he added, looking at her closely. "I think I like to be told the other things best," she said, "they are the easier to believe." "You have to believe whatever I tell you," said Clay, smiling. The girl pressed her hands together in her lap, and looked at him curiously. The people about them were moving and making their farewells, and they brought her back to the present with a start. "I'm sorry you're going away," she said. "It has been so odd. You come suddenly up out of the wilderness, and set me to thinking and try to trouble me with questions about myself, and then steal away again without stopping to help me to settle them. Is it fair?" She rose and put out her hand, and he took it and held it for a moment, while they stood looking at one another. "I am coming back," he said, "and I will find that you have settled them for yourself." "Good-by," she said, in so low a tone that the people standing near them could not hear. "You haven't asked me for it, you know, but--I think I shall let you keep that picture." "Thank you," said Clay, smiling, "I meant to." "You can keep it," she continued, turning back, "because it is not my picture. It is a picture of a girl who ceased to exist four years ago, and whom you have never met. Good-night." Mr. Langham and Hope, his younger daughter, had been to the theatre. The performance had been one which delighted Miss Hope, and which satisfied her father because he loved to hear her laugh. Mr. Langham was the slave of his own good fortune. By instinct and education he was a man of leisure and culture, but the wealth he had inherited was like an unruly child that needed his constant watching, and in keeping it well in hand he had become a man of business, with time for nothing else. Alice Langham, on her return from Mrs. Porter's dinner, found him in his study engaged with a game of solitaire, while Hope was kneeling on a chair beside him with her elbows on the table. Mr. Langham had been troubled with insomnia of late, and so it often happened that when Alice returned from a ball she would find him sitting with a novel, or his game of solitaire, and Hope, who had crept downstairs from her bed, dozing in front of the open fire and keeping him silent company. The father and the younger daughter were very close to one another, and had grown especially so since his wife had died and his son and heir had gone to college. This fourth member of the family was a great bond of sympathy and interest between them, and his triumphs and escapades at Yale were the chief subjects of their conversation. It was told by the directors of a great Western railroad, who had come to New York to discuss an important question with Mr. Langham, that they had been ushered downstairs one night into his basement, where they had found the President of the Board and his daughter Hope working out a game of football on the billiard table. They had chalked it off into what corresponded to five-yard lines, and they were hurling twenty-two chess-men across it in "flying wedges" and practising the several tricks which young Langham had intrusted to his sister under an oath of secrecy. The sight filled the directors with the horrible fear that business troubles had turned the President's mind, but after they had sat for half an hour perched on the high chairs around the table, while Hope excitedly explained the game to them, they decided that he was wiser than they knew, and each left the house regretting he had no son worthy enough to bring "that young girl" into the Far West. "You are home early," said Mr. Langham, as Alice stood above him pulling at her gloves. "I thought you said you were going on to some dance." "I was tired," his daughter answered. "Well, when I'm out," commented Hope, "I won't come home at eleven o'clock. Alice always was a quitter." "A what?" asked the older sister. "Tell us what you had for dinner," said Hope. "I know it isn't nice to ask," she added, hastily, "but I always like to know." "I don't remember," Miss Langham answered, smiling at her father, "except that he was very much sunburned and had most perplexing eyes." "Oh, of course," assented Hope, "I suppose you mean by that that you talked with some man all through dinner. Well, I think there is a time for everything." "Father," interrupted Miss Langham, "do you know many engineers--I mean do you come in contact with them through the railroads and mines you have an interest in? I am rather curious about them," she said, lightly. "They seem to be a most picturesque lot of young men." "Engineers? Of course," said Mr. Langham, vaguely, with the ten of spades held doubtfully in air. "Sometimes we have to depend upon them altogether. We decide from what the engineering experts tell us whether we will invest in a thing or not." "I don't think I mean the big men of the profession," said his daughter, doubtfully. "I mean those who do the rough work. The men who dig the mines and lay out the railroads. Do you know any of them?" "Some of them," said Mr. Langham, leaning back and shuffling the cards for a new game. "Why?" "Did you ever hear of a Mr. Robert Clay?" Mr. Langham smiled as he placed the cards one above the other in even rows. "Very often," he said. "He sails to-morrow to open up the largest iron deposits in South America. He goes for the Valencia Mining Company. Valencia is the capital of Olancho, one of those little republics down there." "Do you--are you interested in that company?" asked Miss Langham, seating herself before the fire and holding out her hands toward it. "Does Mr. Clay know that you are?" "Yes--I am interested in it," Mr. Langham replied, studying the cards before him, "but I don't think Clay knows it--nobody knows it yet, except the president and the other officers." He lifted a card and put it down again in some indecision. "It's generally supposed to be operated by a company, but all the stock is owned by one man. As a matter of fact, my dear children," exclaimed Mr. Langham, as he placed a deuce of clubs upon a deuce of spades with a smile of content, "the Valencia Mining Company is your beloved father." "Oh," said Miss Langham, as she looked steadily into the fire. Hope tapped her lips gently with the back of her hand to hide the fact that she was sleepy, and nudged her father's elbow. "You shouldn't have put the deuce there," she said, "you should have used it to build with on the ace." II A year before Mrs. Porter's dinner a tramp steamer on her way to the capital of Brazil had steered so close to the shores of Olancho that her solitary passenger could look into the caverns the waves had tunnelled in the limestone cliffs along the coast. The solitary passenger was Robert Clay, and he made a guess that the white palisades which fringed the base of the mountains along the shore had been forced up above the level of the sea many years before by some volcanic action. Olancho, as many people know, is situated on the northeastern coast of South America, and its shores are washed by the main equatorial current. From the deck of a passing vessel you can obtain but little idea of Olancho or of the abundance and tropical beauty which lies hidden away behind the rampart of mountains on her shore. You can see only their desolate dark-green front, and the white caves at their base, into which the waves rush with an echoing roar, and in and out of which fly continually thousands of frightened bats. The mining engineer on the rail of the tramp steamer observed this peculiar formation of the coast with listless interest, until he noted, when the vessel stood some thirty miles north of the harbor of Valencia, that the limestone formation had disappeared, and that the waves now beat against the base of the mountains themselves. There were five of these mountains which jutted out into the ocean, and they suggested roughly the five knuckles of a giant hand clenched and lying flat upon the surface of the water. They extended for seven miles, and then the caverns in the palisades began again and continued on down the coast to the great cliffs that guard the harbor of Olancho's capital. "The waves tunnelled their way easily enough until they ran up against those five mountains," mused the engineer, "and then they had to fall back." He walked to the captain's cabin and asked to look at a map of the coast line. "I believe I won't go to Rio," he said later in the day; "I think I will drop off here at Valencia." So he left the tramp steamer at that place and disappeared into the interior with an ox-cart and a couple of pack-mules, and returned to write a lengthy letter from the Consul's office to a Mr. Langham in the United States, knowing he was largely interested in mines and in mining. "There are five mountains filled with ore," Clay wrote, "which should be extracted by open-faced workings. I saw great masses of red hematite lying exposed on the side of the mountain, only waiting a pick and shovel, and at one place there were five thousand tons in plain sight. I should call the stuff first-class Bessemer ore, running about sixty-three per cent metallic iron. The people know it is there, but have no knowledge of its value, and are too lazy to ever work it themselves. As to transportation, it would only be necessary to run a freight railroad twenty miles along the sea-coast to the harbor of Valencia and dump your ore from your own pier into your own vessels. It would not, I think, be possible to ship direct from the mines themselves, even though, as I say, the ore runs right down into the water, because there is no place at which it would be safe for a large vessel to touch. I will look into the political side of it and see what sort of a concession I can get for you. I should think ten per cent of the output would satisfy them, and they would, of course, admit machinery and plant free of duty." Six months after this communication had arrived in New York City, the Valencia Mining Company was formally incorporated, and a man named Van Antwerp, with two hundred workmen and a half-dozen assistants, was sent South to lay out the freight railroad, to erect the dumping-pier, and to strip the five mountains of their forests and underbrush. It was not a task for a holiday, but a stern, difficult, and perplexing problem, and Van Antwerp was not quite the man to solve it. He was stubborn, self-confident, and indifferent by turns. He did not depend upon his lieutenants, but jealously guarded his own opinions from the least question or discussion, and at every step he antagonized the easy-going people among whom he had come to work. He had no patience with their habits of procrastination, and he was continually offending their lazy good-nature and their pride. He treated the rich planters, who owned the land between the mines and the harbor over which the freight railroad must run, with as little consideration as he showed the regiment of soldiers which the Government had farmed out to the company to serve as laborers in the mines. Six months after Van Antwerp had taken charge at Valencia, Clay, who had finished the railroad in Mexico, of which King had spoken, was asked by telegraph to undertake the work of getting the ore out of the mountains he had discovered, and shipping it North. He accepted the offer and was given the title of General Manager and Resident Director, and an enormous salary, and was also given to understand that the rough work of preparation had been accomplished, and that the more important service of picking up the five mountains and putting them in fragments into tramp steamers would continue under his direction. He had a letter of recall for Van Antwerp, and a letter of introduction to the Minister of Mines and Agriculture. Further than that he knew nothing of the work before him, but he concluded, from the fact that he had been paid the almost prohibitive sum he had asked for his services, that it must be important, or that he had reached that place in his career when he could stop actual work and live easily, as an expert, on the work of others. Clay rolled along the coast from Valencia to the mines in a paddle-wheeled steamer that had served its usefulness on the Mississippi, and which had been rotting at the levees in New Orleans, when Van Antwerp had chartered it to carry tools and machinery to the mines and to serve as a private launch for himself. It was a choice either of this steamer and landing in a small boat, or riding along the line of the unfinished railroad on horseback. Either route consumed six valuable hours, and Clay, who was anxious to see his new field of action, beat impatiently upon the rail of the rolling tub as it wallowed in the sea. He spent the first three days after his arrival at the mines in the mountains, climbing them on foot and skirting their base on horseback, and sleeping where night overtook him. Van Antwerp did not accompany him on his tour of inspection through the mines, but delegated that duty to an engineer named MacWilliams, and to Weimer, the United States Consul at Valencia, who had served the company in many ways and who was in its closest confidence. For three days the men toiled heavily over fallen trunks and trees, slippery with the moss of centuries, or slid backward on the rolling stones in the waterways, or clung to their ponies' backs to dodge the hanging creepers. At times for hours together they walked in single file, bent nearly double, and seeing nothing before them but the shining backs and shoulders of the negroes who hacked out the way for them to go. And again they would come suddenly upon a precipice, and drink in the soft cool breath of the ocean, and look down thousands of feet upon the impenetrable green under which they had been crawling, out to where it met the sparkling surface of the Caribbean Sea. It was three days of unceasing activity while the sun shone, and of anxious questionings around the camp-fire when the darkness fell, and when there were no sounds on the mountain-side but that of falling water in a distant ravine or the calls of the night-birds. On the morning of the fourth day Clay and his attendants returned to camp and rode to where the men had just begun to blast away the sloping surface of the mountain. As Clay passed between the zinc sheds and palm huts of the soldier-workmen, they came running out to meet him, and one, who seemed to be a leader, touched his bridle, and with his straw sombrero in his hand begged for a word with el Senor the Director. The news of Clay's return had reached the opening, and the throb of the dummy-engines and the roar of the blasting ceased as the assistant-engineers came down the valley to greet the new manager. They found him seated on his horse gazing ahead of him, and listening to the story of the soldier, whose fingers, as he spoke, trembled in the air, with all the grace and passion of his Southern nature, while back of him his companions stood humbly, in a silent chorus, with eager, supplicating eyes. Clay answered the man's speech curtly, with a few short words, in the Spanish patois in which he had been addressed, and then turned and smiled grimly upon the expectant group of engineers. He kept them waiting for some short space, while he looked them over carefully, as though he had never seen them before. "Well, gentlemen," he said, "I'm glad to have you here all together. I am only sorry you didn't come in time to hear what this fellow has had to say. I don't as a rule listen that long to complaints, but he told me what I have seen for myself and what has been told me by others. I have been here three days now, and I assure you, gentlemen, that my easiest course would be to pack up my things and go home on the next steamer. I was sent down here to take charge of a mine in active operation, and I find--what? I find that in six months you have done almost nothing, and that the little you have condescended to do has been done so badly that it will have to be done over again; that you have not only wasted a half year of time--and I can't tell how much money--but that you have succeeded in antagonizing all the people on whose good-will we are absolutely dependent; you have allowed your machinery to rust in the rain, and your workmen to rot with sickness. You have not only done nothing, but you haven't a blue print to show me what you meant to do. I have never in my life come across laziness and mismanagement and incompetency upon such a magnificent and reckless scale. You have not built the pier, you have not opened the freight road, you have not taken out an ounce of ore. You know more of Valencia than you know of these mines; you know it from the Alameda to the Canal. You can tell me what night the band plays in the Plaza, but you can't give me the elevation of one of these hills. You have spent your days on the pavements in front of cafés, and your nights in dance-halls, and you have been drawing salaries every month. I've more respect for these half-breeds that you've allowed to starve in this fever-bed than I have for you. You have treated them worse than they'd treat a dog, and if any of them die, it's on your heads. You have put them in a fever-camp which you have not even taken the trouble to drain. Your commissariat is rotten, and you have let them drink all the rum they wanted. There is not one of you--" The group of silent men broke, and one of them stepped forward and shook his forefinger at Clay. "No man can talk to me like that," he said, warningly, "and think I'll work under him. I resign here and now." "You what--" cried Clay, "you resign?" He whirled his horse round with a dig of his spur and faced them. "How dare you talk of resigning? I'll pack the whole lot of you back to New York on the first steamer, if I want to, and I'll give you such characters that you'll be glad to get a job carrying a transit. You're in no position to talk of resigning yet--not one of you. Yes," he added, interrupting himself, "one of you is MacWilliams, the man who had charge of the railroad. It's no fault of his that the road's not working. I understand that he couldn't get the right of way from the people who owned the land, but I have seen what he has done, and his plans, and I apologize to him--to MacWilliams. As for the rest of you, I'll give you a month's trial. It will be a month before the next steamer could get here anyway, and I'll give you that long to redeem yourselves. At the end of that time we will have another talk, but you are here now only on your good behavior and on my sufferance. Good-morning." As Clay had boasted, he was not the man to throw up his position because he found the part he had to play was not that of leading man, but rather one of general utility, and although it had been several years since it had been part of his duties to oversee the setting up of machinery, and the policing of a mining camp, he threw himself as earnestly into the work before him as though to show his subordinates that it did not matter who did the work, so long as it was done. The men at first were sulky, resentful, and suspicious, but they could not long resist the fact that Clay was doing the work of five men and five different kinds of work, not only without grumbling, but apparently with the keenest pleasure. He conciliated the rich coffee planters who owned the land which he wanted for the freight road by calls of the most formal state and dinners of much less formality, for he saw that the iron mine had its social as well as its political side. And with this fact in mind, he opened the railroad with great ceremony, and much music and feasting, and the first piece of ore taken out of the mine was presented to the wife of the Minister of the Interior in a cluster of diamonds, which made the wives of the other members of the Cabinet regret that their husbands had not chosen that portfolio. Six months followed of hard, unremitting work, during which time the great pier grew out into the bay from MacWilliams' railroad, and the face of the first mountain was scarred and torn of its green, and left in mangled nakedness, while the ringing of hammers and picks, and the racking blasts of dynamite, and the warning whistles of the dummy-engines drove away the accumulated silence of centuries. It had been a long uphill fight, and Clay had enjoyed it mightily. Two unexpected events had contributed to help it. One was the arrival in Valencia of young Teddy Langham, who came ostensibly to learn the profession of which Clay was so conspicuous an example, and in reality to watch over his father's interests. He was put at Clay's elbow, and Clay made him learn in spite of himself, for he ruled him and MacWilliams of both of whom he was very fond, as though, so they complained, they were the laziest and the most rebellious members of his entire staff. The second event of importance was the announcement made one day by young Langham that his father's physician had ordered rest in a mild climate, and that he and his daughters were coming in a month to spend the winter in Valencia, and to see how the son and heir had developed as a man of business. The idea of Mr. Langham's coming to visit Olancho to inspect his new possessions was not a surprise to Clay. It had occurred to him as possible before, especially after the son had come to join them there. The place was interesting and beautiful enough in itself to justify a visit, and it was only a ten days' voyage from New York. But he had never considered the chance of Miss Langham's coming, and when that was now not only possible but a certainty, he dreamed of little else. He lived as earnestly and toiled as indefatigably as before, but the place was utterly transformed for him. He saw it now as she would see it when she came, even while at the same time his own eyes retained their point of view. It was as though he had lengthened the focus of a glass, and looked beyond at what was beautiful and picturesque, instead of what was near at hand and practicable. He found himself smiling with anticipation of her pleasure in the orchids hanging from the dead trees, high above the opening of the mine, and in the parrots hurling themselves like gayly colored missiles among the vines; and he considered the harbor at night with its colored lamps floating on the black water as a scene set for her eyes. He planned the dinners that he would give in her honor on the balcony of the great restaurant in the Plaza on those nights when the band played, and the senoritas circled in long lines between admiring rows of officers and caballeros. And he imagined how, when the ore-boats had been filled and his work had slackened, he would be free to ride with her along the rough mountain roads, between magnificent pillars of royal palms, or to venture forth in excursions down the bay, to explore the caves and to lunch on board the rolling paddle-wheel steamer, which he would have re painted and gilded for her coming. He pictured himself acting as her guide over the great mines, answering her simple questions about the strange machinery, and the crew of workmen, and the local government by which he ruled two thousand men. It was not on account of any personal pride in the mines that he wanted her to see them, it was not because he had discovered and planned and opened them that he wished to show them to her, but as a curious spectacle that he hoped would give her a moment's interest. But his keenest pleasure was when young Langham suggested that they should build a house for his people on the edge of the hill that jutted out over the harbor and the great ore pier. If this were done, Langham urged, it would be possible for him to see much more of his family than he would be able to do were they installed in the city, five miles away. "We can still live in the office at this end of the railroad," the boy said, "and then we shall have them within call at night when we get back from work; but if they are in Valencia, it will take the greater part of the evening going there and all of the night getting back, for I can't pass that club under three hours. It will keep us out of temptation." "Yes, exactly," said Clay, with a guilty smile, "it will keep us out of temptation." So they cleared away the underbrush, and put a double force of men to work on what was to be the most beautiful and comfortable bungalow on the edge of the harbor. It had blue and green and white tiles on the floors, and walls of bamboo, and a red roof of curved tiles to let in the air, and dragons' heads for water-spouts, and verandas as broad as the house itself. There was an open court in the middle hung with balconies looking down upon a splashing fountain, and to decorate this patio, they levied upon people for miles around for tropical plants and colored mats and awnings. They cut down the trees that hid the view of the long harbor leading from the sea into Valencia, and planted a rampart of other trees to hide the iron-ore pier, and they sodded the raw spots where the men had been building, until the place was as completely transformed as though a fairy had waved her wand above it. It was to be a great surprise, and they were all--Clay, MacWilliams, and Langham--as keenly interested in it as though each were preparing it for his honeymoon. They would be walking together in Valencia when one would say, "We ought to have that for the house," and without question they would march into the shop together and order whatever they fancied to be sent out to the house of the president of the mines on the hill. They stocked it with wine and linens, and hired a volante and six horses, and fitted out the driver with a new pair of boots that reached above his knees, and a silver jacket and a sombrero that was so heavy with braid that it flashed like a halo about his head in the sunlight, and he was ordered not to wear it until the ladies came, under penalty of arrest. It delighted Clay to find that it was only the beautiful things and the fine things of his daily routine that suggested her to him, as though she could not be associated in his mind with anything less worthy, and he kept saying to himself, "She will like this view from the end of the terrace," and "This will be her favorite walk," or "She will swing her hammock here," and "I know she will not fancy the rug that Weimer chose." While this fairy palace was growing the three men lived as roughly as before in the wooden hut at the terminus of the freight road, three hundred yards below the house, and hidden from it by an impenetrable rampart of brush and Spanish bayonet. There was a rough road leading from it to the city, five miles away, which they had extended still farther up the hill to the Palms, which was the name Langham had selected for his father's house. And when it was finally finished, they continued to live under the corrugated zinc roof of their office building, and locking up the Palms, left it in charge of a gardener and a watchman until the coming of its rightful owners. It had been a viciously hot, close day, and even now the air came in sickening waves, like a blast from the engine-room of a steamer, and the heat lightning played round the mountains over the harbor and showed the empty wharves, and the black outlines of the steamers, and the white front of the Custom-House, and the long half-circle of twinkling lamps along the quay. MacWilliams and Langham sat panting on the lower steps of the office-porch considering whether they were too lazy to clean themselves and be rowed over to the city, where, as it was Sunday night, was promised much entertainment. They had been for the last hour trying to make up their minds as to this, and appealing to Clay to stop work and decide for them. But he sat inside at a table figuring and writing under the green shade of a student's lamp and made no answer. The walls of Clay's office were of unplaned boards, bristling with splinters, and hung with blue prints and outline maps of the mine. A gaudily colored portrait of Madame la Presidenta, the noble and beautiful woman whom Alvarez, the President of Olancho, had lately married in Spain, was pinned to the wall above the table. This table, with its green oil-cloth top, and the lamp, about which winged insects beat noisily, and an earthen water-jar--from which the water dripped as regularly as the ticking of a clock--were the only articles of furniture in the office. On a shelf at one side of the door lay the men's machetes, a belt of cartridges, and a revolver in a holster. Clay rose from the table and stood in the light of the open door, stretching himself gingerly, for his joints were sore and stiff with fording streams and climbing the surfaces of rocks. The red ore and yellow mud of the mines were plastered over his boots and riding-breeches, where he had stood knee-deep in the water, and his shirt stuck to him like a wet bathing-suit, showing his ribs when he breathed and the curves of his broad chest. A ring of burning paper and hot ashes fell from his cigarette to his breast and burnt a hole through the cotton shirt, and he let it lie there and watched it burn with a grim smile. "I wanted to see," he explained, catching the look of listless curiosity in MacWilliams's eye, "whether there was anything hotter than my blood. It's racing around like boiling water in a pot." "Listen," said Langham, holding up his hand. "There goes the call for prayers in the convent, and now it's too late to go to town. I am glad, rather. I'm too tired to keep awake, and besides, they don't know how to amuse themselves in a civilized way--at least not in my way. I wish I could just drop in at home about now; don't you, MacWilliams? Just about this time up in God's country all the people are at the theatre, or they've just finished dinner and are sitting around sipping cool green mint, trickling through little lumps of ice. What I'd like--" he stopped and shut one eye and gazed, with his head on one side, at the unimaginative MacWilliams--"what I'd like to do now," he continued, thoughtfully, "would be to sit in the front row at a comic opera, ON THE AISLE. The prima donna must be very, very beautiful, and sing most of her songs at me, and there must be three comedians, all good, and a chorus entirely composed of girls. I never could see why they have men in the chorus, anyway. No one ever looks at them. Now that's where I'd like to be. What would you like, MacWilliams?" MacWilliams was a type with which Clay was intimately familiar, but to the college-bred Langham he was a revelation and a joy. He came from some little town in the West, and had learned what he knew of engineering at the transit's mouth, after he had first served his apprenticeship by cutting sage-brush and driving stakes. His life had been spent in Mexico and Central America, and he spoke of the home he had not seen in ten years with the aggressive loyalty of the confirmed wanderer, and he was known to prefer and to import canned corn and canned tomatoes in preference to eating the wonderful fruits of the country, because the former came from the States and tasted to him of home. He had crowded into his young life experiences that would have shattered the nerves of any other man with a more sensitive conscience and a less happy sense of humor; but these same experiences had only served to make him shrewd and self-confident and at his ease when the occasion or difficulty came. He pulled meditatively on his pipe and considered Langham's question deeply, while Clay and the younger boy sat with their arms upon their knees and waited for his decision in thoughtful silence. "I'd like to go to the theatre, too," said MacWilliams, with an air as though to show that he also was possessed of artistic tastes. "I'd like to see a comical chap I saw once in '80--oh, long ago--before I joined the P. Q. & M. He WAS funny. His name was Owens; that was his name, John E. Owens--" "Oh, for heaven's sake, MacWilliams," protested Langham, in dismay; "he's been dead for five years." "Has he?" said MacWilliams, thoughtfully. "Well--" he concluded, unabashed, "I can't help that, he's the one I'd like to see best." "You can have another wish, Mac, you know," urged Langham, "can't he, Clay?" Clay nodded gravely, and MacWilliams frowned again in thought. "No," he said after an effort, "Owens, John E. Owens; that's the one I want to see." "Well, now I want another wish, too," said Langham. "I move we can each have two wishes. I wish--" "Wait until I've had mine," said Clay. "You've had one turn. I want to be in a place I know in Vienna. It's not hot like this, but cool and fresh. It's an open, out-of-door concert-garden, with hundreds of colored lights and trees, and there's always a breeze coming through. And Eduard Strauss, the son, you know, leads the orchestra there, and they play nothing but waltzes, and he stands in front of them, and begins by raising himself on his toes, and then he lifts his shoulders gently--and then sinks back again and raises his baton as though he were drawing the music out after it, and the whole place seems to rock and move. It's like being picked up and carried on the deck of a yacht over great waves; and all around you are the beautiful Viennese women and those tall Austrian officers in their long, blue coats and flat hats and silver swords. And there are cool drinks--" continued Clay, with his eyes fixed on the coming storm--"all sorts of cool drinks--in high, thin glasses, full of ice, all the ice you want--" "Oh, drop it, will you?" cried Langham, with a shrug of his damp shoulders. "I can't stand it. I'm parching." "Wait a minute," interrupted MacWilliams, leaning forward and looking into the night. "Some one's coming." There was a sound down the road of hoofs and the rattle of the land-crabs as they scrambled off into the bushes, and two men on horseback came suddenly out of the darkness and drew rein in the light from the open door. The first was General Mendoza, the leader of the Opposition in the Senate, and the other, his orderly. The General dropped his Panama hat to his knee and bowed in the saddle three times. "Good-evening, your Excellency," said Clay, rising. "Tell that peon to get my coat, will you?" he added, turning to Langham. Langham clapped his hands, and the clanging of a guitar ceased, and their servant and cook came out from the back of the hut and held the General's horse while he dismounted. "Wait until I get you a chair," said Clay. "You'll find those steps rather bad for white duck." "I am fortunate in finding you at home," said the officer, smiling, and showing his white teeth. "The telephone is not working. I tried at the club, but I could not call you." "It's the storm, I suppose," Clay answered, as he struggled into his jacket. "Let me offer you something to drink." He entered the house, and returned with several bottles on a tray and a bundle of cigars. The Spanish-American poured himself out a glass of water, mixing it with Jamaica rum, and said, smiling again, "It is a saying of your countrymen that when a man first comes to Olancho he puts a little rum into his water, and that when he is here some time he puts a little water in his rum." "Yes," laughed Clay. "I'm afraid that's true." There was a pause while the men sipped at their glasses, and looked at the horses and the orderly. The clanging of the guitar began again from the kitchen. "You have a very beautiful view here of the harbor, yes," said Mendoza. He seemed to enjoy the pause after his ride, and to be in no haste to begin on the object of his errand. MacWilliams and Langham eyed each other covertly, and Clay examined the end of his cigar, and they all waited. "And how are the mines progressing, eh?" asked the officer, genially. "You find much good iron in them, they tell me." "Yes, we are doing very well," Clay assented; "it was difficult at first, but now that things are in working order, we are getting out about ten thousand tons a month. We hope to increase that soon to twenty thousand when the new openings are developed and our shipping facilities are in better shape." "So much!" exclaimed the General, pleasantly. "Of which the Government of my country is to get its share of ten per cent--one thousand tons! It is munificent!" He laughed and shook his head slyly at Clay, who smiled in dissent. "But you see, sir," said Clay, "you cannot blame us. The mines have always been there, before this Government came in, before the Spaniards were here, before there was any Government at all, but there was not the capital to open them up, I suppose, or--and it needed a certain energy to begin the attack. Your people let the chance go, and, as it turned out, I think they were very wise in doing so. They get ten per cent of the output. That's ten per cent on nothing, for the mines really didn't exist, as far as you were concerned, until we came, did they? They were just so much waste land, and they would have remained so. And look at the price we paid down before we cut a tree. Three millions of dollars; that's a good deal of money. It will be some time before we realize anything on that investment." Mendoza shook his head and shrugged his shoulders. "I will be frank with you," he said, with the air of one to whom dissimulation is difficult. "I come here to-night on an unpleasant errand, but it is with me a matter of duty, and I am a soldier, to whom duty is the foremost ever. I have come to tell you, Mr. Clay, that we, the Opposition, are not satisfied with the manner in which the Government has disposed of these great iron deposits. When I say not satisfied, my dear friend, I speak most moderately. I should say that we are surprised and indignant, and we are determined the wrong it has done our country shall be righted. I have the honor to have been chosen to speak for our party on this most important question, and on next Tuesday, sir," the General stood up and bowed, as though he were before a great assembly, "I will rise in the Senate and move a vote of want of confidence in the Government for the manner in which it has given away the richest possessions in the storehouse of my country, giving it not only to aliens, but for a pittance, for a share which is not a share, but a bribe, to blind the eyes of the people. It has been a shameful bargain, and I cannot say who is to blame; I accuse no one. But I suspect, and I will demand an investigation; I will demand that the value not of one-tenth, but of one-half of all the iron that your company takes out of Olancho shall be paid into the treasury of the State. And I come to you to-night, as the Resident Director, to inform you beforehand of my intention. I do not wish to take you unprepared. I do not blame your people; they are business men, they know how to make good bargains, they get what they best can. That is the rule of trade, but they have gone too far, and I advise you to communicate with your people in New York and learn what they are prepared to offer now--now that they have to deal with men who do not consider their own interests but the interests of their country." Mendoza made a sweeping bow and seated himself, frowning dramatically, with folded arms. His voice still hung in the air, for he had spoken as earnestly as though he imagined himself already standing in the hall of the Senate championing the cause of the people. MacWilliams looked up at Clay from where he sat on the steps below him, but Clay did not notice him, and there was no sound, except the quick sputtering of the nicotine in Langham's pipe, at which he pulled quickly, and which was the only outward sign the boy gave of his interest. Clay shifted one muddy boot over the other and leaned back with his hands stuck in his belt. "Why didn't you speak of this sooner?" he asked. "Ah, yes, that is fair," said the General, quickly. "I know that it is late, and I regret it, and I see that we cause you inconvenience; but how could I speak sooner when I was ignorant of what was going on? I have been away with my troops. I am a soldier first, a politician after. During the last year I have been engaged in guarding the frontier. No news comes to a General in the field moving from camp to camp and always in the saddle; but I may venture to hope, sir, that news has come to you of me?" Clay pressed his lips together and bowed his head. "We have heard of your victories, General, yes," he said; "and on your return you say you found things had not been going to your liking?" "That is it," assented the other, eagerly. "I find that indignation reigns on every side. I find my friends complaining of the railroad which you run across their land. I find that fifteen hundred soldiers are turned into laborers, with picks and spades, working by the side of negroes and your Irish; they have not been paid their wages, and they have been fed worse than though they were on the march; sickness and--" Clay moved impatiently and dropped his boot heavily on the porch. "That was true at first," he interrupted, "but it is not so now. I should be glad, General, to take you over the men's quarters at any time. As for their not having been paid, they were never paid by their own Government before they came to us and for the same reason, because the petty officers kept back the money, just as they have always done. But the men are paid now. However, this is not of the most importance. Who is it that complains of the terms of our concession?" "Every one!" exclaimed Mendoza, throwing out his arms, "and they ask, moreover, this: they ask why, if this mine is so rich, why was not the stock offered here to us in this country? Why was it not put on the market, that any one might buy? We have rich men in Olancho, why should not they benefit first of all others by the wealth of their own lands? But no! we are not asked to buy. All the stock is taken in New York, no one benefits but the State, and it receives only ten per cent. It is monstrous!" "I see," said Clay, gravely. "That had not occurred to me before. They feel they have been slighted. I see." He paused for a moment as if in serious consideration. "Well," he added, "that might be arranged." He turned and jerked his head toward the open door. "If you boys mean to go to town to-night, you'd better be moving," he said. The two men rose together and bowed silently to their guest. "I should like if Mr. Langham would remain a moment with us," said Mendoza, politely. "I understand that it is his father who controls the stock of the company. If we discuss any arrangement it might be well if he were here." Clay was sitting with his chin on his breast, and he did not look up, nor did the young man turn to him for any prompting. "I'm not down here as my father's son," he said, "I am an employee of Mr. Clay's. He represents the company. Good-night, sir." "You think, then," said Clay, "that if your friends were given an opportunity to subscribe to the stock they would feel less resentful toward us? They would think it was fairer to all?" "I know it," said Mendoza; "why should the stock go out of the country when those living here are able to buy it?" "Exactly," said Clay, "of course. Can you tell me this, General? Are the gentlemen who want to buy stock in the mine the same men who are in the Senate? The men who are objecting to the terms of our concession?" "With a few exceptions they are the same men." Clay looked out over the harbor at the lights of the town, and the General twirled his hat around his knee and gazed with appreciation at the stars above him. "Because if they are," Clay continued, "and they succeed in getting our share cut down from ninety per cent to fifty per cent, they must see that the stock would be worth just forty per cent less than it is now." "That is true," assented the other. "I have thought of that, and if the Senators in Opposition were given a chance to subscribe, I am sure they would see that it is better wisdom to drop their objections to the concession, and as stockholders allow you to keep ninety per cent of the output. And, again," continued Mendoza, "it is really better for the country that the money should go to its people than that it should be stored up in the vaults of the treasury, when there is always the danger that the President will seize it; or, if not this one, the next one." "I should think--that is--it seems to me," said Clay with careful consideration, "that your Excellency might be able to render us great help in this matter yourself. We need a friend among the Opposition. In fact--I see where you could assist us in many ways, where your services would be strictly in the line of your public duty and yet benefit us very much. Of course I cannot speak authoritatively without first consulting Mr. Langham; but I should think he would allow you personally to purchase as large a block of the stock as you could wish, either to keep yourself or to resell and distribute among those of your friends in Opposition where it would do the most good." Clay looked over inquiringly to where Mendoza sat in the light of the open door, and the General smiled faintly, and emitted a pleased little sigh of relief. "Indeed," continued Clay, "I should think Mr. Langham might even save you the formality of purchasing the stock outright by sending you its money equivalent. I beg your pardon," he asked, interrupting himself, "does your orderly understand English?" "He does not," the General assured him, eagerly, dragging his chair a little closer. "Suppose now that Mr. Langham were to put fifty or let us say sixty thousand dollars to your account in the Valencia Bank, do you think this vote of want of confidence in the Government on the question of our concession would still be moved?" "I am sure it would not," exclaimed the leader of the Opposition, nodding his head violently. "Sixty thousand dollars," repeated Clay, slowly, "for yourself; and do you think, General, that were you paid that sum you would be able to call off your friends, or would they make a demand for stock also?" "Have no anxiety at all, they do just what I say," returned Mendoza, in an eager whisper. "If I say 'It is all right, I am satisfied with what the Government has done in my absence,' it is enough. And I will say it, I give you the word of a soldier, I will say it. I will not move a vote of want of confidence on Tuesday. You need go no farther than myself. I am glad that I am powerful enough to serve you, and if you doubt me"--he struck his heart and bowed with a deprecatory smile--"you need not pay in the money in exchange for the stock all at the same time. You can pay ten thousand this year, and next year ten thousand more and so on, and so feel confident that I shall have the interests of the mine always in my heart. Who knows what may not happen in a year? I may be able to serve you even more. Who knows how long the present Government will last? But I give you my word of honor, no matter whether I be in Opposition or at the head of the Government, if I receive every six months the retaining fee of which you speak, I will be your representative. And my friends can do nothing. I despise them. _I_ am the Opposition. You have done well, my dear sir, to consider me alone." Clay turned in his chair and looked back of him through the office to the room beyond. "Boys," he called, "you can come out now." He rose and pushed his chair away and beckoned to the orderly who sat in the saddle holding the General's horse. Langham and MacWilliams came out and stood in the open door, and Mendoza rose and looked at Clay. "You can go now," Clay said to him, quietly. "And you can rise in the Senate on Tuesday and move your vote of want of confidence and object to our concession, and when you have resumed your seat the Secretary of Mines will rise in his turn and tell the Senate how you stole out here in the night and tried to blackmail me, and begged me to bribe you to be silent, and that you offered to throw over your friends and to take all that we would give you and keep it yourself. That will make you popular with your friends, and will show the Government just what sort of a leader it has working against it." Clay took a step forward and shook his finger in the officer's face. "Try to break that concession; try it. It was made by one Government to a body of honest, decent business men, with a Government of their own back of them, and if you interfere with our conceded rights to work those mines, I'll have a man-of-war down here with white paint on her hull, and she'll blow you and your little republic back up there into the mountains. Now you can go." Mendoza had straightened with surprise when Clay first began to speak, and had then bent forward slightly as though he meant to interrupt him. His eyebrows were lowered in a straight line, and his lips moved quickly. "You poor--" he began, contemptuously. "Bah," he exclaimed, "you're a fool; I should have sent a servant to talk with you. You are a child--but you are an insolent child," he cried, suddenly, his anger breaking out, "and I shall punish you. You dare to call me names! You shall fight me, you shall fight me to-morrow. You have insulted an officer, and you shall meet me at once, to-morrow." "If I meet you to-morrow," Clay replied, "I will thrash you for your impertinence. The only reason I don't do it now is because you are on my doorstep. You had better not meet me tomorrow, or at any other time. And I have no leisure to fight duels with anybody." "You are a coward," returned the other, quietly, "and I tell you so before my servant." Clay gave a short laugh and turned to MacWilliams in the doorway. "Hand me my gun, MacWilliams," he said, "it's on the shelf to the right." MacWilliams stood still and shook his head. "Oh, let him alone," he said. "You've got him where you want him." "Give me the gun, I tell you," repeated Clay. "I'm not going to hurt him, I'm only going to show him how I can shoot." MacWilliams moved grudgingly across the porch and brought back the revolver and handed it to Clay. "Look out now," he said, "it's loaded." At Clay's words the General had retreated hastily to his horse's head and had begun unbuckling the strap of his holster, and the orderly reached back into the boot for his carbine. Clay told him in Spanish to throw up his hands, and the man, with a frightened look at his officer, did as the revolver suggested. Then Clay motioned with his empty hand for the other to desist. "Don't do that," he said, "I'm not going to hurt you; I'm only going to frighten you a little." He turned and looked at the student lamp inside, where it stood on the table in full view. Then he raised his revolver. He did not apparently hold it away from him by the butt, as other men do, but let it lie in the palm of his hand, into which it seemed to fit like the hand of a friend. His first shot broke the top of the glass chimney, the second shattered the green globe around it, the third put out the light, and the next drove the lamp crashing to the floor. There was a wild yell of terror from the back of the house, and the noise of a guitar falling down a flight of steps. "I have probably killed a very good cook," said Clay, "as I should as certainly kill you, if I were to meet you. Langham," he continued, "go tell that cook to come back." The General sprang into his saddle, and the altitude it gave him seemed to bring back some of the jauntiness he had lost. "That was very pretty," he said; "you have been a cowboy, so they tell me. It is quite evident by your manners. No matter, if we do not meet to-morrow it will be because I have more serious work to do. Two months from to-day there will be a new Government in Olancho and a new President, and the mines will have a new director. I have tried to be your friend, Mr. Clay. See how you like me for an enemy. Goodnight, gentlemen." "Good-night," said MacWilliams, unmoved. "Please ask your man to close the gate after you." When the sound of the hoofs had died away the men still stood in an uncomfortable silence, with Clay twirling the revolver around his middle finger. "I'm sorry I had to make a gallery play of that sort," he said. "But it was the only way to make that sort of man understand." Langham sighed and shook his head ruefully. "Well," he said, "I thought all the trouble was over, but it looks to me as though it had just begun. So far as I can see they're going to give the governor a run for his money yet." Clay turned to MacWilliams. "How many of Mendoza's soldiers have we in the mines, Mac?" he asked. "About fifteen hundred," MacWilliams answered. "But you ought to hear the way they talk of him." "They do, eh?" said Clay, with a smile of satisfaction. "That's good. 'Six hundred slaves who hate their masters.' What do they say about me?" "Oh, they think you're all right. They know you got them their pay and all that. They'd do a lot for you." "Would they fight for me?" asked Clay. MacWilliams looked up and laughed uneasily. "I don't know," he said. "Why, old man? What do you mean to do?" "Oh, I don't know," Clay answered. "I was just wondering whether I should like to be President of Olancho." III The Langhams were to arrive on Friday, and during the week before that day Clay went about with a long slip of paper in his pocket which he would consult earnestly in corners, and upon which he would note down the things that they had left undone. At night he would sit staring at it and turning it over in much concern, and would beg Langham to tell him what he could have meant when he wrote "see Weimer," or "clean brasses," or "S. Q. M." "Why should I see Weimer," he would exclaim, "and which brasses, and what does S. Q. M. stand for, for heaven's sake?" They held a full-dress rehearsal in the bungalow to improve its state of preparation, and drilled the servants and talked English to them, so that they would know what was wanted when the young ladies came. It was an interesting exercise, and had the three young men been less serious in their anxiety to welcome the coming guests they would have found themselves very amusing--as when Langham would lean over the balcony in the court and shout back into the kitchen, in what was supposed to be an imitation of his sister's manner, "Bring my coffee and rolls--and don't take all day about it either," while Clay and MacWilliams stood anxiously below to head off the servants when they carried in a can of hot water instead of bringing the horses round to the door, as they had been told to do. "Of course it's a bit rough and all that," Clay would say, "but they have only to tell us what they want changed and we can have it ready for them in an hour." "Oh, my sisters are all right," Langham would reassure him; "they'll think it's fine. It will be like camping-out to them, or a picnic. They'll understand." But to make sure, and to "test his girders," as Clay put it, they gave a dinner, and after that a breakfast. The President came to the first, with his wife, the Countess Manuelata, Madame la Presidenta, and Captain Stuart, late of the Gordon Highlanders, and now in command of the household troops at the Government House and of the body-guard of the President. He was a friend of Clay's and popular with every one present, except for the fact that he occupied this position, instead of serving his own Government in his own army. Some people said he had been crossed in love, others, less sentimental, that he had forged a check, or mixed up the mess accounts of his company. But Clay and MacWilliams said it concerned no one why he was there, and then emphasized the remark by picking a quarrel with a man who had given an unpleasant reason for it. Stuart, so far as they were concerned, could do no wrong. The dinner went off very well, and the President consented to dine with them in a week, on the invitation of young Langham to meet his father. "Miss Langham is very beautiful, they tell me," Madame Alvarez said to Clay. "I heard of her one winter in Rome; she was presented there and much admired." "Yes, I believe she is considered very beautiful," Clay said. "I have only just met her, but she has travelled a great deal and knows every one who is of interest, and I think you will like her very much." "I mean to like her," said the woman. "There are very few of the native ladies who have seen much of the world beyond a trip to Paris, where they live in their hotels and at the dressmaker's while their husbands enjoy themselves; and sometimes I am rather heart-sick for my home and my own people. I was overjoyed when I heard Miss Langham was to be with us this winter. But you must not keep her out here to yourselves. It is too far and too selfish. She must spend some time with me at the Government House." "Yes," said Clay, "I am afraid of that. I am afraid the young ladies will find it rather lonely out here." "Ah, no," exclaimed the woman, quickly. "You have made it beautiful, and it is only a half-hour's ride, except when it rains," she added, laughing, "and then it is almost as easy to row as to ride." "I will have the road repaired," interrupted the President. "It is my wish, Mr. Clay, that you will command me in every way; I am most desirous to make the visit of Mr. Langham agreeable to him, he is doing so much for us." The breakfast was given later in the week, and only men were present. They were the rich planters and bankers of Valencia, generals in the army, and members of the Cabinet, and officers from the tiny war-ship in the harbor. The breeze from the bay touched them through the open doors, the food and wine cheered them, and the eager courtesy and hospitality of the three Americans pleased and flattered them. They were of a people who better appreciate the amenities of life than its sacrifices. The breakfast lasted far into the afternoon, and, inspired by the success of the banquet, Clay quite unexpectedly found himself on his feet with his hand on his heart, thanking the guests for the good-will and assistance which they had given him in his work. "I have tramped down your coffee plants, and cut away your forests, and disturbed your sleep with my engines, and you have not complained," he said, in his best Spanish, "and we will show that we are not ungrateful." Then Weimer, the Consul, spoke, and told them that in his Annual Consular Report, which he had just forwarded to the State Department, he had related how ready the Government of Olancho had been to assist the American company. "And I hope," he concluded, "that you will allow me, gentlemen, to propose the health of President Alvarez and the members of his Cabinet." The men rose to their feet, one by one, filling their glasses and laughing and saying, "Viva el Gobernador," until they were all standing. Then, as they looked at one another and saw only the faces of friends, some one of them cried, suddenly, "To President Alvarez, Dictator of Olancho!" The cry was drowned in a yell of exultation, and men sprang cheering to their chairs waving their napkins above their heads, and those who wore swords drew them and flashed them in the air, and the quiet, lazy good-nature of the breakfast was turned into an uproarious scene of wild excitement. Clay pushed back his chair from the head of the table with an anxious look at the servants gathered about the open door, and Weimer clutched frantically at Langham's elbow and whispered, "What did I say? For heaven's sake, how did it begin?" The outburst ceased as suddenly as it had started, and old General Rojas, the Vice-President, called out, "What is said is said, but it must not be repeated." Stuart waited until after the rest had gone, and Clay led him out to the end of the veranda. "Now will you kindly tell me what that was?" Clay asked. "It didn't sound like champagne." "No," said the other, "I thought you knew. Alvarez means to proclaim himself Dictator, if he can, before the spring elections." "And are you going to help him?" "Of course," said the Englishman, simply. "Well, that's all right," said Clay, "but there's no use shouting the fact all over the shop like that--and they shouldn't drag me into it." Stuart laughed easily and shook his head. "It won't be long before you'll be in it yourself," he said. Clay awoke early Friday morning to hear the shutters beating viciously against the side of the house, and the wind rushing through the palms, and the rain beating in splashes on the zinc roof. It did not come soothingly and in a steady downpour, but brokenly, like the rush of waves sweeping over a rough beach. He turned on the pillow and shut his eyes again with the same impotent and rebellious sense of disappointment that he used to feel when he had wakened as a boy and found it storming on his holiday, and he tried to sleep once more in the hope that when he again awoke the sun would be shining in his eyes; but the storm only slackened and did not cease, and the rain continued to fall with dreary, relentless persistence. The men climbed the muddy road to the Palms, and viewed in silence the wreck which the night had brought to their plants and garden paths. Rivulets of muddy water had cut gutters over the lawn and poured out from under the veranda, and plants and palms lay bent and broken, with their broad leaves bedraggled and coated with mud. The harbor and the encircling mountains showed dimly through a curtain of warm, sticky rain. To something that Langham said of making the best of it, MacWilliams replied, gloomily, that he would not be at all surprised if the ladies refused to leave the ship and demanded to be taken home immediately. "I am sorry," Clay said, simply; "I wanted them to like it." The men walked back to the office in grim silence, and took turns in watching with a glass the arms of the semaphore, three miles below, at the narrow opening of the bay. Clay smiled nervously at himself, with a sudden sinking at the heart, and with a hot blush of pleasure, as he thought of how often he had looked at its great arms out lined like a mast against the sky, and thanked it in advance for telling him that she was near. In the harbor below, the vessels lay with bare yards and empty decks, the wharves were deserted, and only an occasional small boat moved across the beaten surface of the bay. But at twelve o'clock MacWilliams lowered the glass quickly, with a little gasp of excitement, rubbed its moist lens on the inside of his coat and turned it again toward a limp strip of bunting that was crawling slowly up the halyards of the semaphore. A second dripping rag answered it from the semaphore in front of the Custom-House, and MacWilliams laughed nervously and shut the glass. "It's red," he said; "they've come." They had planned to wear white duck suits, and go out in a launch with a flag flying, and they had made MacWilliams purchase a red cummerbund and a pith helmet; but they tumbled into the launch now, wet and bedraggled as they were, and raced Weimer in his boat, with the American flag clinging to the pole, to the side of the big steamer as she drew slowly into the bay. Other row-boats and launches and lighters began to push out from the wharves, men appeared under the sagging awnings of the bare houses along the river-front, and the custom and health officers in shining oil-skins and puffing damp cigars clambered over the side. "I see them," cried Langham, jumping up and rocking the boat in his excitement. "There they are in the bow. That's Hope waving. Hope! hullo, Hope!" he shouted, "hullo!" Clay recognized her standing between the younger sister and her father, with the rain beating on all of them, and waving her hand to Langham. The men took off their hats, and as they pulled up alongside she bowed to Clay and nodded brightly. They sent Langham up the gangway first, and waited until he had made his greetings to his family alone. "We have had a terrible trip, Mr. Clay," Miss Langham said to him, beginning, as people will, with the last few days, as though they were of the greatest importance; "and we could see nothing of you at the mines at all as we passed--only a wet flag, and a lot of very friendly workmen, who cheered and fired off pans of dynamite." "They did, did they?" said Clay, with a satisfied nod. "That's all right, then. That was a royal salute in your honor. Kirkland had that to do. He's the foreman of A opening. I am awfully sorry about this rain--it spoils everything." "I hope it hasn't spoiled our breakfast," said Mr. Langham. "We haven't eaten anything this morning, because we wanted a change of diet, and the captain told us we should be on shore before now." "We have some carriages for you at the wharf, and we will drive you right out to the Palms," said young Langham. "It's shorter by water, but there's a hill that the girls couldn't climb today. That's the house we built for you, Governor, with the flag-pole, up there on the hill; and there's your ugly old pier; and that's where we live, in the little shack above it, with the tin roof; and that opening to the right is the terminus of the railroad MacWilliams built. Where's MacWilliams? Here, Mac, I want you to know my father. This is MacWilliams, sir, of whom I wrote you." There was some delay about the baggage, and in getting the party together in the boats that Langham and the Consul had brought; and after they had stood for some time on the wet dock, hungry and damp, it was rather aggravating to find that the carriages which Langham had ordered to be at one pier had gone to another. So the new arrivals sat rather silently under the shed of the levee on a row of cotton-bales, while Clay and MacWilliams raced off after the carriages. "I wish we didn't have to keep the hood down," young Langham said, anxiously, as they at last proceeded heavily up the muddy streets; "it makes it so hot, and you can't see anything. Not that it's worth seeing in all this mud and muck, but it's great when the sun shines. We had planned it all so differently." He was alone with his family now in one carriage, and the other men and the servants were before them in two others. It seemed an interminable ride to them all--to the strangers, and to the men who were anxious that they should be pleased. They left the city at last, and toiled along the limestone road to the Palms, rocking from side to side and sinking in ruts filled with rushing water. When they opened the flap of the hood the rain beat in on them, and when they closed it they stewed in a damp, warm atmosphere of wet leather and horse-hair. "This is worse than a Turkish bath," said Hope, faintly. "Don't you live anywhere, Ted?" "Oh, it's not far now," said the younger brother, dismally; but even as he spoke the carriage lurched forward and plunged to one side and came to a halt, and they could hear the streams rushing past the wheels like the water at the bow of a boat. A wet, black face appeared at the opening of the hood, and a man spoke despondently in Spanish. "He says we're stuck in the mud," explained Langham. He looked at them so beseechingly and so pitifully, with the perspiration streaming down his face, and his clothes damp and bedraggled, that Hope leaned back and laughed, and his father patted him on the knee. "It can't be any worse," he said, cheerfully; "it must mend now. It is not your fault, Ted, that we're starving and lost in the mud." Langham looked out to find Clay and MacWilliams knee-deep in the running water, with their shoulders against the muddy wheels, and the driver lashing at the horses and dragging at their bridles. He sprang out to their assistance, and Hope, shaking off her sister's detaining hands, jumped out after him, laughing. She splashed up the hill to the horses' heads, motioning to the driver to release his hold on their bridles. "That is not the way to treat a horse," she said. "Let me have them. Are you men all ready down there?" she called. Each of the three men glued a shoulder to a wheel, and clenched his teeth and nodded. "All right, then," Hope called back. She took hold of the huge Mexican bits close to the mouth, where the pressure was not so cruel, and then coaxing and tugging by turns, and slipping as often as the horses themselves, she drew them out of the mud, and with the help of the men back of the carriage pulled it clear until it stood free again at the top of the hill. Then she released her hold on the bridles and looked down, in dismay, at her frock and hands, and then up at the three men. They appeared so utterly miserable and forlorn in their muddy garments, and with their faces washed with the rain and perspiration, that the girl gave way suddenly to an uncontrollable shriek of delight. The men stared blankly at her for a moment, and then inquiringly at one another, and as the humor of the situation struck them they burst into an echoing shout of laughter, which rose above the noise of the wind and rain, and before which the disappointments and trials of the morning were swept away. Before they reached the Palms the sun was out and shining with fierce brilliancy, reflecting its rays on every damp leaf, and drinking up each glistening pool of water. MacWilliams and Clay left the Langhams alone together, and returned to the office, where they assured each other again and again that there was no doubt, from what each had heard different members of the family say, that they were greatly pleased with all that had been prepared for them. "They think it's fine!" said young Langham, who had run down the hill to tell them about it. "I tell you, they are pleased. I took them all over the house, and they just exclaimed every minute. Of course," he said, dispassionately, "I thought they'd like it, but I had no idea it would please them as much as it has. My Governor is so delighted with the place that he's sitting out there on the veranda now, rocking himself up and down and taking long breaths of sea-air, just as though he owned the whole coast-line." Langham dined with his people that night, Clay and MacWilliams having promised to follow him up the hill later. It was a night of much moment to them all, and the two men ate their dinner in silence, each considering what the coming of the strangers might mean to him. As he was leaving the room MacWilliams stopped and hovered uncertainly in the doorway. "Are you going to get yourself into a dress-suit to-night?" he asked. Clay said that he thought he would; he wanted to feel quite clean once more. "Well, all right, then," the other returned, reluctantly. "I'll do it for this once, if you mean to, but you needn't think I'm going to make a practice of it, for I'm not. I haven't worn a dress-suit," he continued, as though explaining his principles in the matter, "since your spread when we opened the railroad--that's six months ago; and the time before that I wore one at MacGolderick's funeral. MacGolderick blew himself up at Puerto Truxillo, shooting rocks for the breakwater. We never found all of him, but we gave what we could get together as fine a funeral as those natives ever saw. The boys, they wanted to make him look respectable, so they asked me to lend them my dress-suit, but I told them I meant to wear it myself. That's how I came to wear a dress-suit at a funeral. It was either me or MacGolderick." "MacWilliams," said Clay, as he stuck the toe of one boot into the heel of the other, "if I had your imagination I'd give up railroading and take to writing war clouds for the newspapers." "Do you mean you don't believe that story?" MacWilliams demanded, sternly. "I do," said Clay, "I mean I don't." "Well, let it go," returned MacWilliams, gloomily; "but there's been funerals for less than that, let me tell you." A half-hour later MacWilliams appeared in the door and stood gazing attentively at Clay arranging his tie before a hand-glass, and then at himself in his unusual apparel. "No wonder you voted to dress up," he exclaimed finally, in a tone of personal injury. "That's not a dress-suit you've got on anyway. It hasn't any tails. And I hope for your sake, Mr. Clay," he continued, his voice rising in plaintive indignation, "that you are not going to play that scarf on us for a vest. And you haven't got a high collar on, either. That's only a rough blue print of a dress-suit. Why, you look just as comfortable as though you were going to enjoy yourself--and you look cool, too." "Well, why not?" laughed Clay. "Well, but look at me," cried the other. "Do I look cool? Do I look happy or comfortable? No, I don't. I look just about the way I feel, like a fool undertaker. I'm going to take this thing right off. You and Ted Langham can wear your silk scarfs and bobtail coats, if you like, but if they don't want me in white duck they don't get me." When they reached the Palms, Clay asked Miss Langham if she did not want to see his view. "And perhaps, if you appreciate it properly, I will make you a present of it," he said, as he walked before her down the length of the veranda. "It would be very selfish to keep it all to my self," she said. "Couldn't we share it?" They had left the others seated facing the bay, with MacWilliams and young Langham on the broad steps of the veranda, and the younger sister and her father sitting in long bamboo steamer-chairs above them. Clay and Miss Langham were quite alone. From the high cliff on which the Palms stood they could look down the narrow inlet that joined the ocean and see the moonlight turning the water into a rippling ladder of light and gilding the dark green leaves of the palms near them with a border of silver. Directly below them lay the waters of the bay, reflecting the red and green lights of the ships at anchor, and beyond them again were the yellow lights of the town, rising one above the other as the city crept up the hill. And back of all were the mountains, grim and mysterious, with white clouds sleeping in their huge valleys, like masses of fog. Except for the ceaseless murmur of the insect life about them the night was absolutely still--so still that the striking of the ships' bells in the harbor came to them sharply across the surface of the water, and they could hear from time to time the splash of some great fish and the steady creaking of an oar in a rowlock that grew fainter and fainter as it grew further away, until it was drowned in the distance. Miss Langham was for a long time silent. She stood with her hands clasped behind her, gazing from side to side into the moonlight, and had apparently forgotten that Clay was present. "Well," he said at last, "I think you appreciate it properly. I was afraid you would exclaim about it, and say it was fine, or charming, or something." Miss Langham turned to him and smiled slightly. "And you told me once that you knew me so very well," she said. Clay chose to forget much that he had said on that night when he had first met her. He knew that he had been bold then, and had dared to be so because he did not think he would see her again; but, now that he was to meet her every day through several months, it seemed better to him that they should grow to know each other as they really were, simply and sincerely, and without forcing the situation in any way. So he replied, "I don't know you so well now. You must remember I haven't seen you for a year." "Yes, but you hadn't seen me for twenty-two years then," she answered. "I don't think you have changed much," she went on. "I expected to find you gray with cares. Ted wrote us about the way you work all day at the mines and sit up all night over calculations and plans and reports. But you don't show it. When are you going to take us over the mines? To-morrow? I am very anxious to see them, but I suppose father will want to inspect them first. Hope knows all about them, I believe; she knows their names, and how much you have taken out, and how much you have put in, too, and what MacWilliams's railroad cost, and who got the contract for the ore pier. Ted told us in his letters, and she used to work it out on the map in father's study. She is a most energetic child; I think sometimes she should have been a boy. I wish I could be the help to any one that she is to my father and to me. Whenever I am blue or down she makes fun of me, and--" "Why should you ever be blue?" asked Clay, abruptly. "There is no real reason, I suppose," the girl answered, smiling, "except that life is so very easy for me that I have to invent some woes. I should be better for a few reverses." And then she went on in a lower voice, and turning her head away, "In our family there is no woman older than I am to whom I can go with questions that trouble me. Hope is like a boy, as I said, and plays with Ted, and my father is very busy with his affairs, and since my mother died I have been very much alone. A man cannot understand. And I cannot understand why I should be speaking to you about myself and my troubles, except--" she added, a little wistfully, "that you once said you were interested in me, even if it was as long as a year ago. And because I want you to be very kind to me, as you have been to Ted, and I hope that we are going to be very good friends." She was so beautiful, standing in the shadow with the moonlight about her and with her hand held out to him, that Clay felt as though the scene were hardly real. He took her hand in his and held it for a moment. His pleasure in the sweet friendliness of her manner and in her beauty was so great that it kept him silent. "Friends!" he laughed under his breath. "I don't think there is much danger of our not being friends. The danger lies," he went on, smiling, "in my not being able to stop there." Miss Langham made no sign that she had heard him, but turned and walked out into the moonlight and down the porch to where the others were sitting. Young Langham had ordered a native orchestra of guitars and reed instruments from the town to serenade his people, and they were standing in front of the house in the moonlight as Miss Langham and Clay came forward. They played the shrill, eerie music of their country with a passion and feeling that filled out the strange tropical scene around them; but Clay heard them only as an accompaniment to his own thoughts, and as a part of the beautiful night and the tall, beautiful girl who had dominated it. He watched her from the shadow as she sat leaning easily forward and looking into the night. The moonlight fell full upon her, and though she did not once look at him or turn her head in his direction, he felt as though she must be conscious of his presence, as though there were already an understanding between them which she herself had established. She had asked him to be her friend. That was only a pretty speech, perhaps; but she had spoken of herself, and had hinted at her perplexities and her loneliness, and he argued that while it was no compliment to be asked to share another's pleasure, it must mean something when one was allowed to learn a little of another's troubles. And while his mind was flattered and aroused by this promise of confidence between them, he was rejoicing in the rare quality of her beauty, and in the thought that she was to be near him, and near him here, of all places. It seemed a very wonderful thing to Clay--something that could only have happened in a novel or a play. For while the man and the hour frequently appeared together, he had found that the one woman in the world and the place and the man was a much more difficult combination to bring into effect. No one, he assured himself thankfully, could have designed a more lovely setting for his love-story, if it was to be a love-story, and he hoped it was, than this into which she had come of her own free will. It was a land of romance and adventure, of guitars and latticed windows, of warm brilliant days and gorgeous silent nights, under purple heavens and white stars. And he was to have her all to himself, with no one near to interrupt, no other friends, even, and no possible rival. She was not guarded now by a complex social system, with its responsibilities. He was the most lucky of men. Others had only seen her in her drawing-room or in an opera-box, but he was free to ford mountain-streams at her side, or ride with her under arches of the great palms, or to play a guitar boldly beneath her window. He was free to come and go at any hour; not only free to do so, but the very nature of his duties made it necessary that they should be thrown constantly together. The music of the violins moved him and touched him deeply, and stirred depths at which he had not guessed. It made him humble and deeply grateful, and he felt how mean and unworthy he was of such great happiness. He had never loved any woman as he felt that he could love this woman, as he hoped that he was to love her. For he was not so far blinded by her beauty and by what he guessed her character to be, as to imagine that he really knew her. He only knew what he hoped she was, what he believed the soul must be that looked out of those kind, beautiful eyes, and that found utterance in that wonderful voice which could control him and move him by a word. He felt, as he looked at the group before him, how lonely his own life had been, how hard he had worked for so little--for what other men found ready at hand when they were born into the world. He felt almost a touch of self-pity at his own imperfectness; and the power of his will and his confidence in himself, of which he was so proud, seemed misplaced and little. And then he wondered if he had not neglected chances; but in answer to this his injured self-love rose to rebut the idea that he had wasted any portion of his time, and he assured himself that he had done the work that he had cut out for himself to do as best he could; no one but himself knew with what courage and spirit. And so he sat combating with himself, hoping one moment that she would prove what he believed her to be, and the next, scandalized at his temerity in daring to think of her at all. The spell lifted as the music ceased, and Clay brought himself back to the moment and looked about him as though he were waking from a dream and had expected to see the scene disappear and the figures near him fade into the moonlight. Young Langham had taken a guitar from one of the musicians and pressed it upon MacWilliams, with imperative directions to sing such and such songs, of which, in their isolation, they had grown to think most highly, and MacWilliams was protesting in much embarrassment. MacWilliams had a tenor voice which he maltreated in the most villanous manner by singing directly through his nose. He had a taste for sentimental songs, in which "kiss" rhymed with "bliss," and in which "the people cry" was always sure to be followed with "as she goes by, that's pretty Katie Moody," or "Rosie McIntyre." He had gathered his songs at the side of camp-fires, and in canteens at the first section-house of a new railroad, and his original collection of ballads had had but few additions in several years. MacWilliams at first was shy, which was quite a new development, until he made them promise to laugh if they wanted to laugh, explaining that he would not mind that so much as he would the idea that he thought he was serious. The song of which he was especially fond was one called "He never cares to wander from his own Fireside," which was especially appropriate in coming from a man who had visited almost every spot in the three Americas, except his home, in ten years. MacWilliams always ended the evening's entertainment with this chorus, no matter how many times it had been sung previously, and seemed to regard it with much the same veneration that the true Briton feels for his national anthem. The words of the chorus were: "He never cares to wander from his own fireside, He never cares to wander or to roam. With his babies on his knee, He's as happy as can be, For there's no place like Home, Sweet Home." MacWilliams loved accidentals, and what he called "barber-shop chords." He used a beautiful accidental at the word "be," of which he was very fond, and he used to hang on that note for a long time, so that those in the extreme rear of the hall, as he was wont to explain, should get the full benefit of it. And it was his custom to emphasize "for" in the last line by speaking instead of singing it, and then coming to a full stop before dashing on again with the excellent truth that "there is NO place like Home, Sweet Home." The men at the mines used to laugh at him and his song at first, but they saw that it was not to be so laughed away, and that he regarded it with some peculiar sentiment. So they suffered him to sing it in peace. MacWilliams went through his repertoire to the unconcealed amusement of young Langham and Hope. When he had finished he asked Hope if she knew a comic song of which he had only heard by reputation. One of the men at the mines had gained a certain celebrity by claiming to have heard it in the States, but as he gave a completely new set of words to the tune of the "Wearing of the Green" as the true version, his veracity was doubted. Hope said she knew it, of course, and they all went into the drawing-room, where the men grouped themselves about the piano. It was a night they remembered long afterward. Hope sat at the piano protesting and laughing, but singing the songs of which the new-comers had become so weary, but which the three men heard open-eyed, and hailed with shouts of pleasure. The others enjoyed them and their delight, as though they were people in a play expressing themselves in this extravagant manner for their entertainment, until they understood how poverty-stricken their lives had been and that they were not only enjoying the music for itself, but because it was characteristic of all that they had left behind them. It was pathetic to hear them boast of having read of a certain song in such a paper, and of the fact that they knew the plot of a late comic opera and the names of those who had played in it, and that it had or had not been acceptable to the New York public. "Dear me," Hope would cry, looking over her shoulder with a despairing glance at her sister and father, "they don't even know 'Tommy Atkins'!" It was a very happy evening for them all, foreshadowing, as it did, a continuation of just such evenings. Young Langham was radiant with pleasure at the good account which Clay had given of him to his father, and Mr. Langham was gratified, and proud of the manner in which his son and heir had conducted himself; and MacWilliams, who had never before been taken so simply and sincerely by people of a class that he had always held in humorous awe, felt a sudden accession of dignity, and an unhappy fear that when they laughed at what he said, it was because its sense was so utterly different from their point of view, and not because they saw the humor of it. He did not know what the word "snob" signified, and in his roughened, easy-going nature there was no touch of false pride; but he could not help thinking how surprised his people would be if they could see him, whom they regarded as a wanderer and renegade on the face of the earth and the prodigal of the family, and for that reason the best loved, leaning over a grand piano, while one daughter of his much-revered president played comic songs for his delectation, and the other, who according to the newspapers refused princes daily, and who was the most wonderful creature he had ever seen, poured out his coffee and brought it to him with her own hands. The evening came to an end at last, and the new arrivals accompanied their visitors to the veranda as they started to their cabin for the night. Clay was asking Mr. Langham when he wished to visit the mines, and the others were laughing over farewell speeches, when young Langham startled them all by hurrying down the length of the veranda and calling on them to follow. "Look!" he cried, pointing down the inlet. "Here comes a man-of-war, or a yacht. Isn't she smart-looking? What can she want here at this hour of the night? They won't let them land. Can you make her out, MacWilliams?" A long, white ship was steaming slowly up the inlet, and passed within a few hundred feet of the cliff on which they were standing. "Why, it's the 'Vesta'!" exclaimed Hope, wonderingly. "I thought she wasn't coming for a week?" "It can't be the 'Vesta'!" said the elder sister; "she was not to have sailed from Havana until to-day." "What do you mean?" asked Langham. "Is it King's boat? Do you expect him here? Oh, what fun! I say, Clay, here's the 'Vesta,' Reggie King's yacht, and he's no end of a sport. We can go all over the place now, and he can land us right at the door of the mines if we want to." "Is it the King I met at dinner that night?" asked Clay, turning to Miss Langham. "Yes," she said. "He wanted us to come down on the yacht, but we thought the steamer would be faster; so he sailed without us and was to have touched at Havana, but he has apparently changed his course. Doesn't she look like a phantom ship in the moonlight?" Young Langham thought he could distinguish King among the white figures on the bridge, and tossed his hat and shouted, and a man in the stern of the yacht replied with a wave of his hand. "That must be Mr. King," said Hope. "He didn't bring any one with him, and he seems to be the only man aft." They stood watching the yacht as she stopped with a rattle of anchor-chains and a confusion of orders that came sharply across the water, and then the party separated and the three men walked down the hill, Langham eagerly assuring the other two that King was a very good sort, and telling them what a treasure-house his yacht was, and how he would have probably brought the latest papers, and that he would certainly give a dance on board in their honor. The men stood for some short time together, after they had reached the office, discussing the great events of the day, and then with cheerful good-nights disappeared into their separate rooms. An hour later Clay stood without his coat, and with a pen in his hand, at MacWilliams's bedside and shook him by the shoulder. "I'm not asleep," said MacWilliams, sitting up; "what is it? What have you been doing?" he demanded. "Not working?" "There were some reports came in after we left," said Clay, "and I find I will have to see Kirkland to-morrow morning. Send them word to run me down on an engine at five-thirty, will you? I am sorry to have to wake you, but I couldn't remember in which shack that engineer lives." MacWilliams jumped from his bed and began kicking about the floor for his boots. "Oh, that's all right," he said. "I wasn't asleep, I was just--" he lowered his voice that Langham might not hear him through the canvas partitions--"I was just lying awake playing duets with the President, and racing for the International Cup in my new centre-board yacht, that's all!" MacWilliams buttoned a waterproof coat over his pajamas and stamped his bare feet into his boots. "Oh, I tell you, Clay," he said with a grim chuckle, "we're mixing right in with the four hundred, we are! I'm substitute and understudy when anybody gets ill. We're right in our own class at last! Pure amateurs with no professional record against us. Me and President Langham, I guess!" He struck a match and lit the smoky wick in a tin lantern. "But now," he said, cheerfully, "my time being too valuable for me to sleep, I will go wake up that nigger engine-driver and set his alarm clock at five-thirty. Five-thirty, I believe you said. All right; good-night." And whistling cheerfully to himself MacWilliams disappeared up the hill, his body hidden in the darkness and his legs showing fantastically in the light of the swinging lantern. Clay walked out upon the veranda and stood with his back to one of the pillars. MacWilliams and his pleasantries disturbed and troubled him. Perhaps, after all, the boy was right. It seemed absurd, but it was true. They were only employees of Langham--two of the thousands of young men who were working all over the United States to please him, to make him richer, to whom he was only a name and a power, which meant an increase of salary or the loss of place. Clay laughed and shrugged his shoulders. He knew that he was not in that class; if he did good work it was because his self-respect demanded it of him; he did not work for Langham or the Olancho Mining Company (Limited). And yet he turned with almost a feeling of resentment toward the white yacht lying calmly in magnificent repose a hundred yards from his porch. He could see her as clearly in her circle of electric lights as though she were a picture and held in the light of a stereopticon on a screen. He could see her white decks, and the rails of polished brass, and the comfortable wicker chairs and gay cushions and flat coils of rope, and the tapering masts and intricate rigging. How easy it was made for some men! This one had come like the prince in the fairy tale on his magic carpet. If Alice Langham were to leave Valencia that next day, Clay could not follow her. He had his duties and responsibilities; he was at another man's bidding. But this Prince Fortunatus had but to raise anchor and start in pursuit, knowing that he would be welcome wherever he found her. That was the worst of it to Clay, for he knew that men did not follow women from continent to continent without some assurance of a friendly greeting. Clay's mind went back to the days when he was a boy, when his father was absent fighting for a lost cause; when his mother taught in a little schoolhouse under the shadow of Pike's Peak, and when Kit Carson was his hero. He thought of the poverty of those days poverty so mean and hopeless that it was almost something to feel shame for; of the days that followed when, an orphan and without a home, he had sailed away from New Orleans to the Cape. How the mind of the mathematician, which he had inherited from the Boston schoolmistress, had been swayed by the spirit of the soldier, which he had inherited from his father, and which led him from the mines of South Africa to little wars in Madagascar, Egypt, and Algiers. It had been a life as restless as the seaweed on a rock. But as he looked back to its poor beginnings and admitted to himself its later successes, he gave a sigh of content, and shaking off the mood stood up and paced the length of the veranda. He looked up the hill to the low-roofed bungalow with the palm-leaves about it, outlined against the sky, and as motionless as patterns cut in tin. He had built that house. He had built it for her. That was her room where the light was shining out from the black bulk of the house about it like a star. And beyond the house he saw his five great mountains, the knuckles of the giant hand, with its gauntlet of iron that lay shut and clenched in the face of the sea that swept up whimpering before it. Clay felt a boyish, foolish pride rise in his breast as he looked toward the great mines he had discovered and opened, at the iron mountains that were crumbling away before his touch. He turned his eyes again to the blazing yacht, and this time there was no trace of envy in them. He laughed instead, partly with pleasure at the thought of the struggle he scented in the air, and partly at his own braggadocio. "I'm not afraid," he said, smiling, and shaking his head at the white ship that loomed up like a man-of-war in the black waters. "I'm not afraid to fight you for anything worth fighting for." He bowed his bared head in good-night toward the light on the hill, as he turned and walked back into his bedroom. "And I think," he murmured grimly, as he put out the light, "that she is worth fighting for." IV The work which had called Clay to the mines kept him there for some time, and it was not until the third day after the arrival of the Langhams that he returned again to the Palms. On the afternoon when he climbed the hill to the bungalow he found the Langhams as he had left them, with the difference that King now occupied a place in the family circle. Clay was made so welcome, and especially so by King, that he felt rather ashamed of his sentiments toward him, and considered his three days of absence to be well repaid by the heartiness of their greeting. "For myself," said Mr. Langham, "I don't believe you had anything to do at the mines at all. I think you went away just to show us how necessary you are. But if you want me to make a good report of our resident director on my return, you had better devote yourself less to the mines while you are here and more to us." Clay said he was glad to find that his duties were to be of so pleasant a nature, and asked them what they had seen and what they had done. They told him they had been nowhere, but had waited for his return in order that he might act as their guide. "Then you should see the city at once," said Clay, "and I will have the volante brought to the door, and we can all go in this afternoon. There is room for the four of you inside, and I can sit on the box-seat with the driver." "No," said King, "let Hope or me sit on the box-seat. Then we can practise our Spanish on the driver." "Not very well," Clay replied, "for the driver sits on the first horse, like a postilion. It's a sort of tandem without reins. Haven't you seen it yet? We consider the volante our proudest exhibit." So Clay ordered the volante to be brought out, and placed them facing each other in the open carriage, while he climbed to the box-seat, from which position of vantage he pointed out and explained the objects of interest they passed, after the manner of a professional guide. It was a warm, beautiful afternoon, and the clear mists of the atmosphere intensified the rich blue of the sky, and the brilliant colors of the houses, and the different shades of green of the trees and bushes that lined the highroad to the capital. "To the right, as we descend," said Clay, speaking over his shoulder, "you see a tin house. It is the home of the resident director of the Olancho Mining Company (Limited), and of his able lieutenants, Mr. Theodore Langham and Mr. MacWilliams. The building on the extreme left is the round-house, in which Mr. MacWilliams stores his three locomotive engines, and in the far middle-distance is Mr. MacWilliams himself in the act of repairing a water-tank. He is the one in a suit of blue overalls, and as his language at such times is free, we will drive rapidly on and not embarrass him. Besides," added the engineer, with the happy laugh of a boy who had been treated to a holiday, "I am sure that I am not setting him the example of fixity to duty which he should expect from his chief." They passed between high hedges of Spanish bayonet, and came to mud cabins thatched with palm-leaves, and alive with naked, little brown-bodied children, who laughed and cheered to them as they passed. "It's a very beautiful country for the pueblo," was Clay's comment. "Different parts of the same tree furnish them with food, shelter, and clothing, and the sun gives them fuel, and the Government changes so often that they can always dodge the tax-collector." From the mud cabins they came to more substantial one-story houses of adobe, with the walls painted in two distinct colors, blue, pink, or yellow, with red-tiled roofs, and the names with which they had been christened in bold black letters above the entrances. Then the carriage rattled over paved streets, and they drove between houses of two stories painted more decorously in pink and light blue, with wide-open windows, guarded by heavy bars of finely wrought iron and ornamented with scrollwork in stucco. The principal streets were given up to stores and cafés, all wide open to the pavement and protected from the sun by brilliantly striped awnings, and gay with the national colors of Olancho in flags and streamers. In front of them sat officers in uniform, and the dark-skinned dandies of Valencia, in white duck suits and Panama hats, toying with tortoise shell canes, which could be converted, if the occasion demanded, into blades of Toledo steel. In the streets were priests and bare-legged mule drivers, and ragged ranchmen with red-caped cloaks hanging to their sandals, and negro women, with bare shoulders and long trains, vending lottery tickets and rolling huge cigars between their lips. It was an old story to Clay and King, but none of the others had seen a Spanish-American city before; they were familiar with the Far East and the Mediterranean, but not with the fierce, hot tropics of their sister continent, and so their eyes were wide open, and they kept calling continually to one another to notice some new place or figure. They in their turn did not escape from notice or comment. The two sisters would have been conspicuous anywhere--in a queen's drawing-room or on an Indian reservation. Theirs was a type that the caballeros and senoritas did not know. With them dark hair was always associated with dark complexions, the rich duskiness of which was always vulgarized by a coat of powder, and this fair blending of pink and white skin under masses of black hair was strangely new, so that each of the few women who were to be met on the street turned to look after the carriage, while the American women admired their mantillas, and felt that the straw sailor-hats they wore had become heavy and unfeminine. Clay was very happy in picking out what was most characteristic and picturesque, and every street into which he directed the driver to take them seemed to possess some building or monument that was of peculiar interest. They did not know that he had mapped out this ride many times before, and was taking them over a route which he had already travelled with them in imagination. King knew what the capital would be like before he entered it, from his experience of other South American cities, but he acted as though it were all new to him, and allowed Clay to explain, and to give the reason for those features of the place that were unusual and characteristic. Clay noticed this and appealed to him from time to time, when he was in doubt; but the other only smiled back and shook his head, as much as to say, "This is your city; they would rather hear about it from you." Clay took them to the principal shops, where the two girls held whispered consultations over lace mantillas, which they had at once determined to adopt, and bought the gorgeous paper fans, covered with brilliant pictures of bull-fighters in suits of silver tinsel; and from these open stores he led them to a dingy little shop, where there was old silver and precious hand-painted fans of mother-of-pearl that had been pawned by families who had risked and lost all in some revolution; and then to another shop, where two old maiden ladies made a particularly good guava; and to tobacconists, where the men bought a few of the native cigars, which, as they were a monopoly of the Government, were as bad as Government monopolies always are. Clay felt a sudden fondness for the city, so grateful was he to it for entertaining her as it did, and for putting its best front forward for her delectation. He wanted to thank some one for building the quaint old convent, with its yellow walls washed to an orange tint, and black in spots with dampness; and for the fountain covered with green moss that stood before its gate, and around which were gathered the girls and women of the neighborhood with red water-jars on their shoulders, and little donkeys buried under stacks of yellow sugar-cane, and the negro drivers of the city's green water-carts, and the blue wagons that carried the manufactured ice. Toward five o'clock they decided to spend the rest of the day in the city, and to telephone for the two boys to join them at La Venus, the great restaurant on the plaza, where Clay had invited them to dine. He suggested that they should fill out the time meanwhile by a call on the President, and after a search for cards in various pocketbooks, they drove to the Government palace, which stood in an open square in the heart of the city. As they arrived the President and his wife were leaving for their afternoon drive on the Alameda, the fashionable parade-ground of the city, and the state carriage and a squad of cavalry appeared from the side of the palace as the visitors drove up to the entrance. But at the sight of Clay, General Alvarez and his wife retreated to the house again and made them welcome. The President led the men into his reception-room and entertained them with champagne and cigarettes, not manufactured by his Government; and his wife, after first conducting the girls through the state drawing-room, where the late sunlight shone gloomily on strange old portraits of assassinated presidents and victorious generals, and garish yellow silk furniture, brought them to her own apartments, and gave them tea after a civilized fashion, and showed them how glad she was to see some one of her own world again. During their short visit Madame Alvarez talked a greater part of the time herself, addressing what she said to Miss Langham, but looking at Hope. It was unusual for Hope to be singled out in this way when her sister was present, and both the sisters noticed it and spoke of it afterwards. They thought Madame Alvarez very beautiful and distinguished-looking, and she impressed them, even after that short knowledge of her, as a woman of great force of character. "She was very well dressed for a Spanish woman," was Miss Langham's comment, later in the afternoon. "But everything she had on was just a year behind the fashions, or twelve steamer days behind, as Mr. MacWilliams puts it." "She reminded me," said Hope, "of a black panther I saw once in a circus." "Dear me!" exclaimed the sister, "I don't see that at all. Why?" Hope said she did not know why; she was not given to analyzing her impressions or offering reasons for them. "Because the panther looked so unhappy," she explained, doubtfully, "and restless; and he kept pacing up and down all the time, and hitting his head against the bars as he walked as though he liked the pain. Madame Alvarez seemed to me to be just like that--as though she were shut up somewhere and wanted to be free." When Madame Alvarez and the two sisters had joined the men, they all walked together to the terrace, and the visitors waited until the President and his wife should take their departure. Hope noticed, in advance of the escort of native cavalry, an auburn-haired, fair-skinned young man who was sitting an English saddle. The officer's eyes were blue and frank and attractive-looking, even as they then were fixed ahead of him with a military lack of expression; but he came to life very suddenly when the President called to him, and prodded his horse up to the steps and dismounted. He was introduced by Alvarez as "Captain Stuart of my household troops, late of the Gordon Highlanders. Captain Stuart," said the President, laying his hand affectionately on the younger man's epaulette, "takes care of my life and the safety of my home and family. He could have the command of the army if he wished; but no, he is fond of us, and he tells me we are in more need of protection from our friends at home than from our enemies on the frontier. Perhaps he knows best. I trust him, Mr. Langham," added the President, solemnly, "as I trust no other man in all this country." "I am very glad to meet Captain Stuart, I am sure," said Mr. Langham, smiling, and appreciating how the shyness of the Englishman must be suffering under the praises of the Spaniard. And Stuart was indeed so embarrassed that he flushed under his tan, and assured Clay, while shaking hands with them all, that he was delighted to make his acquaintance; at which the others laughed, and Stuart came to himself sufficiently to laugh with them, and to accept Clay's invitation to dine with them later. They found the two boys waiting in the café of the restaurant where they had arranged to meet, and they ascended the steps together to the table on the balcony that Clay had reserved for them. The young engineer appeared at his best as host. The responsibility of seeing that a half-dozen others were amused and content sat well upon him; and as course followed course, and the wines changed, and the candles left the rest of the room in darkness and showed only the table and the faces around it, they all became rapidly more merry and the conversation intimately familiar. Clay knew the kind of table-talk to which the Langhams were accustomed, and used the material around his table in such a way that the talk there was vastly different. From King he drew forth tales of the buried cities he had first explored, and then robbed of their ugliest idols. He urged MacWilliams to tell carefully edited stories of life along the Chagres before the Scandal came, and of the fastnesses of the Andes; and even Stuart grew braver and remembered "something of the same sort" he had seen at Fort Nilt, in Upper Burma. "Of course," was Clay's comment at the conclusion of one of these narratives, "being an Englishman, Stuart left out the point of the story, which was that he blew in the gates of the fort with a charge of dynamite. He got a D. S. O. for doing it." "Being an Englishman," said Hope, smiling encouragingly on the conscious Stuart, "he naturally would leave that out." Mr. Langham and his daughters formed an eager audience. They had never before met at one table three men who had known such experiences, and who spoke of them as though they must be as familiar in the lives of the others as in their own--men who spoiled in the telling stories that would have furnished incidents for melodramas, and who impressed their hearers more with what they left unsaid, and what was only suggested, than what in their view was the most important point. The dinner came to an end at last, and Mr. Langham proposed that they should go down and walk with the people in the plaza; but his two daughters preferred to remain as spectators on the balcony, and Clay and Stuart stayed with them. "At last!" sighed Clay, under his breath, seating himself at Miss Langham's side as she sat leaning forward with her arms upon the railing and looking down into the plaza below. She made no sign at first that she had heard him, but as the voices of Stuart and Hope rose from the other end of the balcony she turned her head and asked, "Why at last?" "Oh, you couldn't understand," laughed Clay. "You have not been looking forward to just one thing and then had it come true. It is the only thing that ever did come true to me, and I thought it never would." "You don't try to make me understand," said the girl, smiling, but without turning her eyes from the moving spectacle below her. Clay considered her challenge silently. He did not know just how much it might mean from her, and the smile robbed it of all serious intent; so he, too, turned and looked down into the great square below them, content, now that she was alone with him, to take his time. At one end of the plaza the President's band was playing native waltzes that came throbbing through the trees and beating softly above the rustling skirts and clinking spurs of the senoritas and officers, sweeping by in two opposite circles around the edges of the tessellated pavements. Above the palms around the square arose the dim, white facade of the cathedral, with the bronze statue of Anduella, the liberator of Olancho, who answered with his upraised arm and cocked hat the cheers of an imaginary populace. Clay's had been an unobtrusive part in the evening's entertainment, but he saw that the others had been pleased, and felt a certain satisfaction in thinking that King himself could not have planned and carried out a dinner more admirable in every way. He was gratified that they should know him to be not altogether a barbarian. But what he best liked to remember was that whenever he had spoken she had listened, even when her eyes were turned away and she was pretending to listen to some one else. He tormented himself by wondering whether this was because he interested her only as a new and strange character, or whether she felt in some way how eagerly he was seeking her approbation. For the first time in his life he found himself considering what he was about to say, and he suited it for her possible liking. It was at least some satisfaction that she had, if only for the time being, singled him out as of especial interest, and he assured himself that the fault would be his if her interest failed. He no longer looked on himself as an outsider. Stuart's voice arose from the farther end of the balcony, where the white figure of Hope showed dimly in the darkness. "They are talking about you over there," said Miss Langham, turning toward him. "Well, I don't mind," answered Clay, "as long as they talk about me--over there." Miss Langham shook her head. "You are very frank and audacious," she replied, doubtfully, "but it is rather pleasant as a change." "I don't call that audacious, to say I don't want to be interrupted when I am talking to you. Aren't the men you meet generally audacious?" he asked. "I can see why not--though," he continued, "you awe them." "I can't think that's a nice way to affect people," protested Miss Langham, after a pause. "I don't awe you, do I?" "Oh, you affect me in many different ways," returned Clay, cheerfully. "Sometimes I am very much afraid of you, and then again my feelings are only those of unlimited admiration." "There, again, what did I tell you?" said Miss Langham. "Well, I can't help doing that," said Clay. "That is one of the few privileges that is left to a man in my position--it doesn't matter what I say. That is the advantage of being of no account and hopelessly detrimental. The eligible men of the world, you see, have to be so very careful. A Prime Minister, for instance, can't talk as he wishes, and call names if he wants to, or write letters, even. Whatever he says is so important, because he says it, that he must be very discreet. I am so unimportant that no one minds what I say, and so I say it. It's the only comfort I have." "Are you in the habit of going around the world saying whatever you choose to every woman you happen to--to--" Miss Langham hesitated. "To admire very much," suggested Clay. "To meet," corrected Miss Langham. "Because, if you are, it is a very dangerous and selfish practice, and I think your theory of non-responsibility is a very wicked one." "Well, I wouldn't say it to a child," mused Clay, "but to one who must have heard it before--" "And who, you think, would like to hear it again, perhaps," interrupted Miss Langham. "No, not at all," said Clay. "I don't say it to give her pleasure, but because it gives me pleasure to say what I think." "If we are to continue good friends, Mr. Clay," said Miss Langham, in decisive tones, "we must keep our relationship on more of a social and less of a personal basis. It was all very well that first night I met you," she went on, in a kindly tone. "You rushed in then and by a sort of tour de force made me think a great deal about myself and also about you. Your stories of cherished photographs and distant devotion and all that were very interesting; but now we are to be together a great deal, and if we are to talk about ourselves all the time, I for one shall grow very tired of it. As a matter of fact you don't know what your feelings are concerning me, and until you do we will talk less about them and more about the things you are certain of. When are you going to take us to the mines, for instance, and who was Anduella, the Liberator of Olancho, on that pedestal over there? Now, isn't that much more instructive?" Clay smiled grimly and made no answer, but sat with knitted brows looking out across the trees of the plaza. His face was so serious and he was apparently giving such earnest consideration to what she had said that Miss Langham felt an uneasy sense of remorse. And, moreover, the young man's profile, as he sat looking away from her, was very fine, and the head on his broad shoulders was as well-modelled as the head of an Athenian statue. Miss Langham was not insensible to beauty of any sort, and she regarded the profile with perplexity and with a softening spirit. "You understand," she said, gently, being quite certain that she did not understand this new order of young man herself. "You are not offended with me?" she asked. Clay turned and frowned, and then smiled in a puzzled way and stretched out his hand toward the equestrian statue in the plaza. "Andulla or Anduella, the Treaty-Maker, as they call him, was born in 1700," he said; "he was a most picturesque sort of a chap, and freed this country from the yoke of Spain. One of the stories they tell of him gives you a good idea of his character." And so, without any change of expression or reference to what had just passed between them, Clay continued through the remainder of their stay on the balcony to discourse in humorous, graphic phrases on the history of Olancho, its heroes, and its revolutions, the buccaneers and pirates of the old days, and the concession-hunters and filibusters of the present. It was some time before Miss Langham was able to give him her full attention, for she was considering whether he could be so foolish as to have taken offence at what she said, and whether he would speak of it again, and in wondering whether a personal basis for conversation was not, after all, more entertaining than anecdotes of the victories and heroism of dead and buried Spaniards. "That Captain Stuart," said Hope to her sister, as they drove home together through the moonlight, "I like him very much. He seems to have such a simple idea of what is right and good. It is like a child talking. Why, I am really much older than he is in everything but years--why is that?" "I suppose it's because we always talk before you as though you were a grown-up person," said her sister. "But I agree with you about Captain Stuart; only, why is he down here? If he is a gentleman, why is he not in his own army? Was he forced to leave it?" "Oh, he seems to have a very good position here," said Mr. Langham. "In England, at his age, he would be only a second-lieutenant. Don't you remember what the President said, that he would trust him with the command of his army? That's certainly a responsible position, and it shows great confidence in him." "Not so great, it seems to me," said King, carelessly, "as he is showing him in making him the guardian of his hearth and home. Did you hear what he said to-day? 'He guards my home and my family.' I don't think a man's home and family are among the things he can afford to leave to the protection of stray English subalterns. From all I hear, it would be better if President Alvarez did less plotting and protected his own house himself." "The young man did not strike me as the sort of person," said Mr. Langham, warmly, "who would be likely to break his word to the man who is feeding him and sheltering him, and whose uniform he wears. I don't think the President's home is in any danger from within. Madame Alvarez--" Clay turned suddenly in his place on the box-seat of the carriage, where he had been sitting, a silent, misty statue in the moonlight, and peered down on those in the carriage below him. "Madame Alvarez needs no protection, as you were about to say, Mr. Langham," he interrupted, quickly. "Those who know her could say nothing against her, and those who do not know her would not so far forget themselves as to dare to do it. Have you noticed the effect of the moonlight on the walls of the convent?" he continued, gently. "It makes them quite white." "No," exclaimed Mr. Langham and King, hurriedly, as they both turned and gazed with absorbing interest at the convent on the hills above them. Before the sisters went to sleep that night Hope came to the door of her sister's room and watched Alice admiringly as she sat before the mirror brushing out her hair. "I think it's going to be fine down here; don't you, Alice?" she asked. "Everything is so different from what it is at home, and so beautiful, and I like the men we've met. Isn't that Mr. MacWilliams funny--and he is so tough. And Captain Stuart--it is a pity he's shy. The only thing he seems to be able to talk about is Mr. Clay. He worships Mr. Clay!" "Yes," assented her sister, "I noticed on the balcony that you seemed to have found some way to make him speak." "Well, that was it. He likes to talk about Mr. Clay, and I wanted to listen. Oh! he is a fine man. He has done more exciting things--" "Who? Captain Stuart?" "No--Mr. Clay. He's been in three real wars and about a dozen little ones, and he's built thousands of miles of railroads, I don't know how many thousands, but Captain Stuart knows; and he built the highest bridge in Peru. It swings in the air across a chasm, and it rocks when the wind blows. And the German Emperor made him a Baron." "Why?" "I don't know. I couldn't understand. It was something about plans for fortifications. He, Mr. Clay, put up a fort in the harbor of Rio Janeiro during a revolution, and the officers on a German man-of-war saw it and copied the plans, and the Germans built one just like it, only larger, on the Baltic, and when the Emperor found out whose design it was, he sent Mr. Clay the order of something-or-other, and made him a Baron." "Really," exclaimed the elder sister, "isn't he afraid that some one will marry him for his title?" "Oh, well, you can laugh, but I think it's pretty fine, and so does Ted," added Hope, with the air of one who propounds a final argument. "Oh, I beg your pardon," laughed Alice. "If Ted approves we must all go down and worship." "And father, too," continued Hope. "He said he thought Mr. Clay was one of the most remarkable men for his years that he had ever met." Miss Langham's eyes were hidden by the masses of her black hair that she had shaken over her face, and she said nothing. "And I liked the way he shut Reggie King up too," continued Hope, stoutly, "when he and father were talking that way about Madame Alvarez." "Yes, upon my word," exclaimed her sister, impatiently tossing her hair back over her shoulders. "I really cannot see that Madame Alvarez is in need of any champion. I thought Mr. Clay made it very much worse by rushing in the way he did. Why should he take it upon himself to correct a man as old as my father?" "I suppose because Madame Alvarez is a friend of his," Hope answered. "My dear child, a beautiful woman can always find some man to take her part," said Miss Langham. "But I've no doubt," she added, rising and kissing her sister good-night, "that he is all that your Captain Stuart thinks him; but he is not going to keep us awake any longer, is he, even if he does show such gallant interest in old ladies?" "Old ladies!" exclaimed Hope in amazement. "Why, Alice!" But her sister only laughed and waved her out of the room, and Hope walked away frowning in much perplexity. V The visit to the city was imitated on the three succeeding evenings by similar excursions. On one night they returned to the plaza, and the other two were spent in drifting down the harbor and along the coast on King's yacht. The President and Madame Alvarez were King's guests on one of these moonlight excursions, and were saluted by the proper number of guns, and their native band played on the forward deck. Clay felt that King held the centre of the stage for the time being, and obliterated himself completely. He thought of his own paddle-wheel tug-boat that he had had painted and gilded in her honor, and smiled grimly. MacWilliams approached him as he sat leaning back on the rail and looking up, with the eye of a man who had served before the mast, at the lacework of spars and rigging above him. MacWilliams came toward him on tiptoe and dropped carefully into a wicker chair. "There don't seem to be any door-mats on this boat," he said. "In every other respect she seems fitted out quite complete; all the latest magazines and enamelled bathtubs, and Chinese waiter-boys with cock-tails up their sleeves. But there ought to be a mat at the top of each of those stairways that hang over the side, otherwise some one is sure to soil the deck. Have you been down in the engine-room yet?" he asked. "Well, don't go, then," he advised, solemnly. "It will only make you feel badly. I have asked the Admiral if I can send those half-breed engine drivers over to-morrow to show them what a clean engine-room looks like. I've just been talking to the chief. His name's MacKenzie, and I told him I was Scotch myself, and he said it 'was a greet pleesure' to find a gentleman so well acquainted with the movements of machinery. He thought I was one of King's friends, I guess, so I didn't tell him I pulled a lever for a living myself. I gave him a cigar though, and he said, 'Thankee, sir,' and touched his cap to me." MacWilliams chuckled at the recollection, and crossed his legs comfortably. "One of King's cigars, too," he said. "Real Havana; he leaves them lying around loose in the cabin. Have you had one? Ted Langham and I took about a box between us." Clay made no answer, and MacWilliams settled himself contentedly in the great wicker chair and puffed grandly on a huge cigar. "It's demoralizing, isn't it?" he said at last. "What?" asked Clay, absently. "Oh, this associating with white people again, as we're doing now. It spoils you for tortillas and rice, doesn't it? It's going to be great fun while it lasts, but when they've all gone, and Ted's gone, too, and the yacht's vanished, and we fall back to tramping around the plaza twice a week, it won't be gay, will it? No; it won't be gay. We're having the spree of our lives now, I guess, but there's going to be a difference in the morning." "Oh, it's worth a headache, I think," said Clay, as he shrugged his shoulders and walked away to find Miss Langham. The day set for the visit to the mines rose bright and clear. MacWilliams had rigged out his single passenger-car with rugs and cushions, and flags flew from its canvas top that flapped and billowed in the wind of the slow-moving train. Their observation-car, as MacWilliams termed it, was placed in front of the locomotive, and they were pushed gently along the narrow rails between forests of Manaca palms, and through swamps and jungles, and at times over the limestone formation along the coast, where the waves dashed as high as the smokestack of the locomotive, covering the excursionists with a sprinkling of white spray. Thousands of land-crabs, painted red and black and yellow, scrambled with a rattle like dead men's bones across the rails to be crushed by the hundreds under the wheels of the Juggernaut; great lizards ran from sunny rocks at the sound of their approach, and a deer bounded across the tracks fifty feet in front of the cow-catcher. MacWilliams escorted Hope out into the cab of the locomotive, and taught her how to increase and slacken the speed of the engine, until she showed an unruly desire to throw the lever open altogether and shoot them off the rails into the ocean beyond. Clay sat at the back of the car with Miss Langham, and told her and her father of the difficulties with which young MacWilliams had had to contend. Miss Langham found her chief pleasure in noting the attention which her father gave to all that Clay had to tell him. Knowing her father as she did, and being familiar with his manner toward other men, she knew that he was treating Clay with unusual consideration. And this pleased her greatly, for it justified her own interest in him. She regarded Clay as a discovery of her own, but she was glad to have her opinion of him shared by others. Their coming was a great event in the history of the mines. Kirkland, the foreman, and Chapman, who handled the dynamite, Weimer, the Consul, and the native doctor, who cared for the fever-stricken and the casualties, were all at the station to meet them in the whitest of white duck and with a bunch of ponies to carry them on their tour of inspection, and the village of mud-cabins and zinc-huts that stood clear of the bare sunbaked earth on whitewashed wooden piles was as clean as Clay's hundred policemen could sweep it. Mr. Langham rode in advance of the cavalcade, and the head of each of the different departments took his turn in riding at his side, and explained what had been done, and showed him the proud result. The village was empty, except for the families of the native workmen and the ownerless dogs, the scavengers of the colony, that snarled and barked and ran leaping in front of the ponies' heads. Rising abruptly above the zinc village, lay the first of the five great hills, with its open front cut into great terraces, on which the men clung like flies on the side of a wall, some of them in groups around an opening, or in couples pounding a steel bar that a fellow-workman turned in his bare hands, while others gathered about the panting steam-drills that shook the solid rock with fierce, short blows, and hid the men about them in a throbbing curtain of steam. Self-important little dummy-engines, dragging long trains of ore-cars, rolled and rocked on the uneven surface of the ground, and swung around corners with warning screeches of their whistles. They could see, on peaks outlined against the sky, the signal-men waving their red flags, and then plunging down the mountain-side out of danger, as the earth rumbled and shook and vomited out a shower of stones and rubbish into the calm hot air. It was a spectacle of desperate activity and puzzling to the uninitiated, for it seemed to be scattered over an unlimited extent, with no head nor direction, and with each man, or each group of men, working alone, like rag-pickers on a heap of ashes. After the first half-hour of curious interest Miss Langham admitted to herself that she was disappointed. She confessed she had hoped that Clay would explain the meaning of the mines to her, and act as her escort over the mountains which he was blowing into pieces. But it was King, somewhat bored by the ceaseless noise and heat, and her brother, incoherently enthusiastic, who rode at her side, while Clay moved on in advance and seemed to have forgotten her existence. She watched him pointing up at the openings in the mountains and down at the ore-road, or stooping to pick up a piece of ore from the ground in cowboy fashion, without leaving his saddle, and pounding it on the pommel before he passed it to the others. And, again, he would stand for minutes at a time up to his boot-tops in the sliding waste, with his bridle rein over his arm and his thumbs in his belt, listening to what his lieutenants were saying, and glancing quickly from them to Mr. Langham to see if he were following the technicalities of their speech. All of the men who had welcomed the appearance of the women on their arrival with such obvious delight and with so much embarrassment seemed now as oblivious of their presence as Clay himself. Miss Langham pushed her horse up into the group beside Hope, who had kept her pony close at Clay's side from the beginning; but she could not make out what it was they were saying, and no one seemed to think it necessary to explain. She caught Clay's eye at last and smiled brightly at him; but, after staring at her for fully a minute, until Kirkland had finished speaking, she heard him say, "Yes, that's it exactly; in open-face workings there is no other way," and so showed her that he had not been even conscious of her presence. But a few minutes later she saw him look up at Hope, folding his arms across his chest tightly and shaking his head. "You see it was the only thing to do," she heard him say, as though he were defending some course of action, and as though Hope were one of those who must be convinced. "If we had cut the opening on the first level, there was the danger of the whole thing sinking in, so we had to begin to clear away at the top and work down. That's why I ordered the bucket-trolley. As it turned out, we saved money by it." Hope nodded her head slightly. "That's what I told father when Ted wrote us about it," she said; "but you haven't done it at Mount Washington." "Oh, but it's like this, Miss--" Kirkland replied, eagerly. "It's because Washington is a solider foundation. We can cut openings all over it and they won't cave, but this hill is most all rubbish; it's the poorest stuff in the mines." Hope nodded her head again and crowded her pony on after the moving group, but her sister and King did not follow. King looked at her and smiled. "Hope is very enthusiastic," he said. "Where did she pick it up?" "Oh, she and father used to go over it in his study last winter after Ted came down here," Miss Langham answered, with a touch of impatience in her tone. "Isn't there some place where we can go to get out of this heat?" Weimer, the Consul, heard her and led her back to Kirkland's bungalow, that hung like an eagle's nest from a projecting cliff. From its porch they could look down the valley over the greater part of the mines, and beyond to where the Caribbean Sea lay flashing in the heat. "I saw very few Americans down there, Weimer," said King. "I thought Clay had imported a lot of them." "About three hundred altogether, wild Irishmen and negroes," said the Consul; "but we use the native soldiers chiefly. They can stand the climate better, and, besides," he added, "they act as a reserve in case of trouble. They are Mendoza's men, and Clay is trying to win them away from him." "I don't understand," said King. Weimer looked around him and waited until Kirkland's servant had deposited a tray full of bottles and glasses on a table near them, and had departed. "The talk is," he said, "that Alvarez means to proclaim a dictatorship in his own favor before the spring elections. You've heard of that, haven't you?" King shook his head. "Oh, tell us about it," said Miss Langham; "I should so like to be in plots and conspiracies." "Well, they're rather common down here," continued the Consul, "but this one ought to interest you especially, Miss Langham, because it is a woman who is at the head of it. Madame Alvarez, you know, was the Countess Manueleta Hernandez before her marriage. She belongs to one of the oldest families in Spain. Alvarez married her in Madrid, when he was Minister there, and when he returned to run for President, she came with him. She's a tremendously ambitious woman, and they do say she wants to convert the republic into a monarchy, and make her husband King, or, more properly speaking, make herself Queen. Of course that's absurd, but she is supposed to be plotting to turn Olancho into a sort of dependency of Spain, as it was long ago, and that's why she is so unpopular." "Indeed?" interrupted Miss Langham, "I did not know that she was unpopular." "Oh, rather. Why, her party is called the Royalist Party already, and only a week before you came the Liberals plastered the city with denunciatory placards against her, calling on the people to drive her out of the country." "What cowards--to fight a woman!" exclaimed Miss Langham. "Well, she began it first, you see," said the Consul. "Who is the leader of the fight against her?" asked King. "General Mendoza; he is commander-in-chief and has the greater part of the army with him, but the other candidate, old General Rojas, is the popular choice and the best of the three. He is Vice-President now, and if the people were ever given a fair chance to vote for the man they want, he would unquestionably be the next President. The mass of the people are sick of revolutions. They've had enough of them, but they will have to go through another before long, and if it turns against Dr. Alvarez, I'm afraid Mr. Langham will have hard work to hold these mines. You see, Mendoza has already threatened to seize the whole plant and turn it into a Government monopoly." "And if the other one, General Rojas, gets into power, will he seize the mines, too?" "No, he is honest, strange to relate," laughed Weimer, "but he won't get in. Alvarez will make himself dictator, or Mendoza will make himself President. That's why Clay treats the soldiers here so well. He thinks he may need them against Mendoza. You may be turning your saluting-gun on the city yet, Commodore," he added, smiling, "or, what is more likely, you'll need the yacht to take Miss Langham and the rest of the family out of the country." King smiled and Miss Langham regarded Weimer with flattering interest. "I've got a quick firing gun below decks," said King, "that I used in the Malaysian Peninsula on a junkful of Black Flags, and I think I'll have it brought up. And there are about thirty of my men on the yacht who wouldn't ask for their wages in a year if I'd let them go on shore and mix up in a fight. When do you suppose this--" A heavy step and the jingle of spurs on the bare floor of the bungalow startled the conspirators, and they turned and gazed guiltily out at the mountain-tops above them as Clay came hurrying out upon the porch. "They told me you were here," he said, speaking to Miss Langham. "I'm so sorry it tired you. I should have remembered--it is a rough trip when you're not used to it," he added, remorsefully. "But I'm glad Weimer was here to take care of you." "It was just a trifle hot and noisy," said Miss Langham, smiling sweetly. She put her hand to her forehead with an expression of patient suffering. "It made my head ache a little, but it was most interesting." She added, "You are certainly to be congratulated on your work." Clay glanced at her doubtfully with a troubled look, and turned away his eyes to the busy scene below him. He was greatly hurt that she should have cared so little, and indignant at himself for being so unjust. Why should he expect a woman to find interest in that hive of noise and sweating energy? But even as he stood arguing with himself his eyes fell on a slight figure sitting erect and graceful on her pony's back, her white habit soiled and stained red with the ore of the mines, and green where it had crushed against the leaves. She was coming slowly up the trail with a body-guard of half a dozen men crowding closely around her, telling her the difficulties of the work, and explaining their successes, and eager for a share of her quick sympathy. Clay's eyes fixed themselves on the picture, and he smiled at its significance. Miss Langham noticed the look, and glanced below to see what it was that had so interested him, and then back at him again. He was still watching the approaching cavalcade intently, and smiling to himself. Miss Langham drew in her breath and raised her head and shoulders quickly, like a deer that hears a footstep in the forest, and when Hope presently stepped out upon the porch, she turned quickly toward her, and regarded her steadily, as though she were a stranger to her, and as though she were trying to see her with the eyes of one who looked at her for the first time. "Hope!" she said, "do look at your dress!" Hope's face was glowing with the unusual exercise, and her eyes were brilliant. Her hair had slipped down beneath the visor of her helmet. "I am so tired--and so hungry." She was laughing and looking directly at Clay. "It has been a wonderful thing to have seen," she said, tugging at her heavy gauntlet, "and to have done," she added. She pulled off her glove and held out her hand to Clay, moist and scarred with the pressure of the reins. "Thank you," she said, simply. The master of the mines took it with a quick rush of gratitude, and looking into the girl's eyes, saw something there that startled him, so that he glanced quickly past her at the circle of booted men grouped in the door behind her. They were each smiling in appreciation of the tableau; her father and Ted, MacWilliams and Kirkland, and all the others who had helped him. They seemed to envy, but not to grudge, the whole credit which the girl had given to him. Clay thought, "Why could it not have been the other?" But he said aloud, "Thank YOU. You have given me my reward." Miss Langham looked down impatiently into the valley below, and found that it seemed more hot and noisy, and more grimy than before. VI Clay believed that Alice Langham's visit to the mines had opened his eyes fully to vast differences between them. He laughed and railed at himself for having dared to imagine that he was in a position to care for her. Confident as he was at times, and sure as he was of his ability in certain directions, he was uneasy and fearful when he matched himself against a man of gentle birth and gentle breeding, and one who, like King, was part of a world of which he knew little, and to which, in his ignorance concerning it, he attributed many advantages that it did not possess. He believed that he would always lack the mysterious something which these others held by right of inheritance. He was still young and full of the illusions of youth, and so gave false values to his own qualities, and values equally false to the qualities he lacked. For the next week he avoided Miss Langham, unless there were other people present, and whenever she showed him special favor, he hastily recalled to his mind her failure to sympathize in his work, and assured himself that if she could not interest herself in the engineer, he did not care to have her interested in the man. Other women had found him attractive in himself; they had cared for his strength of will and mind, and because he was good to look at. But he determined that this one must sympathize with his work in the world, no matter how unpicturesque it might seem to her. His work was the best of him, he assured himself, and he would stand or fall with it. It was a week after the visit to the mines that President Alvarez gave a great ball in honor of the Langhams, to which all of the important people of Olancho, and the Foreign Ministers were invited. Miss Langham met Clay on the afternoon of the day set for the ball, as she was going down the hill to join Hope and her father at dinner on the yacht. "Are you not coming, too?" she asked. "I wish I could," Clay answered. "King asked me, but a steamer-load of new machinery arrived to-day, and I have to see it through the Custom-House." Miss Langham gave an impatient little laugh, and shook her head. "You might wait until we were gone before you bother with your machinery," she said. "When you are gone I won't be in a state of mind to attend to machinery or anything else," Clay answered. Miss Langham seemed so far encouraged by this speech that she seated herself in the boathouse at the end of the wharf. She pushed her mantilla back from her face and looked up at him, smiling brightly. "'The time has come, the walrus said,'" she quoted, "'to talk of many things.'" Clay laughed and dropped down beside her. "Well?" he said. "You have been rather unkind to me this last week," the girl began, with her eyes fixed steadily on his. "And that day at the mines when I counted on you so, you acted abominably." Clay's face showed so plainly his surprise at this charge, which he thought he only had the right to make, that Miss Langham stopped. "I don't understand," said Clay, quietly. "How did I treat you abominably?" He had taken her so seriously that Miss Langham dropped her lighter tone and spoke in one more kindly: "I went out there to see your work at its best. I was only interested in going because it was your work, and because it was you who had done it all, and I expected that you would try to explain it to me and help me to understand, but you didn't. You treated me as though I had no interest in the matter at all, as though I was not capable of understanding it. You did not seem to care whether I was interested or not. In fact, you forgot me altogether." Clay exhibited no evidence of a reproving conscience. "I am sorry you had a stupid time," he said, gravely. "I did not mean that, and you know I didn't mean that," the girl answered. "I wanted to hear about it from you, because you did it. I wasn't interested so much in what had been done, as I was in the man who had accomplished it." Clay shrugged his shoulders impatiently, and looked across at Miss Langham with a troubled smile. "But that's just what I don't want," he said. "Can't you see? These mines and other mines like them are all I have in the world. They are my only excuse for having lived in it so long. I want to feel that I've done something outside of myself, and when you say that you like me personally, it's as little satisfaction to me as it must be to a woman to be congratulated on her beauty, or on her fine voice. That is nothing she has done herself. I should like you to value what I have done, not what I happen to be." Miss Langham turned her eyes to the harbor, and it was some short time before she answered. "You are a very difficult person to please," she said, "and most exacting. As a rule men are satisfied to be liked for any reason. I confess frankly, since you insist upon it, that I do not rise to the point of appreciating your work as the others do. I suppose it is a fault," she continued, with an air that plainly said that she considered it, on the contrary, something of a virtue. "And if I knew more about it technically, I might see more in it to admire. But I am looking farther on for better things from you. The friends who help us the most are not always those who consider us perfect, are they?" she asked, with a kindly smile. She raised her eyes to the great ore-pier that stretched out across the water, the one ugly blot in the scene of natural beauty about them. "I think that is all very well," she said; "but I certainly expect you to do more than that. I have met many remarkable men in all parts of the world, and I know what a strong man is, and you have one of the strongest personalities I have known. But you can't mean that you are content to stop with this. You should be something bigger and more wide-reaching and more lasting. Indeed, it hurts me to see you wasting your time here over my father's interests. You should exert that same energy on a broader map. You could make yourself anything you chose. At home you would be your party's leader in politics, or you could be a great general, or a great financier. I say this because I know there are better things in you, and because I want you to make the most of your talents. I am anxious to see you put your powers to something worth while." Miss Langham's voice carried with it such a tone of sincerity that she almost succeeded in deceiving herself. And yet she would have hardly cared to explain just why she had reproached the man before her after this fashion. For she knew that when she spoke as she had done, she was beating about to find some reason that would justify her in not caring for him, as she knew she could care--as she would not allow herself to care. The man at her side had won her interest from the first, and later had occupied her thoughts so entirely, that it troubled her peace of mind. Yet she would not let her feeling for him wax and grow stronger, but kept it down. And she was trying now to persuade herself that she did this because there was something lacking in him and not in her. She was almost angry with him for being so much to her and for not being more acceptable in little things, like the other men she knew. So she found this fault with him in order that she might justify her own lack of feeling. But Clay, who only heard the words and could not go back of them to find the motive, could not know this. He sat perfectly still when she had finished and looked steadily out across the harbor. His eyes fell on the ugly ore-pier, and he winced and uttered a short grim laugh. "That's true, what you say," he began, "I haven't done much. You are quite right. Only--" he looked up at her curiously and smiled--"only you should not have been the one to tell me of it." Miss Langham had been so far carried away by her own point of view that she had not considered Clay, and now that she saw what mischief she had done, she gave a quick gasp of regret, and leaned forward as though to add some explanation to what she had said. But Clay stopped her. "I mean by that," he said, "that the great part of the inspiration I have had to do what little I have done came from you. You were a sort of promise of something better to me. You were more of a type than an individual woman, but your picture, the one I carry in my watch, meant all that part of life that I have never known, the sweetness and the nobleness and grace of civilization,--something I hoped I would some day have time to enjoy. So you see," he added, with an uncertain laugh, "it's less pleasant to hear that I have failed to make the most of myself from you than from almost any one else." "But, Mr. Clay," protested the girl, anxiously, "I think you have done wonderfully well. I only said that I wanted you to do more. You are so young and you have--" Clay did not hear her. He was leaning forward looking moodily out across the water, with his folded arms clasped across his knees. "I have not made the most of myself," he repeated; "that is what you said." He spoke the words as though she had delivered a sentence. "You don't think well of what I have done, of what I am." He drew in his breath and shook his head with a hopeless laugh, and leaned back against the railing of the boat-house with the weariness in his attitude of a man who has given up after a long struggle. "No," he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, "I don't amount to much. But, my God!" he laughed, and turning his head away, "when you think what I was! This doesn't seem much to you, and it doesn't seem much to me now that I have your point of view on it, but when I remember!" Clay stopped again and pressed his lips together and shook his head. His half-closed eyes, that seemed to be looking back into his past, lighted as they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his arm and pointed to it with a wave of the hand. "When I was sixteen I was a sailor before the mast," he said, "the sort of sailor that King's crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same profession. I was of so little account that I've been knocked the length of the main deck at the end of the mate's fist, and left to lie bleeding in the scuppers for dead. I hadn't a thing to my name then but the clothes I wore, and I've had to go aloft in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with my bare toes and pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and started in their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions for six months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as dumb and untamed as the steers themselves. I've sat in my saddle night after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no sound but the noise of the steers breathing in their sleep. The women I knew were Indian squaws, and the girls of the sailors' dance-houses and the gambling-hells of Sioux City and Abilene, and Callao and Port Said. That was what I was and those were my companions. Why!" he laughed, rising and striding across the boat-house with his hands locked behind him, "I've fought on the mud floor of a Mexican shack, with a naked knife in my hand, for my last dollar. I was as low and as desperate as that. And now--" Clay lifted his head and smiled. "Now," he said, in a lower voice and addressing Miss Langham with a return of his usual grave politeness, "I am able to sit beside you and talk to you. I have risen to that. I am quite content." He paused and looked at Miss Langham uncertainly for a few moments as though in doubt as to whether she would understand him if he continued. "And though it means nothing to you," he said, "and though as you say I am here as your father's employee, there are other places, perhaps, where I am better known. In Edinburgh or Berlin or Paris, if you were to ask the people of my own profession, they could tell you something of me. If I wished it, I could drop this active work tomorrow and continue as an adviser, as an expert, but I like the active part better. I like doing things myself. I don't say, 'I am a salaried servant of Mr. Langham's;' I put it differently. I say, 'There are five mountains of iron. You are to take them up and transport them from South America to North America, where they will be turned into railroads and ironclads.' That's my way of looking at it. It's better to bind a laurel to the plough than to call yourself hard names. It makes your work easier--almost noble. Cannot you see it that way, too?" Before Miss Langham could answer, a deprecatory cough from one side of the open boat-house startled them, and turning they saw MacWilliams coming toward them. They had been so intent upon what Clay was saying that he had approached them over the soft sand of the beach without their knowing it. Miss Langham welcomed his arrival with evident pleasure. "The launch is waiting for you at the end of the pier," MacWilliams said. Miss Langham rose and the three walked together down the length of the wharf, MacWilliams moving briskly in advance in order to enable them to continue the conversation he had interrupted, but they followed close behind him, as though neither of them were desirous of such an opportunity. Hope and King had both come for Miss Langham, and while the latter was helping her to a place on the cushions, and repeating his regrets that the men were not coming also, Hope started the launch, with a brisk ringing of bells and a whirl of the wheel and a smile over her shoulder at the figures on the wharf. "Why didn't you go?" said Clay; "you have no business at the Custom-House." "Neither have you," said MacWilliams. "But I guess we both understand. There's no good pushing your luck too far." "What do you mean by that--this time?" "Why, what have we to do with all of this?" cried MacWilliams. "It's what I keep telling you every day. We're not in that class, and you're only making it harder for yourself when they've gone. I call it cruelty to animals myself, having women like that around. Up North, where everybody's white, you don't notice it so much, but down here--Lord!" "That's absurd," Clay answered. "Why should you turn your back on civilization when it comes to you, just because you're not going back to civilization by the next steamer? Every person you meet either helps you or hurts you. Those girls help us, even if they do make the life here seem bare and mean." "Bare and mean!" repeated MacWilliams incredulously. "I think that's just what they don't do. I like it all the better because they're mixed up in it. I never took so much interest in your mines until she took to riding over them, and I didn't think great shakes of my old ore-road, either, but now that she's got to acting as engineer, it's sort of nickel-plated the whole outfit. I'm going to name the new engine after her--when it gets here--if her old man will let me." "What do you mean? Miss Langham hasn't been to the mines but once, has she?" "Miss Langham!" exclaimed MacWilliams. "No, I mean the other, Miss Hope. She comes out with Ted nearly every day now, and she's learning how to run a locomotive. Just for fun, you know," he added, reassuringly. "I didn't suppose she had any intention of joining the Brotherhood," said Clay. "So she's been out every day, has she? I like that," he commented, enthusiastically. "She's a fine, sweet girl." "Fine, sweet girl!" growled MacWilliams. "I should hope so. She's the best. They don't make them any better than that, and just think, if she's like that now, what will she be when she's grown up, when she's learned a few things? Now her sister. You can see just what her sister will be at thirty, and at fifty, and at eighty. She's thoroughbred and she's the most beautiful woman to look at I ever saw--but, my son--she is too careful. She hasn't any illusions, and no sense of humor. And a woman with no illusions and no sense of humor is going to be monotonous. You can't teach her anything. You can't imagine yourself telling her anything she doesn't know. The things we think important don't reach her at all. They're not in her line, and in everything else she knows more than we could ever guess at. But that Miss Hope! It's a privilege to show her about. She wants to see everything, and learn everything, and she goes poking her head into openings and down shafts like a little fox terrier. And she'll sit still and listen with her eyes wide open and tears in them, too, and she doesn't know it--until you can't talk yourself for just looking at her." Clay rose and moved on to the house in silence. He was glad that MacWilliams had interrupted him when he did. He wondered whether he understood Alice Langham after all. He had seen many fine ladies before during his brief visits to London, and Berlin, and Vienna, and they had shown him favor. He had known other women not so fine. Spanish-American senoritas through Central and South America, the wives and daughters of English merchants exiled along the Pacific coast, whose fair skin and yellow hair whitened and bleached under the hot tropical suns. He had known many women, and he could have quoted "Trials and troubles amany, Have proved me; One or two women, God bless them! Have loved me." But the woman he was to marry must have all the things he lacked. She must fill out and complete him where he was wanting. This woman possessed all of these things. She appealed to every ambition and to every taste he cherished, and yet he knew that he had hesitated and mistrusted her, when he should have declared himself eagerly and vehemently, and forced her to listen with all the strength of his will. Miss Langham dropped among the soft cushions of the launch with a sense of having been rescued from herself and of delight in finding refuge again in her own environment. The sight of King standing in the bow beside Hope with his cigarette hanging from his lips, and peering with half-closed eyes into the fading light, gave her a sense of restfulness and content. She did not know what she wished from that other strange young man. He was so bold, so handsome, and he looked at life and spoke of it in such a fresh, unhackneyed spirit. He might make himself anything he pleased. But here was a man who already had everything, or who could get it as easily as he could increase the speed of the launch, by pulling some wire with his finger. She recalled one day when they were all on board of this same launch, and the machinery had broken down, and MacWilliams had gone forward to look at it. He had called Clay to help him, and she remembered how they had both gone down on their knees and asked the engineer and fireman to pass them wrenches and oil-cans, while King protested mildly, and the rest sat helplessly in the hot glare of the sea, as the boat rose and fell on the waves. She resented Clay's interest in the accident, and his pleasure when he had made the machinery right once more, and his appearance as he came back to them with oily hands and with his face glowing from the heat of the furnace, wiping his grimy fingers on a piece of packing. She had resented the equality with which he treated the engineer in asking his advice, and it rather surprised her that the crew saluted him when he stepped into the launch again that night as though he were the owner. She had expected that they would patronize him, and she imagined after this incident that she detected a shade of difference in the manner of the sailors toward Clay, as though he had cheapened himself to them--as he had to her. VII At ten o'clock that same evening Clay began to prepare himself for the ball at the Government palace, and MacWilliams, who was not invited, watched him dress with critical approval that showed no sign of envy. The better to do honor to the President, Clay had brought out several foreign orders, and MacWilliams helped him to tie around his neck the collar of the Red Eagle which the German Emperor had given him, and to fasten the ribbon and cross of the Star of Olancho across his breast, and a Spanish Order and the Legion of Honor to the lapel of his coat. MacWilliams surveyed the effect of the tiny enamelled crosses with his head on one side, and with the same air of affectionate pride and concern that a mother shows over her daughter's first ball-dress. "Got any more?" he asked, anxiously. "I have some war medals," Clay answered, smiling doubtfully. "But I'm not in uniform." "Oh, that's all right," declared MacWilliams. "Put 'em on, put 'em all on. Give the girls a treat. Everybody will think they were given for feats of swimming, anyway; but they will show up well from the front. Now, then, you look like a drum-major or a conjuring chap." "I do not," said Clay. "I look like a French Ambassador, and I hardly understand how you find courage to speak to me at all." He went up the hill in high spirits, and found the carriage at the door and King, Mr. Langham, and Miss Langham sitting waiting for him. They were ready to depart, and Miss Langham had but just seated herself in the carriage when they heard hurrying across the tiled floor a quick, light step and the rustle of silk, and turning they saw Hope standing in the doorway, radiant and smiling. She wore a white frock that reached to the ground, and that left her arms and shoulders bare. Her hair was dressed high upon her head, and she was pulling vigorously at a pair of long, tan-colored gloves. The transformation was so complete, and the girl looked so much older and so stately and beautiful, that the two young men stared at her in silent admiration and astonishment. "Why, Hope!" exclaimed her sister. "What does this mean?" Hope stopped in some alarm, and clasped her hair with both hands. "What is it?" she asked; "is anything wrong?" "Why, my dear child," said her sister, "you're not thinking of going with us, are you?" "Not going?" echoed the younger sister, in dismay. "Why, Alice, why not? I was asked." "But, Hope-- Father," said the elder sister, stepping out of the carriage and turning to Mr. Langham, "you didn't intend that Hope should go, did you? She's not out yet." "Oh, nonsense," said Hope, defiantly. But she drew in her breath quickly and blushed, as she saw the two young men moving away out of hearing of this family crisis. She felt that she was being made to look like a spoiled child. "It doesn't count down here," she said, "and I want to go. I thought you knew I was going all the time. Marie made this frock for me on purpose." "I don't think Hope is old enough," the elder sister said, addressing her father, "and if she goes to dances here, there's no reason why she should not go to those at home." "But I don't want to go to dances at home," interrupted Hope. Mr. Langham looked exceedingly uncomfortable, and turned appealingly to his elder daughter. "What do you think, Alice?" he said, doubtfully. "I'm sorry," Miss Langham replied, "but I know it would not be at all proper. I hate to seem horrid about it, Hope, but indeed you are too young, and the men here are not the men a young girl ought to meet." "You meet them, Alice," said Hope, but pulling off her gloves in token of defeat. "But, my dear child, I'm fifty years older than you are." "Perhaps Alice knows best, Hope," Mr. Langham said. "I'm sorry if you are disappointed." Hope held her head a little higher, and turned toward the door. "I don't mind if you don't wish it, father," she said. "Good-night." She moved away, but apparently thought better of it, and came back and stood smiling and nodding to them as they seated themselves in the carriage. Mr. Langham leaned forward and said, in a troubled voice, "We will tell you all about it in the morning. I'm very sorry. You won't be lonely, will you? I'll stay with you if you wish." "Nonsense!" laughed Hope. "Why, it's given to you, father; don't bother about me. I'll read something or other and go to bed." "Good-night, Cinderella," King called out to her. "Good-night, Prince Charming," Hope answered. Both Clay and King felt that the girl would not mind missing the ball so much as she would the fact of having been treated like a child in their presence, so they refrained from any expression of sympathy or regret, but raised their hats and bowed a little more impressively than usual as the carriage drove away. The picture Hope made, as she stood deserted and forlorn on the steps of the empty house in her new finery, struck Clay as unnecessarily pathetic. He felt a strong sense of resentment against her sister and her father, and thanked heaven devoutly that he was out of their class, and when Miss Langham continued to express her sorrow that she had been forced to act as she had done, he remained silent. It seemed to Clay such a simple thing to give children pleasure, and to remember that their woes were always out of all proportion to the cause. Children, dumb animals, and blind people were always grouped together in his mind as objects demanding the most tender and constant consideration. So the pleasure of the evening was spoiled for him while he remembered the hurt and disappointed look in Hope's face, and when Miss Langham asked him why he was so preoccupied, he told her bluntly that he thought she had been very unkind to Hope, and that her objections were absurd. Miss Langham held herself a little more stiffly. "Perhaps you do not quite understand, Mr. Clay," she said. "Some of us have to conform to certain rules that the people with whom we best like to associate have laid down for themselves. If we choose to be conventional, it is probably because we find it makes life easier for the greater number. You cannot think it was a pleasant task for me. But I have given up things of much more importance than a dance for the sake of appearances, and Hope herself will see to-morrow that I acted for the best." Clay said he trusted so, but doubted it, and by way of re-establishing himself in Miss Langham's good favor, asked her if she could give him the next dance. But Miss Langham was not to be propitiated. "I'm sorry," she said, "but I believe I am engaged until supper-time. Come and ask me then, and I'll have one saved for you. But there is something you can do," she added. "I left my fan in the carriage--do you think you could manage to get it for me without much trouble?" "The carriage did not wait. I believe it was sent back," said Clay, "but I can borrow a horse from one of Stuart's men, and ride back and get it for you, if you like." "How absurd!" laughed Miss Langham, but she looked pleased, notwithstanding. "Oh, not at all," Clay answered. He was smiling down at her in some amusement, and was apparently much entertained at his idea. "Will you consider it an act of devotion?" he asked. There was so little of devotion, and so much more of mischief in his eyes, that Miss Langham guessed he was only laughing at her, and shook her head. "You won't go," she said, turning away. She followed him with her eyes, however, as he crossed the room, his head and shoulders towering above the native men and women. She had never seen him so resplendent, and she noted, with an eye that considered trifles, the orders, and his well-fitting white gloves, and his manner of bowing in the Continental fashion, holding his opera-hat on his thigh, as though his hand rested on a sword. She noticed that the little Olanchoans stopped and looked after him, as he pushed his way among them, and she could see that the men were telling the women who he was. Sir Julian Pindar, the old British Minister, stopped him, and she watched them as they laughed together over the English war medals on the American's breast, which Sir Julian touched with his finger. He called the French Minister and his pretty wife to look, too, and they all laughed and talked together in great spirits, and Miss Langham wondered if Clay was speaking in French to them. Miss Langham did not enjoy the ball; she felt injured and aggrieved, and she assured herself that she had been hardly used. She had only done her duty, and yet all the sympathy had gone to her sister, who had placed her in a trying position. She thought it was most inconsiderate. Hope walked slowly across the veranda when the others had gone, and watched the carriage as long as it remained in sight. Then she threw herself into a big arm-chair, and looked down upon her pretty frock and her new dancing-slippers. She, too, felt badly used. The moonlight fell all about her, as it had on the first night of their arrival, a month before, but now it seemed cold and cheerless, and gave an added sense of loneliness to the silent house. She did not go inside to read, as she had promised to do, but sat for the next hour looking out across the harbor. She could not blame Alice. She considered that Alice always moved by rules and precedents, like a queen in a game of chess, and she wondered why. It made life so tame and uninteresting, and yet people invariably admired Alice, and some one had spoken of her as the noblest example of the modern gentlewoman. She was sure she could not grow up to be any thing like that. She was quite confident that she was going to disappoint her family. She wondered if people would like her better if she were discreet like Alice, and less like her brother Ted. If Mr. Clay, for instance, would like her better? She wondered if he disapproved of her riding on the engine with MacWilliams, and of her tearing through the mines on her pony, and spearing with a lance of sugar-cane at the mongrel curs that ran to snap at his flanks. She remembered his look of astonished amusement the day he had caught her in this impromptu pig-sticking, and she felt herself growing red at the recollection. She was sure he thought her a tomboy. Probably he never thought of her at all. Hope leaned back in the chair and looked up at the stars above the mountains and tried to think of any of her heroes and princes in fiction who had gone through such interesting experiences as had Mr. Clay. Some of them had done so, but they were creatures in a book and this hero was alive, and she knew him, and had probably made him despise her as a silly little girl who was scolded and sent off to bed like a disobedient child. Hope felt a choking in her throat and something like a tear creep to her eyes: but she was surprised to find that the fact did not make her ashamed of herself. She owned that she was wounded and disappointed, and to make it harder she could not help picturing Alice and Clay laughing and talking together in some corner away from the ball-room, while she, who understood him so well, and who could not find the words to tell him how much she valued what he was and what he had done, was forgotten and sitting here alone, like Cinderella, by the empty fireplace. The picture was so pathetic as Hope drew it, that for a moment she felt almost a touch of self-pity, but the next she laughed scornfully at her own foolishness, and rising with an impatient shrug, walked away in the direction of her room. But before she had crossed the veranda she was stopped by the sound of a horse's hoofs galloping over the hard sun-baked road that led from the city, and before she had stepped forward out of the shadow in which she stood the horse had reached the steps and his rider had pulled him back on his haunches and swung himself off before the forefeet had touched the ground. Hope had guessed that it was Clay by his riding, and she feared from his haste that some one of her people were ill. So she ran anxiously forward and asked if anything were wrong. Clay started at her sudden appearance, and gave a short boyish laugh of pleasure. "I'm so glad you're still up," he said. "No, nothing is wrong." He stopped in some embarrassment. He had been moved to return by the fact that the little girl he knew was in trouble, and now that he was suddenly confronted by this older and statelier young person, his action seemed particularly silly, and he was at a loss to explain it in any way that would not give offence. "No, nothing is wrong," he repeated. "I came after something." Clay had borrowed one of the cloaks the troopers wore at night from the same man who had lent him the horse, and as he stood bareheaded before her, with the cloak hanging from his shoulders to the floor and the star and ribbon across his breast, Hope felt very grateful to him for being able to look like a Prince or a hero in a book, and to yet remain her Mr. Clay at the same time. "I came to get your sister's fan," Clay explained. "She forgot it." The young girl looked at him for a moment in surprise and then straightened herself slightly. She did not know whether she was the more indignant with Alice for sending such a man on so foolish an errand, or with Clay for submitting to such a service. "Oh, is that it?" she said at last. "I will go and find you one." She gave him a dignified little bow and moved away toward the door, with every appearance of disapproval. "Oh, I don't know," she heard Clay say, doubtfully; "I don't have to go just yet, do I? May I not stay here a little while?" Hope stood and looked at him in some perplexity. "Why, yes," she answered, wonderingly. "But don't you want to go back? You came in a great hurry. And won't Alice want her fan?" "Oh, she has it by this time. I told Stuart to find it. She left it in the carriage, and the carriage is waiting at the end of the plaza." "Then why did you come?" asked Hope, with rising suspicion. "Oh, I don't know," said Clay, helplessly. "I thought I'd just like a ride in the moonlight. I hate balls and dances anyway, don't you? I think you were very wise not to go." Hope placed her hands on the back of the big arm-chair and looked steadily at him as he stood where she could see his face in the moonlight. "You came back," she said, "because they thought I was crying, and they sent you to see. Is that it? Did Alice send you?" she demanded. Clay gave a gasp of consternation. "You know that no one sent me," he said. "I thought they treated you abominably, and I wanted to come and say so. That's all. And I wanted to tell you that I missed you very much, and that your not coming had spoiled the evening for me, and I came also because I preferred to talk to you than to stay where I was. No one knows that I came to see you. I said I was going to get the fan, and I told Stuart to find it after I'd left. I just wanted to see you, that's all. But I will go back again at once." While he had been speaking Hope had lowered her eyes from his face and had turned and looked out across the harbor. There was a strange, happy tumult in her breast, and she was breathing so rapidly that she was afraid he would notice it. She also felt an absurd inclination to cry, and that frightened her. So she laughed and turned and looked up into his face again. Clay saw the same look in her eyes that he had seen there the day when she had congratulated him on his work at the mines. He had seen it before in the eyes of other women and it troubled him. Hope seated herself in the big chair, and Clay tossed his cloak on the floor at her feet and sat down with his shoulders against one of the pillars. He glanced up at her and found that the look that had troubled him was gone, and that her eyes were now smiling with excitement and pleasure. "And did you bring me something from the ball in your pocket to comfort me," she asked, mockingly. "Yes, I did," Clay answered, unabashed. "I brought you some bonbons." "You didn't, really!" Hope cried, with a shriek of delight. "How absurd of you! The sort you pull?" "The sort you pull," Clay repeated, gravely. "And also a dance-card, which is a relic of barbarism still existing in this Southern capital. It has the arms of Olancho on it in gold, and I thought you might like to keep it as a souvenir." He pulled the card from his coat-pocket and said, "May I have this dance?" "You may," Hope answered. "But you wouldn't mind if we sat it out, would you?" "I should prefer it," Clay said, as he scrawled his name across the card. "It is so crowded inside, and the company is rather mixed." They both laughed lightly at their own foolishness, and Hope smiled down upon him affectionately and proudly. "You may smoke, if you choose; and would you like something cool to drink?" she asked, anxiously. "After your ride, you know," she suggested, with hospitable intent. Clay said that he was very comfortable without a drink, but lighted a cigar and watched her covertly through the smoke, as she sat smiling happily and quite unconsciously upon the moonlit world around them. She caught Clay's eye fixed on her, and laughed lightly. "What is it?" he said. "Oh, I was just thinking," Hope replied, "that it was much better to have a dance come to you, than to go to the dance." "Does one man and a dance-card and three bonbons constitute your idea of a ball?" "Doesn't it? You see, I am not out yet, I don't know." "I should think it might depend a good deal upon the man," Clay suggested. "That sounds as though you were hinting," said Hope, doubtfully. "Now what would I say to that if I were out?" "I don't know, but don't say it," Clay answered. "It would probably be something very unflattering or very forward, and in either case I should take you back to your chaperon and leave you there." Hope had not been listening. Her eyes were fixed on a level with his tie, and Clay raised his hand to it in some trepidation. "Mr. Clay," she began abruptly and leaning eagerly forward, "would you think me very rude if I asked you what you did to get all those crosses? I know they mean something, and I do so want to know what. Please tell me." "Oh, those!" said Clay. "The reason I put them on to-night is because wearing them is supposed to be a sort of compliment to your host. I got in the habit abroad--" "I didn't ask you that," said Hope, severely. "I asked you what you did to get them. Now begin with the Legion of Honor on the left, and go right on until you come to the end, and please don't skip anything. Leave in all the bloodthirsty parts, and please don't be modest." "Like Othello," suggested Clay. "Yes," said Hope; "I will be Desdemona." "Well, Desdemona, it was like this," said Clay, laughing. "I got that medal and that star for serving in the Nile campaign, under Wolseley. After I left Egypt, I went up the coast to Algiers, where I took service under the French in a most disreputable organization known as the Foreign Legion--" "Don't tell me," exclaimed Hope, in delight, "that you have been a Chasseur d'Afrique! Not like the man in 'Under Two Flags'?" "No, not at all like that man," said Clay, emphatically. "I was just a plain, common, or garden, sappeur, and I showed the other good-for-nothings how to dig trenches. Well, I contaminated the Foreign Legion for eight months, and then I went to Peru, where I--" "You're skipping," said Hope. "How did you get the Legion of Honor?" "Oh, that?" said Clay. "That was a gallery play I made once when we were chasing some Arabs. They took the French flag away from our color-bearer, and I got it back again and waved it frantically around my head until I was quite certain the Colonel had seen me doing it, and then I stopped as soon as I knew that I was sure of promotion." "Oh, how can you?" cried Hope. "You didn't do anything of the sort. You probably saved the entire regiment." "Well, perhaps I did," Clay returned. "Though I don't remember it, and nobody mentioned it at the time." "Go on about the others," said Hope. "And do try to be truthful." "Well, I got this one from Spain, because I was President of an International Congress of Engineers at Madrid. That was the ostensible reason, but the real reason was because I taught the Spanish Commissioners to play poker instead of baccarat. The German Emperor gave me this for designing a fort, and the Sultan of Zanzibar gave me this, and no one but the Sultan knows why, and he won't tell. I suppose he's ashamed. He gives them away instead of cigars. He was out of cigars the day I called." "What a lot of places you have seen," sighed Hope. "I have been in Cairo and Algiers, too, but I always had to walk about with a governess, and she wouldn't go to the mosques because she said they were full of fleas. We always go to Homburg and Paris in the summer, and to big hotels in London. I love to travel, but I don't love to travel that way, would you?" "I travel because I have no home," said Clay. "I'm different from the chap that came home because all the other places were shut. I go to other places because there is no home open." "What do you mean?" said Hope, shaking her head. "Why have you no home?" "There was a ranch in Colorado that I used to call home," said Clay, "but they've cut it up into town lots. I own a plot in the cemetery outside of the town, where my mother is buried, and I visit that whenever I am in the States, and that is the only piece of earth anywhere in the world that I have to go back to." Hope leaned forward with her hands clasped in front of her and her eyes wide open. "And your father?" she said, softly; "is he--is he there, too--" Clay looked at the lighted end of his cigar as he turned it between his fingers. "My father, Miss Hope," he said, "was a filibuster, and went out on the 'Virginius' to help free Cuba, and was shot, against a stone wall. We never knew where he was buried." "Oh, forgive me; I beg your pardon," said Hope. There was such distress in her voice that Clay looked at her quickly and saw the tears in her eyes. She reached out her hand timidly, and touched for an instant his own rough, sunburned fist, as it lay clenched on his knee. "I am so sorry," she said, "so sorry." For the first time in many years the tears came to Clay's eyes and blurred the moonlight and the scene before him, and he sat unmanned and silent before the simple touch of a young girl's sympathy. An hour later, when his pony struck the gravel from beneath his hoofs on the race back to the city, and Clay turned to wave his hand to Hope in the doorway, she seemed, as she stood with the moonlight falling about her white figure, like a spirit beckoning the way to a new paradise. VIII Clay reached the President's Palace during the supper-hour, and found Mr. Langham and his daughter at the President's table. Madame Alvarez pointed to a place for him beside Alice Langham, who held up her hand in welcome. "You were very foolish to rush off like that," she said. "It wasn't there," said Clay, crowding into the place beside her. "No, it was here in the carriage all the time. Captain Stuart found it for me." "Oh, he did, did he?" said Clay; "that's why I couldn't find it. I am hungry," he laughed, "my ride gave me an appetite." He looked over and grinned at Stuart, but that gentleman was staring fixedly at the candles on the table before him, his eyes filled with concern. Clay observed that Madame Alvarez was covertly watching the young officer, and frowning her disapproval at his preoccupation. So he stretched his leg under the table and kicked viciously at Stuart's boots. Old General Rojas, the Vice-President, who sat next to Stuart, moved suddenly and then blinked violently at the ceiling with an expression of patient suffering, but the exclamation which had escaped him brought Stuart back to the present, and he talked with the woman next him in a perfunctory manner. Miss Langham and her father were waiting for their carriage in the great hall of the Palace as Stuart came up to Clay, and putting his hand affectionately on his shoulder, began pointing to something farther back in the hall. To the night-birds of the streets and the noisy fiacre drivers outside, and to the crowd of guests who stood on the high marble steps waiting for their turn to depart, he might have been relating an amusing anecdote of the ball just over. "I'm in great trouble, old man," was what he said. "I must see you alone to-night. I'd ask you to my rooms, but they watch me all the time, and I don't want them to suspect you are in this until they must. Go on in the carriage, but get out as you pass the Plaza Bolivar and wait for me by the statue there." Clay smiled, apparently in great amusement. "That's very good," he said. He crossed over to where King stood surveying the powdered beauties of Olancho and their gowns of a past fashion, with an intensity of admiration which would have been suspicious to those who knew his tastes. "When we get into the carriage," said Clay, in a low voice, "we will both call to Stuart that we will see him to-morrow morning at breakfast." "All right," assented King. "What's up?" Stuart helped Miss Langham into her carriage, and as it moved away King shouted to him in English to remember that he was breakfasting with him on the morrow, and Clay called out in Spanish, "Until to-morrow at breakfast, don't forget." And Stuart answered, steadily, "Good night until to-morrow at one." As their carriage jolted through the dark and narrow street, empty now of all noise or movement, one of Stuart's troopers dashed by it at a gallop, with a lighted lantern swinging at his side. He raised it as he passed each street crossing, and held it high above his head so that its light fell upon the walls of the houses at the four corners. The clatter of his horse's hoofs had not ceased before another trooper galloped toward them riding more slowly, and throwing the light of his lantern over the trunks of the trees that lined the pavements. As the carriage passed him, he brought his horse to its side with a jerk of the bridle, and swung his lantern in the faces of its occupants. "Who lives?" he challenged. "Olancho," Clay replied. "Who answers?" "Free men," Clay answered again, and pointed at the star on his coat. The soldier muttered an apology, and striking his heels into his horse's side, dashed noisily away, his lantern tossing from side to side, high in the air, as he drew rein to scan each tree and passed from one lamp-post to the next. "What does that mean?" said Mr. Langham; "did he take us for highwaymen?" "It is the custom," said Clay. "We are out rather late, you see." "If I remember rightly, Clay," said King, "they gave a ball at Brussels on the eve of Waterloo." "I believe they did," said Clay, smiling. He spoke to the driver to stop the carriage, and stepped down into the street. "I have to leave you here," he said; "drive on quickly, please; I can explain better in the morning." The Plaza Bolivar stood in what had once been the centre of the fashionable life of Olancho, but the town had moved farther up the hill, and it was now far in the suburbs, its walks neglected and its turf overrun with weeds. The houses about it had fallen into disuse, and the few that were still occupied at the time Clay entered it showed no sign of life. Clay picked his way over the grass-grown paths to the statue of Bolivar, the hero of the sister republic of Venezuela, which still stood on its pedestal in a tangle of underbrush and hanging vines. The iron railing that had once surrounded it was broken down, and the branches of the trees near were black with sleeping buzzards. Two great palms reared themselves in the moonlight at either side, and beat their leaves together in the night wind, whispering and murmuring together like two living conspirators. "This ought to be safe enough," Clay murmured to himself. "It's just the place for plotting. I hope there are no snakes." He seated himself on the steps of the pedestal, and lighting a cigar, remained smoking and peering into the shadows about him, until a shadow blacker than the darkness rose at his feet, and a voice said, sternly, "Put out that light. I saw it half a mile away." Clay rose and crushed his cigar under his foot. "Now then, old man," he demanded briskly, "what's up? It's nearly daylight and we must hurry." Stuart seated himself heavily on the stone steps, like a man tired in mind and body, and unfolded a printed piece of paper. Its blank side was damp and sticky with paste. "It is too dark for you to see this," he began, in a strained voice, "so I will translate it to you. It is an attack on Madame Alvarez and myself. They put them up during the ball, when they knew my men would be at the Palace. I have had them scouring the streets for the last two hours tearing them down, but they are all over the place, in the cafés and clubs. They have done what they were meant to do." Clay took another cigar from his pocket and rolled it between his lips. "What does it say?" he asked. "It goes over the old ground first. It says Alvarez has given the richest birthright of his country to aliens--that means the mines and Langham--and has put an alien in command of the army--that is meant for me. I've no more to do with the army than you have--I only wish I had! And then it says that the boundary aggressions of Ecuador and Venezuela have not been resented in consequence. It asks what can be expected of a President who is as blind to the dishonor of his country as he is to the dishonor of his own home?" Clay muttered under his breath, "Well, go on. Is it explicit? More explicit than that?" "Yes," said Stuart, grimly. "I can't repeat it. It is quite clear what they mean." "Have you got any of them?" Clay asked. "Can you fix it on some one that you can fight?" "Mendoza did it, of course," Stuart answered, "but we cannot prove it. And if we could, we are not strong enough to take him. He has the city full of his men now, and the troops are pouring in every hour." "Well, Alvarez can stop that, can't he?" "They are coming in for the annual review. He can't show the people that he is afraid of his own army." "What are you going to do?" "What am I going to do?" Stuart repeated, dully. "That is what I want you to tell me. There is nothing I can do now. I've brought trouble and insult on people who have been kinder to me than my own blood have been. Who took me in when I was naked and clothed me, when I hadn't a friend or a sixpence to my name. You remember--I came here from that row in Colombia with my wound, and I was down with the fever when they found me, and Alvarez gave me the appointment. And this is how I reward them. If I stay I do more harm. If I go away I leave them surrounded by enemies, and not enemies who fight fair, but damned thieves and scoundrels, who stab at women and who fight in the dark. I wouldn't have had it happen, old man, for my right arm! They--they have been so kind to me, and I have been so happy here--and now!" The boy bowed his face in his hands and sat breathing brokenly while Clay turned his unlit cigar between his teeth and peered at him curiously through the darkness. "Now I have made them both unhappy, and they hate me, and I hate myself, and I have brought nothing but trouble to every one. First I made my own people miserable, and now I make my best friends miserable, and I had better be dead. I wish I were dead. I wish I had never been born." Clay laid his hand on the other's bowed shoulder and shook him gently. "Don't talk like that," he said; "it does no good. Why do you hate yourself?" "What?" asked Stuart, wearily, without looking up. "What did you say?" "You said you had made them hate you, and you added that you hated yourself. Well, I can see why they naturally would be angry for the time, at least. But why do you hate yourself? Have you reason to?" "I don't understand," said Stuart. "Well, I can't make it any plainer," Clay replied. "It isn't a question I will ask. But you say you want my advice. Well, my advice to my friend and to a man who is not my friend, differ. And in this case it depends on whether what that thing--" Clay kicked the paper which had fallen on the ground--"what that thing says is true." The younger man looked at the paper below him and then back at Clay, and sprang to his feet. "Why, damn you," he cried, "what do you mean?" He stood above Clay with both arms rigid at his side and his head bent forward. The dawn had just broken, and the two men saw each other in the ghastly gray light of the morning. "If any man," cried Stuart thickly, "dares to say that that blackguardly lie is true I'll kill him. You or any one else. Is that what you mean, damn you? If it is, say so, and I'll break every bone of your body." "Well, that's much better," growled Clay, sullenly. "The way you went on wishing you were dead and hating yourself made me almost lose faith in mankind. Now you go make that speech to the President, and then find the man who put up those placards, and if you can't find the right man, take any man you meet and make him eat it, paste and all, and beat him to death if he doesn't. Why, this is no time to whimper--because the world is full of liars. Go out and fight them and show them you are not afraid. Confound you, you had me so scared there that I almost thrashed you myself. Forgive me, won't you?" he begged earnestly. He rose and held out his hand and the other took it, doubtfully. "It was your own fault, you young idiot," protested Clay. "You told your story the wrong way. Now go home and get some sleep and I'll be back in a few hours to help you. Look!" he said. He pointed through the trees to the sun that shot up like a red hot disk of heat above the cool green of the mountains. "See," said Clay, "God has given us another day. Seven battles were fought in seven days once in my country. Let's be thankful, old man, that we're NOT dead, but alive to fight our own and other people's battles." The younger man sighed and pressed Clay's hand again before he dropped it. "You are very good to me," he said. "I'm not just quite myself this morning. I'm a bit nervous, I think. You'll surely come, won't you?" "By noon," Clay promised. "And if it does come," he added, "don't forget my fifteen hundred men at the mines." "Good! I won't," Stuart replied. "I'll call on you if I need them." He raised his fingers mechanically to his helmet in salute, and catching up his sword turned and strode away erect and soldierly through the debris and weeds of the deserted plaza. Clay remained motionless on the steps of the pedestal and followed the younger man with his eyes. He drew a long breath and began a leisurely search through his pockets for his match-box, gazing about him as he did so, as though looking for some one to whom he could speak his feelings. He lifted his eyes to the stern, smooth-shaven face of the bronze statue above him that seemed to be watching Stuart's departing figure. "General Bolivar," Clay said, as he lit his cigar, "observe that young man. He is a soldier and a gallant gentleman. You, sir, were a great soldier--the greatest this God-forsaken country will ever know--and you were, sir, an ardent lover. I ask you to salute that young man as I do, and to wish him well." Clay lifted his high hat to the back of the young officer as it was hidden in the hanging vines, and once again, with grave respect to the grim features of the great general above him, and then smiling at his own conceit, he ran lightly down the steps and disappeared among the trees of the plaza. IX Clay slept for three hours. He had left a note on the floor instructing MacWilliams and young Langham not to go to the mines, but to waken him at ten o'clock, and by eleven the three men were galloping off to the city. As they left the Palms they met Hope returning from a morning ride on the Alameda, and Clay begged her, with much concern, not to ride abroad again. There was a difference in his tone toward her. There was more anxiety in it than the occasion seemed to justify, and he put his request in the form of a favor to himself, while the day previous he would simply have told her that she must not go riding alone. "Why?" asked Hope, eagerly. "Is there going to be trouble?" "I hope not," Clay said, "but the soldiers are coming in from the provinces for the review, and the roads are not safe." "I'd be safe with you, though," said Hope, smiling persuasively upon the three men. "Won't you take me with you, please?" "Hope," said young Langham in the tone of the elder brother's brief authority, "you must go home at once." Hope smiled wickedly. "I don't want to," she said. "I'll bet you a box of cigars I can beat you to the veranda by fifty yards," said MacWilliams, turning his horse's head. Hope clasped her sailor hat in one hand and swung her whip with the other. "I think not," she cried, and disappeared with a flutter of skirts and a scurry of flying pebbles. "At times," said Clay, "MacWilliams shows an unexpected knowledge of human nature." "Yes, he did quite right," assented Langham, nodding his head mysteriously. "We've no time for girls at present, have we?" "No, indeed," said Clay, hiding any sign of a smile. Langham breathed deeply at the thought of the part he was to play in this coming struggle, and remained respectfully silent as they trotted toward the city. He did not wish to disturb the plots and counterplots that he was confident were forming in Clay's brain, and his devotion would have been severely tried had he known that his hero's mind was filled with a picture of a young girl in a blue shirt-waist and a whipcord riding-skirt. Clay sent for Stuart to join them at the restaurant, and MacWilliams arriving at the same time, the four men seated themselves conspicuously in the centre of the café and sipped their chocolate as though unconscious of any imminent danger, and in apparent freedom from all responsibilities and care. While MacWilliams and Langham laughed and disputed over a game of dominoes, the older men exchanged, under cover of their chatter, the few words which they had met to speak. The manifestoes, Stuart said, had failed of their purpose. He had already called upon the President, and had offered to resign his position and leave the country, or to stay and fight his maligners, and take up arms at once against Mendoza's party. Alvarez had treated him like a son, and bade him be patient. He held that Caesar's wife was above suspicion because she was Caesar's wife, and that no canards posted at midnight could affect his faith in his wife or in his friend. He refused to believe that any coup d'etat was imminent, save the one which he himself meditated when he was ready to proclaim the country in a state of revolution, and to assume a military dictatorship. "What nonsense!" exclaimed Clay. "What is a military dictatorship without soldiers? Can't he see that the army is with Mendoza?" "No," Stuart replied. "Rojas and I were with him all the morning. Rojas is an old trump, Clay. He's not bright and he's old-fashioned; but he is honest. And the people know it. If I had Rojas for a chief instead of Alvarez, I'd arrest Mendoza with my own hand, and I wouldn't be afraid to take him to the carcel through the streets. The people wouldn't help him. But the President doesn't dare. Not that he hasn't pluck," added the young lieutenant, loyally, "for he takes his life in his hands when he goes to the review tomorrow, and he knows it. Think of it, will you, out there alone with a field of five thousand men around him! Rojas thinks he can hold half of them, as many as Mendoza can, and I have my fifty. But you can't tell what any one of them will do for a drink or a dollar. They're no more soldiers than these waiters. They're bandits in uniform, and they'll kill for the man that pays best." "Then why doesn't Alvarez pay them?" Clay growled. Stuart looked away and lowered his eyes to the table. "He hasn't the money, I suppose," he said, evasively. "He--he has transferred every cent of it into drafts on Rothschild. They are at the house now, representing five millions of dollars in gold--and her jewels, too--packed ready for flight." "Then he does expect trouble?" said Clay. "You told me--" "They're all alike; you know them," said Stuart. "They won't believe they're in danger until the explosion comes, but they always have a special train ready, and they keep the funds of the government under their pillows. He engaged apartments on the Avenue Kleber six months ago." "Bah!" said Clay. "It's the old story. Why don't you quit him?" Stuart raised his eyes and dropped them again, and Clay sighed. "I'm sorry," he said. MacWilliams interrupted them in an indignant stage-whisper. "Say, how long have we got to keep up this fake game?" he asked. "I don't know anything about dominoes, and neither does Ted. Tell us what you've been saying. Is there going to be trouble? If there is, Ted and I want to be in it. We are looking for trouble." Clay had tipped back his chair, and was surveying the restaurant and the blazing plaza beyond its open front with an expression of cheerful unconcern. Two men were reading the morning papers near the door, and two others were dragging through a game of dominoes in a far corner. The heat of midday had settled on the place, and the waiters dozed, with their chairs tipped back against the walls. Outside, the awning of the restaurant threw a broad shadow across the marble-topped tables on the sidewalk, and half a dozen fiacre drivers slept peacefully in their carriages before the door. The town was taking its siesta, and the brisk step of a stranger who crossed the tessellated floor and rapped with his knuckles on the top of the cigar-case was the only sign of life. The newcomer turned with one hand on the glass case and swept the room carelessly with his eyes. They were hard blue eyes under straight eyebrows. Their owner was dressed unobtrusively in a suit of rough tweed, and this and his black hat, and the fact that he was smooth-shaven, distinguished him as a foreigner. As he faced them the forelegs of Clay's chair descended slowly to the floor, and he began to smile comprehendingly and to nod his head as though the coming of the stranger had explained something of which he had been in doubt. His companions turned and followed the direction of his eyes, but saw nothing of interest in the newcomer. He looked as though he might be a concession hunter from the States, or a Manchester drummer, prepared to offer six months' credit on blankets and hardware. Clay rose and strode across the room, circling the tables in such a way that he could keep himself between the stranger and the door. At his approach the new-comer turned his back and fumbled with his change on the counter. "Captain Burke, I believe?" said Clay. The stranger bit the cigar he had just purchased, and shook his head. "I am very glad to see you," Clay continued. "Sit down, won't you? I want to talk with you." "I think you've made a mistake," the stranger answered, quietly. "My name is--" "Colonel, perhaps, then," said Clay. "I might have known it. I congratulate you, Colonel." The man looked at Clay for an instant, with the cigar clenched between his teeth and his blue eyes fixed steadily on the other's face. Clay waved his hand again invitingly toward a table, and the man shrugged his shoulders and laughed, and, pulling a chair toward him, sat down. "Come over here, boys," Clay called. "I want you to meet an old friend of mine, Captain Burke." The man called Burke stared at the three men as they crossed the room and seated themselves at the table, and nodded to them in silence. "We have here," said Clay, gayly, but in a low voice, "the key to the situation. This is the gentleman who supplies Mendoza with the sinews of war. Captain Burke is a brave soldier and a citizen of my own or of any country, indeed, which happens to have the most sympathetic Consul-General." Burke smiled grimly, with a condescending nod, and putting away the cigar, took out a brier pipe and began to fill it from his tobacco-pouch. "The Captain is a man of few words and extremely modest about himself," Clay continued, lightly; "so I must tell you who he is myself. He is a promoter of revolutions. That is his business,--a professional promoter of revolutions, and that is what makes me so glad to see him again. He knows all about the present crisis here, and he is going to tell us all he knows as soon as he fills his pipe. I ought to warn you, Burke," he added, "that this is Captain Stuart, in charge of the police and the President's cavalry troop. So, you see, whatever you say, you will have one man who will listen to you." Burke crossed one short fat leg over the other, and crowded the tobacco in the bowl of his pipe with his thumb. "I thought you were in Chili, Clay," he said. "No, you didn't think I was in Chili," Clay replied, kindly. "I left Chili two years ago. The Captain and I met there," he explained to the others, "when Balmaceda was trying to make himself dictator. The Captain was on the side of the Congressionalists, and was furnishing arms and dynamite. The Captain is always on the winning side, at least he always has been--up to the present. He is not a creature of sentiment; are you, Burke? The Captain believes with Napoleon that God is on the side that has the heaviest artillery." Burke lighted his pipe and drummed absentmindedly on the table with his match-box. "I can't afford to be sentimental," he said. "Not in my business." "Of course not," Clay assented, cheerfully. He looked at Burke and laughed, as though the sight of him recalled pleasant memories. "I wish I could give these boys an idea of how clever you are, Captain," he said. "The Captain was the first man, for instance, to think of packing cartridges in tubs of lard, and of sending rifles in piano-cases. He represents the Welby revolver people in England, and half a dozen firms in the States, and he has his little stores in Tampa and Mobile and Jamaica, ready to ship off at a moment's notice to any revolution in Central America. When I first met the Captain," Clay continued, gleefully, and quite unmindful of the other's continued silence, "he was starting off to rescue Arabi Pasha from the island of Ceylon. You may remember, boys, that when Dufferin saved Arabi from hanging, the British shipped him to Ceylon as a political prisoner. Well, the Captain was sent by Arabi's followers in Egypt to bring him back to lead a second rebellion. Burke had everybody bribed at Ceylon, and a fine schooner fitted out and a lot of ruffians to do the fighting, and then the good, kind British Government pardoned Arabi the day before Burke arrived in port. And you never got a cent for it; did you, Burke?" Burke shook his head and frowned. "Six thousand pounds sterling I was to have got for that," he said, with a touch of pardonable pride in his voice, "and they set him free the day before I got there, just as Mr. Clay tells you." "And then you headed Granville Prior's expedition for buried treasure off the island of Cocos, didn't you?" said Clay. "Go on, tell them about it. Be sociable. You ought to write a book about your different business ventures, Burke, indeed you ought; but then," Clay added, smiling, "nobody would believe you." Burke rubbed his chin, thoughtfully, with his fingers, and looked modestly at the ceiling, and the two younger boys gazed at him with open-mouthed interest. "There ain't anything in buried treasure," he said, after a pause, "except the money that's sunk in the fitting out. It sounds good, but it's all foolishness." "All foolishness, eh?" said Clay, encouragingly. "And what did you do after Balmaceda was beaten?--after I last saw you?" "Crespo," Burke replied, after a pause, during which he pulled gently on his pipe. "'Caroline Brewer'--cleared from Key West for Curacao, with cargo of sewing-machines and ploughs--beached below Maracaibo--thirty-five thousand rounds and two thousand rifles--at twenty bolivars apiece." "Of course," said Clay, in a tone of genuine appreciation. "I might have known you'd be in that. He says," he explained, "that he assisted General Crespo in Venezuela during his revolution against Guzman Blanco's party, and loaded a tramp steamer called the 'Caroline Brewer' at Key West with arms, which he landed safely at a place for which he had no clearance papers, and he received forty thousand dollars in our money for the job--and very good pay, too, I should think," commented Clay. "Well, I don't know," Burke demurred. "You take in the cost of leasing the boat and provisioning her, and the crew's wages, and the cost of the cargo; that cuts into profits. Then I had to stand off shore between Trinidad and Curacao for over three weeks before I got the signal to run in, and after that I was chased by a gun-boat for three days, and the crazy fool put a shot clean through my engine-room. Cost me about twelve hundred dollars in repairs." There was a pause, and Clay turned his eyes to the street, and then asked, abruptly, "What are you doing now?" "Trying to get orders for smokeless powder," Burke answered, promptly. He met Clay's look with eyes as undisturbed as his own. "But they won't touch it down here," he went on. "It doesn't appeal to 'em. It's too expensive, and they'd rather see the smoke. It makes them think--" "How long did you expect to stay here?" Clay interrupted. "How long?" repeated Burke, like a man in a witness-box who is trying to gain time. "Well, I was thinking of leaving by Friday, and taking a mule-train over to Bogota instead of waiting for the steamer to Colon." He blew a mouthful of smoke into the air and watched it drifting toward the door with apparent interest. "The 'Santiago' leaves here Saturday for New York. I guess you had better wait over for her," Clay said. "I'll engage your passage, and, in the meantime, Captain Stuart here will see that they treat you well in the cuartel." The men around the table started, and sat motionless looking at Clay, but Burke only took his pipe from his mouth and knocked the ashes out on the heel of his boot. "What am I going to the cuartel for?" he asked. "Well, the public good, I suppose," laughed Clay. "I'm sorry, but it's your own fault. You shouldn't have shown yourself here at all." "What have you got to do with it?" asked Burke, calmly, as he began to refill his pipe. He had the air of a man who saw nothing before him but an afternoon of pleasant discourse and leisurely inactivity. "You know what I've got to do with it," Clay replied. "I've got our concession to look after." "Well, you're not running the town, too, are you?" asked Burke. "No, but I'm going to run you out of it," Clay answered. "Now, what are you going to do,--make it unpleasant for us and force our hand, or drive down quietly with our friend MacWilliams here? He is the best one to take you, because he's not so well known." Burke turned his head and looked over his shoulder at Stuart. "You taking orders from Mr. Clay, to-day, Captain Stuart?" he asked. "Yes," Stuart answered, smiling. "I agree with Mr. Clay in whatever he thinks right." "Oh, well, in that case," said Burke, rising reluctantly, with a protesting sigh, "I guess I'd better call on the American minister." "You can't. He's in Ecuador on his annual visit," said Clay. "Indeed! That's bad for me," muttered Burke, as though in much concern. "Well, then, I'll ask you to let me see our consul here." "Certainly," Clay assented, with alacrity. "Mr. Langham, this young gentleman's father, got him his appointment, so I've no doubt he'll be only too glad to do anything for a friend of ours." Burke raised his eyes and looked inquiringly at Clay, as though to assure himself that this was true, and Clay smiled back at him. "Oh, very well," Burke said. "Then, as I happen to be an Irishman by the name of Burke, and a British subject, I'll try Her Majesty's representative, and we'll see if he will allow me to be locked up without a reason or a warrant." "That's no good, either," said Clay, shaking his head. "You fixed your nationality, as far as this continent is concerned, in Rio harbor, when Peixoto handed you over to the British admiral, and you claimed to be an American citizen, and were sent on board the 'Detroit.' If there's any doubt about that we've only got to cable to Rio Janeiro--to either legation. But what's the use? They know me here, and they don't know you, and I do. You'll have to go to jail and stay there." "Oh, well, if you put it that way, I'll go," said Burke. "But," he added, in a lower voice, "it's too late, Clay." The expression of amusement on Clay's face, and his ease of manner, fell from him at the words, and he pulled Burke back into the chair again. "What do you mean?" he asked, anxiously. "I mean just that, it's too late," Burke answered. "I don't mind going to jail. I won't be there long. My work's all done and paid for. I was only staying on to see the fun at the finish, to see you fellows made fools of." "Oh, you're sure of that, are you?" asked Clay. "My dear boy!" exclaimed the American, with a suggestion in his speech of his Irish origin, as his interest rose. "Did you ever know me to go into anything of this sort for the sentiment of it? Did you ever know me to back the losing side? No. Well, I tell you that you fellows have no more show in this than a parcel of Sunday-school children. Of course I can't say when they mean to strike. I don't know, and I wouldn't tell you if I did. But when they do strike there'll be no striking back. It'll be all over but the cheering." Burke's tone was calm and positive. He held the centre of the stage now, and he looked from one to the other of the serious faces around him with an expression of pitying amusement. "Alvarez may get off, and so may Madame Alvarez," he added, lowering his voice and turning his face away from Stuart. "But not if she shows herself in the streets, and not if she tries to take those drafts and jewels with her." "Oh, you know that, do you?" interrupted Clay. "I know nothing," Burke replied. "At least, nothing to what the rest of them know. That's only the gossip I pick up at headquarters. It doesn't concern me. I've delivered my goods and given my receipt for the money, and that's all I care about. But if it will make an old friend feel any more comfortable to have me in jail, why, I'll go, that's all." Clay sat with pursed lips looking at Stuart. The two boys leaned with their elbows on the tables and stared at Burke, who was searching leisurely through his pockets for his match-box. From outside came the lazy cry of a vendor of lottery tickets, and the swift, uneven patter of bare feet, as company after company of dust-covered soldiers passed on their way from the provinces, with their shoes swinging from their bayonets. Clay slapped the table with an exclamation of impatience. "After all, this is only a matter of business," he said, "with all of us. What do you say, Burke, to taking a ride with me to Stuart's rooms, and having a talk there with the President and Mr. Langham? Langham has three millions sunk in these mines, and Alvarez has even better reasons than that for wanting to hold his job. What do you say? That's better than going to jail. Tell us what they mean to do, and who is to do it, and I'll let you name your own figure, and I'll guarantee you that they'll meet it. As long as you've no sentiment, you might as well fight on the side that will pay best." Burke opened his lips as though to speak, and then shut them again, closely. If the others thought that he was giving Clay's proposition a second and more serious thought, he was quick to undeceive them. "There ARE men in the business who do that sort of thing," he said. "They sell arms to one man, and sell the fact that he's got them to the deputy-marshals, and sell the story of how smart they've been to the newspapers. And they never make any more sales after that. I'd look pretty, wouldn't I, bringing stuff into this country, and getting paid for it, and then telling you where it was hid, and everything else I knew? I've no sentiment, as you say, but I've got business instinct, and that's not business. No, I've told you enough, and if you think I'm not safe at large, why I'm quite ready to take a ride with your young friend here." MacWilliams rose with alacrity, and beaming with pleasure at the importance of the duty thrust upon him. Burke smiled. "The young 'un seems to like the job," he said. "It's an honor to be associated with Captain Burke in any way," said MacWilliams, as he followed him into a cab, while Stuart galloped off before them in the direction of the cuartel. "You wouldn't think so if you knew better," said Burke. "My friends have been watching us while we have been talking in there for the last hour. They're watching us now, and if I were to nod my head during this ride, they'd throw you out into the street and set me free, if they had to break the cab into kindling-wood while they were doing it." MacWilliams changed his seat to the one opposite his prisoner, and peered up and down the street in some anxiety. "I suppose you know there's an answer to that, don't you?" he asked. "Well, the answer is, that if you nod your head once, you lose the top of it." Burke gave an exclamation of disgust, and gazed at his zealous guardian with an expression of trepidation and unconcealed disapproval. "You're not armed, are you?" he asked. MacWilliams nodded. "Why not?" he said; "these are rather heavy weather times, just at present, thanks to you and your friends. Why, you seem rather afraid of fire-arms," he added, with the intolerance of youth. The Irish-American touched the young man on the knee, and lifted his hat. "My son," he said, "when your hair is as gray as that, and you have been through six campaigns, you'll be brave enough to own that you're afraid of fire-arms, too." X Clay and Langham left MacWilliams and Stuart to look after their prisoner, and returned to the Palms, where they dined in state, and made no reference, while the women were present, to the events of the day. The moon rose late that night, and as Hope watched it, from where she sat at the dinner-table facing the open windows, she saw the figure of a man standing outlined in silhouette upon the edge of the cliff. He was dressed in the uniform of a sailor, and the moonlight played along the barrel of a rifle upon which he leaned, motionless and menacing, like a sentry on a rampart. Hope opened her lips to speak, and then closed them again, and smiled with pleasurable excitement. A moment later King, who sat on her right, called one of the servants to his side and whispered some instructions, pointing meanwhile at the wine upon the table. And a minute after, Hope saw the white figure of the servant cross the garden and approach the sentinel. She saw the sentry fling his gun sharply to his hip, and then, after a moment's parley, toss it up to his shoulder and disappear from sight among the plants of the garden. The men did not leave the table with the ladies, as was their custom, but remained in the dining-room, and drew their chairs closer together. Mr. Langham would not believe that the downfall of the Government was as imminent as the others believed it to be. It was only after much argument, and with great reluctance, that he had even allowed King to arm half of his crew, and to place them on guard around the Palms. Clay warned him that in the disorder that followed every successful revolution, the homes of unpopular members of the Cabinet were often burned, and that he feared, should Mendoza succeed, and Alvarez fall, that the mob might possibly vent its victorious wrath on the Palms because it was the home of the alien, who had, as they thought, robbed the country of the iron mines. Mr. Langham said he did not think the people would tramp five miles into the country seeking vengeance. There was an American man-of-war lying in the harbor of Truxillo, a seaport of the republic that bounded Olancho on the south, and Clay was in favor of sending to her captain by Weimer, the Consul, and asking him to anchor off Valencia, to protect American interests. The run would take but a few hours, and the sight of the vessel's white hull in the harbor would, he thought, have a salutary effect upon the revolutionists. But Mr. Langham said, firmly, that he would not ask for help until he needed it. "Well, I'm sorry," said Clay. "I should very much like to have that man-of-war here. However, if you say no, we will try to get along without her. But, for the present, I think you had better imagine yourself back in New York, and let us have an entirely free hand. We've gone too far to drop out," he went on, laughing at the sight of Mr. Langham's gloomy countenance. "We've got to fight them now. It's against human nature not to do it." Mr. Langham looked appealingly at his son and at King. They both smiled back at him in unanimous disapproval of his policy of non-interference. "Oh, very well," he said, at last. "You gentlemen can go ahead, kill, burn, and destroy if you wish. But, considering the fact that it is my property you are all fighting about, I really think I might have something to say in the matter." Mr. Langham gazed about him helplessly, and shook his head. "My doctor sends me down here from a quiet, happy home," he protested, with humorous pathos, "that I may rest and get away from excitement, and here I am with armed men patrolling my garden-paths, with a lot of filibusters plotting at my own dinner-table, and a civil war likely to break out, entirely on my account. And Dr. Winter told me this was the only place that would cure my nervous prostration!" Hope joined Clay as soon as the men left the dining-room, and beckoned him to the farther end of the veranda. "Well, what is it?" she said. "What is what?" laughed Clay. He seated himself on the rail of the veranda, with his face to the avenue and the driveway leading to the house. They could hear the others from the back of the house, and the voice of young Langham, who was giving an imitation of MacWilliams, and singing with peculiar emphasis, "There is no place like Home, Sweet Home." "Why are the men guarding the Palms, and why did you go to the Plaza Bolivar this morning at daybreak? Alice says you left them there. I want to know what it means. I am nearly as old as Ted, and he knows. The men wouldn't tell me." "What men?" "King's men from the 'Vesta'. I saw some of them dodging around in the bushes, and I went to find out what they were doing, and I walked into fifteen of them at your office. They have hammocks swung all over the veranda, and a quick-firing gun made fast to the steps, and muskets stacked all about, just like real soldiers, but they wouldn't tell me why." "We'll put you in the carcel," said Clay, "if you go spying on our forces. Your father doesn't wish you to know anything about it, but, since you have found it out for yourself, you might as well know what little there is to know. It's the same story. Mendoza is getting ready to start his revolution, or, rather, he has started it." "Why don't you stop him?" asked Hope. "You are very flattering," said Clay. "Even if I could stop him, it's not my business to do it as yet. I have to wait until he interferes with me, or my mines, or my workmen. Alvarez is the man who should stop him, but he is afraid. We cannot do anything until he makes the first move. If I were the President, I'd have Mendoza shot to-morrow morning and declare martial law. Then I'd arrest everybody I didn't like, and levy forced loans on all the merchants, and sail away to Paris and live happy ever after. That's what Mendoza would do if he caught any one plotting against him. And that's what Alvarez should do, too, according to his lights, if he had the courage of his convictions, and of his education. I like to see a man play his part properly, don't you? If you are an emperor, you ought to conduct yourself like one, as our German friend does. Or if you are a prize-fighter, you ought to be a human bulldog. There's no such thing as a gentlemanly pugilist, any more than there can be a virtuous burglar. And if you're a South American Dictator, you can't afford to be squeamish about throwing your enemies into jail or shooting them for treason. The way to dictate is to dictate,--not to hide indoors all day while your wife plots for you." "Does she do that?" asked Hope. "And do you think she will be in danger--any personal danger, if the revolution comes?" "Well, she is very unpopular," Clay answered, "and unjustly so, I think. But it would be better, perhaps, for her if she went as quietly as possible, when she does go." "Is our Captain Stuart in danger, too?" the girl continued, anxiously. "Alice says they put up placards about him all over the city last night. She saw his men tearing them down as she was coming home. What has he done?" "Nothing," Clay answered, shortly. "He happens to be in a false position, that's all. They think he is here because he is not wanted in his own country; that is not so. That is not the reason he remains here. When he was even younger than he is now, he was wild and foolish, and spent more money than he could afford, and lent more money to his brother-officers, I have no doubt, than they ever paid back. He had to leave the regiment because his father wouldn't pay his debts, and he has been selling his sword for the last three years to one or another king or sultan or party all over the world, in China and Madagascar, and later in Siam. I hope you will be very kind to Stuart and believe well of him, and that you will listen to no evil against him. Somewhere in England Stuart has a sister like you--about your age, I mean, that loves him very dearly, and a father whose heart aches for him, and there is a certain royal regiment that still drinks his health with pride. He is a lonely little chap, and he has no sense of humor to help him out of his difficulties, but he is a very brave gentleman. And he is here fighting for men who are not worthy to hold his horse's bridle, because of a woman. And I tell you this because you will hear many lies about him--and about her. He serves her with the same sort of chivalric devotion that his ancestors felt for the woman whose ribbons they tied to their lances, and for whom they fought in the lists." "I understand," Hope said, softly. "I am glad you told me. I shall not forget." She sighed and shook her head. "I wish they'd let you manage it for them," she said. Clay laughed. "I fear my executive ability is not of so high an order; besides, as I haven't been born to it, my conscience might trouble me if I had to shoot my enemies and rob the worthy merchants. I had better stick to digging holes in the ground. That is all I seem to be good for." Hope looked up at him, quickly, in surprise. "What do you mean by that?" she demanded. There was a tone of such sharp reproach in her voice that Clay felt himself put on the defensive. "I mean nothing by it," he said. "Your sister and I had a talk the other day about a man's making the best of himself, and it opened my eyes to--to many things. It was a very healthy lesson." "It could not have been a very healthy lesson," Hope replied, severely, "if it makes you speak of your work slightingly, as you did then. That didn't sound at all natural, or like you. It sounded like Alice. Tell me, did Alice say that?" The pleasure of hearing Hope take his part against himself was so comforting to Clay that he hesitated in answering in order to enjoy it the longer. Her enthusiasm touched him deeply, and he wondered if she were enthusiastic because she was young, or because she was sure she was right, and that he was in the wrong. "It started this way," Clay began, carefully. He was anxious to be quite fair to Miss Langham, but he found it difficult to give her point of view correctly, while he was hungering for a word that would re-establish him in his own good opinion. "Your sister said she did not think very much of what I had done, but she explained kindly that she hoped for better things from me. But what troubles me is, that I will never do anything much better or very different in kind from the work I have done lately, and so I am a bit discouraged about it in consequence. You see," said Clay, "when I come to die, and they ask me what I have done with my ten fingers, I suppose I will have to say, 'Well, I built such and such railroads, and I dug up so many tons of ore, and opened new countries, and helped make other men rich.' I can't urge in my behalf that I happen to have been so fortunate as to have gained the good-will of yourself or your sister. That is quite reason enough to me, perhaps, for having lived, but it might not appeal to them. I want to feel that I have accomplished something outside of myself--something that will remain after I go. Even if it is only a breakwater or a patent coupling. When I am dead it will not matter to any one what I personally was, whether I was a bore or a most charming companion, or whether I had red hair or blue. It is the work that will tell. And when your sister, whose judgment is the judgment of the outside world, more or less, says that the work is not worth while, I naturally feel a bit discouraged. It meant so much to me, and it hurt me to find it meant so little to others." Hope remained silent for some time, but the rigidity of her attitude, and the tightness with which she pressed her lips together, showed that her mind was deeply occupied. They both sat silent for some few moments, looking down toward the distant lights of the city. At the farther end of the double row of bushes that lined the avenue they could see one of King's sentries passing to and fro across the roadway, a long black shadow on the moonlit road. "You are very unfair to yourself," the girl said at last, "and Alice does not represent the opinion of the world, only of a very small part of it--her own little world. She does not know how little it is. And you are wrong as to what they will ask you at the end. What will they care whether you built railroads or painted impressionist pictures? They will ask you 'What have you made of yourself? Have you been fine, and strong, and sincere?' That is what they will ask. And we like you because you are all of these things, and because you look at life so cheerfully, and are unafraid. We do not like men because they build railroads, or because they are prime ministers. We like them for what they are themselves. And as to your work!" Hope added, and then paused in eloquent silence. "I think it is a grand work, and a noble work, full of hardships and self-sacrifices. I do not know of any man who has done more with his life than you have done with yours." She stopped and controlled her voice before she spoke again. "You should be very proud," she said. Clay lowered his eyes and sat silent, looking down the roadway. The thought that the girl felt what she said so deeply, and that the fact that she had said it meant more to him than anything else in the world could mean, left him thrilled and trembling. He wanted to reach out his hand and seize both of hers, and tell her how much she was to him, but it seemed like taking advantage of the truths of a confessional, or of a child's innocent confidences. "No, Miss Hope," he answered, with an effort to speak lightly, "I wish I could believe you, but I know myself better than any one else can, and I know that while my bridges may stand examination--_I_ can't." Hope turned and looked at him with eyes full of such sweet meaning that he was forced to turn his own away. "I could trust both, I think," the girl said. Clay drew a quick, deep breath, and started to his feet, as though he had thrown off the restraint under which he had held himself. It was not a girl, but a woman who had spoken then, but, though he turned eagerly toward her, he stood with his head bowed, and did not dare to read the verdict in her eyes. The clatter of horses' hoofs coming toward them at a gallop broke in rudely upon the tense stillness of the moment, but neither noticed it. "How far," Clay began, in a strained voice, "how far," he asked, more steadily, "could you trust me?" Hope's eyes had closed for an instant, and opened again, and she smiled upon him with a look of perfect confidence and content. The beat of the horses' hoofs came now from the end of the driveway, and they could hear the men at the rear of the house pushing back their chairs and hurrying toward them. Hope raised her head, and Clay moved toward her eagerly. The horses were within a hundred yards. Before Hope could speak, the sentry's voice rang out in a hoarse, sharp challenge, like an alarm of fire on the silent night. "Halt!" they heard him cry. And as the horses tore past him, and their riders did not turn to look, he shouted again, "Halt, damn you!" and fired. The flash showed a splash of red and yellow in the moonlight, and the report started into life hundreds of echoes which carried it far out over the waters of the harbor, and tossed it into sharp angles, and distant corners, and in an instant a myriad of sounds answered it; the frightened cry of night-birds, the barking of dogs in the village below, and the footsteps of men running. Clay glanced angrily down the avenue, and turned beseechingly to Hope. "Go," she said. "See what is wrong," and moved away as though she already felt that he could act more freely when she was not near him. The two horses fell back on their haunches before the steps, and MacWilliams and Stuart tumbled out of their saddles, and started, running back on foot in the direction from which the shot had come, tugging at their revolvers. "Come back," Clay shouted to them. "That's all right. He was only obeying orders. That's one of King's sentries." "Oh, is that it?" said Stuart, in matter-of-fact tones, as he turned again to the house. "Good idea. Tell him to fire lower next time. And, I say," he went on, as he bowed curtly to the assembled company on the veranda, "since you have got a picket out, you had better double it. And, Clay, see that no one leaves here without permission--no one. That's more important, even, than keeping them out." "King, will you--" Clay began. "All right, General," laughed King, and walked away to meet his sailors, who came running up the hill in great anxiety. MacWilliams had not opened his lips, but he was bristling with importance, and his effort to appear calm and soldierly, like Stuart, told more plainly than speech that he was the bearer of some invaluable secret. The sight filled young Langham with a disquieting fear that he had missed something. Stuart looked about him, and pulled briskly at his gauntlets. King and his sailors were grouped together on the grass before the house. Mr. Langham and his daughters, and Clay, were standing on the steps, and the servants were peering around the corners of the house. Stuart saluted Mr. Langham, as though to attract his especial attention, and then addressed himself in a low tone to Clay. "It's come," he said. "We've been in it since dinner-time, and we've got a whole night's work cut out for you." He was laughing with excitement, and paused for a moment to gain breath. "I'll tell you the worst of it first. Mendoza has sent word to Alvarez that he wants the men at the mines to be present at the review to-morrow. He says they must take part. He wrote a most insolent letter. Alvarez got out of it by saying that the men were under contract to you, and that you must give your permission first. Mendoza sent me word that if you would not let the men come, he would go out and fetch them in him self." "Indeed!" growled Clay. "Kirkland needs those men to-morrow to load ore-cars for Thursday's steamer. He can't spare them. That is our answer, and it happens to be a true one, but if it weren't true, if to-morrow was All Saints' Day, and the men had nothing to do but to lie in the sun and sleep, Mendoza couldn't get them. And if he comes to take them to-morrow, he'll have to bring his army with him to do it. And he couldn't do it then, Mr. Langham," Clay cried, turning to that gentleman, "if I had better weapons. The five thousand dollars I wanted you to spend on rifles, sir, two months ago, might have saved you several millions to-morrow." Clay's words seemed to bear some special significance to Stuart and MacWilliams, for they both laughed, and Stuart pushed Clay up the steps before him. "Come inside," he said. "That is why we are here. MacWilliams has found out where Burke hid his shipment of arms. We are going to try and get them to-night." He hurried into the dining-room, and the others grouped themselves about the table. "Tell them about it, MacWilliams," Stuart commanded. "I will see that no one overhears you." MacWilliams was pushed into Mr. Langham's place at the head of the long table, and the others dragged their chairs up close around him. King put the candles at the opposite end of the table, and set some decanters and glasses in the centre. "To look as though we were just enjoying ourselves," he explained, pleasantly. Mr. Langham, with his fine, delicate fingers beating nervously on the table, observed the scene as an on-looker, rather than as the person chiefly interested. He smiled as he appreciated the incongruity of the tableau, and the contrast which the actors presented to the situation. He imagined how much it would amuse his contemporaries of the Union Club, at home, if they could see him then, with the still, tropical night outside, the candles reflected on the polished table and on the angles of the decanters, and showing the intent faces of the young girls and the men leaning eagerly forward around MacWilliams, who sat conscious and embarrassed, his hair dishevelled, and his face covered with dust, while Stuart paced up and down in the shadow, his sabre clanking as he walked. "Well, it happened like this," MacWilliams began, nervously, and addressing himself to Clay. "Stuart and I put Burke safely in a cell by himself. It was one of the old ones that face the street. There was a narrow window in it, about eight feet above the floor, and no means of his reaching it, even if he stood on a chair. We stationed two troopers before the door, and sent out to a café across the street for our dinners. I finished mine about nine o'clock, and said 'Good night' to Stuart, and started to come out here. I went across the street first, however, to give the restaurant man some orders about Burke's breakfast. It is a narrow street, you know, with a long garden-wall and a row of little shops on one side, and with the jail-wall taking up all of the other side. The street was empty when I left the jail, except for the sentry on guard in front of it, but just as I was leaving the restaurant I saw one of Stuart's police come out and peer up and down the street and over at the shops. He looked frightened and anxious, and as I wasn't taking chances on anything, I stepped back into the restaurant and watched him through the window. He waited until the sentry had turned his back, and started away from him on his post, and then I saw him drop his sabre so that it rang on the sidewalk. He was standing, I noticed then, directly under the third window from the door of the jail. That was the window of Burke's cell. When I grasped that fact I got out my gun and walked to the door of the restaurant. Just as I reached it a piece of paper shot out through the bars of Burke's cell and fell at the policeman's feet, and he stamped his boot down on it and looked all around again to see if any one had noticed him. I thought that was my cue, and I ran across the street with my gun pointed, and shouted to him to give me the paper. He jumped about a foot when he first saw me, but he was game, for he grabbed up the paper and stuck it in his mouth and began to chew on it. I was right up on him then, and I hit him on the chin with my left fist and knocked him down against the wall, and dropped on him with both knees and choked him till I made him spit out the paper--and two teeth," MacWilliams added, with a conscientious regard for details. "The sentry turned just then and came at me with his bayonet, but I put my finger to my lips, and that surprised him, so that he didn't know just what to do, and hesitated. You see, I didn't want Burke to hear the row outside, so I grabbed my policeman by the collar and pointed to the jail-door, and the sentry ran back and brought out Stuart and the guard. Stuart was pretty mad when he saw his policeman all bloody. He thought it would prejudice his other men against us, but I explained out loud that the man had been insolent, and I asked Stuart to take us both to his private room for a hearing, and, of course, when I told him what had happened, he wanted to punch the chap, too. We put him ourselves into a cell where he could not communicate with any one, and then we read the paper. Stuart has it," said MacWilliams, pushing back his chair, "and he'll tell you the rest." There was a pause, in which every one seemed to take time to breathe, and then a chorus of questions and explanations. King lifted his glass to MacWilliams, and nodded. "'Well done, Condor,'" he quoted, smiling. "Yes," said Clay, tapping the younger man on the shoulder as he passed him. "That's good work. Now show us the paper, Stuart." Stuart pulled the candles toward him, and spread a slip of paper on the table. "Burke did this up in one of those paper boxes for wax matches," he explained, "and weighted it with a twenty-dollar gold piece. MacWilliams kept the gold piece, I believe." "Going to use it for a scarf-pin," explained MacWilliams, in parenthesis. "Sort of war-medal, like the Chief's," he added, smiling. "This is in Spanish," Stuart explained. "I will translate it. It is not addressed to any one, and it is not signed, but it was evidently written to Mendoza, and we know it is in Burke's handwriting, for we compared it with some notes of his that we took from him before he was locked up. He says, 'I cannot keep the appointment, as I have been arrested.' The line that follows here," Stuart explained, raising his head, "has been scratched out, but we spent some time over it, and we made out that it read: 'It was Mr. Clay who recognized me, and ordered my arrest. He is the best man the others have. Watch him.' We think he rubbed that out through good feeling toward Clay. There seems to be no other reason. He's a very good sort, this old Burke, I think." "Well, never mind him; it was very decent of him, anyway," said Clay. "Go on. Get to Hecuba." "'I cannot keep the appointment, as I have been arrested,'" repeated Stuart. "'I landed the goods last night in safety. I could not come in when first signalled, as the wind and tide were both off shore. But we got all the stuff stored away by morning. Your agent paid me in full and got my receipt. Please consider this as the same thing--as the equivalent'--it is difficult to translate it exactly," commented Stuart--"'as the equivalent of the receipt I was to have given when I made my report to-night. I sent three of your guards away on my own responsibility, for I think more than that number might attract attention to the spot, and they might be seen from the ore-trains.' That is the point of the note for us, of course," Stuart interrupted himself to say. "Burke adds," he went on, "'that they are to make no effort to rescue him, as he is quite comfortable, and is willing to remain in the carcel until they are established in power.'" "Within sight of the ore-trains!" exclaimed Clay. "There are no ore-trains but ours. It must be along the line of the road." "MacWilliams says he knows every foot of land along the railroad," said Stuart, "and he is sure the place Burke means is the old fortress on the Platta inlet, because--" "It is the only place," interrupted MacWilliams, "where there is no surf. They could run small boats up the inlet and unload in smooth water within twenty feet of the ramparts; and another thing, that is the only point on the line with a wagon road running direct from it to the Capital. It's an old road, and hasn't been travelled over for years, but it could be used. No," he added, as though answering the doubt in Clay's mind, "there is no other place. If I had a map here I could show you in a minute; where the beach is level there is a jungle between it and the road, and wherever there is open country, there is a limestone formation and rocks between it and the sea, where no boat could touch." "But the fortress is so conspicuous," Clay demurred; "the nearest rampart is within twenty feet of the road. Don't you remember we measured it when we thought of laying the double track?" "That is just what Burke says," urged Stuart. "That is the reason he gives for leaving only three men on guard--'I think more than that number might attract attention to the spot, as they might be seen from the ore-trains.'" "Have you told any one of this?" Clay asked. "What have you done so far?" "We've done nothing," said Stuart. "We lost our nerve when we found out how much we knew, and we decided we'd better leave it to you." "Whatever we do must be done at once," said Clay. "They will come for the arms to-night, most likely, and we must be there first. I agree with you entirely about the place. It is only a question now of our being on time. There are two things to do. The first thing is, to keep them from getting the arms, and the second is, if we are lucky, to secure them for ourselves. If we can pull it off properly, we ought to have those rifles in the mines before midnight. If we are hurried or surprised, we must dump them off the fort into the sea." Clay laughed and looked about him at the men. "We are only following out General Bolivar's saying 'When you want arms take them from the enemy.' Now, there are three places we must cover. This house, first of all," he went on, inclining his head quickly toward the two sisters, "then the city, and the mines. Stuart's place, of course, is at the Palace. King must take care of this house and those in it, and MacWilliams and Langham and I must look after the arms. We must organize two parties, and they had better approach the fort from here and from the mines at the same time. I will need you to do some telegraphing for me, Mac; and, King, I must ask you for some more men from the yacht. How many have you?" King answered that there were fifteen men still on board, ten of whom would be of service. He added that they were all well equipped for fighting. "I believe King's a pirate in business hours," Clay said, smiling. "All right, that's good. Now go tell ten of them to meet me at the round-house in half an hour. I will get MacWilliams to telegraph Kirkland to run an engine and flat cars to within a half mile of the fort on the north, and we will come up on it with the sailors and Ted, here, from the south. You must run the engine yourself, MacWilliams, and perhaps it would be better, King, if your men joined us at the foot of the grounds here and not at the round-house. None of the workmen must see our party start. Do you agree with me?" he asked, turning to those in the group about him. "Has anybody any criticism to make?" Stuart and King looked at one another ruefully and laughed. "I don't see what good I am doing in town," protested Stuart. "Yes, and I don't see where I come in, either," growled King, in aggrieved tones. "These youngsters can't do it all; besides I ought to have charge of my own men." "Mutiny," said Clay, in some perplexity, "rank mutiny. Why, it's only a picnic. There are but three men there. We don't need sixteen white men to frighten off three Olanchoans." "I'll tell you what to do," cried Hope, with the air of having discovered a plan which would be acceptable to every one, "let's all go." "Well, I certainly mean to go," said Mr. Langham, decidedly. "So some one else must stay here. Ted, you will have to look after your sisters." The son and heir smiled upon his parent with a look of affectionate wonder, and shook his head at him in fond and pitying disapproval. "I'll stay," said King. "I have never seen such ungallant conduct. Ladies," he said, "I will protect your lives and property, and we'll invent something exciting to do ourselves, even if we have to bombard the Capital." The men bade the women good-night, and left them with King and Mr. Langham, who had been persuaded to remain overnight, while Stuart rode off to acquaint Alvarez and General Rojas with what was going on. XI There was no chance for Clay to speak to Hope again, though he felt the cruelty of having to leave her with everything between them in this interrupted state. But their friends stood about her, interested and excited over this expedition of smuggled arms, unconscious of the great miracle that had come into his life and of his need to speak to and to touch the woman who had wrought it. Clay felt how much more binding than the laws of life are the little social conventions that must be observed at times, even though the heart is leaping with joy or racked with sorrow. He stood within a few feet of the woman he loved, wanting to cry out at her and to tell her all the wonderful things which he had learned were true for the first time that night, but he was forced instead to keep his eyes away from her face and to laugh and answer questions, and at the last to go away content with having held her hand for an instant, and to have heard her say "good-luck." MacWilliams called Kirkland to the office at the other end of the Company's wire, and explained the situation to him. He was instructed to run an engine and freight-cars to a point a quarter of a mile north of the fort, and to wait there until he heard a locomotive whistle or pistol shots, when he was to run on to the fort as quickly and as noiselessly as possible. He was also directed to bring with him as many of the American workmen as he could trust to keep silent concerning the events of the evening. At ten o'clock MacWilliams had the steam up in a locomotive, and with his only passenger-car in the rear, ran it out of the yard and stopped the train at the point nearest the cars where ten of the 'Vesta's' crew were waiting. The sailors had no idea as to where they were going, or what they were to do, but the fact that they had all been given arms filled them with satisfaction, and they huddled together at the bottom of the car smoking and whispering, and radiant with excitement and satisfaction. The train progressed cautiously until it was within a half mile below the fort, when Clay stopped it, and, leaving two men on guard, stepped off the remaining distance on the ties, his little band following noiselessly behind him like a procession of ghosts in the moonlight. They halted and listened from time to time as they drew near the ruins, but there was no sound except the beating of the waves on the rocks and the rustling of the sea-breeze through the vines and creepers about them. Clay motioned to the men to sit down, and, beckoning to MacWilliams, directed him to go on ahead and reconnoitre. "If you fire we will come up," he said. "Get back here as soon as you can." "Aren't you going to make sure first that Kirkland is on the other side of the fort?" MacWilliams whispered. Clay replied that he was certain Kirkland had already arrived. "He had a shorter run than ours, and he wired you he was ready to start when we were, didn't he?" MacWilliams nodded. "Well, then, he is there. I can count on Kirk." MacWilliams pulled at his heavy boots and hid them in the bushes, with his helmet over them to mark the spot. "I feel as though I was going to rob a bank," he chuckled, as he waved his hand and crept off into the underbrush. For the first few moments the men who were left behind sat silent, but as the minutes wore on, and MacWilliams made no sign, they grew restless, and shifted their positions, and began to whisper together, until Clay shook his head at them, and there was silence again until one of them, in trying not to cough, almost strangled, and the others tittered and those nearest pummelled him on the back. Clay pulled out his revolver, and after spinning the cylinder under his finger-nail, put it back in its holder again, and the men, taking this as an encouraging promise of immediate action, began to examine their weapons again for the twentieth time, and there was a chorus of short, muffled clicks as triggers were drawn back and cautiously lowered and levers shot into place and caught again. One of the men farthest down the track raised his arm, and all turned and half rose as they saw MacWilliams coming toward them on a run, leaping noiselessly in his stocking feet from tie to tie. He dropped on his knees between Clay and Langham. "The guns are there all right," he whispered, panting, "and there are only three men guarding them. They are all sitting on the beach smoking. I hustled around the fort and came across the whole outfit in the second gallery. It looks like a row of coffins, ten coffins and about twenty little boxes and kegs. I'm sure that means they are coming for them to-night. They've not tried to hide them nor to cover them up. All we've got to do is to walk down on the guards and tell them to throw up their hands. It's too easy." Clay jumped to his feet. "Come on," he said. "Wait till I get my boots on first," begged MacWilliams. "I wouldn't go over those cinders again in my bare feet for all the buried treasure in the Spanish Main. You can make all the noise you want; the waves will drown it." With MacWilliams to show them the way, the men scrambled up the outer wall of the fort and crossed the moss-covered ramparts at the run. Below them, on the sandy beach, were three men sitting around a driftwood fire that had sunk to a few hot ashes. Clay nodded to MacWilliams. "You and Ted can have them," he said. "Go with him, Langham." The sailors levelled their rifles at the three lonely figures on the beach as the two boys slipped down the wall and fell on their hands and feet in the sand below, and then crawled up to within a few feet of where the men were sitting. As MacWilliams raised his revolver one of the three, who was cooking something over the fire, raised his head and with a yell of warning flung himself toward his rifle. "Up with your hands!" MacWilliams shouted in Spanish, and Langham, running in, seized the nearest sentry by the neck and shoved his face down between his knees into the sand. There was a great rattle of falling stones and of breaking vines as the sailors tumbled down the side of the fort, and in a half minute's time the three sentries were looking with angry, frightened eyes at the circle of armed men around them. "Now gag them," said Clay. "Does anybody here know how to gag a man?" he asked. "I don't." "Better make him tell what he knows first," suggested Langham. But the Spaniards were too terrified at what they had done, or at what they had failed to do, to further commit themselves. "Tie us and gag us," one of them begged. "Let them find us so. It is the kindest thing you can do for us." "Thank you, sir," said Clay. "That is what I wanted to know. They are coming to-night, then. We must hurry." The three sentries were bound and hidden at the base of the wall, with a sailor to watch them. He was a young man with a high sense of the importance of his duties, and he enlivened the prisoners by poking them in the ribs whenever they moved. Clay deemed it impossible to signal Kirkland as they had arranged to do, as they could not know now how near those who were coming for the arms might be. So MacWilliams was sent back for his engine, and a few minutes later they heard it rumble heavily past the fort on its way to bring up Kirkland and the flat cars. Clay explored the lower chambers of the fort and found the boxes as MacWilliams had described them. Ten men, with some effort, could lift and carry the larger coffin-shaped boxes, and Clay guessed that, granting their contents to be rifles, there must be a hundred pieces in each box, and that there were a thousand rifles in all. They had moved half of the boxes to the side of the track when the train of flat cars and the two engines came crawling and twisting toward them, between the walls of the jungle, like a great serpent, with no light about it but the glow from the hot ashes as they fell between the rails. Thirty men, equally divided between Irish and negroes, fell off the flat cars before the wheels had ceased to revolve, and, without a word of direction, began loading the heavy boxes on the train and passing the kegs of cartridges from hand to hand and shoulder to shoulder. The sailors spread out up the road that led to the Capital to give warning in case the enemy approached, but they were recalled before they had reason to give an alarm, and in a half hour Burke's entire shipment of arms was on the ore-cars, the men who were to have guarded them were prisoners in the cab of the engine, and both trains were rushing at full speed toward the mines. On arriving there Kirkland's train was switched to the siding that led to the magazine in which was stored the rack-arock and dynamite used in the blasting. By midnight all of the boxes were safely under lock in the zinc building, and the number of the men who always guarded the place for fear of fire or accident was doubled, while a reserve, composed of Kirkland's thirty picked men, were hidden in the surrounding houses and engine-sheds. Before Clay left he had one of the boxes broken open, and found that it held a hundred Mannlicher rifles. "Good!" he said. "I'd give a thousand dollars in gold if I could bring Mendoza out here and show him his own men armed with his own Mannlichers and dying for a shot at him. How old Burke will enjoy this when he hears of it!" The party from the Palms returned to their engine after many promises of reward to the men for their work "over-time," and were soon flying back with their hearts as light as the smoke above them. MacWilliams slackened speed as they neared the fort, and moved up cautiously on the scene of their recent victory, but a warning cry from Clay made him bring his engine to a sharp stop. Many lights were flashing over the ruins and they could see in their reflection the figures of men running over the same walls on which the lizards had basked in undisturbed peace for years. "They look like a swarm of hornets after some one has chucked a stone through their nest," laughed MacWilliams. "What shall we do now? Go back, or wait here, or run the blockade?" "Oh, ride them out," said Langham; "the family's anxious, and I want to tell them what's happened. Go ahead." Clay turned to the sailors in the car behind them. "Lie down, men," he said. "And don't any of you fire unless I tell you to. Let them do all the shooting. This isn't our fight yet, and, besides, they can't hit a locomotive standing still, certainly not when it's going at full speed." "Suppose they've torn the track up?" said MacWilliams, grinning. "We'd look sort of silly flying through the air." "Oh, they've not sense enough to think of that," said Clay. "Besides, they don't know it was we who took their arms away, yet." MacWilliams opened the throttle gently, and the train moved slowly forward, gaining speed at each revolution of the wheels. As the noise of its approach beat louder and louder on the air, a yell of disappointed rage and execration rose into the night from the fort, and a mass of soldiers swarmed upon the track, leaping up and down and shaking the rifles in their hands. "That sounds a little as though they thought we had something to do with it," said MacWilliams, grimly. "If they don't look out some one will get hurt." There was a flash of fire from where the mass of men stood, followed by a dozen more flashes, and the bullets rattled on the smokestack and upon the boiler of the engine. "Low bridge," cried MacWilliams, with a fierce chuckle. "Now, watch her!" He threw open the throttle as far as it would go, and the engine answered to his touch like a race-horse to the whip. It seemed to spring from the track into the air. It quivered and shook like a live thing, and as it shot in between the soldiers they fell back on either side, and MacWilliams leaned far out of his cab-window shaking his fist at them. "You got left, didn't you?" he shouted. "Thank you for the Mannlichers." As the locomotive rushed out of the jungle, and passed the point on the road nearest to the Palms, MacWilliams loosened three long triumphant shrieks from his whistle and the sailors stood up and cheered. "Let them shout," cried Clay. "Everybody will have to know now. It's begun at last," he said, with a laugh of relief. "And we took the first trick," said MacWilliams, as he ran his engine slowly into the railroad yard. The whistles of the engine and the shouts of the sailors had carried far through the silence of the night, and as the men came hurrying across the lawn to the Palms, they saw all of those who had been left behind grouped on the veranda awaiting them. "Do the conquering heroes come?" shouted King. "They do," young Langham cried, joyously. "We've got all their arms, and they shot at us. We've been under fire!" "Are any of you hurt?" asked Miss Langham, anxiously, as she and the others hurried down the steps to welcome them, while those of the 'Vesta's' crew who had been left behind looked at their comrades with envy. "We have been so frightened and anxious about you," said Miss Langham. Hope held out her hand to Clay and greeted him with a quiet, happy smile, that was in contrast to the excitement and confusion that reigned about them. "I knew you would come back safely," she said. And the pressure of her hand seemed to add "to me." XII The day of the review rose clear and warm, tempered by a light breeze from the sea. As it was a fete day, the harbor wore an air of unwonted inactivity; no lighters passed heavily from the levees to the merchantmen at anchor, and the warehouses along the wharves were closed and deserted. A thin line of smoke from the funnels of the 'Vesta' showed that her fires were burning, and the fact that she rode on a single anchor chain seemed to promise that at any moment she might slip away to sea. As Clay was finishing his coffee two notes were brought to him from messengers who had ridden out that morning, and who sat in their saddles looking at the armed force around the office with amused intelligence. One note was from Mendoza, and said he had decided not to call out the regiment at the mines, as he feared their long absence from drill would make them compare unfavorably with their comrades, and do him more harm than credit. "He is afraid of them since last night," was Clay's comment, as he passed the note on to MacWilliams. "He's quite right, they might do him harm." The second note was from Stuart. He said the city was already wide awake and restless, but whether this was due to the fact that it was a fete day, or to some other cause which would disclose itself later, he could not tell. Madame Alvarez, the afternoon before, while riding in the Alameda, had been insulted by a group of men around a café, who had risen and shouted after her, one of them throwing a wine-glass into her lap as she rode past. His troopers had charged the sidewalk and carried off six of the men to the carcel. He and Rojas had urged the President to make every preparation for immediate flight, to have the horses put to his travelling carriage, and had warned him when at the review to take up his position at the point nearest to his own body-guard, and as far as possible from the troops led by Mendoza. Stuart added that he had absolute confidence in the former. The policeman who had attempted to carry Burke's note to Mendoza had confessed that he was the only traitor in the camp, and that he had tried to work on his comrades without success. Stuart begged Clay to join him as quickly as possible. Clay went up the hill to the Palms, and after consulting with Mr. Langham, dictated an order to Kirkland, instructing him to call the men together and to point out to them how much better their condition had been since they had entered the mines, and to promise them an increase of wages if they remained faithful to Mr. Langham's interests, and a small pension to any one who might be injured "from any cause whatsoever" while serving him. "Tell them, if they are loyal, they can live in their shacks rent free hereafter," wrote Clay. "They are always asking for that. It's a cheap generosity," he added aloud to Mr. Langham, "because we've never been able to collect rent from any of them yet." At noon young Langham ordered the best three horses in the stables to be brought to the door of the Palms for Clay, MacWilliams, and himself. Clay's last words to King were to have the yacht in readiness to put to sea when he telephoned him to do so, and he advised the women to have their dresses and more valuable possessions packed ready to be taken on board. "Don't you think I might see the review if I went on horseback?" Hope asked. "I could get away then, if there should be any trouble." Clay answered with a look of such alarm and surprise that Hope laughed. "See the review! I should say not," he exclaimed. "I don't even want Ted to be there." "Oh, that's always the way," said Hope, "I miss everything. I think I'll come, however, anyhow. The servants are all going, and I'll go with them disguised in a turban." As the men neared Valencia, Clay turned in his saddle, and asked Langham if he thought his sister would really venture into the town. "She'd better not let me catch her, if she does," the fond brother replied. The reviewing party left the Government Palace for the Alameda at three o'clock, President Alvarez riding on horseback in advance, and Madame Alvarez sitting in the State carriage with one of her attendants, and with Stuart's troopers gathered so closely about her that the men's boots scraped against the wheels, and their numbers hid her almost entirely from sight. The great square in which the evolutions were to take place was lined on its four sides by the carriages of the wealthy Olanchoans, except at the two gates, where there was a wide space left open to admit the soldiers. The branches of the trees on the edges of the bare parade ground were black with men and boys, and the balconies and roofs of the houses that faced it were gay with streamers and flags, and alive with women wrapped for the occasion in their colored shawls. Seated on the grass between the carriages, or surging up and down behind them, were thousands of people, each hurrying to gain a better place of vantage, or striving to hold the one he had, and forming a restless, turbulent audience in which all individual cries were lost in a great murmur of laughter, and calls, and cheers. The mass knit together, and pressed forward as the President's band swung jauntily into the square and halted in one corner, and a shout of expectancy went up from the trees and housetops as the President's body-guard entered at the lower gate, and the broken place in its ranks showed that it was escorting the State carriage. The troopers fell back on two sides, and the carriage, with the President riding at its head, passed on, and took up a position in front of the other carriages, and close to one of the sides of the hollow square. At Stuart's orders Clay, MacWilliams, and Langham had pushed their horses into the rear rank of cavalry, and remained wedged between the troopers within twenty feet of where Madame Alvarez was sitting. She was very white, and the powder on her face gave her an added and unnatural pallor. As the people cheered her husband and herself she raised her head slightly and seemed to be trying to catch any sound of dissent in their greeting, or some possible undercurrent of disfavor, but the welcome appeared to be both genuine and hearty, until a second shout smothered it completely as the figure of old General Rojas, the Vice-President, and the most dearly loved by the common people, came through the gate at the head of his regiment. There was such greeting for him that the welcome to the President seemed mean in comparison, and it was with an embarrassment which both felt that the two men drew near together, and each leaned from his saddle to grasp the other's hand. Madame Alvarez sank back rigidly on her cushions, and her eyes flashed with anticipation and excitement. She drew her mantilla a little closer about her shoulders, with a nervous shudder as though she were cold. Suddenly the look of anxiety in her eyes changed to one of annoyance, and she beckoned Clay imperiously to the side of the carriage. "Look," she said, pointing across the square. "If I am not mistaken that is Miss Langham, Miss Hope. The one on the black horse--it must be she, for none of the native ladies ride. It is not safe for her to be here alone. Go," she commanded, "bring her here to me. Put her next to the carriage, or perhaps she will be safer with you among the troopers." Clay had recognized Hope before Madame Alvarez had finished speaking, and dashed off at a gallop, skirting the line of carriages. Hope had stopped her horse beside a victoria, and was talking to the native women who occupied it, and who were scandalized at her appearance in a public place with no one but a groom to attend her. "Why, it's the same thing as a polo match," protested Hope, as Clay pulled up angrily beside the victoria. "I always ride over to polo alone at Newport, at least with James," she added, nodding her head toward the servant. The man approached Clay and touched his hat apologetically, "Miss Hope would come, sir," he said, "and I thought I'd better be with her than to go off and tell Mr. Langham, sir. I knew she wouldn't wait for me." "I asked you not to come," Clay said to Hope, in a low voice. "I wanted to know the worst at once," she answered. "I was anxious about Ted--and you." "Well, it can't be helped now," he said. "Come, we must hurry, here is our friend, the enemy." He bowed to their acquaintances in the victoria and they trotted briskly off to the side of the President's carriage, just as a yell arose from the crowd that made all the other shouts which had preceded it sound like the cheers of children at recess. "It reminds me of a football match," whispered young Langham, excitedly, "when the teams run on the field. Look at Alvarez and Rojas watching Mendoza." Mendoza advanced at the front of his three troops of cavalry, looking neither to the left nor right, and by no sign acknowledging the fierce uproarious greeting of the people. Close behind him came his chosen band of cowboys and ruffians. They were the best equipped and least disciplined soldiers in the army, and were, to the great relief of the people, seldom seen in the city, but were kept moving in the mountain passes and along the coast line, on the lookout for smugglers with whom they were on the most friendly terms. They were a picturesque body of blackguards, in their hightopped boots and silver-tipped sombreros and heavy, gaudy saddles, but the shout that had gone up at their advance was due as much to the fear they inspired as to any great love for them or their chief. "Now all the chessmen are on the board, and the game can begin," said Clay. "It's like the scene in the play, where each man has his sword at another man's throat and no one dares make the first move." He smiled as he noted, with the eye of one who had seen Continental troops in action, the shuffling steps and slovenly carriage of the half-grown soldiers that followed Mendoza's cavalry at a quick step. Stuart's picked men, over whom he had spent many hot and weary hours, looked like a troop of Life Guardsmen in comparison. Clay noted their superiority, but he also saw that in numbers they were most woefully at a disadvantage. It was a brilliant scene for so modest a capital. The sun flashed on the trappings of the soldiers, on the lacquer and polished metal work of the carriages; and the Parisian gowns of their occupants and the fluttering flags and banners filled the air with color and movement, while back of all, framing the parade ground with a band of black, was the restless mob of people applauding the evolutions, and cheering for their favorites, Alvarez, Mendoza, and Rojas, moved by an excitement that was in disturbing contrast to the easy good-nature of their usual manner. The marching and countermarching of the troops had continued with spirit for some time, and there was a halt in the evolutions which left the field vacant, except for the presence of Mendoza's cavalrymen, who were moving at a walk along one side of the quadrangle. Alvarez and Vice-President Rojas, with Stuart, as an adjutant at their side, were sitting their horses within some fifty yards of the State carriage and the body-guard. Alvarez made a conspicuous contrast in his black coat and high hat to the brilliant greens and reds of his generals' uniforms, but he sat his saddle as well as either of the others, and his white hair, white imperial and mustache, and the dignity of his bearing distinguished him above them both. Little Stuart, sitting at his side, with his blue eyes glaring from under his white helmet and his face burned to almost as red a tint as his curly hair, looked like a fierce little bull-dog in comparison. None of the three men spoke as they sat motionless and quite alone waiting for the next movement of the troops. It proved to be one of moment. Even before Mendoza had ridden toward them with his sword at salute, Clay gave an exclamation of enlightenment and concern. He saw that the men who were believed to be devoted to Rojas, had been halted and left standing at the farthest corner of the plaza, nearly two hundred yards from where the President had taken his place, that Mendoza's infantry surrounded them on every side, and that Mendoza's cowboys, who had been walking their horses, had wheeled and were coming up with an increasing momentum, a flying mass of horses and men directed straight at the President himself. Mendoza galloped up to Alvarez with his sword still in salute. His eyes were burning with excitement and with the light of success. No one but Stuart and Rojas heard his words; to the spectators and to the army he appeared as though he was, in his capacity of Commander-in-Chief, delivering some brief report, or asking for instructions. "Dr. Alvarez," he said, "as the head of the army I arrest you for high treason; you have plotted to place yourself in office without popular election. You are also accused of large thefts of public funds. I must ask you to ride with me to the military prison. General Rojas, I regret that as an accomplice of the President's, you must come with us also. I will explain my action to the people when you are safe in prison, and I will proclaim martial law. If your troops attempt to interfere, my men have orders to fire on them and you." Stuart did not wait for his sentence. He had heard the heavy beat of the cavalry coming up on them at a trot. He saw the ranks open and two men catch at each bridle rein of both Alvarez and Rojas and drag them on with them, buried in the crush of horses about them, and swept forward by the weight and impetus of the moving mass behind. Stuart dashed off to the State carriage and seized the nearest of the horses by the bridle. "To the Palace!" he shouted to his men. "Shoot any one who tries to stop you. Forward, at a gallop," he commanded. The populace had not discovered what had occurred until it was finished. The coup d'etat had been long considered and the manner in which it was to be carried out carefully planned. The cavalry had swept across the parade ground and up the street before the people saw that they carried Rojas and Alvarez with them. The regiment commanded by Rojas found itself hemmed in before and behind by Mendoza's two regiments. They were greatly outnumbered, but they fired a scattering shot, and following their captured leader, broke through the line around them and pursued the cavalry toward the military prison. It was impossible to tell in the uproar which followed how many or how few had been parties to the plot. The mob, shrieking and shouting and leaping in the air, swarmed across the parade ground, and from a dozen different points men rose above the heads of the people and harangued them in violent speeches. And while some of the soldiers and the citizens gathered anxiously about these orators, others ran through the city calling for the rescue of the President, for an attack on the palace, and shrieking "Long live the Government!" and "Long live the Revolution!" The State carriage raced through the narrow streets with its body-guard galloping around it, sweeping down in its rush stray pedestrians, and scattering the chairs and tables in front of the cafés. As it dashed up the long avenue of the palace, Stuart called his men back and ordered them to shut and barricade the great iron gates and to guard them against the coming of the mob, while MacWilliams and young Langham pulled open the carriage door and assisted the President's wife and her terrified companion to alight. Madame Alvarez was trembling with excitement as she leaned on Langham's arm, but she showed no signs of fear in her face or in her manner. "Mr. Clay has gone to bring your travelling carriage to the rear door," Langham said. "Stuart tells us it is harnessed and ready. You will hurry, please, and get whatever you need to carry with you. We will see you safely to the coast." As they entered the hall, and were ascending the great marble stairway, Hope and her groom, who had followed in the rear of the cavalry, came running to meet them. "I got in by the back way," Hope explained. "The streets there are all deserted. How can I help you?" she asked, eagerly. "By leaving me," cried the older woman. "Good God, child, have I not enough to answer for without dragging you into this? Go home at once through the botanical garden, and then by way of the wharves. That part of the city is still empty." "Where are your servants; why are they not here?" Hope demanded without heeding her. The palace was strangely empty; no footsteps came running to greet them, no doors opened or shut as they hurried to Madame Alvarez's apartments. The servants of the household had fled at the first sound of the uproar in the city, and the dresses and ornaments scattered on the floor told that they had not gone empty-handed. The woman who had accompanied Madame Alvarez to the review sank weeping on the bed, and then, as the shouts grew suddenly louder and more near, ran to hide herself in the upper stories of the house. Hope crossed to the window and saw a great mob of soldiers and citizens sweep around the corner and throw themselves against the iron fence of the palace. "You will have to hurry," she said. "Remember, you are risking the lives of those boys by your delay." There was a large bed in the room, and Madame Alvarez had pulled it forward and was bending over a safe that had opened in the wall, and which had been hidden by the head board of the bed. She held up a bundle of papers in her hand, wrapped in a leather portfolio. "Do you see these?" she cried, "they are drafts for five millions of dollars." She tossed them back into the safe and swung the door shut. "You are a witness. I do not take them," she said. "I don't understand," Hope answered, "but hurry. Have you everything you want--have you your jewels?" "Yes," the woman answered, as she rose to her feet, "they are mine." A yell more loud and terrible than any that had gone before rose from the garden below, and there was the sound of iron beating against iron, and cries of rage and execration from a great multitude. "I will not go!" the Spanish woman cried, suddenly. "I will not leave Alvarez to that mob. If they want to kill me, let them kill me." She threw the bag that held her jewels on the bed, and pushing open the window stepped out upon the balcony. She was conspicuous in her black dress against the yellow stucco of the wall, and in an instant the mob saw her and a mad shout of exultation and anger rose from the mass that beat and crushed itself against the high iron railings of the garden. Hope caught the woman by the skirt and dragged her back. "You are mad," she said. "What good can you do your husband here? Save yourself and he will come to you when he can. There is nothing you can do for him now; you cannot give your life for him. You are wasting it, and you are risking the lives of the men who are waiting for us below. Come, I tell you." MacWilliams left Clay waiting beside the diligence and ran from the stable through the empty house and down the marble stairs to the garden without meeting any one on his way. He saw Stuart helping and directing his men to barricade the gates with iron urns and garden benches and sentry-boxes. Outside the mob were firing at him with their revolvers, and calling him foul names, but Stuart did not seem to hear them. He greeted MacWilliams with a cheerful little laugh. "Well," he asked, "is she ready?" "No, but we are. Clay and I've been waiting there for five minutes. We found Miss Hope's groom and sent him back to the Palms with a message to King. We told him to run the yacht to Los Bocos and lie off shore until we came. He is to take her on down the coast to Truxillo, where our man-of-war is lying, and they will give her shelter as a political refugee." "Why don't you drive her to the Palms at once?" demanded Stuart, anxiously, "and take her on board the yacht there? It is ten miles to Bocos and the roads are very bad." "Clay says we could never get her through the city," MacWilliams answered. "We should have to fight all the way. But the city to the south is deserted, and by going out by the back roads, we can make Bocos by ten o'clock to-night. The yacht should reach there by seven." "You are right; go back. I will call off some of my men. The rest must hold this mob back until you start; then I will follow with the others. Where is Miss Hope?" "We don't know. Clay is frantic. Her groom says she is somewhere in the palace." "Hurry," Stuart commanded. "If Mendoza gets here before Madame Alvarez leaves, it will be too late." MacWilliams sprang up the steps of the palace, and Stuart, calling to the men nearest him to follow, started after him on a run. As Stuart entered the palace with his men at his heels, Clay was hurrying from its rear entrance along the upper hall, and Hope and Madame Alvarez were leaving the apartments of the latter at its front. They met at the top of the main stairway just as Stuart put his foot on its lower step. The young Englishman heard the clatter of his men following close behind him and leaped eagerly forward. Half way to the top the noise behind him ceased, and turning his head quickly he looked back over his shoulder and saw that the men had halted at the foot of the stairs and stood huddled together in disorder looking up at him. Stuart glanced over their heads and down the hallway to the garden beyond to see if they were followed, but the mob still fought from the outer side of the barricade. He waved his sword impatiently and started forward again. "Come on!" he shouted. But the men below him did not move. Stuart halted once more and this time turned about and looked down upon them with surprise and anger. There was not one of them he could not have called by name. He knew all their little troubles, their love-affairs, even. They came to him for comfort and advice, and to beg for money. He had regarded them as his children, and he was proud of them as soldiers because they were the work of his hands. So, instead of a sharp command, he asked, "What is it?" in surprise, and stared at them wondering. He could not or would not comprehend, even though he saw that those in the front rank were pushing back and those behind were urging them forward. The muzzles of their carbines were directed at every point, and on their faces fear and hate and cowardice were written in varying likenesses. "What does this mean?" Stuart demanded, sharply. "What are you waiting for?" Clay had just reached the top of the stairs. He saw Madame Alvarez and Hope coming toward him, and at the sight of Hope he gave an exclamation of relief. Then his eyes turned and fell on the tableau below, on Stuart's back, as he stood confronting the men, and on their scowling upturned faces and half-lifted carbines. Clay had lived for a longer time among Spanish-Americans than had the English subaltern, or else he was the quicker of the two to believe in evil and ingratitude, for he gave a cry of warning, and motioned the women away. "Stuart!" he cried. "Come away; for God's sake, what are you doing? Come back!" The Englishman started at the sound of his friend's voice, but he did not turn his head. He began to descend the stairs slowly, a step at a time, staring at the mob so fiercely that they shrank back before the look of wounded pride and anger in his eyes. Those in the rear raised and levelled their rifles. Without taking his eyes from theirs, Stuart drew his revolver, and with his sword swinging from its wrist-strap, pointed his weapon at the mass below him. "What does this mean?" he demanded. "Is this mutiny?" A voice from the rear of the crowd of men shrieked: "Death to the Spanish woman. Death to all traitors. Long live Mendoza," and the others echoed the cry in chorus. Clay sprang down the broad stairs calling, "Come to me;" but before he could reach Stuart, a woman's voice rang out, in a long terrible cry of terror, a cry that was neither a prayer nor an imprecation, but which held the agony of both. Stuart started, and looked up to where Madame Alvarez had thrown herself toward him across the broad balustrade of the stairway. She was silent with fear, and her hand clutched at the air, as she beckoned wildly to him. Stuart stared at her with a troubled smile and waved his empty hand to reassure her. The movement was final, for the men below, freed from the reproach of his eyes, flung up their carbines and fired, some wildly, without placing their guns at rest, and others steadily and aiming straight at his heart. As the volley rang out and the smoke drifted up the great staircase, the subaltern's hands tossed high above his head, his body sank into itself and toppled backward, and, like a tired child falling to sleep, the defeated soldier of fortune dropped back into the outstretched arms of his friend. Clay lifted him upon his knee, and crushed him closer against his breast with one arm, while he tore with his free hand at the stock about the throat and pushed his fingers in between the buttons of the tunic. They came forth again wet and colored crimson. "Stuart!" Clay gasped. "Stuart, speak to me, look at me!" He shook the body in his arms with fierce roughness, peering into the face that rested on his shoulder, as though he could command the eyes back again to light and life. "Don't leave me!" he said. "For God's sake, old man, don't leave me!" But the head on his shoulder only sank the closer and the body stiffened in his arms. Clay raised his eyes and saw the soldiers still standing, irresolute and appalled at what they had done, and awe-struck at the sight of the grief before them. Clay gave a cry as terrible as the cry of a woman who has seen her child mangled before her eyes, and lowering the body quickly to the steps, he ran at the scattering mass below him. As he came they fled down the corridor, shrieking and calling to their friends to throw open the gates and begging them to admit the mob. When they reached the outer porch they turned, encouraged by the touch of numbers, and halted to fire at the man who still followed them. Clay stopped, with a look in his eyes which no one who knew them had ever seen there, and smiled with pleasure in knowing himself a master in what he had to do. And at each report of his revolver one of Stuart's assassins stumbled and pitched heavily forward on his face. Then he turned and walked slowly back up the hall to the stairway like a man moving in his sleep. He neither saw nor heard the bullets that bit spitefully at the walls about him and rattled among the glass pendants of the great chandeliers above his head. When he came to the step on which the body lay he stooped and picked it up gently, and holding it across his breast, strode on up the stairs. MacWilliams and Langham were coming toward him, and saw the helpless figure in his arms. "What is it?" they cried; "is he wounded, is he hurt?" "He is dead," Clay answered, passing on with his burden. "Get Hope away." Madame Alvarez stood with the girl's arms about her, her eyes closed and her figure trembling. "Let me be!" she moaned. "Don't touch me; let me die. My God, what have I to live for now?" She shook off Hope's supporting arm, and stood before them, all her former courage gone, trembling and shivering in agony. "I do not care what they do to me!" she cried. She tore her lace mantilla from her shoulders and threw it on the floor. "I shall not leave this place. He is dead. Why should I go? He is dead. They have murdered him; he is dead." "She is fainting," said Hope. Her voice was strained and hard. To her brother she seemed to have grown suddenly much older, and he looked to her to tell him what to do. "Take hold of her," she said. "She will fall." The woman sank back into the arms of the men, trembling and moaning feebly. "Now carry her to the carriage," said Hope. "She has fainted; it is better; she does not know what has happened." Clay, still bearing the body in his arms, pushed open the first door that stood ajar before him with his foot. It opened into the great banqueting hall of the palace, but he could not choose. He had to consider now the safety of the living, whose lives were still in jeopardy. The long table in the centre of the hall was laid with places for many people, for it had been prepared for the President and the President's guests, who were to have joined with him in celebrating the successful conclusion of the review. From outside the light of the sun, which was just sinking behind the mountains, shone dimly upon the silver on the board, on the glass and napery, and the massive gilt centre-pieces filled with great clusters of fresh flowers. It looked as though the servants had but just left the room. Even the candles had been lit in readiness, and as their flames wavered and smoked in the evening breeze they cast uncertain shadows on the walls and showed the stern faces of the soldier presidents frowning down on the crowded table from their gilded frames. There was a great leather lounge stretching along one side of the hall, and Clay moved toward this quickly and laid his burden down. He was conscious that Hope was still following him. He straightened the limbs of the body and folded the arms across the breast and pressed his hand for an instant on the cold hands of his friend, and then whispering something between his lips, turned and walked hurriedly away. Hope confronted him in the doorway. She was sobbing silently. "Must we leave him," she pleaded, "must we leave him--like this?" From the garden there came the sound of hammers ringing on the iron hinges, and a great crash of noises as the gate fell back from its fastenings, and the mob rushed over the obstacles upon which it had fallen. It seemed as if their yells of exultation and anger must reach even the ears of the dead man. "They are calling Mendoza," Clay whispered, "he must be with them. Come, we will have to run for our lives now." But before he could guess what Hope was about to do, or could prevent her, she had slipped past him and picked up Stuart's sword that had fallen from his wrist to the floor, and laid it on the soldier's body, and closed his hands upon its hilt. She glanced quickly about her as though looking for something, and then with a sob of relief ran to the table, and sweeping it of an armful of its flowers, stepped swiftly back again to the lounge and heaped them upon it. "Come, for God's sake, come!" Clay called to her in a whisper from the door. Hope stood for an instant staring at the young Englishman as the candle-light flickered over his white face, and then, dropping on her knees, she pushed back the curly hair from about the boy's forehead and kissed him. Then, without turning to look again, she placed her hand in Clay's and he ran with her, dragging her behind him down the length of the hall, just as the mob entered it on the floor below them and filled the palace with their shouts of triumph. As the sun sank lower its light fell more dimly on the lonely figure in the vast dining-hall, and as the gloom deepened there, the candles burned with greater brilliancy, and the faces of the portraits shone more clearly. They seemed to be staring down less sternly now upon the white mortal face of the brother-in-arms who had just joined them. One who had known him among his own people would have seen in the attitude and in the profile of the English soldier a likeness to his ancestors of the Crusades who lay carved in stone in the village church, with their faces turned to the sky, their faithful hounds waiting at their feet, and their hands pressed upward in prayer. And when, a moment later, the half-crazed mob of men and boys swept into the great room, with Mendoza at their head, something of the pathos of the young Englishman's death in his foreign place of exile must have touched them, for they stopped appalled and startled, and pressed back upon their fellows, with eager whispers. The Spanish-American General strode boldly forward, but his eyes lowered before the calm, white face, and either because the lighted candles and the flowers awoke in him some memory of the great Church that had nursed him, or because the jagged holes in the soldier's tunic appealed to what was bravest in him, he crossed himself quickly, and then raising his hands slowly to his visor, lifted his hat and pointed with it to the door. And the mob, without once looking back at the rich treasure of silver on the table, pushed out before him, stepping softly, as though they had intruded on a shrine. XIII The President's travelling carriage was a double-seated diligence covered with heavy hoods and with places on the box for two men. Only one of the coachmen, the same man who had driven the State carriage from the review, had remained at the stables. As he knew the roads to Los Bocos, Clay ordered him up to the driver's seat, and MacWilliams climbed into the place beside him after first storing three rifles under the lap-robe. Hope pulled open the leather curtains of the carriage and found Madame Alvarez where the men had laid her upon the cushions, weak and hysterical. The girl crept in beside her, and lifting her in her arms, rested the older woman's head against her shoulder, and soothed and comforted her with tenderness and sympathy. Clay stopped with his foot in the stirrup and looked up anxiously at Langham who was already in the saddle. "Is there no possible way of getting Hope out of this and back to the Palms?" he asked. "No, it's too late. This is the only way now." Hope opened the leather curtains and looking out shook her head impatiently at Clay. "I wouldn't go now if there were another way," she said. "I couldn't leave her like this." "You're delaying the game, Clay," cried Langham, warningly, as he stuck his spurs into his pony's side. The people in the diligence lurched forward as the horses felt the lash of the whip and strained against the harness, and then plunged ahead at a gallop on their long race to the sea. As they sped through the gardens, the stables and the trees hid them from the sight of those in the palace, and the turf, upon which the driver had turned the horses for greater safety, deadened the sound of their flight. They found the gates of the botanical gardens already opened, and Clay, in the street outside, beckoning them on. Without waiting for the others the two outriders galloped ahead to the first cross street, looked up and down its length, and then, in evident concern at what they saw in the distance, motioned the driver to greater speed, and crossing the street signalled him to follow them. At the next corner Clay flung himself off his pony, and throwing the bridle to Langham, ran ahead into the cross street on foot, and after a quick glance pointed down its length away from the heart of the city to the mountains. The driver turned as Clay directed him, and when the man found that his face was fairly set toward the goal he lashed his horses recklessly through the narrow street, so that the murmur of the mob behind them grew perceptibly fainter at each leap forward. The noise of the galloping hoofs brought women and children to the barred windows of the houses, but no men stepped into the road to stop their progress, and those few they met running in the direction of the palace hastened to get out of their way, and stood with their backs pressed against the walls of the narrow thoroughfare looking after them with wonder. Even those who suspected their errand were helpless to detain them, for sooner than they could raise the hue and cry or formulate a plan of action, the carriage had passed and was disappearing in the distance, rocking from wheel to wheel like a ship in a gale. Two men who were so bold as to start to follow, stopped abruptly when they saw the outriders draw rein and turn in their saddles as though to await their coming. Clay's mind was torn with doubts, and his nerves were drawn taut like the strings of a violin. Personal danger exhilarated him, but this chance of harm to others who were helpless, except for him, depressed his spirit with anxiety. He experienced in his own mind all the nervous fears of a thief who sees an officer in every passing citizen, and at one moment he warned the driver to move more circumspectly, and so avert suspicion, and the next urged him into more desperate bursts of speed. In his fancy every cross street threatened an ambush, and as he cantered now before and now behind the carriage, he wished that he was a multitude of men who could encompass it entirely and hide it. But the solid streets soon gave way to open places, and low mud cabins, where the horses' hoofs beat on a sun-baked road, and where the inhabitants sat lazily before the door in the fading light, with no knowledge of the changes that the day had wrought in the city, and with only a moment's curious interest in the hooded carriage, and the grim, white-faced foreigners who guarded it. Clay turned his pony into a trot at Langham's side. His face was pale and drawn. As the danger of immediate pursuit and capture grew less, the carriage had slackened its pace, and for some minutes the outriders galloped on together side by side in silence. But the same thought was in the mind of each, and when Langham spoke it was as though he were continuing where he had but just been interrupted. He laid his hand gently on Clay's arm. He did not turn his face toward him, and his eyes were still peering into the shadows before them. "Tell me?" he asked. "He was coming up the stairs," Clay answered. He spoke in so low a voice that Langham had to lean from his saddle to hear him. "They were close behind; but when they saw her they stopped and refused to go farther. I called to him to come away, but he would not understand. They killed him before he really understood what they meant to do. He was dead almost before I reached him. He died in my arms." There was a long pause. "I wonder if he knows that?" Clay said. Langham sat erect in the saddle again and drew a short breath. "I wish he could have known how he helped me," he whispered, "how much just knowing him helped me." Clay bowed his head to the boy as though he were thanking him. "His was the gentlest soul I ever knew," he said. "That's what I wanted to say," Langham answered. "We will let that be his epitaph," and touching his spur to his horse he galloped on ahead and left Clay riding alone. Langham had proceeded for nearly a mile when he saw the forest opening before them, and at the sight he gave a shout of relief, but almost at the same instant he pulled his pony back on his haunches and whirling him about, sprang back to the carriage with a cry of warning. "There are soldiers ahead of us," he cried. "Did you know it?" he demanded of the driver. "Did you lie to me? Turn back." "He can't turn back," MacWilliams answered. "They have seen us. They are only the custom officers at the city limits. They know nothing. Go on." He reached forward and catching the reins dragged the horses down into a walk. Then he handed the reins back to the driver with a shake of the head. "If you know these roads as well as you say you do, you want to keep us out of the way of soldiers," he said. "If we fall into a trap you'll be the first man shot on either side." A sentry strolled lazily out into the road dragging his gun after him by the bayonet, and raised his hand for them to halt. His captain followed him from the post-house throwing away a cigarette as he came, and saluted MacWilliams on the box and bowed to the two riders in the background. In his right hand he held one of the long iron rods with which the collectors of the city's taxes were wont to pierce the bundles and packs, and even the carriage cushions of those who entered the city limits from the coast, and who might be suspected of smuggling. "Whose carriage is this, and where is it going?" he asked. As the speed of the diligence slackened, Hope put her head out of the curtains, and as she surveyed the soldier with apparent surprise, she turned to her brother. "What does this mean?" she asked. "What are we waiting for?" "We are going to the Hacienda of Senor Palacio," MacWilliams said, in answer to the officer. "The driver thinks that this is the road, but I say we should have taken the one to the right." "No, this is the road to Senor Palacio's plantation," the officer answered, "but you cannot leave the city without a pass signed by General Mendoza. That is the order we received this morning. Have you such a pass?" "Certainly not," Clay answered, warmly. "This is the carriage of an American, the president of the mines. His daughters are inside and on their way to visit the residence of Senor Palacio. They are foreigners--Americans. We are all foreigners, and we have a perfect right to leave the city when we choose. You can only stop us when we enter it." The officer looked uncertainly from Clay to Hope and up at the driver on the box. His eyes fell upon the heavy brass mountings of the harness. They bore the arms of Olancho. He wheeled sharply and called to his men inside the post-house, and they stepped out from the veranda and spread themselves leisurely across the road. "Ride him down, Clay," Langham muttered, in a whisper. The officer did not understand the words, but he saw Clay gather the reins tighter in his hands and he stepped back quickly to the safety of the porch, and from that ground of vantage smiled pleasantly. "Pardon," he said, "there is no need for blows when one is rich enough to pay. A little something for myself and a drink for my brave fellows, and you can go where you please." "Damned brigands," growled Langham, savagely. "Not at all," Clay answered. "He is an officer and a gentleman. I have no money with me," he said, in Spanish, addressing the officer, "but between caballeros a word of honor is sufficient. I shall be returning this way to-morrow morning, and I will bring a few hundred sols from Senor Palacio for you and your men; but if we are followed you will get nothing, and you must have forgotten in the mean time that you have seen us pass." There was a murmur inside the carriage, and Hope's face disappeared from between the curtains to reappear again almost immediately. She beckoned to the officer with her hand, and the men saw that she held between her thumb and little finger a diamond ring of size and brilliancy. She moved it so that it flashed in the light of the guard lantern above the post-house. "My sister tells me you shall be given this tomorrow morning," Hope said, "if we are not followed." The man's eyes laughed with pleasure. He swept his sombrero to the ground. "I am your servant, Senorita," he said. "Gentlemen," he cried, gayly, turning to Clay, "if you wish it, I will accompany you with my men. Yes, I will leave word that I have gone in the sudden pursuit of smugglers; or I will remain here as you wish, and send those who may follow back again." "You are most gracious, sir," said Clay. "It is always a pleasure to meet with a gentleman and a philosopher. We prefer to travel without an escort, and remember, you have seen nothing and heard nothing." He leaned from the saddle, and touched the officer on the breast. "That ring is worth a king's ransom." "Or a president's," muttered the man, smiling. "Let the American ladies pass," he commanded. The soldiers scattered as the whip fell, and the horses once more leaped forward, and as the carriage entered the forest, Clay looked back and saw the officer exhaling the smoke of a fresh cigarette, with the satisfaction of one who enjoys a clean conscience and a sense of duty well performed. The road through the forest was narrow and uneven, and as the horses fell into a trot the men on horseback closed up together behind the carriage. "Do you think that road-agent will keep his word?" Langham asked. "Yes; he has nothing to win by telling the truth," Clay answered. "He can say he saw a party of foreigners, Americans, driving in the direction of Palacio's coffee plantation. That lets him out, and in the morning he knows he can levy on us for the gate money. I am not so much afraid of being overtaken as I am that King may make a mistake and not get to Bocos on time. We ought to reach there, if the carriage holds together, by eleven. King should be there by eight o'clock, and the yacht ought to make the run to Truxillo in three hours. But we shall not be able to get back to the city before five to-morrow morning. I suppose your family will be wild about Hope. We didn't know where she was when we sent the groom back to King." "Do you think that driver is taking us the right way?" Langham asked, after a pause. "He'd better. He knows it well enough. He was through the last revolution, and carried messages from Los Bocos to the city on foot for two months. He has covered every trail on the way, and if he goes wrong he knows what will happen to him." "And Los Bocos--it is a village, isn't it, and the landing must be in sight of the Custom-house?" "The village lies some distance back from the shore, and the only house on the beach is the Custom-house itself; but every one will be asleep by the time we get there, and it will take us only a minute to hand her into the launch. If there should be a guard there, King will have fixed them one way or another by the time we arrive. Anyhow, there is no need of looking for trouble that far ahead. There is enough to worry about in between. We haven't got there yet." The moon rose grandly a few minutes later, and flooded the forest with light so that the open places were as clear as day. It threw strange shadows across the trail, and turned the rocks and fallen trees into figures of men crouching or standing upright with uplifted arms. They were so like to them that Clay and Langham flung their carbines to their shoulders again and again, and pointed them at some black object that turned as they advanced into wood or stone. From the forest they came to little streams and broad shallow rivers where the rocks in the fording places churned the water into white masses of foam, and the horses kicked up showers of spray as they made their way, slipping and stumbling, against the current. It was a silent pilgrimage, and never for a moment did the strain slacken or the men draw rein. Sometimes, as they hurried across a broad tableland, or skirted the edge of a precipice and looked down hundreds of feet below at the shining waters they had just forded, or up at the rocky points of the mountains before them, the beauty of the night overcame them and made them forget the significance of their journey. They were not always alone, for they passed at intervals through sleeping villages of mud huts with thatched roofs, where the dogs ran yelping out to bark at them, and where the pine-knots, blazing on the clay ovens, burned cheerily in the moonlight. In the low lands where the fever lay, the mist rose above the level of their heads and enshrouded them in a curtain of fog, and the dew fell heavily, penetrating their clothing and chilling their heated bodies so that the sweating horses moved in a lather of steam. They had settled down into a steady gallop now, and ten or fifteen miles had been left behind them. "We are making excellent time," said Clay. "The village of San Lorenzo should lie beyond that ridge." He drove up beside the driver and pointed with his whip. "Is not that San Lorenzo?" he asked. "Yes, senor," the man answered, "but I mean to drive around it by the old wagon trail. It is a large town, and people may be awake. You will be able to see it from the top of the next hill." The cavalcade stopped at the summit of the ridge and the men looked down into the silent village. It was like the others they had passed, with a few houses built round a square of grass that could hardly be recognized as a plaza, except for the church on its one side, and the huge wooden cross planted in its centre. From the top of the hill they could see that the greater number of the houses were in darkness, but in a large building of two stories lights were shining from every window. "That is the comandancia," said the driver, shaking his head. "They are still awake. It is a telegraph station." "Great Scott!" exclaimed MacWilliams. "We forgot the telegraph. They may have sent word to head us off already." "Nine o'clock is not so very late," said Clay. "It may mean nothing." "We had better make sure, though," MacWilliams answered, jumping to the ground. "Lend me your pony, Ted, and take my place. I'll run in there and dust around and see what's up. I'll join you on the other side of the town after you get back to the main road." "Wait a minute," said Clay. "What do you mean to do?" "I can't tell till I get there, but I'll try to find out how much they know. Don't you be afraid. I'll run fast enough if there's any sign of trouble. And if you come across a telegraph wire, cut it. The message may not have gone over yet." The two women in the carriage had parted the flaps of the hoods and were trying to hear what was being said, but could not understand, and Langham explained to them that they were about to make a slight detour to avoid San Lorenzo while MacWilliams was going into it to reconnoitre. He asked if they were comfortable, and assured them that the greater part of the ride was over, and that there was a good road from San Lorenzo to the sea. MacWilliams rode down into the village along the main trail, and threw his reins over a post in front of the comandancia. He mounted boldly to the second floor of the building and stopped at the head of the stairs, in front of an open door. There were three men in the room before him, one an elderly man, whom he rightly guessed was the comandante, and two younger men who were standing behind a railing and bending over a telegraph instrument on a table. As he stamped into the room, they looked up and stared at him in surprise; their faces showed that he had interrupted them at a moment of unusual interest. MacWilliams saluted the three men civilly, and, according to the native custom, apologized for appearing before them in his spurs. He had been riding from Los Bocos to the capital, he said, and his horse had gone lame. Could they tell him if there was any one in the village from whom he could hire a mule, as he must push on to the capital that night? The comandante surveyed him for a moment, as though still disturbed by the interruption, and then shook his head impatiently. "You can hire a mule from one Pulido Paul, at the corner of the plaza," he said. And as MacWilliams still stood uncertainly, he added, "You say you have come from Los Bocos. Did you meet any one on your way?" The two younger men looked up at him anxiously, but before he could answer, the instrument began to tick out the signal, and they turned their eyes to it again, and one of them began to take its message down on paper. The instrument spoke to MacWilliams also, for he was used to sending telegrams daily from the office to the mines, and could make it talk for him in either English or Spanish. So, in his effort to hear what it might say, he stammered and glanced at it involuntarily, and the comandante, without suspecting his reason for doing so, turned also and peered over the shoulder of the man who was receiving the message. Except for the clicking of the instrument, the room was absolutely still; the three men bent silently over the table, while MacWilliams stood gazing at the ceiling and turning his hat in his hands. The message MacWilliams read from the instrument was this: "They are reported to have left the city by the south, so they are going to Para, or San Pedro, or to Los Bocos. She must be stopped--take an armed force and guard the roads. If necessary, kill her. She has in the carriage or hidden on her person, drafts for five million sols. You will be held responsible for every one of them. Repeat this message to show you understand, and relay it to Los Bocos. If you fail--" MacWilliams could not wait to hear more; he gave a curt nod to the men and started toward the stairs. "Wait," the comandante called after him. MacWilliams paused with one hand on top of the banisters balancing himself in readiness for instant flight. "You have not answered me. Did you meet with any one on your ride here from Los Bocos?" "I met several men on foot, and the mail carrier passed me a league out from the coast, and oh, yes, I met a carriage at the cross roads, and the driver asked me the way of San Pedro Sula." "A carriage?--yes--and what did you tell him?" "I told him he was on the road to Los Bocos, and he turned back and--" "You are sure he turned back?" "Certainly, sir. I rode behind him for some distance. He turned finally to the right into the trail to San Pedro Sula." The man flung himself across the railing. "Quick," he commanded, "telegraph to Morales, Comandante San Pedro Sula--" He had turned his back on MacWilliams, and as the younger man bent over the instrument, MacWilliams stepped softly down the stairs, and mounting his pony rode slowly off in the direction of the capital. As soon as he had reached the outskirts of the town, he turned and galloped round it and then rode fast with his head in air, glancing up at the telegraph wire that sagged from tree-trunk to tree-trunk along the trail. At a point where he thought he could dismount in safety and tear down the wire, he came across it dangling from the branches and he gave a shout of relief. He caught the loose end and dragged it free from its support, and then laying it across a rock pounded the blade of his knife upon it with a stone, until he had hacked off a piece some fifty feet in length. Taking this in his hand he mounted again and rode off with it, dragging the wire in the road behind him. He held it up as he rejoined Clay, and laughed triumphantly. "They'll have some trouble splicing that circuit," he said, "you only half did the work. What wouldn't we give to know all this little piece of copper knows, eh?" "Do you mean you think they have telegraphed to Los Bocos already?" "I know that they were telegraphing to San Pedro Sula as I left and to all the coast towns. But whether you cut this down before or after is what I should like to know." "We shall probably learn that later," said Clay, grimly. The last three miles of the journey lay over a hard, smooth road, wide enough to allow the carriage and its escort to ride abreast. It was in such contrast to the tortuous paths they had just followed, that the horses gained a fresh impetus and galloped forward as freely as though the race had but just begun. Madame Alvarez stopped the carriage at one place and asked the men to lower the hood at the back that she might feel the fresh air and see about her, and when this had been done, the women seated themselves with their backs to the horses where they could look out at the moonlit road as it unrolled behind them. Hope felt selfishly and wickedly happy. The excitement had kept her spirits at the highest point, and the knowledge that Clay was guarding and protecting her was in itself a pleasure. She leaned back on the cushions and put her arm around the older woman's waist, and listened to the light beat of his pony's hoofs outside, now running ahead, now scrambling and slipping up some steep place, and again coming to a halt as Langham or MacWilliams called, "Look to the right, behind those trees," or "Ahead there! Don't you see what I mean, something crouching?" She did not know when the false alarms would turn into a genuine attack, but she was confident that when the time came he would take care of her, and she welcomed the danger because it brought that solace with it. Madame Alvarez sat at her side, rigid, silent, and beyond the help of comfort. She tortured herself with thoughts of the ambitions she had held, and which had been so cruelly mocked that very morning; of the chivalric love that had been hers, of the life even that had been hers, and which had been given up for her so tragically. When she spoke at all, it was to murmur her sorrow that Hope had exposed herself to danger on her poor account, and that her life, as far as she loved it, was at an end. Only once after the men had parted the curtains and asked concerning her comfort with grave solicitude did she give way to tears. "Why are they so good to me?" she moaned. "Why are you so good to me? I am a wicked, vain woman, I have brought a nation to war and I have killed the only man I ever trusted." Hope touched her gently with her hand and felt guiltily how selfish she herself must be not to feel the woman's grief, but she could not. She only saw in it a contrast to her own happiness, a black background before which the figure of Clay and his solicitude for her shone out, the only fact in the world that was of value. Her thoughts were interrupted by the carriage coming to a halt, and a significant movement upon the part of the men. MacWilliams had descended from the box-seat and stepping into the carriage took the place the women had just left. He had a carbine in his hand, and after he was seated Langham handed him another which he laid across his knees. "They thought I was too conspicuous on the box to do any good there," he explained in a confidential whisper. "In case there is any firing now, you ladies want to get down on your knees here at my feet, and hide your heads in the cushions. We are entering Los Bocos." Langham and Clay were riding far in advance, scouting to the right and left, and the carriage moved noiselessly behind them through the empty streets. There was no light in any of the windows, and not even a dog barked, or a cock crowed. The women sat erect, listening for the first signal of an attack, each holding the other's hand and looking at MacWilliams, who sat with his thumb on the trigger of his carbine, glancing to the right and left and breathing quickly. His eyes twinkled, like those of a little fox terrier. The men dropped back, and drew up on a level with the carriage. "We are all right, so far," Clay whispered. "The beach slopes down from the other side of that line of trees. What is the matter with you?" he demanded, suddenly, looking up at the driver, "are you afraid?" "No," the man answered, hurriedly, his voice shaking; "it's the cold." Langham had galloped on ahead and as he passed through the trees and came out upon the beach, he saw a broad stretch of moonlit water and the lights from the yacht shining from a point a quarter of a mile off shore. Among the rocks on the edge of the beach was the "Vesta's" longboat and her crew seated in it or standing about on the beach. The carriage had stopped under the protecting shadow of the trees, and he raced back toward it. "The yacht is here," he cried. "The long-boat is waiting and there is not a sign of light about the Custom-house. Come on," he cried. "We have beaten them after all." A sailor, who had been acting as lookout on the rocks, sprang to his full height, and shouted to the group around the long-boat, and King came up the beach toward them running heavily through the deep sand. Madame Alvarez stepped down from the carriage, and as Hope handed her her jewel case in silence, the men draped her cloak about her shoulders. She put out her hand to them, and as Clay took it in his, she bent her head quickly and kissed his hand. "You were his friend," she murmured. She held Hope in her arms for an instant, and kissed her, and then gave her hand in turn to Langham and to MacWilliams. "I do not know whether I shall ever see you again," she said, looking slowly from one to the other, "but I will pray for you every day, and God will reward you for saving a worthless life." As she finished speaking King came up to the group, followed by three of his men. "Is Hope with you, is she safe?" he asked. "Yes, she is with me," Madame Alvarez answered. "Thank God," King exclaimed, breathlessly. "Then we will start at once, Madame. Where is she? She must come with us!" "Of course," Clay-assented, eagerly, "she will be much safer on the yacht." But Hope protested. "I must get back to father," she said. "The yacht will not arrive until late to-morrow, and the carriage can take me to him five hours earlier. The family have worried too long about me as it is, and, besides, I will not leave Ted. I am going back as I came." "It is most unsafe," King urged. "On the contrary, it is perfectly safe now," Hope answered. "It was not one of us they wanted." "You may be right," King said. "They don't know what has happened to you, and perhaps after all it would be better if you went back the quicker way." He gave his arm to Madame Alvarez and walked with her toward the shore. As the men surrounded her on every side and moved away, Clay glanced back at Hope and saw her standing upright in the carriage looking after them. "We will be with you in a minute," he called, as though in apology for leaving her for even that brief space. And then the shadow of the trees shut her and the carriage from his sight. His footsteps made no sound in the soft sand, and except for the whispering of the palms and the sleepy wash of the waves as they ran up the pebbly beach and sank again, the place was as peaceful and silent as a deserted island, though the moon made it as light as day. The long-boat had been drawn up with her stern to the shore, and the men were already in their places, some standing waiting for the order to shove off, and others seated balancing their oars. King had arranged to fire a rocket when the launch left the shore, in order that the captain of the yacht might run in closer to pick them up. As he hurried down the beach, he called to his boatswain to give the signal, and the man answered that he understood and stooped to light a match. King had jumped into the stern and lifted Madame Alvarez after him, leaving her late escort standing with uncovered heads on the beach behind her, when the rocket shot up into the calm white air, with a roar and a rush and a sudden flash of color. At the same instant, as though in answer to its challenge, the woods back of them burst into an irregular line of flame, a volley of rifle shots shattered the silence, and a score of bullets splashed in the water and on the rocks about them. The boatswain in the bow of the long-boat tossed up his arms and pitched forward between the thwarts. "Give way," he shouted as he fell. "Pull," Clay yelled, "pull, all of you." He threw himself against the stern of the boat, and Langham and MacWilliams clutched its sides, and with their shoulders against it and their bodies half sunk in the water, shoved it off, free of the shore. The shots continued fiercely, and two of the crew cried out and fell back upon the oars of the men behind them. Madame Alvarez sprang to her feet and stood swaying unsteadily as the boat leaped forward. "Take me back. Stop, I command you," she cried, "I will not leave those men. Do you hear?" King caught her by the waist and dragged her down, but she struggled to free herself. "I will not leave them to be murdered," she cried. "You cowards, put me back." "Hold her, King," Clay shouted. "We're all right. They're not firing at us." His voice was drowned in the noise of the oars beating in the rowlocks, and the reports of the rifles. The boat disappeared in a mist of spray and moonlight, and Clay turned and faced about him. Langham and MacWilliams were crouching behind a rock and firing at the flashes in the woods. "You can't stay there," Clay cried. "We must get back to Hope." He ran forward, dodging from side to side and firing as he ran. He heard shots from the water, and looking back saw that the men in the longboat had ceased rowing, and were returning the fire from the shore. "Come back, Hope is all right," her brother called to him. "I haven't seen a shot within a hundred yards of her yet, they're firing from the Custom-house and below. I think Mac's hit." "I'm not," MacWilliams's voice answered from behind a rock, "but I'd like to see something to shoot at." A hot tremor of rage swept over Clay at the thought of a possibly fatal termination to the night's adventure. He groaned at the mockery of having found his life only to lose it now, when it was more precious to him than it had ever been, and to lose it in a silly brawl with semi-savages. He cursed himself impotently and rebelliously for a senseless fool. "Keep back, can't you?" he heard Langham calling to him from the shore. "You're only drawing the fire toward Hope. She's got away by now. She had both the horses." Langham and MacWilliams started forward to Clay's side, but the instant they left the shadow of the rock, the bullets threw up the sand at their feet and they stopped irresolutely. The moon showed the three men outlined against the white sand of the beach as clearly as though a searchlight had been turned upon them, even while its shadows sheltered and protected their assailants. At their backs the open sea cut off retreat, and the line of fire in front held them in check. They were as helpless as chessmen upon a board. "I'm not going to stand still to be shot at," cried MacWilliams. "Let's hide or let's run. This isn't doing anybody any good." But no one moved. They could hear the singing of the bullets as they passed them whining in the air like a banjo-string that is being tightened, and they knew they were in equal danger from those who were firing from the boat. "They're shooting better," said MacWilliams. "They'll reach us in a minute." "They've reached me already, I think," Langham answered, with suppressed satisfaction, "in the shoulder. It's nothing." His unconcern was quite sincere; to a young man who had galloped through two long halves of a football match on a strained tendon, a scratched shoulder was not important, except as an unsought honor. But it was of the most importance to MacWilliams. He raised his voice against the men in the woods in impotent fury. "Come out, you cowards, where we can see you," he cried. "Come out where I can shoot your black heads off." Clay had fired the last cartridge in his rifle, and throwing it away drew his revolver. "We must either swim or hide," he said. "Put your heads down and run." But as he spoke, they saw the carriage plunging out of the shadow of the woods and the horses galloping toward them down the beach. MacWilliams gave a cheer of welcome. "Hurrah!" he shouted, "it's Jose' coming for us. He's a good man. Well done, Jose'!" he called. "That's not Jose'," Langham cried, doubtfully, peering through the moonlight. "Good God! It's Hope," he exclaimed. He waved his hands frantically above his head. "Go back, Hope," he cried, "go back!" But the carriage did not swerve on its way toward them. They all saw her now distinctly. She was on the driver's box and alone, leaning forward and lashing the horses' backs with the whip and reins, and bending over to avoid the bullets that passed above her head. As she came down upon them, she stood up, her woman's figure outlined clearly in the riding habit she still wore. "Jump in when I turn," she cried. "I'm going to turn slowly, run and jump in." She bent forward again and pulled the horses to the right, and as they obeyed her, plunging and tugging at their bits, as though they knew the danger they were in, the men threw themselves at the carriage. Clay caught the hood at the back, swung himself up, and scrambled over the cushions and up to the box seat. He dropped down behind Hope, and reaching his arms around her took the reins in one hand, and with the other forced her down to her knees upon the footboard, so that, as she knelt, his arms and body protected her from the bullets sent after them. Langham followed Clay, and tumbled into the carriage over the hood at the back, but MacWilliams endeavored to vault in from the step, and missing his footing fell under the hind wheel, so that the weight of the carriage passed over him, and his head was buried for an instant in the sand. But he was on his feet again before they had noticed that he was down, and as he jumped for the hood, Langham caught him by the collar of his coat and dragged him into the seat, panting and gasping, and rubbing the sand from his mouth and nostrils. Clay turned the carriage at a right angle through the heavy sand, and still standing with Hope crouched at his knees, he raced back to the woods into the face of the firing, with the boys behind him answering it from each side of the carriage, so that the horses leaped forward in a frenzy of terror, and dashing through the woods, passed into the first road that opened before them. The road into which they had turned was narrow, but level, and ran through a forest of banana palms that bent and swayed above them. Langham and MacWilliams still knelt in the rear seat of the carriage, watching the road on the chance of possible pursuit. "Give me some cartridges," said Langham. "My belt is empty. What road is this?" "It is a private road, I should say, through somebody's banana plantation. But it must cross the main road somewhere. It doesn't matter, we're all right now. I mean to take it easy." MacWilliams turned on his back and stretched out his legs on the seat opposite. "Where do you suppose those men sprang from? Were they following us all the time?" "Perhaps, or else that message got over the wire before we cut it, and they've been lying in wait for us. They were probably watching King and his sailors for the last hour or so, but they didn't want him. They wanted her and the money. It was pretty exciting, wasn't it? How's your shoulder?" "It's a little stiff, thank you," said Langham. He stood up and by peering over the hood could just see the top of Clay's sombrero rising above it where he sat on the back seat. "You and Hope all right up there, Clay?" he asked. The top of the sombrero moved slightly, and Langham took it as a sign that all was well. He dropped back into his seat beside MacWilliams, and they both breathed a long sigh of relief and content. Langham's wounded arm was the one nearest MacWilliams, and the latter parted the torn sleeve and examined the furrow across the shoulder with unconcealed envy. "I am afraid it won't leave a scar," he said, sympathetically. "Won't it?" asked Langham, in some concern. The horses had dropped into a walk, and the beauty of the moonlit night put its spell upon the two boys, and the rustling of the great leaves above their heads stilled and quieted them so that they unconsciously spoke in whispers. Clay had not moved since the horses turned of their own accord into the valley of the palms. He no longer feared pursuit nor any interruption to their further progress. His only sensation was one of utter thankfulness that they were all well out of it, and that Hope had been the one who had helped them in their trouble, and his dearest thought was that, whether she wished or not, he owed his safety, and possibly his life, to her. She still crouched between his knees upon the broad footboard, with her hands clasped in front of her, and looking ahead into the vista of soft mysterious lights and dark shadows that the moon cast upon the road. Neither of them spoke, and as the silence continued unbroken, it took a weightier significance, and at each added second of time became more full of meaning. The horses had dropped into a tired walk, and drew them smoothly over the white road; from behind the hood came broken snatches of the boys' talk, and above their heads the heavy leaves of the palms bent and bowed as though in benediction. A warm breeze from the land filled the air with the odor of ripening fruit and pungent smells, and the silence seemed to envelop them and mark them as the only living creatures awake in the brilliant tropical night. Hope sank slowly back, and as she did so, her shoulder touched for an instant against Clay's knee; she straightened herself and made a movement as though to rise. Her nearness to him and something in her attitude at his feet held Clay in a spell. He bent forward and laid his hand fearfully upon her shoulder, and the touch seemed to stop the blood in his veins and hushed the words upon his lips. Hope raised her head slowly as though with a great effort, and looked into his eyes. It seemed to him that he had been looking into those same eyes for centuries, as though he had always known them, and the soul that looked out of them into his. He bent his head lower, and stretching out his arms drew her to him, and the eyes did not waver. He raised her and held her close against his breast. Her eyes faltered and closed. "Hope," he whispered, "Hope." He stooped lower and kissed her, and his lips told her what they could not speak--and they were quite alone. XIV An hour later Langham rose with a protesting sigh and shook the hood violently. "I say!" he called. "Are you asleep up there. We'll never get home at this rate. Doesn't Hope want to come back here and go to sleep?" The carriage stopped, and the boys tumbled out and walked around in front of it. Hope sat smiling on the box-seat. She was apparently far from sleepy, and she was quite contented where she was, she told him. "Do you know we haven't had anything to eat since yesterday at breakfast?" asked Langham. "MacWilliams and I are fainting. We move that we stop at the next shack we come to, and waken the people up and make them give us some supper." Hope looked aside at Clay and laughed softly. "Supper?" she said. "They want supper!" Their suffering did not seem to impress Clay deeply. He sat snapping his whip at the palm-trees above him, and smiled happily in an inconsequent and irritating manner at nothing. "See here! Do you know that we are lost?" demanded Langham, indignantly, "and starving? Have you any idea at all where you are?" "I have not," said Clay, cheerfully. "All I know is that a long time ago there was a revolution and a woman with jewels, who escaped in an open boat, and I recollect playing that I was a target and standing up to be shot at in a bright light. After that I woke up to the really important things of life--among which supper is not one." Langham and MacWilliams looked at each other doubtfully, and Langham shook his head. "Get down off that box," he commanded. "If you and Hope think this is merely a pleasant moonlight drive, we don't. You two can sit in the carriage now, and we'll take a turn at driving, and we'll guarantee to get you to some place soon." Clay and Hope descended meekly and seated themselves under the hood, where they could look out upon the moonlit road as it unrolled behind them. But they were no longer to enjoy their former leisurely progress. The new whip lashed his horses into a gallop, and the trees flew past them on either hand. "Do you remember that chap in the 'Last Ride Together'?" said Clay. "I and my mistress, side by side, Shall be together--forever ride, And so one more day am I deified. Who knows--the world may end to-night." Hope laughed triumphantly, and threw out her arms as though she would embrace the whole beautiful world that stretched around them. "Oh, no," she laughed. "To-night the world has just begun." The carriage stopped, and there was a confusion of voices on the box-seat, and then a great barking of dogs, and they beheld MacWilliams beating and kicking at the door of a hut. The door opened for an inch, and there was a long debate in Spanish, and finally the door was closed again, and a light appeared through the windows. A few minutes later a man and woman came out of the hut, shivering and yawning, and made a fire in the sun-baked oven at the side of the house. Hope and Clay remained seated in the carriage, and watched the flames springing up from the oily fagots, and the boys moving about with flaring torches of pine, pulling down bundles of fodder for the horses from the roof of the kitchen, while two sleepy girls disappeared toward a mountain stream, one carrying a jar on her shoulder, and the other lighting the way with a torch. Hope sat with her chin on her hand, watching the black figures passing between them and the fire, and standing above it with its light on their faces, shading their eyes from the heat with one hand, and stirring something in a smoking caldron with the other. Hope felt an overflowing sense of gratitude to these simple strangers for the trouble they were taking. She felt how good every one was, and how wonderfully kind and generous was the world that she lived in. Her brother came over to the carriage and bowed with mock courtesy. "I trust, now that we have done all the work," he said, "that your excellencies will condescend to share our frugal fare, or must we bring it to you here?" The clay oven stood in the middle of a hut of laced twigs, through which the smoke drifted freely. There was a row of wooden benches around it, and they all seated themselves and ate ravenously of rice and fried plantains, while the woman patted and tossed tortillas between her hands, eyeing her guests curiously. Her glance fell upon Langham's shoulder, and rested there for so long that Hope followed the direction of her eyes. She leaped to her feet with a cry of fear and reproach, and ran toward her brother. "Ted!" she cried, "you are hurt! you are wounded, and you never told me! What is it? Is it very bad?" Clay crossed the floor in a stride, his face full of concern. "Leave me alone!" cried the stern brother, backing away and warding them off with the coffeepot. "It's only scratched. You'll spill the coffee." But at the sight of the blood Hope had turned very white, and throwing her arms around her brother's neck, hid her eyes on his other shoulder and began to cry. "I am so selfish," she sobbed. "I have been so happy and you were suffering all the time." Her brother stared at the others in dismay. "What nonsense," he said, patting her on the shoulder. "You're a bit tired, and you need rest. That's what you need. The idea of my sister going off in hysterics after behaving like such a sport--and before these young ladies, too. Aren't you ashamed?" "I should think they'd be ashamed," said MacWilliams, severely, as he continued placidly with his supper. "They haven't got enough clothes on." Langham looked over Hope's shoulder at Clay and nodded significantly. "She's been on a good deal of a strain," he explained apologetically, "and no wonder; it's been rather an unusual night for her." Hope raised her head and smiled at him through her tears. Then she turned and moved toward Clay. She brushed her eyes with the back of her hand and laughed. "It has been an unusual night," she said. "Shall I tell him?" she asked. Clay straightened himself unconsciously, and stepped beside her and took her hand; MacWilliams quickly lowered to the bench the dish from which he was eating, and stood up, too. The people of the house stared at the group in the firelight with puzzled interest, at the beautiful young girl, and at the tall, sunburned young man at her side. Langham looked from his sister to Clay and back again, and laughed uneasily. "Langham, I have been very bold," said Clay. "I have asked your sister to marry me--and she has said that she would." Langham flushed as red as his sister. He felt himself at a disadvantage in the presence of a love as great and strong as he knew this must be. It made him seem strangely young and inadequate. He crossed over to his sister awkwardly and kissed her, and then took Clay's hand, and the three stood together and looked at one another, and there was no sign of doubt or question in the face of any one of them. They stood so for some little time, smiling and exclaiming together, and utterly unconscious of anything but their own delight and happiness. MacWilliams watched them, his face puckered into odd wrinkles and his eyes half-closed. Hope suddenly broke away from the others and turned toward him with her hands held out. "Have you nothing to say to me, Mr. MacWilliams?" she asked. MacWilliams looked doubtfully at Clay, as though from force of habit he must ask advice from his chief first, and then took the hands that she held out to him and shook them up and down. His usual confidence seemed to have forsaken him, and he stood, shifting from one foot to the other, smiling and abashed. "Well, I always said they didn't make them any better than you," he gasped at last. "I was always telling him that, wasn't I?" He nodded energetically at Clay. "And that's so; they don't make 'em any better than you." He dropped her hands and crossed over to Clay, and stood surveying him with a smile of wonder and admiration. "How'd you do it?" he demanded. "How did you do it? I suppose you know," he asked sternly, "that you're not good enough for Miss Hope? You know that, don't you?" "Of course I know that," said Clay. MacWilliams walked toward the door and stood in it for a second, looking back at them over his shoulder. "They don't make them any better than that," he reiterated gravely, and disappeared in the direction of the horses, shaking his head and muttering his astonishment and delight. "Please give me some money," Hope said to Clay. "All the money you have," she added, smiling at her presumption of authority over him, "and you, too, Ted." The men emptied their pockets, and Hope poured the mass of silver into the hands of the women, who gazed at it uncomprehendingly. "Thank you for your trouble and your good supper," Hope said in Spanish, "and may no evil come to your house." The woman and her daughters followed her to the carriage, bowing and uttering good wishes in the extravagant metaphor of their country; and as they drove away, Hope waved her hand to them as she sank closer against Clay's shoulder. "The world is full of such kind and gentle souls," she said. In an hour they had regained the main road, and a little later the stars grew dim and the moonlight faded, and trees and bushes and rocks began to take substance and to grow into form and outline. They saw by the cool, gray light of the morning the familiar hills around the capital, and at a cry from the boys on the box-seat, they looked ahead and beheld the harbor of Valencia at their feet, lying as placid and undisturbed as the water in a bath-tub. As they turned up the hill into the road that led to the Palms, they saw the sleeping capital like a city of the dead below them, its white buildings reddened with the light of the rising sun. From three places in different parts of the city, thick columns of smoke rose lazily to the sky. "I had forgotten!" said Clay; "they have been having a revolution here. It seems so long ago." By five o'clock they had reached the gate of the Palms, and their appearance startled the sentry on post into a state of undisciplined joy. A riderless pony, the one upon which Jose' had made his escape when the firing began, had crept into the stable an hour previous, stiff and bruised and weary, and had led the people at the Palms to fear the worst. Mr. Langham and his daughter were standing on the veranda as the horses came galloping up the avenue. They had been awake all the night, and the face of each was white and drawn with anxiety and loss of sleep. Mr. Langham caught Hope in his arms and held her face close to his in silence. "Where have you been?" he said at last. "Why did you treat me like this? You knew how I would suffer." "I could not help it," Hope cried. "I had to go with Madame Alvarez." Her sister had suffered as acutely as had Mr. Langham himself, as long as she was in ignorance of Hope's whereabouts. But now that she saw Hope in the flesh again, she felt a reaction against her for the anxiety and distress she had caused them. "My dear Hope," she said, "is every one to be sacrificed for Madame Alvarez? What possible use could you be to her at such a time? It was not the time nor the place for a young girl. You were only another responsibility for the men." "Clay seemed willing to accept the responsibility," said Langham, without a smile. "And, besides," he added, "if Hope had not been with us we might never have reached home alive." But it was only after much earnest protest and many explanations that Mr. Langham was pacified, and felt assured that his son's wound was not dangerous, and that his daughter was quite safe. Miss Langham and himself, he said, had passed a trying night. There had been much firing in the city, and continual uproar. The houses of several of the friends of Alvarez had been burned and sacked. Alvarez himself had been shot as soon as he had entered the yard of the military prison. It was then given out that he had committed suicide. Mendoza had not dared to kill Rojas, because of the feeling of the people toward him, and had even shown him to the mob from behind the bars of one of the windows in order to satisfy them that he was still living. The British Minister had sent to the Palace for the body of Captain Stuart, and had had it escorted to the Legation, from whence it would be sent to England. This, as far as Mr. Langham had heard, was the news of the night just over. "Two native officers called here for you about midnight, Clay," he continued, "and they are still waiting for you below at your office. They came from Rojas's troops, who are encamped on the hills at the other side of the city. They wanted you to join them with the men from the mines. I told them I did not know when you would return, and they said they would wait. If you could have been here last night, it is possible that we might have done something, but now that it is all over, I am glad that you saved that woman instead. I should have liked, though, to have struck one blow at them. But we cannot hope to win against assassins. The death of young Stuart has hurt me terribly, and the murder of Alvarez, coming on top of it, has made me wish I had never heard of nor seen Olancho. I have decided to go away at once, on the next steamer, and I will take my daughters with me, and Ted, too. The State Department at Washington can fight with Mendoza for the mines. You made a good stand, but they made a better one, and they have beaten us. Mendoza's coup d'etat has passed into history, and the revolution is at an end." On his arrival Clay had at once asked for a cigar, and while Mr. Langham was speaking he had been biting it between his teeth, with the serious satisfaction of a man who had been twelve hours without one. He knocked the ashes from it and considered the burning end thoughtfully. Then he glanced at Hope as she stood among the group on the veranda. She was waiting for his reply and watching him intently. He seemed to be confident that she would approve of the only course he saw open to him. "The revolution is not at an end by any means, Mr. Langham," he said at last, simply. "It has just begun." He turned abruptly and walked away in the direction of the office, and MacWilliams and Langham stepped off the veranda and followed him as a matter of course. The soldiers in the army who were known to be faithful to General Rojas belonged to the Third and Fourth regiments, and numbered four thousand on paper, and two thousand by count of heads. When they had seen their leader taken prisoner, and swept off the parade-ground by Mendoza's cavalry, they had first attempted to follow in pursuit and recapture him, but the men on horseback had at once shaken off the men on foot and left them, panting and breathless, in the dust behind them. So they halted uncertainly in the road, and their young officers held counsel together. They first considered the advisability of attacking the military prison, but decided against doing so, as it would lead, they feared, whether it proved successful or not, to the murder of Rojas. It was impossible to return to the city where Mendoza's First and Second regiments greatly outnumbered them. Having no leader and no headquarters, the officers marched the men to the hills above the city and went into camp to await further developments. Throughout the night they watched the illumination of the city and of the boats in the harbor below them; they saw the flames bursting from the homes of the members of Alvarez's Cabinet, and when the morning broke they beheld the grounds of the Palace swarming with Mendoza's troops, and the red and white barred flag of the revolution floating over it. The news of the assassination of Alvarez and the fact that Rojas had been spared for fear of the people, had been carried to them early in the evening, and with this knowledge of their General's safety hope returned and fresh plans were discussed. By midnight they had definitely decided that should Mendoza attempt to dislodge them the next morning, they would make a stand, but that if the fight went against them, they would fall back along the mountain roads to the Valencia mines, where they hoped to persuade the fifteen hundred soldiers there installed to join forces with them against the new Dictator. In order to assure themselves of this help, a messenger was despatched by a circuitous route to the Palms, to ask the aid of the resident director, and another was sent to the mines to work upon the feelings of the soldiers themselves. The officer who had been sent to the Palms to petition Clay for the loan of his soldier-workmen, had decided to remain until Clay returned, and another messenger had been sent after him from the camp on the same errand. These two lieutenants greeted Clay with enthusiasm, but he at once interrupted them, and began plying them with questions as to where their camp was situated and what roads led from it to the Palms. "Bring your men at once to this end of our railroad," he said. "It is still early, and the revolutionists will sleep late. They are drugged with liquor and worn out with excitement, and whatever may have been their intentions toward you last night, they will be late in putting them into practice this morning. I will telegraph Kirkland to come up at once with all of his soldiers and with his three hundred Irishmen. Allowing him a half-hour to collect them and to get his flat cars together, and another half-hour in which to make the run, he should be here by half-past six--and that's quick mobilization. You ride back now and march your men here at a double-quick. With your two thousand we shall have in all three thousand and eight hundred men. I must have absolute control over my own troops. Otherwise I shall act independently of you and go into the city alone with my workmen." "That is unnecessary," said one of the lieutenants. "We have no officers. If you do not command us, there is no one else to do it. We promise that our men will follow you and give you every obedience. They have been led by foreigners before, by young Captain Stuart and Major Fergurson and Colonel Shrevington. They know how highly General Rojas thinks of you, and they know that you have led Continental armies in Europe." "Well, don't tell them I haven't until this is over," said Clay. "Now, ride hard, gentlemen, and bring your men here as quickly as possible." The lieutenants thanked him effusively and galloped away, radiant at the success of their mission, and Clay entered the office where MacWilliams was telegraphing his orders to Kirkland. He seated himself beside the instrument, and from time to time answered the questions Kirkland sent back to him over the wire, and in the intervals of silence thought of Hope. It was the first time he had gone into action feeling the touch of a woman's hand upon his sleeve, and he was fearful lest she might think he had considered her too lightly. He took a piece of paper from the table and wrote a few lines upon it, and then rewrote them several times. The message he finally sent to her was this: "I am sure you understand, and that you would not have me give up beaten now, when what we do to-day may set us right again. I know better than any one else in the world can know, what I run the risk of losing, but you would not have that fear stop me from going on with what we have been struggling for so long. I cannot come back to see you before we start, but I know your heart is with me. With great love, Robert Clay." He gave the note to his servant, and the answer was brought to him almost immediately. Hope had not rewritten her message: "I love you because you are the sort of man you are, and had you given up as father wished you to do, or on my account, you would have been some one else, and I would have had to begin over again to learn to love you for some different reasons. I know that you will come back to me bringing your sheaves with you. Nothing can happen to you now. Hope." He had never received a line from her before, and he read and reread this with a sense of such pride and happiness in his face that MacWilliams smiled covertly and bent his eyes upon his instrument. Clay went back into his room and kissed the page of paper gently, flushing like a boy as he did so, and then folding it carefully, he put it away beneath his jacket. He glanced about him guiltily, although he was quite alone, and taking out his watch, pried it open and looked down into the face of the photograph that had smiled up at him from it for so many years. He thought how unlike it was to Alice Langham as he knew her. He judged that it must have been taken when she was very young, at the age Hope was then, before the little world she lived in had crippled and narrowed her and marked her for its own. He remembered what she had said to him the first night he had seen her. "That is the picture of the girl who ceased to exist four years ago, and whom you have never met." He wondered if she had ever existed. "It looks more like Hope than her sister," he mused. "It looks very much like Hope." He decided that he would let it remain where it was until Hope gave him a better one; and smiling slightly he snapped the lid fast, as though he were closing a door on the face of Alice Langham and locking it forever. Kirkland was in the cab of the locomotive that brought the soldiers from the mine. He stopped the first car in front of the freight station until the workmen had filed out and formed into a double line on the platform. Then he moved the train forward the length of that car, and those in the one following were mustered out in a similar manner. As the cars continued to come in, the men at the head of the double line passed on through the freight station and on up the road to the city in an unbroken column. There was no confusion, no crowding, and no haste. When the last car had been emptied, Clay rode down the line and appointed a foreman to take charge of each company, stationing his engineers and the Irish-Americans in the van. It looked more like a mob than a regiment. None of the men were in uniform, and the native soldiers were barefoot. But they showed a winning spirit, and stood in as orderly an array as though they were drawn up in line to receive their month's wages. The Americans in front of the column were humorously disposed, and inclined to consider the whole affair as a pleasant outing. They had been placed in front, not because they were better shots than the natives, but because every South American thinks that every citizen of the United States is a master either of the rifle or the revolver, and Clay was counting on this superstition. His assistant engineers and foremen hailed him as he rode on up and down the line with good-natured cheers, and asked him when they were to get their commissions, and if it were true that they were all captains, or only colonels, as they were at home. They had been waiting for a half-hour, when there was the sound of horses' hoofs on the road, and the even beat of men's feet, and the advance guard of the Third and Fourth regiments came toward them at a quickstep. The men were still in the full-dress uniforms they had worn at the review the day before, and in comparison with the soldier-workmen and the Americans in flannel shirts, they presented so martial a showing that they were welcomed with tumultuous cheers. Clay threw them into a double line on one side of the road, down the length of which his own marched until they had reached the end of it nearest to the city, when they took up their position in a close formation, and the native regiments fell in behind them. Clay selected twenty of the best shots from among the engineers and sent them on ahead as a skirmish line. They were ordered to fall back at once if they saw any sign of the enemy. In this order the column of four thousand men started for the city. It was a little after seven when they advanced, and the air was mild and peaceful. Men and women came crowding to the doors and windows of the huts as they passed, and stood watching them in silence, not knowing to which party the small army might belong. In order to enlighten them, Clay shouted, "Viva Rojas." And his men took it up, and the people answered gladly. They had reached the closely built portion of the city when the skirmish line came running back to say that it had been met by a detachment of Mendoza's cavalry, who had galloped away as soon as they saw them. There was then no longer any doubt that the fact of their coming was known at the Palace, and Clay halted his men in a bare plaza and divided them into three columns. Three streets ran parallel with one another from this plaza to the heart of the city, and opened directly upon the garden of the Palace where Mendoza had fortified himself. Clay directed the columns to advance up these streets, keeping the head of each column in touch with the other two. At the word they were to pour down the side streets and rally to each other's assistance. As they stood, drawn up on the three sides of the plaza, he rode out before them and held up his hat for silence. They were there with arms in their hands, he said, for two reasons: the greater one, and the one which he knew actuated the native soldiers, was their desire to preserve the Constitution of the Republic. According to their own laws, the Vice-President must succeed when the President's term of office had expired, or in the event of his death. President Alvarez had been assassinated, and the Vice-President, General Rojas, was, in consequence, his legal successor. It was their duty, as soldiers of the Republic, to rescue him from prison, to drive the man who had usurped his place into exile, and by so doing uphold the laws which they had themselves laid down. The second motive, he went on, was a less worthy and more selfish one. The Olancho mines, which now gave work to thousands and brought millions of dollars into the country, were coveted by Mendoza, who would, if he could, convert them into a monopoly of his government. If he remained in power all foreigners would be driven out of the country, and the soldiers would be forced to work in the mines without payment. Their condition would be little better than that of the slaves in the salt mines of Siberia. Not only would they no longer be paid for their labor, but the people as a whole would cease to receive that share of the earnings of the mines which had hitherto been theirs. "Under President Rojas you will have liberty, justice, and prosperity," Clay cried. "Under Mendoza you will be ruled by martial law. He will rob and overtax you, and you will live through a reign of terror. Between them--which will you choose?" The native soldiers answered by cries of "Rojas," and breaking ranks rushed across the plaza toward him, crowding around his horse and shouting, "Long live Rojas," "Long live the Constitution," "Death to Mendoza." The Americans stood as they were and gave three cheers for the Government. They were still cheering and shouting as they advanced upon the Palace, and the noise of their coming drove the people indoors, so that they marched through deserted streets and between closed doors and sightless windows. No one opposed them, and no one encouraged them. But they could now see the facade of the Palace and the flag of the Revolutionists hanging from the mast in front of it. Three blocks distant from the Palace they came upon the buildings of the United States and English Legations, where the flags of the two countries had been hung out over the narrow thoroughfare. The windows and the roofs of each legation were crowded with women and children who had sought refuge there, and the column halted as Weimer, the Consul, and Sir Julian Pindar, the English Minister, came out, bare-headed, into the street and beckoned to Clay to stop. "As our Minister was not here," Weimer said, "I telegraphed to Truxillo for the man-of-war there. She started some time ago, and we have just heard that she is entering the lower harbor. She should have her blue-jackets on shore in twenty minutes. Sir Julian and I think you ought to wait for them." The English Minister put a detaining hand on Clay's bridle. "If you attack Mendoza at the Palace with this mob," he remonstrated, "rioting and lawlessness generally will break out all over the city. I ask you to keep them back until we get your sailors to police the streets and protect property." Clay glanced over his shoulder at the engineers and the Irish workmen standing in solemn array behind him. "Oh, you can hardly call this a mob," he said. "They look a little rough and ready, but I will answer for them. The two other columns that are coming up the streets parallel to this are Government troops and properly engaged in driving a usurper out of the Government building. The best thing you can do is to get down to the wharf and send the marines and blue-jackets where you think they will do the most good. I can't wait for them. And they can't come too soon." The grounds of the Palace occupied two entire blocks; the Botanical Gardens were in the rear, and in front a series of low terraces ran down from its veranda to the high iron fence which separated the grounds from the chief thoroughfare of the city. Clay sent word to the left and right wing of his little army to make a detour one street distant from the Palace grounds and form in the street in the rear of the Botanical Gardens. When they heard the firing of his men from the front they were to force their way through the gates at the back and attack the Palace in the rear. "Mendoza has the place completely barricaded," Weimer warned him, "and he has three field pieces covering each of these streets. You and your men are directly in line of one of them now. He is only waiting for you to get a little nearer before he lets loose." From where he sat Clay could count the bars of the iron fence in front of the grounds. But the boards that backed them prevented his forming any idea of the strength or the distribution of Mendoza's forces. He drew his staff of amateur officers to one side and explained the situation to them. "The Theatre National and the Club Union," he said, "face the Palace from the opposite corners of this street. You must get into them and barricade the windows and throw up some sort of shelter for yourselves along the edge of the roofs and drive the men behind that fence back to the Palace. Clear them away from the cannon first, and keep them away from it. I will be waiting in the street below. When you have driven them back, we will charge the gates and have it out with them in the gardens. The Third and Fourth regiments ought to take them in the rear about the same time. You will continue to pick them off from the roof." The two supporting columns had already started on their roundabout way to the rear of the Palace. Clay gathered up his reins, and telling his men to keep close to the walls, started forward, his soldiers following on the sidewalks and leaving the middle of the street clear. As they reached a point a hundred yards below the Palace, a part of the wooden shield behind the fence was thrown down, there was a puff of white smoke and a report, and a cannon-ball struck the roof of a house which they were passing and sent the tiles clattering about their heads. But the men in the lead had already reached the stage-door of the theatre and were opposite one of the doors to the club. They drove these in with the butts of their rifles, and raced up the stairs of each of the deserted buildings until they reached the roof. Langham was swept by a weight of men across a stage, and jumped among the music racks in the orchestra. He caught a glimpse of the early morning sun shining on the tawdry hangings of the boxes and the exaggerated perspective of the scenery. He ran through corridors between two great statues of Comedy and Tragedy, and up a marble stair case to a lobby in which he saw the white faces about him multiplied in long mirrors, and so out to an iron balcony from which he looked down, panting and breathless, upon the Palace Gardens, swarming with soldiers and white with smoke. Men poured through the windows of the club opposite, dragging sofas and chairs out to the balcony and upon the flat roof. The men near him were tearing down the yellow silk curtains in the lobby and draping them along the railing of the balcony to better conceal their movements from the enemy below. Bullets spattered the stucco about their heads, and panes of glass broke suddenly and fell in glittering particles upon their shoulders. The firing had already begun from the roofs near them. Beyond the club and the theatre and far along the street on each side of the Palace the merchants were slamming the iron shutters of their shops, and men and women were running for refuge up the high steps of the church of Santa Maria. Others were gathered in black masses on the balconies and roofs of the more distant houses, where they stood outlined against the soft blue sky in gigantic silhouette. Their shouts of encouragement and anger carried clearly in the morning air, and spurred on the gladiators below to greater effort. In the Palace Gardens a line of Mendoza's men fought from behind the first barricade, while others dragged tables and bedding and chairs across the green terraces and tumbled them down to those below, who seized them and formed them into a second line of defence. Two of the assistant engineers were kneeling at Langham's feet with the barrels of their rifles resting on the railing of the balcony. Their eyes had been trained for years to judge distances and to measure space, and they glanced along the sights of their rifles as though they were looking through the lens of a transit, and at each report their faces grew more earnest and their lips pressed tighter together. One of them lowered his gun to light a cigarette, and Langham handed him his match-box, with a certain feeling of repugnance. "Better get under cover, Mr. Langham," the man said, kindly. "There's no use our keeping your mines for you if you're not alive to enjoy them. Take a shot at that crew around the gun." "I don't like this long range business," Langham answered. "I am going down to join Clay. I don't like the idea of hitting a man when he isn't looking at you." The engineer gave an incredulous laugh. "If he isn't looking at you, he's aiming at the man next to you. 'Live and let Live' doesn't apply at present." As Langham reached Clay's side triumphant shouts arose from the roof-tops, and the men posted there stood up and showed themselves above the barricades and called to Clay that the cannon were deserted. Kirkland had come prepared for the barricade, and, running across the street, fastened a dynamite cartridge to each gate post and lit the fuses. The soldiers scattered before him as he came leaping back, and in an instant later there was a racking roar, and the gates were pitched out of their sockets and thrown forward, and those in the street swept across them and surrounded the cannon. Langham caught it by the throat as though it were human, and did not feel the hot metal burning the palms of his hands as he choked it and pointed its muzzle toward the Palace, while the others dragged at the spokes of the wheel. It was fighting at close range now, close enough to suit even Langham. He found himself in the front rank of it without knowing exactly how he got there. Every man on both sides was playing his own hand, and seemed to know exactly what to do. He felt neglected and very much alone, and was somewhat anxious lest his valor might be wasted through his not knowing how to put it to account. He saw the enemy in changing groups of scowling men, who seemed to eye him for an instant down the length of a gun-barrel and then disappear behind a puff of smoke. He kept thinking that war made men take strange liberties with their fellow-men, and it struck him as being most absurd that strangers should stand up and try to kill one another, men who had so little in common that they did not even know one another's names. The soldiers who were fighting on his own side were equally unknown to him, and he looked in vain for Clay. He saw MacWilliams for a moment through the smoke, jabbing at a jammed cartridge with his pen-knife, and hacking the lead away to make it slip. He was remonstrating with the gun and swearing at it exactly as though it were human, and as Langham ran toward him he threw it away and caught up another from the ground. Kneeling beside the wounded man who had dropped it and picking the cartridges from his belt, he assured him cheerfully that he was not so badly hurt as he thought. "You all right?" Langham asked. "I'm all right. I'm trying to get a little laddie hiding behind that blue silk sofa over there. He's taken an unnatural dislike to me, and he's nearly got me three times. I'm knocking horse-hair out of his rampart, though." The men of Stuart's body-guard were fighting outside of the breastworks and mattresses. They were using their swords as though they were machetes, and the Irishmen were swinging their guns around their shoulders like sledge-hammers, and beating their foes over the head and breast. The guns at his own side sounded close at Langham's ear, and deafened him, and those of the enemy exploded so near to his face that he was kept continually winking and dodging, as though he were being taken by a flashlight photograph. When he fired he aimed where the mass was thickest, so that he might not see what his bullet did, but he remembered afterward that he always reloaded with the most anxious swiftness in order that he might not be killed before he had had another shot, and that the idea of being killed was of no concern to him except on that account. Then the scene before him changed, and apparently hundreds of Mendoza's soldiers poured out from the Palace and swept down upon him, cheering as they came, and he felt himself falling back naturally and as a matter of course, as he would have stepped out of the way of a locomotive, or a runaway horse, or any other unreasoning thing. His shoulders pushed against a mass of shouting, sweating men, who in turn pressed back upon others, until the mass reached the iron fence and could move no farther. He heard Clay's voice shouting to them, and saw him run forward, shooting rapidly as he ran, and he followed him, even though his reason told him it was a useless thing to do, and then there came a great shout from the rear of the Palace, and more soldiers, dressed exactly like the others, rushed through the great doors and swarmed around the two wings of the building, and he recognized them as Rojas's men and knew that the fight was over. He saw a tall man with a negro's face spring out of the first mass of soldiers and shout to them to follow him. Clay gave a yell of welcome and ran at him, calling upon him in Spanish to surrender. The negro stopped and stood at bay, glaring at Clay and at the circle of soldiers closing in around him. He raised his revolver and pointed it steadily. It was as though the man knew he had only a moment to live, and meant to do that one thing well in the short time left him. Clay sprang to one side and ran toward him, dodging to the right and left, but Mendoza followed his movements carefully with his revolver. It lasted but an instant. Then the Spaniard threw his arm suddenly across his face, drove the heel of his boot into the turf, and spinning about on it fell forward. "If he was shot where his sash crosses his heart, I know the man who did it," Langham heard a voice say at his elbow, and turning saw MacWilliams wetting his fingers at his lips and touching them gingerly to the heated barrel of his Winchester. The death of Mendoza left his followers without a leader and without a cause. They threw their muskets on the ground and held their hands above their heads, shrieking for mercy. Clay and his officers answered them instantly by running from one group to another, knocking up the barrels of the rifles and calling hoarsely to the men on the roofs to cease firing, and as they were obeyed the noise of the last few random shots was drowned in tumultuous cheering and shouts of exultation, that, starting in the gardens, were caught up by those in the streets and passed on quickly as a line of flame along the swaying housetops. The native officers sprang upon Clay and embraced him after their fashion, hailing him as the Liberator of Olancho, as the Preserver of the Constitution, and their brother patriot. Then one of them climbed to the top of a gilt and marble table and proclaimed him military President. "You'll proclaim yourself an idiot, if you don't get down from there," Clay said, laughing. "I thank you for permitting me to serve with you, gentlemen. I shall have great pleasure in telling our President how well you acquitted yourself in this row--battle, I mean. And now I would suggest that you store the prisoners' weapons in the Palace and put a guard over them, and then conduct the men themselves to the military prison, where you can release General Rojas and escort him back to the city in a triumphal procession. You'd like that, wouldn't you?" But the natives protested that that honor was for him alone. Clay declined it, pleading that he must look after his wounded. "I can hardly believe there are any dead," he said to Kirkland. "For, if it takes two thousand bullets to kill a man in European warfare, it must require about two hundred thousand to kill a man in South America." He told Kirkland to march his men back to the mines and to see that there were no stragglers. "If they want to celebrate, let them celebrate when they get to the mines, but not here. They have made a good record to-day and I won't have it spoiled by rioting. They shall have their reward later. Between Rojas and Mr. Langham they should all be rich men." The cheering from the housetops since the firing ceased had changed suddenly into hand-clappings, and the cries, though still undistinguishable, were of a different sound. Clay saw that the Americans on the balconies of the club and of the theatre had thrown themselves far over the railings and were all looking in the same direction and waving their hats and cheering loudly, and he heard above the shouts of the people the regular tramp of men's feet marching in step, and the rattle of a machine gun as it bumped and shook over the rough stones. He gave a shout of pleasure, and Kirkland and the two boys ran with him up the slope, crowding each other to get a better view. The mob parted at the Palace gates, and they saw two lines of blue-jackets, spread out like the sticks of a fan, dragging the gun between them, the middies in their tight-buttoned tunics and gaiters, and behind them more blue-jackets with bare, bronzed throats, and with the swagger and roll of the sea in their legs and shoulders. An American flag floated above the white helmets of the marines. Its presence and the sense of pride which the sight of these men from home awoke in them made the fight just over seem mean and petty, and they took off their hats and cheered with the others. A first lieutenant, who felt his importance and also a sense of disappointment at having arrived too late to see the fighting, left his men at the gate of the Palace, and advanced up the terrace, stopping to ask for information as he came. Each group to which he addressed himself pointed to Clay. The sight of his own flag had reminded Clay that the banner of Mendoza still hung from the mast beside which he was standing, and as the officer approached he was busily engaged in untwisting its halyards and pulling it down. The lieutenant saluted him doubtfully. "Can you tell me who is in command here?" he asked. He spoke somewhat sharply, for Clay was not a military looking personage, covered as he was with dust and perspiration, and with his sombrero on the back of his head. "Our Consul here told us at the landing-place," continued the lieutenant in an aggrieved tone, "that a General Mendoza was in power, and that I had better report to him, and then ten minutes later I hear that he is dead and that a General Rojas is President, but that a man named Clay has made himself Dictator. My instructions are to recognize no belligerents, but to report to the Government party. Now, who is the Government party?" Clay brought the red-barred flag down with a jerk, and ripped it free from the halyards. Kirkland and the two boys were watching him with amused smiles. "I appreciate your difficulty," he said. "President Alvarez is dead, and General Mendoza, who tried to make himself Dictator, is also dead, and the real President, General Rojas, is still in jail. So at present I suppose that I represent the Government party, at least I am the man named Clay. It hadn't occurred to me before, but, until Rojas is free, I guess I am the Dictator of Olancho. Is Madame Alvarez on board your ship?" "Yes, she is with us," the officer replied, in some confusion. "Excuse me--are you the three gentlemen who took her to the yacht? I am afraid I spoke rather hastily just now, but you are not in uniform, and the Government seems to change so quickly down here that a stranger finds it hard to keep up with it." Six of the native officers had approached as the lieutenant was speaking and saluted Clay gravely. "We have followed your instructions," one of them said, "and the regiments are ready to march with the prisoners. Have you any further orders for us--can we deliver any messages to General Rojas?" "Present my congratulations to General Rojas, and best wishes," said Clay. "And tell him for me, that it would please me greatly if he would liberate an American citizen named Burke, who is at present in the cuartel. And that I wish him to promote all of you gentlemen one grade and give each of you the Star of Olancho. Tell him that in my opinion you have deserved even higher reward and honor at his hands." The boy-lieutenants broke out into a chorus of delighted thanks. They assured Clay that he was most gracious; that he overwhelmed them, and that it was honor enough for them that they had served under him. But Clay laughed, and drove them off with a paternal wave of the hand. The officer from the man-of-war listened with an uncomfortable sense of having blundered in his manner toward this powder-splashed young man who set American citizens at liberty, and created captains by the half-dozen at a time. "Are you from the States?" he asked as they moved toward the man-of-war's men. "I am, thank God. Why not?" "I thought you were, but you saluted like an Englishman." "I was an officer in the English army once in the Soudan, when they were short of officers." Clay shook his head and looked wistfully at the ranks of the blue-jackets drawn up on either side of them. The horses had been brought out and Langham and MacWilliams were waiting for him to mount. "I have worn several uniforms since I was a boy," said Clay. "But never that of my own country." The people were cheering him from every part of the square. Women waved their hands from balconies and housetops, and men climbed to awnings and lampposts and shouted his name. The officers and men of the landing party took note of him and of this reception out of the corner of their eyes, and wondered. "And what had I better do?" asked the commanding officer. "Oh, I would police the Palace grounds, if I were you, and picket that street at the right, where there are so many wine shops, and preserve order generally until Rojas gets here. He won't be more than an hour, now. We shall be coming over to pay our respects to your captain to-morrow. Glad to have met you." "Well, I'm glad to have met you," answered the officer, heartily. "Hold on a minute. Even if you haven't worn our uniform, you're as good, and better, than some I've seen that have, and you're a sort of a commander-in-chief, anyway, and I'm damned if I don't give you a sort of salute." Clay laughed like a boy as he swung himself into the saddle. The officer stepped back and gave the command; the middies raised their swords and Clay passed between massed rows of his countrymen with their muskets held rigidly toward him. The housetops rocked again at the sight, and as he rode out into the brilliant sunshine, his eyes were wet and winking. The two boys had drawn up at his side, but MacWilliams had turned in the saddle and was still looking toward the Palace, with his hand resting on the hindquarters of his pony. "Look back, Clay," he said. "Take a last look at it, you'll never see it after to-day. Turn again, turn again, Dictator of Olancho." The men laughed and drew rein as he bade them, and looked back up the narrow street. They saw the green and white flag of Olancho creeping to the top of the mast before the Palace, the blue-jackets driving back the crowd, the gashes in the walls of the houses, where Mendoza's cannonballs had dug their way through the stucco, and the silk curtains, riddled with bullets, flapping from the balconies of the opera-house. "You had it all your own way an hour ago," MacWilliams said, mockingly. "You could have sent Rojas into exile, and made us all Cabinet Ministers--and you gave it up for a girl. Now, you're Dictator of Olancho. What will you be to-morrow? To-morrow you will be Andrew Langham's son-in-law--Benedict, the married man. Andrew Langham's son-in-law cannot ask his wife to live in such a hole as this, so--Goodbye, Mr. Clay. We have been long together." Clay and Langham looked curiously at the boy to see if he were in earnest, but MacWilliams would not meet their eyes. "There were three of us," he said, "and one got shot, and one got married, and the third--? You will grow fat, Clay, and live on Fifth Avenue and wear a high silk hat, and some day when you're sitting in your club you'll read a paragraph in a newspaper with a queer Spanish date-line to it, and this will all come back to you,--this heat, and the palms, and the fever, and the days when you lived on plantains and we watched our trestles grow out across the canons, and you'll be willing to give your hand to sleep in a hammock again, and to feel the sweat running down your back, and you'll want to chuck your gun up against your chin and shoot into a line of men, and the policemen won't let you, and your wife won't let you. That's what you're giving up. There it is. Take a good look at it. You'll never see it again." XV The steamer "Santiago," carrying "passengers, bullion, and coffee," was headed to pass Porto Rico by midnight, when she would be free of land until she anchored at the quarantine station of the green hills of Staten Island. She had not yet shaken off the contamination of the earth; a soft inland breeze still tantalized her with odors of tree and soil, the smell of the fresh coat of paint that had followed her coaling rose from her sides, and the odor of spilt coffee-grains that hung around the hatches had yet to be blown away by a jealous ocean breeze, or washed by a welcoming cross sea. The captain stopped at the open entrance of the Social Hall. "If any of you ladies want to take your last look at Olancho you've got to come now," he said. "We'll lose the Valencia light in the next quarter hour." Miss Langham and King looked up from their novels and smiled, and Miss Langham shook her head. "I've taken three final farewells of Olancho already," she said: "before we went down to dinner, and when the sun set, and when the moon rose. I have no more sentiment left to draw on. Do you want to go?" she asked. "I'm very comfortable, thank you," King said, and returned to the consideration of his novel. But Clay and Hope arose at the captain's suggestion with suspicious alacrity, and stepped out upon the empty deck, and into the encompassing darkness, with a little sigh of relief. Alice Langham looked after them somewhat wistfully and bit the edges of her book. She sat for some time with her brows knitted, glancing occasionally and critically toward King and up with unseeing eyes at the swinging lamps of the saloon. He caught her looking at him once when he raised his eyes as he turned a page, and smiled back at her, and she nodded pleasantly and bent her head over her reading. She assured herself that after all King understood her and she him, and that if they never rose to certain heights, they never sank below a high level of mutual esteem, and that perhaps was the best in the end. King had placed his yacht at the disposal of Madame Alvarez, and she had sailed to Colon, where she could change to the steamers for Lisbon, while he accompanied the Langhams and the wedding party to New York. Clay recognized that the time had now arrived in his life when he could graduate from the position of manager-director and become the engineering expert, and that his services in Olancho were no longer needed. With Rojas in power Mr. Langham had nothing further to fear from the Government, and with Kirkland in charge and young Langham returning after a few months' absence to resume his work, he felt himself free to enjoy his holiday. They had taken the first steamer out, and the combined efforts of all had been necessary to prevail upon MacWilliams to accompany them; and even now the fact that he was to act as Clay's best man and, as Langham assured him cheerfully, was to wear a frock coat and see his name in all the papers, brought on such sudden panics of fear that the fast-fading coast line filled his soul with regret, and a wilful desire to jump overboard and swim back. Clay and Hope stopped at the door of the chief engineer's cabin and said they had come to pay him a visit. The chief had but just come from the depths where the contamination of the earth was most evident in the condition of his stokers; but his chin was now cleanly shaven, and his pipe was drawing as well as his engine fires, and he had wrapped himself in an old P. & O. white duck jacket to show what he had been before he sank to the level of a coasting steamer. They admired the clerk-like neatness of the report he had just finished, and in return he promised them the fastest run on record, and showed them the portrait of his wife, and of their tiny cottage on the Isle of Wight, and his jade idols from Corea, and carved cocoanut gourds from Brazil, and a picture from the "Graphic" of Lord Salisbury, tacked to the partition and looking delightedly down between two highly colored lithographs of Miss Ellen Terry and the Princess May. Then they called upon the captain, and Clay asked him why captains always hung so much lace about their beds when they invariably slept on a red velvet sofa with their boots on, and the captain ordered his Chinese steward to mix them a queer drink and offered them the choice of a six months' accumulation of paper novels, and free admittance to his bridge at all hours. And then they passed on to the door of the smoking-room and beckoned MacWilliams to come out and join them. His manner as he did so bristled with importance, and he drew them eagerly to the rail. "I've just been having a chat with Captain Burke," he said, in an undertone. "He's been telling Langham and me about a new game that's better than running railroads. He says there's a country called Macedonia that's got a native prince who wants to be free from Turkey, and the Turks won't let him, and Burke says if we'll each put up a thousand dollars, he'll guarantee to get the prince free in six months. He's made an estimate of the cost and submitted it to the Russian Embassy at Washington, and he says they will help him secretly, and he knows a man who has just patented a new rifle, and who will supply him with a thousand of them for the sake of the advertisement. He says it's a mountainous country, and all you have to do is to stand on the passes and roll rocks down on the Turks as they come in. It sounds easy, doesn't it?" "Then you're thinking of turning professional filibuster yourself?" said Clay. "Well, I don't know. It sounds more interesting than engineering. Burke says I beat him on his last fight, and he'd like to have me with him in the next one--sort of young-blood-in-the-firm idea--and he calculates that we can go about setting people free and upsetting governments for some time to come. He says there is always something to fight about if you look for it. And I must say the condition of those poor Macedonians does appeal to me. Think of them all alone down there bullied by that Sultan of Turkey, and wanting to be free and independent. That's not right. You, as an American citizen, ought to be the last person in the world to throw cold water on an undertaking like that. In the name of Liberty now?" "I don't object; set them free, of course," laughed Clay. "But how long have you entertained this feeling for the enslaved Macedonians, Mac?" "Well, I never heard of them until a quarter of an hour ago, but they oughtn't to suffer through my ignorance." "Certainly not. Let me know when you're going to do it, and Hope and I will run over and look on. I should like to see you and Burke and the Prince of Macedonia rolling rocks down on the Turkish Empire." Hope and Clay passed on up the deck laughing, and MacWilliams looked after them with a fond and paternal smile. The lamp in the wheelhouse threw a broad belt of light across the forward deck as they passed through it into the darkness of the bow, where the lonely lookout turned and stared at them suspiciously, and then resumed his stern watch over the great waters. They leaned upon the rail and breathed the soft air which the rush of the steamer threw in their faces, and studied in silence the stars that lay so low upon the horizon line that they looked like the harbor lights of a great city. "Do you see that long line of lamps off our port bow?" asked Clay. Hope nodded. "Those are the electric lights along the ocean drive at Long Branch and up the Rumson Road, and those two stars a little higher up are fixed to the mast-heads of the Scotland Lightship. And that mass of light that you think is the Milky Way, is the glare of the New York street lamps thrown up against the sky." "Are we so near as that?" said Hope, smiling. "And what lies over there?" she asked, pointing to the east. "Over there is the coast of Africa. Don't you see the lighthouse on Cape Bon? If it wasn't for Gibraltar being in the way, I could show you the harbor lights of Bizerta, and the terraces of Algiers shining like a café chantant in the night." "Algiers," sighed Hope, "where you were a soldier of Africa, and rode across the deserts. Will you take me there?" "There, of course, but to Gibraltar first, where we will drive along the Alameda by moonlight. I drove there once coming home from a mess dinner with the Colonel. The drive lies between broad white balustrades, and the moon shone down on us between the leaves of the Spanish bayonet. It was like an Italian garden. But he did not see it, and he would talk to me about the Watkins range finder on the lower ramparts, and he puffed on a huge cigar. I tried to imagine I was there on my honeymoon, but the end of his cigar would light up and I would see his white mustache and the glow on his red jacket, so I vowed I would go over that drive again with the proper person. And we won't talk of range finders, will we? "There to the North is Paris; your Paris, and my Paris, with London only eight hours away. If you look very closely, you can see the thousands of hansom cab lamps flashing across the asphalt, and the open theatres, and the fairy lamps in the gardens back of the houses in Mayfair, where they are giving dances in your honor, in honor of the beautiful American bride, whom every one wants to meet. And you will wear the finest tiara we can get on Bond Street, but no one will look at it; they will only look at you. And I will feel very miserable and tease you to come home." Hope put her hand in his, and he held her finger-tips to his lips for an instant and closed his other hand upon hers. "And after that?" asked Hope. "After that we will go to work again, and take long journeys to Mexico and Peru or wherever they want me, and I will sit in judgment on the work other chaps have done. And when we get back to our car at night, or to the section house, for it will be very rough sometimes,"--Hope pressed his hand gently in answer,--"I will tell you privately how very differently your husband would have done it, and you, knowing all about it, will say that had it been left to me, I would certainly have accomplished it in a vastly superior manner." "Well, so you would," said Hope, calmly. "That's what I said you'd say," laughed Clay. "Dearest," he begged, "promise me something. Promise me that you are going to be very happy." Hope raised her eyes and looked up at him in silence, and had the man in the wheelhouse been watching the stars, as he should have been, no one but the two foolish young people on the bow of the boat would have known her answer. The ship's bell sounded eight times, and Hope moved slightly. "So late as that," she sighed. "Come. We must be going back." A great wave struck the ship's side a friendly slap, and the wind caught up the spray and tossed it in their eyes, and blew a strand of her hair loose so that it fell across Clay's face, and they laughed happily together as she drew it back and he took her hand again to steady her progress across the slanting deck. As they passed hand in hand out of the shadow into the light from the wheelhouse, the lookout in the bow counted the strokes of the bell to himself, and then turned and shouted back his measured cry to the bridge above them. His voice seemed to be a part of the murmuring sea and the welcoming winds. "Listen," said Clay. "Eight bells," the voice sang from the darkness. "The for'ard light's shining bright--and all's well." 
61845	----	SPACE-LINER X-87 By RAY CUMMINGS The X-87 was a red shambles. It roared the starways, a renegade Venusian at the controls, a swaggering Martian plotting the space-course. And in an alumite cage, deep below-decks, lay Penelle, crack Shadow Squadman--holding the fate of three worlds in his manacled hands. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] I am sure that none of you have had the real details of the tragic voyage of last year, which was officially designated as Earth-Moon Flight 9. The diplomacy of Interplanetary relations is ticklish at best. Earth diplomats especially seem afraid of their own shadows if there is any chance of annoying the governments of Venus or Mars, so that by Earth censorship most of the details of that ill-fated voyage of the _X-87_ were either distorted, or wholly suppressed. But the revolution at Grebhar is over now. If those Venus Revolutionists--helped perhaps by Martian money and supplies--had been successful, they would have been patriots. They lost, so they are traitors, and I can say what I like. My name is Fred Penelle. I'm a Shadow Squadman, working in Great-New York and vicinity. Ordinarily I deal with the tracking of comparatively petty criminals. Being plunged into this affair of Interplanetary piracy which threatened to involve three worlds, Heaven knows was startling to me. I had never before even been on any flight into the starways. But I did my best. My part in the thing began that August evening when an audiphoned call came to my home. It was my superior, Peter Jamison, summoning me to City Night-Desk 6. "I've a job for you," he said. "Get here in a hurry, Fred." The audiphone grid showed his televised face; I had never seen it so grim. I live at the outskirts of Great-New York, in northern Westchester. I caught an overhead monorail; then one of the high-speed, sixth level rolling sidewalks and in half an hour was at the S.S. Building, in mid-Manhattan. We S.S. men work in pairs. My partner, as it happened, was ill. "You'll have to go in on this alone," Jamison told me. "And you haven't much time, Fred. The _X-87_ sails at Trinight." "_X-87?_" I murmured. "What's that got to do with me?" Jamison's fat little figure was slumped at his desk, almost hidden by the banks of instruments before him. Then he sat up abruptly, pushed a lever and the insulating screens slid along the doors and windows to protect us from any possible electric eavesdropping. "I can't tell you much," he said with lowered voice. "This comes from the Department of Interplanetary Affairs. The _X-87_ launches at Trinight tonight, for the Moon. They want me to have a man on it. An observer." Jamison's face went even grimmer, and he lowered his voice still further. "Just what they know, or suspect, they didn't tell even me. But there's something queer going on--something we ought to know about. Quite evidently there's some plot brewing against the Blake Irite Corporation. They even hinted that it concerned perhaps both Venus and Mars--" * * * * * You all know the general history of the Moon, of course; but still it will do no harm to sketch it here. It was scarcely twenty years ago when Georg Blake established the first permanent Moon Colony, erecting the first practical glassite air-domes under which one might live and work on the airless, barren surface of our satellite. Two years later, it was the same Georg Blake who discovered the rich irite deposits on the towering slopes of Mt. Archimedes. The Blake Irite Corporation employs twenty thousand workers now. "Mars and Venus have no irite," Jamison was saying. "They import it from us, for their inferior imitations of our gravity plates. And, combined with the T-catalyst, it runs our modern atomic engines and charges our newest long-range atomic guns. The Governments of Mars and Venus are building imitations of those engines. You know about that, Fred?" I nodded. I had heard quite a bit, of course, about the mysterious T-catalyst. It is made only here on Earth--a guarded secret of the Anglo-American Federation, developed by our Government chemists in Great-London. Our War Department uses it for guns, of course. But its use is forbidden elsewhere, save for commercial purposes. Venus and Mars have been under strict guarantee, regarding its use. We have supplied them from time to time with limited quantities, for commercial purposes only. "Do not misunderstand me. I have no possible desire to anger the present legal Governments of the Martian Union, nor the Venus Free State, and thus project myself--just one unimportant Earth-citizen--into a storm of Interplanetary complications. I am not even hinting that Mars or Venus have ever broken, or ever would break, their guarantees by using the T-catalyst for weapons of war. But in Grebhar, a very sizable revolution against the Venus Free State had broken out. That is something very different. A bandit Government. Bandit army--under guarantees to no one." "What's all this got to do with me, and the _X-87_?" I suggested. Jamison flung a swift look around his shadowed, dimly tube-lit office, as though he feared that someone might be lurking here. "The Blake Irite Corporation, on the Moon, needs the T-catalyst for a thousand things," he said slowly. "The engines of their air-renewers throughout that huge network of domes. The engines of their mining equipment--" "You mean it's being stolen from them?" Jamison shrugged. "Maybe." He paused, and then he drew me toward him. "Anyway, the _X-87_, on this Voyage 9 tonight, is taking the largest supply of T-catalyst to the Moon which has ever been transported." Jamison smiled wryly. "You and I, Fred, are among the very few people who know of it. The _X-87_ is not being unduly guarded. That in itself would look suspicious. Every possible precaution has been taken to keep the thing a secret. But there have been queer things happen. Perhaps only coincidences--" "Such as what?" "Well, Georg Blake died, quite mysteriously, a few days ago--" "Murdered?" Again Jamison shrugged. "The whole thing was censored. I don't know any more about it than you do. He has a son and daughter--young Blake, still under twenty--and Nina, his young daughter, who is only sixteen. The management of the entire Moon industry devolves now upon them." I could envisage Interplanetary spies on the Moon--and with the forceful Georg Blake now out of the way, a raid upon that supply of the T-catalyst-- "Little Nina is going back to the Moon this voyage to take control of the company," Jamison was adding. "Her father died--was murdered if you like--here in Great-New York. And to make it still more mysterious, young Blake--the girl's brother--seems to have vanished. There is only Nina--" Queer indeed. And even worse, Jamison now told me that several members of the _X-87's_ crew were ill, and one or two had recently died, so that she was starting on her flight tonight with at least five new men.... * * * * * The little space-ship was to sail at 3 a.m. I had my luggage aboard an hour ahead; and at quarter of three I was loitering on the tube-lit stage watching the passengers bidding good-bye to their friends and then going up the long incline to where the _X-87_ was cradled forty feet overhead. An S.S. Man, without too much equipment, can hide it all pretty comfortably. Most of my small apparatus was tucked into capacious pockets. And with my square-cut jacket buttoned over my weapon belt, I imagine I looked like any ordinary citizen. I was booked as a mathematics clerk, going to the Moon to take a position in the bookkeeping department of the Blake Company. I'm smallish, and dark--and not too handsome, my friends tell me. Just an unobtrusive fellow whom nobody would particularly notice. I certainly hoped now that that would prove to be so. "How many passengers this voyage?" I asked young Len Smith, who was standing here on the landing shed beside me. He was a slim, handsome fellow, the _X-87's_ radio-helio operator, ornate and exceedingly dapper in his stiff white-and-gold uniform. "Damned if I know. Fifteen or twenty maybe. Usually are about that many." A big seven-foot Martian stopped near us, directing the attendants who were carrying his luggage. "Who's that?" I murmured to Len Smith. Dr. Frye, the _X-87's_ surgeon--a weazened little fellow with a grim, saturnine face and scraggly iron-gray hair--had joined us. He answered me. "Set Mokk, he calls himself." "Going to the Moon, for what?" I persisted. Dr. Frye shrugged. "Passengers aren't required to give their family history. Set Mokk is a wealthy man in Ferrok-Shahn, I understand. An enthusiastic Interplanetary traveler--" Len, the young helio operator, diverted my attention. "Have a look," he murmured. "There comes Nina Blake. If she isn't a little beauty I'm a sub-cellar track-sweeper." Now I'm not much for girls, but I don't mind stating thus publicly that Nina Blake struck me then as the most strikingly beautiful girl of any world whom I had ever seen. As she came past, I saw that four stalwart attendants of the _X-87_ were carrying a long oblong box; one of her pieces of luggage. Quite obviously she was particularly concerned over it; she followed it closely, and signaled the men to precede her with it up the incline. I got away from Len Smith and Dr. Frye and was up the incline close after Nina Blake. I saw the squat, square-rigged figure of Capt. Mackensie come forward to greet the girl, his most distinguished passenger. Instantly she spoke to the men carrying the oblong box, and they set it on end beside her on the desk; and at her gesture, they moved away. * * * * * Nobody noticed me as I got up to that box and stood in its shadow. I had no particular motive, save perhaps my instinct as an S.S. Man to probe anything that puzzles me. And suddenly I heard Nina say softly: "No. I'm not--too frightened, Captain. I'll be quite all right." That stiffened me. But a far greater shock came almost instantly afterward. The girl was whispering now to Mackensie, their voices too low for me to hear. She was leaning partly against the upright box, and I saw her slim white hand furtively roving it, one of her fingers pressing what might have been a hidden lever. The sleek, polished side of the box was close to my head--and abruptly, from within it, I seemed to hear a faint muffled, ticking sound! A mechanism in the huge box which the girl's furtive hand had started! It was a slow, rhythmic tick, and a faint swishing. "Oh, you, Penelle. Come here--I want you to meet Miss Blake." Captain Mackensie had noticed me, and his gesture brought me to join them. For a moment we stood in a group as I was introduced. Nina's hand had darted to the box again, perhaps to stop the ticking. "Your first flight, Penelle?" Mackensie was saying. His voice was booming, hearty, loud enough to carry to any of the passengers and crew who were near us here on the dim side-deck. Jamison had told me that of everyone on the _X-87_, only Captain Mackensie would be aware of my true identity and purpose. I caught his significant glance now as he shot it at me from under his heavy gray-black brows. And then abruptly he stepped nearer to me. "Never talk secretly to me," he murmured. "No insulation here. You take care of Miss Blake. Say nothing--keep your eyes wide. When we get to the Moon--" I stiffened, went cold, with my heart suddenly pounding. My hand darted out, gripped the captain's arm. "Wait!" I murmured. On my chest, underneath my shirt, a flat, round little detector-grid was abruptly glowing warm against my flesh. An interference current was overcharging its low-pressure wires so that they were heating and burning me. An eavesdropping current! No one save a Government criminal-tracker may legally use an eavesdropping ray. But there was one here, listening to us now! I murmured it to Mackensie; turned and darted away. A dim door oval was nearby. I went through it, into a narrow, tube-lit corridor of the ship's superstructure. Momentarily no one was here; there was just the dim, vaulted little arcade, gleaming pallidly silver from its fittings and trim of alumite with rows of cabin doorways on each side. The name-plates glowed with the names of the occupants for this voyage. All the doors were closed; a few faint voices from passengers in the cabins were vaguely audible. * * * * * At a cross-corridor I stopped. Was someone here able to watch me? From my shirt I drew out the little detector-grid. It was cooling now, but still its direction needle was swaying. The source of the current seemed ahead of me in this cross corridor. How far, I could not say--the distance gauge-point was swiftly dropping to zero. The eavesdropping current had been snapped off. Wherever he was, this listener knew now that we were aware of him. On my padded, felt-soled shoes I dashed ahead to where the corridor widened into a tiny smoking lounge. "Oh, you Penelle? What's the matter? Can't you find your cubby?" It was Dr. Frye, the ship's surgeon. Fortunately, he did not see the Banning heat-flash gun in my hand. He was sprawled here in a chair, smoking. His thin face grinned up at me. "Ask the purser your location," he added. His gesture waved me toward the purser's tiny office-cubby down the opposite corridor. "Thanks," I agreed. The purser's cubby was unoccupied. I passed it, came to the stern end where the superstructure stopped and the side decks converged into a triangle of open deck under the dome at the pointed stern. There were a few passengers lounging around and deckhands moving at their tasks of uncradling the vessel which now was ready to take off. Over at a glassite bull's-eye window in the side pressure-wall, the big Martian, Set Mokk, was standing, gazing at the people on the lower stage. And suddenly, from the shadow of a cargo-shifter near at hand, a blob of figure detached itself and moved away. In a moment the deck-light gleamed on it; a member of the crew--squat, bent, misshapen gargoyle shape; a hideous Earth-man hunchback, with dangling gorilla-like arms that swayed as he walked. Then I saw his face; ghastly countenance, lumped with disease, a mouth that seemed to leer and eyes with puckered rims--eyes that seemed to glare at me with impish malevolence as he shambled past me and vanished around the other side deck. In a few minutes more, with a blast of sirens, the little _X-87_ trembled, lifted nose first from its cradle and was away, slanting up into the night. The lights of the giant city dropped beneath us. I stood at one of the side bull's-eyes watching them as they dwindled into a blob, merged with other lights of other cities along the coast. I had been up into the stratosphere many times, of course, but this was to be my first flight into Interplanetary Space. I could envisage our gleaming silver vessel now, tiny little cylinder with pointed ends, alumite keel-bottom and the great rounded glassite dome on top, as we slid so swiftly up out of the atmosphere. A little world now to ourselves. The little vessel pounded and quivered with the vibrations of its disintegrating atomic rocket-streams at the stern. Then as we slid into the upper reaches of the stratosphere, the rocket engines were silenced; the gravity-plates were de-insulated, set with Earth-repulsion as we swung toward the gleaming half-moon ahead and over our bow. The ship was vibrationless now. All movement seemed detached from us. Alone in Space we seemed hovering, poised. The voyage of doom had begun. * * * * * "Apparently you have not suffered from the miserable pressure sickness," Ollog Torio said. "Or have you, Set Mokk?" "I have not. We Martians are made of sterner stuff. Is that not so, Dr. Frye?" "Well," the saturnine little surgeon said, "well, for you, yes, Set Mokk. But Martians are humans, like anybody else. I have seen them in distress, upon occasion, when the pressure changes too fast, coming out of the atmosphere." Four of us were sitting on the triangle of the _X-87's_ bow deck--the towering, swaggering Martian Set Mokk, slumped in his chair, wrapped in his great cloak with his hairy brown legs like huge pillars of strength crossed beneath it, revealed by its flair; the weazened, morose-looking Dr. Frye, and Ollog Torio. I had just met this Venusian. Like most of them from our sister planet, Torio was slender, graceful, with the characteristic finely chiseled features, grayish skin and heavy black brows. He seemed a man of perhaps forty. Romantic in dress and bearing. His hair was sleek and black, with gray streaks in it. His pointed face, accentuated by a pointed, waxed beard, was pallid. His robe was white and purple, with a white ruff at his slender throat. He was, I understood, a wealthy man, a retired capitalist from Grebhar. It was now, by the established ship-time, what might be termed mid-evening. The passengers had had two meals, and a normal time of sleep. They were dispersed about the little vessel, gathered in groups, gazing with a natural awe through the side bull's-eyes at the wonders of the great dome of the Heavens, spread now around us. My first trip into Space. It would be out of place here for me to describe that queer, awed, detached feeling everyone gets, especially at his first view of the vast blackness of Interstellar Space with its blazing white stars. Behind us, the Earth hung, a great dull red ball, blurred and mottled with cloud-banks. The stern deck triangle gleamed dull-red. But up here in the bow the Moon hung round and white. We were still in the cone of the Earth's shadow. The moonlight here drenched the deck like liquid silver. In romance, moonlight shimmers and sparkles to inspire a lover's smile. But the reality of the Moon is cold, bleak and desolate. Even without a telescope now, I could see the etched heights of the great lunar mountains. Archimedes, Copernicus and Kepler lay in full sunlight. The heights glared; the depths of the barren, empty seas were black pools of inky shadow. The great Mare Imbrium was solid, mysterious darkness. I had been awed by the wonders of Space. But the feeling was past now, engulfed by the sense of disaster which more than ever was upon me. The Earth-light on our rear deck seemed to symbolize it. Red--as though already that deck were bathed in blood. I found myself shuddering. Somewhere on board--I had no idea where--a treasure of the precious T-catalyst was hidden. Had that fact leaked out? Why was the beautiful little Nina Blake so flooded with secret terror? What was the huge coffin-like trunk, which sounded like a time-bomb? The box, I knew, had been placed in her sleeping cubby.... And back in the S.S. Building my superior, Jamison, had said something which damnably now hung in my memory: "You keep your eyes and ears open, Fred. Things are not likely to be what they seem, on that voyage." Accursed ineptitude of Earth's Interplanetary Relations Board, that would let a condition such as this come to pass! I felt wholly alone here, coping with God knows what. "Things are not likely to be what they seem." I found myself tensely suspicious of everything, of everybody. This swaggering Martian, Set Mokk--he was sitting now, gazing at me as though appraisingly, his lips twitching in a half-smile of sardonic humour. This Ollog Torio--was he what he seemed, just a wealthy traveler? Even little Dr. Frye, the Ship's Surgeon--I could not forget that when I had tried to nab that eavesdropper, it was Dr. Frye, gazing at me from his seat alone in the ship's smoking lounge, whom I had encountered. * * * * * "So you are going to the Moon to work for the Blake Company?" the Venus man was saying. He spoke English with only a trace of the prim, precise Venus accent. "Yes," I agreed. "Mathematics clerk. It will be a novel experience for me, on the moon--" "Quite," Set Mokk said out of his reverie. "Quite novel." Did they really think I was a mathematics clerk? Someone here on board suspected me; that eavesdropper had turned his ray upon me quickly enough when I had stood talking to Captain Mackensie.... "You're having bad times in Grebhar," little Dr. Frye said presently to Torio. "How is the revolution going? We hear so little by helio--and most of it censored by your Venus Free State." The slim Torio shrugged. "The fighting was in the mountains only, when I was there. I think those rebels will not make out too well." "Rebels," I said. "If they lose, they will be traitors, worthy of death. But if they win, I expect you'll call them patriots?" That made the hulking Martian laugh. "Human behavior is practical, never idealistic. The original right or wrong will be forgotten. It is only results that count." "I pay little attention to it," Torio said blandly. "Venus should be for love, for romance. I have no stomach for killing." "Speaking of romance," Dr. Frye interjected. "Here comes our Earth version of it." We were all on our feet as the small, black and white clad, trousered figure of Nina Blake emerged from the end corridor of the superstructure. She hesitated; then took a seat among us. Her cloak was off; the moonlight and starlight bathed her with its silver. Was the terror still upon her? I could not at first tell. She was quiet, composed. We men were all smoking little white arrant cylinders. She told us smilingly to continue. But as she stretched herself in the cushioned chair, between me and Torio, it seemed that the flash of her gaze upon me carried relief--as though in me she had her only protector here on the ship. "The little Earth-lady is very gracious," Torio commented with Venus smoothness as he lighted one of the cylinders. "I have always maintained that in the lush forests of Venus are the only really beautiful women in the Universe. I shall have to revise that now, Miss Blake." She flushed a little under the boldness of his gaze. And he laughed. "That makes you even more beautiful. 'Flinging back a million starglints, the depths of Space remind me of Thine eyes,'" he quoted. I am only an S.S. Man. Far be it from me now, so publicly to write what might cause Miss Nina Blake any offense. I try to state only what happened. There is no one, I feel sure, who could sit beside her and not be stirred by her beauty in that drenching moonlight. But to Torio, pretty speeches came with a laugh. Instinctive. It annoyed me. I might as well admit it. For a time our little group chatted. Then, one by one, the men wandered away. Was it that one of them wanted to observe Nina and me alone? I could not help the thought as I leaned toward her. "Easy now. Quiet!" And then I said aloud, "That Venus man makes very pretty speeches, Miss Blake. To us of Earth, they do not come so naturally." Her startled gaze at my warning relaxed into a laugh--a laugh like silver glints of moonlight on a mountain stream. "No woman can pretend that she dislikes them." "No. I suppose not." I guess I was really pretty earnest; unsmiling; breathless. I was making conversation with the feeling that someone was watching us trying to lip-read perhaps, not daring to use a ray. But my talk was more than acting; I really meant it. "A Venus man needn't think he has a monopoly on pretty speeches," I added. "Inspired by the moonlight?" "And you," I replied, smiling at her. Adorable little dimples showed in her cheeks as she grinned at me. "Thank you, sir." Then she leaned closer. "You tell the Captain--Torio and Mokk--in the corridor a while ago--" "Easy! Cover your mouth. You heard them?" "Yes. Whispering. Eight men--five in the crew--" "I'm only a mathematics clerk," I said. "But beauty like yours, Miss Blake--it makes me wish I were King. King of the Universe." "That would be very nice," she laughed. "Yes. Wouldn't it? 'If I were King, ah love, if I were King, the stars would be your pearls upon a string; the world a ruby for your finger ring; and you could have the sun and moon to wear--if I were King.'" And I meant it. Surely no man ever made love under such a handicap as this! I bent closer over her, with the perfume of her intoxicating me; and she whispered, "You tell him I'm afraid--tonight--at the next time of sleep--" * * * * * She suddenly checked herself, with a sharp sucking intake of her breath as she stared down the deck. My gaze followed hers. From the gloom beside the superstructure some twenty feet from us, a shadow had detached itself--misshapen shadow; that hunchback, malevolent looking member of the crew. He went shambling past us, with a coil of rope from a cargo shifter in his hand. Did his sudden appearance strike terror into Nina? She was holding herself tense; not speaking, nor glancing at me, but staring seemingly fascinated by the man's gargoyle aspect. He perhaps did not notice us, and yet I had the feeling that his little eyes under the lumpy forehead had flung us a peering glance. When he had gone past and vanished, back toward the stem on the other side deck, it seemed to me that the girl was shuddering. "What is it?" I whispered. "N-nothing." "You're afraid of that fellow, Nina?" "No! Oh no!" Her unnecessary vehemence seemed to belie her words. The thing had so startled me that I had relaxed my caution. I realized it, as abruptly, from the ladder-steps which led up to the control turret on the roof of the superstructure almost over us, a long, lanky, white-uniformed figure was disclosed coming down. It was the ship's First Officer, young William Wilson. He was a handsome young giant. He smiled at us--mostly at Nina, and lounged into the chair beside her. I had no further chance to be with the girl alone. A light meal was served us by one of the stewards, there on deck. The radio-helio operator, young Len Smith, had joined us. The squat, heavy-faced James Polter, ship's Purser, added himself to us; and then the fat, jolly, moon-faced little Peter Green, Second Officer, came puffing down from the chart room behind the control turret and drew up a chair. It was as though the girl were a magnet. I left them presently. From back along the side-deck where I stood apparently gazing through a bull's-eye at the vast wonders of the glittering Heavens in which the little _X-87_ was hanging, I could see the group of men around Nina on the fore-deck, a gay little party in the moonlight. Why was Nina so terrified of that ugly hunchback? I had inquired about him casually from young Len Smith. His name was Durk; a new member of the crew, engaged to replace one of those so mysteriously sick. This was his first voyage.... Five of the crew, Nina had said. I was to tell the Captain about it. Vehemently now I wanted a talk with Mackensie. We'd have to chance an eavesdropper; if I was alert, my detector should warn me; and the promptness with which we had discovered the eavesdropping ray before, I figured would warn the fellow not to use it again. It would have been, by Earth-routine, perhaps eleven p.m. The passengers were retiring to their sleeping cubbies. The decks now were almost deserted. I went up one of the side ladders to the superstructure roof. It glittered with starlight that came down through the glassite pressure dome which arched close overhead here. The superstructure roof was a rectangular deck space, a hundred feet long perhaps, by thirty wide. A low railing surrounded it at which one might look down upon the lower side decks. Chairs were scattered about up here, all of them unoccupied. Amidships was the little kiosk which housed the radio-helio equipment, with young Smith's sleeping cubby adjacent to it. The place was closed and locked now. Aft of it there was open deck space to where the roof-deck ended, with the stern deck-triangle a level below, where the earth-light still was red like blood. I turned forward. The chart room backed against the control turret. The chart room was dark. In the control turret I could see Capt. Mackensie at the controls, his squat, square figure etched by moonlight. Would this be a good time to try and talk with him? I started forward. The party down on the forward deck was just dispersing; I saw the boyish figure of Nina, starting for the superstructure corridor, with the giant handsome William Wilson escorting her. And then Dr. Frye came up the front ladder, went into the control turret and joined Mackensie. I turned aft; it was no time to see Mackensie now. * * * * * Suddenly I stopped, melted down into a black shadow near the helio kiosk and flattened myself on the deck. An S.S. Man, so they say, developes a sixth sense. Maybe so. Certainly I didn't see anything, nor hear anything. But I was aware that someone, or something, was up here on the silent deck with me. Perhaps it was a sense of smell; my nostrils dilated with the impression that the faint drift of artificial air up here had somehow changed its quality. Was there something artificially invisible stalking here? The Groff magnetic cloaks, so recently perfected, are closely held by Governmental orders. Even we S.S. Men seldom use them. But it is a queer thing--no matter what devices you use in crime-tracking, you may be pretty sure the criminal has them to use against you. I tried my infra-red glasses. They disclosed nothing save the glowing heat of the ventilators where the warm air was coming up. The nearest I had to an eavesdropper was a pair of low-scale phones. In a second or two I adjusted them; tuned them. The myriad blended tiny sounds of the ship's interior gave me nothing that I could identify. And then it seemed that there was a very faint hissing--something, quite near me, which should not have been here. Banning heat-gun in hand, I prowled around to the other side of the helio kiosk. How that lurking intruder got away, I don't know. To this day I have no idea. Doubtless he heard or saw me, and slid along the line of deck-shadows in a magnetic cloak, getting away so swiftly that my infra-red glasses could not pick up the heat of his body or his mechanism. At all events he was gone. There was nothing but a faint chemical smell. And then, on the metal of the helio-room door, I saw a burned spot near the lock where his heat-torch just for a second had started its hissing; and then he had become aware of me and had taken flight. Someone trying to break into Smith's helio room! That would have taken me to Captain Mackensie whether Dr. Frye was there or not. But abruptly, again I went tense, so suddenly startled that the blood seemed to chill in my veins. The low-scale magnifiers were still in my ears, murmuring with a chaos of tiny, meaningless sounds. My metal heel-tip by chance must have struck a metal cross-beam of the deck. Abruptly I heard a voice, which at that second must have been raised louder than it had been an instant before. "Oh please! Oh my God, no!" A girl's voice, gasping that fragment in an anguish of terror. Nina's voice! * * * * * I frantically tuned the magnifiers, to clarify it; but I lost it and could not get it back. Nina's voice, seemingly from her sleeping-cubby, which I knew was just about under me in the superstructure. I went down the side companion ladder with a rush; ducked into a nearby cross corridor. It was dim, silent and empty. The name-plates glowed on the doors. I came to hers, with its glowing greenish letters, _Nina Blake_. Without the earphones there was only silence here now. For a second I stood, gun in hand, undecided. The door probably was locked; I did not dare try it to see. With my heat-torch, or even with a flash of the Banning gun, I could melt away the flimsy lock in a few seconds. But would that be quick enough? If one of the villains were in there with her now, and I blasted the door and startled him, his first move might be to kill her.... Tick-tick ... tick-tick.... With naked ears I suddenly realized that I was hearing the ticking from the big coffin-shaped box in her room.... Tick-tick ... tick-tick.... Rhythmic ... gruesome.... I own that my fingers were trembling as I crouched there by the door and adjusted my headphone.... The ticking rose to hammering thuds. Or was it my own pounding heart?... The hammering seemed to drown a tiny whisper of voices. Someone was in there with her, unquestionably. I have no apologies for what an S.S. Man must do under stress. High over the top of the door there was a small transom-like opening, covered by a metal grillework. I could see faint tubelight glowing up there from within her room. I backed across the corridor, adjusting with hurried fingers my miniature projector of the Benson curve-ray. In another second its faint violet stream leaped from my hand in a crescent up to the grille. Curved light-rays, an arc through the grille and down into her room, bringing me along its curved path a faint distorted vista of the scene inside. And then I heard her low voice quivering with terror: "No! No, Jim--don't--" James Polter, the Purser? In that confused second I stared along the Benson curve-light. Just an edge of the coffin-shaped box, which was lying flat on the floor against one wall, was visible to me. In the center of the dim room, Nina was standing--beautiful, slim little figure in a pale-rose, filmy negligee, with her dark hair streaming down over her pink-white shoulders. Her back was to me as she gazed at the deck window. It was a dark oval, with the shadows of the side-deck outside. And in that second the blob of a man was visible in the window. I could only glimpse the hunched outline of him as he scrambled through, dropped to the deck and fled. * * * * * There was a cross corridor here which led directly to the forward end of that starboard side deck. I dashed its length; reached the deck. It was empty. That was my first confused impression; then as I whirled aft, I saw a blob on it, near the other end of the superstructure. A blob which rhythmically moved, sidewise and back again. And in the silence, there was the squish of water. It was the hunchback deckhand. He was swabbing the deck, with a mop and a pail of water. I slowed my pace as I approached him, and dropped the Banning gun into my pocket. Could he by any wild chance, have been the figure I saw climb out of Nina's window? It seemed impossible. "Evening, Durk," I said. I stopped beside him. His lumpy, disease-ridden face came up as he shot me a glance. "Even-sir," he muttered. His bulbous lips were parted, as though perhaps with a panting breath. The idea turned me cold. What ghastly hold could this fellow have upon Nina? I can't pretend to describe my emotions at that moment. Nina wasn't screaming now to tell that a man had forced himself into her room. She was willing to keep it secret. Or perhaps too terrorized to do anything else. "What's your name?" I said pleasantly. I had stopped beside him; was lighting an arrant cylinder. "You said my name, sir. It's Durk." His muttered voice was thick. The sort of voice one might use to disguise its natural tone? Was it that? "Oh, yes. Durk," I agreed. "Jim Durk? You're a new man, aren't you?" "First voyage, yes sir. But my name's Pete Durk." Surely he was breathing too hard for a man scrubbing a deck--much more like a man who had been running. "My first voyage too," I said. I started on; then turned back. "By the way, have you seen Mr. Polter? I was looking for him." "The Purser, sir? I'm thinkin' he should be in his office." I nodded; turned the superstructure corner; went into the main corridor. Polter's little office cubby had a light in it. He was sitting there casting up his accounts. Jim Polter. I had heard half a dozen people call him that. Nina's voice came echoing back into my mind.... "No--no Jim, don't--" Was this the fellow who had climbed out of her window just a few moments ago? His desk light illumined his squat, thick-set figure. He was a man of perhaps forty. He glanced up at my step. "Hello, Mr. Penelle. You're up late." "Just going in," I said. Polter was smoking. The fragile ash on the little white paper cylinder was nearly an inch long. I passed on. At Nina's door I briefly paused. There was no sound. The ventilator grille overhead was dark now. Upon impulse I pressed her buzzer. "Yes? Who is it?" "It's I. Fred Penelle." Her door opened an inch; the sheen of light in the corridor showed her white face framed by the flowing black hair. A wave of her perfume came out to me. "What--what is it?" she murmured. "Are you all right?" I whispered lamely. "Yes. Yes--of course." And she added still more softly, "You're taking too much chance--here like this. The Captain--did you tell the Captain--what I told you--" "I'm going there now." She closed the door. I stood with the sudden realization that I might be going beyond my job as an S.S. Man; my personal interest in this girl leading me to pry into her private affairs. But the feeling was brief. The terror was still in her eyes; I could not miss it. I decided then to go to Mackensie in the control turret. Someone had tried to melt into the helio room. Mackensie must be told it. Heaven knows, there never had been an S.S. Man who felt as helpless as I did at that moment. I could not determine whether I should tell the Captain what I had seen and heard in Nina's room, or not. How much Mackensie himself knew of what might be going on, I could not guess. And there was not another person on the _X-87_ whom I could trust! It was as though I were wholly alone here, with lurking murderers in every shadow, watching their chance--waiting perhaps for a predetermined time when they would come into the open and strike. * * * * * I was part way along the corridor when without warning my body rose in the air. Like a balloon I went to the low vaulted ceiling, struck it gently, rebounded, and floated diagonally back to the floor, where I landed in a heap! Heaven knows, it was startling. For those seconds I had been weightless, the impulse of my last step wafting me up, and my thud against the ceiling knocking me back again. The weird loss of weight was gone at once; I was close to the floor when I felt myself drop down to it. And I scrambled to my feet. My heart was thumping; I knew what had happened. In the base of the ship, artificial gravity controls gave us Earth's normal gravity on board. Without them, the slight mass of the _X-87_ would give a gravity pull so negligible that everything in its interior would be almost without weight. Len Smith, the young helio operator, had taken me around the little vessel just before the voyage began, explaining me its mechanisms. I remembered the room of magnetic controls, where the _X-87's_ artificial gravity was regulated. A young technician named Bentley had been there. I had spoken to him a moment. He and his partner alternated on duty there throughout all the voyage. And the artificial gravity controls now were being tampered with! For just a second or two, this particular area of the corridor here had been cut off, so that as I came to the de-magnetized area my step had tossed me to the ceiling. The floor section was normal now; I stepped out on it gingerly to test it. Why was Bentley experimenting with his controls? Surely that never went wrong by accident. If I could catch Bentley at it--force him to explain--Or was it someone else tampering with the complex gravitational mechanisms down there?... I remembered the location of the little magnetic control room; rushed to the nearest descending ladder. The lower level, down in the hull, was a metal catwalk, with side aisles leading into suspended tiny rooms. Freight storage compartments bow and stern; air renewal systems; pressure mechanisms; heating and ventilating systems. Beneath me, at the bottom of the hull, were the rooms of gravity plate-shifting mechanisms--compressed air shifters of the huge hull gravity plates by which the course of the ship through Space was controlled. I was not concerned with them--merely with the magnetic artificial gravity of the vessel's interior. The little magnet room was near it hand; its door was open, with its blue tubelight streaming out. No one was in sight to see me, apparently, as I padded swiftly along the catwalk. From the distant bow and stern mess-rooms I could hear the faint blended murmuring voices of some of the crew who were off duty. I came to the magnetic room doorway. The room seemingly was empty. The banks of dials, switches and levers which governed the different areas of the ship were ranged up one wall. They all seemed in normal operation; none of the tiny warning trouble-lights were illumined. Bentley's little table, with his pack of arrant cylinders and a scroll book he had evidently been reading, was here with its empty chair before it. * * * * * And then I saw him! He was lying sprawled, face down, over in a corner, with a monstrous shadow from the table upon him, and just the faint glow of the electronic flourescent tubes painting his dark worksuit so that I noticed him. He was dead; I turned him over, stooping beside him. His chest was drilled with a pencilray of heat, presumably from a low-caliber Banning gun.... "Don't move, Penelle! I've got you!" I stiffened at the sound of the low, menacing voice in the dimness behind me. "Leave that gun where it is. Put your hands up and turn around. By God if you try anything funny, I'll drill you through. I've got you covered." I was kneeling by the body of Bentley, with my gun on the floor-grid beside me. With hands up, I slowly turned. The tall figure of William Wilson, the ship's First Officer loomed over me with the tubelight gleaming on his white and gold uniform. He was staring down grimly; he held a small heat-gun at his hip, leveled at me. Out in the open at last. So this was one of the criminals; the fellow who had tried to melt into the helio room? The eavesdropper? The man who had been in Nina's room? Heaven knows, of all on board, I had least suspected him. He thought, of course, he had me trapped. But you can't capture an S.S. Man just by holding a gun on him and telling him to put up his hands. Even with my hands up, and the Banning gun on the floor beside me,--I could have pointed my left shoulder at him, drilled him with a stab of heat from the heat-ray embedded in the padded shoulder of my jacket. My right elbow was pressing my side to fire it, with all my body tensed to try and drop under what might have been his answering shot. But I didn't fire. His next words checked me. "So you're not just a mathematics clerk--a damned murderer here on board! Get up! We're going up to Mackensie." I stared as his foot kicked at my gun, and he swiftly stooped and picked it up. "Come on," he added with a rasp. "Climb to your feet, Penelle. We'll see what the Captain has to say about this--" "That suits me," I murmured. I said nothing more. Docilly I let him shove me in advance of him, up the ladder, along the dim main corridor, up the companionway from the starlit bow deck triangle to the little catwalk bridge in front of the turret. * * * * * Fortunately we encountered no one. At his telescope in the peak of the bow, the forward lookout turned and gazed at us curiously. The dim control turret was empty, eerie with the spots of fluorescent light from its banks of instruments. The controls were locked for the vessel's present course. The door oval to the adjacent chart room was open. Mackensie was alone in there, plotting the _X-87's_ future course on a chart. He stared blankly as the grim young Wilson shoved me in upon him. "Caught this damned fellow in the magnet-room, Captain. He's killed Bentley. By God--something queer's in the air this voyage. Bentley murdered--" Mackensie's first stare of startled amusement as I was shoved captive before him, faded into horror. His heavy, square jaw dropped. "Bentley murdered? Good Lord--why--what ..." "Somebody was tampering with the ship's gravity," I murmured swiftly. "I felt it go off in a section of the main corridor--went down to the magnet-room. Bentley's there dead--drilled through the chest--" "Bentley killed? Murder, here on my ship! Why, by the Gods of the starways--" Big Mackensie was momentarily stupified, his eyes widened, his heavy face mottled an apoplectic red with his rush of anger. "I caught this fellow Penelle--" young Wilson began. "Don't be an ass," Mackensie roared. "He's a Government crime-tracker--stationed here on board this voyage--" My gesture tried to stop him. "Easy Captain. Listeners might be on us--" The chart room door, here beside us, which opened onto the superstructure roof, was closed. But the small oval window beside it, also facing sternward, was open. I dashed to it. The dim roof deck seemed empty. I noticed a light in Len Smith's helio cubby. I drew down the metal shade of our window. Whirled back. The astonished young Wilson stared at me in numbed amazement. "They're coming into the open," I murmured. "Look here, Captain, we've got to plan--" "Why--why, good Lord--I thought we were guarding against a plot on the Moon--" "Well, we're not. It's here--now--" I told him what Nina had said; five of the crew. The new men, placed here on board. And how many of the officers might be in it-- "Why--why good Lord--" Mackensie was completely stricken. For an instant that floored me. I saw him now as a Captain of the old school--bluff, roaring; the sort of fellow who on a surface vessel would deal grimly and ruthlessly with mutineers. But he was frightened now; frightened and confused. "Why--why Penelle--you mean to think that here on my ship--" "Ready to strike--now," I murmured. I told him about the burned place on the helio room door. He could only stare, numbed. And now the murder of Bentley--the first tangible attack our adversaries had made. Who were they? Five of the crew--that would include the hunchback Durk ... Mokk, the Martian? Ollog Torio, the pallid Venus man? Some of the other passengers maybe? And of the ship's officers, whom could we trust? "Why--why all of them, by God," Mackensie murmured, as I voiced it. "I wouldn't have traitors on my staff--" But this treasure of the T-catalyst--it might be worth a million decimars to the Venus revolutionists. And money can buy men--even men who have long been in honest service. The Second Officer--fat, jolly little Peter Green--he perhaps could be trusted. James Polter, the Purser? Of him I could not guess. Dr. Fyre, the Surgeon? Even with a plugged, counterfeit thousandth part of a decimar, I wouldn't take my eyes off him. * * * * * The handsome young giant, Wilson, stood gazing at us now in blank horror. He was hardly more than a boy. Quite evidently he knew completely nothing of what was going on. "But what are we going to do?" Mackensie was stammering. Then he spluttered, "By the God's I won't have this sort of thing on my ship. I'll muster them all up here--find out who this damned murderer is--" I seized him. "Easy Captain." Then I bent closer to him. "Captain Mackensie--things I don't understand yet about this. That big box in Miss Blake's room--" And on impulse I whispered: "Someone was climbing out her window a while ago. She called him Jim. She's in terror of him. Captain, see here, you've got to tell me everything about this." For an instant, his spluttering ineptitude left him. "I can't," he murmured. "That--that isn't mine to tell. Don't ask it, Penelle." Then he swung back to his own troubles. "What do you think we ought to do? By heaven--I'll turn back to Earth. Turn the whole damn ship's company over to the authorities." We were now some forty thousand miles from Earth--just about a sixth of the way to the Moon. "And have them see us swing?" I murmured. "Wouldn't that precipitate whatever it is they're planning to do?" Three of us here, in the control turret and chart room--and except for Nina, down there alone in her cabin, so far as I really knew, everyone else on the ship might be against us. Swiftly I questioned Mackensie. The _X-87_ was not equipped with any long-range guns, and very few side arms. What there were, we had now with us here in the chart room. Mackensie gestured to the little arsenal-locker, here in one of the walls beside us. "Are the crew members allowed to be armed?" I demanded. "Good Heavens, no!" "But they will be," young Wilson put in. "Mutineers will be armed--" There was no argument on that. And each of the officers normally carried one small heat gun. Here in the chart room we had perhaps a half dozen of the heat ray projectors; a few old-fashioned weapons of explosion; powder rifles and automatic revolvers; a small collection of miscellaneous glass bombs--loaded with gas; darkness bombs; a few of the "fainting bombs," as they are popularly called--detonators, with tiny shrapnel impregnated with acetylcholine, which, when introduced into the blood stream by a fragment of shrapnel, instantly lowers the blood pressure so that the victim faints but is not otherwise damaged. And we had two or three small hand projectors of the Benson curve-light, with a device by which we could project the heat ray in a curve as well. "Well, if I don't turn back, then I'll helio my owners for instructions," Mackensie was saying. It sounded futile. What could financiers back at their desks in Great-New York have to do with us, embattled out here in Space, barricaded in our little chart room? "Send a helio for the Interplanetary Patrol," I suggested. "A call for help. If we could contact one of the roving police vessels--" "Not a one in telescopic sight," Mackensie murmured. "I had a routine report on that a few hours ago." "Well, we might as well try anyway." Would the pirates be aware of our efforts? Would it bring an attack from them? My only idea was to stall the situation here, whatever it might be. That, and summon help. Then I had another thought: young Len Smith, the helio man--could he be trusted? "Why--I suppose so," Mackensie stammered. And then he jerked himself out of his terror; his huge hamlike fist banged down on the chart room table, making his calipers and compasses jump. "Damnation, I'll find out quick enough which of my men are loyal. We'll fight this thing through. Penelle, you go tell Smith to get off a distress call. Blast the ether with it--call Interplanetary police. Tell Smith to keep at it till he raises one. You stay with him and see, by God, that he does it. You, Wilson, open up that cupboard--get out the weapons. I'll have my damned officers up here." * * * * * As I started for the door I gripped him, whispered: "Captain--where have you got the T-catalyst hidden?" It startled him. For a second I saw that he was wondering if he could even trust me with the knowledge. Then he gestured. "Over there," he murmured with his lips against my ear. "Little safe hidden in that wall-panel. You press a spring at the left molding. The catalyst is in a small lead cylinder--Gamma-ray insulated." I nodded. "Only one other man on board knows that," he whispered. "If anything happens to me--or him--" Him? Who? I had no time to ask. Mackensie had flung open the door; shoved me out onto the deck. It still seemed deserted; dim with starlight from the glassite dome overhead. Amidships, some forty feet from me, the light in Smith's little helio cubby showed faintly eerie in one of his windows. I ran there. "Smith. Len Smith...." I called it softly. "Len Smith--" There was only the faint echo of my voice, coming back at me from the steel cubby wall. The door was ajar. I shoved at it, burst in and stood stricken, transfixed, with so great a horror flooding me that the eerie scene in the helio cubby swam before my gaze. At his instrument table the white-uniformed figure of young Smith lay sprawled, a white figure crimsoned ghastly with blood. A knife handle protruded from his back. Horribly his head dangled sidewise, with grisly severed neck. And as I rushed forward, my movement jostled the body. It slumped, fell from the stool, hitting the floor with a thud. The blow broke the neck vertebrae; the head--ghastly little ball--rolled across the room and stopped at the wall, gruesomely right side up, with Smith's dead eyes staring at me--eyes with the agony of death frozen in them. Then I saw the wreckage of the instrument table. All our communications smashed, wrecked beyond repair! For another second I numbly stared. Then, from some distant point of the ship's interior, a strident little electric whistle sounded. A signal! From another section I heard it answered. And then a shot! The barking explosion of a powder-gun ... the hiss of a stabbing heat-ray ... a commotion in the lower corridors--shouts of startled passengers ... a turmoil everywhere.... The attack had begun! * * * * * The turmoil that all in those seconds was spreading about the ship like fire in prairie grass released me from my numbness. I whirled; dashed back through the helio cubby door to the roof deck. It was still unoccupied. Back on the stern deck triangle, where just the stern tip of it showed from here, with the dull-red Earth-light upon it, there was the sizzling flash of a heat-gun. I saw the stern lookout collapse back from his telescope; fall to the deck. Toward the bow, through the chart-room window where the shade now was up, Wilson was staring out. "Penelle!" His voice reached me. Beyond the kiosk of chart room and control turret, a figure appeared coming up the little catwalk ladder from the bow deck. It seemed to be the bow lookout, but whether friend or foe I had no way of guessing. "Watch yourself, Wilson," I shouted. "Watch the turret--" I was dashing for the side companionway. Whatever transpired up here, there was only one thing in my mind in the chaos of that moment. Nina.... She was alone down in her cabin. I must get her up here.... I leaped down the last half of that little side ladder. On the dim side deck ten feet away, two men were fighting, one in white gold uniform, the other a deckhand. They rolled on the deck. A knife flashed.... Another man came suddenly from the smoking lounge doorway. He plunged at me, whirling an iron bar. My Banning flash met him head on; I jumped aside as his dead body catapulted to the deck. There was another flash. One of the rolling, fighting men on the deck went limp. The other rose. It was the fat little Peter Green, Second Officer. He was panting; his face streaked with blood. "Get to your room," he gasped as he saw me. "All passengers stay in your cubbies. Piracy!" The passengers were shouting now; from a nearby corridor entrance women were screaming. Then from up at the turret, Mackensie turned on the vessel's distress siren. Its shrill, dismal electrical whine sounded above the turmoil. "Go up to the control turret," I shouted at Green. I dashed into the corridor. Passengers scattered to right and left before me. "Get into your rooms," I shouted. "Everybody stay in. Barricade--" An Earth-woman screamed; somebody shouted, "That big Martian--murderer--I saw him killing--" Two little Lunites, mine workers, a young man and a girl, stood with arms around each other in one of the doorways. Pallid little people, confused, helpless, cringing. I shoved them back into their room and banged their door. Then I turned into the main corridor, ran aft along it, came to the next cross passage. Nina! I saw her, ahead of me in the corridor, close by her smashed door. She was struggling, fighting with the snaky Venus man Ollog Torio; his arms lifted her up as he tried to carry her. I shouted an oath; I did not dare fire. And at the sound of my voice he dropped her, made off through the end door so quickly that I had no time to drill him. "Nina! Nina!" I gathered her up, frail little thing in her negligee with her luxuriant black hair streaming down. "Nina, did he hurt you?" "No! No, I'm all right." She was breathless; pallid; her dark eyes were pools of terror. "Oh, dear God!" she gasped. "It's come." She clutched at me. "That hunchback--that fellow Durk--have you seen him?" "No, I haven't." Her question sent a shudder through me. I set her on her feet. "We've got to get up to the control turret. The captain--his loyal officers up there." "Oh--Oh, Lord!" With a new anguish of terror upon her face she jerked away from me, ran for her doorway. I saw where Torio had melted through its lock with a heat blast. I dashed through it after her, and caught her in the center of her room. "Nina, what's the matter?" * * * * * The oblong coffin box! It lay flat on the floor, over by the wall of the dim room. In a sudden lull of the ship's chaos the rhythmic ticking was audible. And now there were other sounds from within the box! A thumping! A low, mumbling man's voice! A rasping voice in the cabin doorway sounded behind me. Gun in hand, I whirled. One of the huge deckhands stood there, murder on his face, a blood-stained knife between his teeth so that he looked like an ancient picture of a surface vessel pirate. He lunged in at us. My flash caught him full in the face; horribly his features blackened as he went down. "Oh--Oh, I had no chance to let you out!" Nina was half sobbing it as she flung herself down over the box. The ship's alarm siren had suddenly died. Did that mean that the captain and the others in the control turret had been killed? The thought stabbed at me. Distant shots were still sounding. The oaths of fighting men were audible--the loyal members of the crew, fighting those traitors who had so suddenly set upon them. Footsteps were thudding on the roof-deck overhead. "No chance to let you out!" The pallid girl with trembling fingers was fumbling at the box. Its lid rose up, with the head and shoulders of a man appearing beneath; a man entombed, hiding in there, breathing with the air-renewers of the ticking mechanism. A stalwart man of iron-gray hair. Georg Blake! Nina's father. I recognized him from the many pictures I had seen. He leaped out of the box, stared at me. "A Government man," Nina gasped. "Here to help us." The report of Blake's death--his possible murder--all that had been Blake's own doing. He gripped me now; murmured it swiftly. A giant, dominant fellow, he towered over me. Nina was unpacking his weapons from the box as he told me. He had believed there was a plot on the Moon against him; was smuggling himself to the Moon, where in secret, with the villains thinking him dead and only his young daughter to cope with, he expected to expose them. And most of the voyage he had been hidden in the box, afraid of eavesdroppers or some prying Benson curve-ray. "Give me those guns, Nina. These damnable murderers--" Then he swung at me; lowered his voice: "Mackensie has the catalyst?" "Yes," I murmured. "Good! I know where. By Heaven, they can kill us both and still they won't find it." He was buckling his weapons to his huge belt. "The captain's in the control turret," I said. "Making a stand up there. We should go to him." "Yes. You're right. Come on." We ran. I put my arm around the girl as she sagged like a terrified child against me. Bow and stern, the sounds of the fighting seemed somewhat to have slackened. The passengers still were screaming; I shoved them back in their doorways as we dashed past. And suddenly, reaching the side deck, I realized that the towering Blake was not with us. The deck here was wet with blood. Three or four bodies lay nearby. An Earth-woman lay writhing, her white throat slashed with crimson. There was nothing I could do to help her. My gun ranged the deck; there was nothing to shoot at. Off at the stern, I saw a running man leap high in the air and go down. Then the red Earth-light back there momentarily darkened. Someone had thrown a darkness bomb; its light-absorbing gas came spreading along the deck toward us. "This way, Nina--climb. I'll follow." We went up the little ladder. Near the top I held her back, poking my head cautiously up, in advance of her. The dimly starlit deck was blurred with gas and heat fumes. We were mid-forward, perhaps halfway between the helio cubby and the chart room. In a patch here on the deck, darkness gas hung in a layer, a black shroud nearly waist deep. Light still showed in the window of the helio room, where the grewsome body of Len Smith lay sprawled. The chart room was dark, its door closed; but the steel shutter of its window, facing this way, was up a few inches. I thought I saw the muzzle of a gun protruding. Good enough. Mackensie, Wilson and perhaps others were in there--barricaded, still holding out. I shouted, "I'm Penelle. Don't fire!" "Come ahead," Mackensie's great voice roared. * * * * * Life, or death, can hang upon such a little thing. Directly across the thirty-foot roof deck from me the top of the other side-ladder was visible above the layer of darkness. A man's head and shoulders suddenly appeared there. My weapon leveled; but then I saw that it was Nina's father. He saw me at the same instant, waved at me and jumped from the ladder, wading through the waist-high darkness toward the chart room. I do feel that there was nothing I could have done. Heaven knows I would give anything now if only I had had some flash of intuition. But I was thinking only of Nina. I turned to gaze down at her, where she stood a step or two below me on the ladder. "Come on, it's all safe." Safe? I turned back just in time to see a hand and arm come up out of the layer of darkness. Weird, as though detached from its body, it swung; the fingers loosed a little globe. It was only a few feet behind Blake. The globe hurtled at his head, struck it--an explosive bomb. It burst with a sharp report and a little puff of yellow-red light. Perhaps I caught a glimpse of the ghastly scattered fragments of what had been a human head. There was only a grewsome gory neck-stump as the giant body of Blake toppled down into the layer of darkness. I fired into the darkness gas. The stab of heat dispelled it a little. I hit nothing. Then, as I jumped from the ladder, forgetful of Nina, from the chart-room window Mackensie was wildly firing from two weapons. One of the sizzling heat-rays barely missed me. And then someone behind him, Wilson perhaps, tossed a light-bomb. Its blinding actinic glare momentarily dispelled the gloom. At the other side companion-ladder we caught a vague glimpse of the massive head and shoulders of Mokk as he leaped down to the lower deck. His triumphant laugh floated up after him. "You, Penelle, bring the girl in here," Mackensie was roaring. "Hurry now." I all but carried the half-fainting Nina. The darkness gas was floating away; but I thanked God that enough remained to shroud the fallen headless body of her father as we passed it. The door of the chart room opened; I dashed in with her; hands banged the steel door closed and bolted it. "I guess we're all here," Mackensie said. The _X-87_ captain was grim, his thick face puffed with the choleric blood swelling it. His left arm hung almost limp at his side; I saw where his white uniform was burned with the scorching edge of a heat-stab. Young Wilson was here, disheveled, wild-eyed. The little oval to the control turret was open; I could see the fat little Peter Green and James Polter, the purser, in there, crouched at a slit of the forward visor window, weapons in hand. I went in to them. "Just us," I murmured. "Where's Dr. Frye?" Polter grimly gestured. "Down there--see him? Damned traitor. I drilled him. See him?" The _X-87_ was still on her course. The forward deck triangle was still bathed in moonlight, save that gases blurred it. The forward lookout's telescope lay in a wreck, with his body upon it. Other motionless forms were strewn about; chairs were overturned--those same chairs where Nina and the rest of us had gathered in the moonlight so short a time ago. Dr. Frye's thin body lay huddled down there. I was aware now that all the fighting had ceased; there was only the distant murmurs of the terrified passengers, in their cabins beneath us. The mutineers everywhere had won; I could not doubt it. The thing was a swift massacre. Those crew members who had tried to be loyal were all dead. I stared, from the tiny hatch-opening in the bow, which led down to the forward messroom, a hand cautiously appeared. There was a stab of flame; a report; an old-fashioned leaden slug thudded harmlessly against a corner of the catwalk bridge, only a few feet from the slit at which we were peering. And in the silence, the sniper's chuckle sounded. At my elbow, suddenly there was a buzzing. Green turned his head slightly. "Call--coming from the main gravity plate room," he murmured. "Answer it, Penelle." I moved toward the little mouthpiece. But Mackensie had heard it and came running in from the adjacent chart room. "I'll take it. Keep at your lookouts, everybody--this may be a ruse to catch us off guard." I could hear the tiny voice coming from the receiver as Mackensie clapped it to his ear. "This is Torio," the voice said suavely. "Have you had enough, Captain?" "You go to hell," Mackensie roared. "That would be very nice, Captain, but it's more likely to be your own destination." I could picture the sleek, ironically smiling Venus man down there at the speaking tube. "We demand your surrender now--if you do not wish to die." "To hell with you--" "All you have to do is come out of the turret, with your hands up. You'll be treated--like the passengers. Fair treatment, I do assure you." "I'll have all you pirates in the detention pen before this is ended," Mackensie roared. "All we want is your surrender. And to have you tell us where you've hidden that little leaden cylinder." "By Heaven, you'll never find it. Dead or alive." "Dead, if you say so," Torio's voice snapped. And then his irony returned. "We'll give you five minutes to decide." "I want nothing from you. By the gods, I'm still Master here!" "Empty title, Captain." "I'm steering us back to Earth," the captain rasped. "The Interplanetary Patrol is coming for us." That made the Venus man chuckle. "If only it were. But it isn't." "We'll be back on Earth in eighteen hours," the choleric Mackensie asserted. "You can all go to hell--you murderers--bandits--" "Back to Earth?" Torio sneered. "Watch us turn, Captain. Not back to Earth. It's Venus we're going to head for. Venus--where the new triumphant Government will be needing that treasure you've hidden. Up there with you in the turret, isn't it?" "To hell with you--" "Watch us turn, Captain." * * * * * I was aware of the glittering Heavens up through the glassite pressure dome as they made a dizzying swoop. The little _X-87_, with her gravity plates abruptly shifted by the manual controls in the hull room, was turning over. "See it, Captain?" "You damned fools," Mackensie roared. "Disconnect my controls if you like. What the hell of it? You can't chart a course down there. You haven't the instruments or the skill." "Quite true, Captain. That's why we want you to surrender. We'd really rather not kill you. And if we go falling through Space this way, unguided, we might eventually hit something. Your five minutes are almost up. What do you say?" My nostrils abruptly were dilating. What was this? Suddenly I was aware of a queer acrid smell here. And my head gave a swoop. Here in the turret Green and Polter were at the forward window. I saw them fling me a startled glance. Both of them staggered to their feet. And Mackensie, still gripping the receiver, was swaying. "What's the matter, Captain?" Torio's suave ironic voice was demanding. "Do you smell it already? You're so silent." William Wilson, with Nina, was alone on guard in the adjacent chart room. He gave a sudden startled cry. "Come quick! Something's the matter with me." Poisonous gas here! We realized it abruptly; gas pouring in through the ventilators from below. "Close those vents!" Mackensie gasped. "Poisoned air--" His hand was clutching at his throat. With his thick neck, full-blooded body, he felt it worse than any of us. His face was purpling; his eyes abruptly bulging. In that second he staggered and fell, ripping the receiver connection out as he went down, where still the ironic voice of Torio was jibing at us. The rest of us sprang to the grid vents. There was no way of shutting the poisoned air off! The hinges of the multiple little visors were melted away! "That--that damned Dr. Frye," Polter gasped. "He was up here a while ago. I wondered--" A scream from Nina, mingled with a sizzling flash in the other room, transfixed us. With all the weird scene swaying before me, I dashed through the oval. Young Wilson was lying sprawling, dead from a bolt, with his head and shoulders on the window ledge. Nina was crouching in a corner, gasping, staring in terror. I started toward her. My ears were roaring as though with a thousand Niagaras. A titan hand seemed compressing my chest with a band of steel as I gasped for breath. "Nina--Nina--" My own voice, so futile, sounded far away. Then I heard the steel shutter of the chart room window snap up to the top. Into the opening, a man came climbing. Mokk, with a patch of chemical fabric binding his nose and mouth like a mask. My gun sizzled at him, but the stab went wild as I staggered. Then he came leaping at me. From the turret I was aware of other shots; a scream of agony from Polter as he was struck; thudding blows as the visor pane was crashed. And then a scream from little Green. The end! On the chart room floor grid I found myself wildly grappling the hulking Martian. My gun had clattered away as his three hundred-pound weight crashed me down. Dimly I realized that this sudden wild attack upon us was because the bandits, for their own sakes, had no desire to have any great amount of the poisoned air circulating about the little ship. "You damned little Earth-fool," Mokk was growling. "Don't you see I'd rather not kill you?" My puny little blows into his face only made him rasp with anger. I was trying to twist from under him. I almost made it. But abruptly he seized me around the middle, rose up and hurled me. Like a child I hurtled across the room, crashing against the alumite inner wall. The world went up into a blinding roar of light as my head struck. Dimly I was aware of dropping back to the floor. There was only blinding, roaring light, and Nina's choked scream of terror as my senses faded and I slid into the soundless abyss of unconsciousness. * * * * * I was at last aware that I was not dead, by the dim feeling that my head was throbbing. I was lying on something soft. Voices were here; the muffled, blended murmur of men's voices. At first they seemed very faint and far away. Then, as my returning senses clarified a little more, I knew that the voices were close to me. I opened my eyes at last to find myself lying on a blanket on the chart room floor. In a chair Nina was huddled, mutely staring with wide, terrified eyes to where at his chart-table Captain Mackensie was slumped, sullenly staring at the celestial diagrams spread before him. The sleek, ironic figure of Torio was beside him, his slim gray hand gesturing at the charts. "We are now just about here, Captain?" "Yes," Mackensie growled. "Then we want a computation of the swiftest course, from here to Venus. You will figure it out. Tell us the gravity plate combination." I could feel that blood was stiffly matting the hair at the back of my head, a ragged scalp wound there. I was bathed in cold sweat; weak, so dizzy still that the eerie chart room swam before me. But my strength slowly was returning. How much time had passed? Considerable, I judged, from that blood so stiffly dry in my hair. With a fumbling hand I felt of my clothes. All my instruments and weapons had been taken. Then I saw, in another chair, the huge slumped figure of Mokk, his massive legs crossed at ease. On his knees his hand held a gun alert. The room light fell on his heavy face. It bore an expression of grim irony, as his dark eyes, watchful, roved the room. "The segment of a parabola, Captain," the soft voice of Torio was saying. "Would that be most swift? Remember, as we turn in past the Earth, we go no closer than forty thousand miles." "You're fools," Mackensie muttered. "This voyage will take a month or more." "Why not?" "The alarm will be out for us. The Interplanetary Patrol will pick us up." "Let us hope not, Captain. You and Miss Nina would be the first to die. But there is not too much danger, I think. The modern electro-telescopes are very wonderful, but there is none, at forty thousand miles, powerful enough to pick up so small a speck of floating dust as the _X-87_. Or at least, not to identify it." "I wouldn't be too sure, Torio. And at best, your food will give out." "We will hope not," Torio smiled. His voice turned brisk. "Chart your course, Captain. Remember, we kept you alive just for this duty." Nina said suddenly, "This silence everywhere about the ship--where are the passengers?" Torio turned smilingly to her. "Why, little lady, didn't you know? We gave them pressure suits and put them out the keel porte. Have no fear, they'll drift down safely. Some of the suits are powered. If they're clever they'll get back to Earth." As though this were an old-fashioned surface vessel--giving the passengers life preservers and tossing them into the middle of an ocean. "Penelle seems to have recovered his wits," Mokk said suddenly. "See what he knows, Torio." It turned all their gazes upon me. I was up on one elbow. "What I know about what?" I said. * * * * * Torio leaped to his feet and stood bending over me. "Now then, you damned crime-tracker. Where is the T-catalyst? It's hidden around here somewhere. Where is it?" "Catalyst," I mumbled. "I don't know what you mean." Torio's foot kicked savagely at me. I tensed; the giant Mokk shifted his weapon to level down at me. I saw Mackensie flash me a glance. "So you're going to try that too?" Torio rasped. I stared. "He doesn't know any more about it than I do," Mackensie growled. "Nobody knew except Georg Blake, and you killed him. Find it for yourself. My guess it that Blake cast it adrift when the attack came." "You talk without sense," Mokk put in. "Maybe the girl knows." He chuckled. "If you leave me alone with her, Torio, I can think of ways to make her tell." "I know nothing about it," Nina gasped. "Well, some one of you does," Torio said grimly. "We'll start with this damn crime-tracker." He leaped across the room, came back with a length of wire. My gaze strayed to the opposite wall; the treasure was there, back of a secret panel. "Bare your chest, Penelle." Torio stooped to where I was backed against the wall, on the floor. He tore at my shirt, exposing the flesh of my chest. "Are you going to tell?" "I can't. I don't know." Beyond his slim shoulder I saw Nina's face, pallid, her dark eyes glistening with horror, her lips compressed as though to stifle a scream. Torio had a small cylinder in his hand, with the naked length of wire connected to it. The wire was glowing now--red, orange, white, then violet hot. "A few lashes with this," Torio hissed at me. "Whatever you know will come out then." His pale face was blazing. "He will talk even more quickly if you try that on the girl," Mokk growled. "No!" I burst out. "No, damn you! We don't know where it is! I can't tell what I don't know." "We'll see," Torio muttered. He dangled the wire at my face. The violet light of it was blinding; the heat scorched my skin. "Stop! Oh, stop it! I'll tell you!" Nina's anguished cry rang out. The light and heat receded from my face. "Oh, so you're the one who's willing to tell?" Torio swung on her; snapped off the current in his wire and flung it away. "All right, where is it? But remember, by the gods, if we don't find it where you say--" "It's there." She gestured to the wall. "My father told me it's there." "I hope so," the giant Mokk growled. "For your sake, I hope so, little lady." I held my breath. If by some mischance it should not be there-- Then Torio found the pressure-clip and slid the panel. With a cry of triumph as he saw the hidden little safe; he did not wait to question us on how to open it, but seized a heat-torch; melted its lock in a moment. The foot-long leaden cylinder was disclosed. There could be no question of the authenticity of its contents--its contents-dial glowed with the Gamma rays bombarding it from within. The pointer trembled at the figures indicating the strength and character of the bombardment. "All goes well," Mokk chuckled. "We have no problems now, friend Torio. You and I can trust each other, eh? Put it back in the safe. That is as good a place as any." The giant Martian stood up, yawning. "You work out our course with the captain. For me, I shall go down and take some rest." He grinned. "The little Earth-girl fascinates you, eh, Torio? I must leave her up here with you. Very well. I would not be one to quarrel over so small a thing. The girls of Mars please me better." Torio, too, was smiling. They were highly pleased with themselves, these triumphant villains. "Take Penelle with you," Torio said contemptuously. "Lock him up in one of the cubbies. Have one of the men feed him." I caught Torio's flashing, significant look, and one of grinning irony with which the Martian answered it. And Nina saw it also. A cry burst from her and she leaped up. "You--you don't mean that! You're going to kill him, now that you haven't anything more to get out of him! Oh--Oh, please--" Her slim little hands gripped Torio by the shoulders. I saw him tense; he stared; and then he laughed softly. "Well, my dear--when you ask me in such a way as this--" "Oh, I do. I do." "Then I will keep him alive." "Don't--don't take him down there." "You do not trust me?" His voice sounded hurt. He swung on Mokk. "Bind him and lock him up. Do not harm him. If you do, you will answer to me for it. I mean it now." "Quite correct," Mokk agreed with a grin. "If that is your form of love-making, it is your own affair. Let us hope she will give you her favor, since you do this for her." "Take him away," Torio commanded. "Come, Captain--let us get this course charted." * * * * * I stood up as Mokk prodded me with his weapon and he shoved me from the room. Was he going to kill me now out of hand? I had that feeling, and it wasn't pleasant. But he only shoved me along the starlit and moonlit roof deck. We had turned partly over. The huge ball of Earth was directly under us now; the Moon was high overhead, blurred through the glassite pressure dome. I saw, distantly, a man or two of the crew, watching us as we came down the side ladder. How many of the mutineers were there? I had no way of guessing. As Mokk shoved me from the side deck into the cross corridor, down the deck near the stern triangle, I caught a glimpse of the hunchback, Durk, staring silently at us. Part way along the corridor the Martian shoved me into one of the passenger sleeping-cubbies. He lighted one of its tiny hooded wall lights. Then he produced lengths of wire; bound my ankles; lashed my wrists, crossed behind me. "I'll put you into the bunk for greater comfort," he chuckled. "Thanks." "Oh, I do it for friend Torio, and his little lady, not for you. Are you hungry?" "No." "Well, I'll send you food later." He left me, closing the door softly after him. I lay in the shadowed bunk, listening to the silence of the vibrationless little vessel. Across the small sleeping room, the window oval was visible, its alumite shutter halfway down. The open segment was very faintly starlit. Perhaps I had been dozing; my head throbbed; the dank sweat of weakness was still upon me. Then suddenly I was snapped into alertness; it seemed that I had heard a sound on the side deck outside my window. And abruptly there was a shadow there in the half-oval window opening. Someone looking in? My heart pounded as I stared; and in a second the soundless shadow withdrew. A minute passed. Again I tensed at the sound of a faint creak. My door was opening! Beyond the bunk bottom I could see the door as very slowly, quietly it swung inward. Then the sheen of light from the corridor darkened; a blob slipped into the room; the door softly closed. The blob, hunched, stealthy, came slowly toward me. Whatever outcry I might have made froze on my lips with my sudden rush of horror. Twitching, I strained at my bonds, but the damnable wire held and merely dug into my flesh from the effort. The hunchback! He came shambling. In one of his dangling hands he held a knife; the hooded light here in the cubby glinted on its naked blade. And in that second the light-sheen caught his face--ghastly, lumped, twisted countenance, with bulbous parted lips as he sucked in his breath. "Penelle--" "Get away from me," I rasped. "You'll answer to Torio for this. By Heaven, he'll flay you alive." "Not so loud! Easy there, I'm not here to hurt you." What was this? Not a guttural, illiterate voice. I recalled my fleeting impression before that this Durk had the sort of voice one uses for disguise. He was beside me now; and as the light, its hood here within a foot or two, brightly illumined his face, realization came to me. Wax, embedded under the skin, by the Glotz-process of disguise. We of the Shadow Squad sometimes use it, though I must confess I had never seen it so cleverly done as here. "Who are you?" I muttered. He whispered, "I'm Jim--Jim Blake." * * * * * Nina's brother! My S.S. boss had mentioned him; mysteriously he had disappeared. He was loosening the wires which bound me; and his swift whispers told me: Like his father, he had wanted to get secretly to the Moon. Throughout all the mutiny he had had no opportunity of doing anything which seemed better than posing as one of the villains. Only once had he had any chance to communicate with Nina--that time when he had gone to her room, telling her that he was going to try and kill Mokk and Torio before the attack started, and thus ward it off. And that he had not been able to do. He was only a boy really, barely twenty; he was trembling with eagerness and excitement now as he cast me loose and I rose up out of the bunk and stood beside him. "You armed?" I whispered. "No; only this knife. I've tried to get something else but can't." "Any of the crew with weapons?" "No, I don't think so. Knives, machinery bars and things like that. Mokk and Torio seemed to have everything." "How many in the crew?" "Five, and me. One got killed in the fight. Another wounded. There were two or three others planted among the passengers. Maybe more. They got killed, too. Oh, what shall we do? All I could think of was to get here and release you." "And I damn well thank you, Jim." I clapped him on the back. "Look here, you keep the knife. Heaven knows you may need it." "What are we going to do?" he whispered eagerly. "Is--is Nina all right?" "Yes, I guess so. Up in the turret. Have you seen Mokk?" "That Martian? No. What can we do?" Certainly I had no very clear idea. Five men, and Mokk and Torio. They were not very many to be dispersed about the ship, and we had a fair chance of cautiously moving around without encountering any of them. Torio, I figured, was still in the chart room, with Nina and Mackensie. Mokk, perhaps, was asleep somewhere. Young Blake had no very clear idea of where the other five might be. "Come on," I whispered. "Let's take a look at the chart room." If by any wild chance we could overcome Torio and get the electric weapons-- We got up to the roof deck without encounter. From one of the midships ladders I stared forward to the chart room. I could see Torio and Mackensie still in there, at the table with the charts. And now, beside the chart room, where he could command its door and also the control turret, a huge blob was lurking. Was it Mokk? It wasn't. I made the figure out more clearly as he moved a trifle. "That's one of the crew," Blake whispered. "Look--he's got a ray-gun." I could see it. I turned back. "Got to try something else. The midships keel pressure porte," I whispered. "Ever been down there, Jim?" He stared. "No. What's your idea? Pressure porte?" "There's also a pressure porte in the dome, just over the control turret. If we can get some Erentz pressure suits down in the keel--" Whether he understood me or not, I didn't stop to find out. I had still only a very vague idea myself, just the glimmer of a desperate plan which might work out. "You better lead," I suggested. "I'll direct you. Len Smith showed me down there. If we run into anybody you can fool them long enough for me to jump them." Unless it might be the Martian, with his belt bristling with electronic guns. Vehemently I prayed we could keep clear of him. Silently, furtively, we padded into the lower corridor. No sound. With young Blake close ahead of me, we went down onto the mid-level catwalk. Still there was nothing save eerie lights and deserted rooms. Nothing? A ghastly reek came through a doorway at me. I glanced in. "The dead," Blake whispered with a shudder. "Said they were going to cast them out a porte, but they didn't yet." * * * * * The dead. That catwalk room was a reeking, ghastly charnel house. A good thirty bodies--men, women and children of three worlds, piled in a horrible litter. I gasped. All the passengers were here. There had been no disembarking of passengers, as Torio had ironically described to Nina. We went on. Descended another level. We were in the keel now. Suddenly footsteps sounded on the catwalk above us. One of the crew passed along it. Fortunately he did not look down through the grid. "Got by that by a margin," I whispered. "Straight ahead, Jim. Then half a flight down." From one of the storehouse rooms just ahead of us a man suddenly emerged. I shrank against the dark corridor wall. "Oh, you, Durk," the man said softly. "Lookit what I found in here--cask of alcoholite. Good drinkin', Durk." Jim Blake is only a boy, but he didn't shrink from his job. I was tensed to leap past him upon the man in the doorway. The fellow abruptly saw me. He squealed, "Look, behind you--" That's all he ever did say. Blake went at him like a little springing leopard. The knife flashed; the man went down with only a choked gurgle of blood in his throat. "Got him," Blake murmured. "Good enough. Come on." The emergency pressure porte was to one side of the corridor, an oblong compartment, with one tiny segment of the tubelight up in its ceiling sending down a faint pallid sheen. The inner door here was open so that normal air pressure was in the porte. "Luck better be with us now," I murmured. "Let's see what they've left in the emergency equipment room." It was here on the other side the corridor. My heart pounded with triumph. There were plenty of Erentz suits and helmets here. Both young Blake and I had used the familiar Carpley suit and helmet for outer stratosphere flying. These were not so very different, save that the electronic current in the double shell of the fabric circulated faster, for the more speedy absorption of the interior pressure within the suit, when worn in the vacuum of Space. We had them on in a moment, with the huge goggling helmets buckled at the throat. Through my glassite bull's-eye I could see young Blake's weirdly disguised face. He was trying to smile; but he was probably pretty fairly frightened. For which I don't blame him; I was myself. The baggy, still deflated suits hung on us in great grotesque folds. I touched my metal-tipped glove to the metal plate on his shoulder for audiphone contact. "Think you can work it all right?" I murmured. "Yes. Yes, sure." "Keep with me when we get outside," I cautioned. "Yes. I'll--I'll try." I was in an agony of apprehension that someone would come and catch us here before we could get the porte closed. But no one did. Our pressure suits caused no trouble. The Erentz mechanism controls, renewal of the interior air, and the pressure-absorbing current, are simple enough to work. Within a minute our suits were bloated, huge. And then as we stepped into the pressure room, I saw what clarified and altered all my vague plans. A complete get-away! It was possible now, for here on a rack of the pressure room floor lay a little volplane--emergency Space-sled, its canoe-like hull some twenty feet long, its wings for air gliding folded against its sides. It was provisioned with emergency food and water. I bent over it with hurried, triumphant examination. The stern had a tiny outboard rocket engine; and in the bow were small manually controlled gravity plates. It was ready; the descent to Earth in it could be made, with fair safety, and perhaps in a week. * * * * * We slid the inner pressure door closed. An exit out of a pressure room can be swiftly made. We opened the small vents of the outer panels. The air of the room started hissing out into the vacuum outside. "Easy," I murmured. "Not too fast. We don't want to get blown out." Within a minute we could open the outer door; the last escaping air went with a thin hissing rush. At the threshold before us yawned the vast abyss of Space. I stood for a second gazing down at the great mottled reddish ball of Earth. Forty thousand miles down to it. There was a little launching rack out here to hold the volplane. We slid it out; locked it into position. I had told Blake now what I was going to try and do. He demurred at waiting here in the volplane, but I forced him. "You can see up from here," I murmured. "Somebody has to launch it. When I give you the signal, shove it off. You can pick us up." "If we have luck," I murmured it to myself. He nodded comprehension. Then, cautiously, I stepped from the threshold, out into Space. An empty abyss of forty thousand miles, down to the Earth's surface beneath me. Though I knew very well what would happen to me, of course, I must say that I had to steel myself grimly, to step off from the brink of that threshold. It made my senses momentarily reel. But the weird sensation was gone in a moment. It was like a diver taking a step under water. I did not fall. I had let myself off the brink gingerly; and I felt my body sluggishly moving out a foot or two, with all the universe slowly, dizzily turning over. I am no skilled mathematician. Given the gross tonnage of the little _X-87_, doubtless astronomers could figure the relation of its gravity pull upon me, so close, compared to the giant bulk of the Earth, so far away. Perhaps even at forty thousand miles, and against the pull of the Moon, some two hundred thousand miles above me, and the _X-87_ only a foot or two--the Earth would slowly have drawn me down. But I knew that there was an aura of the vessel's artificial interior gravity out here. Len Smith had told me of many tests which had been made between the Earth and the Moon. At all events, I drifted downward a few feet, like a waterlogged chunk of wood slowly turning over. Then slowly I came back; landed in a clumsy, struggling heap against the ship's glistening alumite side. To each of us, himself is the center of the Universe. Cautiously I stood up. At once the vessel seemed my little world, lying flat on its side under me, with the reddish giant Earth to my right, the round white Moon to the left; and over my head, the great glittering vault of the Heavens, star-strewn upon a background of black velvet. I seemed to weigh perhaps a pound or two. Like a fly, gingerly I crawled along the vessel's bulging side. Then I came to the dome. The roof deck within was grotesquely tilted on end. The vision of it was blurred by the glassite pressure plates, but it seemed unoccupied, slowly righting itself as I crawled up the bulge, cautiously clinging to avoid having my own efforts cast me off. Then at last I came to the top, with the little _X-87_ right side up under my feet and the Moon above me. I knew that from the roof deck I could be seen up here as a distorted, shadowy blob. My heart was pounding with the fear that an alarm would come, but none did. I reached, at last, the little pressure porte in the dome over the control turret and chart room. I had two deflated Erentz suits and helmets lashed to me. The emergency panel was here, like a trap door under me. Through its transparent bull's-eye I could see into the small, dim compartment under me. The lower panel was open, but there was a lever out here by which I could slide it closed. Would it make any sound and alarm Torio in the chart room under it? I held my breath as it slid. There was no commotion. * * * * * It took only a minute to let the air out of the little scaled pressure room. Then cautiously I dropped down into it, with the interior gravity gripping me so that suddenly I was my normal weight once more. Breathless, tense, I lay flat, with my suit deflating as I stared down into the chart room. Nina and Torio were there. I could see them, but not hear them. She was in a chair, with him standing before her. And then I caught my breath. What was this? An angle of the control turret also was within my line of vision. A crimsoned figure lay there; the body of Captain Mackensie. He had finished his work; charted the course--and this was his reward. A little of the outside of the turret also was visible. It did not seem that the guard was out there now. Had he been sent away, so that Torio now might be alone with Nina? Fervently I hoped so. There was no alarm as I cautiously slid the trap in the chart room ceiling. "Oh--Oh, please--let me alone!" "But, my dear little lady, do you want me to kill Penelle? Surely you--" The snaky Torio got no further than that. I was some fifteen feet directly above him. Perhaps he was aware of my hurtling body but he had no chance to avoid it as I crashed down upon him. The work-knife in my gloved, metal-fingered hand stabbed. He went limp under me, with blood gushing from his chest where the knife had gone to its hilt. My helmet was up in the pressure room. "Nina, climb up!" I slid the little wall ladder into position for her. "Quick, now! Get into the pressure suit up there. Inflate it, and wait for me." White and grim, she obeyed wordlessly. I started her up the ladder, swung for the hidden wall safe. Would the leaden cylinder of the catalyst still be here? It was. I strapped it quickly to my belt. Then I dashed for the instrument cubby. A little explosive time-bomb.... I found one; and hurried with it into the control turret, where I placed it against the mechanisms of the Erentz current--that huge electronic stream which circulated throughout all the double-shelled plates of the vessel to absorb the inner pressure. Ten minutes? Would that give us time enough? Nina was in the pressure suit when in a minute more I reached the upper room. "Good enough, Nina. Now, the helmet! Your brother Jim is outside--safe." My heart leaped with triumph at her gasp of joy. "Oh, Fred--" "Come on, hurry." We were garbed, ready and through the outer porte in another minute or two. My hand clung to Nina's metal shoulder. "Careful, there's no gravity. Don't shove yourself off." We were like two crawling flies on the smooth outer surface of the pressure dome. Still there was no alarm. We got part way down the side. Young Blake, in the poised little volplane farther down, saw us. I waved my arm, and he shoved his tiny craft off. Like a log in water it floated out twenty feet or so, turned and came drifting diagonally back. "We'll dive for it," I murmured. "He'll pick us up." * * * * * I did not see the emerging figure, here beside us in the starlight; I did not even know that there was a tiny pressure porte here on the side deck at one of the bull's-eyes. But suddenly a panel slid wide. Upon a rush of air, a huge bloated figure came out; struck against me, with its arms gripping me. Mokk! I could see his heavy, snarling face through the visor pane. His body and mine, as we gripped each other, toppled off into emptiness. Amazing, weightless combat. The whole Universe was turning over as we floated out, kicking, flailing, floundering. He was trying to reach the knife at his belt. He got it, but somehow my mailed fist was able to strike it away. It went floating off. The thing to me was a weird chaos. I tried to kick away, but he clung, his great hands with metal fingers gouging at the fabric of my suit to rip it. Once, his hand clapped to my shoulder. With sudden audiphone contact I heard his rasping voice: "The end of you, Earth-man." But, thank God, it wasn't. Abruptly, by some fortunate chance I was able to snatch my knife from its belt-sheath. It ripped into Mokk's fabric. I was aware of a little flash of deranged electricity; his suit deflated. Ghastly human explosion--every tiny cell of his body bursting with its inner pressure. The rush of released, dissipating expanding air from his suit sprayed bursting gore upon me. Gore, and the noisome pink-white foam which had been his flesh. I shoved the ghastly thing away; saw myself now seemingly upon my back, grotesquely struggling to turn erect with the _X-87_ hanging diagonally some twenty feet away. Nina was still clinging to its side, with the volplane gliding near her. She dove, and Blake hauled her aboard. And then he shoved to me; gripped me at last. "All right," I gasped. "Good enough, Jim--you sit here with Nina--" At the bow of our fragile little craft, I set the gravity plates for an intensification of Earth's attraction. I set them to the fullest of their power. For a moment we slowly turned over, with all the Heavens, the Moon, Earth and the little _X-87_ in a dizzying swing. Then we steadied, with the Earth ahead of us. Clinging, I shoved myself back in the canoe-like volplane, to Nina and Blake. Touched them. "We're starting. See the ship?" The little vessel, close behind and above us, was slowly receding. "But they'll discover us!" young Blake murmured. "They have telescopes--they'll discover us--and the _X-87_ can catch us easily." "Maybe," I muttered. "Maybe not--" * * * * * Then it came! It was a weird, soundless explosion. We saw a jagged little series of flashes as the Erentz current burst out. Then, with a puff of light, soundlessly the vessel flew apart ... a million fragments of bursting ship and bursting human bodies. All about us was the glistening, starlit shimmer of them, like a fountain spray of pyrotechnic beauty. Then there was just emptiness of Interplanetary Space where the ship had been. But a cloud of shimmering particles hung there, like myriad specks of stardust to mark where a tiny world had exploded. After a time their little gravity drew them together into a loose ball of shattered Matter hanging balanced by the myriad Celestial forces. Some of the larger pieces were starting around it, little satellites with the inertia of their velocity balancing the gravity of the central mass. A new tiny System, here in the vast Heavens. It drifted off, finding its new orbit--drifted as we dropped away from it until at last it was only a shining speck among the billions of giant worlds. And then we could no longer see it. * * * * * I have little to add. You all know the details of our long but safe descent, with the Interplanetary patrol picking us up before we reached the stratosphere. And now, as a postscript, I may say that Miss Nina Blake has allowed me to announce that very presently she will be applying for the publication of her marriage. And she will name Frederick Penelle, of the Great-New York Shadow Squad. Earth-Moon Flight 9 certainly was not star-crossed, for me. 
62476	----	Conspiracy on Callisto By JAMES MacCREIGH Revolt was flaring on Callisto, and Peter Duane held the secret that would make the uprising a success or failure. Yet he could make no move, could favor no side--his memory was gone--he didn't know for whom he fought. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Duane's hand flicked to his waist and hung there, poised. His dis-gun remained undrawn. The tall, white-haired man--Stevens--smiled. "You're right, Duane," he said. "I could blast you, too. Nobody would win that way, so let's leave the guns where they are." The muscles twitched in Peter Duane's cheeks, but his voice, when it came, was controlled. "Don't think we're going to let this go," he said. "We'll take it up with Andrias tonight. We'll see whether you can cut me out!" The white-haired man's smile faded. He stepped forward, one hand bracing him against the thrust of the rocket engines underneath, holding to the guide rail at the side of the ship's corridor. He said, "Duane, Andrias is your boss, not mine. I'm a free lance; I work for myself. When we land on Callisto tonight I'll be with you when you turn our--shall I say, our _cargo_?--over to him. And I'll collect my fair share of the proceeds. That's as far as it goes. I take no orders from him." A heavy-set man in blue appeared at the end of the connecting corridor. He was moving fast, but stopped short when he saw the two men. "Hey!" he said. "Change of course--get to your cabins." He seemed about to walk up to them, then reconsidered and hurried off. Neither man paid any attention. Duane said, "Do I have to kill you?" It was only a question as he asked it, without threatening. A muted alarm bell sounded through the P.A. speakers, signaling a one-minute warning. The white-haired man cocked his eyebrow. "Not at all," he said. He took the measure of his slim, red-headed opponent. Taller, heavier, older, he was still no more uncompromisingly belligerent than Duane, standing there. "Not at all," he repeated. "Just take your ten thousand and let it go at that. Don't make trouble. Leave Andrias out of our private argument." "Damn you!" Duane flared. "I was promised fifty thousand. I need that money. Do you think--" "Forget what I think," Stevens said, his voice clipped and angry. "I don't care about fairness, Duane, except to myself. I've done all the work on this--I've supplied the goods. My price is set, a hundred thousand Earth dollars. What Andrias promised you is no concern of mine. The fact is that, after I've taken my share, there's only ten thousand left. That's all you get!" Duane stared at him a long second, then nodded abruptly. "I was right the first time," he said. "I'll _have_ to kill you!" * * * * * Already his hand was streaking toward the grip of his dis-gun, touching it, drawing it forth. But the white-haired man was faster. His arms swept up and pinioned Duane, holding him impotent. "Don't be a fool," he grated. "Duane--" The P.A. speaker rattled, blared something unintelligible. Neither man heard it. Duane lunged forward into the taller man's grip, sliding down to the floor. The white-haired man grappled furiously to keep his hold on Peter's gun arm, but Peter was slipping away. Belatedly, Stevens went for his own gun. He was too late. Duane's was out and leveled at him. "_Now_ will you listen to reason?" Duane panted. But he halted, and the muzzle of his weapon wavered. The floor swooped and surged beneath him as the thrust of the mighty jets was cut off. Suddenly there was no gravity. The two men, locked together, floated weightlessly out to the center of the corridor. "Course change!" gasped white-haired Stevens. "Good God!" The ship had reached the midpoint of its flight. The bells had sounded, warning every soul on it to take shelter, to strap themselves in their pressure bunks against the deadly stress of acceleration as the ship reversed itself and began to slow its headlong plunge into Callisto. But the two men had not heeded. The small steering rockets flashed briefly. The men were thrust bruisingly against the side of the corridor as the rocket spun lazily on its axis. The side jets flared once more to halt the spin, when the one-eighty turn was completed, and the men were battered against the opposite wall, still weightless, still clinging to each other, still struggling. Then the main-drive bellowed into life again, and the ship began to battle against its own built-up acceleration. The corridor floor rose up with blinking speed to smite them-- And the lights went out in a burst of crashing pain for Peter Duane. * * * * * Someone was talking to him. Duane tried to force an eye open to see who it was, and failed. Something damp and clinging was all about his face, obscuring his vision. But the voice filtered in. "Open your mouth," it said. "Please, Peter, open your mouth. You're all right. Just swallow this." It was a girl's voice. Duane was suddenly conscious that a girl's light hand was on his shoulder. He shook his head feebly. The voice became more insistent. "Swallow this," it said. "It's only a stimulant, to help you throw off the shock of your--accident. You're all right, otherwise." Obediently he opened his mouth, and choked on a warm, tingly liquid. He managed to swallow it, and lay quiet as deft feminine hands did something to his face. Suddenly light filtered through his closed eyelids, and cool air stirred against his damp face. He opened his eyes. A slight red-headed girl in white nurse's uniform was standing there. She stepped back a pace, a web of wet gauze bandage in her hands, looking at him. "Hello," he whispered. "You--where am I?" "In the sick bay," she said. "You got caught out when the ship changed course. Lucky you weren't hurt, Peter. The man you were with--the old, white-haired one, Stevens--wasn't so lucky. He was underneath when the jets went on. Three ribs broken--his lung was punctured. He died in the other room an hour ago." Duane screwed his eyes tight together and grimaced. When he opened them again there was alertness and clarity in them--but there was also bafflement. "Girl," he said, "who are you? Where am I?" "Peter!" There was shock and hurt in the tone of her voice. "I'm--don't you know me, Peter?" Duane shook his head confusedly. "I don't know anything," he said. "I--I don't even know my own name." "Duane, Duane," a man's heavy voice said. "That won't wash. Don't play dumb on me." "Duane?" he said. "Duane...." He swiveled his head and saw a dark, squat man frowning at him. "Who are you?" Peter asked. The dark man laughed. "Take your time, Duane," he said easily. "You'll remember me. My name's Andrias. I've been waiting here for you to wake up. We have some business matters to discuss." The nurse, still eyeing Duane with an odd bewilderment, said: "I'll leave you alone for a moment. Don't talk too much to him, Mr. Andrias. He's still suffering from shock." "I won't," Andrias promised, grinning. Then, as the girl left the room, the smile dropped from his face. "You play rough, Duane," he observed. "I thought you'd have trouble with Stevens. I didn't think you'd find it necessary to put him out of the way so permanently. Well, no matter. If you had to kill him, it's no skin off my nose. Give me a release on the merchandise. I've got your money here." * * * * * Duane waved a hand and pushed himself dizzily erect, swinging his legs over the side of the high cot. A sheet had been thrown over him, but he was fully dressed. He examined his clothing with interest--gray tunic, gray leather spaceman's boots. It was unfamiliar. He shook his head in further confusion, and the motion burst within his skull, throbbing hotly. He closed his eyes until it subsided, trying to force his brain to operate, to explain to him where and what he was. He looked at the man named Andrias. "Nobody seems to believe me," he said, "but I really don't know what's going on. Things are moving too fast for me. Really, I--why, I don't even know my own name! My head--it hurts. I can't think clearly." Andrias straightened, turned a darkly-suspicious look on Duane. "Don't play tricks on me," he said savagely. "I haven't time for them. I won't mince words with you. Give me a release on the cargo now, before I have to get rough. This is a lot more important to me than your life is." "Go to hell," Duane said shortly. "I'm playing no tricks." There was an instant's doubt in Andrias' eyes, then it flashed away. He bent closer, peered at Duane. "I almost think--" he began. Then he shook his head. "No," he said. "You're lying all right. You killed Stevens to get his share--and now you're trying to hold me up. That's your last chance that just went by, Duane. From now on, I'm running this show!" He spun around and strode to the door, thrust it open. "Dakin!" he bellowed. "Reed!" Two large, ugly men in field-gray uniforms, emblazoned with the shooting-star insignia of Callisto's League police, came in, looking to Andrias for instructions. "Duane here is resisting arrest," Andrias said. "Take him along. We'll fix up the charges later." "You can't do that," Duane said wearily. "I'm sick. If you've got something against me, save it. Wait till my head clears. I'm sure I can explain--" "Explain, hell." The dark man laughed. "If I wait, this ship will be blasting off for Ganymede within two hours. I'll wait--but so will the ship. It's not going anywhere till I give it clearance. I run Callisto; I'll give the orders here!" II Whoever this man Andrias was, thought Duane, he was certainly a man of importance on Callisto. As he had said, _he_ gave the orders. The crew of the rocket made no objection when Andrias and his men took Duane off without a word. Duane had thought the nurse, who seemed a good enough sort, might have said something on his behalf. But she was out of sight as they left. A curt sentence to a gray-clad official on the blast field where the rocket lay, and the man nodded and hurried off, to tell the rocket's captain that the ship was being refused clearance indefinitely. A long, powerful ground car slid up before them. Andrias got in front, while the two uniformed men shoved Duane into the back of the car, climbed in beside him. Andrias gave a curt order, and the car shot forward. The driver, sitting beside Andrias, leaned forward and readied a hand under the dashboard. The high wail of a siren came instantly from the car's roof, and what traffic was on the broad, straight highway into which they had turned pulled aside to let them race through. Ahead lay the tall spires of a city. Graceful, hundreds of feet high, they seemed dreamlike yet somehow oddly familiar to Duane. Somewhere he had seen them before. He dragged deep into his mind, plumbing the cloudy, impenetrable haze that had settled on it, trying to bring forth the memories that he should have had. Amnesia, they called it; complete forgetting of the happenings of a lifetime. He'd heard of it--but never dreamed it could happen to him! _My name, it seems, is Peter Duane_, he thought. _And they tell me that I killed a man!_ The thought was starkly incredible to him. A white-haired man, it had been; someone named Stevens. He tried to remember. Yes, there had been a white-haired man. And there had been an argument. Something to do with money, with a shipment of goods that Stevens had supplied to Duane. There has even been talk of killing.... But--murder! Duane looked at his hands helplessly. Andrias, up ahead, was turning around. He looked sharply at Duane, for a long second. An uncertainty clouded his eyes, and abruptly he looked forward again without speaking. "Who's this man Andrias?" Duane whispered to the nearest guard. The man stared at him. "Governor Andrias," he said, "is the League's deputy on Callisto. You know--the Earth-Mars League. They put Governor Andrias here to--well, to govern for them." "League?" Duane asked, wrinkling his brow. He had heard something about a League once, yes. But it was all so nebulous.... The other guard stirred, leaned over. "Shut up," he said heavily. "You'll have plenty of chance for talking later." * * * * * But the chance was a long time in coming. Duane found himself, an hour later, still in the barred room into which he'd been thrust. The guards had brought him there, at Andrias' order, and left him. That had been all. This was not a regular jail, Duane realized. It was more like a palace, something out of Earth's Roman-empire days, all white stone and frescoed walls. Duane wished for human companionship--particularly that of the nurse. Of all the people he'd met since awakening in that hospital bed, only she seemed warm and human. The others were--brutal, deadly. It was too bad, Duane reflected, that he'd failed to remember her. She'd seemed hurt, and she had certainly known him by first name. But perhaps she would understand. Duane sat down on a lumpy, sagging bed and buried his head in his hands. Dim ghosts of memory were wandering in his mind. He tried to conjure them into stronger relief, or to exorcise them entirely. Somewhere, some time, a man had said to him, "_Andrias is secretly arming the Callistan cutthroats for revolt against the League. He wants personal power--he's prepared to pay any price for it. He needs guns, Earth guns smuggled in through the League patrol. If he can wipe out the League police garrison--those who are loyal to the League, still, instead of to Andrias--he can sit back and laugh at any fleet Earth and Mars can send. Rockets are clumsy in an atmosphere. They're helpless. And if he can arm enough of Callisto's rabble, he can't be stopped. That's why he'll pay for electron rifles with their weight in gold._" Duane could remember the scene clearly. Could almost see the sharp, aquiline face of the man who had spoken to him. But there memory stopped. A fugitive recollection raced through his mind. He halted it, dragged it back, pinned it down.... They had stopped in Darkside, the spaceport on the side of Luna that keeps perpetually averted from Earth, as if the moon knows shame and wants to hide the rough and roaring dome city that nestles in one of the great craters. Duane remembered sitting in a low-ceilinged, smoke-heavy room, across the table from a tall man with white hair. Stevens! "_Four thousand electron rifles_," the man had said. "_Latest government issue. Never mind how I got them; they're perfect. You know my price. Take it or leave it. And it's payable the minute we touch ground on Callisto._" There had been a few minutes of haggling over terms, then a handshake and a drink from a thin-necked flagon of pale-yellow liquid fire. He and the white-haired man had gone out then, made their way by unfrequented side streets to a great windowless building. Duane remembered the white-hot stars overhead, shining piercingly through the great transparent dome that kept the air in the sealed city of Darkside, as they stood at the entrance of the warehouse and spoke in low tones to the man who answered their summons. Then, inside. And they were looking at a huge chamber full of stacked fiber boxes--containing nothing but dehydrated dairy products and mining tools, by the stencils they bore. Duane had turned to the white-haired man with a puzzled question--and the man had laughed aloud. He dragged one of the boxes down, ripped it open with the sharp point of a handling hook. Short-barreled, flare-mouthed guns rolled out, tumbling over the floor. Eight of them were in that one box, and hundreds of boxes all about. Duane picked one up, broke it, peered into the chamber where the tiny capsule of U-235 would explode with infinite violence when the trigger was pulled, spraying radiant death three thousand yards in the direction the gun was aimed.... And that memory ended. Duane got up, stared at his haggard face in the cracked mirror over the bed. "_They say I'm a killer_," he thought. "_Apparently I'm a gun-runner as well. Good lord--what am I not?_" His reflection--white, drawn face made all the more pallid by the red hair that blazed over it--stared back at him. There was no answer there. If only he could remember-- "All right, Duane." The deep voice of a guard came to him as the door swung open. "Stop making eyes at yourself." Duane looked around. The guard beckoned. "Governor Andrias wants to speak to you--now. Let's not keep the governor waiting." * * * * * A long, narrow room, with a long carpet leading from the entrance up to a great heavy desk--that was Andrias' office. Duane felt a click in his memory as he entered. One of the ancient Earth dictators had employed just such a psychological trick to overawe those who came to beg favors of him. Muslini, or some such name. The trick failed to work. Duane had other things on his mind; he walked the thirty-foot length of the room, designed to imbue him with a sense of his own unimportance, as steadily as he'd ever walked in the open air of his home planet. Whichever planet that was. The guard had remained just inside the door, at attention. Andrias waved him out. "Here I am," said Duane. "What do you want?" Andrias said, "I've had the ship inspected and what I want is on it. That saves your life, for now. But the cargo is in your name. I could take it by force, if I had to. I prefer not to." He picked up a paper, handed it to Duane. "In spite of your behavior, you can keep alive. You can even collect the money for the guns--Stevens' share as well as your own. This is a release form, authorizing my men to take four hundred and twenty cases of dehydrated foods and drilling supplies from the hold of the _Cameroon_--the ship you came on. Sign it, and we'll forget our argument. Only, sign it now and get it over with. I'm losing patience, Duane." Duane said, without expression, "No." Dark red flooded into Andrias' sallow face. His jaws bunched angrily and there was a ragged thread of incomplete control to his voice as he spoke. "I'll have your neck for this, Duane," he said softly. Duane looked at the man's eyes. Death was behind them, peeping out. Mentally he shrugged. What difference did it make? "Give me the pen," he said shortly. Andrias exhaled a deep breath. You could see the tension leave him, the mottled anger fade from his face and leave it without expression. He handed the paper to Duane without a word. He gave him a pen, watched him scrawl his name. "That," he said, "is better." He paused a moment ruminatively. "It would have been better still if you'd not stalled me so long. I find that hard to forgive in my associates." "The money," Peter said. If he were playing a part--pretending he knew what he was doing--he might as well play it to the hilt. "When do I get it?" Andrias picked up the paper and looked carefully at the signature. He creased it thoughtfully, stowed it in a pocket before answering. "Naturally," he said, "there will have to be a revision of terms. I offered a hundred and ten thousand Earth-dollars. I would have paid it--but you made me angry. You'll have to pay for that." * * * * * Duane said, "I've paid already. I've been dragged from pillar to post by you. That's enough. Pay me what you owe me, if you want any more of the same goods!" That was a shot in the dark--and it missed the mark. Andrias' eyes widened. "You amaze me, Duane," he said. He rose and stepped around the desk, confronting Duane. "I almost think you really have lost your memory, Duane," he said. "Otherwise, surely you would know that this is all the rifles I need. With them I'll _take_ whatever else I want!" Duane said, "You're ready, then...." He took time to think it over, but he knew that no thought was required. Already the hands that he had locked behind him were clenched, taut. Already the muscles of his legs were tensing. "You're ready," he repeated. "You've armed the Callistan exiles--the worst gutter scum on nine planets. You're set to betray the League that gave you power here.... Well, that changes things. I can't let you do it!" He hurled himself at Andrias, hands sweeping around to grapple for the dark man's throat. Andrias, off-balance, staggered backward. But his own hands were diving for the twin heat guns that hung at his waist. Duane saw his danger, and reacted. His foot twisted around Andrias' ankle; his hands at the other's throat gripped tighter. He lunged forward, slamming the hard top of his head into the other's face, feeling flesh and cartilage give as Andrias' nose mashed flat. His own head pin-wheeled dizzily, agonizingly, as the jar revived the pain of his earlier accident. But Andrias, unconscious already, tumbled back with Duane on top of him. His head made an audible, spine-chilling thud as it hit the carpeted floor. Duane got up, retrieving the two heat guns, and stared at him. "_They tell me I killed Stevens the same way_," he thought. "_I'm getting in a rut!_" But Andrias was not dead, though he was out as cold as the void beyond Pluto. The thick carpeting had saved him from a broken head. Duane stepped over the unconscious man and looked around the room. It was furnished severely, to the point of barrenness. Two chairs before Andrias' ornate, bare-topped desk and one luxurious chair behind it; a tasseled bell cord within easy reach of Andrias' chair; the long carpet. That was all it contained. The problem of getting out was serious, he saw. How could one-- III Methodically he ransacked the drawers of Andrias' desk. Papers, a whole arsenal of hand guns, Callistan money by the bale, ominously black-covered notebooks with cryptic figures littering their pages--those were the contents. A coldly impersonal desk, without the familiar trivia most men accumulate. There was nothing, certainly, that would get him out of a building that so closely resembled a fortress. He tumbled the things back into the drawers helter-skelter, turned Andrias over and searched his pockets. More money--the man must have had a fortune within reach at all times--and a few meaningless papers. Duane took the release he had signed and tore it to shreds. But that was only a gesture. When Andrias came to, unless Duane had managed to get away and accomplish something, the mere lack of written permission would not keep him from the rocket's lethal cargo! When Andrias came to.... An idea bloomed in Duane's brain. He looked, then, at unconscious Andrias--and the idea withered again. He had thought of forcing Andrias himself to front for him, at gun's point, in the conventional manner of escaping prisoners. But fist fights, fiction to the contrary notwithstanding, leave marks on the men who lose them. Andrias' throat was speckled with the livid marks of Duane's fingers; Duane's head, butting Andrias in the face, had drawn a thick stream of crimson from his nostrils, turned his sharp nose askew. No guard of Andrias' would have been deceived for an instant, looking at that face--even assuming that Andrias could have been forced to cooperate by the threat of a gun. Which, considering the stake Andrias had in this play, was doubtful.... He stood up and looked around. He had to act quickly. Already Andrias' breath was audible; he saw the man grimace and an arm flopped spasmodically on the floor. Consciousness was on its way back. Duane touched the heat gun he'd thrust into his belt; drew it and held it poised, while he sought to discover what was in his own mind. He'd killed a man already, they said. Was he then a killer--could he shoot Andrias now, in cold blood, with so much to gain and nothing to lose? He stood there a moment. Then, abruptly, he reversed the weapon and chopped it down on Andrias' skull. There was a sharp grunt from the still unconscious man, but no other sign. Only--the first tremors of movement that had shown on him halted, and did not reappear. "_No_," Duane thought. "_Whatever they say, I'm not a killer!_" But still he had to get out. How? Once more he stared around the room, catalogued its contents. The guard would be getting impatient. Perhaps any minute he would tap the door, first timorously, then with heavier strokes. The guard! There was a way! * * * * * Duane eyed the length of the room. Thirty feet--it would take him a couple of seconds to run it at full speed. Was that fast enough? There was only one way to find out. He walked around the desk to the bell cord. He took a deep breath, tugged it savagely, and at once was in speedy motion, racing toward the door, his footsteps muffled in the deep, springy carpet. Almost as he reached it, he saw it begin to open. He quickly sidestepped and was out of the guard's sight, behind the door, as the man looked in. Quick suspicion flared in his eyes, then certainty as he saw Andrias huddled on the floor. He opened his mouth to cry out-- But Duane's arm was around his throat, and he had no breath to spare. Duane's foot lashed out and the door slammed shut; Duane's balled left fist came up and connected with the guard's chin. Abruptly the man slumped. Duane took a deep breath and let the man drop to the floor. But he paused only a second; now he had two unconscious men on his hands and he dared let neither revive until he was prepared. He grasped the guard's arm and dragged him roughly the length of the room. He leaped on top of the desk, brutally scarring its gleaming top with the hard spikes of his boots. His agile fingers unfastened the long bell cord without causing it to ring and, bearing it, he dropped again to the floor. Tugging and straining, he got the limp form of Andrias into his own chair, bound him with the bell cord, gagged him with the priceless Venus-wool scarf Andrias wore knotted about his throat. He tested his bindings with full strength, and smiled. Those would hold, let Andrias struggle as he would. The guard he stripped of clothing, bound and gagged with his own belt and spaceman's kerchief. He dragged him around behind the desk, thrust him under it out of sight. Andrias' chair he turned so that the unconscious face was averted from the door. Should anyone look in, then, the fact of Andrias' unconsciousness might not be noticed. Then he took off his own clothes, quickly assumed the field-gray uniform of the guard. It fit like the skin of a fruit. He felt himself bulging out of it in a dozen places. The long cape the guard wore would conceal that, perhaps. In any case, there was nothing better. Trying to make his stride as martial as possible, he walked down the long carpet to the door, opened it and stepped outside. * * * * * His luck couldn't hold out forever. It was next to miraculous that he got as far as he did--out of the anteroom before Andrias' office, past the two guards there, who eyed him absently but said nothing, down the great entrance hall, straight out the front door. Going through the city had been easier, of course. There were many men in uniforms like his. Duane thought, then, that Andrias' power could not have been too strong, even over the League police whom he nominally commanded. The police could not all have been corrupt. There were too many of them; had they been turncoats, aiding Andrias in his revolt against the League, there would have been no need to smuggle rifles in for an unruly mass of civilians. Duane cursed the lack of foresight of the early Earth governments. They'd made a prison planet of Callisto; had filled it with the worst scum of Earth. Then, when the damage had been done--when Callisto had become a pest-hole among the planets; its iniquities a stench that rose to the stars--they had belatedly found that they had created a problem worse than the one they'd tried to solve. One like a hydra-beast. Criminality was not a thing of heredity. The children of the transported convicts, most of them, were honest and wanted to be respectable. And they could not be. Earth's crime rate, too, had not been lowered materially by exiling its gangsters and murderers to Callisto. When it was long past time, the League had stepped in, and set a governor of its own over Callisto. If the governor had been an honest man a satisfactory solution might have been worked out. The first governor had been honest. Under him great strides had been made. The bribe-proof, gun-handy League police had stamped out the wide-open plague spots of the planet; public works had been begun on a large scale. The beginnings of representative government had been established. But the first governor had died. And the second governor had been--Andrias. "_You can see the results!_" Duane thought grimly as he swung into the airfield in his rented ground car. Foreboding was stamped on the faces of half the Callistans he'd seen--and dark treachery on the others. Some of those men had been among the actual exiled criminals--the last convict ship had landed only a dozen years before. All of those whom Andrias planned to arm were either of the original transportation-men, or their weaker descendants. What was holding Andrias back? Why the need for smuggling guns in? The answer to that, Duane thought, was encouraging but not conclusive. Clearly, then, Andrias did not have complete control over the League police. But how much control he did have, what officers he had won over to treachery, Duane could not begin to guess. Duane slid the car into a parking slot, switched off the ignition and left it. It was night, but the short Callistan dark period was nearly over. A pearly glow at the horizon showed where the sun would come bulging over in a few minutes; while at the opposite rim of the planet he could still see the blood-red disc of mighty Jupiter lingering for a moment, casting a crimson hue over the landscape, before it made the final plunge. The field was not flood-lighted. Traffic was scarce on Callisto. Duane, almost invisible in the uncertain light, stepped boldly out across the jet-blasted tarmac toward the huge bulk of the _Cameroon_, the rocket transport which had brought him. Two other ships lay on the same seared pavement, but they were smaller. They were fighting ships, small, speedy ones, in Callisto for refueling before returning to the League's ceaseless patrol of the System's starlanes. Duane hesitated briefly, wondering whether he ought to go to one of those ships and tell his story to its League commander. He decided against it. There was too little certainty for him there; too much risk that the commander, even, might be a tool of Andrias'. Duane shook his head angrily. If only his memory were clear--if only he could be sure what he was doing! * * * * * He reached the portal of the ship. A gray-clad League officer was there standing guard, to prevent the ship taking off. "Official business," Duane said curtly, and swept by the startled man before he could object. He hurried along the corridor toward the captain's office and control room. A purser he passed looked at him curiously, and Duane averted his face. If the man recognized him there might be questions. For the thousandth time he cursed the gray cloud that overhung his memory. He didn't know, even, who among the crew might know him and spread the alarm. Then he was at the door marked, _Crew only--do not enter!_ He tapped on it, then grasped the knob and swung it open. A squat, open-featured man in blue, the bronze eagles of the Mercantile Service resting lightly on his powerful shoulders, looked at him. Recognition flared in his eyes. "Duane!" he whispered. "Peter Duane, what're you doing in the clothes of Andrias' household guard?" Duane felt the tenseness ebb out of his throat. Here was a friend. "Captain," he said, "you seem to be a friend of mine. If you are--I need you. You see, I've lost my memory." "Lost your memory?" the captain echoed. "You mean that blow on your head? The ship's surgeon said something ... yes, that was it. I hardly believed him, though." "But were we friends?" "Why, yes, Peter." "Then help me now," said Duane. "I have a cargo stowed in your hold, Captain. Do you know what it is?" "Why--yes. The rifles, you mean?" Duane blinked. He nodded, then looked dizzily for a chair. The captain was a friend of his, all right--a fellow gun-runner! "Good God," he said aloud. "What a mess!" "What's happened?" the captain asked. "I saw you in the corridor, arguing with Stevens. You looked like trouble, and I should have come up to you then. But the course was to be changed, and I had to be there.... And the next I hear, Stevens is dead, and you've maybe killed him. Then I heard you've lost your memory, and are in a jam with Andrias." He paused and speculation came into his eyes, almost hostility. "Peter Duane," he said softly, "it strikes me that you may have lost more than your memory. Which side are you on. What happened between you and Andrias? Tell me now if you've changed sides on me, man. For friendship's sake I won't be too hard on you. But there's too much at stake here--" "Oh, hell," said Peter, and the heat gun was suddenly in his hand, leveled at the squat man in blue. "I wish you were on my side, but there's no way I can tell. I can trust myself, I think--but that's all. Put up your hands!" And that was when his luck ran out. "Peter--" the captain began. IV But a sound from outside halted him. Together the two men stared at the viewplates. A siren had begun to shriek in the distance, the siren of a racing ground car. Through the gates it plunged, scattering the light wooden barrier. It spun crazily around on two wheels and came roaring for the ship. Andrias was in it. Peter turned on the captain, and the gun was rigidly outthrust in his hand. "Close your ports!" he snarled. "Up rockets--in a hurry!" "Listen, Peter," the captain began. "I said, hurry!" The car's brakes shrieked outside, and it disappeared from the view of the men. There was an abrupt babble of voices. "Close your ports!" Peter shouted savagely. "Now!" The captain opened his mouth to speak, then snapped it shut. He touched the stud of a communications set, said into it, "Close ports. Snap to it. Engine room--up rockets in ten seconds. All crew--stand by for lift!" The ship's own take-off siren howled shrilly, drowning out the angry voices from below. Peter felt the whine of the electrics that dogged shut the heavy pressure doors. He stepped to the pilot's chair, slid into it, buckled the compression straps around him. The instruments--he recognized them all, knew how to use them! Had he been a rocket pilot before his mind had blanked--before embarking on the more lucrative profession of gun smuggler? He wondered.... But it was the captain who took the ship off. "Ten seconds," Peter said. "Get moving!" The captain hesitated the barest fraction, but his eyes were on the heat gun and he knew that Duane was capable of using it. "The men--" he said. "If they're underneath when the jets go, they'll burn!" "That's the chance they take," said Duane. "They heard the siren!" The captain turned his head quickly, and his fingers flashed out. He was in his own acceleration seat too, laced down by heavy canvas webbing. His hands reached out to the controls before him, and his fingers took on a life of their own as they wove dexterously across the keys, setting up fire-patterns, charting a course of take-off. Then the heel of his hand settled on the firing stop.... * * * * * The acceleration was worse than Peter's clouded mind had expected, but no more than he could stand. In his frame of mind, he could stand almost anything, he thought--short of instant annihilation! The thin air of Callisto howled past them, forming a high obligato to the thunder of the jets. Then the air-howl faded sharply to silence, and the booming of the rockets became less a thing of sound than a rumble in the framework of the _Cameroon_. They were in space. [Illustration: _The Cameroon blasted from its cradle, racing Andrias' ships for open space._] The captain's foot kicked the pedal that shut off the over-drive jets, reducing the thrust to a mere one-gravity acceleration. He turned to Duane. "What now?" he asked. Duane, busy unstrapping himself from the restraining belts, shook his head without answering. What now? "_A damn good question!_" he thought. The captain, with the ease of long practice, was already out of his own pressure straps. He stood there by his chair, watching Duane closely. But the gun was still in Duane's hand, despite his preoccupation. Duane cocked an ear as he threw off the last strap. Did he hear voices in the corridor, a distance away but coming. The captain, looking out the port with considerable interest, interrupted his train of thought. "What," he asked, "for instance, are you going to do about--those?" His arm was outstretched, pointing outward and down. Duane looked in that direction-- The two patrol rockets were streaking up after his commandeered ship. Fairy-like in their pastel shades, with the delicate tracery of girders over their fighting noses, they nevertheless represented grim menace to Duane! He swore under his breath. The _Cameroon_, huge and lumbering, was helpless as a sitting bird before those lithe hawks of prey. If only he knew which side the ships were on. If only he knew--anything! He couldn't afford to take a chance. "Stand back!" he ordered the captain. The man in blue gave ground before him, staring wonderingly as Duane advanced. Duane took a quick look at the control set-up, tried to remember how to work it. It was so tantalizingly close to his memory! He cursed again; then stabbed down on a dozen keys at random, heeled the main control down, jumped back, even as the ship careened madly about in its flight, and blasted the delicate controls to shattered ashes with a bolt from his heat gun. Now the ship was crippled, for the time being at least. Short of a nigh-impossible boarding in space, the two patrol cruisers could do nothing with it till the controls were repaired. The _Cameroon_, and its cargo of political dynamite, would circle through space for hours or days. It wasn't much--but it was the best he could do. At least it would give him time to think things over. No. He heard the voices of the men in the corridor again, tumbled about by the abrupt course change--luckily, it had been only a mild thing compared to the one that had killed Stevens and caused his own present dilemma--but regaining their feet and coming on. And one of the voices, loud and harsh, was Andrias! Somehow, before the ports closed, he'd managed to board the _Cameroon_! * * * * * Duane stood erect, whirled to face the door. The captain stood by it. Duane thrust his heat gun at him. "The door!" he commanded. "Lock it!" Urged by the menace of the heat gun, the captain hurriedly put out a hand to the lock of the door-- And jerked it back, nursing smashed knuckles, as Andrias and four men burst in, hurling the door open before them. They came to a sliding, tumbling halt, though, as they faced grim Duane and his ready heat pistol. "Hold it!" he ordered. "That's right.... Stay that way while I figure things out. The first man that moves, dies for it." Dark blood flooded into Andrias' face, but he said no word, only stood there glaring hatred. The smear of crimson had been brushed from his face, but his nose was still awry and a huge purplish bruise was spreading over it and across one cheek. The three men with him were guards. All were armed--the police with hand weapons as lethal as Duane's own, Andrias with an old-style projective-type weapon--an ancient pistol, snatched from some bewildered spaceman as they burst into the _Cameroon_. Duane braced himself with one arm against the pilot's chair and stared at them. The crazy circular course the blasted controls had given the ship had a strong lateral component; around and around the ship went, in a screaming circle, chasing its own tail. There was a sudden change in the light from the port outside; Duane involuntarily looked up for a moment. Dulled and purplish was the gleam from the brilliant stars all about; the _Cameroon_, in its locked orbit, had completed a circle and was plunging through its own wake of expelled jet-gases. He saw the two patrol rockets streak past; then saw the flood of rocket-flares from their side jets as they spun and braked, trying to match course and speed with the crazy orbit of the _Cameroon_. He'd looked away for only a second; abruptly he looked back. "Easy!" he snapped. Andrias' arm, which had begun to lift, straightened out, and the scowl on the governor's face darkened even more. _Clackety-clack._ There was the sound of a girl's high heels running along the corridor, followed by heavier thumps from the space boots of men. Duane jerked his gun at Andrias and his police. "Out of the way!" he said. "Let's see who's coming now." It was the girl. Red hair fluttering in the wake of her running, face alight with anxiety, she burst into the room. "Peter!" she cried. "Andrias and his men--" She stopped short and took in the tableau. Duane's eyes were on her, and he was about to speak. Then he became conscious of something in her own eyes, a sudden spark that flared even before her lips opened and a thin cry came from them; even before she leaped to one side, at Andrias. Peter cursed and tried to turn, to dodge; tried to bring his heat gun around. But a thunder louder than the bellowing jets outside filled the room, and a streak of livid fire crossed the fringe of Peter's brain. Sudden blackness closed in around him. He fell--and his closing eyes saw new figures running into the room, saw the counterplay of lashing heat beams. _This is it_--he thought grimly, and then thought no more. IV Duane was in the sickbay again, on the same bed. His head was spinning agonizedly. He forced his eyes open--and the girl was there; the same girl. She was watching him. A cloud on her face lifted as she saw his lids flicker open; then it descended again. Her lips quivered. "Darn you, Peter," she whispered. "Who are you now?" "Why--why, I'm Peter Duane, of course," he said. "Well, thank God you know that!" It was the captain. He'd changed since the last time Peter had seen him. One arm was slung in bandages that bore the yellow seeping tint of burn salve. Peter shook his head to try to clear it. "Where--where am I?" he asked. "Andrias--" "Andrias is where he won't bother you," the captain said. "Locked up below. So are two of his men. The other one's dead. How's your memory, Peter?" Duane touched it experimentally with a questing mental finger. It seemed all right, though he felt still dazed. "Coming along," he said. "But where am I? The controls--I blasted them." The captain laughed. "I know," he said briefly. "Well--I guess you had to, in a way. You didn't trust anyone; couldn't trust anyone. You had to make sure the rifles wouldn't get back to Callisto too soon. But they're working on installing duplicates now, Peter. In an hour we'll be back on Callisto. We shut the jets off already; we're in an orbit." Duane sank back. "Listen," he said. "I think--I think my memory's clearing, somehow. But how--I mean, were you on my side? All along?" The captain nodded soberly. "On your side, yes, Peter," he said. "The League's side, that is. You and I, you know, both work for the League. When they got word of Andrias' plans, they had to work fast. To move in by force would have meant bloodshed, would have forced his hand. That would have been utterly bad. It was too dangerous. Callisto is politically a powder-keg already. The whole thing might have exploded." Peter's eyes flared with sudden hope and enlightment. "And you and I--" he began. "You and I, and a couple of other undercover workers were put on the job," the captain nodded. "We had to find out who Andrias' supporters were--and to keep him from getting more electron rifles while the commanders of the Callisto garrison were quietly checked, to see who was on which side. They've found Andrias' Earth backers--a group of wealthy malcontents who thought Callisto should be exploited for their gain, had made secret deals with him for concessions. You, of course, slowed down the delivery of the rifles as long as you could. They lay in the Lunar warehouses a precious extra week while you haggled over terms. That's what you were doing with Stevens, I think, when the course change caught you both." "You've had him long enough," the nurse broke in. "I have a few words to say." "No, wait--" Duane protested. But the captain was grinning broadly. He moved toward the door. "Later," he said over his shoulder. "There'll be plenty of time." The door closed behind him. Duane turned to the girl. * * * * * He shook his head again. The cloud was lifting. He could almost remember everything again; things were beginning to come into focus. This girl, for instance-- She noticed his motion. "How's your head, Peter?" she asked solicitously. "Andrias hit you with that awful old bullet-gun. I tried to stop him, but all I could do was jar his arm. Oh, Peter, I was so afraid when I saw you fall!" "You probably saved my life," Peter said soberly. "Andrias struck me as a pretty good shot." He tried to grin. The girl frowned. "Peter," she said, "I'm sorry if I seemed rude, before--the last time you were here. It was just that I.... Well, you didn't remember me. I couldn't understand." Peter stared at her. Yes--he _should_ remember her. He did, only-- "Perhaps this will help you," the girl said. She rummaged in a pocket of her uniform, brought something out that was tiny and glittering. "I don't wear it on duty, Peter. But I guess this is an exception...." Peter pushed himself up on one elbow, trying to make out what she was doing. She was slipping the small thing on a finger.... A ring. An engagement ring! "Oh--" said Peter. And suddenly everything clicked; he remembered; he could recall ... everything. That second blow on his head had undone the harm of the first one. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, stood up, reached out hungry arms for the girl. "Of course I remember," he said as she came into the circle of his arms. "The ring on your finger. I ought to remember--_I put it there!_" And for a long time after there was no need for words. * * * * * [Transcriber's Note: There were two Section IV headings in original text.] 
37582	----	produced from scanned images of public domain material from the Google Print project.) THE COAST OF ADVENTURE BY THE SAME AUTHOR ALTON OF SOMASCO LORIMER OF THE NORTHWEST THURSTON OF ORCHARD VALLEY WINSTON OF THE PRAIRIE THE GOLD TRAIL SYDNEY CARTERET, RANCHER A PRAIRIE COURTSHIP VANE OF THE TIMBERLANDS THE LONG PORTAGE RANCHING FOR SYLVIA PRESCOTT OF SASKATCHEWAN THE DUST OF CONFLICT THE GREATER POWER MASTERS OF THE WHEATLANDS DELILAH OF THE SNOWS BY RIGHT OF PURCHASE THE CATTLE BARON'S DAUGHTER THRICE ARMED FOR JACINTA THE INTRIGUERS THE LEAGUE OF THE LEOPARD FOR THE ALLINSON HONOR THE SECRET OF THE REEF HARDING OF ALLENWOOD THE COAST OF ADVENTURE [Illustration: "Dropping his chin upon the stock, he stiffened his arms and held his breath as he squeezed the trigger"--Page 327.] The COAST OF ADVENTURE BY HAROLD BINDLOSS Author of "PRESCOTT OF SASKATCHEWAN," "RANCHING FOR SYLVIA," "FOR THE ALLINSON HONOR," "THE SECRET OR THE REEF," ETC. _WITH FRONTISPIECE IN COLOR_ [Illustration] FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1915, BY FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHED IN ENGLAND UNDER THE TITLE "A RISKY GAME" ALL RIGHTS RESERVED CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. FATHER AGUSTIN'S SHEEP 1 II. THE ADVENTURES BEGIN 12 III. HIGH STAKES 23 IV. THE "ENCHANTRESS" 32 V. THE CALL OF THE UNKNOWN 43 VI. ON THE SPANISH MAIN 52 VII. MANGROVE CREEK 64 VIII. THE TRAITOR 73 IX. STRANDED 80 X. THE PEON PILOT 89 XI. A MODERN DON QUIXOTE 99 XII. BAITING THE SMUGGLERS 105 XIII. THE EMERALD RING 117 XIV. SMOOTH WATER 126 XV. THE TORNADO 136 XVI. THE RUSE 145 XVII. ELUDING THE GUNBOAT 157 XVIII. THE TEST OF LOVE 167 XIX. THE CUBAN SPY 178 XX. THE ARREST OF CASTILLO 189 XXI. A HALF-BREED'S TRICK 198 XXII. HELD FOR RANSOM 209 XXIII. THE INTERCEPTED NOTE 219 XXIV. IN THE CAMP OF THE HILLSMEN 229 XXV. A TRIAL OF SPEED 240 XXVI. TRAPPED 250 XXVII. HANDS DOWN 259 XXVIII. THE PRESIDENT'S DESPATCHES 271 XXIX. THE PRESIDIO 283 XXX. THE ESCAPE 294 XXXI. THE AMERICAN TRADER 305 XXXII. LOVE'S VISION 315 XXXIII. THE HERO OF RIO FRIO 322 XXXIV. THE COMING DAWN 335 THE COAST OF ADVENTURE CHAPTER I FATHER AGUSTIN'S SHEEP High on the sun-scorched hillside above the steamy littoral of the Caribbean Sea the Spanish-Indian town of Rio Frio lay sweltering in the heat of afternoon. The flat-topped, white houses surrounding the plaza reflected a dazzling glare, and the heat shimmered mercilessly upon the rough paving-stones. Flakes of plaster had fallen from the buildings; a few of them were mere ruins, relics of a past age; for the town had been built when _conquistadores_ from Spain first plunged into the tropic forest to search for El Dorado. Here and there dilapidated green lattices shaded upper windows, and nearer the ground narrow openings were guarded by rusty iron bars; but some of the houses showed blank outer walls, and the plaza had rather an Eastern than an American look. Spain has set upon the New World the stamp the Moors impressed on her. At one end of the plaza stood the Café Four Nations, a low, open-sided room, with a row of decaying pillars dividing it from the pavement. It was filled with flies, which stuck in black clusters to the papers hanging from the tarnished lamps and crawled about the dusty tables. The hot air was tainted with aniseed, picadura tobacco, and the curious musky smell which is a characteristic of ancient Spanish towns. On the right-hand side of the square rose the twin towers of the church of San Sebastian. Wide steps led up to the patch of shadow where a leather curtain left uncovered part of the door, and a niche above sheltered an image of the martyr with an arrow in his breast. The figure was well modeled and grimly realistic. Opposite the café, the _calle Mercedes_ cut a cool, dark gap through the dazzling town. On its outskirts, the hillside fell sharply to a wide, green level. Beyond this a silver gleam indicated the sea. The café was in shadow, and at its inner end a number of citizens lounged, half asleep, in low cane chairs. The hour of the siesta had slipped away, but it was not yet time for dinner, and, having read the newspaper and guardedly discussed politics, the leading inhabitants of Rio Frio had nothing else to do. They were men with formal manners, a few dressed in rusty black, and some in white cotton, but all were not of pure European blood. One or two, indeed, plainly showed their Negro descent; others the melancholy of the Indian aboriginal. Near the front pillars, a priest and two men of lighter color were seated at a table. Father Agustin wore a threadbare cassock and clumsy rawhide shoes, but he had an air of quiet dignity, and his sharply cut features were of the Gothic type, which is not uncommon in Spain. His accent was also clean Peninsular. James Grahame, who sat opposite across the chessboard, wore the same vague but recognizable stamp of breeding, though his duck suit was getting ragged and his red silk sash was obviously cheap. He had steady gray eyes, and light hair, a rather prominent nose and a firm mouth. He looked older than his thirty years. The lines on his forehead hinted at stern experience, and his alertness was partly masked by an easy self-control. Walthew was younger, and dressed with scrupulous neatness in duck, with smart tan shoes. His face was mobile, his glance quick but open, and his mouth sensitive; he had the look of an aristocratic American. Father Agustin made a deprecatory gesture as his thin, long-nailed hand moved across the board, and Grahame smiled. "Yes," he said, filling the tiny glass before the priest, "it is mate this time, _padre_. When you had made a few moves I foresaw defeat, but while the candle burns one plays out the game." "It is so, but not with all," Father Agustin replied in his fine Castilian. "The losing game needs courage." "Experience helps. Getting beaten does not hurt so much when one grows used to it." "Ah!" said the priest, "that is the way to the greatest victory man can win. But I am your guest, and will not moralize. I must compliment you on the game you play. It is bold and well thought out, but perhaps somewhat lacking in finesse." "I am afraid finesse is not a virtue of mine," Grahame smiled. Father Agustin studied him quietly. When the Briton spoke he lost something of his reserve. His glance got keen, and his eyes had a curious hawk-like look. The priest could imagine him as swift and determined in action; quick to seize an advantage, but not a good plotter. "For all that, it is a quality that is useful when one deals with the Latins, at Rio Frio, or elsewhere," the priest said. "With apologies, _padre_, that is certainly true," Walthew agreed. "So you have some business here? Perhaps, like the others, you seek a mineral concession." "No. Our host, Don Martin, is of course out of office and doesn't deal in them." "He never will," the priest said quietly. "The natural wealth of this country belongs to its people, but it is stolen from them, piece by piece, and given to foreigners." "The foreigners pay for what they get." "Yes," said the priest; "but where does the money go? If it were spent on the development of the country, one would not complain; but it is gamblers and courtezans who benefit. Those who hold office here fill their pockets from the public purse, and what is left when they are satisfied is needed to keep the Government in power." "Then, why do you not reform your administration and put in straight men?" Father Agustin indicated the drowsy group at the back of the café. "These are our politicians! They meet every day and ruminate over the affairs of the nation. Think of it!" "Well," said Walthew, "they do not look busy; but things do happen here now and then." "It is true. A clique breaks up, there is a new coalition, and those who plotted each other's downfall are united again. We Latins have seldom a continuous policy. Sometimes there is a tumult in the streets and disaffection among the troops; then the man who rules us uses the whip. One hears of no trial, but a malcontent is missing, an officer's duty takes him to the fever jungles, where he cannot live. Sometimes, before the morning mist has lifted, one is wakened by a volley in the ditch behind the citadel." "You are a patient race," Grahame remarked. "Not so," said Father Agustin. "We often dream when we should act, but sometimes we act too soon. It is our misfortune that we do not know how to wait for the right moment." He paused and indicated the thinned-out ranks of pawns on the chessboard. "It is like that in the game of politics! The fight is between the greater pieces, but these others fall." Grahame lighted a cigarette and glanced about the square, for Rio Frio was waking up. Here and there a woman of mixed blood crouched beside a cast-iron pot, fanning the handful of charcoal in it, ready for cooking the evening meal. A team of mules hauled a heavy load across the hot paving stones, a gaunt, dark-faced man in ragged cotton walking at the leaders' heads. Then came a pack train, with jingling bells, a cloud of flies following the burdened animals, and dusty, barefooted peasants plodding by their side. A group of women appeared from the mouth of a narrow street, their faces wet with perspiration and straps across their foreheads supporting the big cane baskets on their backs. After them came a negro with a great tray of fruit upon his head. Next, three or four lean, barefooted fellows with ragged palm-leaf hats seated themselves on the pavement in a strip of shadow. They sat there, silent and motionless, contemplating the scene with listless eyes. The crowd looked dully apathetic, there was languor in the air they breathed; but, after all, they claimed descent from Spanish stock and Grahame thought they could be roused. It does not need much fanning to wake the smoldering fire in the Iberian's veins. "My sheep!" said Father Agustin. "But they have other shepherds, who do not always lead them well." "Shear the flock instead of guarding it? One would imagine that there is not much wool." "None is so poor that he has nothing to give; if not goods, his voice, his sullen clamor and savage rage. The unthinking passion of the mob is terrible, but it is used by those who must answer for the deed some day. My people have their wrongs, but one cannot build the State on foundations of revenge and cruelty." "But you have some honest men who hate the present Government." "It is possible that their honesty lessens their influence. At Rio Frio one does not follow the ideal. It is remote and elusive; the feet get weary, and many things that please the eye lie nearer to hand." Father Agustin rose and bowed with grave courtesy. "And now I have talked enough and have some duties. I thank you and take my leave." They watched him cross the plaza in his rusty cassock. "Guess we've struck the wrong place," Walthew said. "We're more likely to find trouble than money here. Well, there's a prospect of new experiences and a little excitement; and, anyway, we can't go back on our bargain with Don Martin." "I never quite understood what led you to join me," Grahame remarked. "You know the risk we run. If the Government catches us, we'll be hanged or shot--whichever suits their fancy." Walthew laughed. "That's the attraction. But we won't be caught. I guess my Yankee ingenuity will count for something. If these sleepy-looking dagoes should trap us, we can find a way to give 'em the slip." "Optimism is a great asset," Grahame smiled; "but in this country it must have a handmaiden--a convenient revolver." Walthew leaned forward on the table. "We've gone into a risky business together. I know nothing about you except that you seem to understand these dagoes and are a handy man to have around when they pull their knives. You know almost nothing about me." He paused and smiled, and Grahame stirred uneasily. Walthew looked so boyish when he smiled like that. Would he have that carefree look in, say, two months? At times, Grahame regretted letting the boy join him in a venture that might try the heart of even a very strong man. "I say, old chap, you aren't listening!" Walthew expostulated. "I'm telling you that the pater's a money-making machine. When I left Harvard he was for working me up into a partnership in the Walthew factory. But I couldn't stand it--too monotonous. I took ten thousand dollars, instead, on condition that if I hadn't made good in my own way when two years were up, I'd go back and start as clerk." "Well," Grahame returned with a smile, "I haven't much to tell. I have no family business to fall back on. As my means were not large enough to let me live as I liked at home, I went abroad to increase them. So far I haven't succeeded; but, on the whole, I've had a pretty good time, and I don't see much reason for grumbling about my luck." This was correct, so far as it went, for Grahame did not think it worth while to explain that the fiery blood of the Borderers ran in his veins and his people had been soldiers and explorers until economic changes impoverished the family. Nor could he add that, because his name still counted for something in the North, he had left home to avoid being skilfully led into a marriage his friends thought suitable. He had, indeed, run away from a well-born girl with money, who, he suspected, was relieved to see him go. Since then he had known trouble, and it had hardened him. Yet he was honest and was marked by some polish. At first sight, and by contrast with his comrade, Walthew looked callow, but he improved on acquaintance. It was not for nothing that he was the son of a shrewd manufacturer, who had built up a great business from a humble beginning. Walthew was cool in a crisis, and though outwardly careless, he was capable of looking ahead. So far, his talents were undeveloped, but Grahame suspected them. While they sat talking, the scene in the square gained animation. Groups of men, moving quickly, emerged from the side streets; there was a murmur of voices; and a crowd began to gather. Women called from the flat housetops; doors were opened and naked, dark-skinned children dragged in from the pavement. The concourse thickened about the steps of the church; gesticulating men chattered in the native patois. Grahame's eyes grew keen. "Something's going to happen," he said quietly. Then he pressed his comrade's arm as a man appeared on the highest step of the church, and the murmur of the crowd swelled into a roar: "_Viva Castillo! Viva el libertador!_" The tall figure bowed and held up a hand, and for a moment there was silence; then a clear voice rang out, and Grahame tried to catch the sonorous Castilian words. He was too far off, and some escaped him, but he heard enough to gather that it was a grim indictment of the rulers of the country. The man spoke with fire and passion, using lavish gestures, and the cries that answered showed that he could work upon the feelings of the crowd. The café had emptied, and its stout proprietor lounged, napkin in hand, near Grahame's table. "Sounds pretty drastic, if I heard him right," Walthew remarked. "It's obvious that the authorities don't use half-measures. Did he say they had the deputation arrested and its leader shot?" "So I understood," said Grahame. "How did you come to learn Castilian?" "A notion of the old man's; he made me study languages. It's his ambition to ship the Walthew manufactures all over the world, and he got a footing in Cuba some time ago." They were silent for a few minutes, and then Grahame turned to the landlord. "Are these things true?" "It is possible," the other answered cautiously. "Then are you not afraid of a revolution?" "No, señor; why should I fear? When there is a revolution the wine trade is good." "But suppose your customers get killed?" The landlord smiled. "They are philosophic politicians, señor. It is the untaught rabble that fights. These others drink their wine and argue over the newspapers. Besides, there will be no revolution yet. Some talk, perhaps; possibly a supporter of the Government stabbed in the dark." "And that will be all?" Grahame asked with a keen glance. "There will be nothing more. The President waits and watches until he knows his enemies. Then he gives an order and there is an end of them." The man turned away, and when, shortly afterward, the plaza rang with fierce applause, a voice was raised in alarm. Others joined in, the crowd began to stream back from the steps, and the orator disappeared. Then the mass broke into running groups, and through the patter of their feet there came a steady, measured tread. It drew nearer; short, swarthy men in dirty white uniforms marched into the plaza, the strong light gleaming on their rifles. They wheeled and stopped in ranks extended across the square, and the rifles went up to their shoulders. Warning shouts fell from the roofs, the patter of feet grew faster, the shadowy streets were choked with fugitives, and the place was empty except for the line of quiet men. Then an officer laughed and called out, and the rifles came down with a clang. "I suspect that we're up against a big man in the President," Walthew remarked. "Perhaps we'd better light out before these fellows ask us questions." CHAPTER II THE ADVENTURES BEGIN A half moon hung over the flat roofs and the air was very still. Walthew and Grahame sat on a balcony surrounding the patio of Don Martin Sarmiento's house. The lattice windows that opened onto the balcony had old but artistic hinges of bronze, and the crumbling hardwood rails showed traces of skilful carving. Below, a small fountain splashed in a marble basin surrounded by palmettos, and a creeper covered a trellis with trails of dusky purple. A faint smell of decay mingled with the more pungent odors of garlic and olive oil from the kitchen in the courtyard, where a clatter was going on, but no sound from outside broke the silence. Rio Frio was very quiet now. Cups of black coffee and a plate of fruit stood on a table in front of the men, and the señorita Blanca Sarmiento sat in a low chair opposite, with her duenna a few yards away. Blanca was then nineteen, and Walthew, watching her with unobtrusive admiration, wondered how it was that her relatives had not already arranged a marriage for her, unless, perhaps, her father's political opinions stood in the way. One ran a risk in opposing the Government at Rio Frio. The girl was attractive, with a finely molded figure, the grace of which was displayed by her languid pose. Her hair was dark and coiled in heavy masses on a small, well-shaped head; her lips were full and very red, but her eyes were a deep blue and her skin fairer than that of the Spanish-American women Walthew hitherto had met. Nor did she use the powder they lavishly employ. With a crimson rose in her hair, and a fine black-lace mantilla draped about her shoulders and emphasizing the whiteness of her neck and half-covered arms, she reminded Walthew of Carmen. She had something of the latter's allurement, but he thought it was an unconscious attraction that she exercised. The art of the coquette was missing; the girl had a certain dignity, and there was no hint of sensuality in her beauty. She had, no doubt, Spanish fire in her blood, but the lad thought it burned with a clear and pure flame. "How do you come to speak English so charmingly?" he asked, in the hope of satisfying his curiosity about her. "Do I speak it charmingly?" She laughed prettily. "Well, the explanation is that it was my mother's tongue. She was Irish, you must know." "Ah!" said Walthew. "Now I understand." Blanca gave him a glance of languid amusement. "Your interest is flattering, señor; but what is it you understand?" "That's an awkward question," Walthew answered, grinning frankly. "Still, there's something about you that I haven't noticed in Spanish-American girls, charming as they are." "I'm afraid you're evasive. Do you know many of my countrywomen?" "I'd like to know more. But I believe I'm good at reading character. It is a gift I inherited. My father was never mistaken about a man, and he has made use of a good many." Blanca studied him. He had a smooth, fresh face, and looked very young, but while she thought he was direct and perhaps impulsive, something suggested that he was shrewd. "Women are supposed to be more puzzling," she answered. "Then the Sarmientos come from Andalusia, and the Peninsulares are complex people. On the surface, we are often cheerfully inconsequent, but underneath there's a strain of melancholy. We live in the shadow of a fatalism we got from the Moors." She glanced at Grahame. "I think you can understand." Grahame made a sign of assent. Sitting thoughtfully silent, his lean but powerful frame displayed by the thin white duck, and his strong, brown face impassive, he had a somber look. The man was reckless and sparkled with gay humor now and then, but it was the passing brightness of the North. "Yes," he said, "I understand. But the Irish are optimists, and you are Irish too." "Then perhaps that's why I keep hopeful. It is not always easy at Rio Frio, and life was not very joyous when we were exiles in America." "You know my country?" Walthew broke in. "I know your Southern States. We lived there in poverty, wandering up and down. My father is what his friends call a patriot, and his enemies a dangerous agitator. He had to choose between ruin and acquiescence in corrupt tyranny, and his course was plain. But the seed he had sown sprouted, the dictator was driven out, and we came back to our own. Then, for a time, there was rest and safety, until the new ruler began to follow the old. He tried to bribe my father, who had helped to put him in power; but our honor was not for sale, and we had to leave the capital. There are men who trust my father, and look to him for help.... But I think you know something of this." "Yes," said Grahame. "This afternoon we heard Castillo speak in the plaza." The girl's eyes flashed angrily. "Castillo is a fool! He pulls down what others have carefully built up." "Tries to fire the mine before things are ready?" Walthew suggested. "A premature explosion's apt to blow up the men who prepared it." Blanca gave him a keen glance. "That is what nearly happened this afternoon. I believe you are to be trusted, señores?" Grahame bowed. "I am an adventurer, not a patriot, and my partner is out for money, but we made a bargain with Don Martin and we keep our word." "Then," said the girl quietly, "Castillo is hiding here." "In the _casa Sarmiento_! Isn't that dangerous? Won't the President's friends suspect?" "I think they do, but they are afraid of my father's hold on the people; and there is only a handful of troops. When it is late they may make a search, but Castillo will leave soon. It is possible that you are in some danger." Walthew laughed. "That makes things interesting; I've never been in serious danger yet. But I suppose you have Don Martin's permission to be frank with us?" "You are shrewd," she answered, smiling. "He has some confidence in my judgment. I spent the years that should have been happiest in poverty and loneliness. Are you surprised that I'm a conspirator? If you value your safety, you will beware of me." "You might prove dangerous to your enemies, but I believe you'd be very staunch to your friends." "_Gracias, señor._ I'm sure I can at least hate well." A mulatto boy came out on to the balcony, and the girl's stout duenna, who had been sitting silent and apparently half asleep, rose and approached the table. "Don Martin is disengaged," she said to Blanca; and when the girl waited a moment Grahame imagined that something had been left for her to decide. He did not see any sign exchanged, but he thought with some amusement that he and his companion had passed a test when the duenna said to them: "Don Martin would speak with you." Walthew turned to Blanca, saying in Castilian: "Until our next meeting! I kiss your hands, señorita." The girl rose with a grave curtsy and there was a touch of stateliness in her manner. "May you go in safety, señores! We expect much from you." The mulatto led them away, and, passing through the house, they found their host and another man sitting by a dim lamp in a room with the shutters carefully closed. Don Martin Sarmiento wore an alpaca jacket, a white shirt, and a black silk sash round the waist of his duck trousers. He was dark-haired and sallow, lightly built and thin, but his expression was eager and his eyes were penetrating. One could have imagined that his fiery spirit had worn down the flesh. The other man was of coarser type. His skin was very dark, his face hot and fleshy, and Grahame noticed that his hands were wet with perspiration. His glance was restless and he had a rather truculent air, though there was something in it that hinted at uneasiness. Grahame thought that while he might show a rash boldness now and then, his nerve was not very good. "With your permission, I present my comrade, Señor Castillo," said Don Martin. "Should any disaster overtake me, Señor Castillo, or another whom he appoints, will carry out our contract. Our funds are in safe hands; the rifles will be paid for." "They will be delivered," Grahame answered quietly. "Good! The word of a gentleman is sufficient. And now there is something more to be said. My house is my friend's, particularly if he is in trouble, but one has higher duties than hospitality." "Yes," agreed Grahame, turning to Castillo. "The interests of one's country come first. There are only three of us, and Don Martin is the head of an important organization." "It was not for my personal safety that I came here," Castillo broke in hotly. "I carried papers; lists of names, compromising details. It was unthinkable that they should fall into the President's hands. They must be made safe, and then it does not matter what happens to me--though I may, perhaps, claim to have been of some help to the cause of freedom." Grahame saw his host's half-impatient smile. "And so you gave them to Don Martin!" he remarked dryly. "He is not watched as I am," Castillo answered. "I am hunted among the sierras, I hide in the fever swamps; but where I pass I leave a spark that tyranny cannot trample out. It burns and spreads; by and by there comes the purging conflagration." "Yes," said Grahame. "I'm told, however, that your President has a keen scent for smoke, and I don't mean to scatter more sparks than I can help." He turned to Don Martin. "Since our business is finished, we can leave Rio Frio in an hour." "I, too!" exclaimed Castillo. "It is not good for the cause that the soldiers find me. But there are difficulties; the house may be watched." Don Martin looked thoughtful, but not disturbed; and Grahame saw that he could calmly take a risk. Danger and his host obviously were old acquaintances. "It is better that you go," he answered. "Sometimes I entertain an American traveler, and Englishmen now and then visit Rio Frio. I do not think you are suspected yet, and you may be able to help us by drawing off the watchers' attention when you leave. We will see what can be done, but it would be safer for Señor Castillo not to come with us." He took the others to the roof, where he walked to the edge and looked over the low parapet. A narrow, dark street divided Sarmiento's house from the next, but a lattice in a high wall was open, and Grahame imagined that he made out a man's head, which was, however, promptly withdrawn. "Once or twice a guest of mine has reached the _calle_ by a rope, but the President's friends take precautions to-night," Don Martin remarked. "There remain the windows on the other side, but Castillo is heavy and fat. I think the door into the plaza would suit him best." "Wouldn't the small one at the back be safer?" Walthew suggested. "That will be watched, but it might be of some help if you went that way. Possibly you would not mind wearing a sombrero and a Spanish cloak." "Not at all," Grahame assured him. "Still, there are two of us." "That is an advantage. If one leaves shortly after the other, those who keep watch and expect a single man will be puzzled." Walthew chuckled. "Good! I'd a hankering after adventures, and now it looks as if I'd be gratified. But you had better not give us clothes with a name on them." "In this country, people out of favor with the Government are modest about their names," Don Martin rejoined. Ten minutes later Grahame, wearing a wide black hat and a dark Spanish cloak, stepped quietly out into the shadowy street. He had seen that his automatic pistol was ready to his hand, having had more than one experience of the half-breed's dexterity with the silent knife. For all that, his hurried, stealthy gait was assumed and not natural to the man, whose heart beat calmly, though he cast quick glances about. The houses were high, and the street seemed to get narrower and darker as he went on. Then he imagined he heard soft steps behind him. Walking faster, he stopped at a corner and listened. Somebody was certainly following him. Grahame's first impulse was to hide in a dark doorway and wait for his pursuer, but he reflected that this would not fall in with his host's plan, and he went on, keeping in the shadow while he made for the hotel at which he had left his mules. There were, he imagined, two men following him now. A few moments afterward he reached the end of the dark street, and the empty plaza lay before him. The moon shed a faint light upon the stones and the high, white walls, and Grahame was glad of this. Now, if it were needful, he could defend himself: the walk through the shadow had been trying. Still, he must not hurry, for he never promised more than he meant to perform, and he knew that Don Martin relied upon his playing out his part. Perhaps he overdid it when he stopped to light a cigarette, for, looking up as he dropped the match, he saw two dark figures stop at the corner he had left. Then there was a low whistle, and one of them disappeared. Grahame smiled, because he knew that Walthew had divided the attention of the spies. The remaining man, however, walked quickly after him, and when Grahame was half way across the plaza he waited. His pursuer seemed to hesitate, for he came on more slowly, and stopped a few yards off. "The American!" he exclaimed. "English," said Grahame calmly. "The difference is, no doubt, not important." The man looked hard at him, and Grahame carelessly dropped his hand upon his pistol. "I am going to the _fonda_; if you are going that way, I would rather you walked in front. One is careful at night, my friend." Though the fellow had a sinister look, he smiled and went off with an apology, and Grahame, going on to the hotel, waited outside until Walthew came up. The boy looked hot and breathless, but Grahame noticed that he had a flower in his hand. "I've been followed," Walthew laughed. "The fellows dropped back soon after I came into the moonlight. Guess they saw they were after the wrong man." "Very possibly. It happened to me. I wonder whether Castillo got away?" They listened, but the town was quiet. One or two citizens crossed the plaza, but no sound that indicated anything unusual going on rose from the shadowy streets. "It seems likely," Walthew replied. "I don't think they could have arrested him without some disturbance. Why didn't they search Sarmiento's house?" "Perhaps they were afraid of starting a riot that would spread. The President seems to be a capable man, and Don Martin obviously enjoys the confidence of the citizens. On the whole, I think he deserves it." "So do I," Walthew agreed. "What do you think of the other fellow?" "I wouldn't trust him. He's no doubt sincere, but I'm not sure of his nerve. But where did you get the rose?" "On the pavement outside the _casa Sarmiento_," Walthew answered with some embarrassment. "Mmm! Dropped from a window. Such things happen in Spanish-American towns, and it's possible that the President's spies have noted it against you. However, you'll be too busy to think of the señorita when we get back to the coast." Grahame paused and added: "It might be wise to remember that you're engaged in a dangerous business, and can't run the risk of any complications. Neither of us can indulge in philandering until this job's finished." "I'll take no risk that could get us into difficulties, but that's all I'll promise," Walthew said quietly. Grahame gave him a steady glance. "Well, I suppose I must be satisfied." They entered the hotel, and half an hour later they left Rio Frio and rode down the hillside toward the misty swamps that fringed the coast. CHAPTER III HIGH STAKES The green shutters were half closed to keep the dazzling sunshine out of Henry Cliffe's private sitting-room at the smart Florida hotel, but the fresh sea breeze swept in and tempered the heat. The scent of flowers mingled with a delicate perfume such as fastidious women use, but Mrs. Cliffe was enjoying an afternoon nap and her daughter had gone out, so that Cliffe and Robinson had the room to themselves. They sat, opposite each other, at a small table on which stood a bottle and a cigar box, but there was only iced water in the tall glass at Cliffe's hand. He had lunched sparingly, as usual, and now leaned back in his chair, looking thoughtful. His hair was turning gray, and his face was thin and lined, but there was a hint of quiet force about him. His dress was plain but in excellent taste, and he looked, what he was, a good type of the American business man, who had, however, as sometimes happens to his kind, sacrificed his health to commercial success. He was a financier and a floater of companies which generally paid. Robinson was tall, with a high color, a prominent, hooked nose, and a face of Jewish cast. His clothes were well cut, but their adherence to the latest fashion was rather pronounced, and he wore expensive jewelry. He was favorably known on Wall Street and sometimes heard of when a corner was being manipulated in the Chicago wheat pit. Cliffe had proposed a joint venture, because he knew that Robinson did not fear a risk and he had learned that a Jew can generally be relied upon when the reckoning comes. "Well," said Robinson, "I see a chance of trouble. If President Altiera goes down, we lose our money." "A sure thing," Cliffe agreed. "It will be our business to keep him on his feet, and it may cost us something. In a way, that's an advantage. He must have our help, and is willing to bid high for it." "The revolutionaries may beat him." "If he's left alone; but a little money goes a long way in his country, and the dissatisfied politicians would rather take some as a gift than risk their lives by fighting for it. Altiera can buy up most of them if he has the means; and he's capable of quieting the rest in a more drastic way." Cliffe smiled as he continued: "It's not my habit to plan a deal without carefully considering what I may get up against." "Then it's your honest opinion the thing's a good business chance?" "I call it that. One gets nothing for nothing. If you expect a prize, you must put up the stakes." "Very well. Suppose you get the concession? Is there gold worth mining in the country?" "I can't tell," Cliffe answered frankly. "The Spaniards found a good deal three hundred years ago, and now and then a half-breed brings some out of the bush. Guess we could get enough to use as a draw in the prospectus." "You'd have to make the prospectus good," Robinson said with a thoughtful air. "Not an invariable rule, of course, but our names stand for something with the investing public." "I generally do make good. If we don't strike gold, there's rubber, and the soil will grow high-grade cane and coffee. Give me the concession and I'll make it pay." Robinson nodded. Cliffe's business talent was particularly marked in the development of virgin territory, though he never undertook the work in person. He knew where to find the right men, and how far to trust them. "I suppose we won't be required to meddle with dago politics?" Robinson suggested. "Certainly not; that's Altiera's affair, and he's capable of looking after it. A number of his people are getting tired of him, but so long as he can pay his soldiers up to time and buy support where he can't use force, he'll keep control." "A bit of a brute, I've heard." "He's not a humanitarian," Cliffe agreed. "Still, countries like his need a firm hand." "Guess that's so," said Robinson. He and Cliffe were respected in business circles. They met their obligations and kept the rules that govern financial dealings. That they might now be lending their support to tyrannical oppression, and helping to stifle the patriotic aspirations of a downtrodden people, did not enter their minds. That was not their affair; they were out for money, and their responsibility ended with the payment of dividends to those who bought their stock. They would fulfill this duty if the thing were possible; although their standard of morality was not of the highest, they had prosperous rivals who fell short of it. "I'll stand in," Robinson decided after a few moments' silence. "You can let me know how much you will need to carry you through when you get your plans worked out." "Very well. It's over the first payments we take a risk. The money will, so to speak, vanish. We'll have nothing to show for it except the good will of the men in power. Some of it may even get into the wrong hands." Robinson made a sign of comprehension. He knew something about official graft, for he now and then found it needful to smooth the way for a new venture by judicious bribery. "There'll be no trouble after we've bought the concession," Cliffe continued. "The cash will then go to the treasury, and whichever party gets control will have to stand to the bargain. And now I guess we can let the matter drop until I fix things up." They went out to a seat on the veranda, which looked across a row of dusty palmettos and a strip of arid lawn that the glistening showers from the sprinklers could not keep green. An inlet of blue water ran up to its edge, and beyond the curve of sheltering beach the long Atlantic swell rolled into the bay flecked with incandescent foam, for the sunshine was dazzling and the breeze was fresh. Two or three miles away there was a stretch of calmer water behind a long point on which the surf beat, and in the midst of this a small steamer gently rolled at anchor. Nearer the inlet, a little sailing-boat stood out to sea, her varnished deck and snowy canvas gleaming in the strong light. "Miss Cliffe's boat, isn't it?" Robinson remarked. "Looks very small; I s'pose she's safe?" "New York canoe club model," Cliffe replied. "Had her brought down on a freight-car. Evelyn's fond of sailing and smart at the helm. She's all right--though the breeze does seem pretty fresh." While they talked about other matters, Evelyn Cliffe sat in the stern of the tiny sloop, enjoying the sense of control the grasp of the tiller gave her, and the swift rush of the polished hull through the sparkling foam. There was also some satisfaction in displaying her nerve and skill to the loungers on the beach, who were, for the most part, fashionable people from the Northern States. Among these was a young man upon whom Evelyn knew her mother looked with approval. Though he had much to recommend him, and had shown a marked preference for her society, Evelyn had come to no decision about Reginald Gore, but she was willing that he should admire her seamanship, and it was, perhaps, in the expectation of meeting him afterward that she had dressed herself carefully. She wore well-cut blue serge that emphasized her fine pink-and-white color, and matched her eyes; and the small blue cap did not hide her red-gold hair. As the breeze freshened, she forgot the spectators, and began to wish she had taken a reef in the mainsail before starting. Hitherto she had had somebody with her when it was necessary to shorten canvas; but it was unlike a sport to turn back because of a little wind. She would stand on until she had weathered the point and was out on the open Atlantic, and then run home. The strain on the helm got heavier, the foam crept level with the lee deck, and sometimes sluiced along it when the boat dipped her bows in a sea. Then the spray began to beat upon the slanted canvas, and whipped Evelyn's face as she braced herself against the tiller. The boat was sailing very fast, plunging through the sparkling ridges of water; there was something strangely exhilarating in her speed and the way the foam swirled past. Evelyn had an adventurous temperament, and, being then twenty-three, was young enough to find a keen relish in outdoor sport. Now she was matching her strength and skill against the blue Atlantic combers, which were getting steeper and frothing on their crests. The point was falling to leeward; it would be a fair wind home, and she determined to stand on a little longer. Casting a quick glance astern, she saw that the figures on the beach had grown indistinct and small. She felt alone with the sea at last, and the situation had its charm; but when she fixed her eyes ahead she wished that the rollers were not quite so large. She had to ease the boat over them; sometimes let the sheet run in the harder gusts, and then it was not easy to get the wet rope in. When the point shut off the beach, she saw she must come round, and, after waiting for a patch of smooth water, put up the helm to jibe. The strain on the sheet was heavier than she thought; the rope bruised her fingers as it ran through them. The boat rolled wildly, and then the big sail swung over with a crash. Evelyn saw with alarm that the gaff along its head had stopped at an unusual angle to the canvas. Something had gone wrong. But her nerve was good. She could lower the mainsail and run home under the jib. When she left the helm the boat shot up into the wind, with the long boom banging to and fro and the spray flying across her. Evelyn loosed the halyards, but found that the gaff would not come down. Its end worked upon a brass slide on the mast, and the grips had bent and jambed. Things now looked awkward. It was blowing moderately fresh, the sea was getting up, and the sail she could not shorten might capsize the boat. With difficulty, she got the sloop round, but, as the gaff was jambed, she would not steer a course that would take her to the inlet, and Evelyn remembered with alarm that there was some surf on the beach. She could swim, but she shrank from the thought of struggling ashore from the wrecked craft through broken water. Still, it was some comfort to see the point drop astern and the beach get nearer; she was on the way to land, there were boats on the inlet, and somebody might notice that she was in difficulties. No boat came off, however, and she realized that from a distance nothing might appear to be wrong with the sloop. When she was near enough to signal for help it would be too late. A small steamer lurched at anchor not far away; but Evelyn could not reach her: the sloop was like a bird with a broken wing and could only blunder clumsily, in danger of capsizing, before the freshening wind. In another quarter of an hour she would be in the surf, which now looked dangerously heavy. While she was trying to nerve herself for the struggle to land, she saw a boat leave the steamer's side. It was a very small dinghy, and there was only one man on board, but he waved his hand as if he understood her peril, and then rowed steadily to intercept her. This needed judgment: if he miscalculated the distance it would be impossible for him to overtake the sloop. And Evelyn could do nothing to help. She must concentrate her attention upon keeping her craft before the wind. If she jibed, bringing the big sail violently over with its head held fast would result in a capsize. Five minutes later she risked a glance. The dinghy was close at hand, lurching up and down, lost from sight at intervals among the combers. The man, coatless and hatless, seemed to be handling her with caution, easing her when a roller with a foaming crest bore down on him, but Evelyn thought he would not miss her boat. Her heart beat fast as she put the helm hard down. The sloop swung round, slackening speed as she came head to wind, there was a thud alongside, and the man jumped on board with a rope in his hand. Then things began to happen so rapidly that the girl could not remember exactly what was done; but the man showed a purposeful activity. He scrambled along the narrow deck, got a few feet up the mast, and the sail came down; then he sprang aft to the helm, and the sloop headed for the steamer, with his dinghy in tow and only the jib set. They were alongside in a few minutes, and he seized a rope that some one threw him. "Our gig's hauled up on the beach for painting, and I'm afraid we couldn't reach the landing in the dinghy, now the sea's getting up," he said. "You'd better come on board, and I'll see if Macallister can put your gaff right." Evelyn hesitated, for she suspected that it would take some time to mend the damaged spar. It was not an adventure her mother would approve of, but as she could see no way of reaching land, she let the man help her through the gangway. CHAPTER IV THE "ENCHANTRESS" On reaching the steamer's deck, Evelyn glanced with curiosity at her rescuer. He was a tall, lightly built man, dressed in an old blue shirt, paint-stained duck trousers, and ragged canvas shoes, but he had an easy manner that was not in harmony with his rough clothes. Evelyn liked his brown face. It had a hint of force in it; though now he was watching her with a half-amused smile. He fell short of being handsome, but, on the whole, his appearance made a good impression on the girl. Then she looked about the vessel. The deck, finely laid with narrow planks, was littered with odd spars, rusty chain, coal bags, and pieces of greasy machinery, as if repairs and refitting were going on. She was a very small, two-masted steamer, carrying some sail, for smoke-grimed canvas was furled along the booms, and Evelyn thought she had been built for a yacht. Her narrow beam, her graceful sweep of teakwood rail, and the long, tapering counter suggested speed. A low, lead-gray funnel stood just forward of the mainmast, and a teak house, rising three or four feet above the deck, occupied part of her length. The brass boss of the steering wheel bore the name _Enchantress_. The after end of the house, however, was built of iron, with raised lights in the top, and the hammering and the pointed remarks that came up indicated that somebody below was grappling with refractory metal. After one exclamation, Evelyn's companion walked to the skylights. "Mack," he said in a warning tone, "there's a lady on board." "One o' they half-dressed hussies from the hotel? Man, I thought ye had mair taste," a hoarse voice replied. Evelyn was glad that her boating costume was not in the extreme of fashion, for sleeves and skirts were severely curtailed then, but she waited with some amusement. "Come up and don't talk!" said the man who had brought her on board. "Here's a job for you." "That's one thing I'll never die for the want of," the voice below went on. "I've got jobs enough already, and no help wi' them. Ye cannot make a mechanic out o' a dago muleteer, and the gangrel son o' a rich American is no' much better. They're wrecking the bonny mill and when I had them strike at a bit forging the weariful deevils smashed my finger. I telt them----" "It won't stand for repeating. Let up; you've the voice of a bull," somebody broke in. "Grahame's waiting with a lady. Can't you get a move on?" "What's the lady wanting--is it her watch mending?" the Scot asked with a hint of eagerness. A passion for tampering with the works of watches not infrequently characterizes the marine engineer. "Come and see!" called Evelyn's companion; and a few moments later the mechanic appeared. He was big, rather gaunt, and very dirty; but he carried himself well, and had obviously just put on a smart blue jacket with brass buttons that bore the crest of an English mail line. Evelyn thought his age was between forty and fifty, but his eyes had a humorous twinkle and his air was rakish. Behind him came a much younger man in greasy overalls. The engineer bowed to Evelyn with some grace. "Ye'll be Miss Cliffe; I ken ye by sight," he said. "They telt me who ye were in the bar at the hotel." "Do they talk about me in such places?" Evelyn asked with a touch of haughtiness. "What would ye expect? When ye're born good-looking, ye must take the consequences. But, as Grahame has nae manners, I'll present myself--Andrew Macallister, extra chief's ticket, and noo, through speaking my mind to a director, engineer o' this barge." He indicated his greasy companion. "Mr. Walthew, who, though ye might not think it by his look, was taught at Harvard. If my temper stands the strain, I may make a useful greaser o' him yet. The other ye nae doot ken." "No," said Evelyn, half amused. "He kindly came to my help when I was in trouble with my boat." "Then he's skipper. They call him Grahame, and it's a good Scottish name. But I was hoping ye had maybe some difficulty with your watch." "Why did you hope so?" Evelyn asked, laughing. "On no account let him have it," Walthew interposed. "He brought back the last watch a confiding visitor left him with the gold case badly crushed. 'I had to screw her in the vice, but a bit rub with a file will smooth her off,' he told the owner." "He was a fastidious beast o' a Custom House grafter," Macallister explained. "But if it's no' a watch, what way can I serve ye?" Grahame took him to the sloop and showed him the gaff, and a few minutes later he came back with the bent jaws. "It's no' a bad piece o' work; your people have an eye for design, but they make things too light," he said. "Noo I'll cut ye a new grip out o' solid brass, but it will take an hour." "I suppose I must wait; there's no other way of getting back," Evelyn answered dubiously. Macallister went below, and Grahame put a deck chair for Evelyn under the awning in the stern, where he sat down on a coil of rope, while Walthew leaned against the rail near by. The girl felt interested in them all. She had heard that Walthew had been to Harvard, and his appearance suggested that he belonged to her own world. If so, what was he doing in the _Enchantress's_ engine room? Then, Macallister's random talk had some piquancy. His manners were not polished, but they were good in their way. "The steamer is yours, I suppose?" she remarked. "Yes," said Grahame. "We bought her cheap, and are getting her ready for sea. As I dare say you have noticed, she needs refitting." "But wouldn't that have been easier at New Orleans or Galveston?" "Perhaps, if we were able to hire professional assistance, but we have to do the work ourselves, and this place is quiet, and clean for painting." "Aren't you painting her an unusual color? White would have been prettier than this dingy gray." "White's conspicuous," Walthew answered, and Evelyn noticed Grahame's warning glance. "A neutral tint stands better, and doesn't show the dirt. You see, we have to think of our pockets." "Then it isn't to be a pleasure trip. Where are you going?" "Up the Gulf Stream. To Cuba first, and then south and west; wherever there's a chance of trade." "But the boat is very small. What do you think of trading in?" "Anything that comes along," Walthew answered with a thoughtful air. "We might catch turtles, for example." "One understands that turtles are now farmed for the market." "It would be cheaper to catch them. We might get mahogany." "But mahogany logs are big. You couldn't carry many." "We could tow them in a raft. Then the English and American tourists who come out in the mail boats might charter us for trips." "I'm afraid you'd find them exacting. They'd expect nice berths and a good table. Do you carry a good cook?" Grahame chuckled and Walthew grinned. "Modesty prevents my answering, because my partners leave me to put up the hash. I'll admit it might be better; but our passengers wouldn't find that out until we got them away at sea." Evelyn was frankly amused. She could not imagine his cooking very well, but she liked his humorous candor. "Your plans seem rather vague," she said. "They are, but one doesn't want a cut and dried program for a cruise about the Spanish Main. One takes what comes along; in the old days it used to be rich plate ships and windfalls of that kind, and I guess there's still something to be picked up when you get off the liners' track. One expects to find adventures on the seas that Drake and Frobisher sailed." Evelyn mused. She was shrewd enough to perceive that the men were hiding something, and they roused her curiosity, but she thought Walthew was right. Romance was not dead, and the Spanish Main was a name to conjure with. It brought one visions of desolate keys where treasure was hidden, the rush of the lukewarm Gulf Stream over coral reefs, of palm-fringed inlets up which the pinnaces had crept to cut out Spanish galleons, and of old white cities that the buccaneers had sacked. Tragic and heroic memories haunted that blue sea, and although luxurious mail boats plowed it now, the passions of the old desperados still burned in the hearts of men. Walthew was smooth-faced, somewhat ingenuous, and marked by boyish humor, but Evelyn had noticed his athletic form, and thought he could be determined. He was no doubt proficient in sports that demanded strength and nerve. For all that, it was Grahame and his hawk-like look that her thoughts dwelt most upon, for something about him suggested that he had already found the adventures his comrade was seeking. He was a soldier of fortune, who had taken wounds and perhaps still bore their scars. She remembered the cool judgment he had shown when he came to her rescue. Walthew disturbed her reflections. "It will be some time before Andrew fixes your gaff, and there's no use in trying to hurry him," he said. "He's an artist in metal, and never lets up until he's satisfied with a job. So, as you must wait and we have a kettle on the forge below, I can offer you some tea and I'd like your opinion of the biscuit I've been baking for supper." Evelyn felt doubtful. She was spending the afternoon in a way her mother would certainly not approve of, but she could not get ashore until the gaff was mended. Besides, it was pleasant to sit under the awning with the fresh sea breeze on her face and listen to the splash of the combers on the bows. Then she was interested in her companions. They were different from the rather vapid loungers she would have been talking to had she stayed at the hotel. She let Walthew go and then turned to Grahame. "Have you known your partner long?" she asked. "No; I met him for the first time in New Orleans a few months ago." "I asked because he's a type that I'm well acquainted with," Evelyn explained. "And you would not have expected to find him cooking and cleaning engines on a boat like this?" "No; they're rather unusual occupations for a conventionally brought up young American." Grahame smiled. "I understand that Walthew might have enjoyed all the comforts your civilization has to offer, but he preferred the sea. Perhaps I'm prejudiced, but I don't blame him. There's a charm in freedom and the wide horizon." "Yes," she agreed thoughtfully, looking across the blue water; "I suppose that's true. If a man has the courage to break away, he can follow his bent. It's different with women. We're securely fenced in; our corral walls are high." "They keep trouble out. Hardship and danger aren't pleasant things, and after a time the romance of the free-lance's life wears off. One sometimes looks longingly at the sheltered nooks that men with settled habits occupy." "And yet you follow your star!" "Star's too idealistic; my bent is better. What's born in one must have its way. This is perhaps most convenient when it's an inherited genius for making money." "It's useful to oneself and others," Evelyn agreed. "But do these talents run in the blood?" "It seems so," Grahame answered, and was quiet for a time, languidly watching the girl and wondering how far his statement was true. It might be argued that the strongest family strains must be weakened by marriage, and their salient characteristics disappear in a few generations, but he felt strangely akin to the mosstroopers of his name who scourged the Scottish Border long ago. Their restlessness and lust of adventure were his. This, however, was not a matter of much consequence. Chance had thrown him into the company of a pretty and intelligent girl, and he must try to entertain her. "You're fond of the sea and adventurous, or you wouldn't have driven that little sloop so far out under full sail," he said. "Oh," she admitted, smiling, "that was partly because I wanted to show my skill and was ashamed to turn back when the breeze freshened." Grahame laughed. He liked her frankness. "After all," he said, "it's a feeling that drives a good many of us on. A weakness, perhaps, but it may be better than excessive caution." "A matter of opinion. Of course, if you determine never to do anything foolish, you're apt to do nothing at all. But I'm afraid I can't throw much light upon these subjects.... Here comes our tea." It was drinkable, but Evelyn thought the biscuit could undoubtedly have been better. For all that, she enjoyed the meal, and when it was over Macallister appeared with the mended gaff. "I'm thinking yon will never bend or jamb," he said, indicating the beautifully finished pieces of brass-work. Evelyn thanked him, and soon afterward Grahame helped her into the boat and hoisted the reefed sail. The wind was still fresh, but the sloop ran shoreward safely, with the sparkling seas ranging up on her quarter, and Grahame admired the grace of the neat, blue-clad figure at the helm. The rushing breeze and the flying spray had brought a fine color into the girl's face and a brightness to her eyes. As they neared the beach, a gasolene launch came plunging out to meet them, and Evelyn laughed as she turned to Grahame. "I've been missed at last," she said. "That's my father coming to look for me." The launch swung round close alongside and Grahame recognized that he was being subjected to a keen scrutiny by a man on board. The broken water, however, made explanations impossible, and the launch followed the sloop to the inlet, where Evelyn neatly brought the craft up to the landing. On getting ashore, she spoke to Cliffe, and he thanked Grahame and invited him to the hotel. Grahame politely declined, but agreed to borrow the launch to take him on board. As he was leaving, Evelyn held out her hand. "It was fortunate that my difficulties began when I was near your boat, and I don't altogether regret them. I have spent a pleasant afternoon," she said. Grahame bowed and turned away; but somewhat to his surprise, he found his thoughts return to his guest as the launch carried him back to the steamer. The girl was cultured and intelligent, perhaps a little romantic, and unspoiled by luxury; but this was nothing to him. There were times when he felt lonely and outcast from his kind, for until he met Walthew his comrades had generally been rough and broken men. Some years ago he had been a favorite with well-bred women; but he never met them on terms of friendship now. He was poor, and would no doubt remain so, since he had not the gift of making money; but an untrammeled, wandering life had its advantages. With a smile at his brief relapse into sentiment, he resolved to forget Miss Cliffe; but he found it strangely difficult to occupy his mind with calculations about stores for the coming voyage. Evelyn related her adventure to her mother, who listened with strong disapproval. Mrs. Cliffe was a thin, keen-eyed woman, with social ambitions and some skill in realizing them. "If you hadn't been so rash as to go out alone, this wouldn't have happened," she remarked. "You must really be more careful." "I couldn't prevent the gaff's jambing," Evelyn replied. "That is not what I meant. After all, nobody in the hotel knows much about the matter, and there is, of course, no need to do more than bow to the men if you meet them at the landing, though it would be better to avoid this, if possible. A small favor of the kind they did you does not justify their claiming your acquaintance." "Father wanted to bring one of them here." "Your father is a man of business, and has very little discretion in social matters," Mrs. Cliffe replied. "If Reggie cannot go with you, take the hotel boatman when you next go sailing." Evelyn did not answer, but she disagreed with the views her mother had expressed, and she resolved to leave Reggie ashore. For one thing, he was not of much use in a boat. Yet it was curious that she had once been pleased to take him out. CHAPTER V THE CALL OF THE UNKNOWN The sea breeze had fallen, and the air was hot and still. A full moon rested low in the eastern sky, and against its light the tops of the royal palms cut in feathery silhouette. Evelyn was sitting in the hotel garden with Reginald Gore. A dusky rose arbor hid them from the veranda, where a number of the guests had gathered, but Evelyn imagined that one or two of the women knew where she was and envied her. This once would have afforded her some satisfaction, but it did not matter now, and although the spot seemed made for confidential talk, she listened quietly to the rollers breaking on the beach. The roar of the surf had a disturbing effect; she felt that it called, urging her to follow her star and launch out on the deep. Her companion was silent, and she wondered what he was thinking about, or if, as seemed more likely, his mind was vacant. She found him irritating to-night. Gore was the finished product of a luxurious age: well-bred, well-taught, and tastefully dressed. His father had made a fortune out of railroad stock, and although Reginald had not the ability to increase it, he spent it with prudence. He had a good figure, and a pleasant face, but Evelyn suspected that his highest ambition was to lounge through life gracefully. Evelyn knew her mother's plans regarding him, and had, to some extent, fallen in with them. Reggie had much that she valued to offer, but she now and then found him tiresome. He stood for the luxurious, but, in a sense, artificial life, with which she was growing dissatisfied. She felt that she wanted stirring, and must get into touch with the real things. "You're not talkative," she remarked, watching the lights of the _Enchantress_ that swung and blinked with the tossing swell. "No," he agreed good-humoredly. "Doesn't seem to be much to talk about." There was silence for a few moments; then Evelyn put into words a train of thoughts that was forming indistinctly in her mind. "You have never done anything very strenuous in life. You have had all the pleasure money can provide one. Are you content?" "On the whole, yes. Aren't you?" "No," said Evelyn thoughtfully. "I believe I haven't really been content for a long time, but I didn't know it. The mind can be doped, but the effect wears off and you feel rather startled when you come to yourself." Gore nodded. "I know! Doesn't last, but it's disturbing. When I feel like that, I take a soothing drink." Evelyn laughed, for his answer was characteristic. He understood, to some extent, but she did not expect him to sympathize with the restlessness that had seized her. Reggie would never do anything rash or unconventional. Hitherto she had approved his caution. She had enjoyed the comfortable security of her station, had shared her mother's ambitions, and looked upon marriage as a means of rising in the social scale. Her adventurous temperament had found some scope in exciting sports and in an occasional flirtation that she did not carry far; but she was now beginning to feel that life had strange and wonderful things to offer those who had the courage to seize them. She had never experienced passion--perhaps because her training had taught her to dread it; but her imagination was now awake. Her visit to the _Enchantress_ had perhaps had something to do with these disturbing feelings, but not, she argued, because she was sentimentally attracted by her rescuer. It was the mystery in which Grahame's plans were wrapped that was interesting. He was obviously the leader of the party and about to engage in some rash adventure on seas the buccaneers had sailed. This, of course, was nothing to her; but thinking of him led her to wonder whether she might not miss much by clinging too cautiously to what she knew was safe. With a soft laugh she turned to Gore. "Tell me about the dance they're getting up. I hear you are one of the stewards," she said. It was a congenial topic, and as she listened to her companion's talk Evelyn felt that she was being drawn back to secure, familiar ground. Cliffe, in the meanwhile, had come out in search of her and, seeing how she was engaged, had strolled into the hotel bar. A tall, big-boned man, dressed in blue serge with brass buttons on his jacket, was talking at large, and Cliffe, stopping to listen, thought the tales he told with dry Scottish humor were good. "You are the engineer who mended the gaff of my daughter's boat," Cliffe said. "I must thank you for that; it was a first-rate job." "It might have been worse," Macallister modestly replied. "Are ye a mechanic then?" "No; but I know good work when I see it." "I'm thinking that's a gift, though ye may not use it much. It's no' good work the world's looking for." "True," agreed Cliffe; "perhaps we're too keen on what will pay." "Ye mean what will pay the first user. An honest job is bound to pay somebody in the end." "Well, I guess that's so. You're a philosopher." Macallister grinned. "I have been called worse names, and maybe with some cause. Consistency gets monotonous. It's better to be a bit of everything, as the humor takes ye." "What kind of engines has your boat?" Cliffe asked. He was more at home when talking practical matters. "As fine a set o' triples as I've clapped my eyes upon, though they have been shamefully neglectit." "And what speed can you get out of her?" "A matter o' coal," Macallister answered with a twinkle. "A seven-knot bat will suit our purse best." Cliffe saw that further questions on this point would be injudicious, but the man interested him, and he noted the flag on his buttons. "Well," he said, "the _Enchantress_ must be a change from the liners you have sailed in." "I find that. But there's aye some compensation. I have tools a man can work with, and oil that will keep her running smooth. Ye'll maybe ken there's a difference in engine stores." "I've heard my manufacturing friends say something of the kind." Cliffe ordered refreshment, and quietly studied his companion. The man had not the reserve he associated with the Scot, but a dash and a reckless humor, which are, nevertheless, essentially Scottish too. Cliffe wondered curiously what enterprise he and his companions were engaged upon, but he did not think Macallister would tell him. If the others were like this fellow, he imagined that they would carry out their plans, for he read resolution as well as daring in the Scot's character; besides, he had been favorably impressed by Grahame. After some further talk, Macallister left, and Cliffe joined his wife and daughter. The next morning, Evelyn, getting up before most of the other guests, went out on the balcony in front of her room and looked across the bay. The sun was not yet hot, and a fresh breeze flecked the blue water with feathery streaks of white, while the wet beach glistened dazzlingly. There was a refreshing, salty smell, and for a few minutes the girl enjoyed the grateful coolness; then she felt that something was missing from the scene, and noticed that the _Enchantress_ had vanished. The adventurers had sailed in the night. On the whole she was conscious of relief. They had gone and she could now get rid of the restlessness that their presence had caused. After all, there was peril in the longing for change; it was wiser to be satisfied with the security and solid comfort which surrounded her. Looking down at a footstep, she saw Gore strolling about the lawn, faultlessly dressed in light flannel, with a Panama hat. There was not a crease in his clothes that was out of place; the color scheme was excellent--even his necktie was exactly the right shade. He stood for all her mother had taught her to value: wealth, leisure, and cultivated taste. Reggie was a man of her own kind; she had nothing in common with the bronzed, tar-stained Grahame, whose hawk-like look had for the moment stirred her imagination. "You look like the morning," Gore called up to her. "Won't you come down and walk to the beach? The sun and breeze are delightful, and we'll have them all to ourselves." Evelyn noticed the hint of intimacy, but it did not jar upon her mood, and she smiled as she answered that she would join him. A few minutes later, they walked along the hard, white sand, breathing the keen freshness of the spray. "What made you get up so soon?" Evelyn asked. "It's not hard to guess. I was waiting for my opportunity. You're in the habit of rising in good time." "Well," she said with a bantering air, "I think waiting for opportunities is a habit of yours. Of course, you have some excuse for this." Gore looked puzzled for a moment and then laughed. "I see what you mean. As a rule, the opportunities come to me." "Don't they? I wonder whether you're much happier than the men who have to make, or look for, them." "I can't say, because I haven't tried that plan. I can't see why I should look for anything, when I don't have to. Anyway, I guess I'm a pretty cheerful person and easy to get on with. It's the strivers who're always getting after something out of reach that give you jars." "You're certainly not a striver," Evelyn agreed. "However, you seem to have all a man could want." "Not quite," he answered. "I'll confess that I'm not satisfied yet, but I try to make the most of the good things that come along--and I'm glad I got up early. It's a glorious morning!" Evelyn understood. Reggie was not precipitate and feared a rebuff. She believed that she could have him when she liked, but he would look for some tactful sign of her approval before venturing too far. The trouble was that she did not know if she wanted him. She changed the subject, and they paced the beach, engaged in good-humored banter, until the breakfast gong called them back to the hotel. In the afternoon, however, Evelyn's mood changed again. The breeze died away and it was very hot. Everybody was languid, and she found her friends dull. Although Gore tried to be amusing, his conversation was unsatisfactory; and the girls about the hotel seemed more frivolous and shallow than usual. None of these people ever did anything really worth while! Evelyn did not know what she wished to do, but she felt that the life she led was unbearably stale. When dark fell and the deep rumble of the surf filled the air, she sat with her father in a quiet corner of the garden. "Didn't you say you might make a short business trip to the West Indies?" she asked him. "Yes; I may have to spend a week in Havana." "Then I wish you would take me." "It might be arranged," said Cliffe. He seldom refused her anything. "Your mother wouldn't come, but she has plenty of engagements at home. Why do you want to go?" Evelyn found this hard to answer, but she tried to formulate her thoughts. "Cuba is, of course, a new country to me, and I suppose we all feel a mysterious attraction toward what is strange. Had you never a longing for something different, something out of the usual run?" "I had when I was young." "But you don't feel it now?" "One learns to keep such fancies in their place when business demands it," Cliffe answered with a dry smile. "I can remember times when I wanted to go off camping in the Canadian Rockies and join a canoe trip on Labrador rivers. Now and then in the hot weather the traffic in the markets and the dusty offices make me tired. I'll confess that I've felt the snow-peaks and the rapids call." "We went to Banff once," said Evelyn. "It was very nice." "But not the real thing! You saw the high peaks from the hotel garden and the passes from an observation car. Then we made one or two excursions with pack-horses, guides, and people like ourselves, where it was quite safe to go. That was as much as your mother could stand for. She'd no sympathy with my hankering after the lone trail." Evelyn could see his face in the moonlight, and she gave him a quick look. Her father, it seemed, had feelings she had never suspected in him. "But if you like the mountains, couldn't you enjoy them now?" "No," he said, rather grimly. "The grip of my business grows tighter all the time. It costs a good deal to live as we do, and I must keep to the beaten tracks that lead to places where money is made." "I sometimes think we are too extravagant and perhaps more ostentatious than we need be," Evelyn said in a diffident tone. "We do what our friends expect and your mother has been accustomed to. Then it's my pleasure to give my daughter every advantage I can and, when the time for her to leave us comes, to see she starts fair." Evelyn was silent for a few moments, feeling touched. She had formed a new conception of her father, who, she had thought, loved the making of money for its own sake. Now it was rather startling to find that in order to give her mother and herself all they could desire, he had held one side of his nature in subjection and cheerfully borne a life of monotonous toil. "I don't want to leave you," she said in a gentle voice. He looked at her keenly, and she saw that her mother had been speaking to him about Gore. "Well," he responded, "I want to keep you as long as possible, but when you want to go I must face my loss and make the best of it. In the meanwhile, we'll go to Cuba if your mother consents." Evelyn put her hand affectionately on his arm. "Whatever happens," she said softly, "you won't fail me. I'm often frivolous and selfish, but it's nice to know I have somebody I can trust." CHAPTER VI ON THE SPANISH MAIN There had been wind, but it had fallen toward evening, and the _Enchantress_ rolled in a flat calm when her engines stopped. As she swung with the smooth undulations, blocks clattered, booms groaned, and the water in her bilges swirled noisily to and fro. It was difficult to move about the slanted deck, and two dark-skinned, barefooted seamen were seated forward with their backs against the rail. A comrade below was watching the engine fires and, with the exception of her Spanish helmsman, this was all the paid crew the _Enchantress_ carried. She drifted east with the Gulf Stream. Around her there hung a muggy atmosphere pervaded with a curious, hothouse smell. Grahame stood in the channels, heaving the lead. He found deep water, but white patches on the northern horizon, where the expanse of sea was broken by spouts of foam, marked a chain of reefs and keys that rose a foot or two above the surface. A larger streak of white was fading into the haze astern, but Grahame had carefully taken its compass bearings, because dusk, which comes suddenly in the Bahama Channel, was not far away. He dropped the lead on deck, and joined Macallister, who stood in the engine-room doorway rubbing his hands with cotton waste. "No sign o' that steamboat yet?" the Scot asked. "It's hazy to the east," said Grahame. "We mightn't see her until she's close if they're not making much smoke. Still, she ought to have turned up last night." "She'll come. A tornado wouldna' stop her skipper when he had freight to collect; but ye were wise in no' paying it in advance." "You haven't seen the fellow." "I've seen his employers," Macallister replied with a chuckle. "Weel I ken what sort o' man would suit them. Gang canny when ye meet him, and see ye get the goods before ye sign the bill o' lading." "I mean to take precautions. No first-class firm would touch our business." "Verra true. And when ye find men who're no' particular about one thing, ye cannot expect them to be fastidious about another. When I deal wi' yon kind, I keep my een open." "Where's Walthew?" Macallister grinned. "Asleep below, wi' his hair full o' coal-dust, looking more like a nigger than the son o' a rich American. Human nature's a verra curious thing, but if he can stand another month, I'll hae hope o' him." "I think the lad's right. He wants to run his life on his own lines, and he is willing to pay for testing them by experience." Grahame, glancing forward, suddenly became intent, for in one spot a dingy smear thickened the haze. It slowly grew more distinct, and he gave a seaman a quick order before he turned to his companion. "That must be the _Miranda_. You can start your mill as soon as we have launched the dinghy." By the time the boat was in the water the steamer had crept out of the mist. She came on fast: a small, two-masted vessel, with a white wave beneath her full bows and a cloud of brown smoke trailing across the sea astern. She was light, floating high above the water, which washed up and down her wet side as she rolled. A few heads projected over the iron bulwark near the break of the forecastle, and two men in duck stood on the bridge. Studying them through the glasses, Grahame saw they had an unkempt appearance, and he was not prepossessed in favor of the one whom he took to be the captain. He rang the telegraph, and when the engines stopped he jumped into the dinghy with Walthew and one of the seamen. Five minutes later, they ceased rowing close to the steamer's side, which towered high above them, red with rust along the water-line. The black paint was scarred and peeling higher up, the white deckhouses and boats had grown dingy, and there was about her a poverty-stricken look. The boat swung sharply up and down a few lengths away, for the sea broke about the descending rows of iron plates as the vessel rolled. "_Enchantress_, ahoy!" shouted one of the men on her bridge. "This is the _Miranda_. S'pose you're ready for us?" "We've been ready for you since last night," Grahame replied. "Then you might have got your gig over. We can't dump the stuff into that cockleshell." "You can't," Grahame agreed. "The gig's hardly big enough either, and I won't risk her alongside in the swell that's running." "Then what do you expect me to do? Wait until it's smooth?" "No," said Grahame; "we'll have wind soon. You'll have to take her in behind the reef, as your owners arranged. It's not far off and you'll find good anchorage in six fathoms." "And lose a day! What do you think your few cases are worth to us?" "The freight agreed upon," Grahame answered coolly. "You can't collect it until you hand our cargo over. I'll take you in behind the reef and bring you out in three or four hours. There'll be a good moon." The skipper seemed to consult with the man beside him, and then waved his hand. "All right! Go ahead with your steamer and show us the way." "I'd better come on board," Grahame answered. "It's an awkward place to get into, but I know it well." A colored seaman threw them down a rope ladder, and, pulling in cautiously, Grahame waited until the rolling hull steadied, when he jumped. Walthew followed, and in a few moments they stood on the _Miranda's_ deck. Walthew had been wakened when the boat was launched, and he had not had much time to dress, but he wore a fairly clean duck jacket over his coaly shirt. His bare feet were thrust into greasy slippers, and smears of oil darkened the hollows round his eyes. One or two slouching deckhands watched the new arrivals with dull curiosity, and a few more were busy forward opening the hatch. Grahame thought the vessel a rather unfavorable specimen of the small, cheaply run tramp, but when he reached the hatch the skipper came up. He was a little man with a bluff manner, a hard face, and cunning eyes. "They'll have the cover off in a minute and you can see your stuff," he said, and called to a man with a lantern: "Stand by with the light!" When the tarpaulin was rolled back, Grahame went down with a mate and counted the wooden cases pointed out to him. After this, he examined their marks and numbers and, going up, declared himself satisfied. "Now," said the skipper, "you can take us in; the sooner the better, because it will be dark before long. Would you like a drink before you start?" Grahame said that he would wait until he had finished his work. He followed the skipper to the bridge, and rang the telegraph. The _Miranda_ went ahead, her propeller hurling up the foam as it flapped round with half the blades out of the water, while the _Enchantress_ crept slowly up her froth-streaked wake. Grahame, standing at the wheel-house door, was glad that Walthew had come with him, although this reduced his vessel's crew. Macallister, however, was capable of managing his engines without assistance, for a time, and could be trusted to take charge of the _Enchantress_ if necessary, for Grahame did not think the hands would give him trouble. One was a Canary Spaniard, whom they had picked up at Matanzas, a very simple and, Grahame thought, honest fellow; the other three were stupid but apparently good-humored half-breeds. Grahame would have preferred white seamen but for the danger of their getting into trouble in parts where wine was cheap and perhaps betraying the object of the voyage in drunken boasts. His business would not bear talking about--and that was why he distrusted the _Miranda's_ captain. The moon rose before the short twilight had changed to dark, and the steamer moved on across the dimly glittering sea, until a long white line grew plainer ahead. As they drew near, the line could be seen to waver, gaining breadth and distinctness and then fading, while a dull roar which had a regular beat in it mingled with the thud of the engines. Though the _Miranda_ rolled and plunged, the surface of the water was smooth as oil, and in the deep calm the clamor of the surf had an ominous sound. Then another white patch appeared to starboard, and a few moments later, a third to port. The captain was pacing up and down his bridge. "It's a puzzling light," he said, stopping near Grahame with a frown. "I suppose you do know the place?" "Oh, yes," said Grahame carelessly. "We made a rough survey and took soundings. But slow her down and use your lead if you like." "That's what I mean to do," the captain replied. He rang the telegraph, and when the beat of engines slackened a man stood on a footboard outside the bridge, where a broad canvas belt was fastened round his waist. Whirling the heavy plummet round his head, he let it shoot forward to the break of the forecastle, and steadied the line a moment when it ran vertically up and down. "By the deep, eight!" he called. "Starboard!" said Grahame, and there was silence except for the rumble of the surf, while the quartermaster turned his wheel in the glass-fronted house. In a few minutes the lead plunged down again. "By the mark, seven!" was announced. The captain gave Grahame a quick glance, and then looked ahead, where there was something to occupy him, for at regular intervals the sea was torn apart and a spout of foam and a cloud of spray shot up. Moreover, the vessel was heading directly toward the dangerous spot. It was not needful for Grahame to take her so close as he meant to do, but he had reasons for letting the nearness of the reef appeal to the captain's imagination. "And a quarter six!" the leadsman called. The captain grasped the telegraph. "If you mean to go any closer, I'll stop her and back out!" he said. "Then you can tranship your goods outside or I'll take them on, as you like." "We can let her come round now," Grahame answered, and beckoned to the quartermaster. "Starboard. Steady at that!" The _Miranda_ swung until the frothy confusion on the reef, where the swell broke in cascades of phosphorescent flame, bore abeam, and then a similar troubled patch grew plain on the opposite bow. There was, however, a smooth, dark strip between, and she followed it, shouldering off a spangled wash, with the propeller beating slow. Ahead, a low, hazy blur rose out of the sea, and when Grahame spoke to the captain the windlass began to clank and indistinct figures became busy on the forecastle. Then a gray strip of sand came into sight, and Grahame nodded to the anxious captain. "You can let go here, but don't give her much cable." The anchor splashed from the bows, there was a roar of running chain, the throb of the screw slowly turning astern, and a screaming of startled birds. She brought up, the noise died away, and the silence was emphasized by the clamor of the surf on the opposite shore of the key. The captain looked about with a frown, for the desolation of the spot and the nearness of the reefs had their effect on him. "Hail them to get your gig over at once, and then we'll have a drink," he said. Macallister answered Grahame's shout, for the _Enchantress_ had anchored close astern, and the boat was hanging from her davits when he followed the captain into his room. The vessels rolled lazily and the swell broke with a languid splash upon the beach, for the bight was sheltered by the reefs. The small room was lighted by an oil lamp and was very hot. A pilot coat, damp with salt, and a suit of oilskins swung to and fro across the bulkhead, and a pair of knee-boots stood in a corner. Two or three bad photographic portraits were tacked against the teakwood paneling, but except for these, all that the room contained suggested stern utility. Unlocking a cupboard, the captain took a bottle and some glasses from a rack, and Walthew coughed as he tasted the fiery spirit. "That's powerful stuff, but the flavor's good," he said with an attempt at politeness. A big, greasy man who the captain informed the others was Mr. James, his chief engineer, came in. He sat down with his feet on the locker, and helped himself liberally to the spirits. In the meanwhile the captain put an inkstand on the small folding table. "You have the bill of lading; endorse it that you've got delivery, and I'll give you a receipt for the freight." Grahame glanced at Walthew, who sat nearest the door, and the lad looked out. "The gig's alongside, ready for the cases," he said. "We'll heave them up as soon as we've finished this business," the captain replied. Grahame wrote a check and put it on the table with some American paper currency. "Your owners have satisfied themselves that this will be met; I thought I'd better keep the other amount separate." "That's all right," the captain returned; "but you're a hundred dollars short." "I guess you're mistaken," Walthew said. "We've paid the freight, and a bonus to yourself, as we promised because it was an awkward job. What else do you want?" "A bonus for the engineer," the greasy mechanic answered with a grin. "Precisely," said the captain. "Then I'm afraid you'll be disappointed," Grahame said, and Walthew picked up the check, which still lay on the table. There was silence for a few moments while the _Miranda's_ officers looked hard at their visitors. Grahame's face was impassive, but there was a gleam of amusement in Walthew's eyes. "Now, you listen to me," said the captain. "Mr. James is entitled to his share, and he means to get it. You don't suppose he'd take a hand in a risky job like this entirely for the benefit of the owners?" "Mr. James," said Walthew, "runs no risk that I can see. However, if you think he has a right to something, you can divide with him." "No, sir! What you have given me is mine. But there's another point you've overlooked. The crew expect a few dollars, and it might be wise to satisfy them." Grahame smiled. "They certainly struck me as a hard crowd; but seamen don't rob cargo-shippers nowadays. Then it's difficult to imagine that you told them what's in the cases. In fact, the way they obeyed your mate suggested that there's not much liking between men and officers on board this packet. If there was any trouble, I don't know that they'd take your side." The captain frowned; and James drained his glass again and then struck the table. "Think something of yourselves, I reckon, but we've come out on top with smarter folks than you. Put down your money like gentlemen, and say no more." "It's good advice," the captain added meaningly. "Guess we disagree," Walthew said, putting the check into his pocket. "You haven't got your freight payment yet." "Do you think you can keep that check?" "Well," said Walthew coolly, "we could cable the bank to stop payment from the nearest port. For that matter, I'm not certain that you could take it back." "We're willing to try," the big engineer scowled. "And you don't get the goods until we're satisfied," the captain added. "May I ask what you would do with the cases? They're consigned to us, and you'd have some trouble in passing them through a foreign customs house. They open things and inspect the contents when the duty's high." "We could dump them overboard. Better do the fair thing by us and get delivery." "I don't think we're unfair," Walthew replied. "We engaged with your owners to pay a stipulated freight, and added a bonus for the skipper. Now we put down the money and want our goods." "The winch that heaves them up doesn't start without my order," James said with an ugly laugh. Grahame turned to the captain with a gesture of weariness. "We don't seem to get much farther! I suspect you've forgotten something. How much a day does it cost you to run this ship?" "What has that got to do with it?" the captain asked curtly. "Well," said Grahame coolly, "there's a risk of your stopping here for some time. It's an awkward place to get out of unless you know it well; particularly when it's blowing fresh. The Northers hardly reach so far, but they unsettle the weather, and when the wind's from seaward a strong eddy stream runs through the bight. Perhaps you may have noticed that the glass is falling fast." The captain looked disturbed; but he was not to be beaten so easily. "You don't get back on board your boat until you've taken us out!" he threatened. "I can take you out to-night, but if you miss your chance and have to wait we can afford it best. Our expenses aren't heavy, but you'll have to account to your owners for the delay that won't cost us much. Besides, you'd be forced to keep steam up in case she dragged; it's bad holding ground." There was silence for a few moments, and then the captain made a sign of surly acquiescence. "Very well; we won't argue about the bonus. Give me the check." "I think we'll wait until the cases are transhipped," Walthew said with a smile. "Give them steam for the winch, Mr. James," the captain ordered; and the engineer slouched away. The winch began to rattle and an hour or two later Grahame went up to the bridge while the anchor was broken out. When the men were stowing it the engines throbbed and the _Miranda_ turned her head toward open water. In another half hour the propeller stopped and the captain turned to his guests with a grin as the _Enchantress's_ gig came alongside. "I expect the dagoes you're shipping those rifles for will find you hard to beat," he said. CHAPTER VII MANGROVE CREEK There was not a ripple on the sea when the _Enchantress_, steaming slowly, closed with the coast. The glittering water broke with a drowsy murmur at her bows and turned from silver to a deep blue in the shadow of the hull; her wake was marked by silky whirls on the back of the swell. It was four o'clock in the afternoon, the sea flung back a dazzling light, and Grahame's eyes ached as he searched the approaching land with his glasses. Far back, blue mountains loomed through haze and the foreground was blurred and dim. One could not tell where the low expanse began or ended, though a broad, dark fringe, which Grahame knew was forest, conveyed some idea of distance. In one or two spots, a streak of white indicated surf upon a point, but the picture was flooded with a glare in which separate objects lost distinctness. Blue and gray and silver melted into one another without form or salient line. Grahame put down the glasses and turned to the seaman near him. Miguel was getting old, but his tall figure was strong, and he stood, finely posed, with a brown hand on the wheel. His face was rugged, but he had clear, blue eyes that met one with a curious child-like gaze. He was barefooted and his thin cotton trousers and canvas jacket were spotlessly clean, though Grahame imagined he had made the latter out of a piece of old awning they had meant to throw away. "You come from the Canaries, don't you, Miguel?" Grahame asked in Castilian. "It is not so hot there." "From San Sebastian, señor, where the trade-breeze blows and the date-palms grow. My house stands among the tuna-figs beside the mule-track to the mountains." "Then you have a house? Who takes care of it while you are away?" "My señora. She packs the tomatoes they send to England. It is hard work and one earns a peseta a day." "Then why did you leave her?" Grahame asked, for he knew that a peseta, which is equal to about twenty cents, will not buy much of the coarse maize-flour the Canary peasants live upon. "There came a great tempest, and when my three boats were wrecked something must be done. My sons were drawn for the navy; they had no money to send. For years, señor, I was captain of a schooner fishing _bacalao_ on the African coast, and when I came home to catch tunny for the Italian factory things went very well. Then the gale swept down from the peaks one night and in the morning the boats were matchwood on the reef." "Ah!" said Grahame. He could sympathize, for he too had faced what at the time had seemed to be overwhelming disaster. "So you sailed to look for better fortune somewhere else? You hope to go back to San Sebastian some day?" "If my saint is kind. But perhaps it is well that he is a very great angel, for fortune is not always found when one looks for it at sea." There was no irony in Miguel's answer; his manner was quietly dignified. Indeed, though he had been taught nothing except rudimentary seamanship, he had the bearing of a fine gentleman. "Wages are good in English and American ships," Grahame resumed, feeling that he was guilty of impertinence. "Sometimes you are able to send the señora a few dollars?" "I send all but a little to buy clothes when I go where it is cold, and my señora buries the money to buy another boat if it is permitted that I return. Once or twice a year comes a letter, written by the priest, and I keep it until I find a man who can read it to me." Grahame was touched. There was something pathetic in the thought of this untaught exile's patiently carrying the precious letters until he met somebody who could read his language. "Well," he said, "if things go well with us, you will get a bonus besides your wages, which should make it easier for you to go home. But you understand there is danger in what we may have to do." Miguel smiled. "Señor, there is always danger on the sea." Grahame turned and saw Walthew standing in the engine-room door. He wore dirty overalls and a singlet torn open at the neck, there was a smear of oil across his face, and his hands were black and scarred. "What on earth have you been doing?" Grahame asked. "Lying on my back for two hours, trying to put a new packing in the gland of a pump." "Well, who would have predicted a year ago that you would be amusing yourself this way now!" Walthew laughed. "Do you know where we are?" he asked. "I imagine we're not far off the creek; in fact, we might risk making the signal smoke. It will be dark enough to head inshore in a few hours." "Then we'll get to work with the fires," said Walthew, promptly disappearing below. Soon afterward, a dense black cloud rose from the funnel and, trailing away behind the _Enchantress_, spread across the sky. Grahame knew that it might be seen by unfriendly watchers, but other steamers sometimes passed the point for which he was steering. After a while he signaled for less steam, and only a faint, widening ripple marked the _Enchantress's_ passage through the water as she closed obliquely with the land. It was still blurred, and in an hour Grahame stopped the engines and took a cast of the lead. Dark would come before long, when, if they had reached the right spot, signals would be made. In the meanwhile it would be imprudent to venture nearer. Walthew and one of the seamen set out a meal on deck and when it was eaten they lounged on the stern grating, smoking and waiting. There was dangerous work before them; and, to make things worse, it must be done in the dark, because the moon now shone in the daytime. It was very hot, and a steamy, spicy smell drifted off the coast, which grew less distinct as the darkness settled down. A faint rumble of surf reached them from an unseen beach, rising and falling with a rhythm in it. The black smoke had been stopped and thin gray vapor rose straight up from the funnel. The quietness and the suspense began to react upon the men's nerves; they felt impatient and highly strung, but they talked as carelessly as they could. Then in the quietness the roar of the sea on sandy shoals reached them ominously clear. Grahame glanced shoreward, but could see nothing, for the sun had gone and a thin mist was spreading across the low littoral. "We're drifting inshore," he said. "As soon as I get four fathoms we'll steam out. Try a cast of the lead." Walthew swung the plummet and they heard it strike the sea. "Half a fathom to the good," he called as he coiled up the wet line. Then he stopped, looking toward the land. "What's that?" he said. "Yonder, abreast of the mast?" A twinkling light appeared in the mist and grew brighter. "A fire, I think," Grahame answered quietly. "Still, one's not enough." A second light began to glimmer, and soon another farther on. Macallister chuckled. "Ye're a navigator. Our friends are ready. I've seen many a worse landfall made by highly-trained gentlemen with a big mail company's buttons." "A lucky shot; but you had better stand by below. Start her easy." He blew three blasts on the whistle, and the fires went out while the _Enchantress_ moved slowly shoreward through the gloom. Miguel held the wheel and Grahame stood near by, watching the half-breed who swung the lead. Presently another light twinkled, and, listening hard, Grahame heard the splash of paddles. Stopping the engines, he waited until a low, gray object crept out of the mist and slid toward the steamer's side. Ropes were thrown and when the canoe was made fast the first of the men who came up ceremoniously saluted Grahame. "You bring the goods all right?" he asked. "They're ready. If it makes no difference, I'd rather wait until to-morrow before delivering them. I understand the beach is mostly mangrove swamp, and it's a dark night to take the steamer up the creek." "To-morrow she be seen; the coast is watch by spy," said the other in his quaint English; then indicated his companion. "Dese man he takes her anywhere." Grahame hesitated. Secrecy was essential, and if he waited for daylight and was seen by watchers who had noticed the smoke in the afternoon he might not have an opportunity for landing another cargo. For all that, knowing nothing about his pilot's skill, he imagined he ran some risk of grounding if he took the steamer in. Risks, however, could not be avoided. "Very well," he decided. "Send him to the wheel." He kept the lead going as the _Enchantress_ crept forward, and was relieved to find that the water got no shallower. It looked as if the pilot were following a channel, for the wash of the sea on hidden shoals began to rise from both sides. Except for this and the measured throb of the engines, there was deep silence, but after a while the vessel, which had been rolling gently, grew steady, and Grahame thought he could hear the water she threw off splash upon a beach. He looked about eagerly, but there was nothing to be seen. This creeping past invisible dangers was daunting, but he felt comforted as he glanced at the motionless, dark figure at the helm. The fellow showed no hesitation; it was obvious that he knew his business. Through the darkness low trees loomed up ahead, and shortly afterward another clump abeam. Mist clung about them, there was not much space between, and the absence of any gurgle at the bows indicated that the _Enchantress_ was steaming up the inlet with the tide. The lead showed sufficient water, but Grahame had misgivings, for the creek seemed to be getting narrower. It was, however, too late to turn back; he must go on and trust to luck. Some time later a light appeared among the trees, and the pilot ordered the engines to be stopped. Then he pulled the helm over and waved his hand as the _Enchantress_ swung inshore. "_La ancla!_" he cried. "Let her go!" There was a splash and a sharp rattle of chain, and when the _Enchantress_ stopped the beat of paddles came out of the gloom. Then the cargo-lamp was lighted and in a few minutes a group of men climbed on board. Some were dusky half-breeds, but two or three seemed to be of pure Spanish extraction. Grahame took these below, where they carefully examined the cases. When they were satisfied they followed him to the deck-cabin, and Walthew brought them some wine. One man gave Grahame a check on an American bank, and shortly afterward the work of getting up the cargo began. Everybody became suddenly busy. Shadowy figures dragged the cases about the shallow hold and fixed the slings. Dark-skinned men, dripping with perspiration, slackened guys and swung the derrick-boom while canoes crept into the light of the cargo-lamp and vanished, loaded, into the dark. The stir lasted for some time, and then, after the cases had all been hoisted over the side, the white men among the shore party shook hands with their hosts. "It is all right," said the spokesman. "We are ready for the next lot when you get back." "I suppose your man will be here in the morning to take us out?" Grahame asked, because he had been told that it was too late to leave the creek that tide. "If nothing is happen, he certainly come." The visitors got on board their canoe, and it slid off into the mist. When the splash of paddles died away, an oppressive silence settled down on the vessel, and the darkness seemed very thick, for the big cargo-lamp had been put out. After the keen activity a reaction had set in: the men were tired and felt the heat. "It's lonesome," Macallister remarked, and sniffed disgustedly. "Like a hothouse in a botanic garden when they've full steam on, with a dash o' Glasgow sewer thrown in. In fact, ye might call the atmosphere a wee bit high." "I don't suppose you found it very fresh in West Africa," Walthew replied. "I did not. That's maybe the reason the ague grips me noo and then. Ye'll learn something about handling engines when it takes me bad. This is a verra insidious smell." "The mosquitos are worse," Grahame said. "I wonder whether there are many of them about? Anyway, I'd like a warp taken out and made fast to the trees. There's not much room to swing, and though the flood generally runs harder than the ebb in these places, one can't count on that." Walthew got into the boat with Miguel and one of the crew, and came back half an hour later, smeared with mire and wet to the waist. "We've made the rope fast, but this creek has no beach," he said. "The trees grow out of the water, and you slip off their roots into holes filled with slime. Couldn't feel any bottom in one or two, and I was mighty glad I caught a branch. In fact, we've had a rather harrowing experience." "Get your wet clothes off and take some quinine before you go to sleep," Grahame advised; and when Walthew left him he watched the men heave the warp tight. Soon afterward the crew went below, except for one who kept anchor-watch. The ebb tide was running strong, and Grahame was not quite satisfied about the way the vessel was moored. It was, however, impossible to make her more secure in the dark, and, getting sleepy presently, he left his seat on the stern grating and went to his berth. CHAPTER VIII THE TRAITOR Grahame was awakened by a crash. Springing half asleep from his berth, he scrambled out on deck. Thick darkness enveloped the steamer and at first he could see nothing. Then as his eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, he made out indistinct black trees in the mist. They were sliding past and he knew the warp had broken and the _Enchantress_ would swing inshore before her cable brought her up. This must be prevented, if possible, for the creek was narrow and shoal. Jumping on the stern grating he gave his orders, and they were obeyed. He saw Macallister, in pajamas, dive into the engine-room, and the screw began to throb; then barefooted men sprang into the boat alongside, and a heavy rope ran out across the rail. There was nothing more to be done for a few moments and, lashing the wheel, Grahame hurriedly lighted a pyrotechnic flare. The strong blue radiance drove back the gloom, and the water glittered among cakes of floating scum. Then the bright beam picked out the boat, with Walthew toiling, half-naked, at an oar, and Miguel's tall figure bending to and fro as he sculled astern. Another man was rowing forward, and his tense pose told of determined effort, but he vanished as the light moved on. The rope the crew were taking out fixed Grahame's attention. It crawled through the water in heavy coils, like a snake, holding the boat back while the stream swept her sideways. He did not think she could reach the opposite bank, though the _Enchantress_ was sheering that way to help her. Then the light forced up a patch of greasy mud in which crawling things wriggled, and, passing on, picked out foul, dark caves among the mangrove roots. After that, it touched the rows of slender trunks and was lost in impenetrable gloom. A few moments later the flare, burning low, scorched Grahame's fingers and he flung it over the rail. It fell with a hiss into the creek and bewildering darkness shut down. There was now no guide but the strain on the helm, and Grahame began to be afraid of breaking out the anchor. For a time the splash of oars continued, telling of the tense struggle that went on in the gloom, but it stopped suddenly and he knew the men were beaten. Ringing off the engines, he ran forward with a deckhand to drop the kedge anchor. It was heavy, an arm was foul of something, and they could not drag it clear, until a dim object appeared close by. "Heave!" cried a breathless voice. "Handy, noo! Away she goes!" There was a splash and a rattle as the chain ran out, a thud as the returning boat came alongside, and then the vessel quivered, listed down on one side, and became motionless. "I'm thinking she's hard and fast, but we'll try to shake her off," Macallister said and vanished, and soon the engines began to turn. The _Enchantress_ trembled, straining hard and rattling, but when somebody lighted the cargo-lamp, which still hung from a boom, it could not be seen that she moved. The light showed a narrow stretch of water, sliding past, blotched with foul brown foam. Then it fell upon the boat's crew, who had come on board, and Grahame saw that Walthew was gasping for breath. His flushed face was wet and drawn with effort, and his bare arms and neck were marked by small red spots. "Sorry we couldn't manage to reach the bank," he panted. "Warp kept getting across her and the stream was running fast. But I'd better help Mack." "Sit still a minute," Grahame said. "What are those marks on your neck?" "Mosquito bites, I guess. Hadn't time to swat the brutes; they were pretty fierce." The deck was now slanting steeply, and Grahame, looking over the rail, saw a wet strip a foot broad between the dry planks and the water. "You can tell Mack to shut off steam," he said. "She's here until next tide and I'm not certain we can float her then." The engines stopped, there was by contrast a curious stillness, and the men went below; but Grahame spent some time studying a chart of the coast and a nautical almanac before he went to sleep. * * * * * When the cases had been safely landed, the little group of Spaniards and half-breeds separated, some following the coastline going south, others finding a narrow path that led through the jungle beyond the mangrove-trees. Bio, the peon pilot, lingered behind. There was no moon, but the night was not really dark, for the sky was jeweled with stars which covered the earth with a soft, mystic radiance. When the footsteps of the others had died away and the night was quiet, Bio started slowly down the jungle path. It opened out into a flat stretch of sandy land and then was lost in a plantation of coffee-trees. Beyond the coffee plantation was an uncultivated space known to the natives as _La colina del sol_ (The Hill of the Sun) because of the many broad rocks upon which the sun beat down in all its intensity. Here and there a wild date-palm grew, and an occasional clump of bananas; but except for that the hill was covered with low shrubbery and a blanket of trailing vines, which now were wet with the dew. Bio went directly to one of the rocks and stood upon it looking upward at the stars. The warmth that still remained in the rock was pleasant to his damp, bare feet. The air about him was filled with the soft flutter of moths and other honey-seekers; the heavy perfume of a white jasmine came to him, mingled with the sweet odor of the night-blooming cereus. At his side an insect chirped, and above him a whistling frog gave answer. These wild night sounds found quick response in Bio's Indian blood. With an odd little smile of content, he stretched out on the rock to listen--and to sleep. At high tide he would have to return to take the boat out of Mangrove Creek; what better place to wait than _La colina del sol_? He awakened shortly after daybreak, very hungry; but he knew where he could get a pleasant breakfast before returning to the boat. With a comfortable yawn and stretch, he left the rock and pattered off down the hill to a path that led to the main road. A half mile down this stood a little adobe house owned by a Spaniard who was suspected of sympathizing with the revolutionists although he had many friends among the _rurales_. When Bio reached the house he gave his customary signal--a stick drawn harshly across the iron gratings at the window; and the door was soon opened by Filodomo himself. A hasty conversation followed, and Bio went back to the kitchen while Filodomo aroused his daughter. And when the black-eyed Rosita came tripping out, with the flush of sleep still on her, Bio all but forgot the _yanqui_ señores and their boat which waited in Mangrove Creek. He was enjoying his breakfast so much, indeed, that he did not hear Filodomo talking loudly in the front room. Rosita was more alert. She paused a moment to listen, and then the laughter in her eyes changed to quick alarm. "_Los rurales!_" she whispered. Bio was on his feet instantly. The _rurales_ had several counts against him, and he knew what his life would be worth if he were caught. Rosita, too, seemed to know. She led him quickly to the low window and pointed to a narrow path that led through a field of cane. Bio lost no time. As he disappeared among the green stalks, the girl gave a sigh of relief; and then hurried into the front room to put the _rurales_ off his path. Bio made his way quickly but cautiously through the cane-field, meaning to double back to _La colina del sol_; but as he left the cane and rounded a gigantic calabash-tree he ran directly into the arms of two young _rurales_. "Not so fast, my friend," said one of them, grabbing him. "Bio!" exclaimed the other. And Bio knew there was no hope of escape. The _rurales_ were only too eager for the credit of capturing him and taking him to headquarters. Four days later he found himself in a military camp and was led at once to the officer in charge. During all the questions of the _rurales_ he had maintained a sullen silence; but now he was forced to speak. "We are told that the revolutionists are getting rifles from a little boat that lands them at impossible places," the officer said. "Only a pilot with your knowledge of the coast could bring in such a boat. Tell us what you know!" Bio did not answer. The officer leaned forward threateningly. "We have enough charges against you to warrant our shooting you on the spot," he said. "You will never see another sunrise, unless you tell us--and tell us quickly, and truthfully!" A gleam of hope crept into Bio's eyes. "And if I tell you--all?" "Then, if I believe you, you will be set at liberty." There was a sneer in the conditional clause that made Bio's blood run cold for an instant; but it seemed his only chance of escape, and he began haltingly but in a tone that they could not doubt was the truth. "I left the boat far up in Mangrove Creek," he ended. "I think the _yanqui_ señores cannot take her out." "Tell Morales to have the mules ready at once!" the officer ordered. "The quickest road?" he asked Bio. The pilot answered without faltering. The road he told them was twice as far as over _La colina del sol_ and through the jungle path. The officer consulted a few moments with the _rurales_ who had brought Bio in, and then gave his decision. "My men will not need you. You will be held in camp for one day and then set at liberty. I am a man of my word!" Bio could hardly believe his good luck, although he frowned anxiously at that one day's detention. Silently he followed his guards; but, as he expected, he found them very lax after the first hour or two. Long before midnight he was snaking his way noiselessly through the underbrush that surrounded the camp. And in the meantime the _rurales_ were riding furiously along the road that led to Mangrove Creek. CHAPTER IX STRANDED The sun was high above the mangroves when Walthew joined Grahame and Macallister at breakfast the morning after they landed the rifles. No wind entered the gap in the forest, the smoke went straight up from the slanted funnel, and the air was still and sour. The steamer lay nearly dry among banks of mire, though a narrow strip of dazzling water sluggishly flowed inland past her. Fifty yards outshore, there was a broader channel and beyond it the dingy, pale-stemmed mangroves rose like a wall. Some were strangely spotted, and Walthew glanced at them with disgust as he drank his coffee. "I guess I've never seen such repulsive trees," he said. "This place takes away one's appetite. Even the coffee's bitter; you've been doctoring it." "It's weel to take precautions," Macallister replied. "Ye got a few nibbles last night from a dangerous bit beastie they ca' _anopheles_." "I suppose it doesn't manufacture the malaria germ, and from the looks of the place one wouldn't imagine there was anybody else about for it to bite." "That's what we're hoping. We're no' anxious for visitors, but when ye meet a smell like what we noo enjoy, ye take quinine till it makes ye hear church bells ringing in your head." Walthew turned to Grahame. "Can you get her off?" "We'll try. The sooner we get out the better; but the tides are falling." "Do you reckon the half-breed pilot meant to pile her up?" "No," said Grahame thoughtfully. "For one thing, it would be a dangerous game, because his employers wouldn't hesitate about knifing him. They gave us a check which I've reason to believe will be honored and they wouldn't have wasted their money if they'd meant treachery. I imagine they're all too deep in the plot to turn informer." "Do you think the pilot will turn up to take us out then?" "I believe he'll be here at high-water, unless he's prevented." "What could prevent him?" "It's possible that our friends have been followed by the opposition's spies. The man who rules this country is not a fool." "Then it seems to me we must do our best to heave the boat off this tide." "Mack and I agree with you," Grahame said meaningly. Breakfast was soon finished, for nobody had much appetite, and they sat, smoking, in the thin shade while the water got deeper in the creek. When the _Enchantress_ slowly rose upright, Macallister went down to stir the fires; but though the others listened anxiously no splash of paddles broke the silence. "Our pilot's not coming," Grahame said at last. "I'll try to take her out if we can get her afloat." "What's likely to happen to him if he's been corralled by the dictator's rural-guards?" "On the whole," said Grahame, "I'd rather not speculate. They have a drastic way of dealing with rebels here." An hour later the screw shook the vessel, while the windlass strained at the cable. Once or twice a few links of chain ran in and she moved, but the mud had a firm hold and she stuck fast again. Then the water began to fall and Grahame reluctantly told Macallister to draw the fires. "We're here for the next six days," he said. "It's to be hoped the Government's spies don't find us out before we get her off," Walthew remarked. "We could put the coal and heavier stores ashore, if ye can find a bit dry beach to land them on," Macallister suggested. "It would lighten her." "I thought of that," Grahame answered. "On the other hand, it might be safer to keep them on board as long as possible. We could strip her and land everything in a day." Macallister agreed, and for four days they lounged in such shade as they could find. It was fiercely hot, not a breath of wind touched the dazzling creek, and the sun burned through the awning. The pitch bubbled up from the deck-seams, the water in the tanks was warm, and innumerable flies came off from the mangroves and bit the panting men. To make things worse, there was no coolness after sunset, when steamy mist wrapped the vessel in its folds, bloodthirsty mosquitos came down in swarms, buzzing insects dimmed the lamps, and the smell of festering mire grew nauseating. Sleep was out of the question, and when the mosquitos drove them off the deck the men lay in their stifling berths and waited drearily for another day of misery to begin. Among other discomforts, Walthew, who was not seasoned to the climate, was troubled by a bad headache and pains in his limbs, but he said nothing about this and accompanied Grahame when the latter took the soundings in the dinghy. At last they rose at daybreak one morning to lighten the vessel, and although he felt shaky and suffered from a burning thirst, Walthew took charge of the gig, which was to be used for landing coal. The work was hard, for when they reached a sand bar up the creek they were forced to wade some distance through mud and shallow water with the heavy bags on their backs, while the perspiration soaked their thin clothes and the black dust worked through to their skin. At noon they stopped for half an hour and Walthew lay in the stern-sheets of the gig where there was a patch of shade. He could not eat, and after drinking some tea tried to smoke, but the tobacco tasted rank and he put his pipe away. Up to the present his life had been luxurious. He had been indulged and waited on, and had exerted himself only in outdoor sports. Now he felt very sick and worn out, but knew that he must make good. Having declined to enter his father's business, he must prove his capacity for the career he had chosen. Moreover, he suspected that Macallister and Grahame were watching him. When the clatter of the winch began again he hid the effort it cost him to resume his task and stubbornly pulled his oar as the gig floated up the creek with her gunwale near awash. His back hurt him almost unbearably when he lifted a heavy bag, and it was hard to keep upon his feet while he floundered through the mire. Sometimes his head reeled and he could scarcely see. The blisters on his hands had worked into bleeding sores. This, however, did not matter much by comparison with the pain in his head. After the coal was landed they loaded loose ironwork and towed heavy spars ashore, and Walthew held out somehow until darkness fell, when he paddled back to the _Enchantress_ with a swarm of mosquitos buzzing round his face. He could not eat when they sat down to a frugal meal, and afterward lay in his berth unable to sleep, and yet not quite awake, lost in confused thoughts that broke off and left him conscious of intolerable heat and pain. When he went languidly on deck the next morning Grahame looked hard at him. "You had better lie down in the shade," he said. "I may let up when we reach open water," Walthew answered with a feeble smile. "There's not much enjoyment to be got out of a lay-off here." Grahame reluctantly agreed. He knew something about malaria and Walthew did not look fit for work; but every man was needed, and this foul swamp was no place to be ill. The sooner they got out the better. Steam was up when the _Enchantress_ rose with the tide, and shortly afterward the engines began to throb. Muddy foam leaped about the whirling screw, flame mingled with the smoke that poured from her funnel, and steam roared from the blow-off pipe. Then the clatter of winch and windlass joined in, and Grahame stood, tense and anxious, holding a rope that slipped round the spinning drum. The winch could not shorten it, though the vessel was shaking and working in her muddy bed. It was high-water, the tide would soon begin to fall, and the sweat of suspense and strain dripped from the man as, at the risk of breaking the warp, he tightened the turns on the drum. It gripped; to his surprise, a little slack came off, and he nodded to Walthew, who was watching him eagerly from the windlass. "Give her all, if you burst the chain!" he cried. The windlass clanked for a few moments, stopped, and clanked again; the _Enchantress_ trembled and crept a foot or two ahead. Then she stuck while the cable rose from the water, rigid as a bar, and the messenger-chain that drove the windlass creaked and strained at breaking tension. While Grahame expected to see links and gear-wheels fly, there was a long shiver through the vessel's frame, a mad rattle of liberated machinery, and she leaped ahead. Five minutes later Walthew walked shakily aft, scarcely seeing where he went because a confused sense of triumph had brought a mist into his dazzled eyes. This was the first big thing in which he had taken a leading part. He had made good and played the man; but there was still much to be done and he pulled himself together as he stopped near Grahame. "She's moored where she won't ground again, but perhaps you had better see that the chain-compressors and warp fastenings are right." "If you're satisfied, it's enough," said Grahame. "Then I'll take the gig and get the coal on board." "If you feel equal to it," Grahame answered. Walthew got into the boat with a sense of elation. His eyes had met Grahame's while they spoke, and a pledge of mutual respect and trust had passed between them. But this was not quite all. He felt he had won official recognition from a leader he admired; he was no longer on trial but accepted as a comrade and equal. The thought sustained him through a day of murderous toil, during which his worn-out muscles needed constant spurring by the unconquered mind. It was not dainty and, in a sense, not heroic work in which he was engaged, but it must be done, and he dimly saw that human nature rose highest in a grapple with obstacles that seemed too great to overcome. Whatever the odds against him were, he must not be beaten. The heat was pitiless in the afternoon, but Walthew pulled his oar and carried the hundred-pound coal bags across a stretch of mire that grew broader as the tide ebbed. He could scarcely pull his feet out and keep the load upon his aching back, and he sometimes sank knee-deep in the softer spots. The air was heavy with exhalations from the swamps; he had thrown off his jacket and the coal wore holes in his shirt and rubbed raw places on his skin. He was wet from the waist downward and black above, while the gritty dust filled his eyes and nostrils. Still he held out until the work was finished, when the _Enchantress's_ cargo-light began to twinkle through the dusk; and then, losing his balance, he fell forward into the boat with his last heavy load. Miguel pushed her off, and with oars splashing slackly she moved downstream. When she ran alongside the steamer, Grahame saw a limp, black figure lying huddled on the floorings. The others lifted it gently, but Walthew did not speak when he was laid on deck, and Macallister, bending over him, looked up at Grahame. "Fever and exhaustion! I allow that ye were right about the lad. But we must do the best we can for him." They washed off the coal-dust, and when Walthew, wrapped in thick blankets, lay unconscious in his berth, they debated earnestly over the medicine chest before administering a dose that experience in the unhealthy swamps of the tropics alone justified. They forced it, drop by drop, between his clenched teeth, and then Macallister waited with a grimy finger on his pulse, while Grahame sat down limply on the edge of the berth. His hands were bruised, his thin clothes were torn, and he felt the reaction after the day's strain. He had now an hour or two in which to rest, and then he must pull himself together to take the vessel down the creek. When at last Macallister nodded, as if satisfied, Grahame went wearily up on deck. Except for a faint hiss of steam, everything was quiet. Tired men lay motionless about the deck, and the mist that clung to the mangroves did not stir. After a while the lap of the flood-tide against the planks made itself heard, and the moon, which was getting large, rose above the trees. Grahame, sitting limply on the grating, half dozing while he waited, suddenly jumped to his feet, startled. Out of the semi-darkness came distinctly the splash of oars, faint at first and then nearer. Miguel lay nearest him. The Spaniard, quickly grasping the danger, shook his men awake while Grahame ran below to Macallister. "The government spies!" he said briefly. "Our pilot's turned traitor!" CHAPTER X THE PEON PILOT Grahame and Macallister stood on deck, peering into the moonlit jungle of mangroves. So far as they could judge, there was only one pair of oars making the splashes that had aroused them; but they could hear the blades dig deep into the water with an intense effort that could mean only haste on the part of the boatsman. They waited; and presently the small boat appeared in the moonlight and they saw a single figure, who dropped one oar and crossed himself religiously. "_Gracias a Dios!_" he said. "The pilot!" Macallister gasped. Grahame waited, tense and alert, until the pilot climbed on board. The instant the half-breed touched the deck he began gesticulating wildly and talking so rapidly that Grahame had difficulty in grasping his meaning. Miguel, who was more at home in the peon Spanish, explained--in English, for Macallister's sake. "The government men catch him; make him tell; he escape; take short path--Indian _senda_; get here first. _Soldados_ coming. We hurry!" Miguel had worked himself up to a state of great excitement, and when he finished, his bare feet went pattering off across the deck almost before Grahame could give the order. Tired as the men were, they realized the necessity for haste, and they lost no time in getting under way. There was a clatter in the stokehold as the fires were cleaned, the dinghy crept across the creek, and half-seen men forward hurriedly coiled in a wet rope. Then the boat came back and the windlass rattled while the propeller floundered slowly round. The anchor rose to the bows and the _Enchantress_ moved away against the flood tide. The pilot took the wheel while Grahame stood beside him. There were broad, light patches where the water dazzled Grahame's eyes, and then belts of gloom in which the mangroves faded to a formless blur. Still, they did not touch bottom; miry points round which the tide swirled, rotting logs on mud-banks, and misty trees crept astern, and at last they heard the rumble of the swell on beaten sand. She glided on, lifting now and then with a louder gurgle about her planks. When a white beach gleamed in the moonlight where the trees broke off, the _Enchantress_ stopped to land the faithful pilot, who had first betrayed and then saved them. "It was a risky thing he did," Grahame said, as the half-breed, standing easily in his boat, swaying with the rhythm of his oars, rowed off into the moonlight. "Suppose they had caught him coming to us--or with us!" "I'm thinking yon pilot's a bit of a hero," Macallister responded laconically. "Albeit a coward first!" "Oh, it was all for Don Martin's sake that he risked his own hide to warn us. Don Martin has a wonderful hold on those peons. They'd go through fire and water for him." The _Enchantress_ skirted a point where two sentinel cedar-trees stood out blackly against the sky; then the spray leaped about the bows as she dipped to the swell, and the throb of engines quickened as she left the shore behind. * * * * * Two weeks later the _Enchantress_ was steaming across a sea that was flecked with purple shadow and lighted by incandescent foam. Macallister lounged in the engine-room doorway, Grahame sat smoking on a coil of rope, and Walthew, wrapped in a dirty blanket, lay under the awning. His face was hollow, his hair damp and lank, and his hands, with which he was clumsily rolling a cigarette, were very thin. The deck was piled with a load of dyewood, which they had bought rather with the object of accounting for their cruise than for the profit that might be made on it. "It's good to feel alive on a day like this, but I suspect it was doubtful for a time whether I'd have that satisfaction," Walthew remarked languidly. "Guess I owe you both a good deal." They had stubbornly fought the fever that was wasting him away, and had felt that they must be beaten, but Macallister grinned. "I'll no' deny that ye were an interesting case and gave us a chance o' making two or three experiments. As ye seem none the worse for them, ye must be tougher than ye look." "I thought tampering with other people's watches was your specialty." "What's a watch compared with the human body?" Macallister asked. "You do know something about springs and wheels, but it's different with drugs. I expect you gave way to an unholy curiosity to see how they would work." "Maybe there's something in the notion. An engineer canna help wanting to find out how things act. It's a matter o' temperament, and there's no' a great difference between watching the effect o' a new oil on your piston-rings and seeing what happens when a patient swallows your prescription. I'll say this for ye: ye were docile." "I've survived," said Walthew. "From my point of view, that's the most important thing." "And now you had better think about the future," Grahame interposed. "Some people are practically immune from malaria; others get it moderately now and then, and some it breaks down for good. At first it's difficult to tell which class one belongs to, but you have had a sharp attack. There's some risk of your spending the rest of your life as an ague-stricken invalid if you stick to us." "How heavy is the risk?" "Nobody can tell you that, but it's to be reckoned with. I understand that your father would take you back?" "He'd be glad to do so, on his terms," said Walthew thoughtfully. "Still, it's hard to admit that you're beaten, and I suspect the old man would have a feeling that I might have made a better show. He wants me to give in and yet he'd be sorry if I did." "Suppose you go home in twelve months with a profit on the money he gave you?" Grahame suggested. "Then I'm inclined to think he'd welcome me on any terms I cared to make." "Think it over well and leave us out of the question," Grahame said. "You can't be left out," Walthew answered with a gleam in his eyes. "But I'll wait until I feel better. I may see my way then." They left him and he lighted his cigarette, though the tobacco did not taste good. Hardship and toil had not daunted him, the risk of shipwreck and capture had given the game a zest, but the foul mangrove quagmires, where the fever lurks in the tainted air, had brought him a shrinking dread. One could take one's chance of being suddenly cut off, but to go home with permanently broken health or perhaps, as sometimes happened, with a disordered brain, was a different thing. Since he took malaria badly, the matter demanded careful thought. In the meanwhile, it was enough to lie in the shade and feel his strength come back. A few days later they reached Havana, where they sold the dyewood and had arranged to meet Don Martin Sarmiento, whose affairs occasionally necessitated a visit to Cuba. One evening soon after his arrival, Grahame stood in the _patio_ of the Hotel International. The International had been built by some long-forgotten Spanish _hidalgo_, and still bore traces of ancient art. The basin in the courtyard with the stone lions guarding its empty fountain was Moorish, the balconies round the house had beautiful bronze balustrades cast three hundred years ago, and the pillars supporting them were delicately light. The building had, however, been modernized, for part of the _patio_ was roofed with glass, and wide steps, tiled in harsh colors, led to a lounge through which one entered the dining-room, where everything was arranged on the latest American plan. There was a glaring café in the front of the building, and an archway at the back led to the uncovered end of the _patio_, where porters, pedlers, and the like importuned the guests. Just then this space was occupied by a group of Chinamen, half-breeds, and negroes, and Grahame was watching them carelessly when he heard a step behind him. Turning abruptly, he stood facing Evelyn Cliffe. He imagined that she looked disturbed, but she frankly gave him her hand. "You!" she exclaimed. "This is something of a surprise." "That's what I felt," he answered. "I hope the pleasure's also mutual. But you see, I get my meals here and Walthew has a room. He has been down with fever and isn't quite better yet." "And I've just arrived with my father, who has some business in the town," Evelyn said and laughed. "I nearly missed meeting you, because I thought you were a stranger and I meant to slip past, but you were too quick. Do you generally swing round in that alert manner when you hear somebody behind you?" "I admit it's a habit of mine--though I must have been clumsy if you noticed it. A number of people go barefooted in these countries, and the business I'm engaged in demands some caution." "Then it's lucky you have self-control, because you might run a risk of injuring a harmless friend by mistake." "One does not mistake one's friends. They're not too plentiful," he replied, smiling. "But what is the business that makes you so careful?" "I think I could best call myself a general adventurer, but at present I'm engaged in trade. In fact, I'm living rather extravagantly after selling a cargo." Evelyn gave him a quick glance. His manner was humorous, but she imagined he wished to remind her that he did not belong to her world. This jarred, because there was an imperious strain in her, and she felt that she could choose her acquaintances as she liked. Besides, it was mocking her intelligence to suggest that the man was not her equal by birth and education. For all that, she had been disconcerted to find him in the hotel. He had exerted a disturbing influence when they first met, and she had had some trouble in getting free from it. That the influence was unintentional made things no better, because Evelyn did not want her thoughts to center on a man who made no attempt to please her. Yet she felt a strange pleasure in his society. "I suppose you are waiting for dinner now?" she said. "Yes," he answered. "Shall we look for a seat here? A fellow who sings rather well sometimes comes in." He led her to a bench near the marble basin under the broad leaves of a palm. Evelyn noticed that the spot was sufficiently public to offer no hint of privacy, and she admired his tact. It got dark while they engaged in casual talk, and colored servants lighted lamps among the plants and flowers. Then the soft tinkle of a guitar and a clear voice, trilling on the higher notes with the Spanish tremolo, came out of the shadow. One or two others joined in, and Evelyn listened with enjoyment. "The _Campanadas_," Grahame said. "It's a favorite of mine. The refrain states that grapes eaten in pleasant company taste like honey." "Isn't that a free translation? I'm not a Spanish scholar, but I imagine it means something more personal than company in general." "Yes," said Grahame slowly. "It really means--with you." The music changed to a plaintive strain, which had something seductive and passionate in its melancholy. "_Las aves marinas_," said Evelyn. "That means the sea-birds, doesn't it? What is the rest?" "I won't paraphrase this time. The song declares that although the sea-birds fly far across the waves they cannot escape the pains of love. These people are a sentimental lot, but the idea's poetical." "I wonder whether it's true," Evelyn said with a smile. "Perhaps you ought to know." "The sea-birds are fierce wild things that live by prey. One associates them with elemental strife--the white tide-surge across desolate sands and the pounding of the combers on weedy reefs--and not with domestic peace. That's the lot of the tame land-birds that haunt the sheltered copse." "And cannot one have sympathy with these?" "Oh, yes. I've often stopped to listen while a speckled thrush sang its love-song among the bare ash-boughs in our rain-swept North. The joyful trilling goes straight to one's heart." "And lingers there?" "Where our thrushes sing, you can, if you listen, hear the distant roar of the sea. It's a more insistent call than the other." "But only if you listen! Cannot you close your ears?" "That might be wiser. It depends upon your temperament." Evelyn was silent for the next minute or two, and Grahame mused. He had felt the charm of the girl's beauty, and suspected in her a spirit akin to his. She had courage, originality, and, he thought, a longing, hitherto curbed by careful social training, to venture beyond the borders of a tame, conventional life. It was possible that he might strengthen it; but this would not be playing a straight game. For all that, he was tempted, and he smiled as he recalled that in earlier days his ancestors had stolen their brides. "Why are you amused?" Evelyn asked. "An idle thought came into my mind," he said awkwardly. Evelyn smiled. "My father has come to look for me; but I shall see you again. You will be here some time?" "A few days." He watched her join Cliffe in the archway that led from the _patio_, and then he sat down again on the bench under the palm-tree. But he no longer heard the strum of the guitars nor the tinkle of the mandolins: he was thinking of Evelyn. There seemed to be some peculiar bond of sympathy between them; he felt that she understood him even when nothing much was said. "Mooning all alone?" came Walthew's voice. Grahame laughed, and joined his comrade and Macallister, who had entered the _patio_ with Don Martin and Blanca. CHAPTER XI A MODERN DON QUIXOTE The dining-room of the International Hotel was modern, but while noisy, power-driven fans stirred the heavy air and the decoration was profuse, traces of more austere ancient art remained. Stone pillars and the fretted arch at one end had an Eastern grace and lightness; among the gaudy modern lamps hung one or two finely-modeled in copper and burning scented oil. The glass and nickeled knives were American, but curious old carafes filled with red and yellow wine stood among the flowers and fruit on the long table. Evelyn, looking down the room from its opposite end, was conscious of faint displeasure when Grahame entered with a very attractive girl. The feeling could not be jealousy, but she studied Blanca with a curiosity that was half hostile. The girl was dressed in Parisian fashion, but she walked with a grace that only Spanish women show. There was no fault to be found with her supple figure, but her black hair was rather coarse and her blue eyes too languishing. Yet she was well bred, and the man in dark clothes who followed and was, no doubt, her father had an air of dignity. Grahame seemed to be on friendly terms with them, for they talked and laughed when they sat down and Evelyn noticed that the girl sometimes touched him coquettishly with her fan. Walthew sat opposite with a thoughtful expression; and soon Macallister joined in the talk. It was obvious that he was amusing, for Evelyn saw those who sat near smile and then hearty laughter rose from his end of the table. The Spanish girl and Grahame no longer spoke to each other, and the engineer's voice came up through the clink of glass and the hum of conversation, sometimes in broad Scots and sometimes in stumbling and uncouth Castilian. When the guests were leaving the dining-room Grahame met Cliffe in the corridor. "Glad to see you. I didn't expect to find you in Havana," the American said cordially. "I want a smoke. Will you come along?" They found a seat in the _patio_, and Cliffe gave Grahame a cigar. "How's business?" he asked. "We can't complain, so far," Grahame answered cautiously. "The boat, of course, does not carry much, but her light draught allows her to get into harbors that larger vessels can only enter on big tides, and we sold our last cargo at a satisfactory price. Just now I'm looking out for a few passengers to Kingston; there's no boat across for some time." "I might go with you, if you have two good rooms to spare. There's a fruit-growing estate I want to look at in Jamaica." The suggestion was welcome to Grahame. He promised to give Cliffe part of the deckhouse, and they afterward talked of something else. In the meanwhile, Walthew was sitting with Blanca Sarmiento. He was quiet, for he still felt languid and the _patio_ was hot; but he was conscious of his companion's charm. Indeed, he had thought of her often since he left Rio Frio, and she had had a place in the fantastic dreams the fever brought him. "You do not speak much, but you have been ill," she said presently, with a sympathetic glance. "It was a grief to us to hear it; but you have suffered in a good cause." "I'm not sure of that," Walthew answered. "You see I was out for money." "And that was all!" Blanca exclaimed in a half-contemptuous tone. "I think so," Walthew admitted. "My people are traders and I suppose money-making runs in the family. Still, I might claim to be a soldier of fortune, if you like that better. It's more romantic, anyhow." "Ah!" she said with a sparkle in her eyes. "There were great soldiers of fortune among the liberators; one thinks of Bolivar, Lafayette, and Garibaldi. But the brave Italian had wounds and prison, not money, for his reward." "These fellows are too near the top notch for me to follow. I know my limits," Walthew modestly owned. "One should follow the highest, and chivalry is not dead; even commerce cannot kill it. There are still knights errant, who see visions and leave everything, to right the wrong and help the downtrodden. It has been my good fortune to meet one or two." "Your Cervantes wrote about one such. Seems to me that although he meant well, Don Quixote did more harm than good." "Ah, the sad, sad book! But you think like Cervantes? You sneer at romance?" "I'm young, señorita, but I try to keep my head." He gave her a steady glance. "Sometimes I find it difficult." She laughed with a sparkle of coquetry, and touched him with her fan. "Then there is hope for you, and we will labor for your conversion. The man who always keeps his head never does anything great; the power that moves the world comes from the heart." Lowering her voice, she went on: "Our cause is just, señor, but we need trustworthy friends, even if they are not idealists. Quixote failed because he used rusty armor and the lance; we will use rifles." Walthew was trying to be cautious, but was swept away. He had been attracted by the girl at their first meeting, though he had then felt something of the Anglo-Saxon's prejudice against the southern races, which is not unmarked in the United States. This had gone, however, and he now wondered whether Blanca meant to use him only to further her father's objects, or if she had any personal interest in him. Her patriotism was, he thought, a burning flame, and she would not stick at trifles where she saw a chance of serving her country. Still, it would be his fault if she were willing to get rid of him when he had done his work. "I wonder why you thought I could be trusted?" he said. "It is difficult to explain, señor, but one can tell, perhaps by instinct, when a man rings true." "It would hurt to find you had been deceived?" "It might be so," she answered slowly. Walthew wondered if this were mere flirtation, designed to gain an end. Blanca was playing with her fan, which lay in her lap. He could not see her eyes. He felt that he had been given an opportunity, however, and he meant to seize it. Leaning forward toward her, he waited until she raised her eyes to his, and then he spoke in a low, tense voice. "When I was leaving Rio Frio, I found a crimson rose on the pavement. I picked it up because I ventured to think it was meant for me." Blanca was again playing with her fan, opening and shutting it slowly. "Señor, it is possible the flower was dropped by mistake," she said, giving him a sidewise glance that made his heart beat fast. "How--if it was really meant for me?" She hesitated a moment, and then, raising her head, she met his insistent look with a curious smile. "It was given because I thought you were perhaps, in a way, and as far as it was possible for you, like the great soldiers of fortune we talked about." Walthew made her a ceremonious bow. "You set me a pretty big task, señorita, but, as far as it's possible for me, I will try to make good." He was thrilled by the look she gave him as she rose and held out her hand. "Your conversion begins," she said, with a strange, new note in her voice. "It is a chivalrous resolve, and--you will live up to it, señor." When she left him, Walthew found Grahame alone in the hotel lounge. "I promised to let you know whether the malaria would send me home or not," he said. "I've made up my mind to see the business through." Grahame grasped his hand cordially. "I don't know that you are wise, old man; but I am glad to have you, just the same." He gave Walthew a whimsical look. "Haven't you come to a decision rather suddenly?" "That doesn't matter," said Walthew, "I mean to stick to it." CHAPTER XII BAITING THE SMUGGLERS It was late, and the dew was heavy. Macallister's thin clothes were getting damp as he walked impatiently up and down the mole. The _Enchantress's_ gig lay near the steps, but her crew had not arrived, although Macallister had waited half an hour for them. This by no means pleased him, because, while not a tyrant, he expected his orders to be obeyed. Besides, he resented the ingratitude of the men. He had agreed with Grahame that it was prudent to moor the _Enchantress_ out in the harbor and keep the crew short of money. They had behaved well, and during the afternoon Macallister had given them a few pesetas and allowed them a run ashore, although he imagined he had kept within a limit that would ensure their sobriety. They had, however, not returned, and he felt disturbed as he watched the twinkling anchor-lights and the ripples flash in the silvery track the moon cast across the water. Boats were coming and going, and when one approached the landing Macallister drew back into the shadow. He had made the acquaintance of the captain and the engineer of the vessel from which the boat came, and he did not want to be found waiting for his unpunctual crew. The footsteps of those who landed were growing faint when he heard singing farther up the mole. The voice was unsteady, and the patter of bare feet that accompanied it suggestively uneven. Macallister knew the song, and was not surprised that his men, who were obviously coming back the worse for liquor, should show a taste for good music, for this is common among Spanish-Americans. It was, however, difficult to understand how they had made the money he had given them go so far. "Where kept ye, ye drunken swine?" he asked when they lurched into sight. "No savvy," answered his fireman, Pepe, and Macallister explained what he thought of them in the most virulent epithets used along the Clyde. This relieved his feelings and satisfied his sense of discipline, but he did not think it wise to translate his remarks: Spanish half-breeds have fiery tempers and carry knives. "Get into the boat before I kick ye off the mole!" he concluded when he was breathless, and the men clumsily obeyed, though one came near to falling into the water. They had some trouble in getting out the oars, but at last they rowed away. Macallister noted that one man placed a small cane basket under a thwart, and he suspected what was inside. When they reached the _Enchantress_ he was first on deck, but he waited by the gangway until the man who carried the basket climbed up. Macallister held out his hand for the basket, and when the fellow gave it to him confidingly he hurried aft to examine it by the engine lamp. It contained two bottles of _anisado_, a spirit flavored with aniseed in favor in Spanish countries. He felt tempted to throw them overboard, but refrained because such waste went against the grain, and the liquor might be doled out when the men had been forced to work unusually hard. He imagined they had forgotten the matter, and was lighting his pipe when he heard them coming, and stepped out of the engine-room to meet them. "There was a small basket, señor," one said civilly, though his voice was thick. "It is possible you dropped it overboard," Macallister suggested in his best Castilian--which was very bad. "No, señor. One does not drop such baskets over." "What was in it, then?" The man was obviously not sober, but it looked as if he had not lost his senses. "A small present to me and the others, Don Andres. You will give it back to us." "No," said Macallister sternly. "Presents of that kind are not allowed on board this ship." He watched them while they murmured together. They were active, wiry fellows, obedient as a rule, but liable to passionate outbreaks, like most of their mixed race. Now they looked drunkenly determined, and he knew the strength of his fireman, Pepe. "The basket is ours," said one. "We will take it." "I think not," said Macallister shortly. "Stand back!" Their half-respectful mood changed in a flash and they came at him with a rush. They could wrestle and use the knife, and Macallister knew that Pepe, who came first, must be stopped. He supposed that Miguel, whom he had left on board, was asleep; but to summon help would be subversive of authority and the affair would be over before Miguel arrived. Lunging forward, he put the weight of his body into his blow, and Pepe reeled when it landed on his jaw. Before he could recover, Macallister sprang upon him, and with a strenuous effort flung him backward through the gangway. There was a splash in the water and the others stopped, daunted by the vigor of the attack; but Pepe did not strike out for the gig as Macallister expected. Indeed, for there was shadow along the vessel's side, he did not seem to come up, and after a moment's pause Macallister jumped into the sea. The water closed above him, but when he rose a white-clad figure was struggling feebly near by and he seized it. Pepe seemed unable to swim, and Macallister had some trouble in dragging him to the gig, into which the others had jumped. They pulled both men out of the water, and in another few minutes Macallister stood, dripping, on board the _Enchantress_, sternly regarding his fireman. The shock had apparently sobered him, and the others, with the instability of their kind, had become suddenly docile. "Now," said Macallister, "where did you get the _anisado_?" "A gentleman gave it to us in a café." Macallister shook his head. "Try again! A gentleman does not give drunken sailors bottles of liquor." "We were not drunk then," one of them answered naïvely. "And he was a gentleman: he spoke Castilian like the Peninsulares." "Ah," said Macallister thoughtfully, for the use of good Peninsular Spanish indicates a man of education. "So he gave you all some wine and put the bottles in the basket!" "It was so, Don Andres," another answered with a readiness that invited belief. "But why?" "Who can tell?" Pepe rejoined. "Perhaps the señor was generous; then he said he liked sailors and tales of the sea." "You told him some, no doubt," Macallister remarked dryly. "We did, Don Andres. Herman told him of the great shark that bites off the fishermen's oars at Punta Anagan, and I about the ghost _caravela_ that beats to windward in Jaurez Strait." "And what else?" Pepe shook his head. "Then there was some cognac and afterward--I do not remember." "Get below, except the anchor-watch!" Macallister said sternly. "We'll consider what's to be done with you to-morrow." They slouched away, and while Macallister was talking to Miguel a splash of oars grew louder, and presently Grahame clambered up from a shore boat. He heard what had happened and then, sitting down, thoughtfully lighted his pipe. "You must see what this points to," he remarked. "It's no' difficult. Somebody has made the wasters drunk, and I ken what sea stories he would start them telling. A _gran señor_, they said!" "One of President Altiera's spies! But why do you think he gave them the _anisado_ afterward?" "He might have wanted them to make trouble, so we'd put them ashore and he could get hold o' them again. Then it's possible it would have suited him if they'd knifed you or me." "There may be something in that. Anyhow, your going overboard after Pepe ended the matter well. They're not ungrateful; it gives us a hold on them." "I see that noo, but I did no' stop to think before I jumped," Macallister modestly admitted. "It was what ye might call a stroke o' natural genius. Then, ye see, I threw him in." Grahame laughed. "Well, we must keep our eyes open, and get away as soon as we can. I expect to finish with Don Martin to-morrow." * * * * * On the following evening Cliffe was sitting with Evelyn in his private room at the International when a mulatto boy brought him in a card. "Señor Gomez!" he remarked. "The fellow has kept me hanging round three days, and I'd made up my mind to sail with Grahame to-morrow, whether he came or not." "Who is Señor Gomez?" Evelyn asked. "I understand his official title is _Secretario General_, and he's next in power to the President of the country I'm trying to do business with. My opinion is that they're both slippery rascals." He broke off as the door opened and a dark-skinned gentleman came in. Gomez bowed ceremoniously to Evelyn and Cliffe, and then waited with his hat in his hand. He was dressed all in black except for his spotless linen. He wore a number of valuable rings, and Evelyn noticed that his nails were unusually curved and long. She shrank from the glance of bold admiration he gave her, but resentment and half-instinctive dislike conquered this feeling, and she returned his greeting politely when Cliffe presented him. She thought no better of him when she withdrew after some general talk. "Now," Cliffe said when Evelyn had left them, "we'll get down to business. I've been waiting three days for you, and am not sure the deal is worth it." Gomez spread out his hands with a deprecatory air. "It was impossible to come sooner; affairs of state, you understand! May I suggest that the concessions we offer you are valuable?" "So it seems!" Cliffe rejoined bluntly. "The price you asked was high enough, and now, when we have half fixed things, you want to raise your terms." Gomez looked pained. He was rather stout and greasy, but his dress and manners were unexceptionable. "Señor, that is a grief to us, but the affairs of my country necessitate the change. We only ask for a little more money in advance. It is to the advantage of all parties that you agree." "I can't see how it is to my advantage to part with money I can make a good use of," Cliffe replied. "I must speak frankly, señor." Gomez's manner became confidential. "These concessions have already cost you something, and there are dissatisfied people who are anxious to rob the President of his power." "I've heard that some of them are anxious to shoot him; but that's not my business." "With your pardon, señor, we must disagree. If the President loses office before the papers are signed, the concessions go. I imagined you understood this." "I suppose I did understand something of the kind," Cliffe admitted. "Still, if the revolutionists prove too strong for you, I'll lose any additional money I may let you have." Gomez smiled, a slow and rather cruel smile. "If we can get the money there will be an end of the discontent; we know how to deal with it. And now, with apologies, I must remark that while we give you the first opportunity, there are others----" "Ah!" said Cliffe sharply. "I'd thought this business wouldn't have much attraction for my rivals. Whom am I up against?" Gomez gave him a letter from a German syndicate, and Cliffe examined it closely. He knew the principal, and recognized the signature. "I see; they're bolder than I thought," he said. "If I don't come up to the line, you'll make the deal with them." "We should be forced. The political situation demands it." "You mean you must have the money. Well, you have got a good deal of mine already. What becomes of it if the thing falls through?" "It was a gift," Gomez answered with an apologetic smile. "Your generosity will be gratefully remembered." Cliffe was silent for a few minutes. He had not been tricked, because he had known that when one negotiates a transaction of that sort with a Spanish-American country, a certain amount of money must first be spent in clearing the ground, and this, going into the pockets of venal officials, offers no direct return. Gomez and his master had, however, been smarter than Cliffe thought, for, after exacting all they could from him, they had opened negotiations with another party, and would force him to come up to his rival's bid. They could do so, because if he drew back he would lose the money he had already put in. He distrusted them, but he thought he would be safe when he secured the concessions. "I guess I'll have to meet you," he said, "but we'll get everything fixed up now." Half an hour afterward he lighted a fresh cigar, and put some papers into his pocket. He was not altogether satisfied, and neither was Gomez, but they had by mutual compromise arrived at a workable arrangement and each had some respect for the other's astuteness. "How will you get across to Jamaica?" Gomez asked. "A little boat sails in the morning." "The very small, lead-colored steamer? The señorita may find the accommodation rude. Why not wait for a passenger boat?" "It's fine weather, and the man who owns her is a friend of mine." Gomez was puzzled. He was suspicious of the _Enchantress_, and had taken trouble to find out something about her. It surprised him to learn that her owner and Cliffe were friends. "Then he is in Havana?" "He's in this hotel. I noticed him sitting, half asleep, in the far corner of the lounge just before you came in. Do you want to see him?" "Oh, no," Gomez said in a careless tone, for he feared he had been incautious. "I imagined you meant he was somebody you knew in America." He made an excuse for leaving, but Cliffe, noticing his interest, was not satisfied, and went out to the landing with him. Gomez, however, did not go straight to the lounge. He was afraid of rousing Cliffe's curiosity, and men of his stamp are seldom direct in their methods. It seemed wiser to spend a while sauntering about the _patio_, where Cliffe could see him. But Grahame in the meantime came up the stairs, and Cliffe beckoned him. "Do you know Señor Gomez?" he asked. "No," said Grahame, immediately on his guard. "I've heard about him. Clever politician, but a bit of a rogue, I believe." Cliffe gave him a keen glance. "I thought he was interested in you, but I may have been mistaken. Anyway, I told him you were taking a _siesta_ in a corner of the lounge." Grahame smiled carelessly. "Inquisitiveness becomes a habit with fellows like Gomez, and I dare say it's needful. The cafés in these ports are full of political refugees and intriguers." Seeing Macallister in the hall below, Grahame went down to him and told him what he had learned. "Weel," said the engineer, dryly, "after that present o' _anisado_ to the men, I'm thinking it would no' be desirable that ye should meet Señor Gomez. For a' that, I would not have him disappointed, and I'll daunder along to the lounge." "It would be almost as bad if he saw you." Macallister chuckled. "He'll have hard work to recognize me afterward. Come away to the hat-rack." Grahame followed him, feeling puzzled but suspecting that his comrade had some ingenious plan. Seeing nobody about, Macallister borrowed one or two articles from the rack; but neither he nor Grahame noticed that Miss Cliffe watched the proceedings with interest from a shadowy passage. Shortly afterward, Gomez entered the lounge and saw only one person there, but this individual's appearance surprised him. As the light was not good, he strolled toward the drowsy gentleman who lay negligently in a big chair with a newspaper dangling from his hand. He wore a soft hat, pulled down upon his forehead as if to shade his eyes, and a loose dark cloak hung over his shoulder. He looked like a Cuban and although Gomez noticed that his nails were short and broken, this might be accounted for by his having something to do with sugar-making machinery. "Perhaps you are not using the _diario_?" Gomez said. The man did not look up, but held out the paper with a drowsy grunt. Gomez was too clever to make a poor excuse for starting a conversation with a man who obviously did not wish to be disturbed, and, taking the paper, he moved away. After a few minutes he put it down and strolled out of the room. When he had gone, Macallister left by another door, and, replacing the things he had borrowed, rejoined Grahame in the _patio_. "It worked," he said, chuckling. "If Señor Gomez was on our track, he's weel off it noo. But it's fortunate we sail the morn." "He mustn't meet Don Martin," Grahame answered thoughtfully. "I'll go to his room and warn him." He found that Sarmiento was out, and none of the hotel servants knew where he had gone. Grahame felt disturbed by this; but there was nothing he could do. CHAPTER XIII THE EMERALD RING Grahame went in to dinner feeling anxious. Sarmiento had not returned, but he would probably come in before the meal was over, and Gomez was sitting by Cliffe near the head of the table. Blanca sat opposite Walthew, and Grahame found a place next to Evelyn, who had not joined Cliffe because she disliked Gomez. Though his manners were polished, there was something sinister about him, a hint of craft and cruelty, and she did not approve of his association with her father. "Have you met the gentleman yonder?" she asked Grahame. "Señor Gomez? I know who he is, but have not spoken to him." "That's curious, because he has been looking at you as if he were interested." This confirmed Grahame's suspicion, and he felt uneasy. He did not want Gomez to study him, and he would not have come in to dinner only that he must warn Sarmiento. If he and his friends were to succeed in their undertaking, their connection with Don Martin must remain unknown; for it would not be difficult to catch them landing arms should their object be suspected. He wondered where Macallister was, for the engineer could be trusted in an emergency, and presently he saw him coming in. There was no vacant place near Grahame, and Macallister sat down some distance off. "You may have been mistaken, Miss Cliffe," Grahame suggested. "Somehow, I imagine that Gomez is not a favorite of yours." "That's true, though I hardly know him," she answered with a smile. "One is now and then seized by a quick prejudice, and I think the reason I mentioned the man was because I wanted your opinion." "Did you think it worth having?" "I can't judge. Perhaps I really wanted to be agreed with. When you have no good ground for making up your mind about a thing, it's pleasant to find your conclusions confirmed." "Well, I believe you can trust your feelings. Gomez can't be a nice man if all one hears is true. But what turned you against him--the dash of dark blood?" "No, not altogether. I felt repelled, as one feels repelled by a snake or a toad." Grahame made a sign of understanding. There was, he thought, something very refined in the girl's character; an instinctive fastidiousness. She walked in the light and shrank from all that lurked in the shadow. It was her inner self that had recoiled from the swarthy politician and reason had nothing to do with the matter. "Your father seems to be on good terms with the fellow," he remarked. "Yes; it puzzles me. However, I suppose he is forced to deal with all kinds of people----" She paused, and Grahame changed the subject. He might have obtained some information by judicious questions, but he could not take advantage of the girl's frankness by leading her to reveal anything she knew about her father's affairs. This would taint their friendship, which he valued. After a time, she looked at him with a twinkle of amusement. "I watched a little comedy shortly before dinner." "Did you?" said Grahame. "Comedies are not unusual when one knows how to look for them, but they don't catch everybody's eye." "This one was rather obvious; I mean the transformation of a staid Scottish engineer into a Cuban sugar-planter of convivial habits." "Mack isn't really staid. It looks as if you didn't quite understand the Scottish character. Under its surface sobriety one's apt to find a very reckless humor. I'm a Borderer, and rather proud of it, you know. But how did the beginning of the first act strike you?" "It seized my interest. The plot was not unusual; confused identity is a favorite theme, but I noticed some histrionic cleverness. The rake of the _sombrero_ and the hang of the big cloak were good. They carried a hint of mild dissipation; one recognizes artistic talent in these light touches." Grahame laughed. "I'm not sure it was all art; experience may have had something to do with it. Mack's not an ascetic." "But how did the play go off?" "It was a success, I think." "In one act?" "No," said Grahame thoughtfully. "I imagine it isn't played out yet, and the other acts may not be in so light a vein." "As you didn't expect an audience, perhaps I'd better promise not to talk about your play. You may have felt some diffidence about asking that." "Thank you," said Grahame quietly. "You're very quick." Evelyn smiled. There was something about the man which appealed to her. Perhaps it was the mystery that seemed to shroud him and the _Enchantress_. She noticed now that he was casting furtive glances about the dining-room. As a matter of fact, Grahame was worried about Don Martin. The flowers, plates of fruit, and tall wine carafes obstructed his view, but he could see that Sarmiento had not come in. Gomez was talking to Cliffe, but his eyes wandered about the table. For a moment they rested on Blanca, and Grahame felt angry, as if the fellow's glance were an insult to the girl. Then it was fixed observantly upon himself, and he hid his antagonism. Dinner was a lengthy function, but the last course was served, and some of the guests were smoking and some leaving their places to speak to their friends, when Sarmiento came in. He walked toward Grahame, who was glad of the general movement, which might help him to deal with the situation. Looking round quickly, he noted that Gomez had turned to Cliffe; and then, getting up carelessly, he stood between the secretary and Don Martin. He faced Sarmiento, and the latter stopped when he saw Grahame's frown. A life of political intrigue had made him keen-witted, and with a negligent movement he turned and went back, speaking to a waiter as he passed. Evelyn rose and waited by her chair. Something she did not understand was going on, and the hint of intrigue excited her. She trusted Grahame, and she thought his object was good. Moreover, she guessed that it had something to do with thwarting Gomez, and she meant to help him if she had an opportunity. The secretary suddenly pushed back his chair, and Grahame felt his heart beat. Sarmiento was not far from the door, and his back was toward his enemy, but he would have to turn at the end of the table, and that would bring his profile into view. It seemed that he recognized the danger, though Grahame did not think he had seen Gomez, for he bent down, turning his head as he tightened his sash. His face was still hidden when he reached the door, but Grahame, looking round, saw Gomez walk quickly down the room. Other people were now leaving, and Grahame joined them, hoping that he might get out before his antagonist. He was unaware that Evelyn, who guessed his intention, was close behind him. There was more room on Gomez's side of the table, and Grahame was delayed by several ladies whom he could not push aside. He would have risked some apparent rudeness, but dared not make a disturbance. Gomez had almost reached the door when a man collided with him and barred the way, and Grahame smiled as he heard an apology in bad Castilian, for he saw that Macallister had given Sarmiento a few more seconds' start. Evelyn had slipped round the group of women while Grahame was trying to avoid one of them, and she was now in front of Gomez, who was hurrying along the passage. The man was close to her when she stopped and bent down with a warning cry. "Take care, señor! I have dropped a ring." Gomez could not get past her, and his eyes blazed with fury. His polish was superficial, and Evelyn saw something of the savagery beneath. She flinched, but plucked up her courage. "It is a valuable ring, and will break if you tread on it," she said. "Move then!" Gomez commanded harshly; and when she stepped back her dress uncovered the ring. Its setting was of small emeralds and diamonds, and might easily have been crushed. Gomez picked up the ring and gave it to her with a bow. Then he hurried on; but when he reached the _patio_ it was empty, and Grahame, standing at the other end of the passage, heard his ugly exclamation. The next moment Evelyn passed him, coming back, but her manner indicated that she did not wish to speak. After a time Grahame strolled out from the front of the hotel, and looked round as he turned a corner. Nobody followed him; and, as he expected, he found Sarmiento waiting in the shadow some distance farther on. "What was the danger?" the Spaniard asked. "Gomez was in the dining-room." "Ah!" said Sarmiento. "Did he recognize me?" "I don't think so, but I can't be sure. He was suspicious. But it's hardly prudent to stand talking in the street." They entered a shabby café, and, choosing a quiet corner, ordered wine. "If our friend's suspicions are aroused, he'll lose no time in following them up," Sarmiento said; and Grahame noticed that although the café was almost empty he avoided the secretary's name. "A Pinillo boat sails at daybreak and passengers go on board to-night. It seems to me that I'd better embark." "But the Pinillo liners don't call at your port!" Grahame said. Sarmiento smiled. "It may puzzle our friend if he watches the mole. When I have been on board I will return quietly, but not to the hotel. I know this city, where I have trustworthy acquaintances. I may be able to learn the business that has brought him here." "But what about your daughter?" "I do not think our friend knows her, and our name is not on the hotel book. There is a Cuban lady I can leave her with." "One would imagine that watching the fellow might be dangerous. There are half-breed rascals in the port who wouldn't hesitate about sandbagging or stabbing you for a few dollars. But, after all, you run some risk at Rio Frio." "I am safe there, for a time," said Sarmiento. "The opposition dare not arrest me, and the citizens would have to be satisfied if I disappeared. There would be a riot, and the Government is not ready to use force yet." "I see," said Grahame. "It's evident that you are popular; but the leaders of movements like yours are sometimes willing to sacrifice a comrade for the good of the cause. It might not suit them to have their hand forced by a tumult." "Such things happen. But my hold is on the people. They would not be appeased." "May I ask how you got that hold?" "I will tell you, señor. My family is of some importance, and at first I was not an active liberator. The peons on my father's estate were, in a sense, his subjects: ignorant, superstitious people with childish passions; but they trusted him, and it was our tradition that they should be treated well. As I grew up, however, I saw that much had not been done. They wasted effort, suffered needless pains, and died of diseases that might be stamped out. In my inexperience I resolved that I would teach them to live healthily and well." "I dare say you found it hard." Sarmiento smiled. "That is very true. I was young and an enthusiast, and it hurts to be misunderstood. Even the poor I tried to benefit regarded me with suspicion; but this was not the worst. One is not supposed to be disinterested in my country; the man who works for others is a dangerous person. His aim is to gain power, and those who have it watch him with a jealous eye. Well, I found my schemes thwarted by corrupt officials, money one could do much good with must be spent in bribes, and at last I saw that before improvement was possible our government must be reformed. I am not naturally a politician, señor; I was forced to become one." Grahame made a sign of agreement. "I think I understand," he said. "It was uphill work, but the peasants I had helped began to trust me, thoughtful men gave me their support, and some joined because they hated all in authority. I was becoming an influence, and it was supposed I could be bought. Petty honors were offered and an official post. When it was found that these things did not tempt me, I became a danger to the State." "And the President tried a different plan!" "Sometimes I feared for my liberty, and sometimes for my life. I have had to take refuge in Cuba and the United States; much of my money has been spent. But the determination to win freedom and good government spreads. We are growing strong, and soon the reckoning with our oppressors will come." "Will things be very much better afterward?" Sarmiento spread out his hands. "Who can tell? One strives and hopes for the best. It is all that is possible. Some day, perhaps, comes a small instalment of what one fights for." Grahame did not answer, and his companion sank into the melancholy that often characterized him. He was engaged in an arduous struggle, and Grahame suspected that disappointment would meet him even in hardly won victory. The man was sincere, and had sacrificed much for his country's sake; but he could not work alone, and it might happen that his helpers, tasting power, would restore the abuses he had destroyed. It looked as if he knew this, but did not let it daunt him. After a long silence Sarmiento took out his watch. "I think I had better go on board the Pinillo boat now," he said. "Our business is done, and it is well that you sail to-morrow. When we are ready for the next cargo, you will hear from us." Pulling down his hat, he left the café with his cloak thrown loosely over his shoulder, but Grahame noticed that he was careful to keep his right hand free. CHAPTER XIV SMOOTH WATER There was no wind except the draught the steamer made as she lurched across the dazzling swell. Cuba floated like a high, blue cloud over the port hand, cut off from the water by a blaze of reflected light, and the broad Yucatan Channel, glimmering like silver, stretched ahead. The deck had been holystoned and well sluiced before sunrise and was not quite dry, and there was a slight coolness in the air where Evelyn Cliffe sat under the awning. Macallister leaned on the rail near by, wearing a white cap with a mail company's badge, and a blue jacket over his greasy duck. He had given his dress some thought since the passengers came on board. Miguel stood at the wheel, barefooted, tall, and picturesque in spotless white, with a red cap and a red sash round his waist. A few big logs of hardwood that gave out an aromatic smell were made fast amidships. "I suppose that lumber's valuable," Evelyn remarked. "It depends upon whether ye want to buy or sell," Macallister replied. "They telt us good logs were scarce in Cuba, but I doubt we'll find demand is slack when we come to part wi' them." "Then the trade can't be very profitable." "It's just changing a shilling. Sometimes ye get a ha'penny over." Evelyn laughed. "Which one of you looks after business matters?" "I'm thinking it will have to be Walthew. The lad shows a natural ability." "But he's younger than Mr. Grahame--and probably has not had as much experience." Macallister gave her a half-amused glance. "The skipper's no' a fool, but when he makes a bargain he's frank and quick. States the fair price and sticks to it. He will not spend time in scheming how he can screw a few more dollars out o' the other man. Yon's a gift ye must be born with." "Do you mean Mr. Grahame rather despises money-making?" "No' that exactly," Macallister replied in a confidential tone. "But, ye see, he's a Grahame o' Calder Ha'." "Oh! Is that a great distinction?" "It depends on how ye look at things. His branch o' the family is maybe no' o' much importance noo, but in the old wild days the lairds o' Calder Ha' were chiefs on the Border. They guarded the moss roads, they kept the fords, and the kings at Stirling and Westminster noo bought their goodwill with presents and noo hanged a few o' the clan." "And Calder Hall? Is it one of the rude stone towers you see pictures of?" Macallister smiled. "Calder Ha's bonny. The old tower stands, with the coat o' arms above the door, but a low, gray house with stone-ribbed windows runs back where was once the bailly wall. Below's a bit ragged orchard, the bent trees gray with fog, and then the lawn dropping to the waterside. Nae soft Southern beauty yonder; but ye feel the charm o' the cold, rugged North." He paused, and resumed with a reminiscent air: "I mind how I went to Calder Ha' when I was a young and romantic laddie fired by Scott and him who taught the wandering winds to sing; the tales o' the Ettrick shepherd were thought good reading then. After a bit plain speaking to the foreman o' a Clydeside engine shop, I was fitting spinning gear in a new woolen mill, and I left the narrow Border town on a holiday dawn. "There was mist along the alders and a smell o' wet dust where the white road followed the waterside, but as the sun came ower the hills I took to the moor. Red it was like crimson velvet with the light upon the ling, rolling on to Cheviot-foot, with the brown grouse crying and the clear sky above. At noon I came down a bit water that tumbled in a linn, where rowans grew among the stones and the eddies were amber with the seeping from the peat. The burn got wider, the bare hills closed in; and then I came on Calder Ha' at a turning o' the glen. Black firs behind it, standing stiff like sentinels; the house with the tower in the middle on the breast o' the brae, and the lawn running doon to a pool. Then I kent why the Grahames loved it and would never sell, though many a rich man would have bought the place from them." "Did you tell Mr. Grahame this?" Evelyn asked. "Maybe it makes things easier that he thinks I dinna ken," said Macallister. Evelyn agreed, for she saw that his reticence was caused by tactful sympathy. Afterward she was silent for a time. The Scot's admiration for the old Border house appealed to her. He had shown a taste and a half-poetical imagination that she had not suspected when they first met; but it was not of Macallister she was thinking. After all, it must be something to belong to a family with such traditions as clung about Calder Hall; but she must not dwell too much on this. "Aren't we going slowly?" she asked. "Coal's dear in the West Indies, and the slower ye go the less ye use. But if ye are tiring o' the trip, I might drive her a bit faster." Evelyn glanced across the long undulations that were deep-blue in the hollows, and touched upon their summits with brilliant light. She liked to feel the easy lift as the _Enchantress_ shouldered off the swell; the drowsy murmur at the bows and the rhythmical throb of engines were soothing. Then there was a pleasant serenity in the wide expanse. But she was honest with herself, and she knew that the beauty of the calm sea did not quite account for the absence of any wish to shorten the voyage. "Oh," she said, "please don't burn more coal than is necessary. I'm quite content. I love the sunshine and the smooth water." Macallister strolled away, but she saw his twinkling smile and wondered whether he was satisfied with her excuse. Evelyn lay back in her steamer-chair, looking out over the glistening water and idly watching the white-caps far out at sea. She felt, rather than saw, Grahame approach. When she turned to him, smiling, he was close beside her, leaning against the rail. His pose was virile, and his expression marked by the quiet alertness she had learned to know. It suggested resolution, self-reliance, and power of command. These qualities were not obtrusively indicated, but Evelyn recognized them and wondered how much he owed to his being a Grahame of Calder Hall. Hereditary influences must be reckoned on. "This is the first chance I've had to see you alone," he said. "I want to thank you for your help at the International." "Was it useful?" "Very useful. Your quickness and resourcefulness were surprising." "That's a doubtful compliment," she laughed. "To me the affair was quite exciting. To feel that you're engaged in a conspiracy gives you a pleasant thrill." "I wonder!" Grahame remarked rather grimly. "But may I ask----" "Oh, I can't dissect the impulses that prompted me. No doubt, the hint of intrigue was attractive--and perhaps friendship counted too." "And you took the excellence of my intentions on trust?" "Well, there really was no time to question you, and judge if they were good. As a matter of fact, I'm no wiser now." "No," he said. "On the whole, I think it's better that you shouldn't know." "It looks as if I'm more confiding than you." Grahame, studying her face, suspected disappointed curiosity and a touch of pique. "Your confidence is yours, to give or withhold as you think best. Mine, however, belongs to others." "Then there are a number of people in the plot!" Grahame laughed. "If it's any comfort for you to know, when you came to our rescue that night in Havana you helped a man who has made many sacrifices for a good cause." "As you're too modest to mean yourself, you must be speaking of the gentleman with the pretty daughter." "Yes, Doña Blanca is pretty; but I prefer the Anglo-Saxon type. There's a charm in tropical languor, but one misses the bracing keenness of the North." He quoted with a smile, "Oh, dark and true and tender----" "We may be true; one likes to think so. But I'm not sure that tenderness is a characteristic of ours." "It's not lightly given, but it goes deep and lasts," Grahame answered. When he left her a few minutes afterward, Evelyn sat thinking languidly. She found him elusive. He was frank, in a way, but avoided personal topics. Then, remembering the scrap of verse he had quoted, she reflected that he was certainly a Northerner in feeling; but was truth, after all, an essential feature of the type? To be really true, one must be loyal to one's inner self and follow one's heart. But this was risky. It might mean sacrificing things one valued and renouncing advantages to be gained. Prudence suggested taking the safe, conventional course that would meet with the approval of one's friends; but Romance stood, veiled and mysterious, beckoning her, and she thrilled with an instinctive response. Now, however, she felt that she was getting on to dangerous ground, and she joined Cliffe, who sat in the shade of the deckhouse, talking to Walthew; but they did not help her to banish her thoughts. Her father was a practical business man, and Walthew had enjoyed a training very similar to hers. It was strange that he should now seek adventures instead of riches, and stranger still that her father should show some sympathy with him. An hour later Grahame found Macallister leaning on the rail, contentedly smoking his pipe. "She's only making seven knots; you're letting steam down," he said. "Weel," rejoined Macallister, "we're saving coal, and we'll be in Kingston soon enough. Then, Miss Cliffe's no' in a hurry. She's enjoying the smooth water; she telt me so." Grahame looked hard at him. "You have a dangerous love of meddling, Mack," he said. "I'll no' deny it. For a' that, I've had thickheaded friends who've been grateful to me noo and then. What ye have no' is the sense to ken an opportunity." "What do you mean by that?" Macallister's manner grew confidential. "She's thinking about ye and when a lassie goes so far----" Grahame stopped him with a frown. "I'd sooner you dropped this nonsense. It's a poor joke." "Weel, if ye have no ambition! Selling guns to revolutionists is no' a remarkably profitable business, particularly if ye're caught, and I was thinking ye might do better. The girl's no' bad to look at; I've seen ye watching her." "Not bad to look at!" Grahame checked himself. "We'll talk about something else." "As ye like!" Macallister took out a small, tapered piece of steel. "This, ye ken, is a cotter, and the dago from the foundry put it in. He was a good fitter, but the pin's a sixty-fourth too small for the slot. Maybe it was carelessness; but there would have been trouble when the cotter shook out if Walthew hadna' heard her knocking. Yon lad has the makings o' an engineer." Grahame looked thoughtful. "Gomez was in Havana, and I dare say he has his agents and spies. Still, if he suspected anything, it would have been a better stroke to have watched and seized us when we had the arms on board. I'd expect him to see it." "Weel," said Macallister grimly, "if I meet yon dago another time, I'll maybe find out something before I throw him off the mole. A good engine's nearer life than anything man has made, and wrecking her is as bad as murder." "I don't think our opponents would stick at that," Grahame replied as he turned away. Toward evening the barometer fell, and it grew very hot. There was no wind, the sky was cloudless, and the sea rolled back to the horizon without a ripple. For all that, there was a curious tension in the atmosphere, and Evelyn noticed that soon after Macallister came up for a few minutes and looked carefully about, thick smoke rose from the funnel. The girl's head felt heavy, and her skin prickly; and she saw that Grahame's hawk look was more noticeable than usual. He was, however, not fidgety, and after dinner he sat talking to her and Cliffe under the awning. The air was oppressively still, and a half-moon hung like a great lamp low above the sea. About nine o'clock Cliffe went to his cabin to look for a cigar, and Evelyn and Grahame sat silent for a while, wrapped in the mystery of the night. Evelyn was the first to speak. "I suppose you don't expect this calm to last?" she asked in a hushed voice. "I'd like it to last while you're with us. But I can't promise that," Grahame answered. "If we do get a breeze it will probably soon blow itself out." Evelyn glanced at the sea. "It doesn't look as if it could ever be ruffled," she said. "One likes smooth water--but it's apt to get monotonous." "That's a matter of temperament, or perhaps experience. When you've had to battle with headwinds, you appreciate a calm." "I don't know. So far, I've had only sunshine and fine weather, but then I've always clung to the sheltered coast. It's nice to feel safe, but one sometimes wonders what there is farther out." "Breaking seas and icy gales that drive you off your course. Now and then islands of mystic beauty, but more often surf-beaten reefs. On the whole, it's wiser to keep in smooth water." "Perhaps," Evelyn said skeptically. "Still, there's a fascination in adventure, if it's only as a test of courage, and one feels tempted to take a risk." She rose with a laugh. "I don't know why I talk like this! I'm really a very practical girl--not a sentimentalist." She moved away, and Grahame, calling one of the men to furl the awning, went into the deckhouse and deliberately pored over a chart. There were times when it was not safe to permit himself to think of Evelyn. CHAPTER XV THE TORNADO Evelyn was wakened by a peal of thunder, and as she drowsily lifted her head a blaze of lightning filled the narrow room. It vanished and there was another deafening crash. The darkness was now impenetrable, but the startled girl had seen that the deck was sharply slanted and her clothes hung at a wide angle to the paneling of the bulkhead. It was obvious that the _Enchantress_ was listed down nearly on her beam ends. A confused uproar was going on, and Evelyn thought she could distinguish the beating of heavy rain upon the deckhouse. This, however, was only for a few moments, because the other noises swelled into an overwhelming din. Dropping from her berth, she began to dress in the dark, but found it difficult to keep her footing on the slanted deck, which lurched and threw her against the lockers, while the planking worked and shook with the throb of engines. Evelyn could not hear them, but the strong vibration showed that they were running fast. It cost her an effort to refrain from rushing out on deck. Buttons baffled her nervous fingers, the pins she tried to use instead doubled up, but she persevered. She would not leave her room until she was ready: if the worst came, she could not make an open-boat voyage in a disheveled state. That this should seem of importance did not strike her as curious then, but she afterward blushed as she remembered her determination to look as well as possible. At last she opened the door and stepped out, ankle-deep in water. She was to lee of the deckhouse, and, seizing the hand-rail, tried to look about. The rain did not seem so heavy now, and the house sheltered her, although clouds of spray were flying across its top. A few feet away, the low bulwark was faintly distinguishable, but outside this there was only a dim glimmer of foam in the dark. The _Enchantress_ had the wind and sea on her broadside. This surprised Evelyn, because it was not a safe position if the gale were as bad as it seemed. Then a shower of sparks leaped from the funnel and by the momentary light they gave she saw a white streak, cleanly cut off and slanting downward, at the crown of the escape pipe. Evidently, Macallister had raised more steam than he could use. Wondering why Grahame had not brought the vessel head to wind, she moved aft cautiously, clinging to the rail, until she saw that the awning had broken loose from its lashings. Part of it thrashed about the deck, making a furious noise, but the rest, blown forward, had fouled the foresail boom, and was stretched tight, but distended like a half-filled balloon. Acting as a sail, it prevented the steamer from answering her helm. One or two very indistinct figures struggled with the canvas, but they seemed unable to master it, and Evelyn crept on until she could look through the skylight into the engine-room. It was here the real battle must be fought, for the cylinders that strained under top pressure were the vitals of the ship. She could see them shake, as if about to burst their fastening bolts and leap from the columns, as the big cross-heads banged up and down. The iron room was well lighted, though the lamps hung at an alarming angle to the beams, and there was a confused glimmer of steel that flashed through the light and plunged into shadow. A half-naked man lay on a narrow grating, leaning down and touching a ponderous mass of metal as it swept past. In the momentary intervals before it came back he rubbed the bright slide it traveled on with a greasy swab, and the girl knew how important it was that nothing should get hot. The work was dangerous, because the least clumsiness might cost him his arm. When he stopped and turned sideways on the grating the light touched his face, and Evelyn started as she recognized Walthew. He had enjoyed all the comforts and refinements to which she was accustomed, and it was from choice and not necessity that he was doing this rough, hazardous work. There were obviously people who did not attach an undue value to the ease that wealth could buy; this boy, for example, had left the safe, beaten track, and now, when still weak from fever, was taking the consequences without dismay. It looked as if there might be something wrong with her mother's philosophy; but she could think of this better when there was less risk of the steamer's foundering. A man came along the deckhouse and put his arm round her waist as the ship gave a wild lurch. Evelyn laughed as she recognized her father. For a moment she had thought it was Grahame. Holding her tight, Cliffe moved on a yard or two, and then stopped at the corner of the house, where they could see something of what was going on. It was lighter now that the rain had stopped, and presently a ray of moonlight traveled across the sea and touched the laboring vessel. Hove down by the pressure of the wind on deckhouse and awning, she had buried her lee bulwarks and lifted her weather side. Sheets of water blew across her, and the sea looked white as snow. It was not running high: the heavy rain had beaten down the swell; but it would soon rise, and unless the vessel could be brought head to wind the combers would sweep her deck. As the beam of moonlight widened, the figures of the toiling men grew clear. One was clinging to the top of a tall stanchion in a grotesque monkey-like attitude, trying to cut loose the awning, for a knife sparkled in his hand. Another crouched on the deck with folds of the canvas in his arms. Miguel was bent over the wheel. The tenseness of his pose and his hard-set face suggested heavy muscular strain. Grahame stood near by, his hand on a stay, swaying with the movement of the steamer. He was bareheaded and the spray lashed his face, but there was something that reassured the girl in his tranquillity. It was useless to speak. The voice would have been drowned by the roar of the gale, while wire-shroud and chain-guy shrilled in wild harmonies. Evelyn stood fascinated, watching the quick, tense movements of the crew. Presently Grahame turned his head, and, seeing them against the deckhouse, pointed toward the sea. Following his gesture, Evelyn saw a blurred object leap out of the dark. It grew suddenly into definite form as it drove across the belt of moonlight: a small wooden barque with a deck-load of timber, staggering before the hurricane. Fluttering rags showed where her maintopsail had blown from the ropes; curved ribands, held fast at head and foot, marked what was left of her fore-course, and puny figures dotted the yards, struggling futilely with clewed-up canvas that bulged out as if inflated hard. She had a torn jib and topsails set--strips of sail that looked absurdly small by comparison with the foam-lapped hull, but they were bearing her on at tremendous speed. Caught, no doubt lightly manned, by the sudden gale, they had had no time to shorten sail and bring her head to sea. She must run with what canvas was left her until the tornado broke, unless she broached to and her heavy deckload rolled her over. So far, Evelyn had not felt much fear. There was something in the mad fury of the elements that, for a time, banished thought of personal danger. She was overwhelmed and yet conscious of a strange excitement; but the sight of the helpless ship had a daunting effect. Belted with leaping foam, bows up, poop down, the dripping hull drove by, plowing a snowy furrow through the tormented sea. When she plunged into the dark Evelyn was glad that she had gone. She wondered what could be done in this wild weather if the _Enchantress_ would not come round. But she had confidence in Grahame. As she looked at him he commandingly raised his hand. Two men scrambled forward and a dark patch rose at the bows. It swelled and emptied, but the canvas held, and Grahame struggled forward to help the others. The sail might stand if they could hoist it before it split. It ran higher up the stay; the _Enchantress_ slowly fell off before the wind, and then leaped ahead with her bows lifted out of the foam. Evelyn drew a deep breath of relief, for the immediate danger was over, and the vessel might run out of the worst of the storm. Cliffe nodded when she looked at him, and with some trouble they made their way into the house, where, with the door shut, they could hear themselves speak. Evelyn was wet with spray, but there was a high color in her face and her eyes shone. As she sat down, the house shook beneath a blow, and there was a savage flapping on the roof. Then something seemed driven across it, and they could hear only the wind and the sea again. "The awning!" Cliffe said. "They've managed to cut it loose now that she's before the wind. I guess Grahame would rather have brought her head-on, but he won't have much trouble if they can keep her from broaching to. Were you scared?" "No," Evelyn answered thoughtfully. "I suppose it was so appalling that I couldn't realize the danger. I really feel that I'd be sorry if I'd missed it." Cliffe made a sign of comprehension. "Well, this is the first time you've seen men hard up against a big thing. It's an illuminating experience; though a large number of people never get it. Some of them seem to imagine things go right of themselves, and there's no call now for strength and nerve. Anyhow, I was glad to feel that Grahame knew his business." Evelyn was silent for a few moments. Her clothes were wet and ought to be changed, but the tension on her nerves had not slackened much, and she felt restless and unwilling to be alone. Besides, there was a mild satisfaction in doing something imprudent, and she thought the storm had roused her father into a talkative mood. While indulgent to her, he was often marked by a certain reserve, which she had noticed her mother never tried to penetrate. "I wonder why you decided to cross in this little boat, when we could have gone by one of the big passenger liners?" she said. "Saved waiting, for one thing," Cliffe answered in a deprecatory tone. "Then I'll confess that I felt I'd like to do something that wasn't quite usual." Evelyn laughed. "It isn't a wish one would suspect you of." "Well," Cliffe said with a twinkle, "I guess it was boyish, but we all have our weaknesses, though I don't often indulge mine. I find it doesn't pay. I'm a sober business man, but there's a streak of foolishness in me. Sometimes it works out and I feel that I want a frolic, for a change." "Then you must have exercised some self-control." "When I was a young man, I found my job square in front of me. I had to sit tight in the office, straighten out a business that had got rather complicated, and expand it if possible. It wasn't quite all I wanted to do, but I'd a notion that I could make my pile and then let myself go. It took me some years to get things straight, the pile was harder to make than I reckoned, and your mother had a use for all the money I could raise. Her ambition was to put the family high up in the social scale--and she's done it." "So you stifled your longings and went on making money that we might have every advantage!" Evelyn said with a guilty feeling. "I feel ashamed when I realize it." "I've been repaid," Cliffe replied. "Then, after a time, my job became congenial and got hold of me. The work became a habit; I didn't really want to break away." He paused and resumed with a humorous air: "It's only at odd moments I play with the notion that I'd like something different. I know it would jar me if I got it; and I'm getting old." Evelyn mused. Her father's story had its pathetic side. Though they had not much in common, he had been her mother's willing slave: toiling in the city to further plans which Evelyn suspected he would not have made. In a sense, his life had been bare and monotonous; there was something he had missed. Evelyn thought that he recognized this, though not with regret. She started as Grahame came in. Salt water dripped from him and gathered in a pool on the floor, but he turned to them with a smile. "The wind is dropping fast, and the sea hadn't time to get up. We had some trouble at first when the awning blew out of its lashings and stopped her coming round, but she steered all right as soon as we got her before the sea." "We were on deck most of the time," Evelyn said. Grahame laughed as he recalled their conversation in the early evening. "After what you must have seen," he asked, "don't you agree that there are advantages in keeping in smooth water?" "Oh, one can't deny it. For all that, my experience to-night strengthens my belief that there's something very exhilarating in taking a risk." She went out on deck and stood for a minute or two, holding on by a shroud. There was now no fury in the wind, and the moon was bright. The swell had gathered itself up into tumbling combers that shook their crests about the rail as the _Enchantress_ lurched over them. A few torn clouds drove across the southern sky, but the rest of the wide sweep was clear and the scene was steeped in harmonies of silver and dusky blue. By daybreak the vessel would be steaming on an even keel, but Evelyn knew that she would not again be content with glassy calm and languorous tranquillity. The turmoil of the storm had made a subtle change in her; it was as if she had heard a call in the elemental clamor and her heart had answered. CHAPTER XVI THE RUSE Cliffe and his daughter were landed at Kingston, and three weeks later Grahame put into a Central-American port. The propeller was not running well, and Macallister, suspecting it was working loose on the shaft, declared that he must put the vessel on a beach where she would dry at low-water. Grahame had a few days to spare, for he could not land his cargo before the time Don Martin had fixed; but as the arms were on board he would have preferred to wait at sea, outside the regular steamers' track. It happened that there was no repair-shop in the town, but while Macallister thought over the difficulty a tramp steamer dropped anchor, and he went off to her, remarking that he might find a friend on board. In an hour or two the gig came back, and Grahame, hearing _My boat rocks at the pier o' Leith_ sung discordantly, saw that Macallister's expectations had been fulfilled. This did not surprise him, for the Scots engineer is ubiquitous and to have "wrought" at Clydebank or Fairfield is a passport to his affection. Macallister's face was flushed and his air jaunty, but the tall, gaunt man who accompanied him looked woodenly solemn. He began by emptying a basket of greasy tools on the _Enchantress's_ white deck with the disregard for the navigating officers' feelings which the engine-room mechanic often displays. After this, he went down a rope and sat on the sand under the boat's counter, studying the loose screw while he smoked several pipes of rank tobacco, but without making any remark. Then he got up and slowly stretched his lanky frame. "Weel," he said, "we'll make a start." It was eleven o'clock on a very hot morning when he and Macallister lighted a blow-lamp, the flame of which showed faint and blue in the strong sunshine, and they labored on until dusk fell between six and seven in the evening. Offers of food and refreshment were uncivilly declined, and Watson ignored Grahame's invitation to spend the evening on board. "I'll be back the morn," was all he said as he was rowed away. "A new type!" Grahame laughed. "He's unique," Walthew agreed. "Only addressed me twice, and then in a very personal strain. But the fellow's an artist in his way. Spent two hours softening and filing up a taper key, but it fitted air-tight when we drove it in. Something Roman about that man; means his work to last forever." Operations were resumed the next morning, and Grahame had no doubt of the excellence of the job when the Scots seemed satisfied late in the afternoon. Then Watson said he would come back to dine when he had cleaned himself and would bring his skipper, and Grahame dubiously inspected his small stock of wine. He imagined it had not sufficient bite to please his guests. The tramp skipper presently arrived: a short, stout man, with a humorous eye. When dinner was over and the wine finished, the party adjourned to the café Bolívar, but Grahame went with misgivings. He knew something about the habits of tramp captains, and had seen trouble result from the eccentricities of Scotch engineers. The garrison band was playing in the plaza they crossed, and citizens promenaded up and down with their wives and daughters. The clear moonlight fell upon gayly-colored dresses and faces of various shades, while here and there a jingling officer, lavishly decorated with gold-lace, added an extra touch of brightness. Nobody, however, showed a friendly interest in Grahame's party, for Americans and English were not just then regarded with much favor in the ports of the Spanish Main. Indeed, Grahame fancied that a group of slouching soldiers meant to get into his way, but as a brawl was not desirable, he tactfully avoided them. The café was situated at the end of the square, and the party, sitting at a small table among the pillars that divided its open front from the pavement, could look down upon the moonlit harbor. The inlet was long and shallow, with an old Spanish fort among the sands at its outer end and another commanding it from a height behind the town. A cathedral stood opposite the café; and narrow, dark streets, radiating from the plaza, pierced the square blocks of houses. Walthew and Grahame drank black coffee; but this had no attraction for the rest. The tramp captain, soon becoming genial, put his feet on a chair and beamed upon his neighbors, while Macallister, as usual, entered into talk with them. He discoursed at random in very bad Castilian, but his remarks were humorous and in spite of the citizens' prejudices, laughter followed them. Watson sat stonily quiet, drinking fiery _caña_ and frowning at the crowd. "Ye were aye a dumb stirk at Clydebank," Macallister said to him. "Can ye no' talk instead o' glowering like a death's-head?" "I can when I'm roused," Watson replied. "Maybe ye'll hear something frae me when I'm through wi' this bottle." "It's the nature o' the man," Macallister informed the others and then, addressing the company, asked if anybody could sing. No one offered to do so, and, beckoning a dark-complexioned lounger who had a guitar hung round his neck, he brought him to their table and gave him wine. Then he borrowed the guitar, and, somewhat to Grahame's surprise, began a passable rendering of a Spanish song. The captain beat time with a bottle, some of the company sang the refrain, and, after finishing amidst applause, Macallister tried the music of his native land. In this he was less successful, for the wild airs, written for the bagpipes, did not go well upon the melancholy guitar. "It's no' the thing at all," Watson remarked. "Ye're just plodding through it like a seven-knot tramp against the tide. Can ye no' open the throttle and give her steam?" Before Macallister could answer, a neatly dressed gentleman brought a bottle of vermouth from a neighboring table and joined the group. "You like a drink?" he asked politely. Watson nodded, and, taking the small bottle, emptied half of the liqueur into his glass. "Yon's no' so bad," he commented when he had drained the glass. The stranger smiled as he poured out the rest of the vermouth for Watson. "You mend the steamboat screw?" he asked carelessly. "Yes, my friend," Watson replied, regarding the stranger out of sleepy looking eyes. "How it come loose?" "Tail-nut slacked up when the engines ran away in heavy weather." "You get bad weather, then?" "Bad enough," Watson answered. Grahame gave him a cautious glance, but his face was expressionless. It was obvious that the stranger had mistaken him for the _Enchantress's_ engineer. Watson must have realized this, but he had given the fellow misleading answers, and Grahame thought he need not run the risk of trying to warn him. He wondered, though, how far Macallister had taken Watson into his confidence. "Small boat," said the stranger; "you find her wet when it blow. What you load?" "Mahogany and dyewood, when it's to be got." "Then you go to Manzanillo; perhaps to Honduras. But she not carry much; not room for big logs below." "The big ones sit on deck," said Watson stolidly. The man ordered some cognac, but Grahame imagined that he was wasting his hospitality. Though the Scot's legs might grow unsteady, his head would remain clear. "There is cargo that pay better than wood," his companion suggested with a meaning smile. "Maybe," agreed Watson. "But ye run a risk in carrying it." "Ver' true. And when you go to sea?" "I canna' tell. The high-press' piston must come up. She's loosened a ring." The stranger made a few general remarks and then strolled away. He had learned, at the cost of a bottle of vermouth and some brandy, that Watson was the _Enchantress's_ engineer, and the vessel would not sail for a day or two. Grahame chuckled. He meant to leave port the next morning. Having spent some time at the café, he felt that he could now leave his guests. They might, perhaps, indulge in boisterous amusements but he did not think they would come to harm. Indeed, if anybody were hurt in a row it would more likely be the citizens who came into collision with them. "All right; I've had enough," Walthew said when Grahame touched him. "Mack's going to sing again, and I can't stand for that." The moon had sunk behind the white houses as they crossed the plaza, and Grahame kept down the middle, avoiding the crowd near the bandstand and the narrow mouths of the streets. "Who was that fellow talking to Watson?" Walthew asked. "I don't know, but he was interested in our affairs. They have a good secret service in these countries, and we're open to suspicion. We're obviously not yachtsmen, and the boat's too small for a regular trader." "Do you think the man's an agent of the government we're up against?" "I don't know. I'd hardly expect them to send their spies along the coast; but, then, these States may keep each other informed about the movements of dangerous people. Anyway, there'd be an excuse for trouble if they searched us and found the rifles." "Sure," said Walthew thoughtfully. "It's fortunate we light out to-morrow." He looked round as they reached the end of the plaza. The band had stopped, and the ring of lights round its stand was broken as the lamps went out, but a broad, illuminated track extended from the front of the café. The thinning crowd moved across it: a stream of black figures silhouetted against the light. Everything else was dark, and except for the soft patter of feet the city was quiet; but it had a sinister look, and Walthew instinctively kept away from the trees in the small _alameda_ they skirted. He was an Anglo-Saxon, and would not shrink from a danger that could be faced in daylight, but he hated the stealthy attack in the dark and the hidden intrigues the Latin half-breeds delight in. When they reached the beach he stumbled over a small anvil lying near high-water mark, and after another few steps trod upon a hammer. "They have left all their tools about," he said. "Shall we call the boys and put the truck on board?" "I think not," Grahame replied. "It's the marine engineer's privilege to make as much mess as he likes, and he generally resents its being cleaned up without his permission. Besides, their leaving the things suggests that the job's not finished." They pushed off the dinghy and boarded the steamer. The tide had flowed round her, but she would not float for an hour or two, and Walthew, sitting on the rail, glanced down the harbor. It was now very dark, but the water had a phosphorescent gleam. The _Enchantress's_ cable was marked by lambent spangles, and there was a flicker of green fire along the tramp's dark side. Her riding-lights tossed as she swung with the languid swell, and away at the harbor mouth two bright specks pierced the dark. A small gunboat had anchored at dusk, and as the fort had fired a salute she was evidently a foreigner. Walthew felt curious about her nationality, and wondered why she lay where she commanded the entrance instead of mooring near the town. Grahame, however, did not seem disturbed, and they presently sat down to a game of chess in the saloon. Although the ports were open, it was very hot, and when the kerosene lamp flickered in the draughts an unpleasant smell filled the room. The men felt languid and their attention wandered from the dragging game. At last Walthew threw the pieces roughly into the box. "You'd have seen what I was getting after with the bishop if you hadn't been thinking of something else," he said. "It's been a mighty long game; Mack ought to have come back." Grahame nodded agreement, and they went out on deck. The town was quiet, and, so far as they could see, only one light burned in it, between the plaza and the _alameda_. Then an uproar broke out, the clamor reaching them distinctly over the night water. Grahame, running to the engine-room, shook the drowsy half-breed on watch and ordered him to stir the fires, which had been lighted and damped. Then he dropped over the rail into the dinghy with Walthew, and as soon as they jumped ashore they started for the plaza on a run. "Sounds like a _jamboree_," Walthew said. "When things begin to hum you'll find Mack somewhere around; and that tramp captain looked as if he could get on a jag." "He had a wicked eye," Grahame breathlessly agreed. As they entered the plaza, a noisy crowd, which seemed to be getting larger rapidly, surged toward them. In the background the café Bolívar was still lighted, and close at hand a lamp burned at the top of a tall pole. For all that, it was difficult to make out anything except a mass of people pressing about a smaller group, and Grahame roughly flung two or three excited citizens aside before he could see what was going on. Then he was not surprised to note a party of three Britons retreating in good order before an obviously hostile mob. The tramp captain had lost his hat and his jacket was torn, but he carried a champagne bottle like a club, and his hot, red face had a pugnacious look. Macallister trailed the leg of a broken iron chair, and Watson seemed to have armed himself with part of the chair's back. He was hurling virulent epithets at the throng, while Macallister sang a sentimental ballad in an unsteady voice. As Grahame and Walthew drew nearer, the crowd closed in as if to cut off the others' retreat, but a shout from Watson dominated the growing uproar. "Oot o' the way, ye dirt! Drap yon deevil wi' the knife!" Macallister, still singing, swung the leg of the chair and a man went down upon the stones, the knife he held flying from his hand. There was a thud as the captain's champagne bottle descended on somebody's head; and Watson sprang forward, whirling the broken casting. The crowd gave back before his rush and then scattered as Grahame and Walthew appeared in the gap. The fugitives stopped; and during the moment's breathing space Grahame noticed that a smashed guitar, adorned with gaudy ribbons, hung round Macallister's neck. "It was yon fool thing made the trouble," Watson explained. "He racked her till she buckled, but she would not keep the tune, and we had to pit her owner below the table. Then an officer wi' a sword would interfere and when he got a bit tap wi' a bottle we were mobbed by the roomful o' swine." He paused as somebody threw a stone at him, and then addressed the crowd in warning: "We'll no' be responsible for what may happen til ye if we lose our tempers!" The mob had been closing in again, but it fell back when two white-uniformed rural guards with pistols drawn pushed through. Grahame spoke to them in Castilian, and they stopped. While they asked him questions, another man, whom they saluted with respect, joined them. "It is not permitted to make a disturbance in this city," the official said to Grahame. "We will inquire into the matter to-morrow. You will go on board your vessel now." "I'm no' going," Watson declared when Grahame translated the order. "Took a room at Hotel Sevillana, and I want to see the dago who would pit me oot." "Better humor him," advised the captain. "Obstinate beast when he gets a notion into his head. If he's not on board in the morning, I'll send a boatful of deckhands for him." Grahame explained that the engineer wished to spend the night ashore, and the official looked thoughtful. "Very well," he said. "One of the guards will see him to his hotel. It is necessary for him to go now." "Ye can tell him I'm ready," Watson replied, and added in a low voice as he passed Grahame: "Get away to sea as soon as she floats!" He went off with his escort and the official said something aside to the remaining guard, who saluted and told the others to follow him. The crowd had scattered, and nobody interfered with the party on their way to the harbor. "I will wait until I see you go on board," the guard said when they reached the beach. "You will be called upon some time to-morrow." "They'd have been wiser if they had begun their investigations now," Grahame remarked as they launched the dinghy. "She'll be afloat in half an hour. Do you feel up to running the engine, Mack? If not, Walthew must do the best he can." "I could take her oot if I was drunk and I'm far frae that," Macallister declared. "Looks as if ye had no' allooed for the steadiness o' the Scottish head. Noo, there's Watson, and I'll no' say he was quite sober, but he could spoil yon dago's game. Maybe ye're beginning to understand why he would sleep ashore. They think ye canna' get away withoot him." "I see that," said Grahame. "Better send your fireman to collect your tools when Miguel looses the stern mooring. And try to restrain your feelings if things are not quite right below. It's important that we should get away quietly." They reached the _Enchantress_, and preparations for departure were silently begun. They must first slip past the watching fort, and then elude the foreign gunboat. They knew the consequences if they were caught. CHAPTER XVII ELUDING THE GUNBOAT The night was very dark. Here and there a lone star peeped out bravely, but it could shine but faintly through the heavy mist that was settling down over the _Enchantress_. Grahame, the leadline in his hand, leaned anxiously on the rail, watching the foam boil about the vessel's side. Her keel stirred in the sand and the propeller was beating hard; but she did not move. To make things worse, the disturbed water broke noisily on the beach and the thud of engines could be heard at some distance. Grahame had not complied with the formalities required before leaving port, but he carried a dangerous cargo and he feared that he might be detained unless he got away at once. The _Enchantress_, however, was not yet afloat, and he reluctantly signaled for steam to be shut off. Walthew came up when the engines stopped, and Grahame sat down on the ledge of the door. It was very quiet when the splash of water died away, and the darkness and silence reacted upon the men's tense nerves. They found inaction singularly hard. "You have got to take her out the minute she's off the ground," Walthew said. "To be caught getting ready to leave would give us away." "Sure thing! The Port Captain's guard watches the beach; they've sentries at the fort and a wire to the town; and there's a gunboat in the entrance. Our job doesn't look easy." "Ye have quarter o' an hour yet, but that's all," Macallister said as he joined them. "If I canna' give the engines steam then, she'll blow off and rouse the town." They waited anxiously, Grahame glancing at his watch and walking to the rail, where he felt the leadline; but the water rose with exasperating slowness. Then suddenly a jet of steam broke with a muffled throb from the escape-pipe, and Macallister jumped up. "Ye have got to start her noo!" he said. Walthew followed him below; the engines clanked; the propeller spun; and Grahame hauled the lead in with a breath of relief, for the line grew taut as the vessel moved. Then he stood in the main rigging, where he could see better and where Miguel, at the helm, could watch his signaling hand. With screw throbbing gently, the _Enchantress_ crept away into the dark. Her gray hull would be invisible from the shore, but phosphorescence blazed about her bows and her wake was a trail of fire. The tramp steamer rode not far ahead, a mysterious shadowy bulk, with the gleam of her anchor-lights on the water, but as the _Enchantress_ stole past a voice called out to her: "Good luck!" Grahame did not answer, but he was grateful. The tramp captain understood why his engineer had stayed ashore. Macallister's friends were staunch; the Scots stood by one another. The light in the plaza grew dim astern, and the blurred, dark beach was rapidly slipping by. There was a lift on the water as they drew near the harbor mouth; but the fort had yet to be passed, and Grahame searched the shore with his glasses. Little by little he made out a formless mound, which grew more distinct. There was no light in the building, but he knew that sentries were supposititiously keeping watch beside the guns. One or two of these were modern and no vessel was allowed to leave port at night without official permission and a notification to the commandant. If the steamer were seen, refusal to stop would be followed by the roar of a gun. But Grahame did not mean to stop so long as she was not struck. For the next few minutes he felt his nerves tingle, but the fort was dark and silent and only the soft splash along the beach broke the stillness. The shadowy building dropped astern and he turned his glasses upon the harbor mouth. Two lights showed where the gunboat lay, and, some distance beyond them, a dim, pulsating radiance glimmered. This marked where the open water swell broke upon the shoals. Grahame hoped that it would cover the _Enchantress's_ luminous wake; besides, the roar of the surf might drown the thud of engines, which carries far on a calm night. Jumping down from the rigging, he rapped sharply on the engine-hatch, and Walthew ran quickly up the ladder. "Throttle her down," Grahame said. "If I knock once, stop her; if twice, give her all the steam you can." Walthew nodded to show that he understood, for it might be dangerous to use the telegraph gong; and then he disappeared below while Grahame stood still, steadying the glasses on the deckhouse top. With screw spinning slowly, the _Enchantress_ glided on, and the gunboat's hull grew into shape against the sky. Grahame was glad that he had the land behind him and his vessel was small, but he beckoned Miguel to let her swing inshore. There was a shoal on that side, marked by a line of foam; but he must take the risk of going too close. A phosphorescent flicker played about the vague blackness of the gunboat's bows; the light from the lamp on her forestay showed part of the deck, and then receded as she rolled. Grahame could make out an anchor hanging ready to let go and a man standing by her rail, until the light reeled and the figure was lost in gloom. It seemed to him that the _Enchantress_ must be seen, and he wondered whether the other vessel had her boats in the water. He suspected that she belonged to the government which Don Martin meant to overthrow, and it would be difficult to get away from her if she had steam up. She was now abreast of him, but there was no sign of activity on board. The _Enchantress_ crept on. The gunboat dropped back to her quarter. Then there was a sudden harsh rattle, and Grahame gasped. But a splash relieved the tension, because he knew it was only the ash-hoist bringing up furnace cinders. She drew further aft and began to fade; but Grahame now saw danger ahead. The _Enchantress_ was throwing fiery spray about her bows and rolling as she forged slowly through broken water. The shoal was close ahead and, taking a sounding, he found scarcely a fathom under the keel. This was enough, however, and, beckoning to Miguel, he let her go until the darkness astern was broken only by the gunboat's lights. Then, finding deeper water, he struck the engine-hatch. "We're clear!" he called down in an exultant voice. "Drive her, but make no sparks!" The _Enchantress_ began to tremble, and a few moments later loose stanchions rattled and deck-planks shook as she leaped through the long swell with green fire blazing in the wake of her thudding screw. Grahame laughed softly, and sat down to light a cigarette. He imagined that when morning came there would be several badly disappointed intriguers in the port he had left. He thought it best, however, not to proceed directly to his destination, and it was three days later when he ran in behind a point, and anchored in shallow water. It was daylight, but the _Enchantress's_ gray hull and slender spars would be hard to see against the land, and there was no sign of habitation on the sweep of desolate coast. A cliff rose behind the steamer, and then for some miles the dazzling sea broke in a fringe of lace-like foam on a beach of yellow sand. On the landward side of this, glossy-green jungle rolled away and merged into taller forest that was presently lost in haze. No smoke streaked the horizon, and there was not a boat on the beach, but while Grahame carefully watched, two appeared from behind a reef, and he put down his glasses with a smile. "Our friends!" he said to Walthew. "You might get the winch ready while we take the hatches off." An hour later a small party sat in the shade of the new stern awning. The boats had gone away loaded, but they had left Don Martin and three companions on board. Father Agustin, whose rusty black cassock jarred upon the blaze of light and color, leaned back in a canvas chair with a wineglass in his olive-tinted hand. "I'm surprised to find you in such company, Father," Grahame said to him. The priest's eyes twinkled. "It is not only the rich and respected we are sent out to seek, though I think they need us as much as the others." "You might find their help useful," Walthew suggested. "True, if one could buy it! As a rule, they do not give, but sell, and the price they ask is often high." "Some bribes are hard to resist when they are offered in the name of charity; for example, hospitals founded and new churches built," Grahame interposed. "These are things you can make good use of." Father Agustin looked at him steadily. "An honest man does not take a bribe, as you, my son, should know," he said. "Ah!" Grahame returned carelessly. "I did not think you had heard of--a certain affair." Walthew gave him a surprised glance, but Father Agustin smiled. "I hear many curious things. Besides, my companions take precautions. Sometimes they find them needed." "I suppose if I had done what I was asked and pocketed the reward, I should have met with an accident shortly afterward?" Grahame suggested. "One does not talk of such matters, señor, among trusted friends," one of the men interposed. "Your intelligence department seems to be well organized, but there's ground for believing the opposition's is quite as good," Grahame said, and related what had happened at their last port. "Care will be needed after this," said Don Martin. "Now that they know your boat, it is fortunate we changed the landing place; but you are safe here. This coast is low and unhealthy; the President's friends are prosperous and do not live in the swampy jungle." "One can understand that," Grahame responded. "Your appeal is to those who must live how and where they can. No doubt, they suffer now and then for helping you." "Ah!" exclaimed one of the Spaniards, "_how_ they suffer! If you give me leave, señores, I can tell you startling things." They listened with quickening interest, and he kept his promise well, for there is in southern peoples, contaminated by darker blood, a vein of sensual cruelty that sometimes leads to the perpetration of unutterable horrors. Grahame's face grew quietly stern, Walthew's hot and flushed, and Macallister clenched his hand, for the tales they heard fired their blood. "You have told us enough," Walthew said at last. "I went into this business because I was looking for adventure and wanted to make some money--but I mean to see it through if it costs me all I have!" He turned to his comrades. "How do you feel about it?" "Much as you do," Grahame answered quietly, and Macallister put his hand on Sarmiento's arm. "I'm with ye, if ye mean to make a clean sweep o' yon brutes." "I believe their reckoning will come, but our bargain stands," said Don Martin. "We need arms, and will pay for all you bring. Still, I am glad your hearts are with us. It is sentiment that carries one farthest." "How have you been getting on since we last met?" Walthew asked. "We make progress, though there are difficulties. One must fight with the purse as well as the sword, and the dictator's purse is longer than ours. Of late, he has been getting money and spending it with a free hand." "Do you know where he gets it?" Grahame asked thoughtfully. "So far, we have not found out. But it is foreign money, and he must give what belongs to the country in exchange." "An easy plan!" Walthew said. "Makes the country pay for keeping him in power. I guess you'll have to meet the bill when you get in." "That is so," Don Martin agreed. "It forces our hand. We must get in before he leaves us no resources at all." Grahame thought of Cliffe, and wondered about his business with Gomez; but he decided to say nothing of this. "Is Castillo still at liberty?" he asked. "He is watched, but we have been able to protect him. A man of passion and fervor who will rouse the people when the right time comes." "But perhaps not a good plotter?" Father Agustin gave Grahame a shrewd glance. "We do not all possess your northern self-restraint, though one admits its value. Señor Castillo follows a poetical ideal." "So I imagined. Cold conviction sometimes leads one farther." They were silent for a minute or two, and then one said: "We have been anxious about Castillo. It is not that we doubt his sincerity." "You doubt his staying power?" Father Agustin made an assenting gesture. "Our friend is ardent, but a fierce fire soon burns out. The danger is that when warmth is needed there may be no fuel left." "I think you should try to guard him from pressure he is unfit to stand," Grahame suggested. "One cannot always choose one's tools, but if you are careful he may last until his work is done." "It is so," Father Agustin agreed. "One loves the ring of fine, true steel, but it is fortunate that metal of softer temper has its use, though it sometimes needs skillful handling." "He kens!" exclaimed Macallister. "Ye may rake stuff that will serve ye weel from the scrap heap o' humanity, and there's times when it's a comfort to remember that. But I'm surprised to find ye meddling with politics." "I am not a politician; it is not permitted. But I may hate injustice, and there is no canon that bids me support what is evil. I came here as your guest with other friends, and if they honor me with their confidence I cannot refuse; nor do I think it a grave offense to give them a word of advice." "Good advice may prove more dangerous to their enemies than rifles," Grahame said. Father Agustin mused for a few moments. "Our friends' real task begins with their triumph," he said gravely; "for that, at best, can but mean a clearing of the ground. Man builds slowly, but to destroy is easy, and many see no farther." "But when the building is tottering and rotten?" "Sometimes it may be repaired, piece by piece, but that is not your plan." Father Agustin spread out his hands. "If you build on a sound foundation, your new work will stand; but the edifice of the State cannot be cemented with hatred and envy. This responsibility is yours and not your enemies'. But one looks to the future with hope as well as doubt." They then discussed the landing of the next cargo, and the general course of operations, but while they plotted with Spanish astuteness Grahame imagined that the quiet priest was the brain of the party. After a time, the boats came back for another load, and when sunset streaked the water with a lurid glow the guests took their leave and the _Enchantress_ steamed out to sea. CHAPTER XVIII THE TEST OF LOVE The hot summer day was over and the light beginning to fade when Evelyn came down the steps of a country house in northern Maine. Banner's Post stood at the foot of a hillside among the dark pines, and the murmur of running water echoed about its walls. It belonged to Mrs. Willans, Mrs. Cliffe's sister, for Willans, who had bought the house at his wife's command, seldom came there and did not count. Mrs. Willans wanted a peaceful retreat where she and her friends, when jaded by social activities, could rest and recuperate in the silence of the woods. She had many interests and what she called duties, but she had of late felt called upon, with her sister's full approval, to arrange a suitable marriage for her niece. Henry Cliffe was not really rich. Evelyn was dressed in the latest summer fashion, and the thin, light clothes became her. The keen mountain breezes had given her a fine color, and she looked very fresh and young by contrast with the jaded business man at her side. Cliffe wore an old gray suit that Evelyn had never seen and shabby leggings. A creel hung round his shoulders, and he carried a fishing-rod. His face was lined and pale, but when they left the garden and entered the woods Evelyn was surprised to note that his thin figure harmonized with the scattered boulders and the ragged pines. To some extent, this might be accounted for by the neutral tint of his clothes, but he somehow looked at home in the wilderness. Though he had once or twice gone off with an old friend on a shooting trip, she had never thought of her father as a sport. "It is curious that you make me feel you belong to the bush," she said. "I used to go fishing when I was a boy," Cliffe replied with a deprecatory smile. "I've never had much time for it since; but there's nothing I'm fonder of." Evelyn found something pathetic in his answer. He had very few opportunities for indulging in the pastimes he liked, and now he was going out to fish with a keen eagerness that showed how scarce such pleasures were. His enjoyment was essentially natural; her friends' enthusiasm for the amusements Mrs. Willans got up was artificial and forced. They had too much, and her father not enough. "I hope the trout will rise well," she said. "We were surprised to hear that you were coming down." "I found I could get away for the week-end. Have you been having a good time?" "Yes, in a way. I have everything I ought to like; something amusing to do from morning to night, the kind of people I've been used to about me, and Aunt Margaret sees that nobody is dull." She had had more than she mentioned, for Gore was staying at Banner's Post, and had devoted himself to her entertainment with a frank assiduity that had roused the envy of other guests. Evelyn admitted feeling flattered, for Gore had many advantages, and his marked preference had given her an importance she had not always enjoyed. "And yet you're not quite satisfied?" Cliffe suggested with a shrewd glance. "Perhaps I'm not, but I don't know. Is one ever satisfied?" "One ought to be now and then when one is young. Make the most of the pleasures you can get, but aim at the best." Evelyn mused for a few minutes. She could treat her father with confidence. He understood her, as her mother seldom did. "What is the best?" she asked. "To some extent, it depends on your temperament; but it goes deeper than that. There's success that palls and gratification that doesn't last. One soon gets old and the values of things change; you don't want to feel, when it's too late, that there's something big and real you might have had and missed." "Have you felt this?" "No," Cliffe answered quietly; "I get tired of the city now and then and long for old clothes, a boat, and a fishing-rod, but these are things it doesn't hurt a man to go without. I have a home to rest in and a wife and daughter to work for. An object of that kind helps you through life." "My trouble is that I don't seem to have any object at all. I used to have a number, but I'm beginning now to doubt whether they were worth much. But I'm afraid you have made a sacrifice for our sakes." Cliffe looked at her thoughtfully. "My belief is that you always have to make some sacrifice for anything that's worth while." He laughed. "But right now fishing is more in my line than philosophy!" He followed the little path that led to the stream, and Evelyn turned back slowly through the quiet woods. Her father's remarks had led her into familiar but distasteful thought. It was perhaps true that one must make some sacrifice to gain what was best worth having; but she had been taught to seize advantages and not to give things up. Now she could have wealth, a high position, and social influence, which were of value in her world, and in order to gain them she had only to overcome certain vague longings and the rebellious promptings of her heart. Gore wanted her, and she had been pleasantly thrilled to realize it; perhaps she had, to some extent, tried to attract him. It was foolish to hesitate when the prize was in her reach; but she did not feel elated as she went back to the house. She lingered among the last of the trees. They lifted their black spires against the sky, the air was filled with their resinous scent, and faint, elfin music fell from their tops. Far above, the bald summit of Long Mountain shone a deep purple, though trails of mist that looked like lace were drawn about its shoulders. Then the pines rolled down, straggling at first, but growing thicker and taller until they merged into the dark forest that hid the giant's feet. The wild beauty of the scene and the calm of the evening reacted upon the girl; she felt it was a trivial life that she and her friends led. Rousing herself with an effort, she left the woods and entered the well-kept garden. It had an exotic look; the bright-colored borders that edged the lawn jarred upon the austere beauty of the wilderness. Banner's Post was tamely pretty, and Nature had meant the spot to be grand. Still, the nickeled sprinklers that flung glistening showers across the smooth grass, and the big gasolene mower, belonged to her world, in which Nature was kept in her place by civilized art. She saw Gore at the bottom of the steps in the midst of a group which included two attractive girls, and she was conscious of some satisfaction when he left his companions and came toward her. "Luck has been against me all day," he said when he came up. "It seemed impossible to find you except in the center of what was going on. Now we'll run away for a little while." His manner suggested a right to her society, and he turned toward the woods without waiting for her consent, but Evelyn thought he would have acted more wisely had he chosen a quiet nook on the veranda. Reggie was a product of his luxurious age; he was in his right place in a comfortable chair or moving gracefully about a polished floor with smartly dressed people in the background. Though not wholly artificial, and having some force of character, he failed to harmonize with the note of primitive grandeur struck by the rugged pines. It was different with Evelyn when they sat down on a boulder. Her dress was in the latest fashion, but she had the gift of revealing something of her real personality through her attire. Its blue-gray tint matched the soft coloring of the lichened rock, and the lines of her tall figure were marked by a classical severity of grace. Then, her eyes were grave and her face was calm. It was her misfortune that she had not yet realized herself, but had accepted without much question the manners of her caste and the character Mrs. Cliffe had, so to speak, superimposed upon her. "It's good to be quiet for a change," Gore said. "When I'm with you I feel that I needn't talk unless I want to. That's a relief, because it's when I feel least that I talk the most. You're tranquilizing." "I'm not sure you're complimentary. Nowadays a girl is expected to be bright if she can't be brilliant." "That's not your real line. Brilliance is often shallow, a cold, reflected sparkle. One has to get beneath the surface to understand you." "Perhaps it's true of everybody," Evelyn answered with a smile. "Still, we're not taught to cultivate virtues that can't be seen." "You can't cultivate the best of them; they've got to be an inherent, natural part of you. But I'm getting off the track--I do now and then." Evelyn guessed what he meant to say, but although it would mark a turning-point in her life, and she did not know her answer, she was very calm. While she had, for the most part, allowed her mother to direct her actions, she had inherited Cliffe's independence of thought and force of will. So far, she had not exerted them, but she meant to do so now. Looking up, she saw Long Mountain's towering crest cut in lonely grandeur against the fading green and saffron of the sky. The mist upon its shoulders shone faintly white against blue shadows; the pines had grown taller and blacker, and the sound of running water alone broke the silence. The resinous smells were keener, and there was a strange repose in the long ranks of stately trees. Nature had filled the stony wilds with stern beauty, and Evelyn instinctively felt the call of the strong, fruitful earth. One must be real and, in a sense, primitive, here. "This," she said, indicating the shadowy landscape, "is very grand. We don't give much thought to it, but it has its influence." "I guess it's all quite fine," Gore agreed absently. "It would make a great summer-resort if they ran in a branch-railroad. In fact, I've imagined that Willans had something of the kind in view; he has a genius for developing real estate." "An unthinkable desecration!" Evelyn exclaimed. "Well," he said in a quiet voice, "if it would please you, I'd buy Banner's Post and all the land back to the lake, and nobody but my game-wardens should disturb it except when you let me come up here with you. Then you could teach me to appreciate the things you like." The girl was touched, for he belonged to the cities, and had nothing in common with the rocky wilds, but she knew that he would keep his word and indulge her generously. Nor was she offended by the touch of commercial spirit, though she would rather he had offered something that would cost him effort of body or mind. "I'm afraid you wouldn't find me worth the sacrifice you would have to make," she said. "Your tastes don't lie that way." He made a gesture of dissent. "None of them are very strong, and I know that you go farther in everything than I can. You're elusive, but I've felt, for a long time, that if I could reach and win you, you'd help me along. That's my strongest argument and what I really meant to say. Surely, you have seen that I wanted you." Evelyn felt guilty, because she had seen this and had not repulsed him. She did not love the man, but love was not thought essential in her circle and she had never been stirred by passion. "I felt that I couldn't get hold of you," he went on; "you were not ready. We were friends and that was something, but I was looking for a change in you, some hint of warmth and gentleness." "And do you think I am ready now?" "No; I only hoped so. I feared I might be wrong. But I began to find holding myself back was getting too hard, and I was afraid somebody else might come along who had the power to rouse you. I believe you can be roused." "I wonder!" she said in a curious tone. "You make people love you," he broke out. "That's a proof that when the time comes you're capable of loving. But I only ask to be near you and surround you with what you like best. There's a rare aloofness in you, but you're flesh and blood. When you have learned how I love you, you can't hold out." Evelyn was silent, hesitating, with a troubled face. She liked him; he was such a man as her mother meant her to marry and, until the last few weeks, she had acquiesced in her obvious fate. Now, however, something prompted her to rebel, although prudence and ambition urged her to yield. As he watched her in keen suspense, Gore suddenly lost his head. The next moment his arm was round her and he drew her forward until she was pressed against him with her face crushed against his. At first she did not struggle, and he thought she was about to yield, until he felt her tremble and her face was suddenly turned away. Then she put her hand on his shoulder and firmly held him back while she slipped from his relaxing grasp. Gore knew that he had blundered. Letting his arms drop, he waited until she turned to him, without anger, although her eyes were very bright and her color was high. "I'm sorry, Reggie, but it's impossible for me to marry you." "You are sure?" he asked rather grimly. "This is important to me, you know." "Yes," she said with signs of strain; "I am sure. I think I wish it had been possible, but it isn't. You have convinced me." He was silent for a moment. "It cuts pretty deep," he said slowly. "I've been afraid all along that even if you took me you'd never be really within my reach. I guess I've got to bear it and let you go." He rose and stood looking at her irresolutely, and then, with a gesture of acquiescence, abruptly turned away. When he had gone, Evelyn sat still in the gathering dusk. She had, at first, submitted to his embrace, because she wished to find in any emotion he was capable of arousing an excuse for marrying him. But she had felt nothing except repulsion. Then in a flash the truth was plain; any closer relationship than that of friend would make her loathe the man she in some ways admired. This was disturbing, but little by little she began to realize that his touch had a strange after-effect. It had stirred her to warmth, but not toward him. Longings she had not thought herself capable of awoke within her; she was conscious of a craving for love and of a curious tenderness. Only, Reggie was not the man. He had roused her, but she did not know whether she ought to be grateful for that. She blushed as she struggled with her rebellious feelings, and then resolutely pulled herself together. Her mother must be told. Mrs. Cliffe was resting before dinner when Evelyn entered her room and sat down without speaking. "What is the matter?" Mrs. Cliffe asked with a premonition that something had gone wrong. "Why do you come in, in this dramatic way?" "I didn't mean to be dramatic," Evelyn answered quietly. "Still, perhaps I was rather highly strung. Reggie asked me to marry him, and I told him I could not." Mrs. Cliffe sat up suddenly, and there was an angry sparkle in her eyes. "Then I think you must be mad! What led you to this absurd conclusion?" "It's hard to explain," Evelyn answered with a faint smile. "I suppose I couldn't give you any very logical reasons." "Then it may not be too late to put things right!" Mrs. Cliffe saw a ray of hope. "I'm afraid it is. I think Reggie knows that--he was very considerate. There is no use in your trying to do anything; I must have my own way in this." Mrs. Cliffe was painfully surprised. The girl had suddenly developed and revealed unsuspected capacities. She had grown like her father, who, for all his patience, was sometimes immovable. There was inflexibility in Evelyn's attitude; her face was hard and determined. "Very well," she acquiesced. "Your father must be told, and I don't know what he will do about it." "I would rather tell him myself," Evelyn said. This was not what Mrs. Cliffe wanted, but the girl moved to the door as she finished speaking, and her mother sat down, burning with indignation. Her authority had been outraged, she felt overcome, and did not leave her room all evening. Evelyn found Cliffe on the veranda, and took him down the steps before she told him what she had done. He listened without surprise; indeed, she thought his manner was rather curiously sympathetic. "Well," he said, "in a way I'm sorry. Reggie's a good fellow as far as he goes. But I imagined you liked him. Why did you refuse?" "It isn't very plain," Evelyn answered. "I felt I had to. Perhaps Long Mountain had something to do with it." Cliffe smiled, but not with amusement, and Evelyn saw that he understood. Somehow she had expected him to do so and she was touched when he gently pressed her arm. "After all, you're the person most interested, and you must please yourself--though your mother will be badly disappointed," he said. "It's possible we're wiser in the woods than in the city. One sees the things that matter more clearly away from the turmoil." CHAPTER XIX THE CUBAN SPY Gore left Banner's Post abruptly, to Evelyn's relief, and on the morning after his departure she and Cliffe stood on the steps before the other guests had come down to breakfast. It had rained all night, the mist hung low about Long Mountain's side, and a fresh wind woke waves of sound from the rustling pines. A creel hung round Cliffe's shoulders, and he contemplated the dripping woods with a smile of half-apologetic satisfaction. "The fishing should be great to-day!" he exclaimed. "But I feel that I'm playing truant. I ought to be back at the office. Guess the trout I catch will cost me high; but the temptation is pretty strong when I see the water rise." "I'm glad you have been rash for once," Evelyn replied. "Besides, you have an office full of people who can look after things for you." Cliffe shook his head. "That's the excuse I tried to make, but it won't quite work. If you want to be a successful operator, you have to sit tight with your finger on the pulse of the market. A beat or two more or less makes a big difference. Finance soon gets feverish." "And you are one of the doctors who send its temperature up or down." "No; that's a wrong idea. Once on a time the big men did something of the kind, but now the dollar's a world-force that's grown too strong for them. We gave it a power we can't control; it drives us into combines and mergers we didn't plan. It's a blind force that rolls along undirected, over our bodies if we get in its way. All we can do is to try to guess its drift. The successful man is the one who does so first." "I wonder whether you're to be pitied or envied. The work must be absorbing, and it's simple, in a way." "Simple!" Cliffe exclaimed. "Well, you have an object; your aims are definite and you know, more or less, how to carry them out. We others, who have no purpose in life, spend our time in amusements that leave us dissatisfied. When we stop to think, we feel that we might do something better, but we don't know what it is. The outlook is blank." Cliffe gave her a sharp glance. Evelyn had changed in the last few months, and she had been strangely quiet since her refusal of Gore. Seeing his interest, she laughed. "I'm not asking for sympathy; and I mustn't keep you from the trout. Go and catch as many as you can. It must be nice to feel that you have only to pick up a fishing-rod and be young again." She walked to the gate with him, but Cliffe stopped when they reached it, for a big automobile was lurching down the uneven road. The mud splashed about the car indicated distance traveled at furious speed, but it slowed at the bend near the gate, and Cliffe sighed as he recognized Robinson. "I guess this stops my fishing," he said in a resigned tone. Dropping his rod and creel, he jumped on to the footboard as the driver cautiously took the gate, and Evelyn smiled as the car rolled up the drive. She was sorry that her father had lost his favorite sport, but his prompt surrender of it was characteristic. He was first of all a man of business. "Wired for an auto' to meet me when I left the train," Robinson told him. "It was raining pretty hard, and they don't do much grading on these mountain roads, but I made the fellow rush her along as fast as he could." He took some letters from his wallet. "Read these and think them over while I get breakfast." Half an hour afterward they sat in a corner of the veranda, where Mrs. Willans' guests left them alone. These quiet, intent men of affairs obviously did not belong to their world. "Well?" Robinson said. "One of two things has got to be done; there's no middle course." Robinson nodded. "That's true. Middle courses generally lead to nothing." "Very well. We can cut out our deal with President Altiera, lose the money we have spent, and let the concessions go; or we can pay up again, hang on, and put the matter through." "What's your opinion? The fellow asks for more." "Do you mean to be guided by me?" "Yes," Robinson said. "Take which you think is the right line; I'll stand in." "It's pretty hard to see. We'll make good if we get the concessions; but the President's up against a bigger thing than he thought. It's going to cost him and us some money to head off the revolutionists, but if we don't drop out right now, we've got to brace up and put it over. Well, as I'm fixed, it's a big risk. My money's making good interest, and if I go on, I've got to sell out stock I meant to hold. A set-back would be a serious thing for me. I want a few minutes to think it over." Robinson had confidence in Cliffe's integrity and judgment. "An hour, if you like," he said; "then we'll have to pull out, whatever you decide." For a long while Cliffe sat silent with knitted brows. His wife made claims upon his means that he sometimes found it hard to satisfy; and it was his ambition that his daughter should be rich. After carefully pondering the letters, he saw that he might be involved in a conflict with forces whose strength he could not estimate, and defeat would cost him the fruit of several years' labor. Yet the prize to be won was tempting, and he could take a risk. Besides, they already had put a good deal of money into it. "Well," he said at last, "I've made up my mind." "To hold on, I guess," Robinson suggested with a smile. "That's so," Cliffe answered in a quiet voice. "What's more, I'm going out to look into things myself. We can talk it over on the way to town. I'll be ready as soon as I've told my wife." Robinson took out his watch. "Give you half an hour if we're to catch the train," he said. Cliffe met Evelyn in the broad hall, and told her that he would have to go south at once. "Take me with you, won't you?" she begged. "I want to get away from Banner's Post." Cliffe hesitated a moment. "Why, yes," he then said; "I see no reason why you shouldn't go--particularly as your mother means to stay with Margaret Willans." When, a half hour later, the car started from the bottom of the steps and Mrs. Cliffe turned away with a wave of her hand, Evelyn stood in the drive, asking herself bluntly why she wished to accompany her father. A longing for change had something to do with it; she was getting tired of an aimless and, in a sense, uneventful life, for it was true that occupations that had once been full of pleasurable excitement had begun to pall. But this was not her only object. Grahame was somewhere on the coast she meant to visit, and she might meet him. Evelyn admitted with a blush that she would like to do so. The next morning a telegram arrived from Cliffe, directing her to join him in town, and ten days later she stood, at evening, on a balcony of the Hotel International, in Havana. It was getting dark, but a few lamps were lighted in the _patio_, and the moonlight touched one white wall. The air was hot and heavy, and filled with exotic smells, and the sound of alien voices gave Evelyn the sense of change and contrast she had sought. Yet she knew that, so far, the trip had been a failure. It had not banished her restlessness; Havana was as stale as New York. She remembered with regret how different it had been on her first visit. Grahame and his companion had been with her then, and she knew that she missed them. She turned as a man came out on the balcony that ran along the end of the house. He did not look like a Cuban, and she started when the moonlight fell upon him, for she saw that it was Grahame. He was making for the stairs at the corner where the two balconies joined and did not notice her. Evelyn realized that, as she wore a white dress, her figure would be indistinct against the wall, and, if she did not move in the next few moments, he would go down the stairs and disappear among the people in the _patio_. If he had meant to enter the hotel, he would not have come that way. She felt that if she let him go they might not meet again. After all, this might be wiser. Yet her heart beat fast, and she thrilled with a strange excitement as she stood irresolute, knowing that the choice she had to make would be momentous. Grahame reached the top of the stairs without turning, and was going down when she leaned over the balustrade. She did not consciously decide upon the action; it was as if something had driven her into making it. "Mr. Grahame!" she called softly. He looked up with the moonlight on his face and she saw the gleam she had expected in his eyes. Then he came swiftly toward her, and her indecision vanished when she gave him her hand. "This is a remarkably pleasant surprise, but I didn't see you until you spoke," he said. "Have you just come out of one of the rooms?" "No; I've been here some time. I saw you as soon as you appeared on the balcony." Grahame gave her a quick look, and she knew he was wondering why she had waited until the last moment. He was shrewd enough to see that the delay had some significance, but this did not matter. "Well," he said, "I'm glad you didn't let me pass, because I was going out into the street, and it's doubtful if I'd have come back." "Yes," said Evelyn; "I seemed to know that." He was silent for a moment, but his expression was intent and a faint glow of color showed in his brown face. Evelyn let him make what he liked of her admission. She had not been influenced by coquetry, but by a feeling that it was a time for candor. "I was thinking about an interview I'd just finished--that is why I didn't look round," he explained. "I came from Matanzas this afternoon." "Then the _Enchantress_ isn't here?" "No; she's at Matanzas, but I can't get back to-night. Will you be here long?" "A day or two, waiting for a boat. I wonder whether you would stay and dine with us this evening?" Then a thought struck Evelyn, and she added: "That is, if it isn't undesirable for you to be seen here." She had not expected him to hesitate and was prepared for his reckless twinkle. "Of course I'll stay! But did you mean--if it was not unsafe?" "I suppose I did," she admitted with a smile. "You know I helped you in a mysterious plot the last time I was here. Now it would be selfish of me to ask you to wait if you think you'd better not." "There's no risk worth counting, and I'd take it if there was. When you have a temperament like mine it's hard to deny yourself a pleasure." "I shouldn't have thought you self-indulgent," Evelyn smiled. "Well," he said, "one's fortitude has its limits. I suppose it depends upon the strength of the temptation." He had answered in a light vein, and Evelyn followed his lead. "It's a relief to know you mean to stay. My father will be pleased to see you; but he may not have finished his business when dinner is ready, and I rather shrink from going down alone." They talked about matters of no importance for a time, and then went through the _patio_ to the dining-room. It was not full, and Evelyn imagined that Grahame was glad there were several unoccupied chairs between them and the rest of the company. She noticed, moreover, that when people came in he glanced up quietly, as if he did not want her to notice his action, and she had a guilty feeling that she had made him take a risk that was greater than he would own. Yet she was glad that he had taken it. "Where are you going when you leave Havana?" he asked presently. "To Valverde, and afterward perhaps to Rio Frio." Grahame looked thoughtful, and Evelyn quietly studied him. Her training had made her quick at guessing what lay behind the reserve of people who were not quite frank with her, and she saw that he was disturbed. "Why should I not go there?" she asked. "I don't know any good reason if your father's willing to take you, but the country's in a rather unsettled state just now." Grahame paused for a moment and added earnestly: "Don't trust Gomez." "Do you think we shall meet him?" "Yes," he said with a dry smile; "I think it very likely." "Then you must know something about my father's business, and what is going on in the country." "I believe I know more about the country than your father does. In fact, I'd like to warn him against Gomez, only that I imagine he's a good judge of character and already knows his man." Grahame wrote an address on a leaf of a small notebook and, tearing it out, put it on her plate. "I'm going to ask a favor. If you should meet with any difficulty at Rio Frio, will you send me a message through the man whose name I've written down? I might, perhaps, be of some use." "Do you expect us to get into any difficulty?" "No; but one can't tell--trouble might arise." "And, if it did, you could help us?" "Well," he said gravely, "I'd do my best." Evelyn's eyes sparkled. "I know you could be trusted! But all this mystery gives the trip an extra interest. Then, you have made it obvious that the _Enchantress_ will be on the coast." "May I hope that this adds to your satisfaction?" Grahame said, smiling. "Now you're frivolous, and I was pleasantly excited! However, I'll promise that if anything very alarming seems to threaten us I'll send you word." Grahame looked up. An elderly Cuban gentleman, three or four places off, had once or twice glanced at them carelessly and then resumed his conversation with a lady beside him, but Grahame noticed that he stopped when Evelyn spoke. "Am I to tell my father what I have promised?" she asked. "You must use your own judgment about that." Evelyn understood him. He would not ask her to keep a secret from her father, and she liked his delicacy; but he looked thoughtful. She did not know that the Cuban gentleman engaged his attention. "Well," she said, "I'll tell him if it seems necessary; that is, if there's any reason for sending you word. Otherwise, of course, there would be no need to mention it." "No," he agreed with a smile that seemed to draw them closer because it hinted at mutual understanding. "One doesn't feel forced to explain things to you," Evelyn said impulsively. "That's an advantage. Explanations are a nuisance, and sometimes dangerous when they're important. I find them easiest when they don't matter." Cliffe came in and greeted Grahame cordially; and Grahame, glancing down the table without turning his head, saw the Cuban studying them. Something in the man's manner suggested that Cliffe's friendliness had surprised him. He made a few hasty pencil marks on the back of an old letter and then, looking up suddenly, caught Grahame watching him curiously. The Cuban pushed back his chair and left the room, although Grahame suspected that his dinner was not more than half finished. Evelyn, surprising the alert look on Grahame's face, was now more disturbed than ever on his account. Evidently there was danger for him here. Her fears would have been increased had she known the few words the spy wrote on his envelope. CHAPTER XX THE ARREST OF CASTILLO On a hot evening not long after he left Havana, Cliffe sat in a room of the old Spanish _presidio_ at Valverde. The building was in harmony with the decayed town, for it had been begun in more prosperous times, and its lower courses were solidly laid with stone. Molded doors and windows spoke of vanished art, and the gallery round the central _patio_ was raised on finely carved pillars, but Valverde had fallen on evil days and the _presidio_ had been finished with adobe mud. It had served at different times as the seat of the government, the barracks, and the jail, and now, when part had fallen down, the rest had been rudely repaired, and Gomez was quartered there when he visited the port. Outside, the ruinous building still retained a certain dignity, but this was not so within, where degenerate taste was shown in the tawdry decoration, and Gomez's sitting-room frankly offended Cliffe with its suggestion of effeminate luxury. Gaudy silk hangings hid the old adobe walls, a silver lamp with a smoked chimney hung from the ceiling by tarnished chains, and highly colored rugs were spread upon the dirty floor. There were inartistic but heavily gilded French clocks and mirrors; and over all a sickening scent of perfume. Cliffe found it more pleasant to look out through the open window at the town, which lay beneath him, bathed in moonlight. The close-massed, square-fronted houses glimmered white and pink and yellow, with narrow gaps between them where a few lights burned; a break, from which dusky foliage rose, marked the _alameda_. In front ran a curving beach where wet sand glistened below a bank of shingle and a fringe of surf broke with a drowsy roar. Though it was not late, there was no stir in the streets; an air of languorous depression brooded over the town. Gomez seemed to feel that it needed an explanation. "Our trade," he said, "is prosperous, but we do not encourage the people to gather in the plaza, and the cafés are watched. They are the storm centers: it is there the busybodies talk. The man who stays at home and minds his business is seldom a danger to the State. He dislikes change, and has no time to waste on idealistic theories." "I guess that's true, up to a point," Cliffe agreed. "The industrious citizen will stand for a good deal, but he's a man to reckon with when things get too bad. He doesn't talk, like the others; he's been trained to act, and there are developments when he makes up his mind about what he wants. However, this is not what we're here to discuss." "No; but the state of the country has something to do with the matter. We admit that there have been manifestations of discontent, and disturbances caused by mischievous persons who love disorder, and we must enforce quietness and respect for authority. This, you will understand, costs some money." "I've subscribed a good deal," Cliffe reminded him. "I'm anxious to learn when I'm going to get it back." "The wish is natural. May I point out that in generously offering help you threw in your lot with the Government and made our interests yours?" "I see that pretty clearly," Cliffe replied with a touch of grimness, for he recognized the skill with which he had been led on until he could not draw back without a heavy loss. "Anyway, as you seem to have weathered the storm, I want my reward. In short, I've come to find out when your President means to sign the concessions." "It will be as soon as possible; there is a small difficulty. We have an elective legislature; an encumbrance, señor, which hampers the administration, but in times of discontent it has some influence. Our people are jealous of foreigners, and there are interested persons ready to work upon their feelings. This is why the President hesitates about granting fresh concessions until he has found a way of silencing his enemies among the representatives. You perceive that I am frank with you." "It's what I like; but you haven't told me yet what I want to know. Now, unless I can find out exactly when I may expect the papers signed, I'll feel compelled to shut off supplies. I'd rather cut my loss than go on enlarging it." Gomez looked pained. "I must remind you, with some diffidence, that others have offered their help," he said. "They offered it; they haven't paid up. I expect you'll find they'll insist on knowing when you mean to deliver the goods. That's my position; I stand firm on it." "Very well. Before answering, I must inform the President." "You needn't. I'm going to take this matter to headquarters." "Unfortunately, the President has gone to Villa Paz for a short rest. I fear he would not like to be disturbed." "He will see me; he has to," Cliffe declared. "After all, it is possible, but I see a difficulty. There is no inn at Villa Paz where the señorita could find accommodation and the President is, like myself, a bachelor. He could receive you, but not the señorita. Our conventions are antiquated, but they must be considered. It is this which prevents me from offering my hospitality." Cliffe pondered for a few moments. The conventions Gomez mentioned were justified, because women are not treated in his country as they are in the United States, and Cliffe could not leave Evelyn alone in the Valverde Hotel. For all that, he must see the President, and he imagined that although Gomez had made some difficulties the fellow was willing that he should go. Gomez was a clever rogue, but Cliffe thought he could be trusted so long as their interests did not clash. He looked up sharply, for there was a sudden stir in the town. Cliffe was conscious of no definite sound, but he felt that the quietness had been broken and he saw that Gomez was listening. The man's fleshy face was intent; the stamp of indulgence had gone and given place to a look of fierce cruelty. He had become alert and resolute; this struck Cliffe as significant, as there was, so far, nothing to cause alarm. In a few moments a murmur broke out, and swelled while Gomez walked to the open window. The streets were suddenly filled with the patter of hurrying feet, and the confused outcry became a menacing roar. Cliffe jumped up. He had heard something like it when a mob of desperate strikers drove the police through an American manufacturing town; and now his daughter was alone at the hotel. "What is it?" he asked. "A tumult," Gomez answered. "I do not think it will be serious. We have placed a guard about the hotel, so the señorita is safe. But you will excuse me for a few minutes." He went into an adjoining room, and Cliffe, standing by the window, heard a telephone call. After this, all sounds inside the house were drowned by the growing uproar outside. Cliffe could see nothing of the riot, but he thought he could locate it in one of the dark gaps that pierced a block of houses some distance off. The clamor gained in effect from the mystery that surrounded its cause. Two pistol shots rang out and there was a wild shouting, but the note of fury had changed to alarm. Cliffe thought he could hear men running, and he pictured the mob pouring down the narrow street in flight, for the cries grew less frequent and receded. At last they died away, and a group of men moving in regular order came out of the mouth of a street. They seemed to have a prisoner in their midst, and four peons plodded behind, carrying something on a shutter. Then they all vanished into the gloom, and when their measured steps were getting faint Gomez returned with an unpleasant smile. "It is nothing," he said. "We had planned the arrest of a troublesome person called Castillo, who is a favorite with the mob. There was some excitement, and a few stones were thrown, but only one attempt at a rescue, the leader of which was shot by the rural guards. As he was a man we suspected of sedition, this has saved us some trouble." Cliffe looked at him, as one who might study a new species of animal or some rare and ugly plant. Gomez spread out his hands. "It is worth noting that the affair proves our strength," he said gloatingly. "We have seized a popular leader of the discontented, and there was no determined resistance. One may consider it an encouraging sign." Cliffe nodded agreement, and Gomez changed the subject. "I have been thinking," he said. "If you are resolved to see the President, Señora Herrero, wife of the _alcalde_, whom you have met, would take care of the señorita while you are away. They are people of some importance, and she would be safe with them." This struck Cliffe as a good suggestion, and when Gomez accompanied him to the _alcalde's_ house the matter was arranged with Evelyn's consent. The next morning Cliffe set off with a relay of mules and three or four days later was received by the President at a little town among the hills. Nothing was said about business until he had rested and dined, and then he sat with his host on a veranda half hidden by bougainvillea, looking down on the dim littoral that ran back to the sea. President Altiera differed from his secretary. He looked more of an autocratic soldier than a diplomatist. There was a hint of brutality about him, and Cliffe thought he would rather use force than guile. The man had a coarse, strong face, and his eyes were stern, but he was rather reserved than truculent. "Señor," he said, "since I understand you were determined to see me, it is an honor to welcome you, and my house and self are at your command. I imagine, however, that neither of us often wastes much time on compliments." "My excuse is that I find one does best by going to headquarters when any difficulties arise. It seemed possible that your secretary might smooth down my remarks before transmitting them." "And you do not wish them smoothed down," Altiera dryly suggested. "I think it best that we should understand each other." "That is so. What do you wish to understand?" "When I may expect the sealed grant of the concessions." "In two months, provided that my enemies do not kill me first, which I think is hardly probable." "One hopes not, but there is another risk; not large, perhaps, but to be reckoned with." Altiera laughed. "That the people may choose another President? No, señor. I rule this country. When I cease to do so it will be because I am dead. Let us be candid. Your concessions depend upon the luck that may attend some assassin's attempt, and I take precautions." Cliffe thought this was true. Altiera carried a pistol, and could use it remarkably well, and two armed guards were posted outside the veranda. "There is a condition," Altiera said. "The concessions will be yours in two months, but payment of the money my secretary asked for must be made in a fortnight, or, if this is impossible, as soon as you get home." "It would suit me better to take the concessions in a fortnight and pay in two months," Cliffe retorted coolly. "I am not a trader, señor; I do not dispute and haggle over a bargain." "Neither do I," said Cliffe. "Still, it's necessary for a trader to state his terms." There was silence for a few moments, and Cliffe, studying his antagonist's face, thought his statement justified. The man might use brutal means to gain his end, but he would not contend about a small advantage. "Very well," the President conceded. "Though it will cause me some embarrassment, I make another offer. You shall have the grant in a month." "A month is too long to wait." Altiera rose and stood with his brown hand clenched upon the back of his chair and his brows knitted. It seemed to cost him an effort to maintain his self-control, and Cliffe saw that he had pressed him hard. For all that, he did not mean to yield. He had gone farther than was prudent, and knew when to stop. "You understand what you risk by your exactions?" Altiera asked menacingly. "Señor Gomez made that plain. I have no security for the money already paid, except your honor." Altiera bowed. "Though the situation is difficult and you make it worse, I believe your confidence is not misplaced. Well, since one or two of my ministers must be consulted, I cannot give you an answer for a week; but the country is healthful in this neighborhood, and you may be interested in studying its resources. My house is at your disposal, and your comfort will be provided for while I see what can be done." It took Cliffe a minute or two to make up his mind. He would rather have gone back to Valverde at once; but he felt that he must finish his business before returning. Although he had some misgivings, he agreed to stay. In reaching his decision he thought Evelyn safe with the _alcalde_; but he had not reckoned on the cunning of Secretary Gomez. CHAPTER XXI A HALF-BREED'S TRICK Evelyn found the time pass heavily at Valverde. The town was hot and uninteresting, although she did not see much of it, for it was only when the glaring sunshine had faded off the narrow streets that she was allowed a leisurely stroll in company with the _alcalde's_ wife. Señora Herrero, who was stout and placid, and always dressed in black, spoke no English, and only a few words of French. After an hour's superintendence of her half-breed servants' work, she spent most of the day in sleep. Yet she was careful of her guest's comfort, and in this respect Evelyn had no cause for complaint. It was the monotony the girl found trying. After the ten o'clock breakfast there was nothing to be done until dinner was served at four. The adobe house was very quiet and was darkened by lattices pulled across the narrow windows; and there was no stir in the town between noon and early evening. Evelyn patiently tried to grasp the plot of a Spanish novel, and when she got tired of this sat in the coolest spot she could find, listening to the drowsy rumble of the surf. Hitherto her time had been occupied by strenuous amusements, and the lethargic inaction jarred. It was better when the shadows lengthened, because there were then voices and footsteps in the streets. One could watch the languid traffic; but when night came Valverde, instead of wakening to a few hours' joyous life, was silent again. Sometimes a group of people went by laughing, and now and then a few gathered round a singer with a guitar, but there was no noisy talk in the cafés and no band played in the _alameda_. An ominous quietness brooded over the town. All this reacted on Evelyn's nerves, and one hot afternoon she felt ready to welcome any change as she sat in a shaded room. Her hands were wet with perspiration, the flies that buzzed about her face exasperated her, and she found the musky smell that filled the house intolerable. Señora Herrero lay in a big cane chair, looking strangely bulky and shapeless in her tight black dress, with her eyes half closed and no sign of intelligence in her heavily powdered face. Evelyn longed to wake her and make her talk. Then there were steps outside and Gomez came in. He bowed, and Señora Herrero grew suddenly alert. Indeed, it struck Evelyn that her hostess felt disturbed, but she paid no attention to this. She was glad of a break in the monotony, and it was not until afterward her mind dwelt upon what took place. "Señor Cliffe's business with the President will keep him longer than he thought. He may be detained for a fortnight," Gomez said. Evelyn had no reason for being on her guard, and her disappointment was obvious. "I was looking forward to his return in a day or two," she answered. "The señor Cliffe is to be envied for having a dutiful daughter," Gomez smiled. "Still, I need not offer my sympathy, because it is his wish that you should go to him." "When?" Evelyn asked eagerly. "As soon as you are ready. I have ordered the mules, and you can bring what you think needful. We could start after dinner, and I offer myself as escort for part of the way." "But this is impossible!" Señora Herrero exclaimed in horrified protest. Gomez spread out his hands deprecatingly. "With apologies, señora, I think not. My plan is that you should go with your guest until I can place her in some other lady's hands." "But it is years since I have ridden a mule, and exercise makes me ill! Besides, I cannot leave my husband and my household." Evelyn remembered afterward that her hostess's indignant expression suddenly changed, as if Gomez had given her a warning look; but he answered good-humoredly: "I have seen Don José. He feels desolated at the thought of losing you for two or three days, but he agrees that we must do all we can to suit the wishes of our American friends. Besides, you can travel to Galdo, where we stay the night, in a coach. I will see that one is sent, but it may take an hour or two to find mules." "They must be good," said the señora. "I am heavy, and the road is bad." "We will pick the best; but until you overtake us the señorita Cliffe will, no doubt, be satisfied with my escort. We should reach Galdo soon after dark. The señora Romanez will receive us there, and we start early the next morning on our journey to the hills." Gomez turned to Evelyn. "This meets with your approval?" he asked suavely. "Oh, yes," she agreed; though she afterward realized that there was no obvious reason why she should not have waited for the coach, and that it was curious her hostess did not suggest this. Gomez returned after dinner before Evelyn was quite ready, and she was somewhat surprised that he made no remark about the luggage she wished to take. It was skilfully lashed on the broad pack-saddles, and they set off when she mounted a handsome mule. There were two baggage animals, driven by dark-skinned peons, and two mounted men brought up the rear. Gomez said this explained the delay in getting mules for the coach, but added that the girl would find the journey pleasanter in the saddle. Evelyn agreed with him as they rode down the roughly paved street. It was a relief to be moving, and the air had got pleasantly cool. Half-breed women with black shawls round their heads looked up at her from beside their tiny charcoal cooking fires, and she saw dark eyes flash with hostility as her escort passed. Here and there a woman of pure Spanish blood stood on a balcony and glanced down with shocked prudery at the bold American, but Evelyn smiled at this. She distrusted Gomez, who obviously was not a favorite with the poorer citizens, but as a traveling companion she did not find much fault with him. After a while they left the houses behind and turned into a dusty, rutted track. The murmur of the sea followed them until they reached a belt of forest where the sound was cut off, and Evelyn felt as if she had lost a friend. The measured beat of the surf and the gleam of spray were familiar things; the forest was mysterious, and oppressively silent. In places a red glow shone among the massive trunks, but, for the most part, they were hung with creepers and all below was wrapped in shade. The track grew soft and wet; the air was steamy and filled with exotic smells. Evelyn felt her skin get damp, and the mules fell into a labored pace. Strange noises began to fill the gathering gloom; the air throbbed with a humming that rose and fell. Deep undertones and shrill pipings that it was hard to believe were made by frogs and insects pierced the stagnant air. Specks of phosphorescent light twinkled among the leaves, but the fireflies were familiar and Evelyn welcomed them. She felt suddenly homesick, and wished they were not leaving the coast; but she remembered that her father had sent for her, and brushed her uneasiness away. After a time, Gomez stopped. "We have not gone fast, and the señora ought to overtake us soon," he said. "Will you get down and wait for her?" The forest, with the thin mist drifting through it, had a forbidding look, and, for the first time that she could recollect, Evelyn felt afraid of the dark. "Let us go on," she said. Gomez hesitated a moment and then acquiesced. The road got steep and the mist thicker. Drooping creepers brushed them as they passed, and now and then Evelyn was struck by a projecting branch. Her mule, however, needed no guidance, and she sank into a dreamy lethargy. There was something enervating and soporific in the steamy atmosphere. At last the gloom began to lighten and they came out into the luminous clearness of the tropic night. In front lay a few flat blocks of houses, surrounded by fields of cane, and here and there a patch of broad-leafed bananas. Passing through the silent village they reached a long building which Gomez said was the Romanez _hacienda_. Lights gleamed in the windows, but they knocked twice before a strong, arched door was unfastened, and they rode through into the _patio_. It was obvious that they were expected. A gentleman dressed in white, his stout wife in black, and a girl who wore a thin, yellow dress, came down to welcome them. They were hospitable, but Evelyn, speaking only a few words of Castilian, and feeling very tired, was glad when her hostess showed her to her room. She soon went to sleep, and, wakening early, felt invigorated by the cool air that flowed in through the open window and the sight of the blue hills that rose, clean-cut, against the morning sky. Then she had a drowsy recollection of something being wrong, and presently remembered that the señora Herrero had not arrived. This, however, was not important, because Gomez could no doubt arrange for her hostess to accompany them on the next stage of their journey. Evelyn found Gomez apologetic when they met at breakfast. He was much vexed with the _alcalde's_ wife, but the señorita Romanez and her duenna would take her place, and he expected to put Evelyn in her father's care in two more days. This, he added, would afford him a satisfaction that would be tempered by regret. They started after breakfast, but Evelyn did not feel drawn to her new companion. Luisa Romanez was handsome in a voluptuous style, with dark hair, a powdered face, and languishing black eyes, but so far as she could make her meaning clear, she banteringly complimented Evelyn on having won the admiration of a distinguished man. Evelyn declared that this was a mistake, and Gomez had offered his escort as a duty, to which Doña Luisa returned a mocking smile. Her amusement annoyed Evelyn. On the whole, she was glad that conversation was difficult. The sour, elderly duenna who rode behind them said nothing at all. After traveling all day, they stopped at a lonely _hacienda_, where Evelyn soon retired to rest. She slept well, and, wakening rather late the next morning, found that Doña Luisa and her duenna had left an hour before. This was embarrassing, because Evelyn knew something about Spanish conventions; but, after all, she was an American, and they did not apply to her. Gomez appeared annoyed and extremely apologetic. "There has been a misunderstanding," he explained. "I thought the señorita Romanez would go with us to Rio Frio, but she told me last night that she must return early this morning. I expostulated and implored, but the señorita was firm. She declared she had not promised to come farther than the _hacienda_. You see my unfortunate position. One cannot compel a lady to do what she does not wish." "When shall we reach Rio Frio?" Evelyn asked. "If all goes well, late this afternoon." Evelyn thought for a moment. She was vexed and vaguely alarmed, but her father was waiting for her at Rio Frio. "Then let us start as soon as possible," she said. Gomez bowed. "When breakfast is over. I go to give my men their orders." Leaving the _hacienda_, they rode by rough, steep tracks that wound through belts of forest and crossed sun-scorched slopes. Although it was hot, the air was clear, and Evelyn was pleased to see that Gomez kept the mules at a steady pace. At noon they reached a cluster of poverty-stricken mud houses, and Gomez called one of the ragged, half-breed peons. They talked for some time in a low voice, and then Gomez turned to Evelyn. "I am afraid we shall have to wait here for two or three hours," he said. "It might be dangerous to go any farther now." "But I must get on!" Evelyn answered sharply. "Your wishes would be a command, only that I must think of your safety first. There is an inn in the village, and while you rest I will explain why we cannot go forward." Evelyn found the small _fonda_ indescribably dirty, but it offered shelter from the sun. Openings in its bare walls let in puffs of breeze, and decaying lattices kept out the glare, but the room was full of flies, and rustling sounds showed that other insects lurked in the crevices. The place reeked with the smell of _caña_ and kerosene, and Evelyn had to force herself to eat a little of the greasy mess that was set before her in rude, sun-baked crockery. When the meal was over Gomez began his explanation. "You have heard that the country is disturbed. There are turbulent people who want a revolution, and I am not popular with them." Evelyn smiled, for she had learned something about the country's politics and she thought he had expressed the feeling of its discontented citizens very mildly. She distrusted him, but, so far, his conduct had been irreproachable. "I see you understand," he resumed. "The worst is that you too are an object of suspicion; it is known that your father is a friend of the President and has business with him. Well, I have been warned that some of our enemies are in the neighborhood, and they might rouse the peons to attack us. They will know when we left the _hacienda_ and watch for us, but we can outwit them by waiting a while and then taking another road." This was plausible, and Evelyn agreed to the delay, although she did not feel quite satisfied when Gomez left her. The dirty room was very hot and its atmosphere unspeakably foul, but she could not sit outside in the sun, and, taking up a soiled newspaper, she tried to read. Her knowledge of Castilian did not carry her far, but she made out that the Government was being urged to deal severely with a man named Sarmiento. Evelyn put down the paper, feeling that she ought to know the name. Sarmiento had some connection with Grahame and his friends; perhaps they had spoken of him. This led her to think of them. It looked as if Grahame were interested in the country's politics. Remembering the promise she had made, she wondered whether the _Enchantress_ was then on the coast. As he seemed to be opposing Gomez, he must be helping the revolutionaries, while her father had business with the President. This was puzzling, and she sat thinking about it for some time; and then looked up with a start as Gomez came in. "So you have been reading the _diario_!" he remarked. "I don't understand very much; but who is Don Martin Sarmiento?" "A dangerous person who goes about making trouble." "It's curious, but I think I have met him." Gomez gave her a searching glance and then smiled. "He is not worth remembering, but you did meet him at Havana." "Ah!" said Evelyn sharply. Gomez laughed. "Must I remind you, señorita, of a little affair at the Hotel International?" Evelyn remembered it well and guessed that it was Sarmiento whom Gomez had been pursuing when she stopped him by dropping her ring. She could now understand his look of baffled rage, and she recalled her shrinking from the savagery it displayed. "One imagines that you did not know Don Martin," Gomez said lightly, although there was a keen look in his narrowed eyes. "No," Evelyn answered; "I only saw him at dinner." "Then perhaps you have heard your father speak of him?" "I am not sure; I have heard his name somewhere; but I don't think my father ever met him." "Well, I don't know that it is of much importance. I came to tell you that I think we can start." They set off and reached Rio Frio without trouble some time after dark. People in the streets turned and gazed at them, and although some saluted Gomez, Evelyn thought that, for the most part, they watched the party with unfriendly curiosity. She was eager to meet her father, but when they dismounted in the _patio_ of a large white house she got a shock. A dark-skinned woman and several half-breed servants came down from a gallery to welcome them, but Cliffe was not there. CHAPTER XXII HELD FOR RANSOM Gomez once more apologized. The señor Cliffe had not yet arrived from Villa Paz, he explained, but was expected in the morning. In the meantime the good señora Garcia would look after the señorita's comfort. Evelyn had to be content with that. Indeed, she was too tired to feel much disturbed. On getting up the next morning, however, she was troubled by unpleasant suspicions. It had been a shock to find Cliffe absent, and she began to review the misadventures which had marked her journey. To begin with, it now seemed curious that her father had not written instead of sending a message; then, the señora Herrero had not kept her promise to overtake them, and Luisa Romanez had unexpectedly gone back. While she wondered whether all this had any sinister meaning, Evelyn felt for a packet of paper currency which she had, at her father's advice, sewn into her dress. She found that it was gone. A hurried search showed that the stitches had been neatly cut. For a few moments she felt unnerved, and then resolutely pulled herself together. This was no time for hysteria. It was obvious that she had been duped. The lost sum was not large, but with the exception of a few coins it was all she had, and it had not been stolen by a common thief. Somebody had searched her clothes while she slept and taken the money with the object of embarrassing her. Going to the window, she looked out at the town. It had a mean, dilapidated air; the few inhabitants she saw slowly moving about looked poverty-stricken and furtive. Their harsh voices jarred; one could expect no sympathy or help from these foreigners. Hitherto she had been indulged and carefully protected, but she was now alone and in danger, and the novel experience was daunting. Still, she saw that it was unwise to give her imagination rein. She must keep her head and try to grapple with the situation. She finished dressing and without waiting for the morning chocolate found her way to the room in which she had been received on the previous evening. It stretched across one end of the house on the second floor and was furnished in rather barbarous taste. Although there was a profusion of colored silk and a hint of sensual luxury, it was obviously a man's room, and Evelyn studied the woman who joined her when the majordomo brought in breakfast. Señora Garcia was coarsely handsome, but she had not the easy manners of a lady of rank and her dark color hinted at Indian blood. Her expression was arrogant, and Evelyn felt that she was hostile. Besides, she spoke an uncouth Spanish that the girl could not understand at all. Breakfast was a trial of nerve, but Evelyn knew that she must eat and hide her fears. When breakfast was over she would have a talk with Gomez. He soon came in, and dismissed the señora Garcia with a commanding glance. Her servile obedience was significant. "_Buenos días, señorita_," he greeted Evelyn smilingly. "When do you expect my father?" she asked bluntly. "I regret that I cannot answer positively. It may be a week before he comes--perhaps longer." "But you brought me here to meet him!" Gomez smiled, and spread out his hands in a way that always irritated Evelyn. "It now appears that the señor Cliffe's business with the President is not finished," he said. "It would not prevent his coming to meet me if he had promised." "You should know best," Gomez answered with a shrug. "Still, it looks as if the señor Cliffe put his business first and is not very anxious about you." "That is not true!" Evelyn said vehemently. "If he had any cause to be anxious, he would let no business stand in the way!" "Ah! I admit I find this interesting." Gomez looked so satisfied that Evelyn feared she had blundered, though she could not see how. Her heart beat fast and her nerves were tensely strung, but she knew that she must be calm. The man was her antagonist and she was fighting in the dark. "Well," she said, "since my father has not arrived, I will go to him." "I am afraid that is impossible. It is a long way to Villa Paz and the country is disturbed." "Do you mean to prevent my going?" "Far from it, señorita. You are at liberty to do what you wish; but unfortunately, I cannot provide mules and an escort. There are some dangerous revolutionaries among the hills. Then, I must remind you that our people dislike foreigners, and a lady cannot travel alone and without money." Evelyn felt trapped. "How do you _know_ I haven't money? Because it was stolen in this house! You must lend me some--my father will repay it." "Your pardon, señorita, but you are mistaken; I can answer for the honesty of my servants. I would lend you money, only that I cannot permit you to make a journey I know is dangerous." The girl sat still and there was silence for a few moments while she tried to brace herself. She felt that she was at the man's mercy, for there was something threatening behind his suave politeness, and his smile indicated that he was amused by her futile struggles. For all that, she must keep up the fight. "Then what is to be done?" she asked. "I suggest that you write to the señor Cliffe and tell him where you are. If you add that you do not feel safe, he will, no doubt, join you as soon as possible. Although it may reflect upon our care of you, we will see that he gets the letter." It seemed a simple course, but Evelyn was on her guard. She must match her wits against the man's, and he had shown a hint of eagerness that she thought suspicious. Having brought her to Rio Frio by trickery, why did he wish her father to know that she felt alarmed? "I should be glad to write to him, but I do not see why I should make him uneasy on my account," she said. There was something in Gomez's expression which indicated that he felt baffled, and she knew it might be dangerous to provoke him; but he exercised self-control. "That is for you to judge, but are you not inconsistent, señorita? You show some anger and alarm when you do not find your father here, and now when I suggest an easy way of bringing him, you will not take it." "Do you want him to come here?" Evelyn asked bluntly. Gomez gave her a steady, thoughtful look. "On the whole, that would suit us." He paused and added in a meaning tone: "It would facilitate your return to the coast." Evelyn knew she had been given a hint that was half a threat and it cost her something to refuse it, although she felt that to do what the man wished might not be the safest plan. "After all, it might interfere with his business if I made him leave Villa Paz before he is ready." Watching Gomez closely she thought his calm was forced, but he bowed. "As you wish, señorita, but you will think over it. And now I must leave you." For some minutes after he had gone Evelyn sat with relaxed muscles and vacant mind, for the strain had told; then by degrees her courage came back. She was an American and must show no weakness to an antagonist of alien and, she felt, baser blood. Besides, it looked as if she had won the first encounter and she had resources which should prove useful. She had inherited her father's intelligence, and her social training had given her restraint and the power to conceal her thoughts, while a woman's quick, instinctive perception was an advantage. All this, however, was not directly to the point. She had been decoyed to Rio Frio for some purpose. She shrank as she remembered Luisa Romanez's hints; still, she did not think Gomez was in love with her. The fellow was a sensualist, but he had some advantage in view, and she had already suspected what it was. Now she began to understand the matter more clearly. Gomez and the President meant to use her as a means of getting her father into their power. She did not think his personal safety was threatened, but they would insist on his agreeing to their terms as the price of restoring her to him, and it was plain that she would play into their hands by writing a letter that would cause him anxiety. Evelyn determined that they should not have her help, but although she sat for some time with brows knitted and hands clenched, she could make no better plan than to remain quietly obstinate. It was impossible to reach Villa Paz without money, and although she shrank from being left in the power of a man like Gomez, she thought his self-interest would secure her safety. She might, perhaps, get some one to carry a message to Grahame if he were on the coast, but she was reluctant to do so unless the need were urgent. After a while she got up and went out into the plaza. People gazed at her curiously; some smiled at one another as she passed, and a number of the women looked suspicious and hostile. For all that, she was neither molested nor followed, and when the sun got hot she returned to the house, where she spent the day drearily improving her knowledge of Castilian. It promised to become useful, but the fine language jarred her long afterward. The week that followed tried her courage. She was, in reality, a prisoner, though subject to no open restraint and treated well, except that the señora Garcia regarded her with badly disguised hatred. Now and then she saw Gomez, but he was suavely courteous and said nothing of importance. She got nervous and lost her color and her appetite, but there was nothing to do but wait until Gomez, who apparently meant to wear her out, made some fresh demand. One evening he came into the room where she sat and after a ceremonious greeting stood with his head slightly bent in an attitude of respect. He was dressed in a white uniform which emphasized his stoutness and the dark color of his greasy skin. "You look tired, señorita," he remarked. "I am very tired of Rio Frio. Have you come to tell me that I can go away?" "That you should be eager to do so grieves me, but I can, perhaps, make it possible. There is a proposal I wish to make." "Yes?" Evelyn answered as carelessly as she could. "You may find what I propose surprising; but I must beg you to think over it and you will see that it is not so strange as it seems. I have the honor to ask you to be my wife." Evelyn shrank back in horror, as if he had struck her, and then with an effort recovered her self-control. "This is impossible, señor; indeed, it is absurd." "Your pardon," he said with ominous grimness; "I cannot agree. It is, I think, the best way out of an embarrassing situation, but this is an argument I do not wish to use. I would rather speak of the charm you exercise and my respectful admiration." "We can leave that out. I do not value nor desire it." The man's dark eyes flashed, and Evelyn knew the danger of rousing him. His Spanish polish was only skin-deep, and the savage lurked beneath. For all that, she was desperate and meant to force the conflict. "Very well," he said; "I must take another course. To begin with, it looks as if your father did not care what became of you. It is now some time since he left you at Valverde and he has not troubled to inquire if you are safe." "I do not believe that!" "Well, we will let it go. The rest is more important. It is known in Valverde that you did me the honor to run away with me." Evelyn jumped up, with the color rushing to her face and her hands clenched. The prudence she tried to exercise had given place to imperious anger. "You scoundrel!" she cried. "Do you think it matters to me what your black-blooded countrymen and women think! Your Moorish customs may be necessary for them, but I am an American!" Gomez chuckled. "There were two American _comisionistas_ at Valverde and they must have heard the story in the cafés. It is, you understand, a romantic episode: the daughter of a well-known financier elopes with a foreign soldier. The _comisionistas_ talk about it when they return and your newspapers make the most of the tale. Some of them are not reserved or fastidious. It is possible they print your portrait. One can imagine the astonishment of your friends, but the story would be incomplete if it did not end with a romantic wedding." The girl drew back in horror. If the tale reached home, the shock would break her mother down; but it was possible that Gomez was lying. She had heard of no American drummers in the town. He gave her no time to recover. "Then I must show you how what followed our flight from Valverde fits in. We arrive together at Rio Frio after dark; you find shelter in my house." Evelyn started, for this was worse. "Your house!" she exclaimed. "Then who is Señora Garcia?" Gomez smirked in an ugly manner. "A woman of the town who comes at my bidding." The jealous hatred of the coarse but handsome woman was now explained and Evelyn grew hot with humiliation as she saw that the señora Garcia regarded her as a favored rival. It was unendurable; but in spite of her anger she was getting calm. Besides, there was some hope in the thought that Gomez could not be moved by passion. He was a sensual brute, and her beauty had perhaps caught his roving eye, but it was some material advantage he sought. "It was a clever plot; one that only a mind like yours could conceive," she said with quiet scorn. "The important thing is that it succeeded. But may I ask why you object to me? I am a man of influence--in reality, the second in power. The country is disturbed and discontented; before long I may be first." "Your hopes would probably come to a sudden end, if your master guessed them," Evelyn answered with a mocking smile. She saw that she had touched him, for he cast a quick glance at the door, as if to make sure that nobody had heard his boast. As he did so, Evelyn thought she heard a faint movement outside, but she knew she might be mistaken, and Gomez did not seem to notice anything. To distract his attention, she flung another jibe at him. "Señor," she said, "though you think I am in your power, I will never marry you. It is an insult to suggest it. Even if you were not repulsive in person and character, you are not a white man." The blood rushed to his face and his eyes flashed. "You are rash, señorita, in trying to provoke me, but you may take a wiser course before I have finished with you. It pains me deeply to be compelled to remind you that you are in my house, in my power. I repeat to you my offer, señorita; I give you one more chance to marry me _of your own free will_. And now I leave you to think it over." Before Evelyn could more than gasp he was gone. She fell limply into a chair and dropped her head into her hands. She must think, _think_; but the strain had been unbearable and the reaction threatened to overwhelm her. CHAPTER XXIII THE INTERCEPTED NOTE When she was able to think calmly, Evelyn found herself confronted by familiar troubles. She was not a prisoner and yet she could not run away, because she had no money and could not understand the barbarous Castilian spoken among the hills. Moreover, she could not appeal, even by signs, for help, for it was generally believed that she had eloped with Gomez. His friends would, no doubt, send her back to him. His enemies would treat her with rude contempt. Sooner than be forced to marry him, she would steal away and starve; but she had a conviction that things would not come to the worst. It would suit Gomez best to break down her resistance by moral pressure. She was young, but not altogether inexperienced, and during the past week her mental powers had suddenly developed; besides, she was supported by a deep-rooted national pride. It was a privilege to be an American, or, as her countrymen sometimes expressed it, to be white. The sentiment might not be quite free from prejudice, but it was founded on truth and carried an obligation. One must respect one's birthright and never submit to be trampled on by a foreigner. It was, however, obvious that she must seek outside help, and in her need she thought of Grahame. He would come if she sent for him, and she knew now that he would be welcome if he came as her lover. He was a white man; it was an unspeakable relief to dwell upon his fine, athletic symmetry and his strong, brown face with its stamp of semi-ascetic restraint, after the tainted grossness of her persecutor. She had thought of him often, and had indeed found it hard not to do so oftener, but the turning-point had come and, flinging aside ambition, she opened her heart to the love that had been waiting. This was not because she was in danger, although danger had hastened the crisis. For a time she forgot Gomez, and listened vacantly to the patter of feet in the hot streets while she sat quietly in a corner of the shaded room, lost in alluring dreams. Then she roused herself, and going to her apartment wrote a short message, stating that she needed help. She could not find an envelope and dare not ask for one, so she folded the note and wrote across it the address Grahame had given her. Then she stole from the house. No one interfered with her as she went up a street that led to the outskirts of the town, where she was less likely to be watched. The unsealed note could not be posted, because it would no doubt be given to Gomez, but she might find somebody who would arrange for its conveyance by hand. It would be better if the person were a revolutionary, but she imagined that the President's enemies would not make themselves conspicuous. Some risk must be taken, but, after all, very few people could read English. After a time she met a peon and showed him the note. He seemed surprised to see the Spanish name on the back, and at first vigorously shook his head, but when Evelyn held out two or three coins he began to ponder, and presently made a sign of understanding and took the note. Evelyn felt reckless as he moved away, for she had given him all her money and had no resource left. Returning by a different way, she entered the house. Gomez did not seem to be about, but the building was large and she seldom saw him except when he paid her a formal visit. The man was a ruffian, but it was her money he wanted, and he would act discreetly. His boast had thrown some light upon his treacherous schemes: he meant to make himself President, if he could compel her father to provide the necessary funds. The peon carrying the note set out on foot for the next village, where he had a friend who sometimes went to the coast. The friend, however, was not at home, and Evelyn's messenger, being tired and in possession of more money than usual, entered a little wine-shop and ordered refreshment. The _caña_ was strong and after drinking more than was good for him he forgot his caution when one of the villagers asked what had brought him there. To satisfy the fellow's curiosity, he produced the note, and the loungers in the wine-shop grew interested, for the man to whom it was addressed was known as an enemy of the Government. One tried to take it from the peon, another interfered, and as both political parties were represented, a tumult broke out. It was stopped by the arrival of two rural guards, the note was seized, and one of the guards set off for Rio Frio at dawn the next morning. Gomez started when he was given the note, for Evelyn had made an unexpected move; but he saw the importance of what it implied and lighted a cigarette while he thought the matter out. He had suspected the _Enchantress_ for some time and knew that Grahame was her owner. Since the _yanqui_ was in communication with a dangerous revolutionist, he must be engaged in smuggling arms, and if he had landed many, the rebels would be ready to fight. For all that, Gomez was puzzled. Grahame was a friend of the señorita Cliffe's--perhaps even her lover--and he was helping the rebels, while her father had spent a good deal of money to support the President. This suggested that Cliffe might be playing a crooked game, and bore out some suspicions Gomez had entertained. The President must be informed at once; but in the meantime Gomez saw how the note could be made use of. After some thought, he summoned a confidential clerk who had learned English in the United States, and gave him the note. "It seems that the señorita does not like Rio Frio and means to leave us," he remarked. The clerk discreetly contented himself with a sign of agreement. "Well," Gomez resumed, "I think we will let her message go." "Would that be wise?" the other ventured. "We do not know when and which way the Englishman will come, and he may be joined by some of Sarmiento's followers." Gomez smiled. "The señorita Cliffe is artless and has made a mistake. Her note covers only half the paper and leaves room for something to be added underneath." "Ah!" The clerk was a skillful penman and had once or twice successfully imitated the signatures of hostile politicians. "You understand!" said Gomez. "The writing must not look different and you must use the same kind of pencil. Now give me some paper." He smoked a cigarette before he began to write, for the space at the foot of Evelyn's note was limited. Grahame probably knew the girl's hand, but would be deceived by a clever imitation of it in the form of a postscript under her signature. The note was dated at Rio Frio and left it to be understood that Evelyn expected him there, but the postscript directed him to land on the beach near Valverde, where a guide would look out for him for several nights. "There are two words we had better alter; the Americans do not often use them," said the clerk cautiously, and Gomez agreed to the change. "You will have it sent off and make arrangements for the Englishman to be met," he added with a smile. "And now I must start for Villa Paz to tell the President." Half an hour later he mounted in the _patio_, and Evelyn, hearing the clatter of hoofs, looked out through the half-opened lattice and watched him ride away. As he had an armed escort and a spare mule, she imagined he meant to make a long journey, and Grahame might arrive before he returned. Soon after the party had gone, the señora Garcia came in and stood looking at the girl as if she had something to say. Her air of sullen dislike was less marked than usual, and Evelyn, remembering the sound she had heard during her interview with Gomez, suspected that she had listened at the door. Now the woman looked anxious and embarrassed, and while she hesitated Evelyn studied her. The señora must have possessed unusual beauty and was handsome yet, although she was getting stout and losing her freshness, as women of Spanish blood do at an early age in hot climates. Her skin had been spoiled by cosmetics and her face was clumsily touched with paint and powder. Evelyn felt a half contemptuous pity; there was something pathetic in her crude attempts to preserve her vanishing charm. The señora made signs which Evelyn supposed to mean that Gomez had gone away, and then she took out some silver and paper currency. Putting it into the girl's hand, she pointed to the door. Evelyn started, for the hint was plain; the señora was anxious to get rid of her rival. Evelyn grasped at the chance to go. The money could be repaid; it might be some time before Grahame arrived, and the woman could be trusted to convey a note to him, because she could not give it to Gomez without betraying her complicity in the girl's escape. For a time they struggled to grasp each other's meaning, but at last the señora Garcia showed she understood that she was to deliver a note to an Englishman who would come in search of the girl. Evelyn was to find a peon who lived outside the town and would put her on the way to Villa Paz. It would, no doubt, prove a difficult journey, but she was determined to make it. She was soon ready, and walked carelessly across the plaza as if she had no object. The townspeople knew her, and she met with no troublesome curiosity. After a time, she entered a shady street, where she stopped once or twice to look into a shop. Leaving it at the other end, she came out into a hot, stony waste, dotted with tall aloes and clumps of cactus, and presently reached a dilapidated adobe hut. As she stood, hesitating, before it a man came out to meet her and she felt her heart beat fast, for she was now confronted by her first danger. The fellow might rob her or perhaps take her back. His white clothes were threadbare, but they were clean, and on the whole she liked his look; and the sight of a woman peeping through the door was somehow reassuring. It was not easy to make him understand what she wanted, but he looked thoughtful when she repeated a word the señora Garcia had taught her. Then he went in, apparently to consult the woman, and, returning, signified that he would do what she wished. She must, however, go on alone to a village some distance off; on the way he would overtake her with a mule. Evelyn thought it curious that he had not asked for money, but as he seemed anxious that she should not delay she set off. So far, her escape had proved easier than she had imagined. The sun was at its highest, and it was very hot; the road was a rough track where loose stones lay among the heavy dust. Where water ran down the hillside in artificial channels, there were palms and belts of foliage; elsewhere outcropping rock and stones flung up a dazzling brightness. In the background, rugged peaks rose against a sky of intense blue, and far off on the opposite hand a misty gleam indicated the sea. Evelyn soon began to get tired, and she found her thin shoes badly suited to the roughness of the ground. The dust that rose about her gathered on her skin; she got hot and thirsty; but the water she tried to drink was slimy and she toiled on. It seemed wiser to press forward while she could, for there was nobody at work in the scattered fields. Her eyes ached with the glare and her feet were sore, but the peon did not come, and when she looked back the road wound along the hillside, white and empty. Here and there tall trees filled the hollows among the rocks, but the country seemed deserted and she could not see a house anywhere. At last, when the sun was low and the shadows were long and cool, she saw a cluster of small white patches shining amid a belt of green ahead, and supposed this was the _aldea_ the peon had meant. Limping on wearily, she came within half a mile of it, and then, finding a place where she was hidden by a clump of cactus, she sat down to watch the road. She might run some risk of being robbed or stopped if she entered the village alone, for it was obvious that a well-dressed foreigner traveling on foot could not hope to escape notice, and the hill peasants would probably not understand her few words of Castilian. The shadows lengthened until they covered the hillside, and the air got cool, but her guide did not come, and Evelyn began to wonder what had delayed him. He had seemed willing to assist in her escape, and she suspected that he must sympathize with the revolutionaries; but, if so, it was strange that the señora Garcia should have known the password which had apparently decided him. She had, however, been told that these people were fond of intrigue, and that a general plot was often accompanied by minor conspiracies, so to speak, one inside the other. The señora Garcia had perhaps some object of her own to serve; but this did not matter--it was more important that the peon did not arrive. It began to get dark. The dew soaked Evelyn's thin dress, and she felt hungry and achingly tired. Then a light or two twinkled among the trees and some one began to sing to a guitar. The lights and the music, with their suggestions of home and rest after the day's toil, troubled the girl. She was alone and apparently deserted, with enemies behind her and the way ahead unknown. For a few minutes her courage failed and she was in danger of breaking down; then, with a determined effort, she recovered her calm and roused herself to listen. The music had grown plainer, and she recognized an air she had heard when she sat with Grahame in the _patio_ of the International. The contrast was too great, and brought her poignant memories. She was no longer a person of consequence, indulged in every wish, but a homeless fugitive. Then she thought of Grahame, who had translated the song they were singing, for the plaintive refrain of _Las Aves Marinas_ carried clearly through the cooling air. Had the wild sea-hawk got her message, and was he already coming to her rescue? But even this was not of first consequence. What about the peon? Had he betrayed her? Everything was silent upon the hillside, but a faint breeze was getting up and sighed among the stones. There was a splash of water in the distance, but no sound came from the road. It ran back, a dim white streak, into the deepening gloom, and then faded out of sight upon the shoulder of a hill. There was no movement on it as far as the girl could see. She waited what seemed an interminable time, and then a faint drumming caught her attention, and grew into a welcome beat of hoofs. Some one was coming along the road. She watched eagerly, straining her eyes to catch a glimpse of the rider. At last an object emerged from the shadow, and as it drew nearer she could see that it was a man riding a mule. With her nerves at high tension and her heart beating fast, Evelyn left her hiding place in the cacti and stepped out into the middle of the road. The man must see her now, and she had involved herself in fresh difficulties if he were not the peon she expected. He came on fast; he had caught sight of her and was urging his mule. When he pulled up beside her and dropped from the animal, muttering exclamations in an unknown tongue, Evelyn staggered. It was an Indian from the hills. CHAPTER XXIV IN THE CAMP OF THE HILLSMEN Evelyn instinctively drew back a few paces. Through her brain was beating insistently the admonition that had helped her much in the past few days: "_Keep calm! Don't let him think you are afraid!_" Her first thought had been flight, to the village; but reason told her that was impossible. Here alone on the silent hillside, in the early night, a white woman with this strange Indian, there came over her again a pride in her American blood. She felt that she was a match for him, in wits if not in strength. And with the thought came courage. She pointed to the mule, then to herself, then to the village; and explained in Spanish. The Indian shook his head, and stood stolidly beside his mount. After his first exclamations he had remained silent, watching Evelyn intently; but she felt reassured when he made no move to approach her. As a matter of fact, his mind at that moment was a chaos of conjectures and possibilities; and while he hesitated Evelyn gasped with relief. Down the road, carrying distinctly over the night air, came the sound of furious riding--faint at first and then growing nearer, quickly nearer. Even if it were not the peon, at least two strangers would be safer than one. With a guttural grunt that might have meant anything, the Indian jumped upon his mule and started off toward the village, urging the animal along; and Evelyn stepped farther back into the shadow of the cacti. She felt that she had reached the breaking-point. Yet she must nerve herself this once more, for without her guide she could not go on. The hoof-beats drew near; in a minute they would pass and the rider be swallowed up in the gloom beyond. Evelyn opened her mouth and tried to call to him; but her voice failed her. Her worn-out body and her overtaxed nerves were holding her powerless to move or cry. She could only stand, helpless, and watch him sweep past. But the peon's keen eyes had caught sight of the white dress fluttering against the dark outline of the cacti, and even as he passed he reined in his mule. A few moments later he was beside her, holding his battered hat in his hand. "Your servant, señorita," he said courteously. Evelyn never could remember distinctly what happened after that. She had only a hazy recollection of climbing upon the mule and trying to cling there, while the man trotted beside her carrying a long, iron-pointed staff. Somewhere near the village they had turned off the main road and followed a rough path that led up into the hills. And there they had stopped at a small _hacienda_, where Evelyn was hospitably received. When she woke the next morning, in a clean little adobe room, and found a neat-looking Spanish woman smiling upon her, Evelyn smiled in return. Every muscle in her body ached, and the soles of her feet were blistered, but, for the first time in many days, she felt a sense of perfect security. Still smiling, she murmured the password of the revolutionaries. It meant much to her now. "_Confianza!_" * * * * * They had a hasty breakfast and started again, but rested for some time in a belt of forest during the heat of the day. In the early evening they approached a white _aldea_ perched high upon the edge of a ravine. Evelyn's guide made her understand that they might not be allowed to pass. He implied that she was in no danger, but it was with some anxiety that she rode toward the village. They skirted the side of the ravine, which was fretted with tumbling cataracts. Steep rocks ran up from the edge of the trail and were lost in climbing forest a hundred feet above, but after a time the chasm began to widen, and small, square houses straggled about its slopes. A barricade of logs, however, closed the road, and as Evelyn approached two men stepped out from behind it. They were ragged and unkempt, but they carried good modern rifles. "Halt!" ordered one of them. "_Confianza!_" the guide answered, smiling, and they let him pass. Beyond the barricade, the guide stopped in front of an adobe building that seemed to be an inn, for a number of saddled mules were tied around it. Men were entering and leaving and a hum of voices came from the shadowy interior, but the peon motioned to Evelyn that she must get down and wait. Finding a stone bench where she was left undisturbed, she sat there for half an hour while it grew dark, and then a man came up and beckoned her to enter. She went with some misgivings, and was shown into a room with rough mud walls, where a man sat under a smoky lamp at a table upon which a map and a number of papers were spread. He wore plain, white clothes, with a wide red sash; and two others, dressed in the same way, stood near, as if awaiting his orders. Evelyn knew the man, for she had seen him at the International. "_Confianza!_" she said. "I believe you are Don Martin Sarmiento." He gave her a quick glance, and answered in good English: "It is a surprise to receive a visit from Miss Cliffe. But I must ask who gave you the password?" "Señora Garcia at Rio Frio." "That sounds strange. But sit down. There is something we must talk about." He waited until one of the men brought her a chair. "I understand you were going to Villa Paz," he then said. "Yes; I am anxious to join my father." "I am not sure that will be possible; but we will speak of it again. First of all, I must know why you left Valverde." Sarmiento indicated the others. "These are officers of mine, but they do not speak English, and it is not necessary that you should know their names. You have nothing to fear from us, but I must urge you to be frank." Evelyn tried to think calmly. She was in the man's power, and he wore the stamp of command, but she liked his look and did not feel afraid of him. It might be wiser to be candid; but she had an embarrassing story to tell and she began with some hesitation. Sarmiento helped her, now with a nod of comprehension as she slurred over an awkward passage, and now with a look of sympathy, while the others stood silent with expressionless faces. "Gomez is, of course, a scoundrel, and you were wise to run away," he commented when she stopped. "There are, however, matters I do not quite understand. For example, it would not be to the President's interest that he should quarrel with your father; nor do I think Altiera would approve of an alliance between his secretary and you." Evelyn blushed and tried to meet the man's searching look. "I cannot explain these things. I have told you what happened, and I came to you with--confidence." Sarmiento bowed. "We respect our password. You are safe with us; but you cannot continue your journey. The roads will be closed before you get through, and there will be fighting in the next few days. When it seems less dangerous, we must try to send you on, but in the meantime I must put you into my daughter's hands." He gave one of the officers some instructions, and the man beckoned Evelyn, but she hesitated. "I must pay my guide and send him back." "We will give him the money, but he will not go back. We shall, no doubt, find a use for him." Sarmiento smiled meaningly as he added: "It looks as if he could be trusted." Evelyn followed the officer to the back of the house where creepers trailed about a rude pergola. A sheet of cotton had been stretched among the poles, making a tent in which a light burned. Her companion, saying a few words in Castilian, motioned to Evelyn to go in. She did so, and then stopped abruptly. The lamp was small and the light was dim; loops of vines falling about it cast puzzling shadows, but Evelyn knew the girl who rose to meet her. She had seen her talking confidentially to Grahame at the International, and was seized by jealous suspicion. A stout, elderly lady in a black dress, who was apparently the girl's duenna, sat farther back in the shadow. Blanca gave Evelyn a friendly smile of recognition, but it cost her an effort to respond. The Spanish girl seemed to understand that something was wrong, and there was an awkward silence while they stood with their eyes fixed on each other. Then Blanca said with a touch of haughtiness: "I have been told to make you as comfortable as possible, but I am sorry there is not much comfort here. One cannot expect it in a camp." She presented Evelyn to her duenna, and the señora Morales indicated a folding chair. "You come at a bad time," she remarked in awkward French, languidly opening a fan. "It seems we are to have more fighting; it is the way of men." "They must fight," said Blanca. "The cause is good." The señora Morales waved her fan. She wore a black silk mantilla fastened tightly round her head like a cowl, and her dark, fleshy face was thickly smeared with powder. Her eyes were lazily contemptuous. "There are two causes, _niña_, and it is hard to see how both can be right. But, since men quarrel about them, it is not impossible that both may be wrong." Evelyn smiled. The duenna's remarks saved the situation from becoming strained; the woman was obviously shrewd in spite of her heavy face. "They are always quarreling in this country," the señora continued. "Those who will not pay their taxes call themselves Liberators; those who expect favors from the President are Patriots. If he does not give them enough, they conspire with the others to turn him out. Since everybody cannot be satisfied, there is always trouble." "But our friends are not fighting for rewards!" Blanca objected indignantly. "A few are disinterested," the señora conceded. She paused, and turned to Evelyn with an authoritative air. "You must tell me why you ran away from Rio Frio. I can guess something, but want to know the rest." After a moment's hesitation, Evelyn thought it prudent to comply, and the señora seemed to listen with sympathy. "To run away was the simplest plan, but sometimes the simplest plan is not the best," she said. "Did you think of nothing else?" "I sent a message to Mr. Grahame of the _Enchantress_, telling him I was in difficulties," Evelyn replied, watching Blanca. The girl looked up with quick interest, but there was no hint of jealousy in her expression. "You thought he would come to help you?" "I knew he would come if it was possible," Evelyn answered. Blanca looked her in the face with a smile of understanding, and Evelyn saw that her suspicions had been unfounded. Grahame was nothing to the girl. "My father must know this at once!" she said, and hurried away. Don Martin came back with her and questioned Evelyn, and then he stood thoughtfully silent for some moments. "It is fortunate I heard this news," he said. "Your message may be intercepted, and we must try to warn Grahame that you are in our hands." He gave Evelyn a steady look. "I believe he will be satisfied with that." "You can tell him that I feel safe," Evelyn answered. Don Martin left her with a bow, and shortly afterward they heard somebody riding hard along the edge of the ravine. When the beat of hoofs died away Blanca touched Evelyn's arm. "There will be some supper after a while, but let us walk a little way up the path." They went out into the dark, passing slowly between shadowy rows of bushes which Evelyn thought were young coffee plants. She waited, believing that her companion meant to take her into her confidence. "You were rash in sending for Mr. Grahame," Blanca began. "We must hope our messenger arrives in time to stop him, but for all that----" "Do you wish him to come?" Evelyn asked. Blanca smiled. "In a sense, it does not matter to me whether he comes or not, though I would not wish him to run into danger. But he would not come alone." Evelyn started. It was not Grahame, but Walthew, in whom Blanca was interested. Somehow she had not thought of that. "Of course, you met Mr. Walthew in Havana," she said. "And at Rio Frio!" There was a hint of triumphant coquetry and something deeper in Blanca's voice. "Indeed, Mr. Grahame should be grateful to me, because it was I who kept him his companion. Mr. Walthew had been dangerously ill, and was thinking of going home--though of course he did not tell me this----" "But if he did not tell you!" "How did I know?" Blanca laughed. "_Cariña mia_, how do we know such things? Is a man's face a mask? Have we no guide except what he says?" Evelyn thought of Carmen, for Blanca had something of the great coquette's allurement and power. It was not an unconscious attraction she exercised, but the skill with which it was directed was primitive and instinctive rather than intelligent. "And you persuaded Mr. Walthew to stay!" she said. "Did you find it hard?" "Hard? Oh, no! It is not hard to persuade a young man, unless one is a fool. A word or two is enough, and I told him he might become a great _libertador_ like Bolívar and Garibaldi." Evelyn laughed. She liked Walthew, but he was a very modern American, and the thought of his emulating Garibaldi tickled her. Then, although it was dark, she was aware of a change in her companion's mood. Blanca's pose was different, it had somehow hardened, and her head was lifted high. "You find this amusing?" she asked in a haughty tone. "I suppose I do, in a way," Evelyn admitted deprecatingly. "You see, I know my countrymen, and we're not romantic, as a rule." "Then it is clear you do not know Mr. Walthew. He is young, but he has the spirit of these others, the great _libertadores_." "I've no doubt that's true," Evelyn agreed, putting her hand on Blanca's arm. "Indeed, I like and admire him very much." They turned back to the house presently, on friendly terms, for the Spaniard's anger flares up quickly but soon burns down. Evelyn, however, saw that matters had gone farther than she thought, and she imagined that Walthew would have some trouble with his relatives when he went home. "But how did you and your father come to meet Mr. Walthew, and what is the _Enchantress_ doing on the coast?" she asked. "You do not know?" There was a hint of gratified superiority in the girl's tone. "She is bringing us the rifles that we need." Evelyn asked no more questions, because her talk with Blanca had given her much to think about, and when supper was over she sat outside the tent alone. The moon was rising above the tall sierra that ran in a rugged line across the sky. The air was warm and still, and she could hear water splashing down in the bottom of the ravine. Now and then there was a clatter of hoofs as a messenger rode up, and sometimes an order was followed by a patter of feet. Then for a time everything was silent except for a murmur of voices in the inn. The girl noticed this vacantly, for her mind was busy, and she was filled with a strange excitement. For the last week or two she had borne a heavy strain, and her thoughts had been concentrated on finding a means of escape. Now they were free to dwell upon a greater matter. The struggle that began when she boarded the _Enchantress_ was ended, and she could rejoice in her own defeat, as she had not been quite able to do when, on first surrendering, she had written her note at Rio Frio. Prudence, ambition, and self-interest were driven from the field; love had utterly routed them. She loved Grahame, and she knew that he loved her, though he had not avowed it yet. Blanca had spoken truly: words were not needed: it was easy to read a man's heart. Evelyn knew what he thought. He was a poor adventurer, and she was rich. She blushed with shame, remembering how this had once weighed with her. Now it did not matter at all. Nothing mattered except that he belonged to her; but while this had never been so plain, it had not dawned on her with a sudden flash. The light had been steadily creeping in for a long time, while she stubbornly tried to shut it out, until she abandoned her futile efforts and let the warming brightness flood her. Then she thought of Grahame's danger. Don Martin had not received the note. Suppose it had fallen into Gomez's hands. What use might not that half-breed make of it! Evelyn shuddered, and breathed a half-conscious prayer that Don Martin's messenger might reach her lover in time. CHAPTER XXV A TRIAL OF SPEED Night was falling over the troubled water, and there were threats of a tropical storm. The _Enchantress_, with her anchor down, rolled uneasily on the broken swell. A sandy point ran out to windward, but the combers that beat upon its seaward side with a thunderous roar swirled in a white turmoil round its end and filled the lagoon with an angry heave. The palms on the landward shore bent in the wind and the dense green jungle behind them rolled in tossing waves of green. To the north, the sky was barred by leaden clouds and the sea-tops cut against it, lividly white. A trail of smoke whirled about the funnel, now streaming out to lee, now eddying down, for a quantity of ammunition and contraband material had just been landed, and Grahame was ready to go to sea again. There was some danger in remaining, but the weather was bad, and he half expected fresh instructions from Don Martin. While he sat smoking in the lee of the deck-house and Walthew leaned against the rail, Macallister looked out of the engine-room door. "I can give ye steam enough to take her out at half an hour's notice, but if ye're no' likely to need it, I'll bank my fires," he said. "We won't heave anchor unless we're forced to; it's not an enticing night," Grahame replied, and Walthew nodded, as in the pause that followed he heard the rumble of the surf upon the shoals. "What do you reckon has been going on inland?" he asked. "The fellows who took the guns ashore didn't seem to have much news, but they believed you were right in thinking this might be the last important cargo we'd have to run." "The Government has arrested Castillo, and no doubt brought pretty strong pressure to bear on him. I'm afraid he couldn't stand up against it, and has given his fellow conspirators away. The President seems no fool, and Gomez is a cunning rascal, but I'm not sure they could keep their plans dark because the opposition have their spies and sympathizers everywhere. The consequence is that both parties may be driven into prompt action instead of quietly finishing their preparations." "I expect that's so," said Walthew thoughtfully. "I wish I knew, because I must see Don Martin and make a trip to Rio Frio before we leave the coast for good." "You know best; but I imagine it means trouble with your people when you go home." "It may, for a time," Walthew answered with a dogged look. "Still, they'll come round, and I'm glad to think that, considering this job as a business proposition, we have done pretty well. That will appeal to the old man. Gun-running's not the line he wanted me to take, but he'll be tickled when he sees that I've made good at it." "I wouldna' say but he might like Miss Sarmiento as weel as yin o' they hussies at the Florida hotel," Macallister remarked encouragingly. "There was yin in blue, but no' much o' it, with a flagpole in her hat, that gave me what I've heard ye call the googly eye----" Walthew chuckled. "That girl has roomsful of money." "Then she might hae bought some clothes," the Scotsman retorted. They were silent for a few minutes, and through the quietness they heard the splash of canoe paddles. "We may get some news," Walthew said. The canoe ran alongside, and a half-breed handed up a dirty note. Grahame opened it, and his jaws set and a curious glint came into his eyes when he read Evelyn's message. "Where did this come from?" he called sharply to the waiting half-breed. In his anxiety he had spoken in English. The messenger shook his head. "_No entiendo._" Grahame repeated the question in Spanish, and added: "Tell me quickly!" "A man brought it down from the hills a half-hour ago. That's all I know," the half-breed explained. "All right; you may go." Grahame turned to Walthew and Macallister and showed them the crumpled note. "I don't think our partnership agreement covers a risky private undertaking of this kind, and you can turn me out, if you like, but I'm going," he said. "And I'm coming with you," Walthew replied cheerfully. "I've some business of my own at Rio Frio." "You can't come! How is Mack to run the boat alone?" "Weel," said Macallister, "I'm thinking that's no' impossible. Onyway, ye'll take him. We'll quarrel about who's to command her if ye leave him on board." Grahame saw they were both determined; his comrades meant to stand by him, if it cost them the vessel. He was touched, but there was no time to indulge in sentiment. "We'll talk of it later. Start the windlass and stir the fires. I'll want all the steam you can give me." "Ye'll get it," Macallister replied, and vanished below, while Grahame went forward when the windlass began to clank and the cable tightened. Speed was urgently needed. It was several days since the note had been written, and he dared not speculate about what might have happened in the meanwhile. Evelyn was not easily frightened; she would not have sent for him unless the danger was imminent. Then, the postscript stated that a guide would look out for him between midnight and three o'clock in the morning, at a place mentioned, and the _Enchantress_ must be driven hard to get there in time. If she arrived too late, he must steam out to sea before dawn broke and wait for another night. The windlass rattled faster, the chain ran in as the anchor left the ground, and, seeing Miguel ready with the tackle at the cathead, Grahame went aft to the wheel. The gong clanged the signal "Full ahead," and the screw began to throb. There was a crash forward as the swinging anchor struck the bow, but Miguel had men enough to stow it, and Grahame fixed his eyes ahead as he turned his wheel. Rolling across the broken swell, the _Enchantress_ stemmed the strong flood-tide; bending palms and shadowy beach were sliding past, and the turmoil on the shoals drew nearer. Ahead was a narrow channel with about a fathom of water to the good, but the leading marks were obscured and Grahame doubted if he could find it. If the boat struck, she would be washed up, badly damaged, among the sands; but the tide was rising, and before long Macallister would have raised full steam. It was unthinkable that they should lose time, and Grahame meant to take his chance. Spray flew about her forward; as the swell got steeper she dipped to the knightheads, and Miguel, running aft, began to use the lead. Grahame did not stop him, although sounding was a matter of form, because she would drive aground before he could bring her head round if he missed the narrow deep. She crept past the point, rolling wildly and lifting out her screw, while the air got thick with spray and the thud of engines was drowned by the turmoil of the sea. Some distance off, white ridges leaped out of the gathering dark, but nearer at hand they were broken by the shoals and raged in foaming confusion. The _Enchantress_ must cross this belt without much steam to help her, but it was obvious that Macallister was hard at work below, for thick smoke with fiery sparks in it poured from the funnel. Miguel's white-clad figure, swaying in the channels, cut against the gloom, but Grahame could not hear his hail. Though he glanced at the compass now and then, he was feeling his way rather by instinct than definite guidance, and so far the upward sweep of the bows showed there was sufficient water under the vessel. Sometimes a sea came on board and poured aft in a frothing flood, but she was steadily forging ahead, and a few minutes would take her across the worst of the shoals. Suddenly she stopped with a crash, lurched sideways, and lay still while a foam-tipped mass of water rolled up ahead. It broke on board, burying her forward half, and the next moment Grahame was wet to the waist; but she lifted as the roller surged by; and then struck the shoal again. A few more blows of that kind would crush in her bilge, but Grahame set his teeth and clung grimly to his wheel. There was nothing to be done but wait; the crash would warn Macallister what was required of him, and if he could not drive her off, they must cut the boats adrift and leave her to her fate. Another sea came tumbling in, but while its crest broke across the rail it picked her up and she moved on slowly with the water sluicing aft down her inclined deck. For a few seconds Grahame held his breath, waiting for the shock; but she went on, and lifted her head buoyantly as the next comber rolled up. When she had lurched over it and the spray had blown away, he saw that the sea was more regular and the worst of the turmoil lay astern. Five minutes afterward, she reeled out into open water, and Macallister came on deck. "We've started the bilge-pump, but it's no' drawing much," he said. "I dinna think she's the waur for the knocks she got." "That's satisfactory. You know what you have to do." Macallister smiled with quiet enjoyment. "We've no' had the need to drive her yet, but noo I'll let ye see." He went below, and Grahame gave Miguel an order, for in swinging round after leaving the lagoon the _Enchantress_ had brought the wind on her quarter, and she carried a good spread of sail. He would not, however, luff her off her course to make the work easier; the crew must hoist the canvas as best they could, and there was a furious banging and clatter of flying blocks as fore-staysail, foresail, and mainsail went up. Then she listed down with her rail in the white surges that boiled up to lee, while tall, hollow-fronted combers ranged up astern and sped after her. Wire shrouds, strung to the breaking-point, shrieked in wild harmonies as the blasts struck them; chain funnel-guys roared in deeper tones, and there was a confused groaning of masts and booms. Spray swept her, lashing Grahame's back and blowing past his head in clouds, and now and then a sea-top broke on board; but she drove on furiously before the wind. After a while Grahame called Miguel to the helm and stood in the lee of the deckhouse, pipe in mouth, for he had now time to think. He could make no plans until he landed, but it was plain that he must go to Rio Frio; and, if possible, he must leave Walthew behind. He could not allow the lad to run the risk, and Macallister would need him. Some help might be had from the revolutionaries, and he must try to find Don Martin. If he failed to do so, much would have to be left to chance. Grahame looked at another side of the matter. Suppose he rescued Miss Cliffe, what then? Though the gun-running had been profitable, he was an adventurer with very limited means. He could not trade upon Cliffe's gratitude, though he loved the girl. He did not know when he began to love her, but he had for some time made stern efforts to drive the thought of her out of his mind. Perhaps he might have succeeded had nothing unusual happened, for he knew his disadvantages; but now his determination suddenly had been swept away. Evelyn was in danger; somehow this made clear the strength of the feelings with which he had grappled. The future was clouded; there were difficulties to be faced; but he felt that if she had any love for him he could not give her up. The gale freshened; but Grahame would not shorten sail. There was not much time to spare, and the gear was standing well. He could trust the helm to Miguel and might have slept, but, although he imagined his strength might be severely taxed during the next few days, it was impossible for him to rest. In spite of his anxiety, he was sensible of an exultant excitement. The girl he loved was in danger, but she had sent for him. Then, the adventure he was embarking on had a fascination of its own, and he smiled as he remembered that his ancestors had often in past days ridden across the dark marches, leading the Border Spears. It was not for nothing the hot blood of the old mosstroopers ran in his veins. Swept by the seas on her quarter, the _Enchantress_ drove on, and Grahame lurched about the slanted deck and stood amidst the spray that whirled across her stern. She was going fast; his glances at the recording log astonished him, for he had not believed her capable of the speed it showed. His fierce impatience seemed to have inspired thudding engines and quivering hull, and he thrilled when a great, white-topped comber rolled up and swept her on. Flame blew from the funnel, wet canvas, straining in black curves, reeled through the dark, and the sea sped back, snowy white, toward the plunging bows. At last, however, lights shone in the gloom, and Grahame ordered the canvas to be lowered. It cost the crew an arduous struggle, but they made all fast, and Grahame, ringing for half-speed, took the wheel. There was a point a short distance from the town that would break the sea, and by steaming in behind it he might get a boat away. Landing would be difficult, and it was important that he should find the right spot. He watched the beach with his glasses as the _Enchantress_ swung inshore, and when presently the combers changed to a steep, troubled swell that ended in a white band of surf, he stopped the engines and told Miguel to hoist out the gig. The navigation lights had been extinguished, but he thought that anybody carefully watching for the steamer could see her. The men had some trouble in lowering the boat, but as soon as she was in the water Grahame jumped on board and told the men to push off. Then, as they got out their oars, a dark figure leaped from the steamer's rail and Walthew, alighting in the sternsheets, turned to his comrade with a grin. "I'm here, and you'll smash the boat if you try to send me back," he said. "You see, I suspected what you were getting after when you put me at a job it was awkward to leave." "Well, I did my best, anyway," Grahame laughed. Walthew took an oar, for the swell was high enough to make progress difficult, but they found smoother water near the land, and stopped pulling just outside the fringe of surf. Waiting for a slacker interval in the shoreward rush of hissing rollers, they drove her in as fast as she could go, and jumped overboard when she touched the sand. A wave broke into her, but they ran her up safely, and Grahame turned to Walthew after they had emptied the water out. "I don't think I'm straining my authority by telling you to go off with Miguel," he said. "Anyhow, I'm not going," Walthew replied doggedly. "Our association is a partnership, and I mean to come along. I don't know that I'll be of much help to you, but the job you've undertaken is too big for one." Grahame saw that objections would be useless, and, feeling that his pistol was loose, he walked up the beach, with Walthew following a few yards behind. CHAPTER XXVI TRAPPED For a few minutes the men toiled silently across loose, wet sand, and then, on reaching a belt of shingle near high-water mark, stopped to look about. Lights gleamed in the town across the bay, but except for that it was very dark. A clump of trees that fringed the end of a ridge of higher ground could barely be distinguished, but Grahame decided that this must be the spot Evelyn had mentioned in her note. Though the shingle rolled beneath his feet, the sound it made was lost in the roar of the surf upon the point. Dry sand blew past, pricking his face, and when he turned toward the sea he saw a group of indistinct objects still standing about the boat. "What are they waiting for?" he asked. "I told them to push off." "I guess old Miguel takes an interest in us and wants to see we're all right. He knows something about these fellows' tricks, and may not share our confidence." "Well, I guess those are the trees where we should meet our guide." "The fellow might have come down to the beach," Walthew remarked. "I was busy helping Mack during the run and hadn't much time to think, but it now strikes me as curious that Miss Cliffe was able to send the note and arrange for a guide when she was a prisoner." "She must have got into touch with some of Don Martin's spies, and his friends would be ready to help. But we had better get on." They crossed the shingle, seeing nothing that suggested there was anybody about, but Walthew grew uneasy as they approached the trees. The belt of timber was wrapped in gloom, and rolled back up the rising ground in shadowy masses that rustled in the wind. It had somehow a forbidding look, and the nearer he got the less he liked it. He was not daunted, and meant to go on, but his nerves were highly strung and his glances suspicious as he tried to pierce the dark. They found a trail through tall grass and reeds, and followed it across a patch of boggy soil until it led them to an opening in the trees. Here a shadowy object rose out of the gloom, and Walthew instinctively felt for his pistol. The abrupt movement dislodged a small bundle of clothes which he carried by a strap across his shoulder, and it fell to the ground. Then he saw the man come forward, waving his hand. "This way, señor!" he called to Grahame, who was some yards in front. Walthew felt tempted to leave the bundle. He wanted to watch the man; but there was a packet of cartridges among the clothes he had dropped, and he thought they might prove useful. Stooping down, he felt among the grass, but had to move once or twice before he found the bundle; then, springing to his feet, he saw that Grahame and the other had vanished. The next moment his comrade's voice reached him, hoarse and breathless: "Run!" That Grahame said nothing more was ominous; but Walthew did not run back to the boat. Drawing his pistol, he plunged in among the trees, but as he reached them he felt a stunning blow on his head. He staggered and fell into a thicket, blinded by blood that ran into his eyes. A struggle seemed to be going on near by, and, getting upon his knees, he fired at random. He thought a man ran toward him, and he fired again, but his mind was confused and he could hardly see. For all that, he got upon his feet and stumbled forward, dazed but determined to rescue his comrade. A few moments afterward it dawned on him that he was going the wrong way, for he seemed to have come out on the beach. Two or three men were hurrying toward him, but the pistol would not go off. Stumbling on with his hand clenched on the barrel, ready to use the butt, he tripped and fell among the rattling shingle. Then his senses left him. The next thing of which he was conscious was a cool splash on his face, and while he wondered what it was, he felt that he lay upon something that moved in an erratic manner. It was not shingle, for it was smooth when he touched it, but a minute or two passed before he realized that he was lying in the sternsheets of the gig. She was plunging sharply, the spray flew aft in showers, and when he wiped his eyes he saw that the men were pulling hard. With some trouble he got to his knees, and the top of a wave that washed across the gunwale struck his face. "Where is the señor Grahame?" he asked faintly. "Who knows!" somebody answered. "It seems the _rurales_ have him. We came too late." Walthew groaned, for his head was getting clearer. His comrade had fallen into a trap. "Pull her round," he said. "We're going back!" For a moment or two nobody replied. The gig lurched wildly, and a sea-top broke on board. Walthew dimly saw the men swing to and fro at the oars. Their blurred figures cut the sky as the bow went up, and then stood out against white foam as the craft plunged into a hollow. "It is not possible, señor," Miguel said breathlessly. Walthew scrambled to his feet, and stood swaying awkwardly with the violent motion, in danger of going overboard. The sea had got worse, and the savage wind lashed his wet face. It was blowing very hard, and the turn of the tide had brought broken water nearer inshore; he could hear the roar of the surf upon the beach. It would now be dangerous to land; but he must try to rescue his comrade. He seized the oar the man nearest to him pulled. The fellow pushed him back and, losing his balance as the boat plunged over a comber, he fell heavily upon the floorings. "We will smash the boat if we land, and there are _rurales_ on the beach," he heard Miguel say. "The sea is bad; perhaps we cannot reach the steamer." Walthew realized that Miguel was right. The men were unarmed, except for their knives, and something had gone wrong with his pistol. Even if they escaped being swamped by the surf, it would be impossible to cross the beach in face of a hostile force. He lay still with a groan. He felt faint, his head ached excruciatingly, and blood still trickled into his eyes. He had not seen the _Enchantress_ when he stood up, and the desperate way the men were rowing showed that they found it hard to drive the boat offshore. After a while, however, a hail came out of the dark, the men pulled furiously, and then threw down their oars. There was a crash and a rope fell into the boat, which surged violently forward, grinding against the steamer's side. Walthew did not know how he got on board, and he imagined that he fainted soon afterward, for the next thing he remembered was trying to get up from the top grating in the engine-room, where Macallister sat beside him, holding a rag and a can of hot water. "Keep still while I tie up the cut," he said. "But they've got Grahame!" Walthew exclaimed, trying to rise. Macallister gently pushed him back. "I ken. A bad job, but we might have lost ye both." Then he took up a piece of linen. "It's lucky ye'll no' need stitching, but maybe this will nip." Walthew's head smarted intolerably after the bandage was applied, but the dazed feeling left him when Macallister gave him something to drink, and he began to ask questions. "Miguel heard a shot and ran back up the beach with the others," Macallister told him. "They found ye reeling aboot and brought ye down to the gig, with two or three _rurales_ no' far behind; the rest must have gone off with Grahame before our men came up. They had just time to launch her before the _rurales_ began to shoot, but nobody was hit. Looks as if ye had been knocked oot with a carbine butt." "Where are we now?" Walthew asked. "Steaming back to the lagoon as fast as I can drive her, and that's aboot four knots against the gale. The best thing we can do is to send Don Martin word, but ye'll go to sleep in the meanwhile. I canna' look after ye; I hae my hands full." The clanging of hard-driven engines, which quickened to a furious rattle when the screw swung out, made the need for watchfulness plain, and Walthew crept away to his berth. He wanted to help, but knew that to attempt this would probably result in his falling among the machinery. Dazed by the blow on his head, he soon fell asleep, and when he wakened the vessel was at rest. There was no pounding of engines, and the water no longer gurgled along her side, but he heard voices behind the bulkhead. Scrambling awkwardly out of the berth, he made his way on deck with some difficulty. The fresh air revived him, and he saw that the _Enchantress_ was anchored in the lagoon, but he opened a door close by instead of stopping to look about. Two or three of the revolutionaries whom he knew were sitting round a table in the saloon, and as Walthew came in, white-faced, with staring eyes and a red bandage round his head, one of them threw up his hands. "_Ave Maria!_" he exclaimed. Walthew sat down with a jerk and nodded to Macallister. "I'm better." Then he turned to the others. "What are we going to do?" "Nothing, until to-night," said one. "We must wait for dark before it is safe to move. They will not keep your comrade at Valverde, and we must try to find out where they have taken him." "I'll be quite well in a few hours," Walthew declared. "But what is likely to happen to Grahame?" The man shrugged. "Who knows! The regular course would be to try him for smuggling arms, but I do not think the President will follow that plan. They may send him to Rio Frio, because it is some distance from the coast, and it is possible he will be given a chance of escaping on the way." "Do you mean that they may let him go?" Walthew asked eagerly. "He would not go very far. You must understand that the _rurales_ have authority to shoot a prisoner who tries to escape, and the Government finds this useful. Sometimes they arrest a man whom they think the court could not convict, and an excuse is found for not watching him very closely when he is being taken to the nearest jail; perhaps a guard is called away when they stop for food. There is cover near, and the prisoner makes a dash for freedom; then the guard, who has been hiding, fires and the administration is rid of an enemy. Sometimes the _rurales_ break into the house of an obnoxious person and, taken by surprise, he gets angry. A threatening movement is enough; he is shot down. It is simpler than taking him before a judge who may be bribed to let him go." "A gang o' bloodthirsty scoundrels! I'm thinking it's time ye turned on them," Macallister said, while Walthew sat silent with a tense face and fury in his eyes. "But, so far as we ken, they havena' shot Mr. Grahame." "No, señor," said another. "I think he is safe, for a time. He might prove too useful for them to shoot, at least, not until they have tried other means." "If ye believe they can frighten or buy him----" Macallister began savagely; but the man waved his hand. "Señor, I only think we must set him free as soon as possible, and you will agree about the need for that." "I'm coming with you," said Walthew grimly. "If I'm not satisfied with your plans, I'll do the thing in my own way." Macallister gave him a sharp glance. Walthew did not look fit to travel, but Macallister knew that objections would be futile. The boy had grown older and sterner in a night. The revolutionaries began to talk about what had better be done, and it was decided that Macallister must remain in charge of the vessel, which he would hide in a creek, so as to provide a means of escape, if this should be needed. The others would start for Rio Frio as soon as it was dark and, if they could gather a strong enough force, try to overtake and attack Grahame's escort on the march. Failing this, they would follow the _rurales_ to Rio Frio, and be guided by circumstances when they got there. Walthew took no part in the discussion, but when it was finished he got up and stood looking at the others sternly. "We are going to save my partner, and not to do something that may help you in your political schemes," he said. "It may save trouble if you bear this in mind." They assured him that Grahame's rescue was a matter of importance to them; and when, shortly afterward they left the ship, Walthew went to his berth and slept until the afternoon. He was getting better, for it was not the cut but the jar on his skull that had dazed him, and the effect of this was passing. When the evening mist began to creep across the lagoon a canoe came off and a half-breed stood up in her as she approached the gangway. "The señores are waiting," he announced. Walthew shook hands with Macallister. "I'll either bring him back or stop with him," he said grimly. "Your business is to be ready to take us off." "Good luck to ye!" returned Macallister in a rather hoarse voice. "If ye're long aboot it, I'll come after ye myself!" When Walthew got into the canoe and vanished in the haze, Macallister went down to his engine-room and fiercely set about some work that might as well have been left undone. CHAPTER XXVII HANDS DOWN Cliffe had spent some time at Villa Paz when President Altiera sent for him one morning. It was with mixed feelings that Cliffe obeyed the summons, for his business had proved longer and more difficult than he expected, and he was anxious about Evelyn. Indeed, he wondered whether he should let the concessions go and return to the coast; but he determined to be guided by what took place during the interview. It was getting hot when Altiera received him, and a glare of reflected light shone through the unshuttered window. Cliffe, looking out over the little town, thought there was an ominous quiet. An hour earlier he had watched a company of slouching, dusty soldiers, equipped as if for service, march through the narrow streets; but there was now no one about. It struck him as significant that all the green shutters were closed and the entrances to the _patios_ barred. This might have some bearing on his business, but it was not of the first importance, and he turned to the President and studied him closely. There was a subtle change in Altiera since their last meeting. His manner was somehow less cordial, and suspicion seemed to lurk in his dark eyes. When he had indicated a chair he looked at Cliffe steadily. "You have, no doubt, thought over the matter we talked about not long ago," he began. "It is necessary that I should know when we may expect the loan." "That, as I think you understand, depends on when I may expect the concessions." "I cannot sign the papers yet. It would provoke a storm of indignation that I cannot risk. My enemies have taught the people that I am robbing them when I make a grant to foreigners." "In short, you mean to put down the rebels before you conclude the deal with me." "You have guessed right. There will be no complaints when I have shown that I have the upper hand." "If I had known your plans at the beginning, I'd have acted differently," Cliffe said. Altiera gave him a piercing glance. "Señor, I do not think you are justified in charging us with a want of candor, because there is evidence that you have not been quite honest with us. Our most dangerous enemy is Martin Sarmiento, and we find him staying at your hotel in Havana, where the señorita Cliffe helps him in an attempt to escape observation." "I do not know the man," Cliffe protested with a puzzled air. "Then it is strange that we should have caught a messenger bringing you a note from him," Altiera answered. "I think we shall gain nothing by fencing, señor." Cliffe frowned. "I've just got to say that I've never, to my knowledge, met Don Martin. What was the note about?" "We will talk of that later. In the meanwhile, I understand you have decided not to let me have the money that we need?" "Not without a written promise that the papers will be signed and handed to me in a fortnight. Unless you consent, I must start for Valverde at once." Altiera pondered for a few moments, knitting his brows. "You are, no doubt, anxious to rejoin your daughter," he said slowly. "Perhaps I had better tell you that she is not at Valverde." "Not at Valverde!" Cliffe exclaimed. "Then where has she gone?" "I cannot tell you." Cliffe clenched his hand, but would not let his alarm master him. He suspected treachery and knew that he must be cool. "Your secretary assured me that Miss Cliffe would be safe with the _alcalde's_ wife; I shall hold him responsible. Why did she leave Valverde?" "It seems the señorita got tired of waiting, and set off to rejoin you. This is most likely, but it is said in the cafés that she ran away with the señor Gomez." Cliffe looked up with his face set and an ominous sparkle in his eyes. "That is a lie!" "Personally, I think so; but having some knowledge of the sex, I would not care to predict what a romantic young woman might do." "Get on with your tale!" Altiera regarded Cliffe calmly. "The señorita had my secretary's escort, but, finding the road dangerous, he made for Rio Frio, where he put her in safe hands. Her liberty was not interfered with and one morning she left the house and did not come back." Cliffe got up and advanced a yard or two across the floor. "You mean she ran away? Why did she do so?" "Your pardon, señor!" Altiera spread out his hands with a mocking smile. "There is no reason to believe she had any cause to run away; but, not knowing your daughter's character, I cannot tell you why she went." "Very well," said Cliffe, restraining himself with an effort. "I must ask you for an armed escort to Rio Frio, where I will make inquiries. I want the men at once!" "I am afraid that is impossible. We have news that there are rebels in the mountains. If I gave you a guard, the peons might be incited to attack you, and the trouble would spread before we are ready to deal with it. As President of this country, it is my business to think of its welfare first." "I understand," Cliffe said very dryly. "If I promised to let you have the money you want, you might see your duty differently." Altiera looked at him with thoughtful eyes. The American was shrewd, but did not seem as eager as he had expected. "Señor, the need of funds that would ensure the maintenance of order and firm government justifies a risk one would not take without such a reason. I will give you a guard and send soldiers to make a thorough search for the señorita if we can agree about the loan." "This means you really do not know where my daughter is. I was not sure of it until now." Altiera saw he had blundered in admitting that the girl was no longer in his hands; but while he considered how his mistake could be covered Cliffe resumed: "It was a cunning plot, but you put it through clumsily, and you're going to find that kidnapping an American woman is a dangerous game for the President of a third-rate republic." "One must make allowances for the excited imagination of an anxious father," Altiera answered with an indulgent smile. "I deny the plot. There is no need for one. We have a charming young lady left alone in a foreign town who finds waiting tedious and determines to join her relative. This is a simple and satisfactory explanation, without the other that she forms a romantic attachment for an officer of rank. We provide an escort because the country is disturbed, and part of the journey is accomplished. It is not safe for her to go farther, but she is rash, and, disregarding our advice, ventures too far from the house. Then she loses her way and is perhaps seized by the rebels, with the object of embarrassing the Government. We cannot be held responsible, but we are willing to attempt her rescue when we see an opportunity." The explanation was plausible, and could not be disproved until Cliffe heard his daughter's account. But what he wanted was to find her. "The opportunity is now, before the rebels begin to move," he said. "You refuse to seize it?" "You understand why it is impossible. I cannot do anything that might plunge my country into a conflict, unless you show me some reason that would justify the risk." "I cannot give you such a reason." Altiera shrugged. "It is for you to decide! We come to a deadlock; our negotiations break off." "Very well," said Cliffe. "I leave Villa Paz in an hour, and it wouldn't be wise of you to interfere with my movements. My business with you is known to people who have some political influence in the United States, and if I don't turn up in good time, inquiries will be made." He turned abruptly and went out. It seemed safer to move quickly, though he imagined the hint he had given Altiera would prevent any attempt to stop him. The President had found a plausible excuse for Evelyn's disappearance, but he would hesitate about detaining an American citizen whose friends could bring pressure to bear at Washington. This supposition was borne out when Cliffe found no trouble in hiring a guide and mules; but while he made the arrangements his brain was working. He would willingly have met the demand for money, only that Altiera had incautiously admitted that he did not know where Evelyn was. Cliffe had acted on impulse in refusing to submit to further exaction, but calm reflection justified the course. Having a deep distrust of the man, he thought he might take the money and then not undertake the search for the girl. Cliffe determined to set about it himself and make a bid for the help of the revolutionaries. This would involve him in a serious loss, but that did not count. He must rescue his daughter, whatever it cost. Then he remembered that the President had admitted having intercepted a message to him from the rebel leader. He had meant to insist on learning what it was about, but had somehow omitted to do so, and it was now too late to reopen the matter. There was, however, a ray of hope in the thought that Sarmiento had tried to communicate with him. When his baggage had been strapped on a pack-mule, he mounted and rode out of Villa Paz as if making for Valverde, but as soon as they had left the last of the houses behind he pulled up and quietly studied his guide. He was a sturdy, brown-faced peon, dressed in ragged white cotton, with raw-hide sandals and a colored blanket strapped round his shoulders, but he looked trustworthy. Moreover, Cliffe thought his willingness to assist a foreigner who was leaving the President's house without an escort, which must have shown that he had lost the autocrat's favor, had some significance. It was unfortunate that he could not speak much Castilian, but he knew that money talks in a language that is generally understood. "I have changed my mind; we will not go to the coast," he said, stumbling over the words and helping out his meaning by pointing to the mountains. The peon nodded. "To me it is equal where the señor goes, so long as I am paid for the days we spend upon the road." "Very well," said Cliffe, taking out a handful of silver. "Do you know Don Martin Sarmiento?" The peon looked doubtful, and Cliffe saw that, as he had suspected, the fellow had some dealings with the President's enemies. "Don Martin is known to many," he replied cautiously. Cliffe jingled the silver and awkwardly explained that he was no longer a friend of the President's and wished to see Sarmiento as soon as he could. For a time the muleteer did not speak; then he looked up with an air of decision. "It may be difficult, señor, but we will try," he said, and jerking the pack-mule's bridle abruptly left the road. They passed through a coffee plantation and a field of sugar-cane, and then as they reached thick forest the muleteer stopped and indicated the road that wound in loops down the hillside. "It is well the President should think we have gone that way," he remarked with a smile. "He has, no doubt, been told how we left the town." Cliffe looked back across the wide sweep of sun-scorched country to the shining streak on the horizon. His path led into the mountains and he longed for the sea. Then he thought of Grahame and wondered where he was. Cliffe felt sure the man would help him if he knew his need. He was beginning to suspect what business Grahame had on the coast. He asked his guide about the _Enchantress_, but the fellow did not seem to understand, and it was obvious that he had not heard of Grahame. Then Cliffe urged his mule on and plunged into the steamy shade. Two days later they rode into a deep gorge filled with giant, creeper-festooned trees, and the guide moved forward slowly, glancing into the shadow that shut in the winding track. It appeared that his caution was justified, for presently a hoarse voice bade them halt, and as they pulled up two men with rifles stepped out into the sunlight. For some time the muleteer disputed with them, using emphatic gestures and pointing to Cliffe; and then he went on with one while the other sat down watching the American, with his rifle across his knees. It was very hot, for the sun struck down through an opening in the branches, but although the perspiration dripped from him Cliffe did not think it wise to move. Indeed, he was glad that his mule stood quiet, whisking off the flies. At last some one called in the forest and Cliffe's guard told him to ride on, though the man followed at a short distance, as if to prevent his escape. A few hundred yards farther on, the gorge widened into a level hollow, and Cliffe saw that he was in a camp. It was not marked by military order. Men of various shades of color lay about, smoking cigarettes. Some were barefooted, and most were poorly dressed, but all wore red sashes, and good rifles lay ready to their hands. They looked more like brigands than soldiers, and it was hard to imagine they had been drilled, but while their attitudes were slackly negligent, their faces were resolute. In the background, climbing forest, choked with fallen trees and trailing vines, rolled up the steep hillside. It was very hot, and the hum of insects mingled with the sound of drowsy voices. Two men, better dressed than the others, came forward, and Cliffe dismounted and followed them to a seat in the shadow, where they gave him some cigarettes. "Now, señor, you will tell us why you came here," said one. Cliffe had not expected to be addressed in good English, and he looked at the man with surprise. The Spaniard smiled. "With us, the consequences of trying to serve one's country is that one finds it safer to live somewhere else. But we will keep to the point." "I am looking for Don Martin Sarmiento," Cliffe said. "I expect you know where he is." "That is so, but it would be difficult to reach him, and we leave this place to-night. In fact, it is hard to see what we ought to do with you, but it might help if you told us what your business is with Don Martin." "I guess you're surprised I should want to see him," Cliffe remarked with some dryness. "It is natural," said the other. "We know you are a friend of the President's, and we suspect that you have been financing him. The money you gave him would be used to put us down." Cliffe thought for a few moments. The man seemed a person of some consequence, and apparently commanded the band of rebels. His permission must be obtained before Cliffe could proceed, and since he meant to ask Don Martin's help there was, perhaps, no cause for reticence. "Very well," he said. "I will tell you why I am going to your leader." He related what had led to his quarrel with the President, and when he had finished, the man translated the narrative to his comrade. "It is fortunate, señor, you refused the loan, because you will never get the concessions; Altiera's rule will be over in a day or two. But you believed him when he said he did not know where your daughter is?" "Yes. He seemed to speak without thinking, and was sorry afterward." "Then, as the señorita is not in his hands, she is probably in ours, but our forces are scattered, and at present we cannot make inquiries. However, I imagine you will find her quickest by remaining with us--and you will excuse my saying that it would not suit us to let you go. If you were seized by the President's soldiers, he might make some use of you. Have I your promise that you will not try to escape?" Although the man was courteous, Cliffe thought an attempt to run away would lead to trouble, but this was not what decided him to stay. He had been bred to business, but now deep-rooted impulses were stirring. The President and Gomez had cheated him, and he felt very sore about it, but they had, moreover, carried off and, no doubt, terrorized Evelyn. The thought of this filled him with a fierce desire to get even with them. "Señores," he said grimly, "you not only have my word not to attempt to escape but you have my pledge to help you in every way I can." "We start for Rio Frio to-night," the rebel answered in a significant tone. "Good!" Cliffe said, and glanced about at the little groups of determined looking men. "I'll confess I'm curious to know how you got such good rifles," he added. The rebel studied him keenly for a moment; and seemed satisfied. "A countryman of yours bought and landed them for us in small quantities." "Grahame!" Cliffe exclaimed, and laughed, for he found the situation ironically humorous. He liked Grahame, and suspected that Evelyn was interested in him; and now it was obvious that the man had helped the revolutionaries to ruin his plans. "I know him," he said. "As a matter of fact, he's an Englishman." "At present he is Gomez's prisoner. That is one reason we strike the first blow at Rio Frio." "Ah! Well, if you mean to rescue him, you can rely on my doing the best I can." The rebel changed the subject, but Cliffe imagined he had gained his confidence. He was invited to the officers' frugal four o'clock dinner, and afterward sat talking with them while the shadows filled the hollow. Although still anxious about Evelyn, he felt less disturbed, and was sensible of a strange but pleasant thrill. Feelings he thought he had long grown out of were reawakening; there would be no more trucking with the rogues who had cheated him and carried off his daughter. When they next met, he would demand satisfaction with a rifle in his hands. Cliffe admitted that there was something rather absurd and barbarous in the pleasure the thought of the meeting afforded him, but, for all that, the adventure he was embarking on had a strong attraction. CHAPTER XXVIII THE PRESIDENT'S DESPATCHES The sun had set when Walthew urged his worn-out mule up a narrow track that twisted along the hillside through thick timber. The evening was very dark, and thin mist drifted among the giant trees. Creepers streamed down from their interlacing boughs, damp brush projected from the sides of the trail, and Walthew growled savagely when he was buffeted by clusters of dewy leaves. His head ached, the perspiration dripped from his hot face, and he was sore in every limb, while he found the steamy atmosphere almost unbreathable. The cut on his head was healing, but after a long, forced march from the coast, he had at sunrise left the camp where he and the revolutionaries had spent the night. The country ahead was reported to be watched by the President's soldiers, and as the party was not strong enough to fight, they had separated, hoping to slip past the pickets singly and meet at a rendezvous agreed upon. Walthew reached the spot without being molested, but although he waited for an hour nobody else arrived. It seemed possible, however, that he had mistaken the place, and he determined to push on to Rio Frio, trusting that his companions would rejoin him there. He had been told that as the President had dealings with foreigners he might be allowed to pass by any soldiers he fell in with when they saw he was an American. He was, however, still a long way from Rio Frio, his mule was exhausted, and he doubted if he were going the right way. There was nothing to be seen but shadowy trunks that loomed through the mist a yard or two off, and faint specks of phosphorescent light where the fireflies twinkled. Rocking in his saddle with a painful jar, Walthew thought that if the jaded beast stumbled again as badly it would come down, and he half decided to dismount. He felt that he would be safer on his feet; but the mule, recovering, turned abruptly without his guiding it, and a few moments later the darkness grew thinner. The trees now rose on one side in a dense, black mass, the ground was more level, and Walthew saw that the animal had struck into a road that led through a clearing. He followed it, in the hope that there was a _hacienda_ near, and soon a light shone in the distance. The mule now needed no urging, and in a few minutes a building of some size loomed against the sky. Walthew rode up to it, and as he reached the arched entrance to the _patio_ a man appeared, while another man moved softly behind him as if to cut off his retreat. "Can I get a fresh mule here and perhaps something to eat?" he asked as carelessly as he could. "Certainly, señor," said the man. "If you will get down, we will put the beast in the stable." Walthew hesitated. There was no obvious reason why he should distrust the fellow, but he imagined that he had been watching for somebody coming down the road. The mule, however, was worn out, and he did not think he had much chance of escaping if treachery was intended. "Very well," he said, dismounting, and when another man came up, he stumbled after the first into the passage. "You have ridden far, señor, and will enjoy a rest," his guide remarked. "One does not lose time by stopping for food on a long journey." Walthew felt more suspicious. They were now near a lamp that hung in the arch, and although his companion was dressed like a peon his voice suggested some education. The feeling that his arrival had been expected was stronger, but it was too late to turn back and he went on, surreptitiously making sure that his automatic pistol was loose. He was taken across the _patio_, up an outside staircase, and along a balcony, where his guide opened a door. "The house is at your disposal," he said with Spanish politeness, bowing to Walthew to enter. The door was closed sharply and Walthew wondered if he had been trapped as he cast a quick glance about. The room was large, badly lighted, and scantily furnished. Two of its windows were open, but he remembered that they must be some distance from the ground. There seemed, however, to be no reason for alarm. At the far end of the room a table was laid for supper, and a girl and a priest sat near it. They rose as he came forward. Walthew gasped. "_Blanca!_" The girl seemed equally astonished. "Señor Walthew!" she exclaimed, and her tone indicated both perplexity and concern. Walthew's clothes were gray with dust, his pose was slack with fatigue, and a dirty bandage covered his forehead. "You seem surprised," he managed to say; "I guess _I_ am." The gleam in his eyes showed the pleasure he felt. "I didn't expect to find you here." "But where do you come from?" "From the San Lucar lagoon; traveled as fast as I could, but lost my companions in the bush. They belong to your party." The priest came forward and Walthew recognized Father Agustin. "There has been a mistake," the priest said to Blanca, and bowed to Walthew. "You will excuse me; I have an order to give." Walthew thought it had something to do with his arrival. He was no longer suspicious, but puzzled. He was among friends, but they had received him in a curious manner. He turned to Blanca with a smile. "It looks as if I'm intruding, but I hope you won't turn me out." "Oh, no," she said with a compassionate glance that thrilled him. "You seem ill and tired. Are you hurt?" "Not much; a scratch on my head. But are you safe here? They told us the woods were full of the President's soldiers." "We shall be gone at daybreak, and we have a guard." Blanca paused and resumed with an air of relief: "It was fortunate you did not pass the house." "That's a sure thing," Walthew agreed. "However, I guess I know what you mean. When I pulled up I fancied your friends were watching for me, and I'd have found the road blocked if I'd gone on. Don't you think you had better tell me what it's all about?" Blanca hesitated with some color in her face, but just then Father Agustin returned. "I have warned the men," he informed the girl. "Señor Walthew wishes to know what is going on," she said. "It might be better that he should know, and he is to be trusted; but you must decide whether you will tell him or not." Blanca was silent for a moment, and then began in a rather strained voice: "We have a spy in the President's household, and word was sent us that a man would leave Villa Paz with some important despatches for Gomez. We believe they contain instructions about what he must do when the fighting begins, but, to avoid suspicion, Altiera is sending a foreign trader to whom he has given some privileges. We expect him to stop and change mules here, because the _hacienda_ belongs to one of the President's supporters." "I see!" said Walthew. "He would not have carried the despatches past this house. But where is its owner?" "Hiding at a _hacienda_ some distance off. He is a timid man, and we had him warned that the rebels were coming to burn the place. An hour after he left with his family we took possession." "But why did Don Martin send you?" Walthew asked sharply. "Hasn't he men enough?" Blanca blushed and looked embarrassed, but the next moment she lifted her head with an air of pride. There was a sparkle in her deep blue eyes. "I am a patriot, señor, and ready to make a sacrifice for my country. We must seize the despatches, but we do not wish to use force on a foreigner, because this might lead to trouble. Our plan was to change the papers for others and send the messenger on without his knowing that he had lost them. It would not be an easy matter----" "In short," Father Agustin interposed with some dryness, "the señorita thought she might succeed where a man would fail." The blood rushed to Walthew's face, for he understood. Blanca meant to use her personal charm to trick and rob the messenger. It seemed to him an outrage; but she fixed her eyes on him, and they had a haughty, challenging look. She was daring him to deny that the course she meant to take was warranted. He was furiously angry, but he tried to be just, and he knew that she would not go too far. "It seems you do not approve!" she said. Walthew felt a thrill. In a sense, she had admitted that his good opinion was worth something; but he saw that he must be careful. She was proud and had the fiery Spanish temperament. He might lose her by a hint of doubt. "No," he said, "I don't approve; but I can conquer my prejudices, as you must have done. It is hateful to think of a woman's doing such work, but one must admire the courage that has helped you to undertake it. I dare say the cause demands the sacrifice." The girl's expression softened, and she smiled as she turned to the priest. "Do you not think Señor Walthew has answered well?" "It is obvious that he has tact, and I think he has feeling," said Father Agustin. "But has he not some news for us, perhaps?" "I have," said Walthew. "I want your help." He began with the arrival of Evelyn's message, and Blanca started as if about to speak, but Father Agustin stopped her by a sign. Her face grew intent as Walthew told how they had driven the _Enchantress_ before the gale, and her eyes sparkled when he deprecatingly related the struggle on the beach. "I think you have no reason to apologize," she said. "They must have sent a strong guard, and you tried to rescue your friend alone. Miguel was right; there was nothing to be done by two or three men with knives." Then she paused with a thoughtful look. "It seems you do not know that Miss Cliffe is safe with us." "It is a relief to learn that," Walthew said with feeling. "Since she was at Rio Frio when she sent the note, it is plain that Gomez added the few lines that led you into the trap. But we must think how we can rescue Mr. Grahame. You suggest that the men who came with you from San Lucar have no plans?" "No. They expected to gather a force on the way, but the peons had already gone off to join Don Martin. We meant to steal into Rio Frio and then see what could be done. All I know is that I'm not going back without my partner." "We may find a way to set him free, but it will need some thought," Father Agustin remarked. "When a thing looks difficult, force is not always the best means." "It doesn't seem likely to be of much use now," Walthew gloomily agreed. "I'd six of your countrymen with me until I lost them, and we were told that Gomez was filling Rio Frio with soldiers.... But how did you come to take a part in this affair?" Father Agustin's eyes twinkled. "I came as duenna. You were surprised when you heard what the señorita had undertaken, but it appeared that my presence might be something of a protection and, perhaps, a guarantee. One concludes that this did not strike you." Walthew looked embarrassed, but Father Agustin smiled. "You look as if you need refreshment," he said. "We will have our supper now." When the meal was finished, Father Agustin kept Walthew talking while Blanca leaned back silently in her chair. Her look was strained, and once Walthew surprised her cautious glance at the clock. "I had forgotten the despatch-carrier," he said with some sharpness. "He doesn't seem to be coming." "There is another road; longer and at present dangerous," explained Father Agustin. "We have had it watched, but this is the obvious way for a messenger to take." "For all that," said Walthew steadily, "I hope the fellow will choose the other." Neither of them answered. Blanca lay back in her chair; the priest sat with one elbow on the table, his cheek resting on his upturned palm. He was very tired. Walthew studied him for a moment and then put his thoughts into words. "It is curious, Father Agustin, that whenever I have met you things began to happen." "It is possible. Perhaps a priest is most needed where there is trouble, and my mission is not always peace. One looks forward to the time when lust and greed and cruelty shall no longer rule the hearts of men, but it has not come yet." Walthew lighted the cigarette his host passed over to him. Though Father Agustin had told him nothing new and his manner was by no means dramatic, he felt impressed. The quiet priest in his shabby cassock and clumsy, raw-hide shoes, had somehow a dominating personality. It was hard to tell what part he took in the revolution, but even if it were not directly active, Walthew thought him a moral force that must be reckoned with. For a time nothing was said. There was no sound in the room except the ticking of the clock, and it seemed to Walthew that the house had a deserted feeling; he imagined that there was nobody in it except themselves. He grew angry and pitiful by turns as he glanced at Blanca. It was a hateful task she had been given, but he saw that she meant to carry it out. He wanted to get on, because Grahame might be in danger, but he could not leave until the despatch-carrier came. One could trust Father Agustin, but Walthew felt that he must be on hand. It got cooler, and a faint, earthy smell crept in through the windows. Now and then the lamp flickered in a passing draught, and once or twice they forced themselves to talk, but the effort was obvious and the voices presently died away. After this the quietness became oppressive, and by degrees Walthew grew drowsy. Rousing himself, he felt ashamed as he glanced at the girl. She did not move, but her pose was tense, and he knew that she was watchful. He resented the craving for sleep when she was bearing a heavy strain, but he had traveled fast since he left the lagoon and his exhausted body demanded rest. He would not give in, and at last he started as a faint throbbing sound reached him from outside. It came from a long way off, but grew plainer, and he saw Father Agustin lean forward. Then Blanca stood up with a tinge of color in her face and a tightening of her lips. Somebody was riding hard down the road. There was a shout and a sharp answer. For a few moments the three stood waiting with forced calm, and then a man hurriedly entered. "Pepe is here, señor," he announced. "Ah!" said Father Agustin quietly. "Bring him in." He turned to Walthew. "It is one of our men who watched the other road. Something has gone wrong." Walthew saw Blanca's expression change. Although she had meant to get the despatches, he knew she felt relieved. Pepe entered. His face was wet with perspiration and he spoke with a breathless quickness that prevented Walthew's following what he said. Still, it was plain that his news was bad, for his manner was apologetic, and Father Agustin looked thoughtful. "Wait outside; we may want you," he said and turned to Walthew after dismissing the fellow. "The messenger must have been suspicious and our men have blundered. It was very dark and he came upon them suddenly. One was shot as he seized the mule and the messenger escaped before they could mount, but he was forced to turn back." "Could he pass them by making a round?" "It is not likely. There is this road and the other, with thick forest between, and both are guarded. The man must wait for daylight, and I do not think he will reach Rio Frio. We may turn this to your advantage, but it needs thought." He sat down and lighted a cigarette, and Walthew waited in silence until he looked up. "It is possible that Gomez will offer your comrade his liberty in exchange for information he can use against Don Martin." "Grahame will give him none," Walthew answered emphatically. "Then I imagine he is in some danger. You would take a risk to rescue him?" "Of course!" "Very well. Gomez is waiting for instructions and probably knows that the messenger is a foreigner. I suggest that you impersonate him. The guards will let you pass, and Gomez will, no doubt, receive you alone. Then you must try to extort an order for your friend's release." "I'm a pretty good shot," said Walthew meaningly. "I might get him covered before I begin." Father Agustin made a sign of impatience. "Your best argument will be this--if you are detained for more than a few minutes, there will be a tumult in the town. Gomez will hesitate about forcing a rising before he gets his orders. Then as soon as you enter the house some of our people will find an excuse for loitering about the door. The soldiers are not well drilled; it might not be difficult to surprise and disarm the sentry, and then the house could be seized. For all that, there is a risk. Success will depend upon your nerve and coolness." "I can't think of any better plan," said Walthew. Blanca gave him a quick glance, and he thrilled as he saw a hint of trouble in her face. He thought she was unwilling that he should run into danger, but the next moment her eyes sparkled. "It will work!" she said. "I am coming to help!" Walthew made a sign of protest, but she would not let him speak. "I promised to get the despatches, and the messenger may arrive while you are with Gomez. Then somebody must make arrangements for the door to be watched, and I am known in Rio Frio. I can find trustworthy men." She raised her hand imperiously. "You need not object, señor. I am going!" Walthew was forced to acquiesce, and an hour afterward they left the _hacienda_ and rode through the dark bush with two well-armed men behind them. CHAPTER XXIX THE PRESIDIO The sun hung low in the western sky, with a peak of the black cordillera cutting its lower edge, and Rio Frio shone in the glaring light. Seen from the road across the valley, the town had an ethereal look, for the tiers of square, white houses rose from a gulf of shadow and clustered upon the hillside, glimmering with a pearly luster, picked out by clumps of green. Behind were barren slopes, deepening in color to dusky purple as they ran back to the foot of the mountain wall. Walthew pulled up his mule and sat gazing at the town. He had been riding beside Blanca, while Father Agustin and two others followed at some distance. "Five minutes ago you could hardly see the place against the background and now it glows as if it were lighted up inside," he remarked. "Looks more like an enchanted palace than a collection of adobe houses. One could imagine that some magician had suddenly conjured it up." "I'm afraid there's not much enchantment in Rio Frio," Blanca answered. "It's very prosaic and rather dirty." "Well, I don't know," said Walthew, looking boldly at her. "I'm not given to romantic sentiment, but something very strange happened to me one night in your town. Must have been glamour in the air, for I've been a changed man ever since. You wouldn't expect a matter-of-fact American, who was on the hunt for money, to trail round the country trying to act like Garibaldi, unless he was bewitched." Blanca smiled prettily. "You have, at least, chosen to follow a great example, señor." "I don't think I chose him," Walthew returned dryly. "I'd have looked for somebody easier." "But you were free to give up the part if you found it too hard for you." "No; that's the trouble. I wasn't free." The girl knew that he was not talking at random to hide nervousness. There was an underlying gravity in his manner and she secretly thrilled to it. Although he still wore the dirty bandage and was dusty and unkempt, she thought he had a very gallant air. His eyes were bright and intent, and his thin face was very resolute. The faint smile with which he regarded her somehow emphasized his determined, highstrung look. "Señor," she said, "it is better to aim high. Achievement is not everything; the effort counts, and it is a generous errand you go upon to-night. But we will talk of something else. Look; there is the house where I spent the only happy years I can remember, until my father heard the call of duty once more and obeyed. Higher up, you can see the green gap of the _alameda_; beyond it the church of San Sebastian." She paused for a moment with a shiver. "The white line beneath it is the top of the _presidio_, where Gomez lives. But the light fades quickly, and now, see--everything has gone." The sun had sunk behind the cordillera, and the white town, changing suddenly to gray, melted out of sight as the shadows rolled up the hillside. "You must see that it's enchanted," Walthew remarked. "The magician has waved his wand and blotted it out." "It will shine again to-morrow," Blanca answered in a quiet voice. "The shadows have long rested on this country of ours, but one looks for the dawn." The others were close behind them, but the party was smaller than it had been. Ragged men with dark, determined faces had been picked up on the way, but it would excite suspicion if they entered Rio Frio in a body, and they had separated during the last hour. Walthew did not know what their orders were, but he thought they would act upon some plan already made if he failed to secure Grahame's release; and Blanca presently bore this conclusion out. "You will not be left unsupported, but it will be better if you can make Gomez set your comrade free without our help," she said. "We do not wish to strike the first blow to-night, but if it is needful, the _presidio_ will be attacked. Gomez's position is like ours: he is not quite ready to force a conflict. You see how that strengthens your hand. He cannot altogether trust his soldiers, and a shot would rouse the town." Her voice sounded rather strained as she concluded: "But if you are careful, the shot will not be fired. Gomez is cruel, but he is a coward, and will give way if you use moral force." "It's a big thing," Walthew answered thoughtfully. "Still, I must put it over somehow. I have to get my partner out." Darkness fell before they reached Rio Frio, and Blanca stopped her mule on the outskirts of the town. "We must separate here," she said. "I do not think the entrance is carefully guarded, because it is not Gomez's policy to admit that an attack is possible, but there may be spies, and a _rural_ or two on watch." She paused and held out her hand. "I wish you good fortune, señor, and I do not think your nerve will fail, but if the worst comes, we will not leave you in Gomez's power." Walthew, bending down, kissed her hand and then lifted his hat. "Until I see you again, señorita," he said and quietly rode on. There was no moon and the air was still. The town rose before him, vague and shadowy, with a faint musky smell drifting out from it. As he reached the first of the houses, a wave of heat, rising from the rough pavement, surrounded him. The walls looked blank, for there were no lights behind the lattices, but a ray of brightness fell across the street a short distance in front. As he crossed the illuminated strip a man in white uniform stepped forward and seized his bridle. "Who comes?" he asked, looking hard at Walthew's face. "A messenger for the _secretario_." "Pass, friend," said the other, letting go the bridle. Walthew rode on, but checked the mule as soon as he was out of sight. It looked as if he had been expected, but he had been warned that he must give the revolutionaries time to communicate with their friends in the city. They might have some trouble in entering it, although he believed they meant to do so through the house of some sympathizer on the outskirts. When he turned a corner he stopped to listen, but heard nothing behind him, and the street in front was quiet. It seemed that nobody had been sent to announce his arrival, and he could proceed slowly without rousing suspicion. Leaving the direct line, he wound in and out through narrow streets, the mule's shoes clanging on the hot stones. He passed one or two dimly lighted cafés where men, roused by the clatter, looked up, their figures showing indistinct about the small tables between the pillars. Farther on, shadowy groups were sitting close together on the pavement, and though their voices were quiet they had somehow an air of excitement. Men appeared and vanished in the gloom, moving softly and quickly, as if afraid of loitering. There was a mysterious hint of tension about all that Walthew saw, and he felt his heart beat as he rode on. Crossing the plaza, he dismounted at the hotel he had previously visited, and sent for the majordomo when the hostler grumbled something about the stable's being full. "You will remember me," he said. "I want to leave my mule here and perhaps spend the night." "I am sorry, but we have no room; there are a number of strangers in the town. They are not so full at the Golden Fleece." "I'd rather stay here if I have to wait until to-morrow," Walthew answered. "You take care of the mules well, and I may have a long ride. Then one puts up at a place one knows, with more--confidence." The majordomo looked hard at him. "We must try to make room, señor, since you have--confidence." "Exactly," said Walthew, smiling. "Now I want the mule fed but not unsaddled. I may perhaps need it in an hour, and it would be an advantage if you could find me another." "It might be possible," the majordomo replied in a thoughtful tone. "Still, there are spies about and they may watch this house. With permission, I will send the mule to Ramon Silva in the _calle Pinastro_. He is a carrier, and it is known that he buys pack-animals; he will have both mules ready, if you ask for them with confidence." Walthew thanked the man and set off for the _presidio_. It was a long, square-fronted building with a sentry-box at the entrance, and an untidy soldier sat smoking outside. Another stood a little farther on in a slouching attitude, a rifle raking across his shoulder and his _kepis_ tilted to one side. Discipline is seldom marked among Spanish-American soldiers, but Walthew was somewhat surprised to note that the fellow was bantering a group of loiterers. They were dressed like peons, and one carried a tray of sweetmeats and another a quantity of cigarettes, apparently for sale. As Walthew passed, the former hurriedly moved his tray, as if to prevent its being upset. "Be careful, señor!" he exclaimed, giving Walthew a warning glance. Walthew understood it. The men were not there by accident, and he saw that one was within leaping distance of the sentry. He knew that the Spanish knife is almost as dangerous as the rifle at close quarters; and can, moreover, be thrown a short distance with effect. "I have a message for the _secretario_," he told the sentry with a careless air. The man let him pass, and he saw that he was expected when a dusky steward met him at the door. Since the despatch-carrier was known to be a foreigner, it was easy to enter the _presidio_, but he wondered what would happen before he left. Now that the dangerous game was about to begin, he clearly recognized the risk he ran. For all that, it looked as if he held the trump cards, and he hoped that he had nerve enough to play them well. Pulling himself together, he followed his guide across the _patio_ and up an outer stair, until the man stopped and knocked at a door. "The messenger, señor," he announced. Walthew held his breath until he heard the door shut behind him; then he turned to Gomez, who had risen from his seat at a table. It was a small room and the table stood between the men. Walthew felt his nerves tingle and his skin grow damp with perspiration as Gomez looked at him. There was surprise in the secretary's face and he seemed puzzled, as if he were trying to revive a memory. "You are not the man we were told would come, but I think I have seen you somewhere," he said. Walthew stood still, his hand in his jacket pocket, as if about to take the despatches from it. "The other messenger was detained, but we have met. I once dined at your table at the International, in Havana." Gomez gave him a quick, suspicious glance. "Then there is something I do not understand, but it is not important now. You bring the President's orders?" "No; I bring this." He took his hand from his pocket and the barrel of an automatic pistol glinted in the light. Gomez flinched, but recovered his calm with a quickness that showed Walthew he had a dangerous antagonist. "Push your chair back from that open drawer and then keep still!" he ordered. Gomez obeyed, and Walthew sat down on the edge of the table, where, if necessary, he could spring up more quickly than from a chair. Besides, the position helped him to keep both Gomez and the door in sight. "You are uselessly dramatic, señor," Gomez remarked with a forced sneer. "You dare not use the pistol, and I am not to be frightened by so cheap a trick." Walthew did not put down the weapon. "Rather stale, but it has served its purpose by stopping you from calling out, and that's all I wanted to begin with. Now I'm going to show you how we stand." "Your position strikes me as very weak." "Well," said Walthew coolly, "I don't know. There are some chances in my favor." "Not many, I think. A shot or a call from me would lead to your immediate arrest." Walthew lowered the pistol. "I'm not going to shoot and you won't call. One of your sentries is smoking cigarettes, with a wiry liberator ready to put his knife into him, and something would happen to the other before he could throw up his rifle. Then, a number of my friends are waiting to seize the gate." "What would they gain? They could not hold the building. In a few minutes the soldiers would arrive." "Just so. Still, they'd have a few minutes, and there's reason for believing they're not fond of you. Then, I don't mean to be made a prisoner and, if I'm forced to, I'll shoot straight." This was not an idle threat. Walthew's nerves were steady, and he felt a rancorous hatred of the man. He had been guilty of unspeakable cruelties, he had carried off an American girl, and he now had Grahame in his power. Walthew's face was pale, but his lips were firmly set, and there was an ominous gleam in his eyes. Gomez began to grow uneasy. "However," Walthew went on, "the important point is that the first shot starts the revolution. My friends won't have much trouble with the sentries at the door, but if your soldiers try to break in afterward, it will rouse the town. You may take this for granted, because you must see that I'd make sure of being supported outside before I ventured here." Gomez pondered. The American's position was certainly strong. The lad was not a rash fool, and his having made the venture proved his statement about the likelihood of a revolution to be correct; moreover, Gomez had other reasons for not questioning it. As he looked up, Walthew made a warning gesture and Gomez heard footsteps outside. "Don't move!" said Walthew in a low, tense voice. "If that fellow comes in it will make trouble for both of us. You'd better think how you're going to keep him out!" The secretary's lips twitched, but he sat motionless. The steps drew nearer, echoing down the passage; in another moment the man outside would reach the door. Walthew held his breath; but the steps continued and passed. Then they grew fainter, and Walthew saw his antagonist's pose relax; the strain had told on him. Gomez was weakening and the game was nearly won. "What do you want?" the secretary asked. "An order for Grahame's release." "Impossible! My signature would make me responsible to the President." "You'll take a bigger responsibility if you refuse; the men I left waiting will begin the trouble if I'm not outside very soon. You haven't got your master's orders yet, and the liberators have headed his messenger off. I guess you'll have to answer for it if you spoil his plans. Remember you'll have to face a revolution unless you let Grahame out." Gomez was silent for a few moments and then made a sign of acquiescence. "Very well," he said, and pulling his chair to the table began to write. Then he gave Walthew the paper. "Are you satisfied?" "Not quite," said Walthew, glancing over the message. "Ring for one of your men and send it off with this note." He handed both papers to Gomez. "Order him to deliver them at once!" When the man came in, Walthew was sitting carelessly in a chair, as if nothing unusual had been going on. His right hand, however, was gripping the pistol in his jacket pocket. "I'll wait here for five minutes to give him a start. Seems to me that would be safer," he said when the orderly had left them. He was relieved when he thought he could get up, for the strain had been heavy, and he was feeling rather limp, but he walked steadily to the door and did not quicken his steps until he reached the stairs. It was with tingling nerves that he came to the outer gate; but the sentries let him pass, and when he had gone a short distance, three or four peons who were hanging about turned and followed him. He was outside in the friendly darkness, but he had still to leave the town. CHAPTER XXX THE ESCAPE Walthew waited for the peons, and then turned toward _calle Pinastro_, where he had arranged to meet Grahame. He had now three companions whom he thought he could trust, but they were unarmed, except for their knives. Gomez had sent the order for Grahame's release, but if he could rearrest him and seize Walthew without causing a tumult, he would do so. They had only five or six minutes' start. It did not look as if they could get out of the town in time, and Walthew felt fiercely impatient. For all that, he stopped at the corner of a street when one of the others touched him. There was a lighted café near by, and a girl stood on the pavement near its open front. She was dressed very plainly in white, with a dark shawl fastened round her head, like a peasant girl, but he felt a sudden thrill as she turned toward him. Although he could not see her very well, he knew it was Blanca. When he cautiously crossed the street she drew him back into the shadow, but he saw her look of relief. "You have succeeded!" she said softly. "Where is Mr. Grahame?" "I am to meet him at Ramon Silva's." "You cannot go this way; there are two _rurales_ farther on. But it would be dangerous to turn back now." She put her hand on his arm, as if to detain him while she considered what to do, and Walthew looked about, knowing that he could trust her knowledge of the town. The street was narrow and dark except where the light from the café shone across it. A few citizens sat round the small tables, and several shadowy figures loitered in the gloom outside. Walthew thought they had come with the girl, but there was nothing in their attitude to suggest that they had any particular business in the neighborhood, and his own followers had stopped at the corner. Suddenly a clatter of hoofs broke out. Some one was riding fast toward them. Walthew felt Blanca's hand tighten warningly on his arm as she drew back a pace or two. The sound grew louder; there was a hoarse shout like a sentry's challenge, and an answer which Walthew imagined satisfied the _rurales_ on guard; and then a mounted man rode into the stream of light. The mule was foul with sweat and dust, and a trickle of blood ran down its shoulder; the rider's face was pale and set. Walthew's eyes rested on him for only a second, but he knew the fellow was English or American. There was an angry cry in the background, and a stealthy figure, outlined against a blank, white wall, crossed the street. The mounted man was obviously the President's messenger; but Walthew, having seen his grim, tired look, and the way he drove the worn-out mule furiously down the street, felt a touch of half-admiring sympathy. After all, the fellow was white, and was gallantly doing what he had undertaken. A moment more and Walthew saw something glisten in the hand of the stealthy figure that seemed ready to spring. He was only a yard away and, acting on impulse, he stumbled as if by accident and fell against the man. The knife dropped with a jingle, and the messenger dashed past, throwing Walthew a quick glance as he went. An angry murmur broke out, and several of the loiterers closed in on Walthew, while men left the café to see what was going on, and there were quick footsteps farther off in the gloom. Remembering the need for haste and that Grahame might be in danger, Walthew half regretted his rashness, but as he wondered what to do Blanca ran to his side. "The _rurales_ are coming!" she shouted; and the men about them vanished as she led him away. They turned a corner into a lane between dark houses. "Why did you interfere?" she asked breathlessly. "I don't know. Felt I had to," Walthew answered with some embarrassment. "But you know who he is!" "Yes; he's carrying the despatches. Still, he looked played out and he had got through." "Through your friends!" "I suppose so. It didn't seem to make much difference. Guess I've been foolish." "You were generous, but generosity of that kind must be paid for," Blanca answered in a hard tone. "It will cost our people something, and, now that Gomez has got his orders, I don't know that we can leave the town." "Grahame and I must find a way. But you'd be safer without us. I can't let you run into needless danger." Blanca laughed. "Do you think I would leave you to get into fresh difficulties? With a temperament like yours, you're not to be trusted alone." "I handled Gomez pretty well," Walthew boasted. "And you still wear the bandage he saw you with! Is it safe to take it off?" "I'd forgotten it," he admitted. He threw the bandage into the lane with some annoyance, for the girl seemed amused, but she made no remark until they reached a quiet street. "Well," she said, "perhaps I can excuse you to the others, who haven't deserted us. But we turn down here and you had better go a few yards in front." Following the directions she gave him, he presently crossed a square and entered a street where a dim light burned. A man stood near it in a careless pose, smoking a cigarette, and Walthew's heart beat fast as he saw him. "Grahame!" he said; and the next moment he was shaking his comrade's hand. "Got your note," said Grahame. "Thought I'd better wait here. Silva can't let us have the mules." Walthew understood his brevity: there was no time for questions and explanations. Grahame took off his hat as Blanca joined them. "I must see Silva. Wait in the shadow," she said, and moved quickly away. The men stood silent. They had much to say, but it would keep, and the means of escaping from the town occupied their minds. The street was deserted and seemed strangely quiet after the girl's footsteps died away, but indistinct cries came across the flat roofs as if something were happening. Walthew looked about sharply in tense impatience, but could see nothing, and Blanca did not return. At last, however, she came silently toward them through the gloom. "It is impossible for Silva to give us the mules," she said. "The Government has seized all he has, and two _rurales_ guard the stable." "Then we must try to get away on foot," Grahame replied. "Would you be safer, señorita, if you got some of your friends to hide you?" "No," she said; "I must take my father some news I have picked up, and Gomez will leave no place unsearched when he learns that I have been here. I think we shall be out of danger if we can reach a house I know." They went down the street, quickly but silently, and as they turned the corner a man sprang out from the gloom beside a wall and immediately afterward disappeared. A few moments later they heard a whistle, and Blanca led the men into a narrow lane. "It is off our way, and we must run!" she said. She shook off Walthew when he tried to take her arm; and they had gone some distance before they heard footsteps behind them. The pursuers did not seem to gain much ground, but when they slipped round a corner somebody shouted, and the girl sped across the square they had entered. A little farther on, they heard a heavier tread on the uneven stones. "_Rurales!_" Grahame whispered. Blanca turned off quickly and led them through an archway into a street where there was a café, which, to Walthew's surprise, she made for. The pursuers had not come out from the archway yet, and the party, falling into a slower pace before they reached the café, went in and sat down calmly at one of the tables. As usual, the front of the café was open to the pavement, separated from it by only a row of pillars. A few men sat inside and glanced curiously at the newcomers, but they made no remark. "A bottle of vermouth, as soon as you can!" Grahame said to the landlord. The fellow gave him a quick glance, and then his eyes rested for a moment on the girl; but he did not delay, and was coming back with some glasses when several barefooted men and two others in uniform ran down the street. Grahame had taken up a newspaper, but he watched them over it without turning his head; Walthew pushed his chair back carelessly into the shadow; and Blanca played with a gaudy fan. The men did not look into the café, but the landlord, after quietly filling the glasses, put down the bottle with a meaning smile. "They may come back," he said, and moved away. Walthew was about to get up, but Blanca coquettishly tapped him with her fan and, taking the hint, he sat still; they must drink some of the vermouth before they left. He drained his glass, and insisted on refilling the girl's. Blanca protested laughingly, but Grahame saw that she held her fan so that it hid her face from the other customers. She was playing her part well. Still, he thought that Walthew, knowing less of Spanish conventions, did not understand how daring she was. When Grahame's eyes rested on her she blushed and quickly turned her head. "It seems you have a number of supporters in the town," he remarked in a low voice. "Yes," she said; "you are thinking of the landlord's hint. We hope at least half the people are on our side.... But we can venture out in a minute or two." She raised her glass, smiling at Walthew, and then hummed a song until she got up and, standing in front of a dirty mirror, began to arrange the black mantilla that covered her head. Her pose and movements were marked by rakish coquetry, and Grahame saw they had deceived the loungers; but he noticed with a touch of dry amusement that Walthew looked puzzled and not quite pleased. "Now, señores," she said loudly in Castilian, "you have had wine enough and must not keep me waiting." She went out in front of them, flaunting her fan, but when they reached the pavement her manner changed, and her voice was strained as she whispered: "Follow me close, but quickly! There is no time to lose!" They were not molested as they crossed the town, but when they neared its outskirts, Blanca left the road that led to the open country and plunged into a network of narrow streets. At last she stopped in front of a large but dilapidated looking house and, knocking twice, waited a few moments until her summons was answered. There was no light inside, and she exchanged a word with a half-seen person at the door before the party was admitted. The door was shut and bolted, and they were led into an inner room where a small lamp burned, and a woman with a frightened face confronted them. "The road is stopped, and you must go at once before the house is searched!" she said excitedly. "Where are the others?" Blanca asked. "They lost you and have gone on. You know where they will wait." Blanca nodded and beckoned her companions; and they followed her and the woman to a window at the back. Grahame tactfully sprang out first and was relieved to find himself outside the town, with a grove of trees that promised safe concealment not far ahead. He made his way toward them without looking round. Walthew got out next, but as soon as he reached the ground he turned and held up his arms to Blanca, who was sitting on the ledge. As she sprang down he caught her, and holding her fast kissed her ardently. His feeling of triumph banished all thought of their danger when he found that she did not resist. Her eyes shone a deep, mystic blue, and she smiled as she slipped her arm round his neck for a moment before he set her down. Without speaking, they hurried on after Grahame. "We have about a mile to go," Blanca said, when they reached him. She struck into a path that led them past clumps of trees, rows of neatly planted bushes, and fields of cane. It was a still, dark night on which a sound would carry far, but they heard no pursuit, and the town seemed quiet. At last a small building loomed up ahead, and Blanca stopped beside it. "We should find the others here," she whispered. "But you wait. It would be better for them to see me first." They let her go, knowing that she would be easily recognized; but she came back a few moments later. "There is nobody about. Perhaps they have gone on, because they had news from people in the town, or something may have happened to make them change their plans." Sitting down outside the building, they began to consider what must be done. "We must go on without our mules," Blanca said. "I have information that my father must get as soon as possible; but we may not be able to join him until to-morrow night. The road is the nearest way, but now that Gomez has his orders he may have sent out soldiers to stop all travelers. Besides, there are _rurales_ about." "Then we'll take to the mountains," said Walthew. He did not mean her to run a risk. "I guess they've disarmed Grahame, and with one pistol among us we couldn't put up much of a fight." "There's another," Blanca returned quietly. "I might let Mr. Grahame have it, if he is a good shot, but he must give it back to me; and, as time is important, we will take the road." She silenced Walthew's objections and they set off, striking into a broad track some distance farther on. For a time, it wound, deep with dust that clung about their feet heavy with the dew, across a belt of cultivated land where indistinct, orderly rows of coffee bushes ran back from its edge. Then it plunged into thick forest, where the soil was soft and the darkness impenetrable, and they stumbled along blindly, trying to feel their way. For all that, Grahame was conscious of keen satisfaction as he breathed the warm, night air. Heavy as it was, it seemed strangely invigorating after the foul atmosphere of the _carcel_ where he had been imprisoned, and it was something to walk at large again. Walthew, however, felt anxious and limp. He had been highly strung for several hours, and he held himself responsible for the safety of the girl he loved. Listening for sounds of pursuit, he tried to pierce the darkness in front, and started when a leaf rustled or some animal moved stealthily through the forest. He thought his footsteps rang down the branch-arched track alarmingly loud. They came out into barren, rolling country, where clumps of cactus and euphorbia grew in fantastic shapes. The track led upward, and it was obvious that Blanca was getting tired. Unless they are the wives of peons, Spanish-American women do not lead an active life and, as a rule, limit their walks to an evening stroll in the plaza. For a while Blanca leaned on Walthew's arm, and he winced as he felt her limping movements, but at last she stopped. "I cannot go much farther, but there is a house near here," she said. "We can rest when we reach it." The house proved to be empty and in some disorder, suggesting that its occupants had hurriedly fled, but on searching it with a light they found some food, a little charcoal, and an iron cooking pot. Blanca and Walthew had made a long journey after their last meal and Grahame had eaten nothing since his very plain breakfast at ten o'clock. Following the girl's instructions, he lighted the charcoal and set the pot near the door while she prepared the food, but Walthew lay down in the dust outside. He was physically tired, and now, when he imagined they were comparatively safe, he felt very slack and his mind was dull. For all that, he lay where he could see the road, and only moved his eyes from it when he glanced into the small adobe building. The charcoal made a faint red glow that forced up the face of the stooping girl out of the darkness and touched her skin with a coppery gleam. Grahame knelt beside her, a dark, vaguely outlined figure, fanning the fire, and Walthew felt half jealous that he should help. Then he found himself getting drowsy, and, lighting a cigarette, he fixed his eyes resolutely on the road. All was very quiet, and there was not a movement anywhere. But Blanca was not out of danger yet. CHAPTER XXXI THE AMERICAN TRADER Walthew was almost dozing, when he was startled by a sound that came out of the darkness. It was some distance off, but it had a regular beat in it, and when it grew louder he could not doubt that some one was riding fast up the road. "Move the fire back--there's somebody coming!" he called quickly. "Blanca, will you give Grahame your pistol?" He used her name for the first time, and it thrilled him, but he had other things to think about. The faint glow of the charcoal vanished, and Grahame came out and stood listening. "Stay where you are and guard the door!" he said. "I'll drop behind that bush, and then if the fellow gets down we'll have him between us." Throwing away a cigarette he was smoking, he vanished into the gloom, and Walthew lay still with his heart beating fast. The drumming of hoofs grew slower as the rider climbed the hill before the house, but Walthew could not see him until he dismounted and came up the path, leading his mule. It was some comfort to realize that they had only one man to deal with, but if he was a spy of the President's, he must not get away. Walthew, lying at full length, quickly worked his elbow into the dust to steady his pistol hand. When the stranger was three or four yards away he stopped and looped the bridle round his arm. Then he put his hand into his pocket, and Walthew, with his nerves a-tingle, supposed that the man was searching for a match. In another moment he might have to shoot, and he held his breath as his finger tightened on the trigger. He heard the match scrape, a tiny flame flickered between the stranger's hands, and Walthew started as he saw his face. It was the man who had carried the President's orders into Rio Frio. The light spread, falling on Walthew's recumbent figure and sparkling on his pistol, but the messenger did not throw it down as the American had half expected. Instead, he coolly held it up. "I see you have me covered," he said. "Though it's a surprise to find you here, I'm not going to run away." Walthew lowered his pistol. "Very well. Leave your mule and go into the house. Will you tie up the animal, Grahame?" "So there are two of you!" The man did as he was told, and Walthew, following him, asked Blanca to get a light. The girl had found a lamp which she placed on the ground, and the stranger looked at her sharply as she bent over it. Nobody spoke until Grahame came in. "Are you alone?" he asked the messenger. "Quite." "What's your name and business?" "Carson, agent for the trading firm, Henniker and Gillatly." "Where were you going and why did you come here?" Carson turned to Walthew, who had been wondering whether he recognized him. "I imagine this gentleman knows my business," he said. "He did me a service in Rio Frio which I'm glad to acknowledge. As a matter of fact, I stopped here to look for something to eat; the owner of this house is on the President's side. It's pretty plain, though, that he has cleared out. Taking it all round, I haven't had much luck this trip." "Who warned you not to call at the _hacienda_ Perez?" Blanca asked. "I don't know his name--he stopped me for a moment in the dark. I'm sorry I had to put one of your friends out of action, señorita, but I hadn't much choice, because he struck at me with his knife. For all that, I hope the man's not badly hurt." "We expect him to recover." "You seem to know this lady," Walthew broke in. Carson smiled. "I haven't had the pleasure of being presented, but I've seen Miss Sarmiento once or twice, and it would be strange if I forgot her." His easy good-humor disarmed Walthew. "Did you deliver the President's despatches?" he asked. "Yes. To tell the truth, I was glad to get rid of them--and I imagine Miss Sarmiento acted wisely in leaving the town. Now, however, I'm naturally curious to know what you mean to do with me." "Will you give us your word not to tell any of the President's supporters that you have met us?" "I'll promise with pleasure. I feel that I've done enough in carrying his despatches." "Very well," said Grahame. "That clears the ground; but we must talk it over together." "Thanks," Carson said coolly. "I'm not pressed for time--and I notice that you have been cooking. I wonder if I might ask for some supper?" "All we have is at your service, señor," Blanca answered with Spanish politeness. "But we'd better put out the light." She extinguished the lamp, and they gathered round the cooking pot, the men sitting on the earth floor with the red glow of the burning charcoal on their faces. It could not be seen many yards away, and Grahame's view commanded the path to the door. Blanca divided the omelette she had made, and afterward gave them some black coffee and a bundle of cigarettes. "These are Habaneros and should be good," she said. "As they belong to a friend of the President's we need not hesitate about using them." She sat down beside Walthew, and they smoked in silence for a while. Blanca was studying Carson's face as it was lighted by the glow from the charcoal. "Why did you help Altiera?" she asked him suddenly. "Commercial interest. He has given us one or two trading privileges. And he seemed to think I had a pretty good chance of getting through." "Do you know what his orders to Gomez were?" Grahame had wondered when she meant to ask this, and had left it to her, feeling that she was more likely to catch the messenger off his guard. Carson laughed. "Honestly, I don't know; Altiera isn't the man to take an outsider into his confidence." "Still, you know something." "Well," Carson said quietly, "I'm sorry I must refuse to tell you my surmises. No doubt you'll understand my obstinacy." "Aren't you rash, señor?" Blanca asked in a meaning tone. "On the whole, I think not. Of course, I'm in your hands, but as I've promised not to give you away, I expect these gentlemen won't take an unfair advantage of me. Then, from what I know about Don Martin, I feel that I can trust his daughter." Blanca smiled. "Well," she said, "I suppose we must let you go. You are at liberty to leave us when you wish." Grahame and Walthew agreed, and Carson shook hands with them. "It's evident that your only reason for stopping near Rio Frio is that Miss Sarmiento finds it impossible to walk any farther," he remarked. "She's welcome to my mule. Gomez requisitioned it from a man called Silva, who's suspected of sympathizing with your party. I believe I know where to find another animal." They thanked him and let him go; and soon after he vanished into the darkness, Blanca mounted the mule and they set off again. Pushing on until dawn, they found a small, deserted _hacienda_ standing back from the road, and as tall forest grew close up to it, offering a line of retreat, they decided to rest there. The mule looked jaded. Blanca admitted that she could not go much farther, and Walthew was obviously worn out. They could find nothing to eat; but there was some furniture in the house, and Blanca found a place to sleep in one of the rooms, while the men lay down on a rug outside. The sun was now rising above the high cordillera and, wet with the dew as they were, they enjoyed the warmth. A few lizards crept about the wall in front of them, and an archway near by commanded a view of the road. The building was in good order, and had apparently been abandoned on the approach of the President's soldiers. "These people know what to expect; they must have been ready to light out," Walthew remarked. "I rather liked that fellow Carson, but it's curious he didn't ask us anything about our business." "He'd take it for granted that we had an active part in the revolution." "No doubt the señorita's being with us would suggest something of the kind, but he seemed surprised at first," Walthew replied with a thoughtful air. "For all that, I can't quite see----" "No," said Grahame; "I don't think you altogether understand the situation yet. I suppose you mean to marry Miss Sarmiento?" "Certainly, if she'll have me," Walthew answered with firmness, though he looked at his comrade as if he expected something more. Grahame smiled. "Then you're to be congratulated, because you won't have much trouble in getting your wish." "What do you mean?" Walthew's tone was sharp, but he remembered an incident during his escape from the town. "I'll admit I wasn't quite hopeless, but we were both in danger----" He broke off, and Grahame regarded him with a friendly laugh. "You're modest--and you're more ignorant of Spanish customs than I thought. However, I'd better explain, so you'll know how Don Martin will look at it. To begin with, a well-brought-up girl is never permitted to meet a man unless she is suitably escorted by an older member of the family, and you have been wandering about with Miss Sarmiento for two or three days. Now you can understand why Carson was surprised, and I noticed he was uncertain how to address Miss Sarmiento at first. She noticed his hesitation, though you did not." For some moments Walthew was silent, his brows knitted. "No, I never thought of it," he admitted. "But we'll say no more about it until I've seen Don Martin. Besides, there's another matter. A fellow who joined us at the lagoon gave me a letter for you. Sorry I forgot it until now, but I had a good deal to think about." "I don't suppose it's important," Grahame replied, and lighted a cigarette before opening the envelope with an English stamp. Then his expression changed, and a few moments afterward he let the letter drop and sat very still. The cigarette went out, the hot sun shone upon his uncovered head, and a lizard ran across his leg; but he did not move. He seemed lost in thought. Walthew, watching with puzzled sympathy, waited for him to speak. "This letter has been a long time on the way," he explained at last. "It probably had to wait at our Havana address, and then Don Martin's people had no opportunity to deliver it." "But what's the news?" Walthew asked. Grahame answered with a strained laugh. "In a sense, it's rather a grim joke. While I've been risking my life for a few dollars' profit on smuggled guns, and practicing the sternest self-denial, it seems I've been the owner of an old Border estate." "Ah!" said Walthew. "Then Calder Hall now belongs to you?" "What do you know about Calder Hall?" "I've known all about it for some time, and I'm very glad. But I understand that you didn't expect to inherit the estate." "No; it seemed impossible. I won't trouble you with family particulars, but two deaths have occurred in a very short time. The last owner was no older than I am and married, but his only child is a girl, and he was killed while hunting. Although he was my cousin, I've rarely seen him." He was silent again for some minutes, his mind busy with alluring visions. He had long struggled with poverty, and had wandered about the world engaging in reckless adventures, but he had inherited a love for the old home of his race; and now it was his. But this, while counting for much, was not the main thing. He had been strongly attracted by Evelyn Cliffe, but, recognizing his disadvantages, he had tried hard to hold in check the love for her which grew in spite of him. The obstacles that had bulked so large were now removed. He was free to win her if he could, and it was comforting to remember that in her urgent need she had sent for him. But he had work to finish first. "I suppose you mean to start home as soon as you can?" Walthew suggested. "No," Grahame answered quietly, "I'm not going yet. For one thing, we have taken Don Martin's money, and now that he has to meet a crisis we can't leave him in the lurch. Besides, one day at San Lucar, we promised some of the leaders of the movement that we'd see them through." It was a good reason. Grahame was not the man to do a shabby thing, but Walthew, remembering that Evelyn was with the rebels, thought his comrade had a stronger motive for staying. "Well," he agreed, "I guess that's so. Anyway, the game can't last much longer; they'll have to use our guns in the next few days." "Yes; and as we don't know what part we'll have in it, you'd better get some rest. I'll keep watch a while." Walthew was glad of the opportunity to sleep; and Grahame, moving back into the shadow as the sun got hot, sat still, with his mind busy and his eyes fixed upon the road. At noon Blanca came out of the house and stood looking down at Walthew with a compassionate gentleness that she did not try to hide. The half-healed cut showed plainly on his forehead, his brown face looked worn, and he lay in an attitude of deep weariness. "It is a pity to wake him, but we must start," she said, and indicated the scar. "I suppose you can guess that he has borne something, and he got that wound for you." "I'm not likely to forget it," Grahame answered quietly. "No," Blanca said with a curious smile. "You do not make many protestations, you men of the North, but one can trust you." She stooped and touched Walthew gently. "It is noon and we must go." Her voice was quiet, but Walthew seemed to know it in his sleep, for he sprang to his feet with a half-ashamed air. "I didn't mean to sleep so long," he said, and looked at Blanca anxiously. "Have you rested enough? Are you quite fit to travel?" Blanca smiled; and when Walthew brought up the mule and helped her to mount she noticed something new in his manner. Hitherto, it had been marked by a certain diffidence, but now this had gone. He was assiduously careful of her, but with a hint of proprietary right. Something had happened since she had last seen him to account for the change. She gave Grahame a searching glance, but his face was impassive. They set off, Walthew walking beside the mule, but it was to Grahame that the girl spoke as they moved slowly forward in the scorching heat. He thought he understood, and his eyes twinkled with amusement when she was not looking. Blanca suspected him, and she did not mean Walthew to take too much for granted. CHAPTER XXXII LOVE'S VISION It was late when Walthew led Blanca's mule through the rebel camp to the table under a tree where Don Martin sat writing. There was a half moon in the sky, and as they passed between the rows of motionless, dark figures stretched on the ground, here and there an upturned face caught the light and shone a livid white. In places a sentry's form was silhouetted, vague and black, against the sky, but except for this all was wrapped in puzzling shadow, and silence brooded over the camp. One of Don Martin's staff sat beside the table, smoking a cigarette, another lay asleep near by, but a small lamp burned steadily near the leader's hand, lighting up his grave face against the gloom. He put down his pen and waited when Walthew stopped the mule and helped the girl to dismount. "I have had the honor of escorting the señorita from Rio Frio, where with her help I got my partner out of the _carcel_," he said. "Yes," Don Martin returned in a quiet voice, "I have heard something of this. I am told that you met my daughter at the _hacienda_ Perez. Was it by accident?" Walthew, remembering Grahame's remarks on the subject, felt embarrassed, for the steadiness of Don Martin's glance was significant. "Certainly!" he answered. "I had never heard of the _hacienda_ before I reached it. For all that, I would not have kept away if I had known the señorita was there." "One must acknowledge your frankness," Don Martin remarked. "Well, what happened afterward?" Walthew looked at Blanca, but she seemed to be smiling as she unfolded her fan, and he began a brief account of their adventures. "And your comrade is with you?" asked Don Martin. "I was told of his escape, but you have been some time on the way. Our friends who lost you in Rio Frio arrived this morning." Blanca laughed. "I cannot walk like a peon," she explained. "But you came on a mule!" "We had gone some distance when Carson, the trader, lent it to us." Walthew had not mentioned their meeting with the President's messenger, and Don Martin looked surprised. "Carson!" he exclaimed. "If I did not believe Mr. Grahame was a man of honor, I should not know what to think." "Mr. Walthew also is a man of honor," Blanca retorted in a meaning tone. "But I have news which you must hear at once." Don Martin turned to Walthew. "You will give me a few minutes; then I will see you again." Taking this as a dismissal, Walthew went back to where Grahame was waiting and smoked a cigarette with him. Soon after he had finished it, a drowsy soldier beckoned him and he returned to Sarmiento. When he reached the table Blanca had gone. "Señor," he said, "I have a favor to ask; but the accident that I was thrown into Miss Sarmiento's company at the _hacienda_ and Rio Frio has nothing to do with it. You must understand that. I want your consent to my marriage to your daughter." "Ah!" said Don Martin. "You have learned that she is willing?" Walthew felt half guilty when he thought of the kiss beneath the window-sill, but he looked at Don Martin steadily. "I thought it better to follow your customs," he explained. "Blanca does not know I meant to ask you. But I want to say that my mind has been made up for some time. It was for her sake that I determined to stay on the coast and give you all the help I could." There was a gleam of amusement in Don Martin's eyes. "Then my daughter gained us a useful ally. But, so far, you have spoken for yourself. What about your parents? Blanca Sarmiento is not an American." Walthew hesitated for a moment. "They may feel some surprise, but I believe it will vanish when they have seen her; and I choose my wife to please myself. I think I have means enough to make my way without any help, though I haven't a great deal." "How much?" Sarmiento nodded when Walthew told him. "It is enough; you would be thought a rich man in this country. Still, I would prefer to have your father's consent. It is our custom that a marriage should be arranged with the approval of both families." "But you are a progressive and don't count much on customs. I understand that you mean to cut out all those that stop your people from going ahead." "It is true to some extent," Don Martin admitted with a smile. "For all that, one may believe in progress in the abstract, and yet hesitate about making risky experiments that touch one's own family. However, if Blanca is willing, I can trust her to you." "I'll try to deserve your confidence," Walthew answered, and added with a naïvely thoughtful air: "My people will come round; the only thing they'll insist on is that I enter the family business, and that's going to be easier than I thought." "Why did you refuse in the beginning?" "It's rather hard to explain. I wanted to get into touch with realities, to learn what I was good for and find my proper level." Sarmiento made a sign of comprehension. "And in searching for what you call realities, you have found yourself." Walthew recognized the truth of this. It was not that in facing danger and hardship he had gained steadiness and self-control, because he had never lacked courage, but he had acquired a clearer conception of essential things. He would no longer be content to accept thoughtlessly the conventional view. His comrade had taught him much by his coolness in time of strain and his stubborn tenacity when things went wrong. It was not for nothing that Grahame had hawk-like eyes: he had the gift of seeing what must be done. But, after all, it was from hardship itself that Walthew had learned most, and in the light of that knowledge he determined to go home. The work he was best fitted for was waiting in the smoky, industrial town; it was not the task he had longed for, but it was his, and he would be content now. Don Martin smiled. "You may try to persuade Blanca to go with you to your country, if you wish. I want a talk with your comrade now. Will you send him to me?" Walthew left him with a light heart, and shortly afterward Grahame joined Don Martin. "Señor," said the leader, "you have kept your agreement with us faithfully, and I do not know that we have any further claim, but I understand that you do not mean to leave us yet." "No," Grahame replied quietly; "I shall see you through." "Good! Another body of our friends is gathering at a village to which I will send you with a guide. They are well armed and determined. I offer you command." "Where is the señorita Cliffe?" Grahame wanted to know. "At a _hacienda_ two or three hours' ride back. She is in good hands, and at daybreak my daughter leaves to join her." Grahame was sensible of keen disappointment. "When do you wish me to start?" he asked. "As soon as possible; but you'd better take an hour's rest." "I'm ready now if you will give me my orders." When, a few minutes later, he rode away with the guide, Walthew and Blanca left the camp and followed a path that led through a field of rustling sugar-cane. "We must not go far," Blanca protested. "This is quite against my people's idea of what is correct." "It's a sign of the change you're going to make for me. You might have been something like a princess here, and you'll be the wife of a plain American citizen, instead." "I never wanted to be a princess," she said; "and certainly not a conspirator. All I really hoped for was one faithful subject." "You have one whose loyalty won't change. But you mustn't expect too much, because I'm giving up my adventurous career and turning business man. Men like Bolivar and the other fellow you wanted me to copy aren't born every day--and I'm not sure we'd appreciate them if they were." Blanca laughed. "You are a pessimist, but I will tell you a secret. It needs courage to be the wife of a great soldier and I am not brave enough." Her voice fell to a low, caressing note. "One's heart shrinks from sending the man one loves into danger." Walthew stopped in the path and faced the girl. She was smiling. The half-moon, now high overhead, shed its beams down in a weird light that lay over everything like a mantle of blue silver. All about them the tall cane whispered in the wind. Walthew opened his arms, and Blanca cuddled to him. "It is so wonderful!" he breathed, after the first long kiss. "So wonderful that you are really going back to the States with me!" "You are not going back the same," she smiled up at him; and he stooped and kissed the smile. "----You have seen the vision," she finished; "romance has touched you." "It was you who opened my eyes. Perhaps now they are dazzled; but we will never let the vision quite fade. Romance shall spread her bright wings above the home I'm going to build you on the river bluff----" Again he found her mouth, and drank deep. The silence was broken by a rattle of leather and a jingle of steel that startled them, and as they turned quickly and walked up the path a dark figure rose out of the gloom ahead and stood before them, sinister and threatening. When Walthew had answered the sentry's challenge, Blanca shivered. "I had forgotten for a few minutes," she said. "Rio Frio is not taken yet, and you must fight for us." "For two or three days, if all goes well. It can't be a long struggle. Rio Frio is bound to fall." Blanca clung closer to him. "I cannot keep you," she said; "but how I wish the days were over! There is nothing of the princess in me; I am only an anxious girl." CHAPTER XXXIII THE HERO OF RIO FRIO Day was breaking when Cliffe saw Rio Frio loom out above low-lying mist. There was no perceptible light in the sky, but the scattered clumps of trees were growing blacker and more distinct, and the town began to stand out against a dusky background. It had an unsubstantial look, as if it might suddenly fade away, and Cliffe felt that he was doing something fantastic and unreal as he watched the blurred forms of his companions move on. To some extent, want of sleep and weariness accounted for this, because he had marched all night, but the silence with which the rebels advanced helped the illusion. A number of them were barefooted and the raw-hide sandals of the others made no sound in the thick dust. Cliffe marched near the head of the straggling battalion, a cartridge-belt round his waist and a rifle on his shoulder. His light clothes were damp and stained with soil. His costly Panama hat hung, crumpled and shapeless, about his head, and he did not differ much in external appearance from the men around him. They were a picturesque, undisciplined band, but Cliffe knew that they meant business. He recognized that there was something humorous about his marching with them. He belonged to the orderly cities, where he had been treated as a man of importance, but now he was swayed by primitive impulses and had cast off the habits of civilization. The rebel leader had promised to make inquiries about Evelyn, but had learned nothing. Cliffe imagined that the man, having other things to think about, had not been very diligent. He held Gomez accountable for the distress he felt. The rogue had cheated him and stolen his daughter. Cliffe sternly determined that he should pay for it. Gomez, however, was in Rio Frio and, since he could not be reached by other means, Cliffe was ready to fight his way into the town. The curious thing was that instead of finding the prospect disagreeable he was conscious of a certain fierce satisfaction. The commander of the detachment had treated him well, but his limited knowledge of Castilian had made it necessary that he should take his place in the ranks. The leading files halted, and from their disjointed remarks Cliffe gathered that a picket of the enemy's had been surprised by the scouts. He had heard no shots, but he could imagine the dark-skinned men, many of whom had Indian blood in them, crawling silently through the long grass with unsheathed knives. It was not a pleasant picture; but the road was clear. The light was growing when they went on, moving faster. The need for haste was obvious. As they were not numerous, they must enter the town while darkness covered their approach, and they were late. Another detachment should have met them, but it had not arrived. On the whole, Cliffe did not think their chances good, but that did not daunt him, and he trudged on with the rest, the dust rolling like a fog about his head. After a while the advance split up into two streams of hurrying men, and, going with one body, Cliffe saw the flat-topped houses near ahead. Stumbling among small bushes, and gazing between the shoulders of the men in front, he made out a shadowy opening in the line of buildings. A few minutes later the clatter of sandals rose from slippery stones, there were blank walls about him, and he was in the town. It was hard to believe they had entered unopposed, without a shot being fired, but he supposed the guard had been surprised and overpowered by friends inside. The backs of the leading files obstructed his view, but now that they were moving down a narrow lane the air throbbed with the sound of their advance. Rifle slings rattled, feet fell with a rapid beat, and now and then an order broke through the jingle of steel. Then a shot rang out and the men began to run, two or three falling out here and there, with the intention, Cliffe supposed, of occupying friendly houses. A little later, the advance guard swung out into a wider street, and a group of men began tearing up the pavement; it had been loosened beforehand, and the stones came up easily. Another group were throwing furniture out of the houses. They worked frantically, though they were fired at, and Cliffe could hear the bullets splash upon the stones. For the most part, the men were wiry peons, some toiling half naked, but there were a number who looked like prosperous citizens. The light, however, was dim and they were hard to distinguish as they flitted to and fro with their loads or plied the shovel. A barricade was rising fast, but the alarm had spread. Detached shouts and a confused uproar rolled across the town, the call of bugles joined in, and the sharp clang of the rifles grew more frequent. Cliffe could see no smoke, but he imagined that the roofs farther on were occupied by the troops Gomez was no doubt hurrying into action. The attack had obviously been well timed and arranged with the coöperation of revolutionaries in the town, but while the rebels had gained an entrance, they seemed unable to follow up their success, and it remained to be seen if they could hold their ground until reënforcements arrived. Finding no opportunity for doing anything useful, Cliffe sat down on the pavement and lighted a cigarette. He did not feel the nervousness he had expected, but he was tired and hungry. It was four o'clock on the previous afternoon when he shared the officers' frugal dinner, and he had eaten nothing since. There was no use in speculating about what was likely to happen in the next few hours, but he meant to have a reckoning with Gomez if he came through alive. Then, as he watched the blurred figures swarming like ants about the barricade, he broke into a dry smile, for the situation had an ironically humorous side. He had thought himself a sober, business man; and now he was helping a horde of frenzied rebels to overthrow the government he had supported with large sums of money. This was a novelty in the way of finance. Moreover, it was strange that he should derive a quiet satisfaction from the touch of the rifle balanced across his knees. He was better used to the scatter-gun, and did not altogether understand the sights, but he was determined to shoot as well as he could. An opportunity was soon offered him. Some one gave an order, and after some pushing and jostling he squeezed himself between the legs of a table on the top of the barricade. A ragged desperado, who scowled furiously and used what seemed to be violently abusive language, had contested the position with him, and it struck Cliffe as remarkable that he should have taken so much trouble to secure a post where he might get shot. He was there, however, and thought he could make pretty good shooting up to a couple hundred yards. He had got comfortably settled, with his left elbow braced against a ledge to support the rifle, when a body of men in white uniform appeared at the other end of the street. An officer with sword drawn marched at their head, but they did not seem anxious to press forward, or to be moving in very regular order. The distances were uneven, and some of the men straggled toward the side of the street, where it was darker close to the walls. Cliffe sympathized with them, although he felt steadier than he had thought possible. A rifle flashed on a roof and others answered from the barricade, but only a thin streak of gray vapor that vanished almost immediately marked the firing. It looked as if the rebels had obtained good powder. After a few moments Cliffe heard a shrill humming close above his head, and there was a crash as a man behind him fell backward. Then he felt his rifle jump and jar his shoulder, though he was not otherwise conscious that he had fired. He must have pulled the trigger by instinct, but he did not try to ascertain the result of his shot. He had not come to that yet. There was a sharp patter on the front of the barricade and splinters sprang from the table legs. Some one near Cliffe cried out, and the patter went on. Raising his head cautiously, he saw that a number of soldiers were firing from the roofs, while the rest ran steadily up the street. They must be stopped. Dropping his chin upon the stock, he stiffened his arms and held his breath as he squeezed the trigger. After this, he was too busy to retain a clear impression of what happened. His rifle jumped and jarred until it got hot, his shoulder felt sore, and he found he must pull round his cartridge-belt because the nearer clips were empty. He did not know how the fight was going; the separate advancing figures he gazed at through the notch of the rear sight monopolized his attention, but there was thin smoke and dust about, and he could not see them well. It seemed curious that they had not reached the barricade, and he felt angry with them for keeping him in suspense. Then the firing gradually slackened and died away. Everything seemed strangely quiet, except that men were running back down the street in disorder. The rebels had held their ground; the attack had failed. After a few moments, he noticed that the sun shone down between the houses and it was getting hot. He felt thirsty, and the glare hurt his eyes, which smarted with the dust and acrid vapor that hung about the spot. All the soldiers, however, had not gone back; several lay in strange, slack attitudes near the front of the barricade, and a rebel who sprang down, perhaps with the object of securing fresh cartridges, suddenly dropped. The rest lay close and left the fallen alone. Then a tall priest in threadbare cassock and clumsy raw-hide shoes came out of a house and with the help of two or three others carried the victims inside. Cliffe heard somebody say that it was Father Agustin. Soon afterward a man near Cliffe gave him a cigarette, and he smoked it, although his mouth was dry and the tobacco had a bitter taste. The heat was getting worse and his head began to ache, but he was busy wondering what would happen next. Gomez must have more troops than the handful he had sent; the rebels could not hold the position against a strong force, and their supports had not arrived. He hoped Gomez had no machine-guns. Suddenly the attack recommenced. There were more soldiers, and a rattle of firing that broke out farther up the street suggested that the revolutionaries were being attacked in flank. Some of the men seemed to hesitate and began to look behind them, but they got steadier when an officer called out; and Cliffe understood that a detachment had been sent back to protect their rear. In the meantime, the soldiers in front were coming on. They were slouching, untidy fellows, but their brown faces were savage, and Cliffe knew they meant to get in. It was, however, his business to keep them out, and he fired as fast as he could load. When the barrel got so hot that he could hardly touch it, he paused to cool the open breach and anxiously looked about. The street seemed filled with white figures, but they had opened out, and in the gaps he could see the dazzling stones over which the hot air danced. There was a gleam of bright steel in the sun, and he noticed that the walls were scarred. Raw spots marked where the chipped whitewash had fallen off and the adobe showed through. But there was no time to observe these things; the foremost men were dangerously near. Finding he could now hold his rifle, Cliffe snapped in a cartridge and closed the breach. Then he spent a few tense minutes. The enemy reached the foot of the barrier and climbed up. Rifles flashed from roofs and windows, streaks of flame rippled along the top of the barricade, and one or two of the defenders, perhaps stung by smarting wounds or maddened by excitement, leaped down with clubbed weapons and disappeared. Cliffe kept his place between the table legs and pulled round his cartridge-belt. The tension could not last. Flesh and blood could not stand it. He understood why the men had leaped down, courting death. He hoped his own nerve was normally good, but if the struggle was not decided soon, he could not answer for himself. He must escape from the strain somehow, if he had to charge the attackers with an empty rifle. There was a sudden change. The climbing white figures seemed to melt away, and though the rifles still clanged from roofs and windows the firing slackened along the barricade. The troops were going back, running not retiring, and trying to break into houses from which men with rude weapons thrust them out. It looked as if the inhabitants were all insurgents now. Soon the priest reappeared, and Cliffe left his post and sat down where there was a strip of shade. He had helped to beat off two attacks, but he was doubtful about the third. While he rested, a fat, swarthy woman brought him a cup of _caña_, and he was surprised when he saw how much of the fiery spirit he had drunk. The woman smiled, and went on to the next man with the cup. Cliffe wondered how long he had been fighting, for he found his watch had stopped; but the sun was not high yet. After all, the reënforcements he had begun to despair of might arrive in time. While he comforted himself with this reflection, some of the other men dug a trench behind the barricade, and citizens, loading the earth into baskets, carried it off. Cliffe did not know what this was for, but he supposed the baskets would be used to strengthen defenses somewhere else. It was a long time since he had handled a spade, but if they needed his help he could dig. Pulling himself up with an effort, he took a tool from a breathless man and set to work. After a time a citizen appeared with a bundle of papers and a white flag. An officer signed him to come forward, and taking the papers from him threw them among the men. Cliffe got one, and finding a man who spoke a little English, asked him what the notice meant. The man said it was a proclamation by Gomez, stating that, as the people had serious ground for dissatisfaction with the President's administration and were determined to end it, he must accede to the wish of the leading citizens, who had urged him to form a provisional government. He promised a general amnesty for past offenses and the prompt redress of all grievances. "So the dog turns on his master!" the translator remarked with bitter scorn. "Altiera was a tyrant, but this rogue would be worse!" The insurgent leader, standing on top of the barricade, read the proclamation in a loud, ironical voice, and when he tore it up with a dramatic gesture, the roar of mocking laughter that rang down the street showed what all who heard it thought of Gomez's claim. Then people ran out of the houses and pelted the messenger with stones as he hurriedly retired, until a few shots from a roof cleared the street. "The dog has bought the soldiers! Altiera should have been his own paymaster," the man whom Cliffe had questioned remarked. For the next half hour everything was quiet, but Cliffe felt uneasy. One could not tell what Gomez was doing, but it was plain that he must make a resolute attempt to crush the rebels before he turned his forces against the President. He must have felt reasonably sure of his ground when he made his last daring move. As his terms had been scornfully rejected, the country would soon be devastated by three hostile factions, which would make Evelyn's danger very grave. Cliffe forgot that he was thirsty and there was a pain in his left side brought on by want of food. If help did not come by sunset, his friends would be overwhelmed by numbers when it was too dark to shoot straight. Then he saw that they were threatened by a more urgent danger. The end of the street opened into the plaza, which had been deserted. The houses on its opposite side were shuttered, and the sun burned down into the dazzling square, except for a strip of shadow beneath one white wall. Now, however, a body of men appeared, carrying something across the uneven pavement. When they stopped and began to put the separate parts together, Cliffe saw that it was a machine-gun. He wondered why Gomez had not made use of it earlier, unless, perhaps, it had formed the main defense of the _presidio_. The barrel, thickened by its water jacket, gleamed ominously in front of the steel shield as the men got the gun into position; but it was unthinkable that they should be left to do so undisturbed, and Cliffe scrambled back to his post when an order rang out. He felt that he hated the venomous machine, which had perhaps been bought with his money. Steadying his rifle, he fired as fast as he could. Though the smoke was thin, it hung about the rebels' position, making it hard to see, and Cliffe feared their shots were going wide, but after a few moments the barricade trembled, and there was a curious, whirring sound above his head. Dust and splinters of stone were flung up, and large flakes fell from the neighboring walls. All this seemed to happen at once, before he was conscious of a measured thudding like a big hammer falling very fast which drowned the reports of the rifles and dominated everything. The flimsy defenses were pierced. Gaps began to open here and there, and men dropped back into the trench. Then a fierce yell rang across the city, and although Cliffe heard no order the rebel fire slackened. Peering through the vapor, he saw the soldiers were frantically dragging the gun into a new position; the shield no longer hid the men at the breach, but Cliffe did not shoot. He felt paralyzed as he watched to see what was happening. The hammering began again, and flashes that looked pale in the sunshine leapt about the muzzle of the gun. Soldiers lying down behind it were using their rifles, and another detachment hurriedly came up. Cliffe's view of the plaza was limited. He could not see one side of it, where an attack was evidently being made, but presently a mob of running men swept into sight. A few dropped upon the pavement and began to fire, but the main body ran straight for the gun, and he noticed with a thrill that they were led by a light-skinned man. Some of them fell, but the rest went on, and the rebels behind the barricade began to shout. The eagerly expected reënforcements had arrived. The man with the fair skin was the first to reach the gun. Cliffe saw his pistol flash; but the struggle did not last. Gomez's men fell back and the others swung round the gun. Then, as flame blazed from its muzzle, a triumphant yell rose from the barricade, and Cliffe, springing up on the table, waved his hat and shouted with the rest. Grahame, with his handful of peons, had saved the day. In a few seconds Cliffe felt dizzy. His head was unsteady, his knees seemed weak, and as he tried to get down he lost his balance. Falling from the top of the barricade, he plunged heavily into the trench, where his senses left him. It was some time afterward when he came to himself, and, looking round in a half-dazed manner, wondered where he was. The big room in which he lay was shadowy and cool, and he did not feel much the worse except that his head ached and his eyes were dazzled. A tumult seemed to be going on outside, but the room was quiet, and a girl in a white dress sat near by. He thought he ought to know her, although he could not see her face until she heard him move and came toward him. "Evelyn!" he gasped. "Yes," she answered, smiling. "How do you feel?" "Dizzy," said Cliffe. "But this is Rio Frio, isn't it? How did you get here?" "You mustn't talk," she said firmly, and he saw that she had a glass in her hand. "Drink this and go to sleep again." Cliffe did not mean to go to sleep, although he drained the glass because he was thirsty. There was much he wanted to know; but he found it difficult to talk, and Evelyn would not answer. After a futile effort to shake it off, he succumbed to the drowsiness that was overpowering him. CHAPTER XXXIV THE COMING DAWN It was getting dark when Cliffe wakened. The windows were open, and a flickering red glow shone into the room. Footsteps and voices rose from the street below, as if the city were astir, but this did not interest him much. Evelyn was standing near, and a man whom he could not see well sat in the shadow. "You must have something to tell me," Cliffe said to the girl. "We seem to be in safe quarters; but how did we get here?" Evelyn knelt down beside his couch and put her hand on his hot forehead. It felt pleasantly cool, and Cliffe lay still with a sigh of satisfaction. "Father Agustin brought you in here several hours ago," she explained; "but that was before I arrived. I was worried, but the doctor says we needn't be alarmed." "That's a sure thing," Cliffe replied. "I'm feeling pretty well, but thirsty. What's the matter with me, anyhow?" "Exhaustion, and perhaps slight sunstroke and shock. You must have had a bad fall, because you are bruised." "I certainly fell, right down to the bottom of the trench; but that's not what I want to talk about. It is a big relief to see you safe, but where have you been?" "It will take some time to tell." Evelyn bent closer over him as she began an account of her adventures in a low voice, and Cliffe dully imagined that she did not want the other occupant of the room to hear. The fellow was no doubt a doctor. "I had no difficulty after I reached Don Martin's camp," she finished. "His daughter, the pretty girl we saw at the International, was with him most of the time, and afterward her duenna treated me very well. When the rebels advanced on Rio Frio, Don Martin thought it safer for Blanca and me to go with them, but they left us outside with a guard until the town was taken. Then I was told that a priest had picked you up badly hurt and they brought me here. The house belongs to a merchant who took some part in the revolution. You can imagine how anxious I was until Father Agustin sent a doctor." "I hate to think of the danger you were in," he said; "though you seem to have shown surprising grit." Evelyn laughed and patted his shoulder. "Then I must have inherited it. I'm told that you and the others held the barricade stubbornly for two hours. Don Martin admits that he might not have taken Rio Frio if it hadn't been for the stand you made." "He wouldn't have taken it, and there'd have been very few of us left, if Grahame hadn't rushed the gun. But I've something else to thank him for. It seems from your story that he got himself into trouble by going to your help." "Yes," said Evelyn quietly. "You can thank him now, if you like." She beckoned the man across the room. "Come and join us, dear." The red glow from outside fell on her face as Cliffe gave her a surprised look, and he noticed that she blushed. Then he held out his hand to Grahame, because he thought he understood. "It seems I owe you a good deal," he said. "Well," Grahame returned, smiling, "I suppose my intentions were good, but I didn't accomplish much, and my partner had to run a serious risk to get me out of trouble." "The way you rushed that gun was great." "It might have been better if we had taken the fellows in the rear, but we were told that they were making things hot for you, and there was no time to get round." "When we met in Havana I'd no idea that you were up against me," Cliffe said with a laugh. "Curious, isn't it, that we should make friends while I was backing the President and you the rebels!" He turned to the window. "What's the fire outside?" "The _presidio_ burning. Gomez used it as headquarters and made his last stand there." "Ah! Then your friends have finished him?" Grahame nodded. "A rather grim business. He had much to answer for, but although half his troops deserted, he made a gallant end." "Where's your partner, and what are the rebel bosses doing now?" "Walthew was patrolling the streets with a company of brigands when I last saw him; he promised to meet me here as soon as he was relieved. The others are busy forming a provisional government. Don Martin said he'd call on you soon." "I owe him some thanks, but I mean to cut my connection with this country's affairs. No more political speculations; I've had enough." Grahame laughed. "I can imagine that. These people are an unstable lot, and it's not certain that Don Martin, who's much the best man they have, will be the next president.... But we were told to keep you quiet, and Evelyn is tired. She had to follow the rebels' march all night, but wouldn't rest until she was satisfied about you." "How long have you called her Evelyn?" Cliffe demanded, looking hard at him. "He will tell you about that to-morrow," Evelyn answered with a blush. "You must lie still and go to sleep again if you can, but if you give trouble, we'll leave the señora Rocas, who is deaf and very clumsy, to look after you." When Cliffe fell asleep, Evelyn and Grahame went out on to the balcony and watched the moonlight creep across the town. There were lights in the cafés, and excited citizens gathered in the streets. Now and then a few angry cries broke out, but for the most part the scraps of news that spread among the crowd were received with exultant cheers. The next day Cliffe was much better, and after breakfast Grahame found him sitting in the shady _patio_. He listened to the younger man quietly, and then held out his hand. "I'm glad I can agree," he said. "I'll miss her, but I feel that she'll be safe with you." Ten minutes later Grahame met Walthew, who looked disturbed and indignant. "What are they doing at the council?" Grahame asked. "Fooling!" said Walthew fiercely. "Seems to me they're mad! Last night they were solid for Don Martin, but now a faction that means to make Castillo president is gaining ground." "A number of them must know he gave their plans away to save his skin." "They know, all right. One fellow urged that Castillo did so as a matter of policy, because he meant to force Altiera's hand. Guess the crowd who want him would believe anything that suited them!" "Well," Grahame said thoughtfully, "I've had my doubts whether they'd get on with Don Martin. His code of political morality's rather high; they want a man who won't expect too much. I dare say they feel that after turning out Altiera they're entitled to a few opportunities for graft themselves and for finding their friends official jobs. I'm sorry for Sarmiento, though. What does he say?" "Haven't seen him this morning. Father Agustin believes he'll respect the wish of the majority, although the fellows who did the fighting are all on his side." Grahame went to look for Evelyn, and it was noon when Walthew met him again. "After a glorious row, they've chosen Castillo--and I wish them joy of him!" he said. "Don Martin withdraws his claim, and wants to leave to-morrow. He's going to live in Cuba, and if Cliffe's fit to travel, we may as well all clear out. I'm sick of this place. Anyway, I'd like to take Blanca and her father across in the _Enchantress_." "There will be no difficulty about that. I think we can sell the boat at New Orleans. Have you made any plans?" "Sure. I'm going to marry Blanca at Havana and then take her home. She seemed to think she ought to stay with her father, but Don Martin convinced her this wasn't necessary. Guess it hurt him, but he told me the girl had had a pretty rough time wandering about in exile, and he means to give her a chance of a brighter life." "Why did you fix on Havana for the wedding?" Walthew laughed. "My people will see there is no use in kicking when I take my wife home; and they've only to give Blanca a fair show to get fond of her. Then there are a number of Americans in Havana, and I can get the thing properly registered and fixed up by our consul. Don Martin agreed." He paused a minute and added: "Don Martin's going to address the citizens in the plaza at six o'clock, and I think he'd like you and Cliffe to be there." Grahame promised to ask Cliffe; and soon after dinner he found that a place had been kept for his party on the broad steps of the church of San Sebastian. The air was cooling and dusk was near, but the light had not gone, and the square was packed with an expectant crowd, except where a space was kept. The lower steps were occupied by officials and leading citizens, but the two highest were empty. For a few minutes there was deep silence, and nobody moved in the crowded plaza. Then a murmur rose as the leather curtain across the door was drawn back and Don Martin came out, with three priests in their robes behind him. He stood bareheaded on the second step, very straight and soldierlike, but plainly dressed in white, with no sash or badge of office; the priests standing above, with Father Agustin's tall figure in the middle. As he turned his face toward the crowd a great shout went up: "_Viva Sarmiento! Viva el libertador!_" Don Martin bowed, but did not speak; and a bugle call rang across the square and was followed by a measured tramp of feet. Men marching in loose fours swung out of a shadowy opening and advanced upon the church. A red sash round the waist with the ends left hanging loose was the only uniform they wore, and Grahame felt a curious, emotional quiver as he recognized the detachment he had led. He understood that the best of them had been enrolled for a time as a national guard. Their brown faces were impassive as they filled the open space, but after they swung into double line, instead of the conventional salute, they waved their ragged hats, and a roar broke out: "_Viva Sarmiento! Viva el maestro!_" Then some of the group looked anxious, and there was a stir in the crowd as an officer approached the steps. He had his pistol drawn, but he lowered it, and stood opposite Don Martin with his hat off. "Your comrades salute you, señor," he said. "You have led us to victory, and if you have fresh orders for us, we obey you still." He spoke clearly, in a meaning tone, and there was an applauding murmur from the crowd that gathered strength and filled the square. Everybody seemed to feel a sudden tension, and Grahame imagined that the superseded leader had only to give the signal for a counter revolution to begin; but he saw that Father Agustin wore a quiet smile. Don Martin raised his hand. "I thank you, and I know your loyalty; but it belongs to your country, of which I am a private citizen. I can give no orders, but I ask you to serve the new government as well as you have served me." The officer went back to his men with a moody air, and Don Martin turned to the crowd. "In a national crisis, it is a citizen's duty to devote himself to his country's service, and this I have done; but it is a duty that carries no claim for reward. Many of you have helped me with effort and money, and some have given their lives; but the rough work is done and the crisis is past. Now that I am no longer needed, I lay down my authority, and it is better in several ways that I should go. But you who remain have still much to do. It is harder to build than to pull down, and your task is to establish justice, freedom, and prosperity. The best foundation is obedience to the new leader the nation has chosen." He moved back into the gloom, for darkness was gathering fast, and after a few words of grave advice Father Agustin blessed the people. Then the national guard marched away and the crowd broke up; but Grahame and his party waited, with Don Martin standing behind them by the door of the church. A smell of incense floated out, and dim lights twinkled in the building. No one spoke until the measured tramp of feet had died away. Then Grahame put his hand on Don Martin's arm. "The sacrifice you have made to-night must have cost you something," he said in a sympathetic voice. "It is seldom easy to do what is best," Don Martin answered, smiling sadly. "And now, with your permission, I should like to be alone. We will start for Valverde early to-morrow." They left him in the deserted plaza. "What a man that is!" Cliffe remarked. "If they were all like him in Congress, there'd be a big improvement in our politics--and I guess you'd have some use for a few of his kind at Westminster." "That's true," Grahame agreed. "I can't say that such men are scarce, but as a rule they don't come to the top. They do what's demanded of them, and then quietly fall out of sight." * * * * * The next morning they set out for the coast. The _Enchantress_ was in the roadstead when they reached the port, and they went straight on board. Macallister met them at the gangway, and there was deep feeling in his face as he shook hands with his comrades; but a few moments later he surveyed the group with a grin. Walthew had helped Evelyn on board, and Blanca stood near Grahame. "I'm thinking ye're no' sorted right," he said; and when Evelyn blushed he resumed with a chuckle: "Ye need no' tell me; I kenned what would happen, and I wish ye all happiness." He turned with a flourish to Don Martin. "We'd ha' dressed the ship for ye, señor, only our flags are a bit ragged, and I couldna' find the one ye have served so weel." "Thank you," said Don Martin. "We hope our flag will be better known before long." Macallister hurried below to raise steam, but it was some time before they got a working pressure, and dusk was falling when the windlass hauled in the rattling cable and Grahame rang the telegraph. The propeller churned the phosphorescent sea, the _Enchantress_ forged ahead, and the white town began to fade into the haze astern. Don Martin leaned upon the taffrail, watching the dim littoral, until it melted from his sight and only the black cordillera in the background cut against the sky. Then he joined the group about the deck-house and lighted a cigarette. "Another act finished and the curtain dropped, but one looks forward to the next with confidence," he said. "It might have opened better if you had kept the leading part," Grahame replied, and added meaningly: "You could have kept it." "That is possible," Don Martin agreed. "But it might not have been wise. I fought for peace, and I was satisfied when it was secured." "Still, I don't see why you left," Cliffe interposed. "Is Castillo strong enough to rule your people?" "We must give him an opportunity; if he has some failings, his intentions are good. No rule is free from faults, and when it is autocratic a possible claimant for the chief post is a danger to the State. All who love change and turmoil fix their hopes on him." "Do you mean to live in Cuba?" "Yes. I have some skill in organization and a little money left, and friends wish me to help in the development of a new sugar estate. It is not very far from Valverde, and one hears what is going on." Don Martin paused and spread out his hands. "If all goes well, I shall grow sugar, but if it happens that my country needs me I will go back again." Walthew changed the subject, and presently Evelyn and Grahame strolled forward to the bow. There was moonlight on the water, and the _Enchantress_ steamed smoothly up the glittering track while the foam that curled about her stern shone with phosphorescent flame. "I wonder where that path is leading us?" Evelyn said. "Toward the dawn," Grahame answered. "There's glamour in moonlight and mystery in the dark, but we're moving on to meet the sunshine." THE END Transcriber's Note: The following typographical errors present in the original edition have been corrected. In Chapter VII, "creeeping past invisible dangers" was changed to "creeping past invisible dangers". In Chapter XV, "ouside this there was only a dim glimmer of foam" was changed to "outside this there was only a dim glimmer of foam". Hyphenation of the words "deckhouse", "deckload", "rawhide", and "sternsheets", and the use of an accent in the word "Bolivar", was inconsistent in the original text. 
62377	----	ALCATRAZ OF THE STARWAYS By ALBERT dePINA and HENRY HASSE Venus was a world enslaved. And then, like an avenging angel, fanning the flames of raging revolt, came a warrior-princess in whose mind lay dread knowledge--the knowledge of a weapon so terrible it had been used but once in the history of the universe. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories May 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] "Purple!" Mark Denning almost sobbed. "A purple Josmian!" Forgetting the sweat in his eyes and the insufferable heat about him, his clutching hand held up the mud-dripping globe the size of a baseball, iridescent in the Venusian night. The phosphorescent glow that bathed the endless swamp in ghastly green, struck myriad shimmering rainbows from the dark sphere. "Two more of those and you're free, lower species!" It was an ironic voice, with the resonant sweetness of a cello in its depths, that issued from the haze nearby. Frantically Mark reached down into the tepid mud, where he had felt the swaying stems of Josmian lilies whip about his knees. Another globe met his hand. He tugged and twisted until it tore from the stem, but when he raised it to the surface, it was white. Immediately it began to shrink. It would continue until it became the size of a small marble, when it would either rot, as the majority did, or begin to crystallize into a priceless Venusian pearl. But that happened only with one in ten thousand. It was different with the purple ones, they never failed to crystallize into a violet globe of unearthly beauty and incalculable value. Less than a hundred of the purple had ever been found. They were so rare that any prisoner who harvested three, was granted freedom. "Pretty!" the cello voice taunted, behind Mark. "In a few hours it will be rotting and stinking to high heaven!" "Cut it, Aladdo!" Mark growled. He tossed the white Josmian into the basket he pushed before him across the mud; the purple one he placed carefully in his trouser pocket. He pushed on, searching the pungent-smelling mud that came up to his thighs. Suddenly the warm ooze rose to his waist and crept inexorably higher. For an instant, Mark clawed at the mud. It was surging up to his armpits now, as he floundered in the tenacious sink hole. He shook his head to get the sweat out of his eyes and the numbness from his brain. He stopped thrashing about, for he knew that was futile. He threw back his head and gave a shout in which was more than a note of sheer terror. [Illustration: _Mark clawed at the mud surging up to his armpits._] At least a dozen men were moving near him, waist deep in the Venusian mud. At his cry, they stopped and stared at him dully, fatalistically. They could easily have formed a chain and pulled him out, but none moved. They'd seen too many repetitions of this tragedy to care anymore. It happened every day; a new man, a little careless, caught in one of the deadly sink holes ... it happened even to the veterans of this Venusian prison camp, sometimes deliberately, as they became weary of a hopeless existence. The mud was almost to Mark's chin now; only his forearms and his blond head were visible. Hatred came into his eyes as he glared at the men about him, most of them Earthmen like himself, who would not help him. Again he struggled, tried to hoist himself upward. "Don't struggle, you fool!" came the resonant voice from behind him. "Be still; every movement helps to sink you!" Then, in an undertone, "No human was ever able to think clearly, anyway." Mark smiled despite his predicament, then he urged: "Hurry Aladdo--hurry!" * * * * * Over the expanse of hellish, green-lit muck, a tiny figure inched toward Mark. Scarcely five feet in height, Aladdo's arms and legs were now outspread, to distribute his weight over as much area as possible. The rescuing figure was like an imp from hades, clad as it was in a tight-fitting garment of metallic blue, which even the clinging mud failed to dull; while membraneous wings of a lighter hue began at its wrists, joined to the entire under-arm and the sides of its body all the way to its feet, much as the wings of a bat. Swiftly it crawled and wriggled toward the Earthman, and without a word grasped him with both tiny hands by the arms. It braced itself on its wings, and heaved. A few inches of Mark Denning emerged from the mud with a sucking sound. Again Aladdo made a prodigious effort, and again the Earthman came up from the mud a few more inches. The winged figure held him there, while it gasped for breath. "Now, spread your arms on the mud and stiffen your neck, sub-species!" The winged one laughed. Swiftly it cupped its seemingly fragile hands under Mark's chin, and slowly but surely began to pull him back and out. Most of an hour went by before the Earthman's superb torso had emerged and was able to help the rescuer. At last he was out of the sink hole, panting, almost exhausted and half nude. He still found strength to feel at his trouser pocket, and was gratified to find his purple Josmian still there. It was now about half its original size, and soon would cease its shrinkage and begin to crystallize. Mark gazed into the oval face, panting next to his. The heavily fringed eyes were closed as it breathed in labored gasps, and the slender, fragile form shook now and then with nervous spasms. Mark never ceased to wonder at the beauty of the Venusians, nor at their absolute and maddening conviction that theirs was the only true intelligence in the Universe. Now to these qualities Mark added that of indomitable courage, as he gazed at Aladdo and marvelled. "Well, Aladdo, thanks seems sort of a stupid word in a case like this; I owe you my life. I don't know how I'll ever repay the debt...." Mark's eyes roved over the weird scene, taking in the soulless, hopeless hulks that had once been men. And it suddenly occurred to him that he'd had enough of this hellish corner of Venus; he had been here two months and already he was unable to think clearly, he was becoming identified with the living death of the Venusian Prison Swamp. His mission apparently had failed. What he had come to learn, remained a secret, and he was slowly becoming like these shells of men who prowled the ocean of mud, eventually to disappear beneath it. "No need to thank me, middle order, I would have missed our discussions had you gone." The Venusian grinned impishly. "What? I've been promoted! You must be ill, to call me anything above a 'lower order' or a 'sub-species'!" Mark smiled too, but seriously wondered what crime had condemned Aladdo to a prison reserved only for the most hardened and hopeless criminals, or for political prisoners whose existence was a threat to the Tri-Planetary League. "At times, you're almost intelligent," the Venusian replied placidly. "Any one of these other men would have struggled had they been in your place, and I would have been helpless." "Why didn't you use _your_ brain," Mark couldn't resist prodding the other, "and by flying above me, get to me quicker, instead of crawling all that distance?" The winged figure laughed mirthlessly, and for an answer held up its arms. The azure membranes that were its wings, hung in limp folds. "Useless, you see," he said quietly. "The tendons have been cut. Otherwise I could fly up and out of this swamp, despite its five hundred mile width." * * * * * Mark could find no words to say. Since being assigned at his own request to this last grim haven of the damned, by the Tri-Planetary Prison Bureau, on a special mission, there had been moments when the horror of it all had made him doubt the wisdom of maintaining such a ghastly place. He knew, of course, the tremendous deterrent influence its existence exerted, besides the important revenue derived from Venusian pearls; still it all seemed too inhuman. "You don't seem criminal, Earthman!" the cello-like voice introduced on Mark's thoughts. "I fail to catch the typical vibrations of the killers and ravagers. Your crime ... was it political?" "Why, yes!" Mark assented hurriedly. It wouldn't do for this Venusian to suspect he was an operative. "To put it briefly, I am classified as too individualistic for the new order of 'controlled endeavor'. Also typed as irreconcilable--and you know what _that_ means!" "Perfectly!" The enigmatic smile hovering on the Venusian's lips faded slowly. "I, too, am a 'political'. My father was Bedrim, the Liberator. All we of Venus asked was real independence instead of the mock freedom your Earth grants us; in reality we are a vassal state with no voice but Earth's." "Bedrim!" Mark exclaimed, aghast. For more than a decade that name had made history, engulfing three planets in a suicidal struggle that had ended in a stalemate. Bedrim was dead now, Mark knew; but in Venus and even on Mars, the name was a glorious legend. It was only with the greatest effort and vigilance that Earth was able to enforce the peace. "So _this_ is what became of you!" Mark said slowly, softly. "The three worlds do not know, they still wonder--" Then he caught himself and bit his lip. "Yes," Aladdo murmured bitterly. "The worlds do not know. I was to be given amnesty, I was so young; but your inner Council decided that as long as I lived I would be a rallying point for irreconcilables of Venus, and so I was hunted from planet to planet until ... well, here I am on my own world, but as far away from my people as if I were on Betelgeuse. Here I do not live." "But surely there must be some way of convincing the Council that you're harmless! And if that fails, well ... of getting you out of here!" "Out of Paradim?" Aladdo's smile had all the despairing bitterness of a soul damned for all eternity; all the tears and the anguish and the wracking sorrow of the condemned since the world began seemed to be frozen for an instant in that smile. "Look about you, Earthman!" It was true. Mark had to acknowledge the psychological genius who had devised the Venusian Prison System. For five hundred miles the swamp Paradim extended in either direction, impassable, pitted with sink holes into which a man would disappear without trace. And beyond were the impenetrable jungles, alive with lurking carnivora, lurking monsters of the night, red in tooth and claw. Only on the opposite hemisphere were the two larger and hospital continents of Venus. Here, on this tiny continent, the prison ship came once a month, to hover over the tiny islet in the middle of the swamp, the only spot of firm ground for untold miles. Here it dropped supplies and food, and occasionally picked up the little heaps of fabulous Venusian pearls. There were no guards and none were needed, for at night when the awful humidity increased, the men worked or died. With night came the dreaded fog, lurid in the ghostly illumination of the _igniis fatui_, the phosphorescent radiance of this vast graveyard. And the idle died. Decomposition of the blood set in; essential salts within their bodies were dissolved, cellular activity ceased, and their bodies bloated. Not many, however, were idle. Escape? For years it had been thought a virtual impossibility. The very thought would have brought smiles to the grim faces of that august body, the Tri-Planetary Bureau of Prisons. And yet--a notorious killer who had been sent to this swamp only a year ago, had recently been found dead--out in space! * * * * * A patrol ship had found the body floating a few thousand miles off Callisto, an atom-blast hole drilled neatly through the forehead. There was not the slightest doubt that this was the same man. How had this criminal been able to escape the swamp and travel to Callisto, millions of miles away? It was a mystery and above all, a challenge. Apparently the Venus Prison had ceased to be impregnable. And that was why Mark Denning, the Prison Bureau's leading investigator, was here. "Guard your pearl, middle species," Aladdo's voice was ironic once more. "Escape, and with it you may buy a pardon!" Without a backward glance, the Venusian moved on with nightmare slowness through the swirling mists, pushing his basket into which the Josmian globes were loaded. Escape, Mark thought, following the Venusian. He did not need to escape, he could signal the prison ship to pick him up the next time it arrived. He wondered if he should. He had been here two months, and they were an eternity that dwarfed any concept of hell. But he hadn't any clue to the mystery of the escaping convicts, and he could hardly return with a confession of failure. He looked ahead through the mists, at the slender body of Aladdo in its tight-fitting sheath of metallic blue. "I _would_ miss Aladdo," Mark whispered to himself; "and if he can stand it here, I should be able to!" "What are you mumbling about to yourself?" Aladdo's mocking voice came back to him. "That lowers you from the middle species to the sub species again." He held up a Josmian globe against the greenish swamp glow. "White," he said contemptuously and threw it into the basket. Pushing through the muck with his tremendous strength, Mark cut the distance that separated them. "You may have my purple one, Aladdo. I will not need it, and perhaps you ... with it you might...." "If I were to gather a hundred purple ones, I could not buy my release." The Venusian was staring at Mark peculiarly, as if wondering why he should have made that offer. "Do you suppose, Earthman, any of the other men saw you find it? They would kill you for it--cheerfully." "No, I think not; no one saw me bring it up but you." "Then guard it." Aladdo eyed Mark's powerful frame critically. "Guard it with your life, for you may have to fight for it soon." "Telepathy! You've caught someone's thought vibrations?" Mark asked in a whisper. He well knew that telepathy, although not commonly used, was an established fact among the Venusians. But Aladdo's long lashes rested against pallid cheeks, veiling eyes that were abrim with something Mark could not understand. "No," the winged one said at last, "it wasn't a thought vibration--not that clear--perhaps a vibration of evil! Be alert, Earthman. I can say no more." "All right, thanks, Aladdo." But inwardly Mark cursed the inherent Venusian mania for ultra-reserve, for making a mystery of even the most commonplace affairs. "Let's head for the island, it's almost dawn." Above, the cloud-cap was prismatic with color as the sun tried feebly to penetrate the grayness and then gave up the attempt, as if it had tried many times before and failed. Slowly the vast swamp's contours came into view, with their small island a faint green line against the horizon's rim. And as the grayish dawn light increased, suffusing the grim morass, Mark and Aladdo made their slow way toward it. II "Up you go!" Mark's long muscles corded as he heaved and Aladdo's body left the mud with a sucking sound, to sprawl on the solid ground of the island. Presently the Earthman joined him, and for a few seconds they rested silently. All around them the vegetation surged, lush and matted, inextricably tangled with parasitic vines. Whereas the expanse of swamp was bare of the myriad growths of Venus, for some unknown chemical reason, the island itself was riotous with them. It was as if every inch of _terra firma_ were precious. The humid air was hot and stagnant, heavy with the overpowering fragrance of flowers. Even after two months of conditioning, Mark had difficulty in breathing, as the odors of this alien world increased as the temperature rose. "Arrgh, what a world!" Mark said disgustedly, as he rose to his feet. "I'm going to bathe, before the gang arrives. You'd better come too." Together they went up the vine-entangled path toward the barracks, and, rounding a corner of the building, followed another path to where a small spring gushed from an elevation; it fell in a sparkling shower and then meandered a few feet to lose itself in the swamp. Aladdo, as usual, merely let the water flow over the metallic suit that sheathed the slender body. By the time they had finished bathing, the rest of the convicts began to emerge from radiating paths, to dump their swamp pearls onto the growing heap by the side of their barracks. Some of the men threw themselves on the ground, exhausted in minds and bodies, and were almost instantly asleep. A few sat against the barracks wall and chewed the deadly _tsith_ stems, their eyes vacant, their faces gray. _Tsith_ was awful stuff, even if it did banish pain. Mark knew that these men wouldn't last long, but he wondered if perhaps they weren't the wiser ones after all! Returning from his bath to the barracks, Mark found that Aladdo had disappeared. He entered, and donned a thin rubberoid garment from among his meager store of personal belongings. It resembled one of the ancient woolen suits that Earthmen had used against the cold many centuries before; but there was a great difference. Mark's garment was impervious to cold or heat, highly flexible, yet the interlining of allurium mesh could intercept anything short of a ray blast. When Mark emerged, he found Aladdo talking in very low tones, with a tall, Martian-Venusian half-breed. This man was fantastic. He had the slenderness of the Venusians, and the finely chiseled features, but his eyes were Martian--deep purple and immense, far too large for the face. The breadth of shoulder and barrel chest was Martian too, ludicrous in comparison with the wasp waist and slender thighs. Mark had seen this half-breed about the swamp before, and wondered who he was. Now Aladdo, glancing up, called to him. Mark walked over to them. "This is Luhor, Earthman," the Venusian crossed both hands at the wrists in the immemorial Venusian gesture indicating that a friend was being introduced. "Luhor, the Earthman's name is Mark. He is the one I told you about. Note the muscular power of the body, the intelligence of the face, no less than middle-order. I think you shall find him most useful." * * * * * Mark felt as if he were on the auction block, as Aladdo calmly pointed out his physical attributes. He was mystified. At the back of his mind a vague memory strove to emerge; it was barely a sense of having seen this man Luhor before, moving among the torpid convicts and whispering to them briefly. Perhaps it had been an allusion of the swamp's night glow, and yet, the feeling persisted. Mark extended his hand to the Martian-Venusian, who eyed him silently, expressionless, without grasping the proffered hand. Around them, the atmosphere was electric. At last Luhor spoke. "Only fifteen can go. They have been picked out!" His was a rumbling voice, emotionless--cold. "Eliminate one then," Aladdo said imperiously. "How? They'll fight like Ocelandians; they already know they've been picked, O Aladdian!" Then Mark Denning understood. Escape was being planned. Aladdo was one of those to go, and was trying to induce Luhor to include him! Mark's heart was pounding, he knew that it was now or never; he must be among those who escaped. He would never again be so close to the solution of the mysteries he had been sent here to solve. "I'm new here," Mark spoke hurriedly. "Look at my arms, my chest. I have tremendous strength and endurance. My vitality has not been sapped by the swamp as yet. Take me also, Luhor, I'll repay you beyond anything you can dream of!" The half-breed's mouth twisted slowly into a cold sneer as he gazed at the Earthman, then he shrugged his shoulders. It might have meant anything, but Mark thought it meant denial. In silence Luhor bowed to Aladdo and strode off toward a group of several men. It was odd, Mark thought--a half-breed convict showing such a mark of respect to another convict. But perhaps it was because Luhor was half Venusian, and Bedrim had been Aladdo's father. Mark turned questioningly to Aladdo. He was amazed to see sudden alarm leap into the Venusian's eyes, together with a warning cry. Mark stepped lithely aside, but not in time to avoid a terrific blow between his shoulder-blades that left a burning point of fire in his flesh. He half fell to his knees, but whirled around to confront a bestial face, maddened now by blood-lust. In the attacker's hand was the haft and a piece of broken blade from what had evidently been a smuggled knife. It was useless now, shattered against the allurium mesh interlining of Mark's suit. With a cry of baffled rage the attacking Earthman hurled the broken weapon into Mark's face, and launched himself close behind it. Mark rolled slightly aside, then gained his feet and whirled to face his attacker. Mark was icy calm now. He awaited the convict's next rush, then sent a straight left unerringly to the man's head, driving him off-balance. Mark kept facing him, balanced lightly on his toes as the man came boring back in tenaciously. Mark's right arm was a peg upon which he hung the convict's blow, while he used the boxer's left, long and weaving, throwing it swiftly three times like a cat sparring with a mouse. The killer rushed, aggressive and eager. Mark let his heels touch the ground this time, refused to give way. He took a murderous hook to the stomach without flinching, countered with a quick left to the face and then a vicious right-cross. The convict's face seemed to lose contour, its features blurred as the face went gory; his feet crossed and his knees went suddenly rubbery, he fell with a crash and didn't get up. * * * * * Mark towered above him, breathing heavily, only now aware of the little group of interested men who had watched. "You fight like a Venusian Ocelandian--as ruthless, and as methodical." It was Luhor who stepped forward and spoke; he was grinning twistedly as he surveyed Mark's handiwork. "Now I wonder why he wanted to eliminate me?" Mark gestured puzzledly. For an answer Aladdo, standing close by him, tapped the spot where in a hidden, inner pocket reposed the purple pearl. The gesture went unnoticed by Luhor, but Mark suddenly understood. "What do you care?" Luhor waved a hand as if dismissing the fallen foe. "He was one of the chosen. You may take his place, Earthman, since you have so neatly disabled him." His large weird eyes took in Mark's physique with a new interest. To Aladdo he said, "You have your wish." Again there was that odd note of deference in his voice. He bowed slightly and turned away again to the gathered little group of men. "When do we start?" Mark whispered eagerly to Aladdo. But the Venusian's eyes were preternaturally bright. A frail hand was held up for silence. Mark stood tense, listening. The brightness of Aladdo's eyes seemed to increase. And then Mark heard it. They all heard it. It was unbelievable. The low, powerful hum of a repulsion beam rent the stillness. It was faint and far away at first, but became steadily louder. This, Mark knew, was not the hornet's hum of the tiny craft the Prison Bureau sent with supplies; this was the unmistakable vibration of a Spacer hovering above them! Soon the immense bulk of the spaceship dropped slowly from the cloud banks above, like a silvery ghost descending. It hovered fifty feet above the islet, the powerful repulsion beam humming its deafening drone. An under-hull lock opened. A long flexible ladder rushed uncoiling through the murky atmosphere until it struck the ground a dozen paces from the barracks. "Back!" Luhor's voice crackled like an icy javelin as an avalanche of humanity scrambled toward the ladder, clawing, tearing and screaming. In his hand he held an atom-blast capable of annihilating that entire snarling group. They saw it and halted uncertainly. Luhor strode calmly toward the ladder and again shouted, "Back, you vermin!" He brought the weapon up as if to fire, and the tattered dregs who had been human beings still prized life enough to retreat sullenly. In a cold voice Luhor called names from a list in his hand. His huge purple orbs inspected each man to step forward, then he waved them toward the ladder. Aladdo was first, and Mark's heart leaped as the Venusian scrambled up the weaving ladder, grasping the metal rungs with fragile hands. One by one, fifteen convicts were called. Mark was among the last, and he heard Luhor ordering the remaining convicts into the swamp. Two disobeyed and leaped forward desperately. Luhor's atom-blast spat, one man dropped in his tracks and the other went scrambling back. Cries, imprecations, curses and pleadings dwindled as the men retreated to the mud. It was then that Luhor himself began to ascend the rungs, as the ladder was slowly pulled up. A rush of maddened convicts clawed at empty air as the stairway to freedom rose above their heads. Luhor laughed mockingly down at them. Mark, just above, suddenly hated Luhor for that. * * * * * Inside the Spacer, with the air-lock closed, Luhor turned to the waiting men. His rumbling voice rose commandingly. "Anyone with weapons, whatever they are, throw them on the floor before you; if you refuse, or we have to search you and find them, you'll be dropped through the air-lock into the swamp. Choose!" The absolute cold finality of his tone left no doubt. A veritable arsenal of sharpened rocks, crude metal knives, and bent wires coated with deadly poison from Venusian plants, showered down. "All through?" The half-breed's purple eyes ranged down the line of men, as if he could see into their minds. There was a moment of silence, then one of the men hesitantly dropped an outmoded heat-gun, old-fashioned but deadly. Luhor's eyebrows went up, and he smiled thinly. "All right," he told a member of the crew, "gather up this junk and toss it out. You new men follow me. First you'll sluice off the mud and put on some decent clothes. Afterwards you'll see the _Commander_; and," he added, "the _Commander_ will see you!" A fleeting smile hovered on his lips as if he had a little joke all his own. Mark was amazed at the spaciousness of the ship, and at the luxury of its appointments. It was apparent at once that this was no ordinary Spacer, for it was a fighting craft as well--a long, slim torpedo of death modern beyond anything he'd ever seen. He only obtained a glimpse of a few of the craft's weapons, but they looked formidable enough to tackle anything the Tri-Planetary ships could muster. He tried not to appear too curious, however; he knew that just now his best bet was to look dazed and docile. He glanced around for Aladdo, but the little Venusian had disappeared. Mark wasn't too surprised. He was satisfied to know that Aladdo was on the ship, and that eventually he would appear. The men scrubbed themselves with soap under needles of warm water, and achieved cleanliness for the first time in many months. Dressed in clean trousers and tunics, they were ready at last to go before the Commander. The men moved restlessly and whispered among themselves. None knew where they were going, or why. They only knew that a miracle had happened and they had been delivered from the great swamp. It didn't occur to any of them as yet that there could be a situation even remotely as bad as their living death in the swamp. One by one, they were called, as they waited in the ship's comfortable leisure-room. At its far end was an automatic beryllium door, and as each man's name was called through an amplifier, the door would open to permit a man to go through. Already nine men had passed through, and none had emerged. Mark could hardly restrain his impatience. Behind that door was the solution of a great mystery--a mystery which had grown in importance beyond anything the Prison Bureau officials had dreamed of, Mark realized, considering the perilous super-efficiency of this spaceship, now speeding away from Venus! * * * * * Mark's name was called last, and he tried to achieve a careless nonchalance as he walked toward the door that opened silently for him. He would not have been too surprised to find that Aladdo was the Commander of this ship; that thought had occurred to him. As he entered the huge compartment, however, he had only a confused impression of brilliant lighting and indiscriminate luxury. Magnificent, ceiling-high tapestries covered the metal walls; beneath his feet, the resilient pile of an imperial Martian rug was a splash of varicolored splendour. Ornaments from three planets were everywhere, some of them museum pieces, like the desk of extinct Martian _Majagua_ wood, inlaid with miniature mosaics of semi-precious stones. "Loot from the spacelanes!" Mark exclaimed inwardly. And then he was beyond all amazement as his gaze went across the bright room, and he saw the two people present. One was Luhor, dressed resplendently now, the shadow of a smile upturning the corners of his mouth. He was standing. Seated at a desk beside him was a girl. She was clad in a close-fitting uniform of a white, gleaming material like watered silk. Mark slowly let out his breath, and then he crossed the room. He wondered if she were really that beautiful, or if it was just the garish lights and surroundings. She spoke first. "If you must be amazed, please do it quickly. I am weary of these interviews." Mark looked at her eyes that were blue but unsmiling, and lips that smiled thinly but didn't mean it. Her slightly turned-up nose would have been amusing ordinarily but wasn't now. Coppery brown hair was brushed smoothly back from her forehead, to fall in waves to her shoulders. Mark wished she would smile with her eyes as well as her lips. His own smile faded, he took a deep breath and said, "I am sufficiently amazed." "Good. Then we can proceed. Luhor, is this the last one?" "Yes. He's the one I was telling you about." She turned her cold blue eyes upon Mark again. Her voice was emotionless, almost a monotone. "Luhor tells me you were exceedingly anxious to leave the Venus swamp. Why?" "Why!" Mark repeated in amazement. "Why does any man want to leave there? It's a living death--and I was slowly going crazy." "You had only been there a few months?" "That's right." "Why were you sent there?" Mark hesitated for a split second, and decided he had better stick to the same story he'd told Aladdo. "I'm a 'political'," he said. She nodded, as though satisfied. "I have never been actually in the swamp. I understand that you worked hard there?" "Yes, very hard. We had to, to stay alive." "You will work very hard for me--for the same reason. Perhaps you will wish you had stayed in the swamp. What can you do?" Mark brightened. "Around a spaceship? I can handle rocket-tubes, or controls. Also probably any weapon you care to mention. Calculations and differential equations are pretty easy. I could almost quote you the entire _Advanced Principles of Space Navigation_...." With a rush of nostalgia Mark was remembering all the mechanics and mathematics of his four years in Government Spacer School. He went on with cool confidence, "I could take one of your atomomotors apart, jumble the pieces and put it together again. I'm really a mechanic rather than a spaceman. Spacery's only a hobby of mine...." She swung her eyes over to the half-breed. Luhor nodded, grinning with huge amusement. She said to Mark: "You will work at the mines, where you are going. You can make _that_ a hobby of yours. I do not like men with me in space who know more about a ship than I do." Mark slowly seethed, but said nothing. She waved a slim hand in dismissal. Luhor, still grinning, showed Mark the door by which to go out. III Mark awakened suddenly, aware that someone was shaking him. Intense light almost blinded him as he opened his eyes, and he shut them hurriedly. He lay for a few seconds enjoying the luxury of the berth on which he had slept. It had been long since he'd felt the yielding comfort of a coil-pad beneath his body, or cool Lynon sheets against his flesh. "Rouse yourself, sluggard!" The voice was mocking, familiar, rich with golden overtones. "Get that deficient brain of yours to working, lower order!" "Aladdo! You Venusian demon--where have you been?" In his delight Mark grabbed Aladdo's slender hands and almost crushed them. "I was beginning to think I'd have to tear this ship apart to find you!" "My hands!" Aladdo exclaimed in alarm and withdrew them. But there was shining joy in his smile. Perched on the edge of the berth, the tiny Venusian regarded the giant Earthman with laughing eyes, bluer even than the azure wings that hung like a cloak. But it was a subtly different Aladdo; glowing and clean until the exquisitely chiseled face was like alabaster, the curling close-cropped hair blue-black and gleaming. Dressed in a soft gray tunic and tight white trousers, the wings were vivid in contrast, almost iridescent. The tiny feet were encased in bootlets of red Ocelandian fur, and a belt of platinum links circled the narrow waist, holding a holster with a small short-range atom-blast. Surprised, Mark flicked a forefinger at the weapon and looked inquiringly at Aladdo. "They let you have this?" "Yes," the Venusian nodded. "Remember, Bedrim was my father; I can be most useful to them. Although my father's dead, there are still followers on three planets, ready at a moment's notice to rally behind a leader. I could be that leader--or at least appear to be. I am a guest of honor on this cruiser--a prisoner, of course," Aladdo smiled ironically, "but shown every courtesy. I even have my own private quarters instead of sleeping here with the crew." "But what is it all about, Aladdo?" Mark was exasperated as the mystery grew. "What's the purpose behind all this? Ruthless criminals salvaged from a Venusian Prison swamp, and now this super-cruiser built to withstand anything! And who is that girl? I--" But the Venusian interrupted him. "No time now. You'll learn everything presently. Dress quickly and come with me." "I'm dressed," Mark answered, springing up. He zipped on light, insulated shoes and followed Aladdo to the main cabin. The rest of the men were already there, clustered about the starboard ports in an excited group. The light in this room was blazing. Mark could feel the gentle vibration of the atomomotors somewhere deep in the spaceship, and again the question overwhelmed him: where were they going? * * * * * He was soon to learn. Recklessly he gazed out into space. Instantly he pivoted away, as if a gigantic hand had spun him. He had looked almost directly into the sun! It was a sun vast beyond imagining, tongues of flame flickering slowly out for thousands of miles. He knew it was only the thickness of the Crystyte ports that saved the men's eyes. Slowly Mark's eyes became accustomed to the fierce glare and by shading them obliquely he could discern the object of the men's excitement--a dark little speck of a planet sweeping in its orbit just beyond the sun's rim. It rapidly grew larger as the spaceship moved inward on a long tangent. "Mercury!" Mark exclaimed, staring. "No, we crossed the orbit of Mercury two hours ago." It was Aladdo who spoke beside him. "Then, that must be ... but it's impossible!" Mark laughed a little wildly. "How long since we left Venus?" "Ten hours, Earthman. It is possible. That is the planet Vulcan." "Unbelievable," Mark almost whispered. "Why, it takes the fastest Patrol cruiser forty-eight hours to reach Mercury's orbit from Venus. Lord! What sort of speed has this Spacer?" But Aladdo didn't answer. A door had opened and Luhor stepped in. "Vulcan," he said tonelessly. "As we approach, even the thickness of these ports won't be enough. Put on these." He handed the men pairs of Crystyte goggles, the lenses specially processed. "Does this mean we're actually going to attempt a landing on Vulcan?" Mark asked the half-breed. "It's madness! It has never been done!" "But it has been done." Luhor gazed at Mark frigidly. "You merely have never heard of it." "Who's at the controls?" Mark struggled to subdue the excitement in his voice. "Why, the Commander, naturally--assisted by myself." Luhor's vast chest arched with pride. "Observe closely, Earthman, and you will be treated to as masterly a feat of navigation as you're likely ever to see again!" His purple orbs roved over the men, clean-dressed, and rested, the haunted look beginning to fade from their eyes. He nodded approval, as he turned and left. "A base at Vulcan!" Mark was repeating inwardly. And a cold fear at this growing mystery grew apace within him. It was not only a masterly feat of navigation--it was incredible as the hurtling spaceship continued along its tangent, until Vulcan, slightly smaller than Mercury, came swinging around to bisect their trajectory. Very neatly, their speed was manipulated to allow the planet to come between them and the sun; then the great Spacer began to pursue a direct course. Mark noticed that Vulcan kept one side eternally sunwards. Swiftly the spaceship approached the dark, outward side. Actually it was not "dark" but it could be called so in comparison with the molten sunward side. Mark realized the almost insurmountable difficulty of keeping the Spacer on a trajectory, with the sun's tremendous gravitational pull so dangerously near; the slightest deviation now would send them hurtling past Vulcan and into that naming hecotomb. He knew, as well, that there could be no atmosphere on Vulcan to help them brake. * * * * * But even as these thoughts were racing through his mind, Vulcan came rushing up at them with the fury of a miniature hell running rampant. Its surface was lividly aglow, with the flaming curve of the sun as a backdrop blotting out the horizon. Suddenly they were leveling over its surface, at a speed that to Mark spelled disaster. He saw the fore-jets flaming over a wide terrain of what might have been lava or pumice, but that didn't seem to check their reckless speed at all. Directly ahead black mountain ranges sheered upward as if to disembowel the ship on jagged summits. Mark merely closed his eyes, awaiting the crash that seemed inevitable. No ship he knew could ever brake in time at that suicidal speed. A terrific force jarred him to the floor. A profound nausea made him retch. Then Luhor was touching his shoulder, and Mark opened his eyes. "All out, we're home!" the half-breed grinned. "You're lucky that the synchronized magnetic fields minimize deceleration, Earthman." Doors were opening, voices were drifting into the ship. The vibration of the atomomotors had ceased. White-faced and shaken, the men debarked into a wide corridor hewn out of solid rock, into which the ship had berthed. Glancing back, Mark saw metal doors of titanic proportions now hermetically closed; ahead were similar doors. Then he heard the deep, far-away throbbing of generators and he knew that he was in an air-lock built on a gigantic scale. A few seconds later the inner doors slid open. As they walked forward Luhor turned to Mark with a proud smile. "You won't find _that_ type of navigation in the 'Advanced Principles,' eh, Earthman?" "No, indeed not," Mark admitted. "But I still don't understand that braking process!" Luhor pointed to colossal sets of coils, in niches along each side of the vast corridor. "Synchronized magnetic degravitation fields; they arrest mass and speed synchronously, finally stopping the spacer in a graduating net of force. Similar coils to these exist for a mile along the gorge back there, through which we came. Even so it is a very delicate and precise process." They stepped into a grotto so vast as to dwarf anything Mark had ever imagined. It extended for miles, sheltering an entire little city! Mark saw rows of stone dwellings, stream-lined, ultra-modern. From larger buildings came the sounds of blast furnaces and an occasional flash of ruddy glow. Groups of workmen hurried past, glanced curiously at the new arrivals but didn't stop to fraternize. And then Mark saw Carston. Ernest Carston! One of the very highest men among the Tri-Planetary Prison Bureau officials! The surprise stopped Mark Denning in his tracks, but fortunately, thanks to his training, he managed to keep his face impassive as they recognized each other simultaneously. Carston flashed him a quick look that seemed to say, "Later!" Then the newcomers were marching in silence to a spacious building, where they were assigned rooms. The furnishings were simple, but comfortable, and Luhor led them to the rear of the building where the dining-room was located. They ate with the famished eagerness of men who had long subsisted on compressed synthetic rations. Then they were issued cigarettes. To the men who had been doomed on Venus only a few hours previously, it was like awakening in heaven from a nightmare in hell. Through Mark's mind ran an ancient saying: "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow...." IV Standing in the doorway, the girl of the unsmiling blue eyes surveyed the new men silently. Her trim, aloof figure instantly commanded their attention, and their respect as well. "I cannot waste words on you," she said abruptly, "for my time is limited. I know all of your names, so you shall know mine as well, although it will mean nothing to you. I am Cynthia Marnik, but you will address me always as Commander. You will obey me implicitly in all things here. Second to me, you will obey Luhor. "All of you volunteered to come. Now that you're here, you are part of our scheme of things and you will work as hard as you did in the swamp. It is dangerous work, but you will have ample remuneration. Idlers and grumblers will be done away with, I promise you. Your lives were forfeit in the swamp, and that is not altered by your being on Vulcan." She paused as if waiting for objections, but every man was silent. "Very well; Luhor will explain later what you're here for. Meanwhile you are free to go anywhere you like within the city, but be ready to work about eight earth-hours from now." As abruptly as she had come, Commander Cynthia Marnik turned and was gone. The men smoked and talked among themselves, speculating what their tasks might be. The memory of the Prison Swamp was too recent for them to care much. Mark rose quietly and stepped out of the dining-room. He'd noticed that Aladdo was absent from the meal, and he wondered if his Venusian friend was still an 'honored guest.' Deciding to inspect the city, Mark tried to retrace his steps to those buildings where he had heard the blast furnaces; but at the first cross-corridor Ernest Carston stepped out and walked beside him. He smiled at Mark Denning, but held a warning finger to his lips. They walked in silence, while the corridors became rockier and more dimly lighted. At last, far away from the city, Carston stopped under an immense jutting rock and quietly gripped Mark's hand. There was a world of feeling in his voice as he said barely whispering: "I'd lost hope of ever seeing any of you again!" "How did you get here?" Mark asked the question that had been burning in his mind. "Did they pick you up at the swamp, too?" "Yes. We're both on the same trail--and here the trail ends." "But I had no idea you'd preceded me," Mark told him. "It must have been considered a far more important assignment than I was told, to send _you_ to the Swamp!" "We didn't know, we weren't certain," Carston said thoughtfully. "But we received a bit of information which, if true, was of the greatest importance. It seemed impossible, fantastic, but the hazard was so great, that even what amounted to a vague rumor warranted my going. You were to follow in a few months, without knowing I had gone ahead. Well, you already know most of the rest; but Earth's government doesn't even suspect the deadly peril it will soon have to face!" "I'm afraid," Mark stated frankly, "that there are a lot of gaps in what I do know. I can tell, of course, that something mighty big is going on here. But what was that bit of information you received?" "It goes back nearly a quarter of a century," Carston replied slowly, "and concerns a man named George Marnik. He, and his young wife, were among the first pioneers to venture out to Callisto. Those were the ruthless years, when the great Earth Monopolies stopped at nothing, were very often lawless, and usually got what they wanted." Carston paused to light a cigarette. * * * * * "George Marnik," he went on, "discovered one of the richest palladium veins on Callisto, and was developing it slowly. But--one of the Monopolies decided that it wanted Marnik's rich vein. In an ensuing struggle with some of the Monopoly's hired hoodlums, Marnik's wife was burned down brutally with an electro-gun. She left a daughter, about five years old, whom they had named Cynthia ... do you follow me?" "Go on," Mark said in a cold, dry voice. "Well, after the tragedy, George Marnik disappeared. He was never heard of again--except by the Earth Monopolies. They heard of him plenty. He terrorized the spacelanes for years, and more than one Monopoly went under, bankrupt by the incessant attacks on their ships by an enemy who had achieved a ruthlessness greater even than theirs. It was rumored that Marnik had vowed never to set foot on Earth again, and that his life was dedicated to the destruction of the Monopolies. He almost achieved his task, except that the Earth's government finally stepped in and dissolved the Monopolies." Carston paused and drew in a long breath. "And then?" Mark urged, as if fascinated by this saga of another day. "Why, then as you know, Emperor Bedrim of Venus achieved his famous alliance with Dar Vaajo of Mars, and together they sought to end Earth's domination and exploitation of their planets. You know about the bitter ten years' war--that's history. But when the Tri-Planetary Patrol was formed, during the truce that followed at the death of Bedrim, half the Solar System was searched for George Marnik's base and the rich plunder he was reputed to have there. It was all in vain. You can now see why! The Patrol has never been able to land on Vulcan." "But if I remember correctly," Mark Denning said reminiscently, "George Marnik was certified as dead, as the years went by and piracy ceased. The records gave no information as to his daughter Cynthia, she was merely marked 'Missing.'" "Precisely!" Carston assented. "Then that vital bit of information you received must have concerned this base on Vulcan!" "No. Worse! It concerned that George Marnik _was alive and planning to end the Inter-Planetary Truce, to loose bitter war upon three worlds again_!" "Good Lord!" Mark was stunned. "But how? Venus and Mars were disarmed under Earth's dictated peace!" "Yes, true. Mars is a small and dying race and not to be greatly feared. But Venus has never become reconciled. You know their unholy pride and their utter conviction that theirs are the greatest minds in our universe. Underneath the apparently peaceful surface, revolt's smoldering." "Revolt fanned by Marnik?" "Yes," Carston went on. "If George Marnik did have some fantastic plan in mind, Venus would be the likeliest place for him to find backing and followers. On the face of it, it seemed absurd, of course. But when the supply of Venusian Pearls dwindled to a mere trickle, and a criminal from the swamp was found dead millions of miles away, in the vicinity of Callisto, we knew then that there was a definite tie-up. It was time to investigate. George Marnik, the last space pirate, _is alive_--an ancient, embittered wreck living on hate!" Carston fell silent. * * * * * "And Commander Cynthia, his daughter," Mark whispered musingly, "is the one in charge now!" "Yes. You wouldn't have believed it possible, eh? But remember, during those reckless years when her father was the most hunted man in the universe, Cynthia grew up with him, constantly at his side, learning all the tricks of a master at piracy. She must share her father's hatred for a world that only brought them tragedy and sorrow. Marnik's psychopathic, of course, his mind's warped; she must share his views, although at times I wonder ... sometimes when I look at her...." His voice dwindled. "So it all boils down to one thing," Mark's analytical mind had already absorbed all the facts. "That Spacer that brought us here is a menace to civilization. Its speed alone is beyond anything we have at present; a fleet of them could wreak havoc on Earth's forces. Earth must be warned at all costs, Carston!" Ernest Carston looked at Mark pityingly, lines of weariness and anxiety creasing his face. "Do you think," he said slowly, "if there were any way out, I would be here? Vulcan and the Venus Swamp both have a thing in common: there's no escape, except through Marnik. Commander Cynthia only carries out his orders." "But she's a woman, Carston. If she could be made to realize what another Inter-Planetary war means--the awful carnage, the destruction--perhaps she could somehow be reached!" "I wish that were possible!" Carston exclaimed fervently. "But she's like a being that's hypnotized. George Marnik must dominate her completely, old and decrepit as he must be. Remember, it's the only life she's ever known. He must be the only being she's ever loved." "Have you any concrete knowledge of their plans?" "No. Only deductions. Dar Vaajo, ruler of Mars, was here three weeks ago. Cynthia brought him. For hours he was with Marnik in the latter's palace. That can only mean one thing, of course. And then there's the new metal. That is the real problem and the real menace!" "Metal? A new alloy?" Mark Denning was all interest. "Nothing so simple as that," Carston explained with tragic calm. "A metal unique in the universe! A new, _allotropic_ form of beryllium which _beyond a certain temperature reacts by hardening in direct ratio to pressure and heat_! Once cast, it is literally heat and blast proof, and so light that it triples efficiency in relation to fuel consumption. And George Marnik's building, has been building, a fleet of these Super-Spacers!" "I suppose they're mining that metal here?" Mark's face was white. "Yes, on the _sunward_ side of Vulcan! That's what swamp convicts are brought here for." "And I suppose either the ore, or the smelted metal's being shipped to secret bases on Mars and Venus?" Mark's voice was strained and opaque. "Not yet, Earthman!" The alien voice was at once like a whiplash and like a fragment of music. Both men whirled about. * * * * * Out of the shadows, as if emerging from the bizarre scene of tortured rocks and twisted cavern-walls, stepped a slender figure with pendant wings. "Aladdo!" Mark felt a curious tingling at sight of his Venusian friend, as he went forward with hands outstretched. It was nothing compared to the shock mirrored on Carston's face. "Aladdian!" he too exclaimed, a mixture of despair and impotent rage in his voice. "Peace, lower order!" Aladdo laughed, but hiding his hands behind his back as he addressed Mark. "I shall not trust my hands to you again. _It is enough to have crippled wings!_" The Venusian stared full into Carston's eyes as he uttered the last words significantly, and the latter's face turned deep red. "Are you still a guest? Where are they keeping you? I've missed you...." Mark turned to Carston, his face alight. "Aladdo saved my life in the swamp!" "I'm staying with the Commander and her father. It is a small universe after all," he added, turning to Carston, "eh, Colonel?" "You know each other?" Mark asked, surprised. Carston's face reddened and then paled. "I'm a servant of my Government," he answered the Venusian stiffly. "My duty is to obey, not to question orders, Princess!" "What is all this? What do you mean, 'Princess'? Will someone explain?" Mark was exasperated. "Aladdian's the daughter of the late Emperor Bedrim of Venus," Carston said, then fell silent. A look at the Venusian's smiling face told Mark it was true. His own face was ludicrous, his mouth partly open, for the moment speechless. Then a dark flush of anger swept up like a tide to the roots of his hair. "A girl ... a defenseless girl that's never committed a crime in her life, condemned to that Venus Swamp! To the most ghastly, the most cruel living-death in the universe...." Words failed him as he shook with rage. "What was Earth's Government thinking of? The Council must have been mad!" Mark Denning choked. "Careful!" Ernest Carston warned. "Remember you're an Earthman, Denning. To question the Council is treason!" "Treason be damned, and the Council too!" Mark raged. "There are limits! There's no reason for that Prison Swamp except greed. Better atom-blast habitual criminals than to condemn them there; _that_ is worse than any crime!" He towered above Carston, a formidable engine of destruction, his face a mask of fury. Then a tiny, fragile hand was on his arm and the Venusian's calm voice rose in the brief silence, "It is too late to remould the past. But we can refashion the immediate future, Mark Denning." "Can we? How? It seems that Marnik and Commander Cynthia hold all the cards!" "Not all," Aladdian shook her exquisite head. "They have perfected their plans for the immediate future--but we can be _the element of the unpredictable_!" "You mean ... you're not in sympathy with their plans? That you won't serve as a rallying point to sway the masses of Venus?" Carston looked bewildered. "I thought when I saw you, that was the reason they'd brought you here! We know that your people would revolt at a word from you, Princess! That's what our Government feared." "I know. And I will not lead my people to an hecatomb in space. But neither will the Earth continue to exploit my planet and debauch my people. This time, there will be a peace and it will be equitable." Aladdian had drawn herself to a full four feet eleven inches, and there was an imperious note in her voice. Carston stood silent and grim. * * * * * Mark, looking at his Venusian friend anew, thought irrelevantly that, with the spike-heeled sandals of Earth, Aladdian would be only slightly under the average height of an Earth girl. He shook his head irritably. This was no time to ponder inconsequential things. "Aladdian," he said, "do you know much of their plans and what is being done with this new metal?" "Partly. We have discussed ways and means since my arrival here. George Marnik is very impatient; I think he fears he may die before he can see his plans carried through. First he will equip a fleet equal or superior to Earth's forces. Then he will take over Callisto, the new Gibraltar, between the inner and outer planets, after which he will complete an alliance with Venus and Mars. He does not plan to conquer Earth, he knows it would take years; but his scheme would bottle your planet, relegate it to the status of a minor power, without inter-planetary colonies, without outer revenues. Venus and Mars alone would expand in the Solar System." "For a while," Mark said laconically. "Mars would never be content with anything short of complete rule, as long as Dar Vaajo lives! And the metal?..." "It is smelted here under a secret process, and parts for the space cruisers and special rockets manufactured. Then they are stored in one of the asteroids where they will be assembled later into a fleet. That is all the data I have now." "But this Luhor," Mark asked, "what is his real status? Commander Cynthia seems to trust him implicitly." "She does," Aladdian replied. "He's an old friend of George Marnik, one of his trusted lieutenants from the pirate days. But he's a cold devil--combines the worst from both Venusian and Martian. Don't under-estimate him ... he can be deadly!" "I've had occasion to see that," Mark said dryly. "They're all deadly in this deadly little planet!" Carston said vehemently. He looked far older than his scant thirty years, his face was bleak and haggard. "But this is heaven in comparison with the Prison Swamp," Aladdian told him coldly. She seemed to have a determined animosity toward the high-ranking Earth official. "It wasn't I who sent you there!" "No. It was only your relentless pursuit that eventually resulted in my capture," the Venusian answered, "and it was only you who cut the tendons of my wings. Oh, I know--you were only acting under orders." Aladdian was smiling again as she turned back to Mark. "We had better all go back to our quarters now, but it would be best if we did not return together." She moved away, then added: "Watch Luhor, Mark; I am not sure, but I think he too is part of the 'unpredictable.'" Mark watched her slim figure, with the azure wings and tight-curling, blue-black hair, melt away into the shadows. "I will see you tomorrow," her voice floated back like a golden molten stream. V "Only twenty-two men, Luhor?" Commander Cynthia Marnik stood very straight and very slim in the center of the air-lock, surveying the new men plus a sprinkling of others, preparatory to the trip outside. "Even less than the last trip!" Annoyance creased a frown between her blue eyes. "All we can spare, Commander. Every available man's at the furnaces; your father has ordered it so." Turning to the waiting men, Luhor began to instruct them in the operation of their metal surface suits. "As you can see, they're two suits in one," he explained tersely, "operating on the vacuum principle. Here's the cooling device between each metal sheathing. You'll have to bear more heat than you've ever endured, but don't get panicky. Here's where you regulate the oxygen flow into the helmet." He indicated a little dial. Each man was assigned to a wide, flat-bottomed sled which he was to pull behind him. They were also equipped with curious, spur-like picks. Mark failed to understand the reason for such primitive methods, but remained discreetly silent. "You men who have made the trip before, help the new arrivals," Luhor ordered curtly. Mark noted that Luhor himself was not going to accompany them, but Cynthia Marnik was already encased in her suit. Ernest Carston went over to help her adjust the helmet. "I can manage quite all right, thank you," she said. But it did not escape Mark that her voice was soft and that she smiled at Carston. Carston came over to give Mark a hand. He smiled reassuringly through his helmet's visiplate, then flicking on Mark's radio-phone, said briefly: "Stay close to me! I'm one of the veterans." "Bring Vulc, we're about ready," the Commander's voice sounded startlingly inside Mark's headpiece. "Who's Vulc?" Mark asked Carston in a whisper. Before the latter could answer, there was a sudden unearthly rumbling behind them. Mark turned, stared, then froze in his tracks. A huge, awesome apparition was lumbering in a straight line for the Commander. It was vaguely human in that it possessed a head, torso, four limbs of elephantine proportions, and it waddled upright. But the human resemblance went no further. The creature's skin, if skin it was, gleamed silvery metallic and gave the impression of being fluid! It reminded Mark of nothing so much as an immense blob of mercury that might at any moment collapse into a puddle and spread over the floor. But Vulc didn't collapse. He approached the Commander and stood docilely waiting. She patted the creature's arm and then handed him a package of something. Vulc rumbled his appreciation and poured the contents into a gash that appeared in his face. Then he waddled contentedly to a large sled and took up the reins. "Wow! Where did you ever dig up _that_?" Mark turned white-faced to Carston. "Vulc? He's a native of this planet, but more than that, he's our ambassador of peace!" The Commander's crisp voice made further conversation impossible. "Single file, you men. Stay as close to each other as the sleds will permit. Carston, you stay in the middle, as usual, and watch out for the Blitzees. If you men work hard, we should be back within ten hours." Silently the outer door of the lock slid open and the men began to file out, with the gigantic Vulc at the head. The brightness was intense, although they were on the planet's "dark side." Shimmering waves of heat danced before them over the flat terrain. At the very end of the line Commander Cynthia kept pace with them. * * * * * "What did you mean by 'ambassador of peace,' Carston?" Mark had purposefully fallen into line next to him. "Adjust your radio-phone to its shortest distance communication," Carston directed him, "so it will be inaudible to anyone else." As Mark did so, Carston continued, "We couldn't get out the metal we're after, without Vulc. His home is on the Neutral strip where we're going--that part of the planet where the outward and sunward side meet. All of Vulc's kin are there, and they resent us. They have attacked us before. We bring Vulc as an evidence of friendly intentions; they have a speech of sorts, and Vulc's supposed to pacify them." "What was it the Commander gave him before we left?" "Powdered metal, filings, and tiny scraps from the factories. That's what's in those big sacks up there on Vulc's sled--a peace offering for his people." "They subsist on metal!" Mark Denning was aghast. "Everything on this planet does--that is, everything native to it. And they're impervious to heat, of course. If Vulc had not been captured by George Marnik almost immediately after it was born, it would never have been conditioned to the comparatively cool atmosphere of the Base." In silence they trudged mile after mile, following the same line of black hills that housed their Base. Mark marvelled at how comfortable the vacuum suits were, but he knew the real heat hadn't started yet. It came presently, as they veered further outward from the hills. The heat increased steadily and became more intense than anything Mark had ever experienced. Perspiration dripped stickily within his suit. He wanted to wipe his face but couldn't; he could only shake his head to keep the sweat from his eyes. But there was no keeping the mirages from his eyes. In every direction the terrain rocked and rolled under huge undulating hazes of heat. Horizons leaped at him in wave after wave, and fled away again. The men ahead seemed to do fantastic dances. They no longer trod on rock. The ground beneath was soft, white and leprous looking, powdery almost as dust. Mark felt it hot around his metal-clad ankles. Now he realized the reason for the flat-bottomed sleds. He knew, too, that a spaceship could never venture over here and get back safely; compasses and magniplates and everything else would go haywire. Peering ahead, he discerned Vulc's fantastic bulk which now had turned a glowing cherry red! He shuddered at the thought of what would happen to a man suddenly bereft of the protecting vacuum suit. Out of the silence, a vast rumbling sound rose like magnified thunder. Mark saw Carston fumble with his radio-phone then peer all about into the haze. "Blitzees coming!" he yelled into his instrument. Everyone stopped. Mark followed Carston's line of sight, but he couldn't see a thing. "Swarm coming from the left!" Carston yelled again. The Commander moved hurriedly along the line. "Lie down everyone, face to the left! Upend your sleds and if you value your lives, stay behind them!" For a second all was confusion as the men flung themselves to the powdery soil; then a metal barrier sprang up as the sleds came end to end. Still nothing could be seen. * * * * * Suddenly then they came. The air was blue from crackling sparks as dozens of the Blitzees struck the sleds with the impact of bullets. A sound like the humming of millions of hornets was in their ears, as the greater part of the swarm passed overhead. Mark had a confused vision of electric blue streaks that writhed and zig-zagged, landed and leaped again, propelling themselves blindly. As suddenly as it had come, the danger was over. The men arose somewhat shakily. The ground about them was strewn with the snake-like Blitzees. Mark picked one up and found it to be metallic, about five inches in length, transparent blue in color. The head was triangular, eyeless; along its back Mark felt a thin, wiry sort of filament! "They're like living bolts of electricity," Carston told him. "They seem to short-circuit themselves when they strike the sleds." The caravan continued. Hours later they arrived at their destination, a small rise in the terrain before them, covered with glittering crystals in huge, boulder-like lumps. The sides of the little hill was composed of the same ore, apparently in limitless amount. But as if guarding it against them, rows of redly-glowing Vulcs stood motionless, elephantine, facing them. Mark couldn't tell whether they were friendly or hostile. To him there was no expression to be seen on those fluid heads. But Commander Cynthia's Vulc went over to his henchmen and jabbered in rumbling noises, pointing to the huge sacks on his own sled. Presently three of the Vulcs came over and snatched at the sacks, opened them and grabbed handfuls of the metallic filings. Seemingly satisfied, the trio lumbered off followed by the rest, bearing the sacks. The men began to work then, loading the ore on the sleds and breaking it with their small hand-picks. Even to have come here was bad enough, and to breathe was an agony--but to work, in this inferno of unimaginable heat and blinding glare, was a nightmare. More than once Mark felt himself sway, and stood quite still until the dizziness passed. One of the men pitched forward and lay still. Commander Cynthia examined the fallen man. She gestured to Vulc who grasped him and stretched him over the ore in his own sled. The Commander's face was drawn and white through the visiplate, and her eyes were tragic. Mark was seeing evidences today that she was not entirely cold and heartless, as he had at first thought. It seemed an eternity before they were through with their task. At last the sleds were loaded to capacity, and they rested a while before starting the return journey. They could only pull the heavy sleds slowly now, and only the knowledge that every mile brought them nearer to the Base, away from this suffocating hell, spurred them on. After a while the Commander called a halt, and the men sank down against their sleds like puppets whose strings have been cut. There was a strange absence of curses and rebellion against the appalling experience they were undergoing; there was not enough strength left for that. Then Mark saw Commander Cynthia suddenly stand up. Through the visiplate her eyes were wide, and they mirrored horror! VI "Up on your feet, every man of you! Test your oxygen tanks--quickly!" Her voice was tense with suppressed emotion. Something in her tone seemed to cut a path through the heat-ridden lethargy of their minds, for the men staggered to their feet, hands fumbling for the testing buttons. Mark found his, and his eyes darted to the tiny dial inside his helmet. The pointer swung and registered _one hour_. Frantically he pressed the button again; once more the pointer inexorably indicated the same period of time. "One hour!" he breathed, stunned. That was barely a third of the time it would take to return to the Base! Out of the dancing mirage before him the alabaster face of Aladdian seemed to float and smile. With infinite, pain-laden regret Mark realized that unless a miracle happened he would never see her again, and now for the first time it dawned on him how much he wanted to. Around him the men were milling in confusion, panic-stricken. Their few hours' stay at the Base had been like a brief taste of heaven, and life had become precious once more. "All of us can't get back," the Commander was saying. "But there's enough oxygen among us to permit seven, at most eight, to do so. I'm willing to draw lots with the rest of you. But decide quickly! Every instant is precious!" "No!" a man screamed hysterically, near the breaking point. "I'd rather take my chances...." His voice ended in a hoarse sob. Then a strange thing happened. Ernest Carston, white-faced and unsteady, stepped forward. "You can take my supply, Commander Cynthia," he offered. "You need not draw lots; let the men do that." She waved him aside and shook her head, but her eyes softened gratefully. She glanced at the teletimer at her wrist. "I will give you men just thirty seconds to make your decision; otherwise I will be forced to make it." But from the group came no decision, only sullen argument and frantic babbling. Some of them measured the distance between them and the girl, eying hungrily the atom-blast guns at either side of her wrist. "What a woman!" Carston murmured to himself, lost in admiration. But Mark heard him. "Yes, she is magnificent," he agreed in a dry croak. "A pity all that courage and...." He checked himself and fell dully silent again. It was then that Mark saw something or thought he did, far away, shimmering through the dancing heat. He wiped the sparkling dust from his visiplate and strained his eyes desperately, praying that it was not a mirage. He clutched at Carston and pointed. "The hills ... are those the hills? _Our hills?_" Carston nodded dumbly. At last he managed to croak, "Yes, but the entrance is miles away ... at the other end." "But there may be a chance! Remember Aladdian, the corridors--a honeycomb of caverns? Commander!" Mark turned up his radio-phone, his voice drowning out the babble of the men. "How far is that range of hills, Commander?" She followed his pointing arm. "A little less than an hour, at its closest point." "And the system of caverns--how far does it extend? Aren't those hills practically honeycombed their entire length? We might find--" "Wait!" The word came explosively, as her mind darted into the past, down the corridor of years. "Yes, I remember ... some of the caverns did lead out to this side, and father sealed them to make the Base airtight...." She gazed at the distant hills as if trying to recapture a forgotten scene. And a bulky shape hurtled forward, clawing for the weapons at her waist. But Carston had been watching. He thrust out a metal-shod foot and the convict went sprawling ludicrously into the swirling white dust. "Thank you, again!" the Commander said in a whisper. "This trip has been a revelation--in so many ways." Her face was as white as the powdery soil underfoot, and she was near collapse; but from some unknown source she still drew from enough strength reserve to maintain her authority. Hands on her atom-blast guns, she faced the men. "Into line as before. We've got to make the hills in less than one hour. Leave the sleds. It's the hills or your lives!" The effect was miraculous. Suddenly they were docile, grasping at the slender hope she offered them and content to have her bear the burden. Quickly they fell into line, with Vulc leading the way again. The men needed no urging; the knowledge that they only had one more hour of oxygen was enough. * * * * * If their trek up to now had been a nightmare, this latter stage surpassed even the most secret refinements of a Martian torture-chamber. In an agony of slowness the minutes lengthened and seemed to stand still. The low range of hills seemed to dance mockingly and recede into the distance beyond the horizon's endless rim. In addition now to the heat in their brains and the glare in their eyes, their lungs were tortured as they regulated the oxygen intake-valves to the barest minimum. After an eternity in which even memory seemed to have fled, they were walking on rock and the heat began imperceptibly to abate. Directly before them, the hills rose out of the torturing blaze. Cries that were little more than miserable croakings echoed through the radio-phones as the men broke ranks; they staggered on, holding to each other for support. Mark looked around for the Commander, and saw her clutching at Carston's shoulder for support, while his arm was about her waist, half-holding her up. The girl disengaged herself and by sheer will-power drove toward the base of the low-lying cliffs before them. "Wait!" she ordered. She stopped, and the men halted behind her, weaving on their feet. She stared around us as if desperately trying to recall something deeply imbedded in the matrix of the past; then she veered to the right, waving for Vulc and the men to follow. Mark tested his oxygen tank and glanced at the dial again. It read "ten minutes." It was a race with time which now, perversely, seemed to be rushing by on flying feet. Thirty yards further, the cliffs curved in sharply. Rounding it, the Commander gave a glad cry. In the center was a gigantic metal door, hermetically sealing what had once been the entrance to a cave. The men staggered forward, some of them clawing feebly at the barrier. Others sank wordlessly to the rocky ground. They weren't even sure that beyond that metal wall they would find life-giving air. The Commander had drawn both atom-pistols, and stood there surveying the barrier as if paralyzed. "What are you waiting for?" Mark pressed forward. "In minutes, the men will be dying! Blast an opening!" For the very first time, Mark saw her hesitant, indecisive, as if unable to think. "But the air ..." she managed to gasp. "It will escape from the caves, clear back to the Base! All those men there ... and father ... their lives are more important than ours!" * * * * * In those brief seconds Mark admired her. Despite the deadly threat to the Earth she embodied, he admired her for her humanity and loyalty to the men at the Base. But there was no time to lose. He made her decision superfluous. "We've got to chance it!" With a swift, darting movement he wrested an atom-blast gun from her hand and discharged it steadily at the metal door, at a point just above the ground. A second later she was helping him with the other gun. Instantly the metal turned fiery red, then white, and finally a circular section fell outward with a hissing rush of air. "Dive in, men!" With the dregs of a strength he didn't know he still possessed, Mark grasped the men and pushed them toward the aperture, helped shove them through. "Throw your helmets back!" he shouted. "In you go," he told the Commander, and despite her protests he lifted her off her feet, almost handing her through the blasted entrance. Only Vulc and Mark were left. As the Earthman crawled through, he motioned for Vulc to follow. The metallic being dropped to all fours and pushed in his arms, his head, his massive shoulders. His sides scraped the still hot edges of the aperture. And there he stuck. The men inside grasped his arms and pulled, but in vain. Vulc gazed ludicrously from side to side and heaved prodigiously, but in vain. The Vulcanian seemed molded to the hole. "Wait! Tell him not to struggle, not to move!" Mark was exultant as he turned to the girl. "The air's no longer rushing away; if he'll only remain there until we can get back with equipment to seal that hole, the danger's over!" Vulc seemed to be pondering; his limbs sprawled like a distorted swastika, and on his usually blank, fluid face was something like surprise. In the dim recesses of his alien mind he could find no parallel to this. The Commander spoke to him slowly, with desperate emphasis; reaching into a pocket of her suit, she brought out another package of powdered metal which Vulc promptly stuffed into his mouth. "He understands," she said at last. "But I'll leave one of you here with him, to be certain he does." For a while they rested, lying prone, helmets thrown back, luxuriating in the comparative coolness and the draughts of pure air. All were thirsty, their throats parched and aching. But the nightmare was over. Presently the Commander rose to her feet and gave the order to march. She was almost her usual self again, detached, impersonal. But she was white to the lips and her eyes were electric as she said: "Luhor will pay for this!" She barely breathed it, but Mark heard her. And he knew what she meant. It was Luhor who had prepared the units of oxygen for the suits. VII Under the dim illumination maintained even as far as these outlying caves, the group went grimly on. Their passage through the tortuous corridors was dotted by discarded vacuum suits. But no echoes drifted back to them from the activity of the Base. Twice they lost their way, ending up against blank rock walls and retracing their steps. But at last the inter-connecting tunnel chain became familiar to the Commander. "She blames Luhor for the oxygen business!" Mark murmured to Carston walking beside him. "Should!" Carston exclaimed laconically, grimly. "Aladdian warned us against Luhor, remember? There'll be hell to pay when we get back! Any monkey-wrench thrown into the machinery of their plans, helps the Earth. I hope...." He broke off, staring moodily ahead. "She's far more human than you think," Mark Denning said softly. "Yes, I noticed that today." Carston's voice sounded glad. "It's only the Spartan training she learned while cruising the spacelanes with her piratical father that keeps her up--that, and the old man's insane will, driving her on through a sense of loyalty to him." They were so near to the Base now that Mark expected momentarily to hear the clang of metal in the factories, the voices of workmen. His heart quickened at the thought of seeing Aladdian, and he forgot his weariness in embroidering upon that thought. But the ominous stillness remained unbroken. They entered the final corridor leading to the vast central chamber. The Commander ran forward, with the anxious men close behind her. They entered the grotto. The subterranean Base extended into the distance before their startled, unbelieving eyes. "What--" Cynthia began bewilderedly. It was a dead city, soundless and inert. Under the distant cavern roof it had the air of a ghost town drained of all life. Mark's heart leaped into his mouth. "Aladdian!" he cried involuntarily, and his hands clenched in an agony of anxiety of helpless rage. Commander Cynthia was already running toward the palace, a deathly fear mirrored in her eyes. The men had stopped uncertainly, too weary and exhausted to understand. Then driven by a single thought, they staggered off to their building in search of water and food. Scarcely had the echoes of Mark's cry stopped reverberating, when from the shadows of a transverse corridor emerged the elfin figure of the Venusian. Aladdian gazed at Mark as if he had returned from the dead. She closed her eyes, swayed a little. Mark caught her in his arms. He too was silent. No words would serve. "To the palace!" she finally breathed, gently disengaging herself. Followed by Carston, they hurried to the imposing building where old George Marnik reigned. Aladdian led them swiftly through the panelled outer hall, through the magnificent salon where the loot from many years was a fabulous welter of wealth. Mark had no eyes for it now. They did not stop until they reached the inner chambers and finally came to George Marnik's room, where no one but Cynthia was ever permitted. * * * * * Lying grotesquely twisted on the priceless Martian tapestry that covered the bed, the ancient pirate was dead. Cynthia Marnik was kneeling beside him, weeping softly. There was no doubt as to the manner of his death. The pencil-thin opening through his temple could only have been done by an atom-blast. "Luhor," Aladdian said, indicating the wound with a gesture. They withdrew, leaving Cynthia alone with her grief. The two men followed the Venusian girl to the immense palace dining-room. With her own hands she served them food and drink, asking no questions, uttering no words until their vast hunger and thirst were appeased. Then she sat down. "And so," she began without preamble, "the unpredictable has entered." At their rush of questions she held up a hand. "Let me explain," she begged. "I can do it briefly if you are silent. After you left, Luhor ordered every man here to go aboard the Spacer. He blasted down two or three who refused; you will find them in the air-lock. Previous to that, I heard him arguing with George Marnik. He atom-blasted Marnik from behind. I know, because I deliberately contacted his mind, although the effort nearly drove me mad; it is not easy for us to tune to an alien intellect, but Luhor being partly Venusian helped." "The miracle is that he didn't take you with him," Carston ventured. "You were too valuable to leave behind!" "When we came here yesterday," she said simply, "I studied the plans of these caverns. When I learned what was in Luhor's mind, I hid in a maze of abandoned corridors. They searched for me a while, but since he plans to return, he gave up the search for the present. He had no time to waste! The Patrol has been to the Prison Swamp; failing to find either of you, and learning of my disappearance, _Earth has mobilized its fleet_!" "How--how do you know this?" Both men leaned tensely forward. "Through the ethero-magnum George Marnik has in his laboratory here--the most powerful receiving and transmission instrument I've ever seen, greater even than the ethero-magnum we have on Venus!" "So _that's_ how he kept always a step ahead of the Patrol," Carston mused. "The scientists he used to kidnap from space-liners--he must have forced them to perfect scientific inventions here!" "Yes," the Venusian girl nodded, "but I haven't told you the most important part, Luhor's plan. If he succeeds, there will be no peace. He has taken the men to the asteroid where Marnik's new fleet of space vessels are to be assembled. But worse than that--_they are also to fit gigantic rockets to the asteroid itself_! It is very dense, and greatly pitted, which simplifies things. With the rockets of this new metal he can guide the asteroid's course! It will be the terror of space, literally invulnerable, with banks of immense electro-cannon and atom-blasts, and cradling a swarm of the new Spacers!" Ernest Carston could only hold his head in his hands. Earth's greatest enemy had died in Marnik, but a greater, more ruthless one had arisen in Luhor! "Go on, Aladdian, please," Mark's tones were reassuring. "Luhor does not suspect that I contacted his mind. He believes all of you have died in the wastes--I got that from his mind, too. Since he will return, because Vulcan's to be the seat of his empire, and he wants me, we have time to plan how we are going to receive him. He's persuaded that the only living being on Vulcan now is a defenseless girl." She smiled enigmatically. "But that asteroid! That hellish threat to Earth!" Carston was beside himself. "And to Venus, and Mars," Aladdian reminded him gently. "It will take months for those rockets to be installed, Earthman. He will be here long before that, I am certain of it--as only a woman can be certain." She raised her eyes and gazed at the doorway. * * * * * Framed at the entrance to the dining-room, Cynthia Marnik stood looking somberly and dry-eyed. Aladdian rose swiftly and went over to her. "My dear ..." the Venusian said softly, a world of compassion in her voice. Cynthia smiled wanly and took the tumbler of water that Carston extended to her. She drank dazedly and then sat down with the inexpressible weariness of one whose world has come tumbling down about her head. Aladdian darted to the kitchen and upon returning made the Earth girl drink a cup of concentrate, then led her away, to her bedroom. "You must sleep," Aladdian was saying softly, monotonously, with a hypnotic cadence in her voice. "I wonder if it will be safe to arm the men?" Carston questioned thoughtfully, his mind grappling with the problem. "That's a chance we'll have to take," Mark Denning replied. "A few among them are not really hardened criminals, but are _politicals_, as you know. I think they will all fight for us, provided we can offer them freedom when, and if, we win." "I can make them no promises not sanctioned by the Earth Council," Carston said stiffly. "Remember, their lives are forfeit!" "And so will ours be, if you don't snap out of that single-track rut in which you've grooved your brain!" Mark exclaimed acidly. "Council or no Council, the Earth, Venus, Mars and the colonies must be saved! This is no time to quibble about ethics. A hell of a lot will be left of your Council if we don't stop Luhor!" "You startle me sometimes, Mark Denning. You do not sound as a true servant of the Earth State!" "Because to you," Mark said slowly, "the State is the few decrepit members calling themselves the Council, and the top-heavy Government of Earth. But to me, the 'State' are the millions and billions of human beings whose destinies are ruled by a self-appointed few, and who are now facing even a worse slavery if we don't succeed in being what Aladdian calls 'the unpredictable!'" Carston's face flushed with anger. He drew himself to his full height as he said, "I represent the Government of Earth, which rules the Planets--and I am your superior officer!" "You're wrong!" Mark Denning countered, rising too. "I'm a free agent as of this moment, and recognize no superior. I'll not be hamstrung by rules and regulations which can't serve us now, Carston!" "No need to quarrel," Aladdian spoke placidly from the doorway where, unnoticed, she had been listening. "Because only I and Cynthia can make terms with Earth, if we survive." "You and Commander Cynthia?" Carston exclaimed. "Both of your lives have been forfeit. I doubt if the Council will be willing to listen to any terms coming from _you_." Mark Denning's face was stained by a dull flush, and he took a step forward; but Aladdian laid her hand lightly on his arm and stopped him. "The Colonel belongs to the old order," she said very softly, "it is difficult for him to adjust himself to a changing universe. But this time it is beyond his control." "Why?" Carston uttered the word grimly. "Because through the ethero-magnum I have already warned Venus and Mars. My planet is being mobilized. Mars will soon take the necessary steps. But the most important reason of all, is that Earth has no means of landing a fleet on Vulcan, does not know the location of Luhor's asteroid, and _does not even suspect the existence of the new allotropic metal_." Carston looked baffled as the Venusian girl spoke, then turned to Mark Denning with the expression of a man who for once felt hopelessly lost. "I can promise the men who aid us a fortune to each," Aladdian continued, "and the leisure to spend it--on Venus. As for the Earth," she said thoughtfully--"only Commander Cynthia and I know the formula for the new metal, and the location of the asteroid!" * * * * * "I will talk to the men!" Mark said with a finality that left no doubt. "Let them rest for a few hours, then I'll see to it that they're on our side. I know how to rouse them. Wait until they learn that Luhor short-changed them on oxygen! How much backing can you expect from Venus, Aladdian?" "To the last man," she said quietly. "They have already seen me through the ethero-magnum, and heard my story. I intercepted the Tri-Planetary Beam as the Earth broadcast, and transmitted our beam along their channel. By the time Earth's Government set out their interceptor to neutralize my beam, it was already too late; the three planets are seething!" "And Luhor? Wouldn't he have picked up your beam on the Spacer and heard you?" Aladdian shrugged. "He knows I'm here. The confusion created by my broadcast only served to aid his plans for the moment. He has nothing to fear, as far as he knows. A war between the planets would only make his conquest simpler." "And knowing that," Carston spoke bitterly, "you still broadcast your story and let your image be seen! Do you suppose Venus will ever be content now with anything short of war?" "Yes, I do. We are intelligent beings, not Martian atavisms, nor do we have your Earth's insane will to _Power_. We only want peace and with it freedom. But the game is ruthless, Carston, the universe is the stake!" Aladdian turned to leave. "Mark," she said gently from the doorway, "Cynthia can show you where the arsenal is located; you'll find every imaginable weapon. Also, you had better study the combination that opens the air-locks, and the synchronized degravitators. I suspect that Luhor will be back here soon--_very soon_." Suddenly the terrific reaction of that day hit Mark with sickening impact. He was hardly able to rise to his feet. Carston was slumped over the table; Mark went over and shook him gently, and somehow aided the older man to his feet. Together they went into the fabulously furnished salon, and unable to go any further, threw themselves on couches piled with priceless rugs and embroidered scarves from the various planets. Carston instantly was asleep. Despite his utter weariness, Mark slept fitfully, awakening and dropping back to sleep as the hours passed in their eternal caravan. Something clamored at the back of his brain, something he had forgotten because of the major crisis they'd had to confront on their return to the Base. And suddenly he sat upright. The overhead lights had automatically dimmed, no one was stirring. With a shock, Mark had remembered Vulc and the man they had left to watch him! He leaped to his feet, aching in every bone, and ran to the building where the men were quartered. "If Vulc gets tired of waiting and wriggles through that hole!..." He tried not to think of the rest. He burst into the building and roused the men. "Up, on your feet, there's no time to waste!" His terrible urgency instilled them with a nameless fear, prodding them as nothing else would have done. "Your lives are at stake," he told them bluntly, and reminded them of Vulc. "At any moment he might decide he's waited long enough. Who among you knows how to repair that breach?" Three of the men came forward. "All right," Mark told them, "hurry to the shops and get what instruments and materials you need--but hurry!" * * * * * The men could not return to sleep now, knowing that at any moment the Base's life-giving air might go rushing away. This emergency, following so close upon the other hardships of the day, seemed too much. Mark saw that they were all very near the breaking point. Now was the psychological moment to speak to them, and by giving them the entire picture, lift them above the present crisis as well as inspire them with hope for the future. Calmly he told of Luhor's treachery in giving them a short oxygen supply, with the intention of murdering them all. Deliberately, with calculated phrases, he aroused their hatred and thirst for revenge. Mark paused, letting it sink in, giving time for their dark passions to reach a peak. Then he told of Luhor's asteroid, and the threat to the planets. He dangled before their eyes the promise of untold wealth, and freedom on Venus for the rest of their lives. To give his promises authority and weight, he made no bones about the fact that he was a high operative of the Tri-Planetary Bureau of Prisons--but he climaxed it with the guarantee of a blanket pardon from the Earth Council itself. "You will see and hear the Council on the ethero-magnum, but we shall be making the terms," Mark Denning said forcefully. "There's no trick in this, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose! In the Swamp, your lives were forfeit; they were forfeit here on Vulcan too. I promise you wealth on Venus, and the freedom you'll never have any other way! Who's with me?" He need not have asked, for the clamor that answered him was affirmative and unanimous. Gone for the moment was their fatigue, as they embroidered upon the possibilities of the days to come. Not until the trio returned from repairing the breach, bringing Vulc with them, did the men return to their sleep with the first and only hope they had had in years. Only Mark Denning realized the trials to come. These few men had been won over easily. Not so easy would be the negotiated terms with Earth. The Earth Government had won its dominance over the System the hard way, only after a bitter ten-years' inter-planetary war, and it would not easily relinquish its position. VIII The days that followed were eternities to the little group left stranded on Vulcan Base. Nerves were taut and tempers were short. Every man there, as well as the two women, realized that their very lives as well as the fate of the System depended on the day of Luhor's return from the asteroid. Mark had aroused the men too well. They were impatient and restless. They didn't want their freedom handed to them on a silver platter, they wanted to fight for it. Aladdian had said Luhor would be back soon--very soon. Mark questioned her about it. "Even with that fast Spacer," Aladdian replied, "it will take him several days to get out to that asteroid and back again. Cynthia tells me her father sent a crew of men there a month ago, to assemble the new Spacers. Luhor will undoubtedly win them all to his side, and bring half of them back to continue the work here. Cynthia says--" "Cynthia seems to have confided a lot in you!" Mark exclaimed with a sudden, unexplainable suspicion. Aladdian smiled wearily, and slowly shook her head. "You are demoted back to the lower order, Mark Denning," she said with a hint of the same mockery Mark had known in the Swamp. "Cynthia Marnik needs our help now. She only carried out her father's orders, but now that the dynasty is crumbling about her ears, she's bewildered and a little frightened. Something else has happened to her too, for the first time in her life." "What's that?" "Never mind," Aladdian said enigmatically. "Ernest Carston knows. It will turn out all right. Meanwhile you had better put the men here to work, it will help pass the time. Goodbye ... Mark." Like an azure-winged elf she hurried back to the laboratory where she spent most of her time. That was the first instance Mark could remember when Aladdian had called him by his first name, and he liked it. He called the men together and assigned them to posts at the furnaces, where they continued to turn out the metal that would be fashioned into the super rocket-tubes. Earth was massing its fleet and Venus was mobilizing. Mark realized that if a truce could not be called, they would need every one of the outlaw Spacers on the asteroid, and others as well. He took a few of the men with him to the arsenal, where they began to get every available weapon in readiness for the Tri-Planetary showdown that was sure to come. * * * * * "Tell the men to stop work," Aladdian said to Mark two days later, "then bring them to the laboratory. They have as much right as we to know what is happening. I have been working on the ethero-magnum sender, and I shall try to contact both Venus and Earth." They gathered in the magnificent laboratory George Marnik had erected. Here, various machines were arranged in preponderant array, but all were dwarfed by the imposing ethero-magnum in the center of the room. Hidden atomomotors hummed a smooth and powerful threnody. The control panel, as tall as Aladdian herself, connected to huge coils of radical design which themselves led to the televise, a huge sensitized sheet of metal reaching clear up to the ceiling. Carston, an Earth patriot to the end, watched these activities with misgivings. But he was silent, curiously so, and Mark wondered at it. Mark was soon to know the reason for Carston's silence, and to realize that the Earth official did not give up so easily.... "I want you all to stand back against the walls," Aladdian said, "out of range of the televise. Luhor may pick this up, and he must not know there is anyone here but me." She operated the dials quickly, surely, with tendril-like fingers. A faint, far away voice was heard droning monotonously. "Earth is sending to Venus now," Aladdian said, never once removing her gaze from the dancing dials before her. "If I can intercept the Earth beam, I can get my message to Venus through that channel, by drowning them out. I did it once before." The sound of the voice increased, and words became distinguishable. They were haranguing, dictatorial--undoubtedly one of the Earth Council speaking to Venus. At the same time the huge metallic sheet above Aladdian's head took on a silvery glow, and a wavering scene began to appear. The scene was a crowded city square, with thousands of faces upturned to a televise screen atop one of the buildings. "That is N'Vaarl, Capitol City of Venus," Aladdian murmured. "They are listening to the Earth broadcast. Now I will let them see me." Automatically her hand reached out, and grasped a lever which she threw downward. The atomomotors shrieked as they absorbed the increased power, and soon the sound rose above the audible. At the same time the Earth voice was drowned out, and the scene at N'Vaarl became very clear to the watchers in the room. On the huge public televise screen at N'Vaarl, the image of Aladdian, Princess of Venus and daughter of Bedrim the Liberator, became visible. The crowd did not cheer, but awaited her message, knowing that at any moment the Earth would throw off the beam when it realized what was happening. "Greetings, my people!" Aladdian spoke quickly. "As I told you before, Earth is mobilizing its fleet and I know that you are preparing for any contingency. That is well, but I entreat you not to act in any manner until you have heard further from me! There is a greater danger than that of Earth! I am safe and well, I cannot come to you now, but soon--" * * * * * In that moment the Earth beam ceased, and the scene on the televise blanked out. Aladdian turned with a satisfied smile to Mark and Cynthia and the others. "It is enough that they saw me. My people will not act now without word from me. I hope I shall never have to give that word." "Aladdian," Mark spoke worriedly, "isn't it a risk for you to broadcast at all? The Earth Government doesn't know your present whereabouts, but if they were to send out tracer beams and learn you were operating from Vulcan ... well, it's true that no Patrol ship is equipped to land on Vulcan, but they could bottle us up here--" Ernest Carston, who had been silent but eternally watchful, became suddenly tense at Mark's words. "They _have_ sent out tracer beams," Aladdian replied, "but with this instrument I can neutralize them all." Fondly she touched the ethero-magnum by her side. "Anyway, the immediate danger is not from Earth, but from Luhor. Let us not forget that! And I must warn Earth, must make them understand." She turned to the dialed panel again, and even as her fingers made swift connections, she continued to speak. "It may not be easy to establish a direct channel from here to Earth, but I think I have completed a new trans-telector beam on which George Marnik was working. It should do away with the magnetic disturbance caused by our close proximity to the sun. We shall see." Again the atomomotors whined and ascended the scale. This time, there was a new exultant note. Minutes passed, then the overhead screen began to take on a hazy, shifting blur. Aladdian's fingers moved unerringly on the dials. The blur came suddenly, sharply into focus. Carston, standing against the far wall next to Mark Denning, leaned tensely forward, his eyes aglow. The scene on the televise was the Earth Council. Carston almost leaped forward in his excitement, but Mark gripped his arm tightly. Aladdian was speaking to the Council. In slow, matter-of-fact tones she told of George Marnik, of the new metal, of Luhor and Luhor's plans. She told of the asteroid and the fleet being assembled there, without revealing the asteroid's position. She described the properties of the new metal but was careful not to hint of its source. "I seek to warn you," Aladdian's voice came fervent and clear. "You are plunging into disaster. It is not my people I think of now, but the Tri-Planet Federation! If you continue to mobilize your fleet I am not sure I can control the Irreconcilables among my people--I certainly cannot control Dar Vaajo of Mars, who is headstrong beyond reason. It will mean an hecatomb in space, with Luhor holding his asteroid in readiness for the final blow!" "This Luhor and the formidable asteroid of which you speak," came the cold, sneering voice of the Earth Coordinator. "Tell us more of them. Give us the location of the asteroid." Aladdian hesitated for an instant. "No. That I cannot do." "You cannot, because no such asteroid and no such metal exists! You would try to frighten us with this story of a demon asteroid and a super space fleet! It would not be that you seek to gain time for your people to rally to you, now that they know you have escaped the Prison Swamp? Or perhaps you need time in which to coordinate your resources with those of Dar Vaajo of Mars! Let us advise you, Aladdian, that within a week the main body of our fleet will be at Venus, and it will not go well with your Irreconcilables. We shall know how to handle them this time, we shall not be so lenient as before! Perhaps, in order to spare them, you will wish to give yourself up to us, daughter of Bedrim!" Aladdian's slender body grew taut as though struck by a whip lash. With a single sweep of the control lever she cut off the beam. Dazedly she crossed the room, oblivious to the murmurs of the others; her usually alabaster face was now chalk white beneath her curling blue-black hair, her lips were pressed tight but they trembled nevertheless. At the laboratory door Mark caught her arm, walked beside her. "Aladdian," he choked. "I--" She became aware of him then, smiled up at him through her bitterness. "Aladdian, I am--I just wanted to say--I'm sorry I'm an Earthman!" She stopped suddenly, faced him, took one of his hands in both of hers. "No, Mark! Do not say that, do not ever say it. For you are more than that ... much more...." IX It was night, and the overhead lights in the corridors were dimmed. Ernest Carston tossed restlessly in his bed. He could not sleep, he had been unable to sleep since seeing and hearing the Earth Council on the ethero-magnum. Carston arose, and dressed quickly. Silently he crossed the room to the outer door, and stepped out into the corridor. He paced slowly, aimlessly, his brow knit in deep thought. Finally he made a decision, and turned his footsteps in the direction of the palace and the laboratory. He was still an Earth official; he had known all the time that he would have to take matters here into his own hands. Before he reached the corridor leading to the laboratory, however, he heard the soft shuffle of footsteps. Carston leaped back into the shadows just as a lone figure emerged from one of the transverse corridors. It passed very close to him, and he saw that it was Cynthia Marnik; her face seemed very white, and her steps were hurried. Carston's heart quickened a pace, as he followed her at a safe distance, keeping to the shadows. She continued along the main corridor, past the men's quarters and past the furnaces. With a shock, Carston realized she was heading for the outer air-lock. He reached there in time to see the huge door slide open, then Cynthia stepped through, and the door closed. Carston waited, giving her time to leave the tunnel, before he followed. Finally he entered the tunnel himself, having long since learned how to operate the mechanism of these doors. Cynthia was gone; the outer doors were closed. Carston hurried down the long tunnel. The magnetic degravitizing coils along each side were silent now, would remain so until the Spacer's return. Carston reached the racks of vacuum suits near the outer door, quickly donned one and was soon outside the Base. Against the sun-swept horizon, a hundred yards away, he could easily discern Cynthia's metal-encased figure. She kept close to the shadows at the foot of the low lying cliffs. Not once did she look back. A quarter of a mile further, she turned sharply, entered a narrow, steep-walled canyon. Puzzled, Carston hurried forward. He reached the canyon and entered it, realizing that this must be one of the few places on Vulcan's surface where there was anything simulating night; it wasn't really dark, but sort of a twilight gloom between the rock cliffs sheering upward. And he saw Cynthia. She hadn't gone far. Her vacuum-suited figure stood very still, and she seemed to be staring up at the immensity of space. Carston crept closer, came very near indeed, until he could see the profiled whiteness of her face beneath the helmet. Carston stared too, following her gaze. At first he didn't see a thing. Then, high on the horizon, out of the sun's glare, right between the canyon walls ... he caught the bright blue glint of a star. He suddenly realized what it was, and with a sharp intake of breath he whispered: "Earth!" * * * * * She must have had her helmet phones on. She turned slowly to face him, and Carston was startled at the clear-cut radiance of her face. "It's the Earth, yes ... it's beautiful. There's no other place on this planet where you can see it like that, and then only when the position is right. Sometimes not for months...." Carston stepped quickly to her side. Cynthia averted her face, but not before he saw the glint of tears in her eyes, and the lengthening glimmer of one that rolled down her cheek beneath the transparent helmet. For an instant, Carston was dumbfounded. Then a vast exultation surged within him. "I knew it!" he whispered fiercely. "Almost from the first moment I saw you, I sensed there was something artificial beneath your mask of hardness. This is it! You don't hate Earth at all, Cynthia, you've never hated it!" "Yes," she spoke softly, her voice deepening. "I've never hated Earth. It was only father--" Abruptly she stopped, and her gaze strayed to where the blue star shone like an aquamarine ablaze. "I can't remember clearly; it's like a vague dream--but I have a dim vision of green fields and golden light, and clouds in an unreal blue sky; and trees beside a wide lake, with a crisp tang of air, different from the air here. To me, that's Earth. I was born there." Her voice faded, and as if from a great distance Carston heard her say, "Oh perhaps it's just a dream." "No, it's not a dream," Carston whispered, standing very close to her now. "It's part of you, it belongs to you! All Earthians feel that out here, a yearning to get back. Cynthia, I've loved you from the very first ... didn't you know? Let me take you back with me, out of this madness that can only mean death for us all!" He stopped, at the sight of her upturned face, white and wan. "I guessed. Yes, I know. I've been waiting a long time to hear you say this. And I'd go with you, Carston, but how is it possible now? My life's forfeit, you yourself said so!" Now Carston was very sure of himself. "No, my dear," he said softly, trying to filter the triumph from his voice. "Your life's not forfeit if you help prevent the carnage and destruction that Aladdian's mad dream will bring about. She doesn't know, she _can't_ know the awful power of Earth's fleet. Luhor's vaunted super-cruisers will be so many leaves scattered in the void. This allotropic metal on which his hope of invincibility is based, can be neutralized and destroyed!" "But how? What can we do?" Cynthia's voice held a note of despair, as her hand unconsciously went out to his. "We can give Earth the location of Luhor's asteroid, and the secret of Vulcan!" He said it so softly, so insinuatingly that it was little more than a thought. "I can promise you an absolute pardon, my dear--more! I can promise you honor for aiding Earth. The Council knows how to reward, as it knows how to punish." "But Aladdian and Mark? Would it not mean death, or worse, for them both?" She shuddered, as a vision of the Swamp came before her eyes. "I could never condemn them to that," she thought aloud. "With my influence, I can get amnesty for them--leniency at least," Carston said with the glibness of one to whom nothing mattered but the ultimate task that must be accomplished at all costs. "All Earth wants is to avoid another war. If we make it possible for Earth's fleet to capture Luhor and neutralize the asteroid, I'm certain the Council will pardon Aladdian and Mark." He pressed her hand confidently in both of his. She seemed to hesitate, but Carston knew she had already made up her mind. "If you're sure you can obtain the pardon--and stop this senseless war--yes--yes, my dear, I'll give the Earth Council any information you wish--" Her voice dwindled and stopped as Carston took her into his arms. He, himself, was white and trembling with the reaction of having accomplished his task. Over her shoulder he could see the twinkling blue dot of Earth. He smiled, and it was a very smug smile. His breath was long and trembling, but his intense emotion at the moment was _not_ akin to love. X "Soon, now." Carston's murmur echoed eerily against the shrill hum of the atomomotors in the upper scales. The phantasmal glow of the selector screens suffused the chamber. Selenic cells poured additional power into the trans-telector beam as Cynthia's fingers trembled over the shining dials. Carston, standing beside her, was white-faced and tense. Slowly a shifting blur materialized on the huge televise of the ethero-magnum. It focused, and the thin-lipped, ascetic features of the Earth Coordinator materialized in the immense Council room of Earth. The Council in full session surrounded him. All were intent on their receiving screens, on which Carston and Cynthia were reflected. Cynthia stepped nervously aside, and Carston came forward. He bowed low. Then his voice, hoarse with uncontrollable elation, rose in greeting. "Your Beneficence, and Elders of the Council! I am speaking from _Vulcan_, the long-sought base of Captain George Marnik, where I have been a prisoner for many months! But no longer. This," he gestured hesitantly, "is Cynthia, George Marnik's daughter, for whom I beseech the Coordinator's and the Council's clemency for the service she is about to do." Then in slow and measured words Carston told in detail all that had happened, beginning with his own release from the Swamp by Cynthia, relating Luhor's murder of Marnik, and finally telling of the asteroid where Luhor's space cruisers were being assembled, and of the new allotropic metal being mined on Vulcan. Then he motioned for Cynthia to come forward. The Coordinator had listened in silence, his grim face impassive. Every eye in the Council room was unwaveringly on the screen, and the silence lay heavy between two distant worlds. Slowly, Cynthia walked toward the ethero-magnum sender, a sheaf of note paper in her hand. She smiled wanly, but confidently at Carston. Then in a colorless voice she read her mathematical figures giving the position of the asteroid in space, and the formula for the shortest approach from Vulcan, as the key for computation of the trajectory from Earth. Without animation, she gave the formula for the allotropic metal process, and the secret of the entrance to Vulcan. Then she fell silent. As if she didn't know what to do, she turned to Carston and caught for a fleeting instant the smug smile of triumph on his lips; but before she could comprehend its meaning, it was gone. "Will ... will I be pardoned?" Cynthia questioned aloud, more to Carston than to the Coordinator on the screen. But the silence in the Council room of Earth persisted, as busy mathematicians already were furiously computing the mathematical formulae. A thin, contemptuous smile had parted the Coordinator's lips. It was the first time Carston had ever seen him smile, and the room where he and Cynthia stood, although millions of miles distant, seemed colder suddenly as that glacial glimmer came through the screen. Carston opened his lips to speak. "Your Beneficence," he began-- * * * * * But suddenly, catapulted from the deepening darkness of the corridors, an azure-winged figure with curved hands outstretched fell like an avenging fury upon Carston's back! Dainty hands, suddenly transformed into claws, dug like spikes of steel; a supple body too ethereal for strength, now seemed made of metal as the Venusian girl attacked him with a savagery that brought every man of Earth's distant Council room to his feet! Close on her heels Mark Denning had barely time to separate the tangled figures. Carston's face dripped blood where Aladdian's fingernails had furrowed deep. Cynthia seemed rooted to the spot. So incredibly swift had it been, that the battle was over in seconds. Aladdian's eyes were pools of fire as she faced the Council. Her streaming hair seemed to shimmer as she spat her venom into the screen. "Very well, send your space fleet, you clumsy fools! Let your madness condemn the planets to a bath of blood! Yes, you have the formula for the allotropic metal--but what good is it to you without a source of supply? You have the location of the asteroid--but do you suppose your fleet can stand against such a mobile fortress as Luhor will make it? But it's a waste of words, I know I can never convince you. Only death and destruction can. But this I do tell you! Never, _never again_ will you enslave Venus! Never again will you imprison me in that inhuman Swamp, and never will you land on Vulcan! For I have one weapon left, one which only we of Venus possess. We have used it once on Mars, once in our history only, for we are not warlike. But before Luhor and the Martian hordes overrun my planet and _yours_ as he certainly can, I will use this weapon, Earthian!" On the screen, the Coordinator's face was livid. "Arrest her," he said across the immense distance to Carston. "In the name of the Supreme Council of the Tri-Planetary Federation, arrest her! Her life's forfeit!" But Carston stood motionless, pale as death, suddenly confronted by the grim figure of Mark who gripped an electro-pistol in his hand. At this veritable moment, out of the void, cutting in on the beam like the disembodied cachination of some strange creature, wave upon wave of gigantic mirth poured on two worlds! And as every participant of this drama stood tense, watching their screens, there slowly emerged the half-breed figure of Luhor, his gargantuan laughter still roaring in uncontrollable paroxysms. "So that's it!" Luhor managed to choke between spasms. "What entertainment you have provided me with--and what information! And to think, Aladdian, that I'd planned to make you my empress. Why, my little dove has claws!" he exclaimed admiringly. His immense, ugly bulk dominated the entire screen, as his bellowing laughter began again. The Earth Coordinator, almost beside himself, threw a master switch; the televise screens of two worlds flickered and went blank, the pulsing whine of the atomomotors was like a dirge. Cynthia passed a trembling hand across her eyes, and her gaze wavered before Aladdian's accusing stare. She glanced briefly at Carston with a slowly dawning wonderment, as if an awareness of his aims had begun to awaken within her. "I--I'm afraid I've made a mess of things," she said in a slow, deep voice. "Ever since father's death, I seem to have lost my grip. I'm so sorry, Aladdian, I thought it was for the best; Carston assured me we'd be pardoned...." Her voice trailed off as she turned her face away from them all. "I should burn you!" Mark Denning said to Carston in a cold, tight voice, and Carston went white. "You've managed to wreck our plans about as completely as possible. If the Earth blasts Luhor out of space, we face surrender or slow starvation. If Luhor wins, he can starve us out or blast his way in here with his allotropic cruisers, now that he's forewarned by you. Either way we lose--but I guarantee you, Carston, _you_ won't come out of this easily!" Each word was like ice, and Aladdian nodded slowly at Mark's words, a strange light in her brilliant eyes. * * * * * "We haven't lost yet, Mark." With a swift motion she crossed to the ethero-magnum again, and turned it on. "Remember, I have still a weapon. My people are behind me." "But Venus doesn't have a fleet! Earth has seen to that." "Wait." Her unerring precision brought the screen to life in a burst of light. A scene took place, alien, exotic--the imperial palace on Venus. A great crowd stood before it in silence, extending into the distance, as if the park-like expanse had become a place of pilgrimage. In eternal vigil all faced the televise screen that rose from the floor level to the top of the palace. Fantastic blue-green mountains filled the background, dwarfing the small fragile figure that materialized on the receiving screen. "My people, I speak to you for the third, perhaps for the last time--" There was a world of yearning in the cello-like voice as Aladdian opened her arms toward them. A cyclonic roar burst forth in tribute and greeting, but quickly died down as they awaited her message. "When I last spoke, I told you not to act without word from me. I hoped I would never have to give that word, but now I fear I must. The hour is almost here. What I will ask of you, is the supreme sacrifice. You know what that means. I, too, am prepared to make it. There is no other way. Many will die, but only that the others may avoid an even worse slavery than they now endure, and that we may attain our rightful inheritance, an equal place in the Planetary Federation." The voice rose like a stream of music, and tears were in Aladdian's eyes. "The choice is yours, my people!" When the thunderous response had died down in waves of overpowering sound, Aladdian stood in silence for several moments; in silence, too, the Venusian multitude remained with upturned faces. Mark had an eerie feeling that a _Planet_ was in tune with the fragile, winged figure. When the connection had been broken, and once more the laboratory had reverted to semi-gloom, Mark turned to Carston and removed his weapons from him. "I can't take any chances with you now," he said coldly, "after what you've done. You wanted to become a hero in the eyes of the Earth Council. Well, from now on you'll dance to my tune." "But not for long!" Carston sneered openly, recovering his poise and confidence. "The game's up, Denning; you're a renegade to Earth and shall be treated as such. It'll be child's play for Earth's fleet to burn Luhor and his asteroid to a crisp. After that--" He stopped and grinned contemptuously. "After that, we'll be taken care of?" It was Aladdian who spoke, and her voice was soft like dark molten gold. "Careful, Mark," she interposed quickly, placing her hand on Mark's arm as his grip tightened on the electro. "_I_ don't deserve any lenience," Cynthia said dully. "I've been a fool." Aladdian gazed at the Earth-girl with a universe of pity in her eyes, and a great understanding. "No, my dear," she said softly, "not a fool. Only a girl in love." "But you!" she lashed at Carston. "You shall reap the whirlwind; and I assure you, a Venusian whirlwind is beyond your ken!" XI "No sign of the asteroid!" Mark Denning's voice was harsh as he addressed the restless group of men milling in front of the laboratory. "We've picked up Earth's fleet, that is all; it's now proceeding beyond the orbit of Mars. Come in and watch if you wish, but it may be hours yet." The clang and clamor of the furnaces had long ago ceased, as Vulcan awaited the outcome of the space struggle that would mean so much to them all. Since Carston's betrayal had become known, the men had discussed the situation from every angle. Paradoxically they hoped for Luhor's victory, so that _they_ could deal with the Martian half-breed. At the very worst, death was better than Paradim, which surely awaited them again if Earth won in this crisis. As Earth's fleet in awesome array, advanced toward the asteroid's position which Cynthia had given, Aladdian kept a ceaseless vigil at the televise. In far off N'Vaarl, the palace grounds were a sea of upturned Venusian faces intent upon their screen. Dar Vaajo sat brooding on his barbaric throne on Mars, his craggy face dark with passion, thinking of the upstart Luhor who had wrecked his plans. Within the austere Council chamber of Earth, the Coordinator paced to and fro before the screen, while the awed Council didn't dare to stir. It hadn't been hard for the ethero-screens of each world to pick out the flaming majesty of Earth's fleet, and they had followed its progress for hours. The meteoric speed seemed a snail's pace, across the respective televise panels. "Look!" Aladdian cried, spilling the cup of hot concentrate Cynthia had brought to her. With electrifying suddenness, the scene in the panel had leaped to vivid life. Concentric whorls of green, disintegrating light flashed from all units of Earth's fleet simultaneously, merging into a single appalling cloud that preceded the fleet itself. To the watchers, the spread of the light seemed slow, but it must have encompassed thousands of miles. "But why?" Aladdian breathed, even as she twisted the dials trying to center the scene more perfectly. "They're not within hours of the asteroid belt, and they will only give their position away to Luhor!" Carston, Mark and the others had come crowding into the room to watch the scene. Carston whispered, exultantly, "That green light is radio-active disintegrating energy! It merges with whatever it touches, unbalancing the atomic structure of metal. Wait'll they envelop Luhor's asteroid in that!" "Yes, I know it well," Aladdian murmured. "They used it in the long war against Venus. But there is a neutralizing force now, which even Earth does not know. George Marnik developed it, right here on Vulcan Base." Carston's lips curled, but he said nothing. The sight of Earth's mighty armada sweeping forward on its mission had instilled him with a swaggering confidence. They continued to watch the scene in silence, even as the Earth Council and the people of Venus and Dar Vaajo on Mars were watching. Still the Fleet swept forward. Minutes passed. The greenish half-circle of light preceded it, beating back the darkness, expanding unimaginable distances as though reaching out greedy hands. Then suddenly Aladdian's words came true. * * * * * From a point in space far in advance of the Fleet, a tiny white beam of light became visible. It reached out like a slashing saber, swiftly expanding and closing the gap of darkness. It came from the asteroid itself, now revealed to the watchers for the first time--merely a tiny dark mass that seemed to move forward with infinite caution against the Fleet. "There it is!" Mark breathed. "Luhor's carried his plan through! He's made a rogue asteroid of it, moved it clear out of the belt--" Words ceased, as they watched the preliminary maneuvers. The asteroid's slashing saber of white touched the disintegrating power of the green. But it was the green that disintegrated! Slowly, almost carressingly, the pale beam moved across the advancing blanket of light. Where it touched, the green dissolved magically as though it had never been. "That's what I meant. The etheric inertia ray!" Aladdian's murmur was tinged with exultation, as she sensed Carston standing beside her taut with surprise. Still the Earth Fleet moved forward in battle formation, in staggered horizontal tiers. Impelled by the terrific momentum, it depended upon maneuverability to escape the impending danger. But, inexorably, the asteroid moved forward also, as if hungry to meet its enemy. Limned behind its own ghastly light, it was revealed as a leisurely rotating mass of rock and mineral, with jagged pinnacles reaching out and deep black gullies agape. A blinding lance of electric blue lashed from Earth's Flagship, like a probing finger searching for a weak point. It stabbed Luhor's white ray and ended in a corruscating upheaval of incandescent light. The asteroid was very close now; it seemed as if nothing could prevent that sidereal mass, some ten miles in diameter, from plowing through the tiers of Earth Spacers. But in that veritable moment when disaster seemed certain, Earth's massed fleet executed one of the most spectacular feats of navigation the Universe had ever witnessed. The units literally _broke apart_ and moved outward into a perfect cone-like formation, with the base, or open end, toward the asteroid. Again the green radiance, from all sides now, went out to envelop the asteroid in a glaucous sheath, as the dark mass drifted into the trap. "This is it!" Carston gloated hoarsely. "Now watch your asteroid crumble!" The others said nothing. All were tense, as the tiny ten-mile world entered the open end of the cone to what seemed certain destruction. Now the white etheric inertia ray lashed out savagely again, sweeping in swift arcs, but failed to dispel the concentrated waves of green fire. Then from the surface of the dark world, Luhor's own space fleet arose--six cruisers only, dwarfed in size by some of Earth's larger ships. With blinding speed, the six allotropic cruisers headed for the closing jaws of the trap. * * * * * The Earth Commander was not prepared for such acceleration. It was unbelievable. He had little time to think, as Luhor's cruisers blasted with the raking fire of electro-cannon at close range. Three Earth ships went hurtling end over end through the void, ripped from stern to bow. Impervious to the wild fire of Earth's Fleet, the allotropic cruisers plowed on. Two Earth cruisers at the jaws of the trap were unable to maneuver in time. Luhor's ships in a straight line hit them head-on, plowed through them and out again, leaving behind a tangled wreck of twisted girders and scattered debris. Luhor's six ships were out of the trap now, and they wheeled in a mighty arc, hung chain-poised as though to watch. Behind, the now glowing asteroid erupted the real destruction. This had been Luhor's plan from the first. The balance of men taken from Paradim Swamp, left on the bleak little world to fight for their lives, now released hidden rocket tubes that blasted in perfectly spaced rotation. The rocky world began to spin, as it plunged ponderously forward. Bank upon bank of electro-cannon lashed out like uncurled blue lightning. Atomite bombs burst among Earth's fleet which surrounded this deadly pinwheel. In less than a minute Earth's vast armada was completely disorganized, space became a shambles of ripped metal plates, twisted rocket tubes and blasted hulls. Like a livid, craggy corner of hell running rampant, the rogue asteroid spun faster and faster, spewing annihilation. But this was its death throes. The concentrated disintegrating glow had taken effect, and could not now be stopped. The craggy world began to crumble in great masses of rock and metal like a leprous organism. The few remaining units of the Earthian fleet tried desperately to escape the disintegrating lethal mass--but behind them now, at a safe distance from it all, Luhor's ships barred the way. Pitilessly his electro-cannon raked them, impervious to their erratic salvos. His Flagship with its impossible speed darted among them like a cosmic scimitar, until barely half a dozen of Earth's former armada were able to flee in scattered disarray. Half a dozen, out of more than a hundred. Contemptuously, Luhor did not even deign to pursue. Where an immense battle fleet and a dwarf world had battled for supremacy in space, now only shattered metal fragments and a disintegrated rain of mineral and rock remained veiled by cosmic darkness. XII It had been too much and too sudden for speech. Aladdian was on her feet now, even she was still gripped by the awe of the vast debacle. Mark watched Ernest Carston stumble dazedly from the Laboratory room, the appalling horror in his eyes betraying how intimately Earth's tragedy was his. He'd sent them out there to conquer, and they had remained to die. No one spoke. The crowding men who'd hoped for a victory by Luhor, even turned away before the magnitude of his power. The laboratory on Vulcan reflected in miniature the shocked silence of four worlds. They'd seen the mightiest armada of all time reduced to nothing in a space of minutes. Aladdian was the first to act. With the same beam, through which they'd watched the holocaust, she contacted Earth. She tuned the Council chamber where gray faces looked to the Coordinator in bewilderment and fear. But the Coordinator, stricken to the depths of his narrow soul, was incapable of speech. In the oppressive silence Aladdian's winged figure materialized on the screen. "I greet you, Earthians, for the last time." Her molten voice had overtones of sadness. "You have seen your mighty fleet destroyed. Earth is defenseless. Luhor is on his way to Earth." "How--how do you know?" The Coordinator was moved to speech now, galvanized into life by a more immediate fear! "How? Because I am right now in telepathic contact with Luhor's mind." "We shall fight to the end!" "Yes, I expected that of you. You would condemn Earth to the same fate as your Fleet. Awaken, Earthmen! No weapon that you have can destroy allotropic metal. You have seen Luhor's ships slice through your vessels as if they were paper. You're at his mercy now." Aladdian allowed her words to sink while she widened the beam to include Mars and Venus as well as Earth, that her voice might carry to the entire Federation. "I am not speaking to you only, now, but to three worlds whose fate depends on your decision. Agree to what I ask, and the danger from Luhor will be eliminated." "What do you ask?" The Coordinator's voice came through as a mere whisper. "Three things only. Absolute liberation of Venus and Mars, which means equal representation at the Tri-Planetary Federation Council. Complete abolishment of the inhuman Swamp of Paradim. And Venus to retain Vulcan with its allotropic metal as a measure of final safety. Agree to these points before the assembled peoples of the inhabited planets who are listening now, and Luhor shall never reach Earth." On Mars and Earth and Venus her winged figures were reflected, while her voice cadenced in the ears of untold millions. "First," came the Coordinator's voice, "how are _you_ to prevent that fiend Luhor from pursuing his course? And second, what guarantees will we have that Venus will not build more of the allotropic cruisers to attack?" Although white and shaken, the Coordinator could still snarl. "I will answer your second question first. As you well know, Venus has never in all her history resorted to war. Rather than kill," her voice became bitter, "we submitted to Earth's cruel domination. We saw the inhuman Prison Swamp spring into being, for greed of the Josmian pearls; death and persecution for the sake of power. I even personally suffered this!" She held up her wings whose tendons had been cut. "Yet despite it all, history does not record murder by Venusians. _That_, Earthian, is your guarantee that we shall keep the peace. As to Luhor, I and I alone can stop him now. This is an offered chance you may take or leave. Remember, Luhor's fleet has ten times the speed of Earth's fastest vessel, and will be there sooner than you suppose. Think fast, Earthian!" "Think also," Mark interposed in a voice of steel, "that here on Vulcan we have the allotropic metal, the means to work it, and the men to build our own cruisers if we so desire!" "I accept," the Coordinator said sullenly. Despite his fear and helpless rage, he could only envisage defeat and destruction should Luhor arrive at Earth. As for Aladdian on Vulcan stopping the mad half-breed, he did not see how it was possible; but he had nothing further to lose by agreeing. With a gesture, he ordered the Council to draw up a pact. Four worlds watched the signatures grow one by one. Then, and not until then, did Aladdian play her last card as she brought Venus into focus. "_NOW!_" * * * * * The single word was the last she uttered as she opened her arms. Her people were ready. They knew the sacrifice. Millions of miles away an entire _Planet_, as if it had been a single cosmic mind, concentrated on Luhor's fleet. A mighty stream of thought flowed out, vast but intangible. Wave upon wave, directed by Aladdian, the accumulated thought-vibrations beat ceaselessly upon the minds of Luhor and his men. And on Venus, slowly, here and there a winged figure fell and lay still, its mind sapped by the prodigious effort that knew no bounds. But the knowledge that Aladdian, their Princess, who directed the combined flow, was under an infinitely greater mental strain than any of them individually, gave them added inspiration. Aladdian had long since made all the others, even Mark, leave the Laboratory. She maintained her vigil and efforts alone. On her magnum screen, which had shifted to cosmic space, the six invulnerable vessels continued their purposeful route toward Earth. Serenely they sped. But suddenly, with an odd twist, one of the Spacers plunged headlong without warning into a sister ship. Both exploded into a cataract of flame. Another wavered, wheeled, then plunged toward outer space at vertiginous speed, to disappear in a dwindling dot of silver. Of the remaining three, one began to fire broadsides against the others, then rotated over and over out of control, while air-locks opened and figures leaped out to instantaneous death in the frigidity of space. It was a scene of silent horror. But while scores died in space, hundreds died on Venus at the magnitude of the effort. Still the Venusian populace of millions concentrated in purposeful silence. A sense of madness unleashed stole into the laboratory room where Aladdian stood alone, motionless and white-faced. She scarcely breathed. Her blue eyes were dilated. On the screen now only one cruiser remained. Not until then did Aladdian move, her hand reaching out automatically to the dials. A second later the interior of Luhor's cruiser lay revealed. The huge half-breed had held out to the last. He'd realized what was happening, knew that the thought-power of an entire telepathic nation was reaching out across vast distances of space, the ghastly vibration of madness battering against the brains of his men. Now even Luhor began to succumb, his brutal face contorted by spasms of demoniac evil. His crew of men around him were already insane. A few sobbed monotonously on their knees, rocking from side to side. Others were already dead. One crewman was absorbed in daintily flaying another with a bright, keen penknife, while the rest were systematically destroying the ship and each other. In the midst of the scene, Luhor's face went suddenly grey and blank. He drew his electro-pistol and like a man possessed, used it methodically about him until only he remained alive. It was then that Aladdian used her last remaining strength, directing Luhor like an automaton to the controls, where he remained frozen. The vessel heeled in space and changed course, heading away from Earth now, speeding directly sunward toward Vulcan Base. Within the laboratory room, Aladdian swayed, her face whiter than death; she grasped at the instrument panel for support, but her fingers closed on air, as she crumpled to the floor. XIII She was barely conscious of Mark and Cynthia and Carston seconds later, bursting into the room. And of Mark's face mirroring his anxiety as he hurried to her. In the same instant she knew that her people's accumulative vibration had reached an apex of power, and like an avenging fury was turning _their way--centering on one person in that laboratory room_! Desperately Aladdian tried to stop it, but she was too near exhaustion and too late. Like a concentrated, cosmic javelin of death, that stream of madness reached Carston alone. He shrieked but once, and leaped wildly, hands clutching at his temples; then he crumpled to the floor. He had been blasted to death as suddenly as if a gigantic atom-blast had drilled him between the eyes. Not until then, could Aladdian rise wearily to her feet, assisted by Mark. Sorrowfully she looked at the figure of Carston. Already on Venus, she knew, thousands lay dead, and perhaps hundreds more had died in this final vengeful effort. "They could not forget," she said sadly, "that it was Carston who hounded me throughout the System to result in my imprisonment at Paradim; and that it was he who cut the tendons of my wings." She still clung to Mark's arm, half-supported by him. But despite her utter weariness and all she had gone through, Aladdian still had eyes for Cynthia, who stood there, a forlorn, shattered figure, staring down at the body of Carston. "Do not mind too much, my dear." Aladdian's voice and heart went out in pity to the Earth girl. "In a short time you will forget all that has happened here. Come with us to Venus, I know you will find happiness there." "With us?" It was Mark who spoke, his voice a bare whisper of hope. "Yes, Mark." Aladdian smiled at him, the impish smile he had known in Paradim. Then from the recesses of her tunic she drew forth a gleaming, iridescent pearl. "The purple Josmian!" Mark gasped. "The one I found in the Swamp. I'd forgotten about it!" "I kept it for you, Mark, knowing I would need it for this moment. From lower species to middle order," her smile was impish again, "is not bad for an Earthman. Take the Josmian now, it's yours; with it I elevate you to the highest order and--" But she said no more, for within Mark's arms she was deciding he wasn't much taller than the average Venusian; no, not a great deal taller, at all. 
62395	----	Phantom Out of Time By NELSON S. BOND _AN EERIE NOVEL OF SPACE AND TIME._ Graed Garroway's empire on Earth was toppling, smashed by the flaming vengeance of Dirk Morris who struck from nowhere with blinding speed and true justice. Yet such a thing could not be--for Dirk Morris was dead, slain at the brutal command of the Black Dictator. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Fall 1943. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Metal grated upon metal, a heavy gate at the far end of the corridor swung open, and footsteps stirred dull echoes down the quiet prison-block. Neil Hardesty turned beseeching eyes to his friend and leader. "Dirk," he begged, "for the last time ... let us share this with you? Please!" Vurrth, the hulking Venusian, nodded mutely, lending his support to Neil's appeal. Shaughnessey, Vurrth's earthly equal in size and strength, rumbled deep in his throat, "Yes, Dirk. We're all in this together. Let's take the punishment together ... like men." Dirk Morris shook his head. His voice was firm; his gaze calm and steady. "No. It's better _one_ of us should die, than all. We set ourselves a righteous task: to rid the System of a madman and a tyrant. We pledged ourselves to fight ... to win ... or to die. Our first leader has already given his life that worlds may someday again breathe the air of freedom. A dozen of our comrades have paid the price of rebellion. Edwards, Johnson, Vallery ... our blood-brothers. "Now it is my turn. But my passing does not mean we give up the fight. You, Hardesty, must take over the leadership of our little clan. When you have been freed, carry on! Find new recruits; rebuild our organization. Four against an empire is mighty odds, but if you four surrender, the liberty of all men is doomed for generations!" Fred Meacher said hopefully, "That's right. Someone must pick up the torch. Neil, if you'd rather not, _I'll_ bear the _Message_--" "Never mind," said Hardesty. "I'm ready to take it. Well, Dirk?" The footsteps were drawing nearer. Swiftly, coolly, but deliberately, Dirk Morris placed his lips close to Neil's ear, whispered a brief sentence. Hardesty started. His eyes first widened, then narrowed with incredulous surmise. "Dirk!" he gasped. "But that's.... You can't mean--" "Quiet!" warned Brian Shaughnessey. "Here they come! The skulking rats!" He spat contemptuously on the floor as a band of armed men halted before the cell in which the quartet was imprisoned. The foremost guardsmen parted, and before the grille appeared a man tall and powerful, dark of eye and beetling of brow; a personage whose innate ruthlessness and cruelty could not be disguised even by the ornate finery he wore. This was Graed Garroway, "Black" Garroway, tyrant of Earth, emperor of the System, Overlord--by force of arms--of the entire Solar Union. He smiled. But there was little mirth in his smile, and no sincerity. "Well, Morris?" he demanded. "Well?" repeated Dirk stonily. "Your time passes swiftly. Have you decided to tell your secret?" "I know one thing," said Morris, "that is no secret. My time passes swiftly, yes. But so does yours. The days of your dictatorship are numbered, Garroway. Soon the cleansing flame of righteous rebellion will rise to sweep you and every evil thing you stand for from the face of creation!" Garroway stiffened, flushing with dark anger. "You speak boldly for a doomed man, Morris. Guards, open the cell!" He scowled. "It may amuse you to learn that I did not need your information, traitor. I gave you a final chance to offer it of your own free will. But your cherished 'secret' has already been solved." "Solved!" That was Hardesty. "You mean--?" "Quiet, Neil!" warned Dirk. "He's faking!" Garroway laughed. * * * * * "Faking? You shall see in a few minutes, when I put you to death in the murderous device constructed by your one-time leader, Dr. Townsend!" "Murderous--" began Hardesty. "Please, Neil! Then you ... you found Dr. Townsend's chamber?" asked Dirk. "Yes. And experimented with it, too. We know, now, its purpose. Too bad Robert Townsend did not live to receive our congratulations. So that was your secret, eh? Your late leader succeeded in perfecting a disintegration chamber?" "Disint--" began Morris. Then he stopped abruptly. When he spoke again, his voice was defiant. "Well ... now that you know, what are you going to do about it?" Brian Shaughnessey stared at his friend miserably. "Disintegrating machine!" he choked. "Nothing but a damned theoretical gadget! Is _that_ the great invention we've been risking our lives for? Dirk--" "Do about it?" laughed Garroway negligently. "Why, I'm going to turn it to my own usage, of course. And you, my unfortunate young conspirator, will attain the distinction of being the instrument's first human victim. Come, guards! We have no more time to waste." "A moment!" interrupted Morris. "You will keep your promise? My companions go free when I die?" The Overlord nodded with mock graciousness. "Graed Garroway needs compromise with no man. But I have given my word. Yes, your companions go free." "Very well, then. I am ready." Morris turned and gripped warmly the hand of each of his companions in turn. Then he stepped forward. Two guards flanked him. The Captain of the Guard rasped a command. The little band marched down the avenue and out of sight; silence surged in to hush the stir of footsteps. Somewhere a barrier clanged metallically. "A disintegrating machine!" moaned Shaughnessey. "A damned disintegrating machine! Suppose we _did_ have it? What good would it do us? It wasn't portable. We couldn't use it to fight Garroway's hordes. Dirk's just thrown his life away for nothing--" "Please, Brian!" begged Hardesty. His hands were knotted at his sides, the knuckles as white as his lips. Meacher's eyes were ghastly. Only Vurrth displayed no emotion, but the sinews of the Venusian's throat were taut cords of strain as he, with the others, waited. Slow seconds passed on sluggish feet. Then, after a million aeons, came the dreaded signal. From afar sounded the thin, persistent hum of pulsing current; the strong lights of the prison-block dimmed briefly ... glowed ... dimmed again ... and glowed.... * * * * * Brian Shaughnessey, strong fighting man that he was, raised a hand to his eyes. Neil Hardesty's breath broke in a shaken murmur. Meacher whimpered, and Vurrth's massive fists tensed at his thighs. Again a door opened ... again footsteps approached the prisoners. There was a look of gloating malice on Garroway's swarthy face. He said, "Open the cell, guards. Let them out now." Hardesty whispered, "It ... it is over?" "It is over. Your friend has vanished ... disappeared into whatever hell awaits rebels." The Overlord smiled. "It was a most interesting exhibition ... most. Through the glazed pane we saw him standing, panic-stricken, frozen with terror. Then the current was turned on. Before our eyes, he vanished as a mist--" "I don't believe it!" growled Shaughnessey. "Morris was afraid of nothing; man, beast, nor devil--" "And ... _and we_?" broke in Fred Meacher fearfully. "Go free," said Black Garroway, "as I promised. But have a care! If ever I hear a word of complaint or suspicion raised against any of you again, you will share his fate. It is only through my graciousness you live." "We understand," said Neil evenly. "Come, friends." He led the way from the cell as a guard unlocked the door. When the four had almost reached the end of the prison corridor, Garroway called after them. "Oh ... one thing more! I almost forgot to thank you, Meacher!" Shaughnessey said, "Huh? What's that? Why? What's he got to thank _you_ for, Fred?" Meacher's pale eyes rolled, suddenly panicked. "Me? I ... I don't know what he's talking about--" Black Garroway's heavy laughter filled the hall. "What? Oh, come now, Meacher! Of course you do. I appreciate the information you gave me on Morris. The reward I promised you will be waiting at the State Hall tomorrow. A thousand credits, wasn't it? Well, come and claim it--" He chuckled stridently--"if you can." Before the quick suspicion rising in the eyes of the comrades he had betrayed, Meacher quailed. He tugged free of Shaughnessey's hand and scampered to the protection of Garroway's guard. His voice bleated shrill remonstrance. "Sire ... you should not have told them! I served you faithfully and well ... wormed my way into their inner council! Were it not for me you would never have known--" Black Garroway avoided the informer's frenzied clawing. His voice was hard, mocking, contemptuous. "Fool! You brought me no information worth hearing! Through my own efforts I discovered Townsend's instrument and solved its secret. You are a dolt, a stupid bungler! I need no such aides." "But I told you Morris held the Secret--" "Bah! There is no longer a secret to be held." "But there is, Sire! Before he died, Morris told it to--" Hardesty interrupted coldly, "Am I to understand, Garroway, that this man is no longer under your protection?" Garroway shrugged. "I have washed my hands of him," he said carelessly. "Come, guards!" He turned away as Meacher screamed, vainly struggled to escape the vengeful trio closing in on him. "Take him, Vurrth!" ordered Hardesty succinctly. The great Venusian's hands closed briefly around the traitor's throat, stifling his garbled cries. With revealing ease he lifted the Earthman, held him dangling like a sack of meal in midair, and looked at Hardesty for orders. "Put him down," commanded Neil. "We will settle our differences elsewhere." Vurrth grunted, and obediently loosed his grip. The body, of Fred Meacher slumped to the floor awkwardly ... and lay still. Brian Shaughnessey bent over the crumpled figure. He glared up angrily at his comrade. "Confound you, Vurrth! He's dead!" Vurrth grinned slowly. "Sor-ree," he said. "Maybe hold too tight?" One of the guards, glancing back, muttered a word to his captain who, in turn, passed the message to the Overlord. A thin smile touched Garroway's lips, but he did not turn his head. The incident was, his attitude intimated as he led his entourage from the hall, a matter in which he took no concern whatsoever.... II As at his captors' bidding he stepped into the great metal chamber which was the late Dr. Townsend's creation, two singular emotions filled Dirk Morris' mind. One of these was thankfulness, the second ... curiosity. Fear was strangely absent. Perhaps that was because for many months Dirk and those with whom he conspired for the overthrow of Black Garroway's tyrannical rule had lived under a Damoclean sword. Death, long a silent guest at their every gathering, was a host whose imminence aroused no dread. Dirk was thankful that he had been able to buy, with his own life, the freedom of his companions. Why the Emperor had been willing to strike this bargain, Dirk did not exactly understand; possibly because the Overlord held his enemies in contempt, now their leader was being removed; more likely because Garroway still held a lurking fear of those who plotted against him, and was freeing them only that his hireling spies might watch their movements. But even that, thought Morris gratefully, was better than that all should die, and the Movement end. Hardesty now knew the Secret, and while one remained alive to work on that knowledge, hope endured. The second commingling emotion, curiosity, concerned the chamber into which, at this very moment, he was stepping. A "disintegration chamber" Garroway had called it, vowing his scientists had learned its method of operation. But in this, Dirk knew with positive assurance, the Overlord was mistaken. Utterly mistaken. Yet, if it were not a disintegration machine, then what--? There was no time for further thought. The door was closed; through the thick pane Morris saw Garroway nod, saw a soldier close the switch on the instrument's control-board. For an instant the thin hum of current filled Dirk's ears; a terrific impact of pure electrical energy pierced his every nerve and fiber with flaming hammers of agony. He felt his knees buckle beneath him, was vainly aware that his mouth opened to cry aloud noiselessly. A strange, twisting vibration wrenched and tore him; the solid walls about him seemed to melt and writhe at angles the eyes ached to follow. All this he saw as in the throes of wild delirium. Then, unable to longer bear the fearful pain, every sinew of his being tensed for an intolerable instant ... then darkness, blessed darkness, rushed in to claim Dirk Morris. He sank, weak and senseless, into its enfolding arms. * * * * * Silence. Silence and darkness. Then, out of the silence, sound. Out of the infinite darkness, light. Light, and warmth, and comfort. Dirk Morris opened his eyes. He opened his eyes ... then closed them again, shaking his head to rid his fancy of its weird hallucination. Beside him a voice spoke soft, rippling syllables that held no meaning. Another voice replied; a masculine voice, equally soft, but elderly and grave. The possessor of the first voice, pressed a cup to Morris' lips. An unknown liquor tingled Dirk's palate and swept the lethargy from his veins. He stirred and lifted himself to one elbow, stared about him incredulously. "Where--?" he began--"where on earth--?" Then he stopped, seeing the sky above him, the ground supporting him, those who were his Samaritans. A poignant regret seized him. He whispered, "_Not_ on Earth. Then the ancient religions were true? There _is_ an afterlife ... a Heaven peopled with angels." The girl kneeling beside him laughed, her voice like the music of rill waters. She turned to her elder companion, said in strange, accented English, "See, I was right, father! He _is_ from over There. I recognized the garments; severe and ugly. Not at all like _ours_--" She touched the flowing hem of her own brief, silken kirtle with fingers equally soft and white. Both she and the graybeard were dressed in clothing of classic simplicity. No stiff military harness like that worn by earthlings of Dirk's era, but something resembling the _chiton_ of ancient Greece. Dirk said wonderingly, "You ... you're human!" "But, of course, stranger." "This ... this isn't Earth, though. Nor any planet of the System!" Dirk gestured toward the landscape, smooth and gaily gardened, stretching from horizon to horizon with no ornament save the natural adornments of Nature. Here were no grim and ugly buildings towering to the skies, blocking the sun's warm rays from view; no shining mansions flanked by filthy hovels; none of the cheek-and-jowl splendor and squalor of the world whence he had come. Here was only gentle, untrammeled beauty in a quiet, pastoral existence. No planet of the Solar System was so organized, Dirk knew. But were a second, convincing proof needed, he had but to glance at the sky. There shone not the lone, familiar Sun of Earth ... but _two_ suns! A binary system. One golden-yellow like Sol, the other a bluish-white globe of radiance. "No," answered the elderly man, "this is neither the Earth from which you came nor any planet of its system. This is the planet Nadron, satellite of the twin suns, Kraagol and Thuumion, in the fourth galactic level." Triumph was a bursting bomb in Morris' heart. "Then it was a success, after all!" he cried. "Then Townsend was right! If only he had lived to see this day! A success ... and all because Garroway's scientists, playing with an instrument they did not understand, succeeded where we had failed for years! "But ... but your planet is unfamiliar to me; I do not know your suns by the names you have given them. Your system lies just where in relation to the galactic center? How many miles ... or light years ... are we from my native Earth?" The old man looked at him oddly for a moment, then: "We are _no_ miles from your Earth, my friend," he announced quietly, "and the distance may be measured in _seconds_ ... not light-years." Dirk stared, bewilderment in his eyes. "I ... I'm afraid I don't understand, sir. I hope you will forgive me. Perhaps you are joking--?" "It is no jest, my boy, but the simple truth. Earth and Nadron are ... but, stay! Let me prove my point otherwise. Has it not occurred to you to wonder that we, the people of a foreign world, know your language?" Dirk said wonderingly, "Why ... why, that's right; you do! But how--?" "Because," explained the elder, "we have listened to it being spoken for many, many years. Over our visors we have both heard and watched you on your neighboring world." "Neighboring world?" "How came you here?" asked the old man. "What means of propulsion brought you hither?" That, at least, Dirk knew. He answered eagerly. "I came here through the medium of the greatest discovery ever made by man. The _teleport_, a machine invented by Robert Townsend. A perfect solution to the long puzzling problem of material transport through Space. It disassembles the atoms of any body placed in its transmitting chamber, and reconstructs that body at a destination selected by a setting of its dials. "Through circumstances not of my own choosing, I was a subject of that machine. I was forced into the transmitter by ... well, it does not matter whom ... and my body broadcast to this spot. Though I do not yet, sir, understand just where I am, or exactly how I reached here--" The old man shook his head regretfully. "I am sorry, my boy, to tell you the machine did not work as was planned. Its theory was sound; in one respect it performed as expected. It _did_ disassemble your atomic components, did reconstruct your body elsewhere. But it was to no far bourne your journey carried you. "_Your body still stands in exactly the spot it stood before the machine operated!_" * * * * * For a long, uncomprehending moment Dirk Morris gaped at his informant. At last his bedazement found words. "Oh, now, surely you can't expect me to believe--" "No," interrupted the graybeard gently, "not without visual evidence. Rima, my dear--?" He turned to the girl, who nodded and from the folds of her garment produced a shimmering crystal object; a mirror of some sort, or a lens. This she handed to Dirk. "If you will look through this--?" she suggested. Morris lifted the crystal to his eyes wonderingly ... then almost dropped it in his excitement! Beneath his feet still lay the lush greensward of an alien world, but through the curious crystal he gazed upon no panorama of soft, rolling hills and pleasant valleys. Before him lay the image of a scene he had but recently quitted: the execution dock of Graed Garroway's prison! A few feet to his right stood the metal chamber into which he had been thrust, the supposed "disintegration cell." Through the viewpane of this the Overlord was peering, a grim smirk of satisfaction on his lips. As Dirk watched, Garroway turned and gestured to the guardsman whose hand had depressed the activating switch. Dirk heard no words, but could easily read the movement of the Emperor's lips. "_Enough! It is done!_" With an instinct born of illogic, Dirk reached forth as if to grip the throat of the murderous Garroway. In doing so, the crystal left his eyes. Instantly the scene vanished. He looked once more upon distance-purpled hills softly limned in the splendor of two suns. The girl laughed softly. "Confusing at first, isn't it? But you'll soon--" "Please!" begged Dirk hoarsely. "I must see--" He placed the mirrorlike object once more to his eyes, saw Graed Garroway lead the way from the execution chamber. Awkwardly, uncertainly, Morris took a step forward ... another. Though he knew his feet trod the soil of the planet Nadron, to his eyes it seemed he glided forward across the floor of the prison. The door swung to behind Garroway and his followers, and involuntarily Dirk flinched ... then grunted reproof at his own needless gesture. So far as he was concerned, that heavy metal barrier did not exist. For the briefest fraction of an instant his vision was blotted by jet darkness, then he stood outside the door, looking down the corridor. He hastened forward, stumbling, as feet that appeared to be traversing smooth floors actually trod uneven soil, and paused at last, an invisible presence at the tableau next enacted. He witnessed his friends' release from the cell, read the movement of Hardesty's dry lips as Neil whispered, "_It ... it is over?_" He saw Garroway's boastful warning, Brian's hot denial, then watched--first with dazed incomprehension, then with fierce understanding--the betrayal, panic and execution of Fred Meacher. * * * * * When Meacher's corpse lay on the floor at ... or so it seemed ... his very feet, and the comrades left the hallway, he would again have followed them. But at that moment he landed with a solid bump against something hard, and with a start he looked from the crystal to find a tree before him. More than a hundred yards away waited those who had befriended him. He retraced his steps slowly to their company. "Now you understand and believe, my boy?" the kindly alien asked. "I believe," said Dirk simply. "But, sir--" "My name, man of Earth, is Slador. On this world, I am known as the Ptan Slador, which is to say 'teacher.' This is my daughter, Rima." "I am called Morris. Dirk Morris. I also--" Dirk spoke bitterly--"have a number, as have all Earthmen of this unhappy century. Yes, Ptan Slador, I believe, but even yet I do not understand. I stand in one world, but looking through your crystal I see into another: my own. Why is this?" "Because, Dirk Morris, our two worlds lie adjacent." "Adjacent? You mean in Space?" "I mean in Space-Time. Look, my young friend ... your Earth science knows of the atom?" "But of course. It is the building-block of matter. The smallest indivisible unit--" "Exactly. Yet even this minute fleck of matter, the building-block of worlds, so small that it cannot be observed under man's strongest microscopes, is composed of ninety-nine per cent _empty space_! "Or, let me say, rather ... what _appears_ to be such to the men of all universes. Actually, there is no emptiness in the atom. It is composed of solid matter, but the individual zerons of this single entity are all vibrating at a different frequency in the Greater Universe which includes _all_ of Space and Time. "Consequently, you on Earth, existing at one rate of vibration, see an entire universe vibrating at a period which matches your own. We of Nadron live under another vibration. Our solidity, our world, our universe ... these are all part of the 'emptiness' of _your_ world, just as _your_ existence forms a part of the emptiness of _our_ atom. Do you see?" "Vaguely," said Dirk humbly. "Only vaguely. We, the young men of my era, are not an educated people, Ptan Slador. There was a time in Earth's history when all men were free to study where and as they wished, read what they willed. It is not so now. Only the highborn are permitted to own books, or borrow them from the Overlord's crypts; only those designated by the Emperor are taught to read and write. The rest of us, hungry for a crust of knowledge, must gather in hidden places to learn our letters from instructors who risk their lives to teach us." "You mean," cried the girl, "one man has dared grasp so much power? So much evil power?" Slador nodded gravely. "Yes, my dear. I have long believed some such situation existed on our neighbor world. From scenes I have witnessed through the visor, snatches of whispered conversation, I guessed such might be the case. It is a sorry plight for a once proud world. Drowned in a sea of ignorance, sunken in a slough of misery and despair, mankind is beaten helpless--" Dirk laughed gratingly. "Pardon me, sir. Not beaten. Not helpless. We are ignorant, yes ... but not yet have all of us abandoned hope of striking off our shackles. "We have a secret organization, fostered by the late Dr. Townsend, led until recently by myself, now headed by the bravest of my former comrades: Neil Hardesty. The members of this clan are pledged to one purpose ... the overthrow of Graed Garroway, tyrant of the Solar System. "Our greatest hope for success lay in Dr. Townsend's invention, the _teleport_. It is quite impossible to muster an armed band on any of the planets under Garroway's thumb. His spies are everywhere. Even--" Dirk finished bitterly--"among our own supposed comrades. "Therefore we had planned to transport our bodies to some extra-Solar world, there gird ourselves for a last fight against Garroway's minions. That was our dream. But now--" He paused, shaking his head sorrowfully. That dream was now ended. Dr. Townsend's secret weapon was not what had been hoped. Instead-- * * * * * Then, even as he despaired, understanding drove home with blinding force. The weapon was _not_ a failure! It was a success ... but in another way than had been planned. He cried aloud: "But, yes! I've been blind! This way is just as good ... perhaps better!" "What way, Dirk Morris?" asked the girl. "There is no need to seek a far planet of a far sun! We planned that solely because we did not know anything about the existence of your world, your universe. "Nadron shall be our rallying spot! It is the ideal spot wherein to gather our forces. Close to Earth ... seconds, not light-years, from the foe we would crush--" "A moment, Earthman!" interrupted Slador. "You mean to use our world as the breeding-place for conflict on yours? Is that your thought?" "But of course. What better place?" The Ptan shook his head gravely. "I am sorry, my son. But I fear that is impossible. The Council would never permit it." "Council?" "Our government. Here we have a World Council, made up of the oldest and wisest amongst us. Many, many centuries ago the question was raised as to whether we of Nadron should establish and maintain intercourse between our neighboring planets. "After a lengthy period of observation and study, it was decided we should not. It was the Council's judgment--" Here Slador flushed with thin apology--"that Earth is in too primitive a stage of development for such a union. "Wherever and whenever we watched affairs unfolding, we saw war, strife, bickering and discontent. We saw poverty and hunger ... perils unknown in our own quiet civilization. We heard the roar of gunfire and the bombastic mouthings of warlords. We found, in short, no culture worthy of inclusion in our own placid existence. "At that time was the Law laid down ... that we of Nadron should not embroil ourselves in Earth's affairs until such time as a civilized Earth should be able to meet us on a plane of equal amity. "Therefore--" sighed the Ptan--"despite my private sympathy with your cause, I am compelled to warn you that you may not use Nadron as host for your gathering forces. Though a peaceful world, we have means of enforcing this edict. I am sorry, but you must develop other plans." Dirk stared at the speaker strickenly, realizing the logic of all Slador had said, but feeling, nevertheless, sick despair that Earth's past madnesses should now so destroy the only chance of present salvation. He turned to the girl, who returned his gaze with a helpless little shrug of sympathy. He wet his lips, said hoarsely, "But ... but if you do not help us, Earth is doomed to tyranny for countless decades to come. You cannot refuse us your aid--" Slador said smoothly, surprisingly, "I have not said I would not aid you. I have merely forbidden your forces the soil of Nadron. But there are ... other ways of helping. Ways not under the ban of our Council's sage decision." Hope surged in Morris like a welling tide. "There are?" he cried. "What ways, Ptan Slador?" "Have you forgotten," asked Slador, "the strangeness of your own existence here? Or is it that you do not yet see how this can be bent to use? Listen, my son--" He spoke, and Dirk Morris listened with ever growing interest. III Corporal Ned Tandred, Precinct Collector of Taxes in the Ninth Ward, Thirty-Fourth district of Greater Globe City, did not like his job. As he wheeled his unicar through the twilight shaded streets of the city, hemmed by a rush of bustling traffic, he thought regretfully of those from whom he had this day forced payment of tithes--tribute--they could ill afford. An old man ... an even older widow ... the husband of an invalid wife and father of three small children ... a young man unable, now new taxes had been exacted, to marry the girl who had been waiting for him seven long years ... these were just a few of the humble lives the Emperor's recent edict had driven to newer, deeper, sloughs of despair. And he, Corporal Tandred, had been the unwilling instrument through which Garroway had dipped once again into the pockets of his subjects. "Subjects!" grunted Corporal Tandred. "Not subjects ... slaves! That's what we are, all of us. Myself included!" He tugged savagely at the handle of his unicar, careening the tiny one-wheeled vehicle perilously to the curb of the avenue as a gigantic, gray-green armored tanker of the Imperial Army roared belligerently up the center of the street, hogging the road and scattering traffic before it. "Miserable serfs, all of us! If I thought there were half a chance of getting away with it, I'd skip this filthy uniform and--" He stopped suddenly, a strange sensation coming over him. The sensation of somehow being watched ... listened to. He peered cautiously over his shoulder. No ... no one in the car but himself. The communications unit was dull; no chance his rebellious grumbling had been overhead by a keen-eared Headquarters clerk. Corporal Tandred breathed a sigh of relief. Nerves. Just plain nerves ... that was all that bothered him. That was the result of living under constant surveillance, inescapable oppression. You got the feeling of never being free. "This cursed money!" he grumbled again. "If I could get away with it, I'd throw it in the Captain's face! In the Overlord's face! Thieving--" Once more he stopped in midsentence, his lips a wide and fearful O of bewilderment. This time he had made no mistake! There _was_ someone near him. A voice spoke in his ear. "_Make no such foolish gesture, Corporal!_" Corporal Tandred recovered control of his car with a sudden effort. He depressed its decelerating button, drew it to the curb, and stared wildly about him. "W-who said that?" he demanded hoarsely. "Where are you?" "_Who speaks_," said the quiet, insistent voice, "_does not matter. Nor the spot from whence I speak. The important thing is that you hear and obey my words. Make not the error of hurling the tribute money in anyone's face. Deliver it to your superior officer--but see that you get a signed receipt for it. Do you understand?_" "No!" said Corporal Tandred weakly. "I hear a voice speaking, but see no one. I don't understand--" "_It is not necessary that you understand. Just obey. Get a signed receipt for that money. That is all!_" "Wait!" cried Corporal Tandred. "Wait a minute--!" He was talking to himself. Even as he spoke, he sensed that. The strange, semi-electrical feeling of a nearby presence was gone. * * * * * For a moment he sat stock-still, trying to sooth his ruffled nerves. His effort was not altogether successful; he started the unicar with a jerk, and sped down the avenue at a rate of speed forbidden by civic ordinance. A uniformed attendant frowned disapproval as he screeled to a stop in front of the Revenue Office, but Corporal Tandred paid him no heed. He hurried straightway to the central office, there deposited his collections before his captain. The captain nodded abstractedly, then, his attention drawn by some oddness in the subaltern's appearance, raised a questioning eyebrow. "What is it, Tandred? Anything wrong?" "N-no, sir," said the corporal uncertainly. "Someone make a complaint? That it?" "Well, sir, there _were_ several complaints. Citizens find these new taxes hard to swallow, sir; very hard." The captain laughed derisively. "Sheep! Let them suffer. It is no concern of ours. The Overlord has a militia to maintain. Well ... that is all." He waved a hand in dismissal. Corporal Tandred said hesitantly, "Yes, sir. But the ... the receipt, sir?" "Receipt? For what?" "For the money, sir. Regulations, sir." "Oh, yes." The captain grinned caustically. "Don't you trust me, Corporal? You never asked for a receipt before that I can remember." "N-no, sir. I mean ... of course I trust you, sir. I just thought that ... that this being a new tax--" "Very well; very well!" The captain scribbled, tore a receipt from his pad, and handed it to the underling. "You may go now, Corporal." "Yes, sir. Thank you, sir." Corporal Tandred left hurriedly, still uncertain _why_ he had obeyed the instructions of the mysterious voice, still uncomprehending as to _why_ he should have asked for a receipt, but with a strong conviction he had done the wise thing. He was right! Five minutes later the money vanished mysteriously from the captain's desk. Or so, at any rate, in stern, judicial court the captain swore repeatedly to an even colder superior. In vain the captain protested his innocence and tried to shift the blame to Corporal Tandred's shoulders. The Corporal was in the clear, triumphantly acquitted through possession of a signed receipt for the missing money. In the bleak gray of the following dawn, the captain was shot for theft and conspiracy against the State. But the money was not found among his effects.... * * * * * Brian Shaughnessey, crouched in the concealment of a flowering hedge, heard the footsteps of the guard pass within scant inches of his head. He counted slowly to himself. "... eight ... nine ... ten...." Noiselessly he gathered himself for the silent dash. Watchful waiting had taught him that ten seconds after marching past this bush, the guard turned briefly down a side lane from which the roadway was invisible. A hurried run, a swift and silent dash, would take him to the doorway of the supply warehouse. He crouched, tensed, listened ... then ran. For a big man he made little noise. He had reached his objective with seconds to spare before the guard, returning from the bypath, glanced up and down the main avenue, found all clear, and resumed his rounds. Shaughnessey grinned, slipped into the shadow of the doorway, and fumbled at his belt. He withdrew a metal ovoid, prepared to draw the pin that set its mechanism into operation ... then stopped! His fingers faltered, and he whirled, eyes darting anxiously. For from the darkness, a voice had spoken. "_No, Brian!_" Brian Shaughnessey shook himself like a great, shaggy dog. He was a strong man, a man of great courage. But he was also a superstitious man. Awe dawned now in his eyes. "This is it, then," he whispered to himself. "I'm not long for this world. It ... it's _him_, come to meet me. Well--" He shrugged--"if that's the way it must be, I might as well finish this job--" And again he reached for the pin. But this time the sense of unseen presence was so strong that Brian Shaughnessey could almost feel the grip of ghostly fingers tingling on his wrist. And the voice was louder, clearer. "_No, Brian! Not here!_" "Morris!" cried Shaughnessey starkly, unbelievingly. "Dirk Morris!" "_Hush, you idiot!_" warned the voice. "_You'll bring the guard down upon us!_" "Us?" repeated Brian, baffled. "_Don't toss that grenade here. You're too close to the munitions bins. Here ... let me have it!_" Shaughnessey, stricken with a near-paralysis of awe, felt a curious vibration tingle through his fingers as from his slackened grip the explosive ovoid slipped ... and vanished! He stared about him wildly, gasped, "The grenade! Where did it go? Dirk--" "_Not now!_" whispered the urgent voice. "_Go to Neil. Tell him to gather the Group at the regular place tonight. I will come to you. Now, get out of here. Quickly!_" "B-but I don't understand--" gulped Brian. "_Quickly!_" insisted the voice. Shaughnessey nodded. He did not in the least understand what manner of mystery here confronted him. But he was a faithful servant of the Group. It was enough for him that he had heard Dirk Morris' voice, and that voice issued orders. Without another word he turned and slipped across the pathway to the cover of the hedge. Using it as a shelter, he fled the vicinity of the warehouse. It was well he did so. Less than two minutes later, a terrific blast hurled him headlong to the ground as a bolt of man-made lightning seared the munitions dump wherein was stored the bulk of Graed Garroway's military supplies for this area. A livid stalk of greasy smoke, flame-laced, mushroomed to the skies, and the terrain for miles around was shaken as by a temblor. When the ensuing fire was finally brought under control, there remained but charred and twisted girders in that gaping pit which once had been a fortress.... * * * * * Lenore Garroway hummed softly to herself as she sat before the gorgeous, full-length mirror of her dressing-room table. She was happy ... and that was not altogether commonplace, because for an Emperor's daughter, surrounded by ease and every comfort, dwelling in the lap of luxuries few others even dared dream of, Lenore Garroway was not often happy. But she was now, because she was with her gems. No pleasure in the seven worlds compared, in the Princess Lenore's mind, with that of fondling her precious stones, rare and perfect specimens gathered from the farflung corners of the System at the cost of no one dared guess how many lives. Before and about her in bounteous array lay a ransom of glittering baubles. Chalcedony and sardonyx ... diamond and ruby ... the rare green _pharonys_ delved from the sea-bottoms of Venus, the even rarer ice-amethyst of Uranus ... _wisstrix_ from giant Jupiter and the faceted _koleidon_ of tiny Eros ... these were her playthings. So she sat, allowing the glittering motes to sift through her soft, white fingers, raising this matched set of rings to her ears, that exquisite lavaliere to her equally exquisite throat, humming softly to herself as she sat at her dressing table, watching the graceful movements of her perfect body in the full-length rock-quartz mirror. A soft tap pulsed through the room, and the Princess Lenore turned, the flicker of a frown marring the perfection of her brow. "Well, Marta?" she demanded. Her maid-in-waiting entered fearfully. She was old and ugly. The Princess would not have about her any who were not; her radiance must be at all times like that of a true jewel amidst paste. Even the ladies of the court were required to dress down their own lesser beauty when gathered for state occasions. "Well, Marta?" repeated the princess. "Your pardon, Highness," breathed the old woman. "A delegation from the women of the city--" "What do they want?" "It is something about ... taxes, Highness. They say they cannot afford--" "Taxes!" The princess' eyes clouded. "Why must they fret me with their miserable woes? I know nothing of taxes. Bid them see my father." Marta cringed humbly. "They have tried to, Highness, but without success. That is why they have come here. To beg your intercession--" "I cannot see them," said Lenore. "Tell them to go away. I am busy." "But, Highness--" "Away, I said!" The princess' voice was silken-soft no longer; it flamed with sudden petulance. "I am too busy to hear their petty grievances. Send them away! And you, too!" With abrupt, feline violence she snatched a handful of baubles from the table before her, hurled them at the aged servant. Marta stood like a withered Danae beneath the rich rain, whined, "Yes, Highness," and disappeared. The princess shut intrusion from her mind as the door closed. She turned once more to her playthings, picked up and fondled a pendant of intricately interwoven sapphire and _tolumnis_. Its green-and-scarlet flame burned cold against the smooth satin of her breast. She hummed softly to herself, happy.... It was then the voice spoke. The voice was a man's voice. Its masculine deepness was like the rasp of grating steel in the languid femininity of this room. "_Send them away, eh, Princess? Very well. As you have judged, so shall it also be judged against you!_" The Princess Lenore whirled to the doorway, startled white hands leaping to her throat. Her gray-green eyes were wide with shock ... and horror. They widened even more as they found ... no one! "Wh-where are you?" she gasped. "Who dares enter the boudoir of the Princess Lenore?" She heard no sound of footsteps, but the voice drew nearer with each word. "_I so dare, Princess._" "And ... and who are you?" "_My name does not matter. But you may call me Conscience, if you must give me a name. For I am the Conscience of an empire._" The voice was beside Lenore now. She spun swiftly, her hands seeking emptiness about her. "It is a trick! Someone will die for this! Leave! Leave this instant, or I call the guard--" The voice of "Conscience" laughed. "_Call the guard if you will, Princess. I will have gone ere they arrive ... and these with me!_" This time the sound came from _behind_ her. Again the girl whirled, this time to see a stupefying sight. As if imbued with eerie lapidary life, the jewels were rising from her dressing-table in great handfuls. Leaping clots of rich iridescence climbed into thin air ... and vanished! * * * * * Up till now the princess had been overwhelmed with shock; now she was struck to the quick with another emotion. She screamed aloud and darted forward in defense of her precious gems. "Stop! They are mine! How dare you--?" Her questing hands touched the disappearing jewels, and for an instant a strange, electrical tingling coursed her veins. Then the warmth of a human hand struck down her clawing fingers; the Voice cried sternly, "_Let be, woman! These go to those who need them more than you!_" Then with a quick change of tone, "_Stand still, you little hell-cat_--" The Princess Lenore had flung herself forward upon the invisible thief, was groping with maddened fingers at a face, at eyes she could not see. Her hands touched flesh ... her ears caught the swift sibilance of an indrawn breath. In all her life, never had Lenore been in such close contact with a man. Strong arms gripped her shoulders, shook her fiercely, an angry voice grated, "_You greedy little fool! Are these all you live for, then? Cold stones? No wonder your heart is an icy barren, without sympathy or compassion. Don't you know what it means to hunger and be without bread, to want and be without hope, to love and be without love? In all your life, have you known only the icy caress of gems? Not this--?_" And harshly, stunningly, the cries of the Princess Lenore were stifled by the crush of male lips upon her own. For an instant the world spun dizzily beneath her; it seemed a burning brand raced through her veins, crying a tocsin. A vast, engulfing weakness shook the princess; she fell back, trembling and shaken. Then anger, fierce and bitter, cleared her senses. She opened her eyes ... and found herself viewing an incredible sight: herself bent to the embrace of a tall, dark-haired man clad in the rough habiliments of the working class. A young man whose jacket pockets bulged with the jewels that had disappeared ... a young man whose eyes were covered with a pair of strangely shaped spectacles.... With a start, she realized she was seeing her formerly invisible guest in the rock-quartz mirror. At her gasp, the stranger spun, saw his reflection in the glass. With an oath he loosed her, seized a heavy stool, and hurled it at the glass. Its smoothness shattered into a thousand gleaming splinters ... and once again she saw no one. "_Vixen!_" grated the voice. For a few more seconds, jewels continued to leap upward into what the Princess Lenore now knew were hidden pockets, while she stood helplessly by. Then--she never could explain just _why_, but by some curious _absence_ of sensation she knew--the boudoir was deserted save for herself. The Princess Lenore stared long and wonderingly at what had been a mirror, the most perfect example of Plutonian rock-quartz crystal ever moulded. Then one soft hand lifted strangely to lips which still tingled ... and something like a smile, a thoughtful smile, touched those lips. Then, at long last, the Princess Lenore called the guard. IV Neil Hardesty peered anxiously at the chronometer on his wrist. He said, "Almost midnight. Brian, are you sure it was--?" "Positive!" said Brian Shaughnessey stubbornly. "It was Dirk Morris, Neil. You've got to believe me. I know how it sounds. Crazy. But it was him." "You didn't _see_ him," reminded Hardesty gently. "You were under great stress. It might have been an hallucination, you know." "Was that explosion," demanded Shaughnessey, "imagination? It blew the warehouse plumb from here to Tophet. If I'd been within five hundred yards, I'd have been blown to a bunch of rags. It was him, Neil. I'd know his voice any time, any place." Vurrth said thoughtfully, "But Dirk dead, no?" "That's what we _thought_," said Brian doggedly. "But he ain't dead. Either he's still alive, or his ghost--" A strange look swept his features. He stopped, glanced at the new leader of the group. "Neil, could it have been a--" "I don't know," confessed Hardesty. "I honestly do not know. We'll just have to wait and see, Brian. But if he's coming here tonight, he'd better come soon. It's almost midnight. After the curfew, we won't be allowed to move on the streets." "Particularly," interjected a new member of the Group, "now. The Overlord's guards are watching the streets like a pack of hounds since the theft of the Princess' jewels." Hardesty said staunchly, "They can't blame that on us. We were all at work when it happened. Still ... I'd like to know who did it. I'd like to know what became of them, too. Disappeared into thin air, the Princess claimed--" "_The jewels_," said a familiar voice, "_have been distributed where they will do the most good. Their wealth has been converted into food to fill the bellies of those who hunger._" All occupants of the refuge spun as one, seeking in vain the speaker. Neil Hardesty cried: "Dirk! Then Brian was right! But ... where are you?" The voice from nowhere chuckled. "That is what Garroway would like to know. I am beside you, Neil. Reach out your hand." Hardesty did so. Briefly he felt a strange, warm tingling ... then his hand met and gripped the hand of Morris. Tears sprang to the Group leader's eyes. He choked, "Dirk! Thank the gods you have returned! We thought you were--" He hesitated over the word. Morris supplied it. "Dead? I am, Neil ... so far as you are concerned." All members of the listening party stirred uneasily. Vurrth grunted, and Brian Shaughnessey husked, "You see? I guessed it. A ghost--" "That's right," laughed Morris in most unwraithlike tones. "A ghost. A galactic ghost ... free to roam the System without hindrance or bar. Fleshless at will ... but with a body if I so desire." "You ... you mean," choked Neil, "you can make yourself visible if you wish?" "Not visible to your eyes, no. But I can render myself solid when it is necessary to do so. It was thus--" Morris laughed--"I stole the tax-collector's gleanings and the Princess Lenore's jewels. Thus, too, I helped Brian destroy the munitions dump." "I'm afraid," said Hardesty humbly, "I'm afraid I do not understand, Dirk. You are fleshless ... yet you can make your body solid. You are alive, yet you call yourself 'dead so far as we are concerned.' What does it mean?" "I'm not sure," answered Morris, "that I understand it myself, completely. But here is the explanation as it was told me--" * * * * * He told them, then, of that which had followed his "execution" in the teleport. Of his meeting with Ptan Slador and Rima, and that which had transpired between them. To a group such as this, untutored and unlettered, it was vain to speak in technical language; he told his story as simply as possible. "--thus," he concluded, "though the laws of Nadron forbid our using that adjacent world as a gathering-spot for our forces, the Ptan Slador and his fellows are sympathetic to our cause. They, therefore, instructed me in the use of their visor, as well as in the employment of certain strange faculties developed in me by my passage through the teleport. "I am, you see, no longer simply a man of Earth, but a creature of two worlds. Through the machination of the teleport, my atomic vibration was altered to that of Nadron's galactic universe. But in the greater continuum of Space-Time, there remains a life-path which is mine, and typically mine. "To this ineradicable life-path I am always free to return. Could you see me, you would note that I wear two odd bits of apparel. One, a pair of visor-spectacles secured to my eyes; the second, a force-belt which enables me to give my invisible body substance when such is needed. "To reach any given spot on Earth, I have but to go to its matching spot on Nadron, then turn the stud upon the force-belt. This sends a magnetic flux through my body, diverting it from Nadron's vibration to that of Earth ... and placing me on my home planet. But as for visibility--" He shook his head sadly--"that I can never be again ... to you. There are limits to the diversion of matter. My only _real_ existence now is upon Nadron; my visits to Earth can be made only as a tangible and vengeful wraith." "Then we can never see you again, Dirk?" "Not on Earth. On Nadron, perhaps. The Ptan Slador has promised that when we have rid Earth of its tyrant, intercourse may be opened between our two worlds. Not before, though." Dirk pondered briefly. "There is one other way," he said. "A way which I did not know of myself until a few hours ago. But I shall not mention it, even to you. It was an accident which happened in the Princess' boudoir. I must ask the Ptan about it when next I see him. Meanwhile--" "Yes?" said Brian eagerly. "What do we do, Dirk?" "You," ordered Morris sternly, "get out of sight and lay low! All of you! The incidents which have occurred today are but a mild beginning to what is to come. There is about to burst loose a reign of terror such as Graed Garroway in the depth of his infamy never dreamed possible ... and I am its originator! "When this begins, Garroway's first logical move will be to herd all known living members of the Group together for questioning. You know the manner of his interrogation. You must be spared the pleasures of his rack and brand. "So ... hide! Go where you can, as swiftly as you can, and forget you have heard from me. But spread the word to all freedom-loving men that the time approaches when Earth and the solar system will rid itself of Garroway's shackles. You can do this from concealment?" "We can," said Hardesty eagerly. "We can and will, Dirk. The hearts of millions are with us. If you will but tell us when and where to strike." "You will be told from time to time. When word does not come, you will know to strike where a weakness has been driven in the enemy's defenses." The voice of Dirk Morris was not pleasant now. It rang with the bitter hardness of forged steel. "I will strike Garroway hard, and often, and everywhere! Where least he expects attack, there will I strike him. His armies will be robbed of leaders, stores, strongholds. I will make Earth a boiling hell for him. And when Earth becomes too hot a cauldron for his tasting, to the far planets of the System I will pursue him inexorably. This I vow by the bond of comradeship we have pledged!" Hardesty asked, "Far planets, Dirk? You can leave Nadron, then?" "Yes. There is no time for further explanation now, though. You must get into hiding immediately. For tonight begins the vengeance we have so long waited. Until happier days, then, my friends--" The voice dimmed with the final words. An electric tenseness left the air, and somehow the assembled listeners knew their visitor had gone. Neil Hardesty shook himself. "Goodbye, Dirk, and ... good luck!" Then, to his companions, "Well ... that's all. Now we know what to expect. Come on ... let's get going! There's a lot of work ahead of us, as well as Morris." * * * * * Already back on the fair soil of Nadron, Dirk Morris had retraced his wanderings to the home of the Ptan Slador. He approached its "doorway," marveling again--as he had when first the Ptan revealed the entrance to his domicile--at the ease with which the portal merged itself into the surrounding landscape. Homes on Nadron, Dirk had learned, were _underground_! That was why the eye beheld nothing but the beauties of nature when the horizon was scanned. The functions of living were carried on in cleverly constructed subterranean dwelling-places, leaving the entire surface of the planet a playground for the pastoral race. The Ptan was awaiting his return, eager curiosity in his eyes. He looked up as Morris entered. "Well, my friend?" he asked. Dirk smiled grimly. "Very!" he replied. "It has been a day Graed Garroway will long remember ... if I give him a chance to do so." "Your plans were successful?" "Perfectly. I assisted one of my erstwhile comrades in the destruction of a vital munitions storehouse, robbed a tax collector of his monies and the Emperor's own daughter of her jewels, and distributed these where they were needed most ... amongst the poverty-ridden families of the capital." Morris chuckled. "There will be more surprised faces tomorrow when those poor devils wake to find themselves richer by a king's ransom than when they sought their pallets." "Still," said Slador thoughtfully, "you have really accomplished little. It would take a thousand men as many years to redistribute the tribute Garroway's army has exacted from the people of your homeland--" "That is true. But this is only a beginning; a few, minor incidents created to strike fear and awe into Garroway's hirelings. Later, I will strike at more vital spots. And as for men ... there will be not thousands, but millions, to rally when Garroway's force begins to weaken." Slador nodded. "Yes, that I believe. It is the history of mankind. Ever there have been millions to arise when oppression grows unbearable." A remembered question stirred in Dirk's mind; something which had vaguely puzzled him in his previous conversations with the Nadronian. He asked, "How is it, Ptan Slador, you know so much about the history of Earthmen? And how, even more strangely, does it come about that you of Nadron and we of Earth are identical in physical structure? Man's space-vessels have flamed to the farthermost planets of our sun, but nowhere else was ever found a life-form similar to that on our own Earth. "The Venusians resemble us, but are taller by many feet, heavier, slower of wit. The Plutonians again look like us ... save for the fact that their skins are green. Yet you, not only removed from our Solar Galaxy, but from our very ken of knowledge, might be a brother of my own." The Ptan smiled slowly. "And so, in fact, I am, Dirk Morris." "What?" "A brother many times and many centuries removed. Tell me ... have you never heard of the land of Aztlan?" "Azt--?" Dirk pondered, shook his head. "No. I'm afraid I have not, Slador. Where was it ... or is it?" "It was," answered the older man, "an island in the ocean you Earthmen now call the 'Atlantic' The very ocean takes its name from our once-great nation--" "Aztlan!" ejaculated Morris. "Atlantis! Of course! Now I remember. It is a myth ... a fable ... of an island which sank beneath the waves countless centuries ago! But surely, sir, you don't mean--?" * * * * * "I mean," Slador assured him gravely, "that legend is no fable, but veritable truth. Yes, my son, there _was_ such an island ... and we of Nadron were once the rulers of that island, and of your world. "Its ancientness is not measured in centuries, but in millennia. How long we descendants of the Atlanteans have lived on Nadron, our archives do not tell. Those who fled hither from the holocaust that deluged our former home could not bring with them the impedimenta of a cultured civilization. We had to fight our way upward from semi-barbarism to our present state of living ... and even yet we have not regained all the lost lore of Aztlan." Dirk said humbly, "Great must have been the wisdom of your forebears to be able to transfer themselves from a sinking island to this place. I understand, now, your interest in Earth. It is more than just sympathy for us ... it is a natural love for a land which once was yours." "Yes," said the Ptan. "A land which once we ruled, and now have lost forever. But enough of this, my son. You were telling me of your adventures--?" "Yes," said Dirk, remembering. "There was one thing happened which I do not understand. In the boudoir of the Princess Lenore, Ptan Slador, I was _visible_ for a few seconds! Why was that?" Slador stared at him in astonishment. "Visible! Impossible!" "That's what I thought. But it is true, sir. I saw my own image in the Princess' mirror--" "Mirror! Ah!" exclaimed the Ptan. "Now I begin to understand. This mirror ... it was not plain, silvered glass? It was, perhaps, quartz?" "Possibly," admitted Dirk. "I would not know about such things, sir." "Undoubtedly," mused his advisor, "it _must_ have been a rock-quartz mirror. That is the only Earthly substance of dual isotopic form. Its converse refractions hold and trap not only the normal vibrations of your system, but harmonic vibrations as well. Surely your scientists know this. Many hundreds of years ago, I know they experimented with the use of quartz substances in both light and sound transmission. "But we are not so interested now in causes as in results. Do you think the Princess saw you in this mirror?" "I ... I am afraid so," confessed Dirk. "It was her astonishment that attracted my gaze to the glass. Of course, I shattered the mirror instantly. But too late to keep her from seeing--" "If, of course," interrupted a cool voice, "she was not as bemused as yourself." "Eh?" Dirk spun, flushing in swift embarrassment as his eyes met those of Slador's daughter. Rima's lips were lifted in a light smile which, oddly, was not altogether of amusement. "Oh, you mean ... then, you ... you saw?" "You do let business interfere with pleasure, do you, Dirk Morris?" laughed the girl. "Yes, I am sorry, but I must confess to having been an innocent witness to your ... momentary digression. It was inexcusable of me, I know, but I was so interested in your endeavors that I turned on the visor to follow your adventures, and--" "Rima," blurted Dirk, "you must believe me ... it was nothing. I mean, the Princess means nothing to me. I--" He stopped, his embarrassment heightening with his color as he realized how any attempt at explanation merely made an already awkward situation worse. It suddenly mattered to him terribly that Rima should have watched that impulsive episode between himself and the Emperor's daughter. He had no right, he knew, to think of Rima as other than a girl who had befriended him on an alien world ... but somehow he already did. At first sight of her, a new meaning had entered into his life. It did not soothe him that Rima turned away his explanation with a laughing shrug. "Oh, but do not misunderstand me, Dirk Morris. It does not concern _me_ in the least how you amuse yourself in your lighter moments. And your other exploits were, I must acknowledge, thrilling to watch ... in a somewhat different way." Dirk said miserably, "Please! It was an impulse ... one I regretted immediately. The Princess Lenore means nothing to me ... nothing. I shall never lay eyes on her again in my life...." V In that one statement, Morris was mistaken. He made it in all good faith, but its truth was a matter over which he was not to have full control. Two weeks passed. Two weeks filled with excitement and adventure. Two weeks during which Dirk Morris made good his pledge to the assembled brothers of the Group, now safely in hiding. During that fortnight the Galactic Ghost ... as soon he became known to the whispering citizenry of Earth ... struck again, again, and yet again at the wide-flung forces of Black Garroway. Some of these blows were of a minor nature: the theft of hoarded gold, and the subsequent reappearance, as if by magic, of that gold where starving folk could lay eager hands on it; the mysterious disappearance of the Emperor's armored unicar scant moments before Garroway was to make an impressive "personal appearance" before the populace of the capital city; the inexplicable vanishment of a secret formula wherewith the Overlord's military experts hoped to subdue the gallant little guerrilla army which still held a salient against Garroway's might on the planetoid Iris. Other occurrences were more violent ... the kind that not even a ruthlessly controlled press can keep from public knowledge. The shocking demolition of the Overlord's strongest Asiatic fortress at Chuen-tzwan, keypoint from which his troops dominated all of what had once been Southern China. At six-fifteen in an evening, according to testimony given by the commanding officer at the subsequent investigation, from out of nowhere had appeared a placard, advising the entire garrison to withdraw immediately from the fortress, advising its component members, moreover, to rebel against Garroway. This ultimatum had teeth in it. Midnight was set as the deadline for obedience. When at midnight the garrison was still abristle with an aroused and suspicious force of armed men, from a dozen key points had broken out instantaneous fires. "Only a member of the Imperial High Command," testified the wretched officer, "could have known where to set those fires. Each was at a vitally strategic place: near a munitions bin, a water supply depot, or a warehouse of inflammables. We were helpless. In an hour the entire fortress was doomed. I was lucky to save a tenth of my men." He was not so fortunate in facing Garroway's wrath. The ex-commanding officer was put to death, along with every other ranking officer of the destroyed battalion. This summary execution seemed bootless, though, when a day or so later a similar flame destroyed the spaceport wherein was cradled one quarter of the Emperor's fleet. It was revealed by those who escaped this debacle that it had been impossible to salvage a single one of the spacecraft. "They were not merely attacked with fire from without," one official avowed. "Each vessel was found to have been tampered with by someone of the crew. The hypos were smashed as if with sledges, vital running parts were broken or stolen. We were helpless!" Helpless ... helpless ... helpless! There were excuses Garroway heard often, far too often, during the next weeks. It was a word he learned to hate fiercely, because it was so true. In quick succession he saw fall his outpost in Lower Africa, the well-fortified city of Buenos Aires, the central armaments depot on Lake Huron. And each time the apologies were the same. "We saw no one ... heard no one ... until it was too late." * * * * * Meanwhile, trouble had reared its head challengingly in the capital city itself. Here, as elsewhere, a frightened populace began by asking, "Why?" and rapidly changed its query to the more daring, "Why not?" Rumor, despite Garroway's every attempt to still it, ran like quicksilver through the city. If the press was silent on a new disaster, a common man or woman walking the streets might hear at his elbow a mysterious Voice asking, "_Did you know that last night the fortress at Toulon fell? The city is freed of the Emperor's rule; already the people have declared their independence, set up a provisional government. You can do the same. The hour is near!_" Or a child, playing with his little companions on the streets, would suddenly stop and look about him strangely, listen as to an unseen speaker ... then run home to his parents with the inexplicable words of a Voice: "_Yesterday the Territory of Mexico threw off the Overlord's bonds. In a short while you may do the same. Prepare!_" Or an unwimpled nun, praying in the sanctuary of a forbidden cloister--Black Garroway had long since outlawed the Church--might hear the vengeful, whispered tones of an unecclesiastic visitant: "_On Timor the Cross is worshipped openly since the Overlord's force has been broken. Here it will soon be the same. Spread the word!_" Thus the message was passed from person to person, and through a citizenry for decades apathetic to its own plight a new sense of hope and courage pulsed. Garroway's warriors sought in vain the refuge of the Group, upon the heads of whose members the Emperor had long since placed a tremendous price. But any common man who felt the urge to add his contribution to the rising tide of revolt could find that refuge with ease ... for at his work, or by his side, or in the heart of a crowd would be a Voice to tell him its location. So grew revolt like a tropic vine, reaching out new tentacles with every rising dawn, developing new strength with every failure of Garroway's heretofore supposedly invulnerable war machine, gathering new converts with every fresh disaster. And the mute whisperings of fearful people began to thrum with a new and heady tone ... the spirit of daring, the renascense of the flame of liberty. The voice of the people ... which is the will of God. Graed Garroway heard the bruitings of this voice, and was afraid. * * * * * Graed Garroway, whose boast had ever been he feared no man, heard the slow, insistent voice of revolt closing in about him ... and was afraid. For the first time in his brutal career he had met an enemy he could not crush with ruthless blows, destroy by force, obliterate with a flick of the hand. His armies had fallen twice ... thrice ... a dozen times before a phantom, a will-o'-the-wisp that struck and fled, leaving terror, awe, and desolation in its wake. He was baffled and confused, was Black Garroway. A terror was upon him that he could neither escape nor admit, for his confession of this fear to his commanders might be the last thing needed to send them, too, fleeing from his banner. There was but one living soul to whom he dared admit this fear. That was his own flesh and blood, the Princess Lenore. Yet even to her he would not make an open avowal. His admission came in the form of blustering attack. "Cowards!" he stormed, pacing the floor of his daughter's boudoir. "Snivelling cowards ... the lot of them! All this nonsense about a Voice ... a ghost that destroys strong forts ... a phantom that passes unscathed through flame ... _pah!_ It's lies, lies ... nothing but lies!" Princess Lenore studied her father lazily. She was not of the type easily stirred to fear. Under other circumstances, born the daughter of a lesser man than Black Garroway, Lenore Garroway might have made a name for herself in the world. As an adventuress ... a fighting-woman ... a daring woman. She drawled, half amusedly, "Lies? Are you so sure of that, my father?" "Sure?" snorted Graed Garroway. "Of course, I'm sure! There is no such thing as invisibility! My scientists have proven that time and time again in laboratories. The fabled 'magic cloak' of invisibility is both hypothetically and actually impossible. Where matter exists, there must be either reflection, refraction, or occultation--" The Princess yawned. "I do not understand these high-sounding words," she said, "nor need I. Because, you see, I have met the Galactic Ghost myself." "Nonsense!" fumed her parent. "It was an hallucination you suffered. Sympathetic reaction set up by nervousness. The medical examiner testified--" "Sometimes," interrupted the girl coldly, "you allow your ultrascientific viewpoint to warp your better judgment, my father. You talk nonsense! Could a nervous reaction account for the theft of my jewels, or the shattering of my mirror?" "I am not denying," protested Black Garroway stiffly, "that the ... the Ghost visited you. Possibly he hypnotized you into believing him invisible. As for your broken mirror, that might have happened in a dozen ways--" "The mirror was broken," said Lenore, "by the Ghost! Because I saw him reflected in it!" "Furthermore, it is ridiculous to assume--" The Emperor stopped abruptly, his brow congealing--"Eh? What did you say? You saw--" "I tried to tell you," purred the girl, "at the time. But you were too concerned with the loss of my gems to listen to me. I told you I saw the Galactic Ghost. He was a tall, dark-haired young man--" "Ridiculous!" puffed Garroway. "More hypnosis!" "--with crisp, curling hair," continued the Princess reminiscently, "and a small, triangular scar over his right eyebrow. A very interesting young man--" * * * * * Garroway had stiffened at her words, but this time it was with a tensing of interest. He leaned forward. "A moment, my dear. Did you say ... a small scar above his right eyebrow?" "Why, yes." "A triangular scar? You are certain of that?" "Positive. Why?" "Because if you are right--" The Overlord left the sentence dangling; strode to the wall audio and crisped sharp orders into its metallic throat. Elsewhere in the palace a corps of underlings went into action, collecting swiftly the information demanded by their master. Within minutes there came a messenger, bearing a portfolio. This Garroway pawed through, selecting a photograph which he handed to the girl. "Is this," he asked hoarsely, "the image you saw?" The Princess Lenore took the photo, studied it, and nodded. "It is. I remember him well. Who is he?" Graed Garroway laughed. But now there was a touch of hysteria in his laughter, and his deeprooted fear struck new depths as he answered. "His name is Dirk Morris ... an underling." "Dirk Morris," repeated the girl. "It is a pleasant name to the ears. Well ... now that you know the identity of the Ghost, what are you going to do?" Garroway said slowly, "I am going to do ... nothing. Dirk Morris was put to death almost three weeks ago. The ... the Galactic Ghost is a ghost indeed!" The girl smiled. "Perhaps," she said thoughtfully. "But a ghost with very tangible body ... and impulses. And, if I am not greatly mistaken, an Achilles' heel. Listen, my father.... I will drive a bargain with you. For a certain price, I will deliver into your hands this threat to your power." "Price?" The Overlord stared at her bleakly. "What price do you ask?" "The life," said the girl, "of the Ghost." Garroway's brow darkened. "Have you gone mad?" he demanded harshly. "His life is forfeit the moment my men seize him!" "But," pointed out the Princess Lenore sagely, "they cannot lay hands on him ... without my help. Come, father ... I, too, can be ruthless in getting that which I desire. Will you give me the man, Dirk Morris, and put an end to these depredations? Or must your fortresses continue to fall because of all on earth, I alone know how this phantom may be caught?" Garroway's cheeks were mottled with rage; for a moment it seemed he might strike his own daughter. "You ... you ingrate!" he husked. "You dare bargain with the System's Emperor?" "I dare bargain," taunted the Princess, "with my own father. And with a badly frightened man." Garroway fumed at the taunt ... but capitulated, as the Princess had known he must do. He lowered his hands weakly. "Very well," he said. "I give you your price. Now, what must be done?" "This--" said the Princess. And for a long time two remarkably similar heads, both in physiognomy and mentality, bent close together in conference.... VI "Tonight?" asked Dirk Morris. "You're sure, Neil?" "This very night," swore Neil Hardesty. "At the Palace Royal. I got it on the highest authority. From one of the Imperial Guard, recently converted to our Cause. A grand meeting of the Emperor's strategy Council, summoned to discuss ways and means--" He grinned--"of apprehending the Galactic Ghost." Dirk Morris smiled, too, though his features were invisible to his friend. "The Ghost," he promised, "will attend the Council meeting. Neil, send out a hurried summons to all the Group. Tonight may be the night for which we have waited and planned. The situation has finally turned to our advantage. This is the setting we needed to strike our final, and heaviest, blow. A gathering of all Graed Garroway's most trusted lieutenants! What better time to bring an abrupt end to his tyranny?" "Destruction?" asked Brian Shaughnessey. "You plan to kill them all, Dirk?" "That is not the best way. Killing would immortalize Garroway and--in the minds of many misguided people--forever brand the Galactic Ghost as an outlaw and murderer. No ... I will not destroy the Overlord. I will make him appear ignominious in the eyes of his subjects ... prove to all men that his vaunted powers are weak and futile. There is no weapon so strong as mirth, no blade so keen as scorn." Vurrth grunted heavily. "Maybe better you kill, Dirk. No trust Overlord." "My plans have been successful thus far," pointed out the Voice of Conscience. "Play along with me a little farther. I think the end is in sight. Neil ... be ready to send your forces into the Palace the moment I give the signal." "Right!" "And you, Brian ... see that the audiocast stations are controlled by us in time to speed word to the populace that the Emperor has been taken." "Right, Dirk." "And you, Vurrth--" "Me be on hand," growled Vurrth, "to watch Overlord. No like this." Dirk laughed. "As you will. Well ... until tonight, comrades!" Again, as oft before during these past weeks, the assembled brothers of the Group sensed the passage of a tingling vibrancy, and knew their leader had gone back to that strange, mysterious other universe which was now his home. Neil issued orders. The Group disbanded. * * * * * Back on Nadron, Dirk Morris sighed and unlimbered himself of the heavy harness which necessity forced his wearing when he made his peregrinations between the two worlds. To the Ptan Slador he said, "Well ... that's all I can do now. I shall try to rest until the hour comes." "And then?" asked Slador. "And then," repeated Dirk slowly, "success ... at last. If everything goes well, tonight will mark the beginning of the end. Earth's greatest citadel will fall, carrying with it into destruction not only the Emperor, but all those upon whom the burden of his military power rests. "With the fall of Earth, half the battle is won. No other planet is so tightly under Garroway's control as ours. With the Overlord imprisoned, the other worlds will burst free of their bondage ... the System will know again the joys of liberty." Rima said, "Dirk ... you have laid careful plans for tonight? You have plotted every move you will make?" "Under the circumstances, that is well-nigh impossible. I know only that the Emperor gathers with his staff. I shall have to make my entrance, then decide on the spur of the moment how best to accomplish my aims." "You are sure--" hesitated the girl--"this is not a trap of some sort?" "Trap?" Dirk laughed lightly. "How could it be?" "I don't know. But the Overlord is no fool. He is a ruthless man ... but he is no fool." "He also," reminded Dirk, "thinks I am dead. The identity of the Galactic Ghost is, to him, a complete mystery. Were he to discover my identity, then perhaps I might have occasion to fear a trap of some sort, for ... as you say ... Garroway is no fool. He would realize, then, that the teleport brought about not death, but some sort of sinister change. But I am sure there is no danger. Ptan Slador ... let us drink to success, and to the final reunion of our freed worlds!" So they toasted a new life opening to all mankind. And the maiden, Rima, drank the toast with them. But even as she drank, her eyes were grave and thoughtful.... * * * * * Nevertheless, despite his claims of confidence, it was with some slight degree of trepidation that Dirk Morris prepared for his ultimate exploit later that night. This was, he knew, his boldest stroke to date. He had hurled his forces elsewhere with supreme confidence. But always he had avoided too-close contact with Graed Garroway. For in his heart of hearts he agreed with Rima. He knew the Emperor to be, in truth, no fool ... but a cunning adversary of infinite daring and resource. Still, the die was cast now. The Group's preparations were made; he could not let them down. He must pave the way for the general uprising which would sweep Garroway from power ... or his own scheming into disaster. Slador and Rima accompanied him to the spot on Nadron where his translation was to take place. It was a tiny wooded glade, bathed in the cool moonlight of the alien planet. In the thickets small night-things chirruped, and from somewhere a sleepy bird sang a listless lullaby. Dirk, standing there breathing the sweet, fresh air of Nadron found it hard to believe that the mere pressure of a switch on his belt would place him on the musty, lower levels of that architectural monstrosity which was the Palace Royal ... a towering structure of numberless stories ... at the very topmost of which would be held the conference he pledged himself to end. He held out a hand; first Slador, then Rima, gripped it warmly. "Good luck!" said the Ptan. And Rima added, "We'll be waiting ... and watching!" Dirk nodded, not daring to trust his thoughts to words, and depressed the switch. As oft before he felt a churning moment of vertigo ... then he stood in a lower corridor of the Palace Royal. Not ten feet distant stood an armed guard. This man stirred restlessly, his head turning as if he felt the electric disturbance of Dirk's entrance. But when his searching eyes found nothing, he returned to the pacing of his post. Dirk slipped past him swiftly, noiselessly, and to the first of the long series of staircases he must negotiate. The Palace Royal was equipped with elevators, but these he dared not use. The movement of an "empty" elevator would be token enough to the wit-sharpened Palace guards that the dreaded Galactic Ghost was in their midst. So he pressed forward and upward to the heights of the tower. It was a long climb and a brutal one. The Emperor's palace dwarfed to shame the puny "skyscraper" attempts of ancestors a thousand years removed. Thus it was a weary Dirk Morris who finally attained the topmost flight, and there rested himself briefly before entering the suite which comprised the Overlord's council chamber. The vagrant thought struck him that the Palace was poorly guarded, considering the chaos into which the Ghost's activities should have thrown the Emperor. But this, he reasoned, might be but another proof of the weakening of Graed Garroway's grip; so undermined was the structure of his empire now that not even in his own bailiwick could he command the meticulous discipline he had heretofore exacted of his hirelings. Rested at last, he moved toward the massive portal of the council hall. It hung slightly ajar; with no effort he inched it open and eased his still-invisible, but now substantial body through. His entrance found the Overlord addressing a group seated in a semi-circle about the dais from which Garroway spoke. All backs save that of the Emperor himself were turned to Dirk. He moved forward silently, cautiously. "--therefore, my lords and generals," the Overlord was saying, "it is vitally necessary that we apprehend this dastard, this criminal, who has so dared attack our government. Never until the so-called Galactic Ghost is captured and put to death will we be free to--" "--to continue," said Dirk loudly, boldly, "your murderous onslaught against the rights and liberties of freedom loving people! Is that your meaning, Graed Garroway? Then abandon the thought. For truly, tonight your empire crumbles beneath you!" "_The Ghost!_" * * * * * The cry lifted in the hall; all heads whirled as one. Eyes opened wide in futile scanning, and jaws fell agape. And of all that vast, terrified assemblage, there was only one who did not freeze with sudden fear. That one was Garroway. Strangely, a smile seized his lips as he cried: "Yes, the Ghost ... as I had hoped! Guards ... _lights!_" Instantly the room, which had been cloaked in semi-darkness, blazed with the fury of a thousand beaming flares. And to his horror, Dirk Morris saw.... ... not only those who had spun to face him, tight faces wreathed in scowls, hands gripping lethal weapons ... but his own image, reflected a hundred times from every nook and corner of the vast hall! From a hundred mirrors placed to reflect in their revealing rock-quartz surfaces every move he made! Too late, comprehension dawned upon him! Rima had guessed aright ... this was a trap, ingeniously set for him by the Overlord, and now sprung at the proper moment. The Princess had revealed that which she had seen; the Overlord was clever enough to take advantage of it. There was but one thing to do, and that quickly! In a trice, Dirk's hand leaped to the control stud on his belt, seeking to depress the switch that would return him to Nadron. But here, too, the Emperor had anticipated his move. His voice again cleft the stark, foreboding silence. "_Field!_" And instantly there hummed through the room a shrill, whining current. It took but the split of a second for Dirk Morris to discern its purpose. For when his own hand tightened on the switch ... nothing happened! He did not find himself hurling the vibration-span to the safety of Nadron. He remained where he was, writhing in the coils of an electric agony that coursed through his veins like liquid fire. It was then the Overlord laughed, his voice a grating triumph. "You see, Dirk Morris, it is useless! My scientists have probed the secret of your ghostly state ... and you are snared in a net of their devising! Toss down your weapons!" The grim purpose in his voice left Dirk no choice. Reluctantly he dropped to the floor the weapon with which he had hoped to capture Graed Garroway, stood still as grim-faced guards moved forward to grip him, bundle him to the dais wherefrom watched the smirking Overlord. The tide was terribly turned. The biter was bitten! VII Dirk released the stud, pressure upon which had not brought him the escape he hoped, and gained some consolation in the fact that the pain faded. One thing he would _not_ do, he pledged himself, was show fear or hurt before Garroway. In as level a voice as he could muster he said, "So we meet again, Overlord of scavengers?" Garroway laughed harshly. "The trapped rabbit uses strong language still. You have profited little by your experience, I see, Dirk Morris." "On the contrary," retorted Dirk, "I have profited much. And the measure of my profit lies in the dissolution of your empire ... as you have learned in this past fortnight." Garroway said, "True, you have caused me trouble. I acknowledge it. But that trouble is ended, now, for I have discovered--at last, but fortunately not too late--the true nature of the machine in which I had thought to execute you. It was _not_ a disintegrating machine, but one that distorted the atoms of your body, rendering you invisible." Dirk's heart leaped; he struggled to maintain the impassive mask which was his face, revealed to the Overlord in a hundred reflecting surfaces of quartz. Then not yet had Garroway learned of the existence of Nadron, of the adjacent universe. That, at least, was something to be thankful for. He said, "It was a clever trap you set for me, Garroway. You announced a council meeting which you knew I must attend; you surround yourself not with your generals, as was expected, but with guards. You listened to the advice of your daughter, used rock-quartz to make my body visible--" "--and," added Garroway complacently, "prepared an electric wave-transmitter that disrupted your own instrument, trapped you in our presence, and makes it impossible for you to escape. "Well--" His voice changed abruptly--"your puny attempt to overthrow me has failed, Morris. As a fighter, I cannot restrain a certain degree of admiration for your effort, but as Emperor of the System, there is one thing I can, and must, do. _Guards--!_" His voice was a thin snarl. But as hulking stalwarts moved forward to perform his bidding, another slighter figure hastened before them to confront her parent. The Princess Lenore. "Wait!" she commanded. "What means this, my parent? Why do you call the guards?" "Return to your apartment, Lenore!" ordered Garroway sternly. "You have served your purpose. It is not seemly you should witness the judgment on this rebel." "Have you forgotten your promise?" raged the woman. "You cannot kill this man. You pledged me his life!" "Forget this foolish whim!" bade her father. "He is but an underling. Surely there are other men--" "I want this one!" insisted Lenore. For a moment her dark, vivid eyes touched Dirk's with lingering ferocity ... and despite the tenseness of the moment, the peril of his situation, Dirk Morris could not restrain the quick thrill of admiration and ... something else which burned through him. His brain tossed in a turmoil of conflicting emotions. He understood, now, why an ungovernable impulse had caused him to sweep this girl into his arms that night in her apartment. It was because she was ... she was his type of woman! A hard, gallant, ruthless fighting-woman who knew what she wanted and would adopt any measures to get it. There was Rima on Nadron ... true. He respected her. For her he felt--though he had known her but a short time--a great tenderness and affection. But it was not true love. It was a brotherly feeling; a comfortable confidence in her presence and companionship. _This_ girl, the Princess Lenore, alone could stir his veins to running fire; she alone quickened a hungry spark within him. It was mad ... it was impossible ... but true. He loved--and the knowledge of it struck Dirk Morris with brutally staggering force--he loved an enemy and the daughter of his bitterest foe! Stranger yet ... she loved him! Now she was talking again, hurriedly arguing a case to win his life. "It is not necessary to kill this man, my parent. It would be folly to do so. Think! On all this world ... in all this universe ... there are few men worthy of the name of _man_! Your court is a _melange_ of smirking nincompoops and weaklings. Who amongst them can match in strength and vigor the spirit of Dirk Morris? Which can compare with him in audacity and daring?" "That," responded her father darkly, "is why he must die. I cannot allow so dangerous a foe to live--" "No? Have you forgotten the medical science of which your attendants are capable? Think, my father ... were it not better to make slight alterations in this man's brain, converting him to a true and faithful servant, than to destroy forever the bravery in his heart?" The words struck home. Garroway frowned thoughtfully. "It is true," he mused. "A slight operation ... a period in the Mental Clinic to erase from his brain-passage all thoughts of rebellion ... would make him a new man. But it is too great a chance. Were anything to go wrong--" The Princess Lenore gazed at him scornfully. "I see. Very well, then--" With slow, deliberate movements she reached up, stripped from her raven hair the glittering imperial emblem which designated her a member of the Family Royal--"if such must be your decision, so be it? But I ... I shall no longer confess myself a Garroway. If the word of the Emperor is so lightly to be given...." And this time she was triumphant. Her scorn hit the Overlord in his one most vulnerable spot ... his colossal vanity. His dark eyes flamed with petulance. He snarled, "Oh, let be! No man shall say the Overlord retracted a pledge. If you must have this man--" He turned to Morris--"Well, what say _you_, rebel? Are you too proud to buy your life at the expense of rebellion? Or will you accept life at the price of a new existence of loyalty ... to me?" * * * * * Dirk wavered, sorely tempted. Until this moment his life had been consecrated to a single Cause ... the overthrow of Garroway's cruel empire. But now, suddenly, strangely, singingly, had entered into it another influence ... love for a woman of matchless courage and beauty. His attempts to destroy Garroway had failed. He was hopelessly ensnared, his cohorts could not save him. Years might pass before another Dirk Morris arose to lead malcontents in rebellion. Neil Hardesty was a good man, a strong and faithful friend ... but he lacked the spark of genius that leads lost causes to success. Perhaps it would be better, in the long run, to accept defeat ... and in accepting it, accept also such share of happiness as this world had to offer. As the mate of Lenore he would live a new life, all rebellious thoughts exiled from his brain by the surgery of Garroway's physicians.... So he hesitated, and for those tense moments the fate of a world hung in the balance. But then ... honor won! With infinite sadness, but with courage too, Dirk Morris made his answer. It was symbolic that he made it to the Princess. "I am sorry, my Princess," he said quietly. "I know a great wonder, and a great pride, that you have made this plea for me. But ... I cannot accept life on such terms. For me there is but one clear and unavoidable path ... to go on. This path I must choose to glory or ... the grave." "Don't be a fool!" cried the girl. "Don't you see you can gain nothing by this gesture. You have no choice!" Her words were sharp ... but her voice was fearful. Dirk, recognized this as he said, still softly, "Yes, that, too, I see. And, believe me, Princess, I am deeply sorry. But I have made my choice." For an instant that seemed eternities the Princess Lenore, she who had until a fortnight since known passion for nothing save costly baubles, stared into Dirk's eyes. Then a little sob broke from her lips, and she turned away. And the Emperor nodded. "Guards!" he said. "Take this man--" It was a command that was never obeyed ... an order never completed! For at that moment came interruption in the form of a violent blast that shook the entire council hall as a thatched shack trembles in a cyclone's wake. A column of living fire blossomed in the room; eyes burned and eardrums throbbed to see and hear the tingling of an unleashed and unguessable _force_ turned loose in their midst. And in the heart of this column, loose-girt in shining white, radiant as a goddess, but calm with the ominous quiet of powers unfathomable ... stood the girl, _Rima of Nadron_! * * * * * It was Morris who first recovered sufficiently from the unexpected appearance to make a movement. A cry broke from his lips, "_Rima!_" He moved toward the girl. But her voice lifted in crisp warning. "Back, Dirk! To touch this flame means death!" Her words stopped not only Morris, but a group of the Imperial Guards who, as one, had now spun toward the visitant. They faltered, stopped dead in their tracks and turned to the Overlord for guidance. Graed Garroway's black eyebrows were knit with rage and bafflement. He demanded hoarsely, "Who is this woman? And whence comes she, that she dares enter the stronghold of the Emperor?" It was incredible how forceful could be the tones of Rima. Her voice was dulcet sweet, but carried conviction. "I am of a race that ruled this world before your ilk was spawned, Black Garroway ... a race whose least remembered knowledge so surpasses your own that you are as pawns with which we play at will. "I came because the evil in your heart has inspired you to do a great wrong ... a wrong upon mankind that we, who once loved Earth, can neither condone nor allow. I came to free Dirk Morris, and to free Earth of a tyrant. "Dirk ... bid the Emperor step from his dais. He no longer rules this city or this System." "No longer rules--" choked Garroway. "The city has fallen," said Rima. "While in this tower you plotted for the life of a rebel leader, you have lost an empire. Listen ... or better yet, turn on your visi-screens. Therein you will see I speak the truth." In sudden, fumbling haste Graed Garroway turned to a vision-unit set in the auditorium wall. Instantly a section of the capital city sprawled before the gaze of those assembled. It was as Rima had foretold. No matter where the dial was swung, there reflected the same scene: people leaping, laughing, rejoicing in the streets ... marching in vast, inchoate crowds, singing and cheering. Here and there were grisly evidences of the reason for their rejoicing ... a knot of tumbled bodies garbed in the uniform of Garroway's forces ... a burning pyre which had been an Imperial blockhouse ... a torn, stained militiaman's cap lying in a gutter. And now, to further the evidence, came the sound of voices, running footsteps, through the tower itself. And into the council hall flooded a host of jubilant freedmen, led by a trio at sight of whom Dirk's heart filled with gladness. The gigantic Vurrth, grinning from ear to ear and wearing a jacket snatched from a fallen foe ... a jacket that had ripped up the back under the strain of the Venusian's mighty muscles. Brian Shaughnessey, bellowing loud greetings. Neil Hardesty, grave and quiet as ever, even in this hour of triumph, as he spoke to his leader. "It is over, Dirk. You have succeeded here, too?" Dirk said ruefully, "I have succeeded, yes. But it was not of my doing. Rima--" "He has succeeded," interrupted the Nadronian girl. "The Emperor is deposed." Neil said gratefully, "We awaited your signal, Dirk. When it did not come we grew anxious. Then Rima--" For an instant his eyes sought those of the alien girl, and there was a curious humility in them, an almost worshipful admiration--"then Rima came to us; told us the hour had struck. We issued our rallying cry. It ... it was easier than we had dared hope. The city was like a ripe plum, ready for our taking. At every street-corner new hordes joined us. Even Garroway's hirelings abandoned their old leaders to follow the standard of the fabulous Galactic Ghost." "Thus, you see," said Rima so softly that only Dirk could hear her, "you _did_ succeed, Dirk Morris. It was the Ghost whose spirit forged this rebellion. I but stepped in when the moment needed me." * * * * * Garroway, who had been standing at the vision plate, staring as a man transfixed at the image of his own downfall, now turned to his destroyers. His dark eyes were haggard, his sagging jowls suddenly no longer the harsh features of a ruler, but those of a defeated old man. He whispered: "This, then, is the end? Very well--" A burst of his former defiance flamed in him. He forced a laugh. "You have won, Dirk Morris. And the death I promised you lies in store for me? Well ... so be it. It has been a long game, but one worth the playing. Of one thing you cannot rob me ... the memory that once I ruled the mightiest empire known to man." But again it was Rima who spoke. Her voice was like a crystal bell. "Not death, Graed Garroway. It is the right of none to judge that ultimate penalty on another. _Exile_ shall be your fate. Those who know your system better than I shall decide which planet ... or planetoid far removed from Earth ... shall be your final refuge. "Neil Hardesty--" She turned to the listening captain--"send him away. Your new government shall sit in judgment on him later." Hardesty nodded, motioned to Shaughnessey, and the erstwhile Overlord was led away. With him were herded from the room, none too gently, those who had been his companions in the attempt to trap Dirk. Within a matter of minutes the hall was cleared save for a handful: Dirk and Rima, in her glowing pillar of flame; Hardesty, the Princess Lenore. In the Princess' eyes glittered a great defiance and a great sorrow. She asked, "And I? I join my father in exile?" Rima looked at Dirk. "Well, Dirk Morris?" she asked. Dirk's throat was dry, his mind confusion. He said, "Must ... must I, then, be the one to judge, Rima? She saved my life ... or tried to. Were it not for her--" Rima said gently, "You love her. Isn't that what you mean, Dirk?" Dirk's head turned slowly; his eyes met those of the Princess Lenore. And what he found there forced the answer from his lips. "Yes, Rima. May the gods help me ... I love her." "That," said the Nadronian girl, "I know. And this also I know ... that she loves you. Does she love you enough to join you in the new world which is the only one whereon you now can live? Enough to join you on Nadron?" It was Lenore who answered that question. She said simply, "I do not understand your meaning, woman who dwells in a column of flame ... but this much I _do_ know. Where Dirk Morris dwells, there would I dwell also." Rima nodded, satisfied. "That, too, I had expected. It is well. She will make you a good mate, Dirk Morris. I wish--" There was a strange catch in her voice, a catch clenched teeth upon her lower lip could not quite stifle--"I wish you ... much joy ... in my lost, beloved homeland--" Dirk stared at her aghast, uncomprehending. "Rima!" he cried. "Lost homeland? I don't understand--" The maid of Nadron smiled wanly. Her voice, when she spoke, was infinitely gentle. "Surely _you_ should know, Dirk Morris, that one cannot pass with impunity from one universe of vibration to another?" Dirk said, "You mean that you, as I did, have become a ... a wraith to your own world? That henceforth you have no true existence on Nadron, as I none on Earth?" Rima nodded quietly, sadly. "But then," stammered Dirk, "if not on Nadron, where _is_ your new plane of existence?" A hope caught and tugged at his heart. "Earth, perhaps? Our planet will become your new world?" * * * * * Rima shook her head. "No, Dirk Morris. The atomic pathway of Space-Time winds ever upward ... not downward to a lower vibrational plane. When this protective shield, which already wanes--" She glanced with a swift, despairing apprehension as the iridescence dulled, and a crepuscular wavering dimmed its outlines--"When this shield wanes, I shall move ... forward to a bourne I cannot guess. A better world, perhaps, or ... a worse--" "No!" cried Dirk. He started forward, but within the blazing column a white arm rose in stern command. "No farther, Dirk. To touch this field means death!" "Rima!" cried Dick huskily. "Rima, you shouldn't have done this. It wasn't required of you!" "The quest of liberty," said the girl softly, "is the quest of all men, all women, everywhere. I was watching your progress, Dirk. When I saw you had been trapped, I knew someone must come to your aid, someone must carry out the plans you had so carefully laid. "My father was too old. The journey between our two worlds is ... well, not without pain. So--" The girl smiled--"I came." "You sacrificed yourself," cried Dirk humbly, "for us. It is too much. Earth can never repay you, Rima." "I was repaid when you refused life at the expense of your own honor, Dirk. Now it is done I can tell you that on your decision at that moment rested the future fate of Earth. We of Nadron have ever hesitated in dabbling in the affairs of others. Had you proved unworthy of our aid in that moment of trial. I would not have made the journey. "And now--" There flickered in her eyes a shadow of thin, wondering fear as the veil of flame about her seemed to shudder--"the time has come for ... parting--" "No!" shouted Dirk, as if by the very strength of his cry he could withhold the inexorable. "No, Rima! Don't--" His cry ended in a little moan. For at that moment the shimmering column trembled and ... vanished like the flame of a snuffed candle. The last vision of Rima to be burned forevermore upon the retina of Dirk Morris' memory was that of a slim and gallant goddess, whiteclad, lifting a soft arm in salute ... and farewell. Then ... nothing. * * * * * Dirk turned away, shaken. He whispered, "Gone! Rima ... gone ... no one knows where--" Lenore said soberly, "_She_ loved you, too, Dirk." "No. She never loved me. Not as I love you ... not as you love me--" "It was a different kind of love," said the princess. "I will find her!" vowed Dirk brokenly. Lenore moved to his side quietly; the warmth of her beside him like the courage of a voice in the wilderness. "You and I," she breathed, "together, Dirk." And suddenly, though there stretched before him a new and greater quest than that recently acquitted, Dirk was consumed with a vast impatience to know again the lips of the girl whose nearness was a heady wine, challenging him to dare any danger. He turned to Lenore. "Together," he agreed. "But first I must return to Nadron to lay the plans. You ... you will come soon, my Princess?" "Soon," she promised. "Soon. But, first--" She moved toward his voice. If she closed her eyes, she could not tell it was invisible arms that held her close, nor invisible lips that quickened upon her own.... 
39540	----	generously made available by the Google Books Library Project (http://books.google.com) Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file which includes the original illustrations. See 39540-h.htm or 39540-h.zip: (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/39540/39540-h/39540-h.htm) or (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/39540/39540-h.zip) Images of the original pages are available through the the Google Books Library Project. See http://books.google.com/books?vid=Qo4MAAAAYAAJ&id Transcriber's note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). THE REVOLUTIONS OF 1848-9. Es reden und träumen die Menschen viel Von bessern künftigen Tagen: Nach einem glücklichen, goldenen Ziel Sieht man sie rennen und jagen. Die Welt wird alt, und wird wieder jung; Doch der Mensch hofft immer Verbesserung. * * * * * Es ist kein leerer schmeichelnder Wahn, Erzeugt im Gehirne des Thoren. Im Herzen kündet es laut sich an: Zu was Besserm sind wir geboren; Und was die innere Stimme spricht, Das täuscht die hoffende Seele nicht. SCHILLER. [Illustration: _Giuseppe Mazzini._] THE REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENT OF 1848-9 IN ITALY, AUSTRIA-HUNGARY, AND GERMANY. With Some Examination of the Previous Thirty-three Years. by C. EDMUND MAURICE, Author of "The Lives of English Popular Leaders in the Middle Ages." With an Engraved Frontispiece and Other Illustrations. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons London: George Bell and Sons 1887. [The right of translation is reserved.] Chiswick Press:--C. Whittingham and Co., Tooks Court, Chancery Lane. PREFACE. The following book is the result of many years' work. It aims at showing the links which connected together the various movements in Germany, Italy, and the Austrian Empire in 1848-9. Many as are the books which have been written on the various parts of that struggle, I do not know of any attempt to link them together. How adventurous this effort is I am most painfully aware, and none the less so because I happen to know that the task was undertaken and abandoned by at least one writer who has many qualifications for it to which I can lay no claim. I allude to my friend Dr. Eugene Oswald, who has most generously assisted me in carrying out the work for which he was unable to spare the time. But I may say without arrogance that however deficient my history may be in the learning and ability which Dr. Oswald's would have shown, as well as in that lifelikeness which his personal share in the important rising in Baden would have enabled him to give to the descriptions; yet I shall at least have no temptation to any one-sided estimate of the merits of the various races concerned in the struggle, a temptation from which the most candid German could hardly escape. My only danger in that matter would be that I might be tempted to speak too favourably of _all_ the movements of those various races; seeing that during my investigations in the cities affected by these movements, I received the most extreme courtesy and kindness from German and Bohemian, Magyar and Szekler, Saxon and Roumanian, Serb, Croat, and Italian; and I feel nothing but pain at any word of criticism I have uttered in these pages that may jar on the susceptibilities of any of those races. It will be noticed, of course, that I have omitted from this history any account of the French Revolution. My reasons for this have been given at the beginning of the seventh chapter. But I may add to what I have said there that I had long felt the disproportionate importance which many people attached to the French Revolution of 1848, in regard to its immediate influence on Europe. From Palermo, not from Paris, came the first revolutionary outburst. From Presburg, not from Paris, came the word that shook Metternich from power, and secured a European character to the Revolution. Under these circumstances, I conceived the idea of telling the story of the European Revolution, without touching on the French part of it, except in the most incidental manner; so that the students of this period may be able fairly to estimate the other influences which produced these great results, unblinded by the splendour which anything done in Paris seems always to have for the student of revolution. One other peculiarity in my book also needs some explanation. I have, as far as possible, avoided references to authorities in notes. Such references only worry the general reader, while the student will, I think, be more helped by the list of authorities which I append to this preface. It now only remains for me to thank those friends who have helped me in my work.--For the German part of the Revolution, I have received much help from the kind loan of the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung" by the late Dr. Karl Marx. For the special Baden part of it I received help not only from Dr. Oswald but also from Dr. Karl Blind, who lent me pamphlets not otherwise accessible. For the Bohemian part of the narrative I owe much to the kind help of Dr. Gabler, Mr. Naprstek, Count Leo Thun the younger, and Dr. Rieger. For hints about the Viennese struggle I owe thanks to Dr. von Frankl, the well-known poet of the revolution, and also to Dr. Friedjung. For some general hints on the Slavonic question I am much indebted to Baron Helfert; and my obligation to Dr. Herbst I have acknowledged in a note. For general Hungarian information I owe thanks to Mr. Pulszky, to Miss Toulmin Smith, to General Klapka, to my kind friend Professor Felmeri of Klausenburg, to Dr. Lindner, Mr. Kovacs, Mr. Kovary, Mr. Boros, of the same town, and to Mr. Szabò, now Librarian of Klausenburg University, formerly a distinguished officer in General Bem's army; also to Mr. Fekete, Mr. Sandor, and Professor Koncz of Maros Vasarhely; and last but not least to Mr. Paget, the author of "Hungary and Transylvania." For special hints about the Saxon question I am indebted, amongst others, to Dr. Teutsch, to Professor Senz, and to the late "Obergespan" of Hermannstadt, Herr von Brennerberg, whose loss to the district I can well understand, since the acquaintance of a week enabled me to appreciate the singular justice of his mind, as well as his uniform kindness; while for information from the Roumanian point of view I owe thanks to Mr. Barritzu. For information on Serb questions I am indebted principally to Mr. Polit, and Mr. Hadjiç of Neusatz, and Mr. Boscoviç of Belgrade, for whose acquaintance I have to thank the late Servian Minister in England, Mr. Mijatoviç. The same introducer I have to thank for the kindness shown me by Mr. Matkovicu of Agram. In the last mentioned town I also received useful information and help from Mr. Subek, and from the Librarian of the South Slavonic Academy. For help in Italian work I have to thank my old friend Madame Venturi, Signor Ernesto Nathan, Signor Cardinali, Signor Berti, Professor Villari, Signor Guastalla, Professor Aurelio Saffi (the Ex-Triumvir of Rome), Signor Galli, Dr. Sacchi, the Syndic of Goito, the Librarian of the Biblioteca di Brera at Milan, and my friend Signor Pizzi.--For help of various kinds I have to thank Miss Wedgwood, Miss Irby, Dr. Brandl and Mr. Garnett of the British Museum. I have also to acknowledge the kindness of Mr. Diösy in allowing a copy to be taken of his picture of Kossuth, for insertion in my book. This favour, with other help, I owe to my friend Mr. B. Gunszt. CONTENTS. PAGE AUTHORITIES CONSULTED xi CHIEF RACES OF AUSTRIAN EMPIRE xvii TABLE OF DATES xix CHAPTER I. THE TRIUMPH OF DESPOTISM 1 " II. FIRST EFFORTS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM 19 " III. FAITH AND LAW AGAINST DESPOTISM 52 " IV. LANGUAGE AND LEARNING AGAINST DESPOTISM 88 " V. DESPOTISM RETIRING BEFORE CONSTITUTIONALISM 117 " VI. FIRST MUTTERINGS OF THE STORM 168 " VII. THE DOWNFALL OF DESPOTISM 216 " VIII. THE STRUGGLE OF THE RACES 275 " IX. THE REVOLUTION BREAKS INTO SEPARATE PARTS 334 " X. LAST EFFORTS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM 401 " XI. THE DEATH STRUGGLE OF FREEDOM 431 INDEX 497 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS. GIUSEPPE MAZZINI _Frontispiece._ KOSSUTH LAJOS _to face page_ 84 ROBERT BLUM " 224 IL VASCELLO, ROME " 483 AUTHORITIES CONSULTED. GENERAL HISTORY. Metternich's Memoirs. Menzel's Geschichte der letzten vierzig Jahre. GERMANY. GENERAL GERMAN HISTORY. Arndt, Life of. Blum, Life of. Görres, Life of. Marx, Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Perthes, Life of. Stein, Life of, by Professor Seeley. Stenographischer Bericht des deutschen Vor Parlaments zu Frankfort. ---- des Fünfziger Ausschüsses. ---- der deutschen Constituirenden Versammlung. Zimmermann Deutsche Revolution. PRUSSIA. Humboldt Brief-Wechsel mit einem Jungen Freunde. ---- Letters to Varnhagen von Ense. Schmalz Berichtigung einer Stelle in der Bredow-Venturinischen Chronik für das Jahr 1808. BADEN. Goegg (Amand) Rückblick auf die Badische Revolution (from La Ligue des Peuples). La Liberté de Penser (a journal containing pamphlets, &c., on the Baden Revolution). Morel Der März-Aufstand und Die Badische Revolution. Struve (Gustav) Geschichte der Volks Erhebungen in Baden. " (Amalie) Erinnerungen, &c. SCHLESWIG-HOLSTEIN. Adressen an eine hohe deutsche Versammlung, &c., von Kiel. Bunsen. Memoir on Constitutional Rights of the Duchies. Droysen. The Policy of Denmark towards the Duchies. SWITZERLAND. Der Untergang des Sonderbundes. AUSTRIA. GENERAL HISTORY. Helfert. Geschichte Oesterreichs. Springer. Geschichte Oesterreichs seit der Wiener Frieden, 1809. Pillersdorf. Rückblick auf die politische Bewegung in Oesterreich. VIENNA. Dunder. Denkschrift über die Wiener October Revolution. Grüner. Geschichte der October Revolution. Reschauer. Das Jahr 1848. Reichstag's Gallerie, &c. Verhandlungen des Oesterreichischen Landtages 1848. Violand. Die Sociale Geschichte der Revolution in Oesterreich. Wiener Boten. BOHEMIA. Müller. Die merkwürdigsten Tage Prags in der Pfingst-Woche des Jahres 1848. Pameti (Pamphlets and proclamations, &c., in the Archives of Prague). Schöpf. Volks Bewegung in Prag. Ständische Verhältnisse des Konigreichs Böhmen. Stiles. Austria in 1848-9. Tomain. Das Böhmische Staatsrecht. GALICIA. Ausschlüsse über die jungsten Ereignisse in Polen. Krasinski. Panslavismus und Germanismus. Krolikowski. Mémoire sur l'Etat de Cracovie, 1840. Zaleski. Die Pölnische Frage. HUNGARY. GENERAL HISTORY. Beschwerden and Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn, 1843. Böhmisch-Slavische Helden in der Panslavismus. Deak, Life of. Görgei. My Life and Acts in Hungary. Irby (Miss). Across the Carpathians. Klapka. Memoirs of the War of Independence in Hungary. Kossuth, Memoir of in a History of Hungary by E. O. S. Kovari (Laslò) Okmanytar az 1848-9. (This book, though written in Hungarian, contains some important documents in German, of which alone I have been able to make use.) Mailath (Count Johann) Geschichte von Oesterreich. " Der Ungarische Reichstag in 1830. Paget. Hungary and Transylvania. Pulszky. Meine Zeit mein Leben. " (Madame). Memoirs of a Hungarian Lady. Smith (Toulmin). Parallels between Constitution and Constitutional History of England and Hungary. Szechenyi (Vortrag über) Ludwig Fezstory. Zur Geschichte des Ungarischen Freiheits-Kampfes Autentische Berichte. CROATIA AND SLAVONIA. Aktenstücke zur Geschichte des Croatisch Slavonischen Landtages, by Pejakoviç. Agramer Zeitung, 1843-8. Deutsche Viertels-Jahr-Schrift (article called Mittheilungen aus Serbien). Le Duc. La Croatie et la Confedération Italienne. Serbes de Hongrie, &c. Verhandlungen des Agramer Landtags in October, 1845. Other pamphlets on the Croatian question. TRANSYLVANIA. Bem. Feldzug in Siebenbürgen, by Czetz. Bonar. Transylvania, its Products and People. Deutsche Worte, a magazine. Friedenfels, Joseph Bedeus von Scharberg. Klausenburg, Collection of documents in Library of. Lauriani. Die Romänen der Oesterreichischer Monarchie. Maros Vasarhely, Collection of Baron Apor at. Roth. Der Sprach-Kampf in Siebenbürgen. Scharberg. Die Verfassung Siebenbürgens. Unterhaltungen aus der Gegenwart. Vereinigung Siebenbürgens mit Ungarn vom Standpunkte der Sachsischen Nation beleuchtet. Zieglauer. Die Reform-Bewegung in Siebenbürgen. ITALY GENERAL HISTORY. Alfieri. Opere. Autobiography. Bianchi (Nicomede), Storia della politica Austriaca rispetto ai Sovrani ed ai Governi Italiani dell'anno 1791, al Maggio del 1857. Coppi. Annali d'Italia. D'Amato. Panteon dei Martiri della libertà Italiana. Farini. Lo Stato Romano (really including much of other parts). Foscolo (Ugo) Scritte politici inediti. Jacopo Ortis. ---- Lettera a Conte Verri. ---- Lettera a Conte di Ficquelmont. ---- (Vita di). Pecchio. Gallenga. Italy in 1848. Gioberti Vincenzo (biography by V. G. in I Contemporanei Italiani). Del Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani. Gualterio. Gli Ultimi Rivolgimenti Italiani. ---- Delle Negative date dal Conte Solaro della Margherita. La Concordia (paper published at Genoa). La Farina. Storia dell Italia dopo il Settembre del 1847. Manzoni (Alessandro). Cenni Sulla vita Sua. Miscellanee politiche Genovesi (pamphlets, songs, &c., published at Genoa, and bearing on the revolution). Mazzini, Life and Writings of (translated by E. A. V.). Panizzi, Lettere ad, di uomini illustri, &c. Ranalli. Istorie Italiane dal 1846 al 1853. LOMBARDY AND VENETIA. Andryane. Mémoires d'un prisonnier d'Etat. Anfossi (Francesco). Memorie sulla campagna di Lombardia del 1848. Biblioteca di Brera (Milan), Collections of Caricatures, Pamphlets, and Proclamations in. Cantù (Cesare). Editions and Lives of Monti and Parini. Casati. Nuove rivelazioni su i fatti di Milano nel 1847-8. Cattaneo. Dell'Insurrezione di Milano. " Archivio Triennale. Dandolo. Italian Volunteers and Lombard Rifle Brigade. Gazzetta di Milano, 1848. Manin, Documents et pièces autentiques laissées par. Quadro politico di Milano (collection of pamphlets, &c.). Vedovi (Timoleone). I martiri di san Georgio e di Belfiore. NAPLES AND SICILY. Colletta. History of Naples (translated). Ruggiero Settimo. Per Gabriele Colonna. PIEDMONT. Balbo (Cesare) autobiography. " Speranze d'ltalia. Brofferio. Storia di Piemonte. " I miei Tempi. Solaro della Margherita, Vita di per Biginelli. " Memorandum Storico-Politico. " Avvedimenti Politici. ROMAN STATES. Artaud. Vie de Pie 7. " Vie de Pie 8. Balleydier. Storia della Revoluzione di Roma. Beghelli. La Republica Romana del 1849. Brasini. L'8 Agosto 1848, Bologna. " La Resistenza di Bologna nelle otto Giornate di Maggio, 1849. D'Azeglio (Massimo) Degli ultimi casi di Romagna. " Correspondance Politique. Monitorio Romano, 1848 and 1849. Orsini. Memoirs. Pasolini (Memoir of), by his son, translated. Protocollo della Republica Romana. Republica Italiana del 1849 (anonymous clerical). Rossi (Pellegrino). Vita di per Raggi (including other notices of him). Torre (Federico). Memorie Storiche sull'intervento Francese (unfinished). TUSCANY. Guerrazzi (Domenico) Apologia della Vita Politica. (His novels should also be read to estimate his influence.) CHIEF RACES OF AUSTRIAN EMPIRE. HUNGARY. _Magyars_, ruling race; found in most parts of the Kingdom, but most largely in the Northern parts. Semi-Turkish race (non-Aryan). Various creeds; Calvinism the most distinctive (_i.e._, the one that has most connected itself with the race-struggles). Chief town, Buda-Pesth. _Croats_, chiefly found in Croatia, but sometimes in Slavonia and Dalmatia. Creed, Roman Catholic; Slavonic race; chief town, Agram. _Saxons_, found in S.E. of Transylvania. Creed, mainly Lutheran; race, German; chief town, Hermannstadt. _Serbs_, found chiefly in Slavonia, but also in Banat, Bacska, and in smaller numbers in other parts of Hungary. Creed, Greek Church; race, Slavonic; chief towns, Neusatz and Carlowitz. _Slovaks_, found in North Hungary. Creed, Lutheran; race, Slavonic. _Szekler_, found in N.E. of Transylvania. Creeds, various; race, same as Magyars; chief town, Maros Vasarhely. _Roumanian_, or _Wallack_, in all parts of Transylvania, and a few in the Banat. Creed, Greek Church; race, mixed Dacian and Italian; chief town, Blasendorf. _Italians_, found in Dalmatia and Istria. WESTERN AUSTRIA. _Germans_, found everywhere, but chiefly in Archduchy. Creed, mainly Roman Catholic; chief town, Vienna. _Slovenes_, found in Krain, Carinthia, and Styria. Race, Slavonic. _Czechs_, in Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Creed, chiefly Roman Catholic; race, Slavonic; chief town, Prague. GALICIA. _Poles_, found in all parts. Creed, Roman Catholic; race, Slavonic; chief town, Lemberg. _Ruthenians._ Creed, Greek Church; race, Slavonic. TABLE OF DATES. 1846. April 25. Charles Albert defies Austria about the salt-tax. June 15. Election of Pius IX. July 8. King of Denmark asserts his right to absorb Schleswig-Holstein. " 16. Pius IX's. amnesty. 1847. Jan. 3. Landtag summoned to Berlin. July 5. Pope grants Civic Guard to Rome. " 14. Clerical conspiracy suppressed in Rome. " 16. Austrian occupation of Ferrara. " 20. Swiss Diet resolves to dissolve Sonderbund. Sept. 1. Unsuccessful rising in Messina. " 12. Meeting of South German Liberals at Offenburg. " 29. Metternich formally expresses his approval of the Sonderbund. Nov. 4. Motion carried at Pesth for taxation of nobles. " 24. Troops of the Swiss Diet occupy Luzern. Dec. 9. Nazari makes his motion for reform in Milan. " 16. Agreement for Austrian troops to evacuate Ferrara. " 27. Ciceruacchio asks the Pope to join the Italian League. 1848. Jan. 2 and 3. Smoking riots at Milan. " 12. Sicilian rising begins. " 19. Arrest of Manin and Tommaseo at Venice. " 29. Neapolitan Constitution granted. Feb. 4. Leopold of Tuscany promises Constitution. " 12. Pope appoints first lay Ministers. " 22. Martial law proclaimed in Lombardy. " 27. Meeting at Mannheim to demand German Parliament. Mar. 2. Second Chamber of Baden demands repeal of Carlsbad Decrees. Downfall of Ministry in Bavaria. " 3. Kossuth's speech at Presburg. " 11. First meeting at the Wenzelsbad in Prague. " 13. Rising in Vienna. Workmen's petition in Berlin. Granting of Liberal Ministry by King of Saxony. " 15. Abdication of Metternich. " 16. Students' rising in Pesth. Rising in Berlin. Granting of Constitution by Pope. " 17. Serb meeting at Pesth. " 18 to 22. Five days of Milan. " 22. Rising in Venice. " 23. Manin chosen President of Venetian Republic. Jellaciç made Ban of Croatia. Charles Albert declares war on Austria. " 25. Prussian Assembly opens. " 26. King of Naples deposed by Sicilians. " 31. Meeting of Vor-Parlament at Frankfort. April 2. Bundestag repeals Carlsbad Decrees. " 4. Bundestag authorises Prussia to act for Germany in Schleswig-Holstein. " 8. First battle of Goito. " 11. Palacky refuses to join the Committee of Fifty at Frankfort. " 16. First Baden insurrection. " 29. Papal allocution against the Italian war. May 1. Slavs summoned to meet in Prague. " 3. Mamiani Ministry formed. " 13. Meeting of Serbs at Carlowitz. Provisional Government at Milan declare for fusion. " 15. Coup d'état in Naples. Second rising in Vienna. Meeting of Roumanians at Blasendorf. " 18. First meeting of Constituent Assembly at Frankfort. Flight of Emperor of Austria to Innspruck. " 28. Battle of Curtatone. " 29. Unsuccessful riot in Milan. Completion of vote of fusion. " 30. Slavonic Congress in Prague. Abolition of Transylvanian Parliament. Surrender of Peschierato Charles Albert. June 2. First encounter between Magyars and Roumanians. " 3. Separate Provisional Government formed in Bohemia. " 11. Hrabowsky's attack on Carlowitz. Fall of Vicenza. " 12 to 18. Rising in Prague. " 19. Ferdinand declares Jellaciç a traitor. " 29. Jellaciç made Dictator by Croatians. Archduke John chosen Administrator of the German Empire. July 4. Venice accepts the fusion with Piedmont. " 22. Kossuth supports vote for sending troops against Italians. Aug. 5. Capitulation of Milan. " 8. Expulsion of Austrians from Bologna. " 11. Restoration of Manin's dictatorship in Venice. " 26. Truce of Malmö signed. " 31. Abolition of feudal dues in Vienna. Sept. 5. Frankfort Assembly condemns the Truce of Malmö. " 9. Jellaciç crosses the Drave. " 11. Meeting of Roumanians to protest against Hungarian conscription. " 16. Frankfort Assembly rescinds its vote about the Truce of Malmö. " 18. Émeute in Frankfort. " 21. The "Struve Putsch." " 25. Official appointment of Lamberg at Buda-Pesth. " 28. Murder of Lamberg. Oct. 3. Jellaciç declared Dictator of Hungary. " 6. Murder of Latour. " 7. Croat army surrenders to the Hungarians. Ferdinand flies to Innspruck. " 8. Kossuth threatens death to those who won't hang out the Hungarian flag. " 10. Auersperg and Jellaciç join forces. " 11. Bohemian deputies meet in Prague. " 18. Puchner's appeal to the Transylvanians. " 21. Hungarian troops cross the Austrian frontier. " 22. First meeting of Kremsier Parliament. " 30. Battle of Schwechat. Nov. 1. Windischgrätz enters Vienna. " 9. Blum shot. " 15. Murder of Rossi. Prussian Assembly votes that no more taxes be paid. " 24. Flight of Pope. " 28. Prussian Assembly decide to leave Berlin. Cavaignac announces intended expedition to Rome. Dec. 2. Abdication of Ferdinand. " 5. Final dissolution of Prussian Parliament. " 13. Address from Forli asking for Constituent Assembly. " 18. Frankfort Parliament abolishes feudal dues. " 31. Hungarian Committee of Defence retreats to Debreczin. 1849. Jan. 11. Frankfort Parliament votes for exclusion of Austria from Germany. " 22. Görgei sends Waizen Declaration to Windischgrätz. Feb. 1. Saxons apply for help to Russians. " 6. Re-occupation of Ferrara by Austrian troops. " 8. Flight of Grand Duke from Tuscany. " 9. Proclamation of Roman Republic. " 19. Görgei superseded by Dembinski. " 21. Announcement that the Austrians have crossed the Po. " 26. Opening of Prussian Parliament. Mar. 7. Dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament. " 11. Capture of Hermannstadt by Bem. " 12. Charles Albert declares war on Austria. " 20. Formal announcement of new Austrian Constitution. " 23. Battle of Novara. Abdication of Charles Albert. " 28. Frankfort Parliament decides to offer Crown of Germany to King of Prussia. " 29. Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini made Triumvirs. April 1. Capture of Brescia by Haynan. " 3. King of Prussia refuses the Crown of Germany. " 14. Declaration of Hungarian Independence. " 17. Final meeting of Sicilian Parliament. " 24. French arrive before Civita Vecchia. " 25. Re-occupation of Pesth by the Hungarians. " 27. Dissolution of Prussian Parliament. May 14. Beginning of third Baden insurrection. King of Prussia recalls Prussian members from Frankfort Parliament. " 15. Neapolitans capture Palermo. " 20. Bologna captured by Austrians. " 26. Proposals of Lesseps accepted by Triumvirs. " 30. Frankfort Parliament resolves to adjourn to Stuttgart. " 31. Oudinot rejects Lesseps' Convention. June 4. Russian proclamation of intended invasion of Hungary. " 13. Ledru Rollin's insurrection in Paris. " 17. First Russian victory in Transylvania. " 18. Final dissolution of German Parliament. " 19. Austrians capture Ancona. " 30. Roman Assembly decides to yield. Prussians surround Rastatt, which is centre of Baden movement. July 3. French enter Rome. " 15. Papal Government restored. " 28. Death of Charles Albert. Hungarian Diet dissolves itself. Aug. 5. Capture of Hermannstadt by Russians. 11. Görgei made Dictator. Kossuth flies from Hungary. " 13. Görgei surrenders at Vilagos. " 28. Austrians enter Venice. Sept. 26. Klapka surrenders Komorn. CHAPTER I. THE TRIUMPH OF DESPOTISM. 1815-1819. Condition of Europe in 1815.--Metternich's position.--Character of Alexander of Russia.--Metternich's attitude towards religion.--Madame de Krüdener.--The Holy Alliance.--Aspirations of the Germans.--Stein _v._ Metternich.--Schmalz's pamphlet.--The Rhine Province.--Arndt and Görres.--The Small States of Germany.--Würtemberg.--Weimar.--The Jena demonstration.--The Burschenschaft.--The Wartburg demonstration.--The Murder of Kotzebue.--The Carlsbad decrees.--The Final Act of Vienna.--Metternich's triumph. In the year 1814 Napoleon Buonaparte ceased to reign over Europe, and, after a very short interregnum, Clement Metternich reigned in his stead. Ever since the fall of Stadion, and the collapse of Austria in 1809, this statesman had exercised the chief influence in Austrian affairs; and, by his skilful diplomacy, the Emperor had been enabled to play a part in Europe which, though neither honourable nor dignified, was eminently calculated to enable that Prince to take a leading position in politics, when the other Powers were exhausted by war, and uncertain of what was to follow. But Francis of Austria, though in agreement with Metternich, was really his hand rather than his head; and thus the crafty Minister easily assumed the real headship of Europe, while professing to be the humble servant of the Emperor of Austria. The system of the new ruler resembled that of Napoleon in its contempt for the rights of men and of nations; but it was to be varnished over with an appearance of legality, a seeming respect for the rights of kings, and a determination to preserve peace and avoid dramatic sensations, which made it welcome to Europe, after eighteen years of almost incessant wars or rumours of wars. As he looked round upon the countries that had fallen under his rule, the contemplation of the existing state of Europe seemed to promise the new monarch a fairly successful reign. France had been satisfied by the preservation of Alsace and Lorraine, and by the sense that, from having been the focus of revolution, she had now become the corner-stone of legitimacy. England had at first seemed to give pledges to the cause of liberty by her promise of independence to Genoa, and her guarantee of the Sicilian Constitution; but with the help of Castlereagh, whom Metternich described as "that upright and enlightened statesman," the Austrian Government had succeeded in persuading the English to consent to look on quietly while Genoa was absorbed in the Kingdom of Sardinia, and while the Anglo-Sicilian Constitution was destroyed by Ferdinand of Naples; and the English zeal for independence had been happily diverted from the support of constitutions and civic liberties to the championship of the most contemptible of Napoleon's puppets, the King of Saxony. The King of Prussia, who in 1813 had seemed in danger of becoming the champion of popular rights and German freedom, was now, with his usual feebleness, swaying towards the side of despotism; and any irritation which he may have felt at the opposition to his claim upon Saxony, had been removed by the concession of the Rhine Province. Among the smaller sovereigns of Europe, the King of Sardinia and the Pope alone showed any signs of rebellion against the new ruler of Europe. The former had objected to the continued occupation of Alessandria by Austrian forces; while the representatives of the Pope had even entered a protest against that vague and dangerous clause in the Treaty of Vienna which gave Austria a right to occupy Ferrara. But, on the other hand, the King of Sardinia had shown more zeal than any other ruler of Italy in restoring the old feudal and absolutist régime which the French had overthrown. And though Cardinal Consalvi, the chief adviser of the Pope, was following for the present a semi-Liberal policy, he might as yet be considered as only having established a workable Government in Rome. And a Pope who had been kidnapped by Napoleon was hardly likely to offer much opposition to the man who, in his own opinion, was the overthrower of Napoleon. Yet there were two difficulties which seemed likely to hinder the prosperity of Metternich's reign. These were the character of Alexander I. of Russia, and the aspirations of the German nation. Alexander, indeed, if occasionally irritating Metternich, evidently afforded him considerable amusement, and the sort of pleasure which every man finds in a suitable subject for the exercise of his peculiar talents. For Alexander was eminently a man to be managed. Enthusiastic, dreamy, and vain; now bent on schemes of conquest, now on the development of some ideal of liberty, now filled with some confused religious mysticism; at one time eager to divide the world with Napoleon, then anxious to restore Poland to its independence; now listening to the appeals of Metternich to his fears, at another time to the nobler and more liberal suggestions of Stein and Pozzo di Borgo;[1] only consistent in the one desire to play an impressive and melodramatic part in European affairs. But, amusing as Alexander was to Metternich, there were circumstances connected with the condition of Europe which might make his weak love of display as dangerous to Metternich's policy as a more determined opponent could be. There were still scattered over Europe traces of the old aspirations after liberty which had been first kindled by the French Revolution, and again awakened by the rising against Napoleon. Setting aside, for the moment, the leaders of German thought, there were men who had hoped that even Napoleon might give liberty to Poland; there were Spanish popular leaders who had risen for the independence of their country; Lombards who had sat in the Assembly of the Cis-Alpine Republic; Carbonari in Naples, who had fought under Murat, and who had at one time received some little encouragement, even from their present King. If the Czar of Russia should put himself at the head of such a combination as this, the consequences to Europe might indeed be serious. But the stars in their courses fought for Metternich; and a force, which he had considered almost as dangerous as the character of Alexander, proved the means of securing the Czar to the side of despotism. Nothing is more characteristic of Metternich and his system than his attitude towards any kind of religious feeling. It might have been supposed that the anti-religious spirit which had shown itself in the fiercest period of the French Revolution, and, to a large extent, also in the career of Napoleon, would have induced the restorers of the old system to appeal both to clerical feeling and religious sentiment, as the most hopeful bulwark of legitimate despotism. Metternich was far wiser. He knew, in spite of the accidental circumstances which had connected Atheism with the fiercer forms of Jacobinism, that, from the time of Moses to the time of George Washington, religious feeling had constantly been a tremendous force on the side of liberty; and although he might try to believe that to himself alone was due the fall of Napoleon, yet he could not but be aware that there were many who still fancied that the popular risings in Spain and Germany had contributed to that end, and that in both these cases the element of religious feeling had helped to strengthen the popular enthusiasm. He felt, too, that however much the clergy might at times have been made the tools of despotism, they did represent a spiritual force which might become dangerous to those who relied on the power of armies, the traditions of earthly kings, or the tricks of diplomatists. Much, therefore, as he may have disliked the levelling and liberating part of the policy of Joseph II., Metternich shared the hostility of that Prince to the power of the clergy. Nor was it purely from calculations of policy that Metternich was disposed to check religious enthusiasm. Like so many of the nobles of his time, he had come under the influence of the French philosophers of the eighteenth century; his hard and cynical spirit had easily caught the impress of their teaching; and he found it no difficult matter to flavour Voltairianism with a slight tincture of respectable orthodox Toryism. The method by which he achieved this end should be given in his own words: "I read every day one or two chapters of the Bible. I discover new beauties daily, and prostrate myself before this admirable book; while at the age of twenty I found it difficult not to think the family of Lot unworthy to be saved, Noah unworthy to have lived, Saul a great criminal, and David a terrible man. At twenty I tried to understand the Apocalypse; now I am sure that I never shall understand it. At the age of twenty a deep and long-continued search in the Holy Books made me an Atheist after the fashion of Alembert and Lalande; or a Christian after that of Chateaubriand. Now I believe and do not criticize. Accustomed to occupy myself with great moral questions, what have I not accomplished or allowed to be wrought out, before arriving at the point where the Pope and my Curé begged me to accept from them the most portable edition of the Bible? Is it bold in me to take for certain that among a thousand individuals chosen from the men of which the people are composed, there will be found, owing to their intellectual faculties, their education, or their age, very few who have arrived at the point where I find myself?" This statement of his attitude of mind is taken from a letter written to remonstrate with the Russian Ambassador on the patronage afforded by the Emperor Alexander to the Bible Societies. But how much more would such an attitude of mind lead him to look with repugnance on the religious excitement which was displaying itself even in the Arch Duchy of Austria! And, to say the truth, men of far deeper religious feeling than Metternich might well be dissatisfied with the influence of the person who was the chief mover in this excitement. The Baroness de Krüdener, formerly one of the gayest of Parisian ladies of fashion, and at least suspected of not having been too scrupulous in her conduct, had gone through the process which Carlyle so forcibly describes in his sketch of Ignatius Loyola. She had changed the excitements of the world for the excitements of religion, and was now preaching and prophesying a millennium of good things to come in another world, to those who would abandon some of the more commonplace amusements of the present. The disturbance which she was producing in men's minds specially alarmed Metternich; and, under what influence it may be difficult to prove, she was induced to retire to Russia, and there came in contact with the excitable Czar. Under her influence Alexander drew up a manifesto, from which it appeared that, while all men were brothers, kings were the fathers of their peoples; Russia, Austria, and Prussia were different branches of one Christian people, who recognized no ruler save the Highest; and they were to combine to enforce Christian principles on the peoples of Europe. When the draft of this proclamation was first placed before Metternich it was so alien from his modes of thought that he could only treat it with scorn; and Frederick William of Prussia was the only ruler who regarded it with even modified approval. But with all his scorn Metternich had the wit to see that the pietism of Alexander of Russia had now been turned into a direction which might be made use of for the enforcement of Metternich's own system of government; and thus, after having induced Alexander, much against his will, to modify and alter the original draft, Metternich laid the foundation of the Holy Alliance. But there still remained the troublesome question of the aspirations of the German nation; and these seemed likely at first to centre in a man of far higher type and far more steady resolution than Alexander. This was Baron von Stein, who, driven from office by Napoleon, had been in exile the point of attraction to all those who laboured for the liberty of Germany. He had declared, at an early period, in favour of a German Parliament. But Metternich had ingeniously succeeded in pitting against him the local feeling of the smaller German States; and instead of the real Parliament which Stein desired, there arose that curious device for hindering national development called the German Bund. This was composed of thirty-nine members, the representatives of all the different German Governments. Its object was said to be to preserve the outward and inward safety of Germany, and the independence and inviolability of her separate States. If any change were to be made in fundamental laws, it could only be done by a unanimous vote. Some form of Constitution was to be introduced in each State of the Bund; arrangements were to be made with regard to the freedom of the press, and the Bund was also to take into consideration the question of trade and intercourse between the different States. All the members of the Bundestag were to protect Germany, and each individual State, against every attack. The vagueness and looseness of these provisions enabled Metternich so to manage the Bundestag as to defeat the objects of Stein and his friends, and gradually to use this weakly-constituted Assembly as an effective engine of despotism. But in fact Stein was ill fitted to represent the popular feeling in any efficient manner. His position is one that is not altogether easy to explain. He believed, to some extent, in the People, especially the _German_ People. That is to say, he believed in the power of that people to _feel_ justly and honourably; and, as long as that feeling was expressed in the form of a cry to their rulers to guide and lead justly, he was as anxious as anyone that that cry should be heard. He liked, too, the sense of the compact embodiment of this feeling in some institution representing the unity of the nation. But, with the ideas connected with popular representation in the English sense, he had little sympathy. That the People or their representatives should _reason_ or act, independently of their sovereigns, was a political conception which was utterly abhorrent to him. In short, Stein's antagonism to Metternich was as intense as that of the most advanced democrat; but it was not so much the opposition of a champion of freedom to a champion of despotism, as the opposition of an honest man to a rogue. Metternich wrote in his Memoirs, when he was taking office for the first time in 1809, "From the day when peace is signed we must confine our system to tacking and turning and flattering. Thus alone may we possibly preserve our existence till the day of general deliverance." This policy had been consistently followed. The abandonment of Andrew Hofer after the Tyrolese rising of 1809, the adulterous marriage of Maria Louisa, the alliance with Napoleon, the discouragement of all popular effort to throw off the French yoke, the timely desertion of Napoleon's cause, just soon enough to give importance to the alliance of Austria with Prussia and Russia and England, just late enough to prevent any danger of defeat and misfortune; these acts marked the character of Metternich's policy and excited the loathing of Stein. As he had been repelled from Metternich by arts like these, so Stein had been drawn to Arndt, Schleiermacher, and Steffens by a common love of honesty and by a common power of self-sacrifice; but he looked upon them none the less as, to a large extent, dreamers and theorists; and this want of sympathy with them grew, as the popular movement took a more independent form, until at last the champion of Parliamentary Government, the liberator of the Prussian peasant, the leader of the German people in the struggle against Napoleon, drifted entirely out of political life from want of sympathy with all parties. But it was not to Stein alone that the Germans of 1813 had looked for help and encouragement in their struggle against Napoleon. The People had found other noble leaders at that period, and it remembered them. The King of Prussia remembered them too, to his shame. He was perfectly aware that he had played a very sorry part in the beginning of the struggle, and that, instead of leading his people, he had been forced by them most unwillingly into the position of a champion of liberty. It was not, therefore, merely from a fear of the political effects of the Constitutional movement, but from a more personal feeling, that Frederick William III. was eager to forget the events of 1813. But if the King wished to put aside uncomfortable facts, his flatterers were disposed to go much further, and to deny them. A man named Schmalz, who had been accused, rightly or wrongly, of having acted in 1808 with Scharnhorst in promoting the Tugendbund,[2] and of writing in a democratic sense about popular assemblies, now wrote a pamphlet to vindicate himself against these charges. Starting from this personal standpoint, he went on to maintain that all which was useful in the movement of 1813 came directly from the King; that enterprises like that by which Schill endeavoured to rouse the Prussians to a really popular struggle against the French were an entire mistake; that the political unions did nothing to stir up the people; that the alliance between Prussia and France in 1812 had saved Europe; and that it was not till the King gave the word in February, 1813, that the German people had shown any wish to throw off the yoke of Napoleon. This pamphlet at once called forth a storm of indignation. Niebuhr and Schleiermacher both wrote answers to it, and the remaining popularity of the King received a heavy blow when it was found that he was checking the opposition, and had even singled out Schmalz for special honour. The great centre of discontent was in the newly-acquired Rhine province. The King of Prussia, indeed, had hoped that by founding a University at Bonn, by appointing Arndt Professor of History, and Görres, the former editor of the "Rhenish Mercury," Director of Public Instruction, he might have secured the popular feeling in the province to his side. But Arndt and Görres were not men to be silenced by favour, any more than by fear. Görres remonstrated with the King for giving a decoration to Schmalz, and organized petitions for enforcing the clause in the Treaty of Vienna which enabled the Bund to summon the Stände of the different provinces. Arndt renewed his demand for the abolition of serfdom in his own province of Rügen, advocated peasant proprietorship, and, above all, Parliamentary Government for Germany. The feeling of discontent, which these pamphlets helped to keep alive, was further strengthened in the Rhine Province by a growing feeling that Frederick William was trying to crush out local traditions and local independence by the help of Prussian officials. So bitter was the anti-Prussian feeling produced by this conduct, that a temporary liking was excited for the Emperor of Austria, as an opponent of the Prussianizing of Germany; and Metternich, travelling in 1817 through this province, remarked that it is "no doubt the part of Europe where the Emperor is most loved, _more even than in our own country_." But it was but a passing satisfaction that the ruler of Europe could derive from this accidental result of German discontent. He had already begun to perceive that his opposition to the unity of Germany, and his consequent attempt to pose as the champion of the separate States, had not tended to secure the despotic system which his soul loved. Stein had opposed the admission of the smaller German States to the Vienna Congress, no doubt holding that the unity of Germany would be better accomplished in this manner, and very likely distrusting Bavaria and Würtemberg, as former allies of Napoleon. Metternich, by the help of Talleyrand, had defeated this attempt at exclusion, and had secured the admission of Bavaria and Würtemberg to the Congress. But he now found that these very States were thorns in his side. They resented the attempts of Metternich to dictate to them in their internal affairs; and, though the King of Bavaria might confine himself to vague phrases about liberty, the King of Würtemberg actually went the length of granting a Constitution. Had this King lived much longer, Metternich might have been able to revive against him the remembrance of his former alliance with Napoleon. But when, after his death in 1816, the new King of Würtemberg, a genuine German patriot, continued, in defiance of his nobles, to uphold his father's Constitution, this hope was taken away, and the South German States remained to the last, with more or less consistency, a hindrance to the completeness of Metternich's system. But the summary of Metternich's difficulties in Germany is not yet complete. The ruler of another small principality, the Duke of Weimar, had taken advantage, like the King of Würtemberg, of the permission to grant a Constitution to his people; and had been more prominent than even the King of Würtemberg in encouraging freedom of discussion in his dominions. This love of freedom, in Weimar as in most countries of Europe, connected itself with University life, and thus found its centre in the celebrated University of Jena; and on June 18th, 1816, the students of the University met to celebrate the anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. There, to the great alarm of the authorities, they publicly burnt the pamphlet of Schmalz, and another written by the play-writer Kotzebue, who was believed to have turned away Alexander of Russia from the cause of liberty, and now to be acting as his tool and spy. The head of the Rhine police, conscious, no doubt, of the ferment in his own province, remonstrated with the Duke of Weimar on permitting such disturbances. This opposition increased the movement which it was designed to check. Jahn, who had founded the gymnastic schools which had speedily become places of military exercise for patriotic Germans during the war, now came forward to organize a Burschenschaft, a society which was to include all the patriotic students of Germany. Metternich and his friends had become thoroughly alarmed at the progress of the opposition, but again events seemed to work for him; and the enthusiasm of the students, ill-regulated, and ill-guided, was soon to give an excuse for the blow which would secure the victory for a time to the champions of absolutism. The desire for liberty seems always to connect itself with love of symbolism; and the movement for reform, naturally led to the revival of sympathy with earlier reformers. Actuated by these feelings, the students of Leipzig and other German Universities gathered at the Wartburg, in 1817, to revive the memory of Luther's testimony for liberty of thought; and they seized the opportunity for protesting against the tyranny of their own time. Apparently the enthusiasm for the Emperor of Austria had not extended to Saxony; for an Austrian corporal's staff was one of the first objects cast into the bonfire, which was lighted by the students; while the dislike to Prussia was symbolized by the burning of a pair of Prussian military stays, and the hatred of the tyranny which prevailed in the smaller States, found vent in the burning of a Hessian pig-tail. The demonstration excited much disapproval among the stricter followers of Metternich; but Stein and others protested against any attempt to hinder the students in their meeting. In the following year the Burschenschaft, which Jahn desired to form, began to take shape, and to increase the alarm of the lovers of peace at all costs. Metternich rose to the occasion; and boasted that he had become a moral power in Europe, which would leave a void when it disappeared. In March, 1819, the event took place which at last gave this "moral power" a success that seemed for the moment likely to be lasting. Ludwig Sand, a young man who had studied first at Erlangen and afterwards at Jena, went, on March 23rd, 1819, to the house of Kotzebue at Mannheim, and stabbed him to the heart. It was said, truly or falsely, that a paper was found with Sand, declaring that he acted with the authority of the University of ----. It was said also that Sand had played a prominent part in the Wartburg celebration. With the logic usual with panic-mongers, Metternich was easily able to deduce from these facts the conclusion that the Universities must, if left to themselves, become schools of sedition and murder. The Duke of Weimar, with more courage, perhaps, than tact, had anticipated the designs of Metternich by a proclamation in favour of freedom of thought and teaching at the Universities, as the best security for attaining truth. This proclamation strengthened still further the hands of Metternich. Abandoning the position which he had assumed at the Congress of Vienna, of champion of the smaller States of Germany, he appealed to the King of Prussia for help to coerce the Duke of Weimar, and the German Universities. Frederick William, in spite of his support of Schmalz, was still troubled by some scruples of conscience. In May, 1815, he had made a public promise of a Constitution to Prussia; Stein and Humboldt were eager that he should fulfil this promise, and even the less scrupulous Hardenberg held that it ought to be fulfilled sooner or later. But Metternich urged upon the King that he had allowed dangerous principles to grow in Prussia; that his kingdom was the centre of conspiracy against the peace and order of Germany, and that, if he once conceded representative government, the other Powers would be obliged to leave him to his fate. The King, already alarmed by the course which events were taking, was easily persuaded by Metternich to abandon a proposal which seemed to have nothing in its favour except the duty of keeping his word. Arndt was deprived of his professorship, and tried by commission on the charge of taking part in a Republican conspiracy; Jahn was arrested, and Görres fled from the country, to reappear at a later time in Bavaria as a champion of Ultramontanism against the hateful influence of Prussia. Then Metternich proceeded to his master stroke. He called a conference at Carlsbad to crush the revolutionary spirit of the Universities. A commission of five members was appointed, under whose superintendence an official was to be placed over every University, to direct the minds and studies of students to sound political conclusions. Each Government of Germany was to pledge itself to remove any teacher pronounced dangerous by this commission; and if any Government resisted, the commission would compel it. No Government was ever to accept a teacher so expelled from any other University. No newspaper of less than twenty pages was to appear without leave of a Board, appointed for the purpose, and every state of Germany was to be answerable to the Bund for the contents of its newspapers. The editor of a suppressed paper was to be, _ipso facto_, prohibited from starting another paper for five years in any state of the Bund; and a central Board was to be founded for inquiry into demagogic plots. These decrees seem a sufficiently crushing engine of despotism; but there still remained a slight obstacle to be removed from Metternich's path. The 13th Article of the Treaty of Vienna had suggested the granting of Constitutions by different rulers of Germany; and, vaguely as it had been drawn, both Metternich and Francis felt this clause an obstacle in their path. As soon, therefore, as the Carlsbad Decrees had been passed, Metternich summoned anew the different States of Germany, to discuss the improvement of this clause. The representatives of Bavaria and Würtemberg protested against this interference with the independence of the separate States; and, although the representative of Prussia steadily supported Metternich, it was necessary to make some concession in form to the opponents of his policy. It was, therefore, decided that the Princes of Germany should not be hindered in the exercise of their power, nor in their duty as members of the Bund, by any Constitutions. By this easy device Metternich was able to assume, without resistance, the Imperial tone, which suited his position. The entry in his memoirs naturally marks this supreme moment of triumph. "I told my five-and-twenty friends," he says, "what we want, and what we do not want; on this avowal there was a general declaration of approval, and each one asserted he had never wanted more or less, nor indeed anything different." Thus was Metternich recognized as the undisputed ruler of Germany, and, for the moment, of Europe. FOOTNOTES: [1] A Corsican of noble birth who left his country after it fell under the rule of France, and whose influence was used with Alexander to encourage him in a Liberal policy. [2] A popular and patriotic society, for training the Germans in resistance to the French yoke. CHAPTER II. FIRST EFFORTS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM, 1820-1832. Effect of Napoleonic Wars on Italian Feeling.--Austrian promises and performances in Lombardy.--Vincenzo Monti.--Ugo Foscolo.--Alessandro Manzoni.--Federigo Confalonieri.--Position of Sardinia.--Relations of Sardinia with Austria.--Reaction under Victor Emmanuel.--Ferdinand I. of Naples.--The Carbonari.--The Spanish rising.--The Spanish Constitution.--The Neapolitan rising.--Guglielmo Pepe.--The Conference at Troppau.--Palermo and the Constitution of 1812.--Divisions in the Liberal Camp.--Ferdinand's attitude.--The movement in Piedmont.--Santa Rosa.--Charles Albert.--"Voleva e non voleva."--The Students' rising.--The rising in Piedmont, and causes of its failure.--Reaction in Italy.--The first martyr.--The Greek rising.--Alexander of Russia.--George Canning.--Breaking of the Holy Alliance.--The Movements of 1830-31.--The Frankfort Decrees.--Metternich's second triumph. Of all the countries of Europe, none had been more affected than Italy, both for good and evil, by the Napoleonic wars; and in no part of Italy were the traces of these wars so evident as in Lombardy. Though settled liberty had been unknown there since the cities of the Lombard League had fallen under their petty tyrants; though any sense, even of national independence, must have ceased since the sixteenth century; yet the real misery of the position of a conquered country, the sense of an absolutely alien rule, seems hardly to have been fully realised by the Lombards, until the Peace of Utrecht, in 1713, had substituted the Austrian rule for that of the Spaniards. The Spanish tyranny, however cruel, had been softened to the Italians by the sense of community of race and similarity of language; and the readiness of the conquerors to inter-marry with the conquered had given hopes of an ultimate amalgamation between the races. But under the German rule there were no such modifications of the evils of conquest. The new rulers held aloof from the Italians; and the latter were reminded at every moment that they were not merely slaves, but slaves to an alien and unsympathetic master. When, then, an Italian, at the head of a French army, offered the Lombards deliverance from German rule; when he organized them into a separate legion, and showed special trust in them throughout his wars; when he established the Government of the Cis-Alpine Republic, and held out before their astonished eyes the vision of an united Italy, it was natural that such appeals should awaken hopes of a newer life, and a prouder position in the councils of Europe. It was true that their confidence had received terrible shocks. The horrible treachery of the Treaty of Campo Formio, the manipulation of the Constitution of the Cis-Alpine Republic, the gradual changes which tended to absorb it into the French Empire; these had been tolerably clear signs to the Lombards of what they might ultimately expect from their so-called liberator. Yet amid all these acts of violence and treachery, Napoleon had still kept before them the idea of a separate kingdom of Italy, if not in the present, then in the not distant future. If Napoleon failed them, Eugène Beauharnais might realise the ideal with which his step-father had mocked them; if Eugène Beauharnais proved false, King Joachim of Naples might lead them to freedom. And then, most wonderful of all! came the announcement that the Austrian might become, in his turn, the liberator. In 1809, Archduke John had promised to the Italians, in the name of the Emperor Francis, "a Constitution founded on the nature of things, and a frontier inaccessible to any foreign rule. Europe well knows," continued the Archduke, "that the word of this Prince is sacred, and that it is as unchangeable as it is pure. It is Heaven that speaks by his mouth." General Nugent, the leader of the Austrian forces, followed up this proclamation, at a later time, by equally strong promises of Italian independence, and as late as April 26, 1814, Lord William Bentinck, the founder of the Sicilian Constitution of 1812, had added his guarantee for the liberty, prosperity, and independence of Italy. The Italians, therefore, had some hopes of justice from the Powers of Europe. These were shaken by the Congress of Vienna; and the Lombards received a new shock when they found how unreal were even the seeming concessions made by that Congress. A central Congregation of Lombardy, which had no power of initiating reforms, and hardly leave to utter complaints, was the sole embodiment of the principle of Italian independence; and the "frontier guaranteed against the foreigner" was unable to exclude, not only Austrian soldiers from the garrisons of Lombardy, but even Austrian judges from her tribunals, and Austrian professors from her universities; secret tribunals tried Lombards, who were arrested for they knew not what cause; taxes out of all proportion to the size of Lombardy drained the country for the benefit of other parts of the empire; and police dogged the footsteps of the most distinguished citizens. Nor could Lombardy be even certain of her own sons. The wisest Lombards might well have been confused by the rapid changes of government which had taken place in the short space of eighteen years. They had seen Austrian tyranny give place to a Cis-Alpine Republic; they had passed from republican rule by somewhat confused stages under the despotism of Napoleon, a despotism which had in its turn to give way to the freer rule of Eugène Beauharnais; and lastly they had seen Beauharnais overthrown, and Austrian rule restored in a more crushing form than before. Not merely their political judgment, but their sense of right and wrong had been unsettled by such changes. When men of high genius, like the poet Vincenzo Monti, could begin his literary career by a fierce poem against France, continue it by songs in praise of the French conquerors as promoters of liberty, then write eulogies on Napoleon's empire, and finally join in the inauguration of a library, which was to be the means of reconciling the Italians to their Austrian conquerors, it can scarcely be wondered at if men of lower intellect found themselves equally ready to worship each new ruler as he rose into power, and to trample on the memory of fallen heroes. A man of nobler type than Monti expressed, perhaps still more clearly, the sense of despair which seemed likely to become the keynote of Italian feeling. Ugo Foscolo was, from his very birth, an embodiment of the confused state of Italy at that period. He was born in 1778, in the Isle of Zante, then a colony of the Venetian Republic, and in a condition of the utmost lawlessness. He was sent from thence to study at Padua, and thus grew up to manhood during the period of those continual changes in Lombardy which marked the period of the struggle against France. At one time he thought of becoming a priest, but soon devoted himself to literature. The sole models for the Italian dramatists, at that period, were the writings of Vittorio Alfieri, whose feelings and literary taste had led him to adhere, as closely as he could, to the old classical traditions. At the age of nineteen Foscolo chose, as his first subject for a drama, the horrible story of Thyestes; but though this work was received with great applause, his literary career was, for a time, cut short by the Treaty of Campo Formio. His political convictions seem already to have been strongly developed, for he was forced to leave Venice to escape the persecution of the new Government. Yet the creation of the Cis-Alpine Republic revived his hopes, and he hastened to Milan to take a share in the new life. There he became acquainted with the two leading poets of the day, Vincenzo Monti and Giuseppe Parini. From the former he gained several hints in style; from the latter he learnt the nobler lesson of hatred of corruption and servility. But the growing tyranny of Napoleon, the sense of the fickleness of his own countrymen, and the loathing of the rule of the Austrians, produced in Foscolo a bitter tone of cynicism and despair. It was while in this state of mind that he fell in with Goethe's romance of Werther; and on this he modelled the strange rhapsodical story of Jacopo Ortis, in which the hero, disappointed in love and politics, takes refuge, like Werther, in suicide. But while the German romance was merely the expression of a passing feeling, which the author took pleasure in throwing into an artistic form, the Italian story was the deliberate expression of Foscolo's most permanent state of mind, and was accepted as the embodiment of the feelings of many other Lombard youths. Foscolo, after fighting for the independence of Italy against the Austrian invasion of 1815, withdrew in disgust to England; but some of those who would gladly have welcomed him as a fellow-worker still remained in Lombardy, and tried to form a nucleus of free Italian thought. Of these, the most remarkable was Alessandro Manzoni, best known to foreigners as the author of "I Promessi Sposi." Manzoni's influence was more widely felt in Italy at a later period; but the presence of such a man among the Lombard patriots of 1816-20 is too remarkable a fact to pass without notice. He, like so many other young nobles, had gone through a phase of eighteenth-century scepticism. But in 1808 he had been attracted by a beautiful Protestant lady, who, after her marriage to Manzoni, drifted into Roman Catholicism, and eventually led her husband to accept the same faith. Many of his old comrades denounced his conversion, and some even attributed it to evil motives. But they soon discovered that his new faith, far from weakening his Italian feeling, had strengthened, while in some sense, it softened it. The hard classicism of which Alfieri had set the fashion, and which Foscolo could not shake off, was repugnant to Manzoni, who desired to become the sacred poet of Italy, and who was recognized by Goethe as being "Christian without fanaticism, Roman Catholic without hypocrisy." Manzoni disliked Eugène Beauharnais for wishing to derive his title to the kingdom of Italy from Alexander of Russia; but he sympathized with the attempt of Murat, and was ready to act with those Lombards who wished to rouse Italian feeling in literature and politics. But though men like Foscolo and Manzoni had a wider and deeper influence in all parts of Italy, the person who most attracted the hopes of the Lombards and the fear and hatred of Metternich, at this period, was a man whose name is now little remembered outside his own country. This was Count Federigo Confalonieri. He, like so many of the better men of his country, had become equally disgusted with French and Austrian rulers; and, when a proposal was made by the Italian Senate in 1814 to secure from the allies an independent kingdom of Italy, to be governed by Eugène Beauharnais, Confalonieri headed a protest against the proposal. The Austrian spies seized the opportunity to stir up a riot against the Senate; and in this disturbance Prina, one of the ministers, was seized by the mob and murdered, in spite of Confalonieri's indignant protest. The Senate fled; and the new Provisional Government of Lombardy sent Confalonieri to Paris, to plead for an independent kingdom of Lombardy. His appeal, however, was in vain; and, when the Austrians recovered their rule, Confalonieri was banished from Milan. He soon, however, returned, and devoted himself to developing in all ways the resources of his country. He had studied in London and Paris the principle of mutual instruction; and he founded schools for that purpose in Lombardy. He succeeded in getting the first steamboat built in Milan, introduced gas light, and encouraged all kinds of improvements, both artistic and industrial. But his great work was the gathering round him, for literary and political purposes, of the great writers of Lombardy; and he founded a journal called "Il Conciliatore," to which contributions were sent by the poet Silvio Pellico, by the historians Sismondi and Botta, by Manzoni and Foscolo, and, amongst others, by a certain Lombard exile, who was afterwards to earn a short and sad celebrity in Italian history, Pellegrino Rossi. Thus, as a great noble encouraging the material growth of his country, as the centre of a literary movement, and above all as a known champion of freedom, Confalonieri riveted the attention of all who knew him. But, however zealous this small knot of Lombards might be for the progress and freedom of their country, none of them supposed that Lombardy could throw off the yoke of Austria without assistance from other Powers. The question therefore was, to whom they should look for help. Their nearest neighbour, the King of Sardinia, had some special grounds for grievance against the Emperor of Austria, besides the tradition of dislike which he had inherited from Victor Amadeus. That unfortunate king had had reason to regret the prominent part which he had taken in defying the French Republic in 1796. For he found that Francis of Austria was eager on every occasion to take advantage of the weakness of his ally. When Savoy was hard pressed by the French, the Austrians had demanded that, in return for any help that they might give to the King of Sardinia, he should surrender to them part of the territory in Lombardy which had been secured to him by recent treaties. Victor Amadeus endeavoured to resist this proposal as long as he could; but he was induced by the pressure of English diplomatists to consent that, if in the war any lands were taken from Austria, he would compensate the Austrians by part of the territory which they demanded. Victor Emmanuel found in 1815 that alliance with Austria cost him as dear as it had cost his predecessor in 1796. For, even in the last desperate struggle against Napoleon, the Austrians demanded that the treaty of alliance between Austria and Sardinia should contain a clause for the destruction of the fortifications of Alessandria; and in the Congress of Vienna they tried to take from Victor Emmanuel the district of Novara. By the help of Alexander of Russia these intrigues were defeated; but the Austrians, in revenge, made all the delay that they could devise in evacuating Piedmont; and, when they finally left it in 1816, they destroyed the fortress outside Alessandria. Under these circumstances it was natural enough that the King of Sardinia should bear a bitter grudge against the House of Austria. But, on the other hand, there was great reason to doubt whether Victor Emmanuel could be persuaded to take the lead in any war that savoured of revolution. For, hostile as he was to the claims of Austria, the newly-restored king resented yet more strongly the changes which had been introduced during the French occupation. On his restoration in 1814, he abolished by one sweeping Act all laws passed since 1800 in Piedmont; primogeniture, aristocratic privileges, ecclesiastical tribunals, tortures, secret inquisitions, were all restored. Even at the universities learned men were deposed, as likely to be friendly to the French, and were replaced by men who had no claim but their social rank. A system of espionage was introduced, at least as inquisitorial and degrading as that of Metternich, and it was soon found that to maintain that system it was necessary to sacrifice national dignity, and to have recourse to the great master in the art of tyranny. Thus it came about that Austrian officers were chosen to control the police in Turin. In two important respects the government of Victor Emmanuel was even worse than that of Austria. Clerical injustice and oppression were as distasteful to Francis and Metternich as they had been to Joseph and Leopold; while in Piedmont, on the contrary, friars and monks were allowed a licence which speedily became a new source of evil. The other point of difference was that, tyrannical and unjust as the Austrian tribunals were in cases where political questions were involved, they were perfectly pure in cases between man and man unconnected with politics; whereas in Piedmont judicial decisions were sold to the highest bidder. Under these circumstances, the eyes of the champions of Italian liberty naturally turned to that kingdom from which the last effort had been made for the unity of Italy. Naples had contributed a very large proportion of those who had died for the cause of liberty in the earlier struggles, and even before that time had produced at least one man who had left his mark on sciences which tended to promote good government. Gaetano Filangieri had been one of the most distinguished writers on law and political economy, and had gained great influence at one period over Ferdinand I. of Naples. Ferdinand himself, though intensely weak, and capable of cruelty under certain circumstances, was not a man of habitually cruel character, nor even of so despotic a temperament as Victor Emmanuel of Sardinia. But, like most of the sovereigns of Italy, he found himself compelled to rely more and more on Austria for the re-establishment of his power. He appointed Nugent, the Austrian general, as the head of his army, and a central council interfered with the liberties which had grown up in Naples. His refusal to carry out the promises of liberty which he had made in his time of difficulty naturally irritated his people against him, while the recollections of Murat stirred in them the desire for new efforts for freedom. But the great ally which Naples supplied at this time to the cause of liberty was the Society of the Carbonari. Connected by vague traditions with some societies of the past, Carbonarism had received its first distinct political shape in the year 1811, when Murat was reigning in Naples. In 1814, when Murat had shown signs of a despotic spirit, it transferred its allegiance to King Ferdinand, then reigning only in Sicily. When Ferdinand had been restored to the throne of Naples, he found Carbonarism a dangerous element in his kingdom, and he began to prosecute the members of the Society. This had not, however, deprived the Carbonari of their monarchical sympathies; they merely transferred them from Ferdinand to his son Francis, who, having assisted at the establishment of the Constitution of 1812 in Sicily, was supposed to be committed to the cause of liberty. A vague talk about equality, and a more definite demand for the independence of Italy, constituted the programme of the Carbonari. But the Society was surrounded by various symbols of an impressive character, and its rules were enforced by a secret and vigorous discipline. It was evident that, in some way, it was suited to the wants of the time; for it spread rapidly from Naples to other parts of Italy, and took root both in Lombardy and Piedmont. In Lombardy it speedily attracted the attention of the Austrian police, and in 1818 several arrests were made; but such attempts merely strengthened the growth of the movement, and Carbonarism soon appeared in Spain. In the latter country the betrayal of the Constitutional cause had been, perhaps, baser than in any other part of Europe. With the exception of Frederick William of Prussia, no sovereign had owed more to the zeal of his people in the struggle against Napoleon than Ferdinand of Spain. In 1812, before he had been restored to his throne, he had been forced to grant a Constitution to his people, which, on recovering full power, he had abolished; and anyone who ventured to speak of liberty had been exiled or imprisoned. Among those who had been forced to fly from the country was Rafael del Riego, who had been one of the earliest to rise on behalf of Ferdinand against Napoleon. He had succeeded, by the help of the Carbonari, in establishing relations with many of the discontented soldiers in the Spanish army; and in January, 1820, he suddenly appeared at Cadiz and proclaimed the Constitution of 1812. His success was rapid, and Ferdinand was compelled once more to swear to maintain the Constitution. This, the first Constitution proclaimed since the downfall of Napoleon, was remarkable for its democratic character. Parliament was to have the power of making laws in conjunction with the king, and if they passed a law three times, the king was to lose the right of vetoing it. Ministers were to be responsible to Parliament. Freedom of the press was to be secured, and a Council of State was to advise the king on questions of peace or war and the making of treaties. At the same time, the nation was to prohibit the practice of any but the Roman Catholic religion. The news rapidly spread to Naples; for not only was there continual communication between the Carbonari of Spain and those of Naples, but even official duty would make speedy communication necessary, since Ferdinand of Naples was the next heir to the Spanish throne, and it was therefore held that this Constitution would be binding on him. The Carbonari were ready for the emergency; and while some of them, in the city of Naples, were demanding concessions, the more revolutionary districts of Calabria and Salerno had already risen in open insurrection. Ferdinand was able to arrest some of the leaders in the city; but he soon found that the insurrectionary spirit had spread even among the generals of his army. Officer after officer declared for the Constitution; and even those who were not ready to take that step were suspected by, and suspicious of, their fellows. Guglielmo Pepe, known as a supporter of the previous movement of Murat, and at one time sentenced to death for his opposition to the Bourbon rule, was marked out by the Carbonari as their leader. He at first hesitated to join them, and was even chosen by Nugent to lead the king's forces against the insurgents; but Ferdinand distrusted him, and opposed his appointment, and Pepe was finally driven to accept the leadership of the revolution. On July 5th he gathered round him a great body of the officers and soldiers, and led them to Naples; and Ferdinand, finding that he had no one to rely upon, yielded to the insurgents and consented to the appointment of a provisional Junta (composed to a great extent of the previous supporters of Murat), and swore to accept the Spanish Constitution. Metternich was greatly startled at the completeness of this popular victory. He had been convinced that, with a people like the Neapolitans, blood would flow in streams; and he was alarmed to find that the leading Carbonari were men of high character. He at once assumed that Alexander of Russia was at the bottom of the conspiracy; and he set himself to convert him once more to the side of order. But that fickle Prince seems never to have seriously resumed the championship of liberalism in Europe, after the death of Kotzebue; and though he may have wished occasionally to play with the Carbonari, and may have been flattered by their appealing to him, he was much more anxious to put in force those principles which Mme de Krüdener had taught him, which forbade kings to keep faith with those subjects to whom they had granted liberties. He therefore readily consented to come to Troppau, to consider the best means of checking the Neapolitan insurrection. In the meantime, suspicions had arisen between the Carbonari and the old followers of Murat, and the want of organization in their forces seemed to doom the insurrection to failure. But a still more fatal cause of division was the attitude of Sicily. The news of the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution had, at first, been welcomed there; but the nobles of Palermo cherished the recollection of that short time of independence when Ferdinand, driven out of Naples, had ruled Sicily as a separate kingdom; the Sicilian Constitution of 1812, which was welcome to the nobles of Palermo, as more aristocratic in its character than the Spanish Constitution, was acceptable to all the Palermitans as the symbol of Sicilian independence. The cry, therefore, of "the Constitution of 1812" was raised in Palermo, in opposition to the cry of "the Spanish Constitution." A Neapolitan intriguer, named Naselli, did his best to fan the flame of this division; riots arose; and the news spread to Naples that the Sicilians were enemies of Naples, and were opposing the Spanish Constitution. The Palermitans, on their part, appealed to the King by the memory of the old fidelity which the Sicilians had shown him when he was in exile. The King, and some others, might have responded to this appeal; and General Florestano Pepe, who was sent to suppress the rising, ended by conceding to the Sicilians the right of deciding by popular vote between the two Constitutions. But the Neapolitan pride was excited; a cry arose that the King was surrendering an important part of the kingdom, and thereby violating the Constitution. In the meantime, however, it had become clear that the preference of the Palermitans for the Constitution of 1812 was not shared by the whole body of the Sicilian people. Messina, followed by other towns, rose on behalf of the Spanish Constitution; and, while the Neapolitans were preparing new forces to suppress the rising in Palermo, the Palermitans were sending their troops against Messina. During this state of confusion the news arrived that the representatives of the Powers at the Congress of Laybach had urged pacific means of intervention, but at the same time had advised the Neapolitans to modify their Constitution. Under these circumstances, considerable alarm was caused by the news that the King intended to go to Laybach. Ferdinand, to check this alarm, declared to the Parliament that, whatever happened, he would defend the fundamental principles of the Constitution, freedom of the press, equality before the law, sole right of representatives to vote taxes, independence of judicial power, and responsible ministry. This speech, instead of calming the fears of the people, raised new alarms; for it seemed as though the King were meditating already _some_ changes in the Government; and the people declared that they could only allow him to depart if he went to defend the Spanish Constitution. But Ferdinand earnestly assured them that he had meant nothing against the Constitution, and that, if he could not defend the rights of the people and the crown by his words at Laybach, he would return to defend them by his sword. The Duke of Ascoli, an old friend and confidant of the King, asked him privately for more specific directions; and Ferdinand urged him to try to maintain peace; but, if it should be necessary, to prepare for war. With such promises, Ferdinand left Naples for Laybach in January, 1821. In the meantime, the work of the Carbonari had been spreading in Piedmont; and other sects of a similar character, and with more definite objects, had sprung up by their side. Unlike the Neapolitans, the Piedmontese Liberals had no French political traditions, either to encourage or to hamper them. Although the House of Savoy was French in its origin, both rulers and people had been forward in their resistance to the aggressions of the French Republic. Their ideas of liberty were derived, not from France, but from their own poet, Vittorio Alfieri; and these ideas had been strengthened by the love of independence which they had developed in the struggle against France, and which was now wholly directed against Austria. The risings in Spain and Naples had attracted the sympathies of the Piedmontese; and it was even rumoured that Victor Emmanuel I. himself had said that if his people demanded a Constitution he would grant it. His minister, Prospero Balbo, who had previously served under Napoleon, was supposed to have Liberal leanings. But while all these circumstances tended to connect the desire for liberty in the minds of the Piedmontese with the support of monarchical principles, and while the absence of any interest in political affairs on the part of the peasantry, or the artizans, prevented any strong democratic organization, it was yet necessary, if the movement was to be successful, that there should be some leader who was not afraid of revolutionary measures. Such a man was Santorre di Santa Rosa, an officer who had fought in the royal guard against the French, and who was now a major of infantry in Turin. His sympathies were not only monarchical, but in some respects even aristocratic; and when the Spanish Constitution was first proclaimed, he was inclined to prefer some other Constitution like that of Sicily, or even the charter which had been granted in France. But, with keen insight, he quickly perceived that the Spanish Constitution had become a watchword which was thoroughly understood by the people, and that any new cry would only cause division. Nor were the designs of Santa Rosa limited to his own State. He knew that no struggle for Piedmontese liberty could be successful which did not aim at throwing off the yoke of Austria; and that that could only be done by combining with the other States, which were groaning under the same oppression. The patriots of Lombardy were willing enough to act with the Piedmontese, for Confalonieri was already in communication with the Neapolitans and other Italian Liberals, and was ready to provide arms for the rising. But there was still needed a figure-head who must be placed in front of the movement, if it was to retain any appearance of monarchical Constitutionalism. Whatever casual remarks Victor Emmanuel may have let fall, it soon became evident that _he_ was disposed to resist the Constitutional movement, and he even began to increase the guards about his palace. Charles Felix, his brother, the next heir to the throne, was known to be a yet sterner champion of despotism than the King himself; and it was under these circumstances that the eyes of the Liberals of Piedmont were for the first time turned to the head of the younger branch of the House of Savoy, Charles Albert, Prince of Carignano. He had been brought up as a simple citizen in a public school, and had specially attracted attention by the favour which he had shown to Alberto Nota, whom he had made his secretary. Nota was a writer who had set himself to restore the national comic theatre in Piedmont, who had excited the suspicion of the courtiers of Victor Emmanuel by his Liberal principles, and who had at last been banished from Turin. But, though the favour shown by Charles Albert to Nota was the fact in the Prince's life which had most impressed the Piedmontese, other influences had already been brought to bear on him; for he had also studied at Paris under an Abbé, who had impressed on him a loathing for the French Revolution. He was only twenty-three, and was still hesitating between the lessons of these rival teachers. But before Santa Rosa and his friends could carry out their schemes, the first sign of protest against tyranny in Turin was given from a different quarter. Although the desire for liberty had not yet penetrated to the poorer classes of Italy, and though the leadership of these movements naturally fell into the hands of men of noble birth, like Confalonieri and Santa Rosa, yet there was another class in the State which was already full of the new ideas, and which was eventually to play an important part as a link between the more intelligent members of the aristocracy and the still silent classes of the community. The University students of Germany, Austria, and Italy, from the time of the gathering at Jena in 1816 down to the fall of Venice in August, 1849, were to hold a position in the great movements of the time which affected considerably the character of those movements, both for good and evil. The share of the Turin students in the Piedmontese rising of 1821 was touched with a certain character of boyish frolic. On January 11th, some of the University students appeared at the theatre at Turin in red caps. The police at once arrested them. But their companions rose on their behalf and demanded that they should be tried by the tribunals of the University. In this demand they hoped that the professors would support them; but the rector of the college was opposed to the movement, and the professors were unwilling to interfere. Thereupon the students took matters into their own hands, took away the keys of the University from the door-keeper, placed guards at all the entrances, defended the two principal gates with forms and tables, tore up the pavements, and barred the windows. Then they despatched two delegates to Count Balbo, to entreat him to set free their comrades, or to hand them over to the authorities of the University. The representatives of the provincial colleges flocked to the assistance of the Turin students; and the sight of the soldiers, who were called out to suppress their rising, only roused them to more determined resistance. The delegates returned speedily, followed by Count Balbo himself, who promised to defend the cause of the students before Victor Emmanuel, if they would in the meantime remain quiet. The students, therefore, consented to wait for further news; but the soldiers remained encamped outside the University. Suddenly the attention of the soldiers was attracted by some boys coming out of school; and, irritated presumably at some boyish mischief, they attacked the children with bayonets. The students, indignant at the sight, threw stones at the soldiers, who thereupon charged the barricades of the University, and a general massacre followed. The news of this massacre caused the most furious indignation in Turin, and tended to swell the growing revolutionary feeling. Charles Albert paid a special visit to the hospitals to console those who had been wounded by the soldiers. But in the meantime the proceedings at the Congress of Laybach were alarming the lovers of liberty. The King of Naples, by all sorts of pretences, had tried to lull to sleep the vigilance of the Junta at home; but it soon became known that the Powers had resolved to suppress the Neapolitan Constitution, and in February, 1822, their forces were on the march to Naples. The Piedmontese Liberals were eager to protest against this violation of national independence; and their fears were further roused by a rumour that Austria was renewing her demands for the surrender of the Piedmontese fortresses. These rumours were specially rife in Alessandria, which had known the degradation of an Austrian occupation; and Victor Emmanuel in vain tried to convince the Alessandrians of the unreasonableness of this panic. On March 6th, Santa Rosa and his friends went to Charles Albert and asked him to put himself at the head of the movement; and it was now that Santa Rosa discovered the character of the man with whom he had to deal, and left on record that saying which summed up the whole life of that unhappy Prince--"Voleva e non voleva" (He would and would not). On March 6th, says one writer, "I do not know if Charles Albert _con_sented, but he certainly _as_sented" to the proposals of Santa Rosa. The rising was fixed for the 8th, but on the 7th Charles Albert had changed his mind and wished to delay the movement. Again Santa Rosa and his friends urged him to act with them, but without telling him on which day the insurrection was to break out. There was, indeed, no time to be lost; for suspicions had already arisen of the designs of the Liberals, and arrests were being made. On March 10th, therefore, Count Palma seized on the citadel of Alessandria and proclaimed the Spanish Constitution. Almost at the same time Captain Ferrero occupied the little town of San Salvario and unfurled the Italian flag in the church. Students and soldiers readily joined the insurgents, and both King and Ministers in Turin were seized with panic. Orders came from the Powers at Laybach that Victor Emmanuel should march to Alessandria, and Balbo called on all loyal soldiers to return to Asti. But Santa Rosa was as firm in his purposes as the Royalists were undecided. The Spanish Constitution was proclaimed in the fortress of Turin, and the soldiers, who were sent to attack the people, fled after a few shots; Charles Albert represented to the King the wishes of the people; and on the night of March 14th, Victor Emmanuel abdicated in favour of his brother Charles Felix, appointing Charles Albert Regent in Turin. On the following day Charles Albert, in his capacity of Regent, swore to accept the Spanish Constitution. But it was soon apparent that one vigorous man could not make a revolution successful, when he had to depend on a nobility many of whom were servile admirers of Austria, and on a Regent who "would and would not." Men were appointed to posts in the new administration who had no claim to their office except their rank. The leaders in Alessandria suspected the leaders in Turin; while the hopes of persuading Charles Albert to declare war on Austria grew fainter and fainter. In the meantime, the new King, Charles Felix, was residing in Modena, under the protection of the Grand Duke. Francis IV. of Modena had shown himself the most distinctly tyrannical of all the princes of Italy; while his extravagance and indifference to the welfare of his people had startled even Metternich. His relationship to the House of Savoy had led him to sympathise at first with Victor Emmanuel in his irritation at the arrogance of Austria; but that very same relationship now led him to hope that he might succeed to the throne instead of Charles Albert, if the latter offended the ruling Powers. He therefore readily supported Charles Felix in his protest against the proceedings of the new Regent. Charles Felix, on his side, was a man of more rugged and narrow spirit than Victor Emmanuel, and had none of the sense of national dignity which occasionally interfered with the despotic inclinations of his brother. When, therefore, he issued from Modena a denunciation of the new Government, he did not scruple to add that, if order were not soon restored, his august allies would come to his rescue. In the same letter he ordered Charles Albert to go to Novara and place himself under the orders of Della Torre. "I shall see by this," said Charles Felix, "if you are still a Prince of the House of Savoy, or if you have ceased to be so." Charles Albert concealed this letter from his Ministers; and, after a few days of hesitation, fled secretly to Novara. The feeble officials of Turin would have at once deserted the cause; but, in defiance of their opinion, Santa Rosa published a proclamation declaring that the King was a prisoner in the hands of the enemy, and that _he_, as Minister of Charles Albert, called on them to stand by the Constitution and declare war on Austria. One or two of the generals fled to Della Torre, at Novara; but at the same time the Genoese rose on behalf of the Spanish Constitution. Della Torre sent orders to Santa Rosa, in the name of the King, to resign his authority. Santa Rosa refused to recognize the King while he remained in a foreign country, and despatched a force against Novara. But, in the meantime, the news came that General Pepe had in vain tried to rally his forces in defence of the Neapolitan Constitution; that his bands had been dispersed at the first attack of the Austrians; and that the Austrians, having crushed out the freedom of Naples, were marching northwards. The Russian Ambassador thereupon entreated the Junta to modify the Spanish Constitution. Some of the Ministers were inclined to consent; but Santa Rosa knew that to lose the Spanish Constitution was to lose the watchword of the Revolution; and no doubt he felt the indignity of yielding to a foreign ambassador. He therefore refused this proposal, and once more despatched forces against Della Torre, who was now preparing to march on Turin. Colonel Regis, the leader of the Constitutional forces, succeeded in reaching Novara before Della Torre had begun his advance. The armies met outside the town; but in the middle of the battle the news arrived that the Austrians had crossed the Ticino and were marching into the country. Regis and Ferrero fought gallantly; but the double forces against them were too strong; and though they once or twice repelled the Austrian attack, the want of discipline of the Piedmontese soldiers, combined with the superior force of the enemy, led to a crushing defeat. Santa Rosa, finding it impossible to defend Turin, retreated first to Alessandria and then to Genoa; but the men on whom he relied had lost courage and hope; and he and such of his friends as were fortunate enough to reach Genoa were soon obliged to leave it again and to fly from Italy, most of them to fight in foreign countries for the liberty which they had lost at home. The reaction set in with the greatest fury. In Piedmont the system of espionage was resumed with double force. The University was closed. Under the influence of favouritism, and in the absence of any free expression of public opinion, corruption of tribunals revived, and the Jesuits, who had lost power during the Liberal interregnum, speedily recovered it. In Naples, the Austrians, after recommending mildness to Ferdinand, yielded to his demands for the right to punish; and the sense of his dishonourable position seems to have called out in him a savagery which he had not previously shown; while the presence of the Austrian troops irritated the country into a state of intermittent insurrection. Lord William Bentinck attempted a protest in the English House of Commons against a second destruction of Sicilian independence; but Castlereagh defeated the motion, and Sicily fell back under Neapolitan rule. Metternich specially devoted himself to restoring order in Lombardy. He established an Aulic Council at Vienna to superintend the affairs in that province, so as to crush out still further any local independence. At the same time a special committee was formed at Milan to enquire into the conspiracy. Several leading conspirators were arrested. One tried to save his friends by confessing his own fault; but the confession was used as a new clue by the police. Confalonieri was urged to save himself by flight; but he answered, "I will not retire in face of the storm which I wish to confront. Let what God will become of me!" He was soon after arrested; and, after being kept in doubt of his fate for nearly two years, he was condemned to death. His case excited sympathy even in Vienna, where the Empress interceded for his life; and at last, after long entreaty, his sentence was commuted to imprisonment for life in the fortress of Spielberg. There Metternich in vain tried to extort from him the betrayal of his fellow-conspirators. But the crafty statesman little knew the result of this treatment. One of those who suffered imprisonment about the same time describes the effect of Confalonieri's influence by contrasting him with the head of the Austrian police in Lombardy. "Confalonieri and Salvotti seemed to represent, in the eyes of the Milanese, the angel of Liberty and the demon of Slavery, striving not more for the success of their respective causes than for the triumph of their individual personalities. About Confalonieri gathered the prayers of honest people, of men of feeling hearts, who saw in him an unfortunate persecuted being whom adversity clothed with all the lustre of devotion and courage." This passage strikingly exhibits that noble, but illogical, popular instinct which so often confuses the hero and martyr with the mere victim of unjust oppression. Confalonieri had undoubtedly organized an insurrection, and his arrest and imprisonment might fairly be justified by the ordinary rights of self-defence which exist in every Government. Yet the instinct of horror and pity for this imprisonment had a truth deeper than logic. Under the system of government then prevailing, the prison or the scaffold was the natural place for such men; but the pity of it was that a system of government should prevail which logically necessitated the imprisonment of Confalonieri and the triumph of Metternich. And it was a sign of the deep folly of the latter that he called the attention of the public to this fact, and provided the cause of Italian unity with its first prominent martyr. The stories of Confalonieri's imprisonment spread from mouth to mouth, and were preserved as tender memorials. It was told, for instance, how, when his wife had visited him, he had tried to preserve the cushion on which her tears had fallen, and how the guards had insisted on taking it from him; how his friends had devised a plan for his escape, and he had refused to avail himself of it because his fellow-prisoners would not be able to escape with him; and lastly, of the continual pressure which had been brought to bear upon him to reveal the secrets of his fellow-conspirators, and his steady refusal to purchase health and liberty by their betrayal. The defeat which despotism had sustained by the imprisonment, and still more by the persecutions, of Confalonieri would hereafter be plain. At present Metternich might think that he had conquered in Lombardy; but elsewhere he could not feel sure of victory, for there came to him at this time two unmistakeable warnings that he was no longer to be allowed to reign undisturbed in Europe. Even at that very Congress of Laybach which succeeded in crushing out the independence of Naples, the question of Greece, which could not be so easily disposed of, came before the Powers, and puzzled considerably the mind of Metternich. The pietistic maunderings of Alexander might be made use of in defence of the rights of Roman Catholic kings, but he could not be persuaded that the principles of the Christian religion justified him in supporting the tyranny of the Turks over Christian populations. He had indeed abandoned the Wallachian leader, Alexander Ypsilanti, when he discovered that the rising in Wallachia was simultaneous with the risings in Naples and Piedmont; but the Greeks could not so easily be persuaded that their patron, the Czar of Russia, had deserted their cause. The Hetairiai of Wallachia and Greece had done the same work which the Carbonari had accomplished in Spain and Italy; and on April 4, 1821, the Greeks suddenly rose at Patras and massacred the whole Turkish population. In three months the southern part of Greece was free; and by January, 1822, a Provisional Government had been formed, with Alexander Mavrocordatos at its head. Religious feeling, classical sentiment, and the loathing of the barbarous rule of the Turks combined to rouse in Europe an amount of sympathy which Metternich could not afford to disregard. He admitted the right of Alexander of Russia to sympathise with the Greeks, both on the ground of Christian sentiment and on the pretext of rights granted by previous treaties with Turkey; and he even intervened diplomatically to secure concessions from the Porte to its Christian subjects. But, though he felt the danger of the precedent which even this amount of concession to the revolutionary spirit would cause, Metternich yet believed that, by timely compromise and judicious diplomacy, he could bring back Alexander to sounder principles. The influence of Capo d'Istria was indeed an antagonistic power in the Court of St. Petersburg; but, on the other hand, Tatischeff, the rival minister at the Russian Court, seems to have been a mere tool of Metternich, and could be used effectively for the interests of Austria. So successfully did this diplomacy work, in Metternich's opinion, that on May 31, 1822, he writes exultingly in his memoirs, that he has "broken the work of Peter the Great, strengthened the Porte against Russia, and substituted Austrian and English influence for Russian in Eastern Europe." So he wrote in May; in August of the same year "that upright and enlightened statesman," Lord Londonderry, committed suicide. Then George Canning became Minister for Foreign Affairs, and hastened to cut the knot which linked the interests of Austria with those of England. The change in England's policy soon became evident. No doubt the feeling of dislike to Metternich had been gradually growing in that country. Its representatives had held aloof even from the Congress of Laybach; and when, in 1822, the Powers met again at Verona to encourage the French Cabinet in their attempt to restore Ferdinand of Spain, England entered a decided protest against the proceedings of the Congress. Nor did the protest remain a barren one. The invasion of Spain by the French was followed by the recognition of the independence of the Spanish colonies by England; and when the absolutist movement threatened to spread to Portugal, Canning despatched troops to protect the freedom and independence of that country. It is amusing to note the growth of Metternich's consciousness of the importance of the opponent who had now arisen. "A fine century," he writes at first, "for these kinds of men; for fools who pass for intellectual, but are empty; for moral weaklings, who are always ready to threaten with their fists from a distance when the opportunity is good." But in the following year he writes: "Canning's nature is a very remarkable one. In spite of all his lack of discernment, the genius which he undoubtedly has, and which I have never questioned, is never clouded. He is certainly a very awkward opponent; but I have had opponents more dangerous, and it is not he who chiefly compels me to think of him." And in 1824 he sums up this difficulty, satisfactorily to himself, in these words: "What vexes me with the English is that they are all slightly mad. This is an evil which must be patiently endured, without noticing too much the ludicrous side of it." This outburst of insanity on the part of England naturally drove Metternich back into the arms of Russia; and this change became more congenial to him when, in 1825, the fickle Alexander died and was succeeded by the stern despot Nicholas. It seemed, too, as if the Greek rising might end about that time in the success of the Turks. Ibrahim, the Pasha of Egypt, had come to the rescue of the Sultan, and was carrying all before him. Marco Botzaris, the chief general of the Greeks, had been killed in battle; and in 1826 the garrison of Messolonghi blew up their fortress and themselves to avoid surrendering to the Egyptian forces. But Metternich soon found that, whatever objection Nicholas might have to revolution elsewhere, he felt as much bound to protect the Greeks as had Alexander before him; and in August, 1827, Nicholas consented to Canning's proposal that England, France, and Russia should send a fleet to the Bay of Navarino to enforce an armistice between the Greeks and the Turks. Then followed the celebrated battle which Wellington afterwards described as "that untoward event." This convinced even Metternich that the results of the Greek insurrection would have to be recognized by the Powers, and perhaps even secured by force. The Russian war of 1828 followed, and Metternich had to admit that the European alliance of 1814-15 was practically broken. But though the effect of the Greek insurrection in weakening the chances of Metternich's system was certainly important, it soon began to be doubtful whether the change would be permanent. England, indeed, in spite of the death of Canning and the short rule of Wellington, was evidently hopelessly lost to the cause of despotism. But the revolutionary movements of 1830-31 seemed to leave far less trace of freedom in Europe than the previous risings of 1820-22. The July monarchy of Louis Philippe was soon forced to become Conservative; and the Belgian revolution seemed to have little connection with the other movements of Europe. The Polish rising and its sudden collapse only secured Nicholas to the side of despotism. The treachery of Francis of Modena to Ciro Menotti destroyed for a time the tendency to believe in revolutionary princes. The rising in Bologna, by compelling the intervention of the Austrians, strengthened their hold over the Papacy, and even enabled Metternich cheaply to pose as the adviser of reforms which, out of respect for the independence of the Papacy, he would not enforce. But his greatest triumph of all was in Germany. There Constitutions had been proclaimed in Bavaria, Würtemberg, and Saxony; and Metternich resolved to follow up the Carlsbad Decrees by a still more crushing enactment. So it was decided at the Federal Diet of 1832 that a German prince was _bound_, "as a member of the Confederation, to reject petitions tending to the increase of the power of the Estates at the expense of the power of the Sovereign," and further, "that the internal legislation of the States belonging to the German Confederation should in no case be such as to do prejudice to the objects of the Confederation." Thus Metternich had again triumphed; but it was for the last time. Two forces of very different kinds were already in motion, to undo the work of his life. Two men were about to cross his path, very different from each other in moral calibre, in width of sympathy, and in the means at their disposal, but alike in that power of reaching the heart of a People, for want of which the leaders of the previous Liberal movements had failed in their objects. These men were Giuseppe Mazzini and Louis Kossuth. CHAPTER III. FAITH AND LAW AGAINST DESPOTISM. 1825-1840. Tuscany under Fossombroni.--"Il Mondo va da se."--The Antologia.--Romanticism v. Classicism.--Domenico Guerrazzi.--Giuseppe Mazzini.--His early career.--His experiences as a Carbonaro.--His plans in the fortress of Savona.--His first banishment.--Louis Philippe and the Italian Revolutionists.--Collapse of the rising of 1831.--Accession of Charles Albert.--Italian belief in him.--Mazzini's letter.--Charles Albert's position.--Mazzini's second banishment.--His influence.--La Giovine Italia.--Its enemies and friends.--Charles Albert's cruelties.--The expedition to Savoy.--Menz and Metternich v. Mazzini.--The special position of Hungary.--The County Government.--The Germanization of the nobles.--The Diet of 1825.--Szechenyi.--The Magyar language.--Material reforms.--Metternich and Szechenyi.--Wesselenyi.--The Transylvanian Diet.--Poland and Hungary.--Serfdom in Hungary.--The Urbarium.--Francis Deak.--Wesselenyi at Presburg.--Louis Kossuth.--His character.--His first work.--Arrest of Kossuth and Wesselenyi.--The protest.--Metternich's defeat. While Piedmont and Naples had been vibrating between revolution and despotism; while the government of the popes had been steadily growing more tyrannical and unjust; and while the rulers of Parma, Lucca, and Modena had remained (with whatever occasional appearance to the contrary) the mere tools of Austria, the government of Tuscany had retained a peculiar character of its own. The vigorous programme of reform, introduced by Leopold I. when the government first passed into the hands of the House of Austria, had not been further developed by his successors. But a tradition of easy-going liberality had been kept alive both under Ferdinand III. and Leopold II. Fossombroni, the chief minister of Tuscany, took for his motto "Il mondo va da se" (the world goes of itself); and thus a certain liberty of thought and expression continued to prevail in Tuscany that was hardly to be found in other parts of Italy. This might have excited the alarm of the Austrian Government, and of the other princes of Italy; for conspirators condemned by them took refuge in Tuscany. But two circumstances protected this freedom. The fact that the ruler of Tuscany was a member of the House of Austria seemed to exclude him from the chance of ever becoming the leader of a purely Italian movement; and Metternich was, perhaps, not sorry to be able to show the opponents of Austria that an Austrian prince could be the most popular ruler in Italy. Secondly, Fossombroni, while so easy-going in internal matters, maintained a dignified independence in foreign affairs; and Ferdinand and Leopold had enough of the spirit of the founder of the dynasty to second the efforts of their Minister. Thus, when the Austrian officials sent to Ferdinand a list of the Carbonari in Tuscany, with the request that he would punish them, he simply burnt the list; and when, on the death of Ferdinand in 1824, the Austrian Minister demanded that Leopold's accession should not be publicly notified until the terms of the notice had been approved by Austria, Fossombroni at once announced Leopold's accession as the only answer to this insolent demand. Lastly, in 1831, when the Austrians were trampling out the liberties of Bologna, Fossombroni prevented them from extending their aggressions in Italy by an invasion of Tuscany. Here, then, it was natural that the thought of Italy, whether taking a literary or political form, should find its freest expression. The Conciliatore of Manzoni and Confalonieri had been suppressed in Lombardy, but its work was revived by the Florentine journal called the "Antologia." Manzoni's influence gained much ground here among the literary men, who connected the struggle between the old classicism of Alfieri, and the freer and more original writing to which the name of Romanticism was given, with the struggle for a freer life in Italy against the traditions of the past. The writer who attracted the most attention, and whose name became most widely known among the Romantic School, was Domenico Guerrazzi. It is, perhaps, a little difficult for an Englishman to understand the attraction of this author's novels; but an Italian writer thus explains it: "The singularity of his forms and the burning character of his style, the very contradiction of principles that are perceived in his writings, gave to Guerrazzi the appearance of something extraordinary, which struck upon imaginations already excited by misfortunes and grief." Moreover, perhaps, Guerrazzi, more definitely than most of these writers, connected the literary movement with the political; and even in Tuscany he became an object of some alarm from his desire for Italian freedom. He naturally gathered round him a knot of young men of more decided type than the ordinary contributors to the "Antologia;" and it was to him, therefore, that the proposal was addressed to revive in Leghorn a Genoese journal which had been just suppressed by the Sardinian Government. The proposal was probably made to Guerrazzi in the first instance by a young and enthusiastic Livornese named Carlo Bini; but the chief promoter of the enterprise was a young Genoese of between twenty and thirty years of age. This youth was chiefly known as having recently sent to the "Antologia" at Florence an article on Dante which had been rejected by them, but which was subsequently inserted in another paper. Among his contemporaries at the University the new comer had already excited an enthusiasm which was not yet understood by the outer world. Such was the first appearance in public life of Giuseppe Mazzini. Under the influence of a very earnest and remarkable mother, he had early been interested in the cause of Italian liberty, and he dated his first impression of the importance of this cause from an interview with one of the exiles who was about to leave Italy on account of his share in the struggle of 1821. Mazzini had been intended by his father for the profession of the law; but he had already shown a decided preference for literature and politics; and while still at the University he had been influenced by the gloomy romance of Jacopo Ortis. But, though that strange book had deepened his feeling for the miseries of his country, the scepticism and despair which were its keynote could not long hold him in slavery. On him, as on all the greatest minds of Italy, Dante soon gained a powerful hold; and while he profoundly admired the "Divina Commedia," he learned from the "De Monarchiâ" that mystic enthusiasm for Rome and that belief in the theological basis for political principles which was to colour so deeply his later career. The journal which, with Guerrazzi's help, Mazzini started at Leghorn was called the "Indicatore Livornese." It soon became so alarming even to the mild Tuscan Government that after some warnings it was suppressed. Shut out for the moment from the literary expression of his faith, Mazzini turned to more directly political action. He felt that it was his duty to make use of whatever existing machinery he could find for carrying on the struggle for Italian freedom; and he therefore joined the Carbonari. The very formula of the oath which was administered to him, on entering this Society, seemed to suggest the inadequacy of this body for stirring up the faith of a people. For, instead of speaking of work to be done for the freedom or unity of Italy, the words of the oath merely exacted implicit obedience to the Order. Mazzini's spirit revolted alike against this slavery, and against the solemn buffooneries with which the rulers of the Order tried to impress those who joined it with the sense of its importance.[3] His irritation at the uselessness and tyranny of the Carbonari brought on him the stern rebuke of some of their leaders. The July Insurrection of 1830, in France, woke new hopes in Mazzini, as in other Italians; but before he could join in any active movement, he was arrested at Genoa, and, without trial, was soon after imprisoned in the fortress of Savona. The explanation given to Mazzini's father, by the Governor of Genoa, of the reasons for this arrest affords a striking picture of the despotism of the time. The Governor said that Giuseppe was a young man of talent, very fond of solitary walks by night, and habitually silent as to the subject of his meditations; and that the government was not fond of young men of talent the subject of whose musings was unknown to it. The real cause of the arrest was Mazzini's connection with the Carbonari, which had been betrayed by a pretended member of the Society, who, however, declined to support his charge in public. It was during this imprisonment that Mazzini came to the conclusion that the Society of the Carbonari had failed to accomplish the purpose for which it was founded, and that some new organization was required in its place. While he was considering the objects which such an organization should set before itself, there arose before his mind the idea of Italian unity. The failure of the local efforts of 1821 and 1831 had been due to the want of common action between the different Italian States; and the mystic enthusiasm for Rome supplied a poetical argument in favour of the practical conclusion which he drew from these failures. While too the treachery of Charles Albert and of Francis of Modena had left on Mazzini a deep-rooted distrust of kings, and inclined him to believe that a republic was necessary to solve the difficulties of his country, he was willing, as will presently appear, to accept any leader or form of government which should bring about the unity of Italy. Anarchy he loathed with all his heart. He thoroughly disliked the French doctrine of the Rights of Man; and he desired to assert authority when legitimately established. But the great distinction between Mazzini and the other political leaders of his time was, that his aim was not merely to establish a form of government, but to imbue the people with a faith. The unity of Italy was not with him a mere political arrangement, but the working out of God's government over the world, a development of a nobler and better life. This affected his attitude to the question both of the relation of classes to each other, and of the relation of Italy to the rest of Europe. Though he appealed to the working men of Italy with an effect that no previous politician had produced, he never appealed to them on the ground of purely selfish interests; for he felt that the special motives for improving their condition should always be subordinated to the general welfare of the nation. And it is a striking proof of the extent to which this side of his teaching has taken hold of his followers, that, in the demonstration to his memory at Genoa in the year 1882, among the banners borne in the procession, and inscribed with quotations from his works, was one on which were written the words "Fight not against the bourgeoisie, but against egotism, wherever it grows, under the blouse of the workman, as under the coat of the capitalist." Italy too was to help in the regeneration of Europe, but not after the manner of the French Republic, by merely establishing a foreign tyranny, calling itself Republican, in the place of native kings. Patriotism, with Mazzini, was not the hard, narrow thing which it became in the minds of too many of the leaders of the revolution. The Peoples were to help each other in developing their own national life after their own fashion, and to respect each other's national claims as they claimed respect for their own.[4] After long delay Mazzini was acquitted of the charge laid to him, no evidence being brought forward against him. Thereupon the Governor of Genoa appealed to Charles Felix to set aside the decision of the judges, and to condemn Mazzini. The King consented; and Mazzini was ordered to choose between banishment from Italy and confining himself to a place of residence in one of the small towns in the centre of Piedmont. He believed that the former alternative would offer him freer scope for action; and he sailed for France. The hopes of the Italian exiles had been roused, first by the July Revolution in France, and secondly by the risings at Modena and Bologna. General Regis, who had played such an important part in the Piedmontese insurrection of 1821, was organizing with other exiles an expedition, composed of Italians and French, to go to help the insurgents who were still holding out in Bologna. But the hopes of the insurgents were doomed to disappointment. Louis Philippe, after playing with them for some time, came to the same sagacious conclusion about Revolution that he afterwards announced with regard to war, viz., that to talk about assisting a Revolution, and to assist a Revolution, were two different things.[5] Just as the expedition was on its march, orders were issued to abandon it, and a body of cavalry were sent to enforce the command. Some abandoned the attempt; but Mazzini and a few friends escaped to Corsica, which was still Italian in feeling, though French in government; and there they hoped to organize an expedition to help the Bolognese. The Bolognese, however, though gallant enough in their own struggles, were unwilling to commit themselves to a wider programme than the defence of their own State. So they refused to send to Corsica the money which was necessary for the expeditionary force. The Austrians soon after entered the Papal territory; and when they had crushed out the insurrection they were in many cases welcomed by the inhabitants as a protection against the cruelties of the Papal troops. Two other points in the insurrection alone need notice. One was, that at the surrender of Ancona Terenzio Mamiani, already known as a philosophic writer, refused to sign the conditions of capitulation, and was consequently forced to go into exile. The other was that, while the representatives of the Pope showed themselves, as a rule, utterly reckless in violating the conditions under which the surrender of the towns was made, one honourably distinguished himself by keeping his word. This was the Governor of Imola, Giovanni Mastai Ferretti, afterwards Pius IX. The movement, however, in spite of its scattered and disconnected character, had excited attention in Piedmont, and several leading Piedmontese Liberals had determined to press Charles Felix to grant a Constitution. Of these Liberals, the most remarkable were Angelo Brofferio, the future historian of Piedmont; Augusto Anfossi, hereafter to play so brilliant a part in the rescue of Milan from Austria; and Giacomo Durando, whose book on Italian nationality was afterwards to hold an honourable place among the writings which stirred up Italian feeling. The conspiracy was, however, discovered; the leaders of the movement were arrested; and, while the prisoners were still awaiting their trial, Charles Felix died, and Charles Albert succeeded to the throne. During the time between the failure of the insurrection of 1821 and his accession to the throne, Charles Albert's only important public act had been his service in the French Army, which was suppressing the liberties of Spain. Yet, in spite of this act of hostility to the Liberal cause, and in spite of the recollections of his previous desertion in 1821, the Liberals still had hopes that he would become their champion. This is a fact which requires more explanation than can be found in the mere desire on the part of the reformers of Italy to choose some King to lead them against Austria. After the treachery of Francis of Modena, no Liberal expected _him_ to return to the cause which he had deserted; and, when Francis of Naples had succeeded Ferdinand I., none of the passing hopes, which had pointed him out in earlier life as a possible constitutional champion, could save him from the hatred which his tyranny deserved. Nor must we be misled by the subsequent history of Italy into the theory that there was anything special in the traditions of the kingdom of Sardinia which should lead Liberals to fix their hopes on a ruler of that country. Victor Amadeus of Sardinia had been the foremost of the allies of Austria in the war against the French Republic; and though there were continual causes of irritation between the aggressive House of Austria and the rulers of the little monarchy, these were not of a kind to have attracted the sympathy of any large body of Liberals outside Piedmont. The only movement for the unity of Italy, previous to the movement of 1821, had come from Naples; unless, indeed, Eugène Beauharnais had intended Lombardy to be the centre of a similar attempt. When we take all these points into consideration we must come to the conclusion that there was something in the personal character of Charles Albert which riveted the attention of Italian Liberals almost in spite of themselves; nor could any appearances to the contrary induce them to doubt that he had at heart a desire for the liberty and unity of Italy such as no previous Italian Prince had entertained. It was, perhaps, the greatest proof of this strange fascination that Mazzini, Republican as he was, yet thought it well to yield to the strong feeling of the Liberals of Italy, and to give Charles Albert one more chance of playing the part of a leader. Mazzini, therefore, addressed to the new King a letter in which he called his attention to the enthusiasm with which his accession was greeted. "There is not a heart in Italy whose pulse did not quicken at the news of your accession. There is not an eye in Europe that is not turned to watch your first steps in the career now open to you." He told him that the Italians were ready to believe that his desertion of their cause was the mere result of circumstances; and that, being at last free to act according to his own tendencies, the new King would carry out the promises that he had first made as a Prince. He warned him that a system of terror would only provoke reprisals; and that a system of partial concessions would not only fail to satisfy the wishes of the people, but would have an arbitrary and capricious character which would increase the existing irritation. "The people are no longer to be quieted by a few concessions. They seek the recognition of those rights of humanity which have been withheld from them for ages. They demand laws and liberty, independence and union. Divided, dismembered, and oppressed, they have neither name nor country. They have heard themselves stigmatised by the foreigner as the Helot Nation. They have seen free men visit their country, and declare it the land of the dead. They have drained the cup of slavery to the dregs; but they have sworn never to fill it again." Mazzini then calls on Charles Albert to put himself more definitely at the head of a movement for Italian Independence, and to become the King of a united Italy. The letter concludes with these words: "Sire, I have spoken to you the truth. The men of freedom await your answer in your deeds. Whatever that answer be, rest assured that posterity will either hail your name as the greatest of men, or the last of Italian tyrants. Take your choice." Before we consider Charles Albert's answer, we must call to mind, once more, his position. He came to the throne in the very crisis of a conspiracy against his predecessor, and had hardly been able to realize what had been the intention of the conspirators towards himself. The Duke of Modena, who had plotted to remove him from the succession (a proposal discussed at some length in the Congress of Laybach), had just recovered his own Dukedom by Austrian help, and was no doubt watching with eager eyes any false step which his rival might make. Charles Albert, with all his liberal sympathies, was proud of being a prince of the House of Savoy; and he was surrounded by the courtiers of Charles Felix, who must have persuaded him that the dignity and independence of that House could only be maintained by opposition to the movement for reform. There was, too, another influence which must never be forgotten in estimating the difficulties of Charles Albert. He was a strong Roman Catholic, at a time when the connection between reverence for the Pope and reverence for the Church was, perhaps, closer than it had been at most previous periods of the history of the Papacy. The commonplace tyrannies of Leo XII. and Pius VIII. had not wholly dispelled the halo which the heroic attitude of Pius VII.'s early days had shed round the Papacy; and it seems highly probable that the most puzzling act of Charles Albert's life, his share in the French invasion of Spain, had been due, to a large extent, to that strong religious sentiment which gathered in so peculiar a manner round the kings of Spain. A man influenced by such sentiments could not fail to remark that the most vigorous and determined of the insurgents of 1831 had directed their attacks against the Papacy; and it might well seem to him that a letter which called on him to oppose the Austrian restorers of the papal power was the utterance of an enemy to the religion of the country. But the fact was, as Mazzini afterwards confessed, that any king who was to undertake the work which he had suggested to Charles Albert must possess at once "genius, Napoleonic energy, and the highest virtue. Genius, in order to conceive the idea of the enterprize and the conditions of victory; energy, not to front its dangers--for to a man of genius they would be few and brief--but to dare to break at once with every tie of family or alliance, and the habits and necessities of any existence distinct and removed from that of the people, and to extricate himself both from the web of diplomacy and the counsels of wicked or cowardly advisers; virtue enough voluntarily to renounce a portion at least of his actual power; for it is only by redeeming them from slavery that a people may be roused to battle and to sacrifice." If such were the qualities required by any prince who undertook this office, what must have been needed from one who had to contend with a Power which had ten years before helped to crush out the aspirations of his people, and which was just then triumphantly ruling in the centre of Italy? A man of genius might have undertaken the task; Charles Albert was only a man who "would and would not." But, if Charles Albert refused to listen to Mazzini's appeal, he had no alternative but to protest against it; and he did so by banishing Mazzini, under pain of imprisonment if he should return to Italy. Nevertheless, the letter had produced its effect on the nation. The demand for the unity of Italy had been openly and definitely made, and put forward as a boon to be struggled for by Italians, and not to be conferred by a foreign conqueror. The attention of the youth of Italy was at once attracted to the writer of the letter, and none the less that he was an exile. The personal fascination which he exercised even over casual observers may be gathered from the following letter, which seems to refer to this period. It was written by one of his fellow-exiles, describing his first sight of Mazzini in the rifle ground at Marseilles. "I went into the ground, and, looking round, saw a young man leaning on his rifle, watching the shooters, and waiting for his turn. He was about 5ft. 8in. high, and slightly made; he was dressed in black Genoa velvet, with a large Republican hat; his long curling black hair, which fell upon his shoulders, the extreme freshness of his clear olive complexion, the chiselled delicacy of his regular and beautiful features, aided by his very youthful look, and sweetness and openness of expression, would have made his appearance almost too feminine, if it had not been for his noble forehead, the power of firmness and decision that was mingled with their gaiety and sweetness in the bright flashes of his dark eyes, and in the varying expression of his mouth, together with his small and beautiful moustache and beard. Altogether, he was at that time the most beautiful _being_, male or female, that I had ever seen, and I have not since seen his equal. I had read what he had published; I had heard of what he had done and suffered, and the moment I saw him I _knew_ it could be no other than Joseph Mazzini." It was under such auspices that the Society of Young Italy was founded. The general drift of the principles of that Society has already been sufficiently indicated in the account of Mazzini's meditations in the fortress of Savona. It was to make Italy free, united, Republican, recognizing duty to God and man as the basis of national life, rather than the mere assertion of rights. But the great point which distinguished it from all the other societies which had preceded it was that, instead of trusting to the mysterious effect of symbols, and the power of a few leaders to induce the main body of Italians blindly to accept their orders, it openly proclaimed its creed before the world, and even in the articles of association set forth the full arguments on which it grounded the defence of the special objects which it advocated. And the principles were further to be preached in a journal which was to be called, like the Society, "Giovine Italia." But while he put forward a definitely Republican programme, Mazzini never fell into the French mistake of thinking that a knot of men, monopolizing power to themselves, can, by merely calling themselves Republicans, make the government of a nation a Republic. While he fully hoped, by education, to induce the Italians to accept a Republican Government, he was quite prepared to admit the possibility of failure in that attempt, and to accept the consequence as a consistent democrat. This is distinctly stated in the first plan of Young Italy. "By inculcating before the hour of action by what steps the Italians must achieve their aim, by raising its flag in the sight of Italy, and calling upon all those who believe it to be the flag of national regeneration to organize themselves beneath its folds--the association does not seek to substitute that flag for the banner of the future nation." "When once the nation herself shall be free, and able to exercise that right of sovereignty which is hers alone, she will raise her own banner, and make known her revered and unchallenged will as to the principle and the fundamental law of her existence." Plentiful as was the scorn and misrepresentation showered upon Mazzini and his doctrines, the two years from 1831 to 1833 brought a vast number of supporters to the Society of Young Italy; and the revolutionary movement in other countries gained organization and definiteness of purpose from this model. In the meantime, the Government of Louis Philippe was becoming more and more definitely committed to the cause of reaction; and every kind of slander was being circulated by Frenchmen against the Society of Young Italy. The theory that this Society undertook to exterminate all who disobeyed its orders was supported, by attributing to its action any casual violence which might take place in the streets of Paris; and though Mazzini prosecuted one of these slanderers for defamation a few years later, and compelled him to make a complete retractation in the law courts, the slander was too convenient to be allowed easily to drop. On the other hand, men of the older type of revolutionist, who had drawn their ideas from the first French Republic, and had afterwards hoped to find their realization in the methods of the Carbonari, objected to Mazzini as "too soft and German" in his ideas. But nevertheless some who were afterwards known in other ways came forward to contribute to the Journal of Young Italy. Amongst them may be mentioned the historian Sismondi and a future opponent of Mazzini, the Abate Vincenzo Gioberti. By 1833 the Society had established centres in Lombardy, Genoa, Tuscany, and the Papal States, and it was resolved to attempt an invasion of Savoy. For, in spite of the promises which Charles Albert had held out of reforms in the government, the prosecutions for the conspiracy of 1831 were being carried on with renewed rigour, and the prisons of some of the chief towns of Piedmont were filled with men in many cases arrested on the barest suspicion, and who were threatened with death if they would not reveal the secrets of their fellow-conspirators. Such cruelties were used to extort confessions that Jacopo Ruffini, a young friend of Mazzini's, committed suicide in prison for fear he should be compelled to betray his friends. The news of these acts quickened the eagerness of the Italians for the invasion of Savoy, and they desired to co-operate with men of other countries. Among these, there were few from whom they expected so much sympathy as the Poles. Unable to organize successful insurrections in their own country, the Poles were scattered over Europe, a revolutionary element in every land in which they were to be found. They, like the Italians, had at first expected sympathy from the July monarchy in France. They, too, had been bitterly disappointed. But this had not prevented them from maintaining a centre at Paris; and many of those who had fought in vain in 1830 for the liberty of Poland came back to Paris to learn there what further was to be done. Amongst these came a man named Ramorino, a Savoyard by birth, who had acted as a general in the Polish struggle of 1830. The part which he had played in that insurrection was only known very indistinctly to most of the Italians who were organizing the new expedition; but the mere fact that he had been a leader in a war for liberty was enough to make them desire his help. Mazzini had gathered from the Polish exiles the opinion generally held of Ramorino by those who knew the facts of the insurrection of 1830. He found that the reputation which Ramorino had held at that period was very low, both for trustworthiness and military ability; and he opposed his election as leader of the expedition to Savoy. The only result of the opposition was a charge against Mazzini of personal ambition. The expedition had already been weakened by the opposition of one of those fanatical revolutionists who had before denounced Mazzini as too soft and German in his ideas. This man, who bore the honoured name of Buonarotti, had complained of the members of the expedition for admitting men of noble rank and some wealth to the position of leadership in it, and he had succeeded in detaching from the movement an important section of its supporters. Mazzini, therefore, saw that, under these circumstances, to lose the friends of Ramorino would ruin the chances of the expedition; and, feeling that any further opposition would only excite division, he consented to act with Ramorino. The new leader soon showed his true character by hindering the expedition as long as possible; but in February, 1834, he yielded to the pressure of Mazzini and began the march. Unfortunately, Mazzini was seized with a fever on the route, and Ramorino, finding this obstacle to his treachery removed, ordered the columns to be dissolved and rode away. Plenty of scorn was heaped upon the failure of this first expedition of Young Italy. But Metternich, at any rate, judged more truly. In April, 1833, he had written to the chief of his spies in Lombardy to warn him against the growth of a new revolutionary party, and particularly against the advocate Mazzini, one of the most dangerous men of the faction; and he told him to procure copies of the journal called "La Giovine Italia," and two copies also of Mazzini's pamphlet about guerilla warfare. Menz, the spy in question, while believing that the journal of Young Italy was losing ground, yet considered that it was the most dangerous of the newspapers which circulated in Lombardy. This request of Metternich's was, indeed, made a few months before the actual invasion of Savoy, and Menz, no doubt, began to think that after that failure the power of Mazzini would decline; but it is tolerably clear that Metternich did not share that delusion, and kept his eye steadily on the new leader. Nor did even Menz believe that mere repression would now suffice to win the sympathies of the Lombards to Austria, and he proposed to divert the intellectual zeal of disaffected Lombards into a direction favourable to the State by offering prizes for the solution of questions in different branches of human knowledge. From the winners of these prizes, he thought, might be chosen professors, inspectors, and directors of studies, and encouragement might be given to compositions of poems and paintings, of which "the subject, and even the colour," was to be dictated by Government.[6] He further proposed that, with this object, an Academy of Poetry should be founded in Lombardy, under the absolute direction of the Austrian Government, who are to see that the nation should take part in an intellectual movement "with a correct view, and that these productions of the imagination, bearing the impress of a tendency profitable to the well-being of society, would, in their turn, act in a very favourable manner on the public spirit." Further, as "the Circus was in the time of the Romans the secret means of the State for rendering the people submissive to the Government," ... so "the Austrian Government should give a very generous subsidy to the theatre of La Scala (at Milan); but it would be also desirable that it should make some sacrifice for the provincial theatres." A few modifications of the Austrian code, some reduction on customs duties, and lessening of the restrictions on passports, are also suggested in the Report. Such were the means by which the trusted servant of Metternich hoped to counteract the influence of Mazzini and Young Italy. But in the meantime another form of opposition to the power of Metternich was growing up in a country very different from Italy, both in its circumstances and the character of its people. While, in all other countries of Europe, Metternich looked upon every approach to self-government with suspicion, and tried to crush it out either by force or diplomacy, both he and Francis recognized that in Hungary there were reasons for maintaining and even encouraging Constitutional feeling. For here the Constitutional rights did not rest upon any revolutionary basis; at any rate, not upon any revolution of modern times. They were not connected with the sort of national aspirations which made the movements in Italy and Germany so alarming to Metternich. There was, as yet, no desire here to redistribute the country according to popular aspirations; all rights rested on clearly defined laws handed down from a distant past, and in many cases these rights had been the subject of a peaceable contract between the previous rulers of the country and the House of Austria. So much was this felt by Francis that he even appealed on one occasion to the Hungarian Diet for sympathy against the revolutionary methods of Liberal leaders of other countries. But, indeed, had the liberty of the Hungarians depended, like that of other nations, on the assertion of the power of a central parliament, they might have been crushed as the other peoples had been; for from 1813 to 1825 no Diet met in Hungary. But the full force of Hungarian liberty dwelt in the organization of those county assemblies which the Magyars had probably derived from the conquered Slavs. The Government could not enforce its laws except through the county officers, all of whom, with one exception, were elected by the landholders of the district. That one Government official was bound to call together once a year a meeting of the nobles and clergy of the county. _There_ the wants and grievances of the district were discussed, and orders were sent to the representatives of the county in the Diet at Presburg to introduce bills to remedy those grievances. These county assemblies could raise taxes and levy soldiers; and they not only possessed, but exercised the right to refuse to obey the orders of the King himself if, after discussion, such orders proved illegal. In the county elections all freeholders of Hungary had votes; and in the smaller village elections the suffrage was still wider. The electors in the villages chose, not only legislators, but judges of their village concerns. The non-freeholding peasantry were, indeed, often oppressed; the towns were in a backward state as regards self-government; but yet this system of county organization secured a wider diffusion of general interest in political affairs than prevailed in any other country of Europe. At the same time, there were elements in Hungary which might give Metternich some hopes that he could drain out the forces of Hungarian liberty. The Magyar nobles were drawn more and more to Vienna; and a process of Germanization was going on of so effective a kind that many of the nobles had almost forgotten their own language. Thus, though the Magyar aristocracy had more often acted as champions of independence than the nobles of any other country in Europe, they were gradually being drifted away from the main body of the people, and were becoming absorbed in the ranks of Austrian officialism. But when the Spanish Revolution of 1820 began to stir men's minds, the discussions in the Hungarian county assemblies took a wider range, and representations were made to Francis which he could not long resist. He did not at first, indeed, realize the full force of the opposition, and in 1822 he tried to levy new taxes on the Hungarians without summoning the Diet. But this attempt failed, and in 1825 the Diet at Presburg was once more called together. It seemed, indeed, to some of those who afterwards played a prominent part in the struggles of 1848 as if little was gained by this Diet; and as if it was even less satisfactory than its predecessor of 1791. But a movement was inaugurated on this occasion which, though it may have contained in it the seeds of future misunderstanding, and even of civil war, was yet in its beginning as noble in its intention as it was necessary to the welfare of Hungary; and, had it been pursued in the spirit of its first leader, might have produced in time all the blessings which have since been secured to Hungary, without any of those terrible divisions and bitternesses that hinder those blessings from producing their full effect. The leader of this new movement was Count Stephen Szechenyi, a member of one of the great families of Hungary. His father had held office at the Court of Vienna, but had grieved over the process of denationalization which was going on among the nobles of Hungary. Count Stephen was early trained to sympathize with the desire for the restoration of Hungarian life. He saw that the withdrawal of the great nobles from Hungary to Vienna led to the mismanagement of their estates, the growth of an evil class of money-lenders, and the separation between the aristocracy and the rest of the nation. The abandonment of the Magyar language was, in his eyes, the great source of all evil; and the Diet of 1825 afforded him the first opportunity of protesting against it. While the Hungarian nobles talked German in private, they used Latin in the management of public affairs; and Szechenyi, as a protest against this practice, spoke in the Magyar language in bringing forward a question in the House of Magnates. But, before the Diet had risen, he gave a much more solid proof of his zeal for his native tongue. On November 3rd, 1825, he offered, in the House of Magnates, to give a whole year's income, 60,000 gulden, to found a Society for promoting the Study of the Magyar Language. His example was followed, with more or less zeal, by other nobles; and in 1827 a Hungarian Academy was established by Royal Decree. The movement which Szechenyi had stirred up was in danger of being brought to ridicule by some of its supporters, for Count Dessewfy actually proposed that a law should be passed forbidding the marriage of any Hungarian maiden who did not know her native tongue; but this was resisted as too strong a measure. But though Szechenyi opposed these wilder schemes of his supporters, he was none the less ready to use all possible attractions for carrying out his chief object, the drawing Hungarian nobles back to their country. As one of these means, he established a horse-race at Pesth, and founded a union for training horses. He promoted, too, the material advantages of Hungary by introducing steamships on the Danube. The work to which he devoted most attention was the erection of a suspension bridge, to connect Pesth with Buda. Szechenyi's enthusiasm in this matter seemed to many ludicrously disproportionate to the result to be obtained; but the fact was that he intended this work to give the opportunity for the first blow at that great injustice, the exemption of the Hungarian nobles from taxation. If he could induce the Magnates to consent that the burden of so important a national undertaking should fall in part upon them, they might be willing hereafter to accept a more just distribution of the whole burdens of the State. While, however, Szechenyi was labouring to promote Hungarian national life, and was willing to sacrifice personal comfort, and any unjust privileges of his order, for the sake of that object, he remained essentially the Conservative Magyar Magnate. He not only shrank from any movement for Constitutional reform, but even hoped to accomplish his ends with the sympathy of the Austrian Government. It was not indeed that he was deficient in courage, or in the tendency to speak his mind plainly in private conversation. He said boldly that "the promises of the King are not kept, that the law is always explained in favour of the King to the disadvantage of the people; and, to speak plainly, affairs just now have the appearance as if the Constitution were being overturned." And in the same conversation he further nettled Metternich by suggesting to that statesman that his high position might prevent him from seeing some things. Yet it was not merely offended vanity that irritated the ruler of Europe against Szechenyi. Metternich seems always to have had a preference for the thorough-going men among his opponents. He might hate and desire to crush them; but what pleased him was that he understood the logic of their position and, as he supposed, their motives. The moderate and Constitutional Liberals were always a puzzle to him. But when a man like Szechenyi actually thought that he could work with him, while undermining the centralization which was the essence of his schemes, and appealing to that positive form of patriotism which it was the object of Metternich to crush out, so inconsistent a position drove the Prince beyond the bounds of ordinary courtesy. Taking advantage of his own high position and Szechenyi's youth, he told him that he was a man lost through vanity and ambition, asked him if he could really confess to his friends the kindly feeling to the Austrian Government which he had expressed to Metternich; and, on Szechenyi making some admission of the difficulties of such a course, "Then," said Metternich, "you must be a traitor either to me or to your friends, that is to yourself." But if Szechenyi's position was unintelligible to Metternich, he found it far easier to understand another nobleman who came forward a little later and played a different, but hardly less important, part. This was Nicolaus Wesselenyi, the descendant of a family of nobles who had constantly held their own against both king and People. The father of Nicolaus had been a fiery, overbearing man, who had indulged in private feuds, and who had fought scornfully for the special privileges of the nobles. His son had all the fire of his family, and the same love of opposition, but directed by the circumstances of the time into healthier channels. It was not, however, at Presburg that the Wesselenyis had hitherto played their principal part, but at the Diet which met at Klausenburg, in Transylvania. The circumstances and organization of that peculiar province will be more naturally considered in connection with the movements which arose a few years later. For the present, the important point to remember in connection with Wesselenyi's position is, that the Austrian Government tolerated an unusual amount of freedom in the Transylvanian Diet, in the hopes thereby of weakening that larger Hungarian feeling which gathered round the central Diet at Presburg. When both the Hungarian and the Transylvanian Diets were called together in 1830, and a demand was made by the Emperor for new recruits for the army, the House of Magnates in Transylvania showed, under Wesselenyi's leading, a bolder and firmer opposition than the House of Magnates at Presburg. In the central Diet, indeed, the chief opposition to the Emperor came from the Lower House, and the nobles were disposed to yield to the demands of Francis. But Wesselenyi, with his splendid bearing and magnificent voice, stirred up a far more dangerous opposition in Transylvania; and the Government at Vienna began to mark him out as their most dangerous opponent. But in the meantime new questions were coming to the front in Hungary, and new leaders were being called forth by them. The Polish insurrection of 1830 had roused more sympathy in Hungary than probably in any other country of Europe; and a connection between the two nations was then established which had a not unimportant influence on the subsequent history of Hungary. The wiser men among the Hungarian leaders saw the great defect which marred all struggles for liberty in Poland. Whatever aspirations may have been entertained by the Polish patriots of 1791, certain it is that, when Poland fell before the intrigues of Russia and Prussia, the new Constitution had not had time to bring about any better feeling between noble and peasant; and the Polish peasantry looked with distrust and suspicion on movements for freedom inaugurated by their oppressors. The Hungarian reformers saw that, if they were to make the liberties of Hungary a reality, they must extend them to the serf as well as to the noble. In spite of the air of freedom of discussion which the County Assemblies of Hungary spread around them, there were, at this time, out of the thirteen millions of Hungarians, about eleven million serfs. These were not allowed to purchase an acre of the soil which they cultivated; they paid all the tithes to the clergy and most of the taxes to the State, besides various payments in kind to their landlords; their labour might be enforced by the stick; while for redress of their grievances they were obliged, in the first instance, to apply to the Court over which their landlord presided. The reigns of Maria Theresa and Joseph II., while modifying the evils of the position of the serf, had taught him to look to the Court of Vienna, rather than to the Diet of Presburg, for help in his troubles. The Edict of Maria Theresa, called the Urbarium, had granted the peasant the right of leaving the land when he pleased, or of remaining if he liked, while he complied with certain conditions; and by this act he was allowed to bequeath the use of his land to his descendants. Further, a right of appeal had been granted from his landlord's decision to the official court at Buda, known as the Statthalterei. By the same law the labour to be performed by the peasantry had been fixed, instead of being left to the will of the lord, as heretofore. The reforms of Joseph II. had, like most of his attempts, been too vigorous to be lasting; but he had done enough to strengthen in the minds of the oppressed peasantry of Hungary the desire to look to the Emperor as their liberator. Thus the satisfaction of the claims of humanity had tended to weaken Constitutional freedom. The bitter feeling between noble and peasant was illustrated most painfully in the year 1831, when an outbreak of cholera in Hungary was attributed by the peasantry to the poisoning of the wells by the nobles. Agrarian risings had followed, and more than fifty peasants had been hung without trial. Such was the state of feeling when the Diet of 1832 met at Presburg. Had the leader of the movement for agrarian reform been a mere champion of Constitutionalism, the work of drawing together the peasant and noble might have been more difficult. But fortunately the work fell into the hands of a man who, though not deficient in powers of oratory, was far less a popular leader than a thoughtful and humane student of affairs. This was Francis Deak, then thirty years of age, trained, like so many leaders of the time, for the bar, and already known as a speaker in the County Assembly of Zala. He was not a man of the delicate, cultured type of Szechenyi; nor did he possess the commanding figure and lion voice of Wesselenyi. He was broad and sturdy in figure, his face was round and humorous, and his eye twinkled with fun. Yet he was not without a deep shade of melancholy. He was a man who inspired in all who came near him a sense of entire trust in his honesty and steadiness of purpose; and this feeling, though unlike the enthusiasm which is roused alike by the highest genius and by merely popular gifts, was yet exactly the form of confidence needed to enable Deak to do the special work which lay before him. The question of the reform of the Urbarium he at once made his own. Besides the miseries of the peasantry above mentioned, they were continually exposed to all kinds of petty tyrannies. Their horses were liable to be seized by tourists through the country, and soldiers were billeted upon them. Deak demanded the extension to the peasant of the right of buying land, and better security for person and property. But it soon became evident that, whatever exceptions there might be to the rule, the Magnates of Hungary were not prepared to surrender their privileges. The point which the reformers specially insisted on in the new Urbarium was a clause enabling the peasant to free himself from his feudal dues by a legal arrangement with the landlord. Thirteen times the Lower House of the Diet passed the clause; thirteen times the House of Magnates rejected it; and when at last that House consented to pass it, the Emperor vetoed it. The reformers were now clearly justified in calling on the people to recognize them as their champions against both nobles and sovereign. But in order to prevent this recognition the Government had forbidden any publication of the debates. Wesselenyi had met this difficulty in the Transylvanian Diet by introducing a private press of his own, with the help of which he circulated a report of the proceedings. This so alarmed the Government that they dissolved the Transylvanian Diet and established an absolute ruler in that province. Wesselenyi then transferred his eloquence to the House of Magnates in Presburg, where he thundered against the Government for opposing the liberties of the peasantry, denouncing them in the following words: "The Government sucks out the marrow of nine million of men (_i.e._, the peasantry); it will not allow us nobles to better their condition by legislative means; but, retaining them in their present state, it only waits its own time to exasperate them against us. Then it will come forward to rescue us. But woe to us! From freemen we shall be degraded to the state of slaves." But the work which Wesselenyi had half done for Transylvania was to be carried out for Hungary more thoroughly by a man who had been gradually rising into note. This was Louis Kossuth, of whom it may be said that, more than any other man in Europe, he was the author of the Revolution of 1848. He was a few years older than Francis Deak, and, like him, was trained as a lawyer. He had been appointed, in the exercise of his profession, arbitrator between several wealthy proprietors and their dependants. In this position he gained the confidence of many of the peasantry, and he was also able to give them help in the time of the cholera. He possessed a quick and keen sensibility, which was the source of many of his faults and of his virtues. A curious illustration of this quality is shown in his renunciation of field sports, in consequence of reading a passage in a Persian poet on the duty of humanity to all living things. No doubt it was to this sensibility that he owed a large part of that matchless eloquence which was to be so powerful an engine in the revolutionary war. It was connected, too, with the keen statesmanlike instinct which enabled him to see so often the right moment for particular lines of action; and which, had it been united with a wider sympathy, stronger nerves, and a more scrupulous conscience, might have made his career as useful as it was brilliant. [Illustration: KOSSUTH LAJOS.] This instinct it was which enabled him to see at this crisis that nothing could be effected for Hungary until the work done in the Diet was better known to the main body of the people. The private press which he now started may have been suggested to him by Wesselenyi's attempt in Transylvania; but its work was carried out with an ingenuity and resourcefulness which were altogether Kossuth's own. The Government became so alarmed at this press that they wished to purchase it from him, but, wherever print was hindered, he circulated written correspondence. Nor did he confine his reporting to the debates in the Diet of Presburg, for he circulated also reports of the county meetings. The Count Palatine, the chief ruler of Hungary, tried to hinder this work; but the county officials refused to sanction this prohibition, and thus deprived it of legal force. The Government was now thoroughly roused; and in May, 1837, Kossuth was indicted for treason, arrested, and kept for two years in prison without any trial. But great as was the indignation excited by this arrest, it was as nothing compared to the storm which was aroused by the prosecution and imprisonment of Wesselenyi. The Government had marked him out during the Transylvanian debates as an enemy who was to be struck on the first opportunity. The printing of the Transylvanian reports would have been followed very speedily by a prosecution, had he not escaped into North Hungary; but his speech against the Government in the Presburg Diet gave a new opportunity for attack. The enthusiasm which his prominent position, impressive manner, and high rank had caused had been strengthened in Transylvania by the extreme personal kindness which he had shown towards his peasantry; and one of them walked all the way from Wesselenyi's Transylvanian estate to Vienna to petition, on his own behalf and that of one hundred fellow-peasants, that their landlord might be restored to them. Had Francis been still on the throne, it is possible that Metternich would have offered further resistance to the popular demands. But Francis had died in 1835, the year before the closing of the Diet. His successor, Ferdinand, though, chiefly from physical causes, too weak to hold his own against Metternich, was a kindly, easy-tempered man, not without a sense that even kings ought to obey the law. But whether Metternich or Ferdinand were to blame in the matter, the concessions of the King were made in a hesitating and grudging manner which took away their grace, and made the defeat more vividly apparent both to victors and spectators. A more popular Chancellor of Hungary, Anton Mailath, was appointed; another member of the same family was made chief justice; and about the same time the Transylvanian Diet was restored. Hoping that he had now conciliated popular feeling, Metternich, in 1839, called together the Diet of Presburg and demanded four million florins and thirty-eight thousand recruits. But the members of the Assembly had been instructed by their constituents to oppose any demands of the Government until Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and the members of a club who had been arrested at the same time, were liberated. And while Deak still led the opposition in the Lower House, Count Louis Batthyanyi came forward as the champion of freedom in the House of Magnates. Finally, the Emperor consented, not only to grant an amnesty to Wesselenyi, Kossuth, and others, but to pass that clause about the peasants' dues which he had vetoed in 1836. The Diet then voted the money, and was dissolved. Thus, while in Italy a new faith was springing up which was to supply a force to the struggles for liberty that they had previously lacked, in Hungary the different, but hardly less effective, power of old traditions of Constitutional freedom was checking Metternich in his full career of tyranny, and forcing him to confess a defeat inflicted, not by foreign diplomatists, but by that very people who had rallied round Maria Theresa in her hour of danger, and who had sternly rejected the advances of Napoleon when he had invited them to separate their cause from that of the House of Austria. FOOTNOTES: [3] "He congratulated me on the fact that circumstances had spared me the tremendous ordeals usually undergone; and seeing me smile at this, he asked me severely what I should have done if I had been required, as others had been, to fire off a pistol in my own ear, which had been previously loaded before my eyes. I replied that I should have refused, telling the initiators that either there was some valve in the interior of the pistol into which the bullet fell--in which case the affair was a farce unworthy of both of us--or the bullet had really remained in the stock: and in that case it struck me as somewhat absurd to call upon a man to fight for his country, and make it his first duty to blow out the few brains God had vouchsafed to him."--_Life and Writings of Mazzini, Vol. I._ [4] As an instance of his way of carrying out this idea may be mentioned his feeling to Savoy. He felt that in race, language, and possibly in sympathy, Savoy might naturally gravitate towards France, while its geographical position and the modes of life of its inhabitants might naturally connect it with Switzerland. He therefore desired that by the deliberate vote of an elected Assembly, not by a fictitious Napoleonic plebiscite, Savoy should decide the question of its connection with Italy, France, or Switzerland. Mazzini expressed a hope that it would decide in favour of Switzerland. [5] "Mais M. Bulwer parler de faire la guerre, et faire la guerre sont choses bien différentes." [6] Document 158 to Gualterio Gli Ultimi Rivolgimenti Italiani. CHAPTER IV. LANGUAGE AND LEARNING AGAINST DESPOTISM. 1840-1846. Contrast between position of German language in North Germany and in Austrian Empire.--Condition of Germany between 1819 and 1840.--Literary movements.--Protest of the Professors of Göttingen against abolition of Hanoverian Constitution.--Effect of the protest on other parts of Germany.--Position and character of Frederick William III.--His struggle with the Archbishop of Cologne.--Accession of Frederick William IV.--His character and policy.--Ronge's movement of Church Reform.--Robert Blum's share in it.--Language movement in Hungary.--Position and history of Croatia.--Louis Gaj and the "Illyrian" movement.--"The Slavonic ocean and the Magyar island."--Kossuth's treatment of the Slavonic movement.--Count Zay's circular.--The "taxation of the nobles."--Szechenyi's position.--Deak's resignation.--The Croats at Presburg.--Kossuth's inconsistency.--Ferdinand's intervention in the struggle.--The struggle of races absorbs all other questions.--History of Transylvania.--The "three nations."--The position of the Roumanians.--Effect of Joseph II.'s policy in Transylvania.--The "Libellus Wallachorum."--Andreas Schaguna.--Stephan Ludwig Roth.--General summary of the effect of the revival of national feelings. 'Twas from no Augustan age, No Lorenzo's patronage, That the German singers rose; By no outward glories crowned, By no prince's praise renowned, German art's first blossom blows. From her country's greatest son, From the mighty Frederick's throne, Scorned, the Muse must turn away. "_We_ have given thy worth to thee;" "Let our heart-beats prouder be;" Can each German boldly say. So to loftier heights arose, So in waves more swelling flows German poet's minstrelsy. He in ripeness all his own, From his heart's deep centre grown, Scorns the rule of pedantry. So sang Schiller; and, while in Germany the Muse was ascending to the heights in which Schiller gloried to see her, the opposite process had been producing opposite results under the rule of another German sovereign. Frederick II. of Prussia preferred bad French to the best utterances of his own country; and so the German Muse was free to develope in her own way. Joseph II. of Austria felt his heart warmed with the greatness of German traditions; he looked round on dominions inhabited by men of different races and languages, and, perceiving that these differences led to continual misunderstandings, and hindered any great work of common reform, resolved to extend the blessings of German language and literature to all the races of his dominions. To them, he thought, a change would prove a bond of union; while neither Bohemian, Hungarian, nor Croat could claim for their native tongues, however dear to them, such glorious associations and traditions as were already connected with the language which was to take their place. The consequence of this nobly intended effort has been that German is, to this day, a badge of tyranny to the majority of the people of the western half of the Austrian Empire; and if it has almost ceased to be so in the eastern half, that is simply because its supremacy has been replaced by the no less crushing tyranny of another language which was offered to the various populations of the Hungarian kingdom by its rulers, as a symbol of national freedom and unity. The spirit of literary independence in North Germany, and the rivalry of languages in the Austrian Empire, were both forcing themselves on the attention of the public during the period of Metternich's rule. To outward appearance there was no time at which the condition of Germany must have seemed more helpless and hopeless than between 1819 and 1840. The German insurrections of 1831 could not be compared for their historical importance with either the English reform movement of the same period, or with the Italian uprisings; nor for dramatic brilliancy with the Polish insurrection of 1830. Even the Hanoverian Constitution of 1833, which seemed to be firmly established, went down four years later without a sword being drawn in its defence; while the heavy burdens of the Carlsbad decrees of 1819 and the Frankfort decrees of 1832 were made still heavier in 1834 by a new Edict, passed at Vienna, establishing courts of arbitration, elected by members of the Bund, to decide questions at issue between sovereigns and parliaments. If the Assemblies, in defending their rights of taxation, should refuse to appeal to this Court, the sovereign might then proceed to levy, without further delay, the supplies which had been granted by the previous Assembly. Yet Germany was not dead. Apart from the continual assertions of independence by the South German States, the growth of German literature was keeping alive the sense of union between the different parts of the nation. Stein, after his retirement from political affairs, had devoted himself to the encouragement of German literature, and particularly of German history. For this purpose he brought together historians from different parts of Germany; and Perthes, the bookseller, who had helped to defend Hamburg against the French, exerted himself to promote a book trade which was to unite the North and South of Germany. Occasionally, some prince, like the Duke of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, would show an inclination to play the part of the Duke of Weimar as a patron of literature, but could only call attention thereby to such life as still remained, not evoke any new life. The German Muse was still to thrive by her own labours, and the great proof of the existence of a still independent literary class was given in 1837, when the King of Hanover suppressed the Constitution which his predecessor had established. On November 17th, 1837, seven professors of Göttingen University drew up against this act of tyranny a protest which so ably connected the feeling of the true literary man and the true teacher with that of the independent citizen that it deserves to be given at length. They said that the whole chance of the success of their work depended not more certainly on the scientific worth of their teaching than on their personal blamelessness. Should they appear before the young students as men who would play carelessly with their oaths, then at once the blessing of their work would be gone; and what importance could the oath of homage possibly have, if the King had received it from men who just before had audaciously violated another oath? This protest was signed by Dahlmann, Albrecht, Gervinus, the brothers Grimm, Weber, and Ewald. They were summarily dismissed from their offices by the King, who declared that he could buy professors anywhere for money, as easily as dancers. At once the greatest enthusiasm broke out in different parts of Germany. In Leipzig and Königsberg subscriptions were opened for the professors, and in twelve hours the Leipzigers had subscribed nearly 1,000 thalers. The subscription of Leipzig was followed by a public reception given to Albrecht and Dahlmann; an address was delivered in which the professors were told that the whole heart of the German people beat with them. The man who delivered this address, and who thus first made his appearance before the public, was the Leipzig bookseller, Robert Blum. In Saxony the Constitution which had been won in 1831 was still nominally in existence, and the Prime Minister was even called a Liberal. The Members of the Parliament hoped to seize this opportunity of putting Saxony forward as the champion of German rights; but the Government shrank from that position, and seemed disposed even to check the independent movement among the people. Now in spite of the steady courage that had shown itself among the literary men of Germany, the bulk of the nation was still essentially monarchical, and they needed some king at the head of the movement for freedom and unity. However much of Liberalism might occasionally have been shown by some of the smaller princes of Germany, none of them were in a position to take the leading part in any common German movement. The Emperor of Austria, even had his policy tended in that direction, was hindered by his connection with non-German territories from assuming such a leadership. And the memories of 1813 gathered, if not round the King of Prussia, at least round his kingdom. The institution of the Zollverein formed one point of attraction between Prussia and the Liberals of Germany; the position of Prussia as the great Protestant Power strengthened her influence in Northern Germany; and just at the time when the King of Hanover was dismissing the professors of Göttingen, the King of Prussia was supporting at the University of Bonn professors whom the Archbishop of Cologne was trying to suppress. The prohibition of mixed marriages by the same Archbishop further excited Frederick William's opposition; and, unable to secure obedience by other methods, the King seized and imprisoned the Archbishop. An act of tyranny in the interests of liberty seems to commend itself more readily to Continental revolutionists than to those who have been bred up under the principle of mutual forbearance produced by Constitutional life; and there can be little doubt that much of the strongest part of North German feeling was enlisted on the side of the King of Prussia. But Frederick William III. was not a man to take the lead in anything. By the mere accident of his position he had become the figure-head of the rising of 1813; and by the same accident he continued to attract the wishes, one can hardly say the hopes, of those who desired to counteract in Germany the policy of Metternich. He could at no time have done much to help forward the unity of Germany; and he had long since abandoned any wish to work in that direction. But while the excitement arising from the tyranny of the King of Hanover, and the struggle of the King of Prussia with the Archbishop of Cologne, were still distracting Germany, Frederick William III. died, and was succeeded by Frederick William IV. The new King was a man of somewhat poetical and enthusiastic temperament, with a strong religious bias, desirous in a way of the welfare of his people, and not ill disposed to play a Liberal part within due limits. He restored Arndt to his position at Bonn; he set free not only Jahn, but also the Archbishop of Cologne; he found a post for Dahlmann in the University of Bonn; and he began also to talk Constitutionalism in a way which roused new hopes in Germany. He inspired no confidence in those who looked more closely into matters; but his career began at a time when the Germans were in a state of eager expectation, which had been quickened by a movement already preparing in other parts of Germany. The first utterance of the new reformers was a protest against religious superstition. A Roman Catholic priest, named Ronge, denounced the famous worship of the Holy Coat at Treves. This protest attracted attention, and was followed by an attack on a number of other corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church. The movement spread; a reformed Catholic Church was founded in Posen and Silesia, and Ronge was appointed minister of the first congregation of the new faith. It was in 1845 that the movement reached Saxony. Two years before, the Liberal Ministry had retired; a complete reaction had set in, and Robert Blum had been subjected to a fine and four weeks' imprisonment for an article in which he had advocated publicity of trial. Nothing daunted by this, Blum threw himself heartily into the new movement, and, although a Roman Catholic himself, denounced the practice of the confessional and the celibacy of the clergy. The Ultramontanes raised a riot in which Blum was personally attacked, and the Saxon Ministry declared their determination to put down "the sects." Such a threat naturally gave new force to the reformers, and they raised the cry, so often to be heard in the coming Liberal movements, of "Down with the Jesuits!" That unfortunate Society, so often the object of hatred both to kings and Peoples, was in this case specially obnoxious to the Liberals from the patronage which was extended to it by the heir to the throne. When the Prince appeared to review the troops at Leipzig he was received in silence, and when he had retired to his hotel the crowd gathered round it with cries of "Long live Ronge!" and "Down with the Jesuits!" accompanied by the singing of "Ein fester Burg ist unser Gott," and followed by songs of a different description. Stones soon began to fly. Then the soldiers were called out, they fired on the crowd, and many were killed. On the following day the students of Leipzig gathered to hear an address from Robert Blum. He urged them to abstain from violence, but to put into form their demand for legal remedies; and for this purpose a committee was chosen. The following demands were laid before the Town Council--viz., that the preservation of order should be entrusted to the civic guard; that the soldiers should be removed from the town; that inquiries should be made into the circumstances of the riot, and a solemn burial given to those who had been shot. The Town Council yielded, and though the soldiers were soon sent back into Leipzig, a beginning had been made which might lead to a larger reform. Blum then founded a debating society; and, at the end of 1845, he was chosen representative of Leipzig in the Lower House of Saxony. But while the national feeling of Germany was gathering round the intellectual leaders of that country, the feeling for national peculiarities and national language was producing widely different results in those countries where the unfortunate policy of Joseph II. had made the German language a symbol of division rather than of unity. The movement for substituting the Magyar language for the Latin (which had previously been customary in the Diet at Presburg) was the revival of a struggle which had begun in the very time of Joseph II.; and, had Hungary been a homogeneous country, the movement might have passed as naturally into a struggle for freedom as the enthusiasm for German poetry and German learning had chimed in with the desire for German political unity. But Hungary had never been a country of one race or of common aspirations. Several waves of conquest and colonization had passed over different parts of it, without ending, in any case, in that amalgamation between the different races which alone could secure national unity. Yet it is just possible that, had the leadership of the Magyars fallen into the hands of a man of wider sympathies and more delicate feeling than Kossuth, an understanding might have been effected between the different peoples of Hungary. During the struggle against Joseph II., the other races seem to have submitted to the leadership of the Magyars, and to a great extent to have adopted the Magyar language, because it was not then thrust on them by force. But when, after the Diet of 1830, Hungary began to reawaken to the desire for liberty, signs of national feeling soon showed themselves among other races than the Magyars. The first race who felt the new impulse were the Croats. They, more than any of the other peoples who had been annexed to the Kingdom of Hungary, had preserved their separate government and traditions of independence. In 1527 they offered the throne of Croatia to the Hapsburgs, without waiting for any decision by the Magyars; and when Charles VI. was submitting to the Powers of Europe and to the inhabitants of his different dominions the question of the Pragmatic Sanction, Croatia gave her decision quite independently of the Diet at Presburg. But apart from her actual legal rights to independence, there remained a tradition of the old period when the Kingdom of Croatia had been an important Power in Europe, and had extended over Slavonia and Dalmatia. But these claims were not undisputed. The hold which Venice had gained over Dalmatia and Istria had introduced into those provinces an Italian element; and when, in the sixteenth century, the Serbs were called into Hungary in large numbers, Slavonia had developed a variety of the Slavonic tongue which must have weakened the absolute supremacy of the Croats. The sense, however, of a connection between the dialects of the different Slavonic States was a bond of union between those States which might at any time be drawn closer. When, then, Szechenyi began to stir up the Magyars to develop their language and literature, it occurred to a Croatian poet to link together the different dialects of the Southern Slavs into one language. The Croatians had been so far in advance of their neighbours the Serbs that they had abandoned the Cyrillic alphabet, which had been introduced at the time of their first conversion to Christianity, and had adopted the ordinary Latin alphabet. But the Croatian dialect, by itself, would not have been accepted by the other Slavs; and the softer language and higher culture of the old Republic of Ragusa supplied a better basis for the development of the new language. Louis Gaj, the Croatian poet, had studied at the University of Leipzig, which seems to have been the centre of a good deal of Slavonic feeling; and he hoped to link together, not merely the three provinces of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, but several, also, of the south-west provinces of Austria; and, on the other hand, he wished to draw into this bond of sympathy those Slavonic countries which still groaned under the Turkish yoke. It was necessary, however, to find a new name for a language which was a new combination of dialects. To call it the Croatian language would have implied a claim to superiority for Croatia which it was most desirable to avoid; and as none other of the Slavonic provinces could well be treated as the godmother of the new language, Gaj went back to the seventeenth century for a name. At that period Leopold I. of Austria had granted special privileges to the _Illyrian_ nation, and it was only in the eighteenth century that the _Illyrian_ Chancellery at Vienna had been abolished. Here, then, was a name, recognized by Imperial authority in legal documents, and giving no superiority to any one of the Slavonic provinces over the others. To carry out his purposes, Gaj started a journal in 1835 to which at first he gave the name of the "Gazette of Croatia," but which he soon renamed the "National Gazette of Illyria." This newspaper was written in the new language, and the Hungarian authorities refused to sanction it. Nor were they the only opponents of the new movement. The Turkish Pasha in Bosnia was alarmed at the attempt to draw the subjects of the Sultan into closer alliance with the Slavs in Hungary; and he tried to persuade Francis that Gaj was attempting to shake the Imperial authority and found a separate kingdom. At the same time the Bishop of Agram warned the Pope of the evident tendency of this movement to give the upper hand to the members of the Greek Church, who formed the majority of the Southern Slavs, over the Roman Catholics of Croatia. But these efforts failed. Metternich saw in Gaj's movement an opportunity of weakening the Magyars; Francis sent a ring to Gaj, as a sign of his approval; and Gregory XVI. was so far from being influenced by the Bishop of Agram's appeal that he removed him from his see for having made it. The fact that Francis had encouraged, and Metternich at all events not disapproved, this movement was enough to alarm the sensibilities of the Magyars; and when Gaj appeared in the Hungarian Diet of 1840, Deak rebuked him for his work. Gaj answered in words which became afterwards only too memorable. "The Magyars," he said, "are an island in the Slavonic ocean. I did not make the ocean, nor did I stir up its waves; but take care that they do not go over your heads and drown you." The words were certainly not conciliatory; but they had been provoked by the evident signs of hostility on the part of the Magyars. If the latter had been content to ignore the movement, it might have remained, for their time at least, a purely literary effort; or, if it had taken a political form, it might have drifted into union with the Bohemian struggle against German supremacy, or even into a crusade against the Turks. It is, however, more than probable that the attempt to found this new language would have been earlier abandoned had it not been for the opposition which it called forth. For Gaj, however zealous as a patriot, and however ingenious as a philologer, seems to have been deficient in the power of producing such a great work of imagination as that which enabled Dante to unite the not less diverse elements of the Italian language. But the Magyar cry of alarm at the demands of the Slavs was now echoed by a fiercer voice than that of Deak. In 1841, the year after the dissolution of that Presburg Diet by which Metternich had been so signally defeated, Kossuth started a paper called the "Pesti Hirlap" (the Gazette of Pesth), which soon became at once the most determined champion of those liberties which Kossuth desired for his countrymen, and the bitterest opponent of those liberties which he grudged to the other races of Hungary. For it was not merely in provinces marked off from the Magyar world like Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, that a movement like Gaj's would produce effect. The Slavs were scattered about in nearly all the districts of Hungary, and though they might not all desire separate political organizations like those which the Croats demanded, the question of the preservation of their language concerned even those who had no separate political existence; and they too resented any attempt on the part of the Magyars to substitute for it the language of the ruling race. Kossuth was as indignant at this hindrance to his schemes of national unity as Joseph II. had been at the hindrances which had been thrown in the way of the Germanizing of the Empire. The same year, 1841, which saw the starting of the journal in which Kossuth was to vindicate the liberties of Hungary against Metternich, was also the year in which he dealt his first decided blow against the liberties of the Slavonic races of Hungary. At a general convention of the Hungarian Protestants, he proposed that certain of the schools in which the Slavonic clergy studied physical science, and other branches of knowledge, should be deprived of these teachings, and that mere practice in writing sermons should be substituted. This proposal was defended on the ground that Slavonic gatherings, unless carefully limited, must be a source of danger to the country. Any one who ventured to defend the Slavonic cause at this meeting was howled down, and Kossuth's motion was carried. Fierce attacks on the Slavs and their language now appeared in the "Pesti Hirlap," and Kossuth refused to insert the answers to these attacks. Count Zay, who had just been appointed chief inspector of the Protestant Congregations and Schools, openly announced in a public circular his determination to Magyarize the Slavs. The Slavonic speech, he said, would prevent the Slavs from being firm in the Protestant faith; and while they used that speech they would not be capable of freedom, and could not even be considered to have a proper share in humanity. The Magyarizing of the Slavs was the holiest duty of every genuine patriot of Hungary, every defender of freedom and intelligence, and every true subject of the Austrian House. Others accused the Slavs of offering sacrifices to their old deity Svatopluk; while that great bugbear, the fear of Russian influence, was pushed forward on every occasion. Slavonic hymns, previously sung in the churches, were prohibited; and Magyar preachers were thrust upon congregations who did not understand a word of the Magyar language. It was while this bitter feeling was at its height that the elections began for the Diet of 1843 at Presburg, and for the Croatian Assembly at Agram. The Hungarian elections turned, to some extent, on the quarrel with the Slavs; but partly also on the question, which was now coming to the front, of the exemption of the so-called nobles of Hungary from taxation. These "nobles" were not confined to the great families who sat in the House of Magnates, but included all the freeholders of the country; and great injustice had arisen from the fact that the men who laid on the taxes were, in the main, not those who paid them. Szechenyi, as before mentioned, had tried to diminish this injustice; but the fiery methods of Kossuth, and the growing tendency to opposition to the Austrian rule, had alarmed Szechenyi; and he shrank more and more from the leaders of the popular movement. It was not, however, merely the extreme character of their aims, nor their rough-and-ready methods, which alienated him; it was also their growing injustice to the Slavs. Szechenyi, who had been so much the first in reviving an interest in Magyar language and literature, now came forward, as President of the Hungarian Academy, to denounce any step for spreading the Magyar language which could offend the Croats. On the other hand, the peasant nobles of Hungary protested fiercely against the attempt to deprive them of their exemption from taxation, and they gathered at the county meetings in a riotous manner, breaking, in one case, into the Hall of Election, with knives in their hands, and shouting, "Freedom for ever! We will not pay taxes." This fierce intimidation on the part of the opponents of reform provoked reprisals from the reformers. And, where they were unable to hold their own by intimidation, they resorted to bribery. One protest was made against this defection from the true principles of liberty which was of vital importance to the future history of Hungary. The election of Zala county had ended once more in the return of Francis Deak; and the electors were gathered to hear the announcement of the election, when, to their dismay, Deak came forward and stated that, in consequence of the way in which the election had been conducted, he should refuse to sit as their representative. His friends pressed round him, some entreating him not to desert their cause; some even venturing to reproach him with cowardice in shrinking from the struggle. But he replied that, if he went to the Diet after this election, he should always "see bloodstains on his mandate." Thus, at a crisis when they most needed a man who would combine genuine popular feeling with moderation and justice, the reformers were deprived of _the_ leader in the Lower House who possessed those qualities in the largest degree. As for Deak himself, it must be remembered that he was sacrificing the undoubted position of leader of the reforming party, at the time when its objects were becoming more and more definite, and its leadership was in consequence growing more attractive to a man of courage and patriotism. Though he was still to play a useful part in the coming struggles, it was of necessity a secondary one; and it was not till twenty-three years later that he was to resume the first place in the Hungarian national movement. In the meantime the Croatian question had become more complicated by an element of internal division. In a district not far from Agram, there was established a complete settlement of Croatian "nobles," of a similar type to those who had been raising the cry against equal taxation in the Hungarian counties. These men claimed the right, much disputed by the other Croats, to attend the county meetings at Agram _en masse_, instead of returning representatives like other citizens. In this Diet of 1843, Count Jozipoviç, leader of this band of "nobles," asserted their right in a very imperious manner; and a fierce fight followed in the streets of Agram. Thus began a contest which extended, with various degrees of violence, over several years. The Croatian Assembly, however, at first attempted to place their claims in a moderate manner before the Magyars; and instructed Haulik, Bishop of Agram, to assure the Magyars of their desire to live on good terms with them, if they were secured in those rights which had been granted by law, and guaranteed by the oath of the King. They pointed out that many of them were ignorant of the Magyar language, and that the Magyars were in many cases ignorant of theirs. On the former ground they desired to maintain the right of their representatives to speak Latin in the Hungarian Diet. On the latter ground they objected to censors being appointed over the Croatian press, who were ignorant of the Croatian language. The former right was the first to be tested; for no sooner did the Croatian deputies begin, according to old custom, to speak Latin in the Diet of Presburg than they were interrupted by a clattering of sabres from the Magyar members, and a demand that they should speak in the Magyar language. Thereupon Jozipoviç saw an opportunity of making new friends for his cause; and, while he disputed the legality of the election of his opponents, he declared that he and his supporters were "body and soul Hungarian." Kossuth at once assumed the justice of the cause of Jozipoviç; and, while he was eagerly opposing the privileges of the nobles in Hungary, he thus supported in Croatia an aristocratic privilege of doubtful legality, and undoubtedly disorderly and unjust in its effects. The Magyars responded to Kossuth's appeal; and the Lower House of the Hungarian Diet passed a resolution forbidding the use of any language but Magyar in the Diet. The House of Magnates, doubtless under the influence of Szechenyi, were disposed to make concessions to the Croats; but even they were not able to do much to check the storm. In the meantime the Emperor had been trying to exercise a moderating influence on these conflicts. Finding the bitterness caused in Hungary by Gaj's movement, Ferdinand prohibited the use of the name "Illyrian" in newspapers and in public discussions; but at the same time he promised to encourage the development of the Croatian language, and urged the Magyars to suspend for six years their prohibition of Latin in the Hungarian Diet. While, too, the Magyar language was to be used in Church boards and legal tribunals of Hungary, Hungarian officials were to accept Latin letters from Croatia and the other outlying districts that were united with Hungary. But these proposals, unfortunately, did not satisfy the feeling of the Magyars; and some of them actually ventured on the extraordinary statement that, if the Croat boards could understand letters written in the Magyar language, they must necessarily be able to compose Magyar letters in answer; and they maintained that the Croats ought not to be allowed to elect any members to the Diet who could not then speak the Magyar language. Thus, although in all parts of the Kingdom of Hungary there was a growing demand for freedom and equality, each question in turn became complicated by this quarrel between the members of the different races. On the one hand, a proposal for admitting men not hitherto recognized as "nobles" to the possession of land was met by an amendment to limit this concession to those who knew Magyar; and this exclusion was rejected by only twenty-eight votes against seventeen; while a proposal to limit offices to those who could speak Magyar was rejected by a majority of only two. On the other hand, the Croats successfully resisted a proposal to allow Protestants to settle in Croatia as a part of the scheme for Magyarizing their country. But though these divisions hindered the co-operation of the members of the different nations who might have worked together for freedom and progress, it should always be noted that the desire of each nation was, in the first instance, for the development of a free national life, connected with true culture and learning, and independent of mere officialism. If the Magyars were tyrannical and overbearing towards the Croats, it was partly because they believed that these divisions, (the fault of which they attributed to the Croats) were tending to strengthen the hands of their common oppressors. If, on the other hand, the Croats appealed to the Emperor for protection against the Magyars, it was not from any courtier-like or slavish desire to strengthen the hands of despotism; but partly because they felt that the position of the Emperor enabled him to judge more fairly between the contending parties, partly because they found from experience that Ferdinand of Austria was a juster-minded man than Louis Kossuth. While the growth of national feeling in Hungary and Croatia was tending at once to a healthier life and to dangerous divisions, a much more remarkable awakening of new and separate life was showing itself in the province of Transylvania. The geographical isolation of that province from the rest of Hungary is very striking, even now that railways have connected the different parts of the kingdom; but in 1848 this isolation was far greater, and had a considerable effect on the political history of the time. The Carpathians almost surround the country, and form a natural bulwark. Between this high wall of mountains on the north-east and Buda-Pesth stretches a vast plain. No province of the Empire contained a greater variety of separately organized nations. The Transylvanian Diet was not, like the other local assemblies, the result of an attempt to express the feelings of a more or less united people, but arose merely from the endeavour to give reasonable solidity to an alliance between three distinct peoples. Of the three ruling races, the first to enter Transylvania were the Szekler, a people of the same stock as the Magyar, but slower to take the impress of any permanent civilization. They conquered the original inhabitants of the country, a race probably of mixed Dacian and Roman blood, called Wallachs or Roumanians. Towards the end of the ninth century came in the Magyars, before whom the Szekler retreated to the north-east, where the town of Maros-Vasarhely became their capital. This town is on the River Maros, which, rising in the Carpathians, flows all across Transylvania. The Magyars in the meantime extended their rule over all parts of Hungary, but the position which they gained in Transylvania was one of much less undisputed supremacy than that which they established in Northern Hungary; for in the former province they remained a second nation, existing by the side of the Szekler, neither conquering nor absorbing them. Much of the country, however, was still uncolonized, and was liable to inroads from dangerous neighbours; so in the twelfth century a number of German citizens who lived along the Rhine, and some of the German knights who were seeking adventures, came into Transylvania to offer their services to the King of Hungary. The German knights were unable to come to a satisfactory agreement with the King, and went north to try to civilize the Prussians; but the citizens remained, acquired land, developed trade, and developed, also, a power of self-government of which neither Szekler nor Magyar were at that time capable. That portion of the country which has been colonized by the Saxons has a look of greater neatness and comfort than the rest. The little homesteads are almost English in their appearance, with, occasionally, gardens and orchards. Hermannstadt, the capital of this district, bears traces of its former greatness in several fine old churches, a law academy, and picture gallery. Its fortifications must have been almost impregnable in old times, with strong watch-towers and walls of great height. The portions of the walls that remain show marks of the sieges of 1849. The Carpathians, on the south-east, are many miles distant, but the Rothenthurm Pass, through which the terrible Russian force made its way into the country, is visible in some lights. These three ruling nations--the Magyar, the Szekler, and the Saxon--though separate in their organization, had more than one common interest. They were united by a common love of freedom and a common temptation to tyranny. In 1438 they formed a union against the Turks, which in 1459 was changed into a union in support of their freedoms and privileges, "for protection against inward and outward enemies, against oppression from above or insurrection from below." And when, in the seventeenth century, they separated for a time from Hungary, the three nations accepted the Prince of Transylvania as their head. When Transylvania and Hungary had both passed under the rule of Austria, Leopold I., in 1695, established a separate Government for Transylvania, and Maria Theresa increased the importance and the independence of this position. It will be noted that among the objects for which the three nations combined is mentioned "insurrection from below;" and this was a bond of great importance; for, while the Magyar, Szekler, and Saxon were enjoying an amount of freedom and independence in Transylvania not generally allowed by the House of Austria to its subjects, the original population of the country, the Wallachs, or Roumanians, as they prefer to be called, were hated and attacked by the Szekler, made serfs of by the Magyar, excluded from their territory by the Saxons, and despised by all. Even the full benefit of the village organization, which was the great protection of the Hungarian peasant, was not extended to the Roumanians in Transylvania, for they were never allowed to choose one of their own men as president of the village community; and while the landowners oppressed them in the country, the Saxon guilds excluded them from the trade of the towns. So they remained a race of shepherds, without culture and wealth, among the warriors of the Magyar and Szekler, and the prosperous traders of the Saxons. When, then, the reforming zeal of Joseph II. was extended to Transylvania, the Roumanians alone hailed it with delight; for, while, in his eagerness for a united Empire, the Emperor tried to sweep away all the special organizations of separate self-government so dear to the ruling races, he introduced sweeping reforms in favour of the serfs. He put forth an Edict, securing to the peasant an amount of liberty not hitherto enjoyed by him. No peasant was to be hindered from marriage, or from studying in other places, or from following different kinds of work; none was to be turned out of his village or land at bidding of the landlord; the power of the landlord to impose new burdens (already restricted by the Urbarium of Maria Theresa) was to be still further limited; and the county officials were to protect the dependant from any oppression of his landlord. The hopes of the Roumanians were naturally raised by this Edict; and many of them believed, when a general conscription followed, that by entering the army they could escape serfdom. The lords, backed by many of the officials, hindered this attempt, and interfered to prevent the carrying out of the Edict. Thereupon the Roumanians rose in insurrection, under two leaders, Hora and Kloska; and all those horrors followed which are naturally connected with an agrarian rising of uncivilized serfs, and the violent suppression of it by hardly more civilized tyrants. But among the bishops of the Roumanians, to whom they always granted great authority, were some who saw a better way than insurrection for the cure of the sufferings of their countrymen. Having observed that when the three dominant races were protesting against the reforms of Joseph II. they had appealed continually to historic rights, these Roumanian leaders drew up a petition, which was called the "Libellus Wallachorum," and was presented to the Diet of 1791. It was in this document that the Roumanians first put forward that claim to descent from the ancient Romans which has ever since exercised such influence on the imagination of this singular race. The petition further declared that, in the first inroad of the barbarians, the Roumanians had continued to maintain that Christianity which they had learned under the Roman Empire; and that when the Magyars came into the country, the Roumanians had voluntarily accepted the Magyar chief as their leader; that though their name was then changed by the invaders from Roumanians into Wallachs, their independent rights were still secured. They went on to say that even the union of the three ruling races in 1438 had not been intended originally to deprive the Roumanians of their rights; it was not till the seventeenth century that they had been crushed down into their present position. They therefore entreated that they might be restored to all the civil and political rights which they had possessed in the fifteenth century; that the clergy of the Greek Church, to which they belonged, might be placed on an equality with those of other religions; and that, wherever the Roumanians had a majority in any villages, those villages might be called by Roumanian names. The reading of this petition was received by the representatives of the three ruling races, after a brief silence, with fierce protests; only the Saxons thought it necessary to make even vague promises of concession; and those promises were not fulfilled. But, when this demand had once been put into form, the memory of it lingered on among the Roumanians; and in 1842, during the general wakening of national feeling, they attempted again to make an appeal to the Transylvanian Diet for special recognition. Again they failed; but their leaders did not, therefore, lose heart. Some of them, indeed, were disposed to resort to their old method of insurrection; and a few years later they rose, under the leadership of a woman named Catherine Varga, and for a long time held their own against the Magyar officials. But it is to the suppressor of this movement, rather than to its leader, that the Roumanians look back as their national hero. This was Andreas Schaguna, who, at the time of Catherine Varga's insurrection, was holding the position of Archimandrite. He came down to the village, where the Magyar officials had not dared to penetrate, rebuked the Roumanians for their turbulence, and carried off Catherine Varga from their midst, no one daring to resist. But this, though a striking, was not a characteristic exercise of his authority. He was far from thinking that force was a remedy for the grievances of the Roumanians; and he devoted time and thought to the foundation of schools and the education of the people. This education he carried out, not by mere teaching, but by seeking out and advising those whom he saw fitted for more intellectual occupations, and helping them to become lawyers and doctors. Last, but by no means least, he tried to reduce into a more literary form the Roumanian language. But it was not only in their own ranks that the Roumanians were now finding champions for their national cause. In 1842 appeared a pamphlet by a Saxon clergyman, named Stephen Roth, in which the writer protested against the attempt of the Magyars to crash out the rival languages in Transylvania; for this, as he pointed out, was a new form of tyranny. In North Hungary, indeed, the movement had been accompanied by an attempt to improve the condition of the peasant; and the Magyar language was held out to him as a new boon to be added to the abolition of feudal dues. But in Transylvania little or nothing had been done by the Magyars to improve the condition of the peasant; and therefore there could be no talk of _benefits_ there. If there were to be one official language in Transylvania, it ought, urged Roth, to be the language of the majority of the population, that is, Roumanian; and though it was undesirable to make this or any other language universal, it was certain that the ruling race would never be able to Magyarize the Roumanians; who might, however, be pacified by greater respect for their dignity as men, completer recognition of their form of Christianity, better means of education, provision for material need, and a freer position. This pamphlet of Roth's was notable, as a sign of sympathy felt by a member of the most cultivated race in Transylvania for the complaints of the most uncivilized one. But it is no reproach to Roth to say that he was thinking, at the time, as much of maintaining the rights of his own race as of redressing the wrongs of the Roumanians. For though the Magyars did not, as yet, venture to lord it over a German People as they did over Slav and Roumanian, they were yet trying, by various underhand methods, to weaken the devotion of the Saxons to their race and language. Roth and his friends tried to counteract this, partly by founding unions for the encouragement of German culture; and also by the more effective way of introducing German immigrants from the old country. A movement of a similar kind had been inaugurated by Maria Theresa about 1731; and for more than forty years it had been carried on with success; the German Protestants, who had been driven out of other countries, finding a natural refuge in the wholly Protestant Saxon settlement of Transylvania. Strange to say, Joseph II. does not seem to have carried on his mother's work; perhaps he had made himself too unpopular in Transylvania to do it with success. But Roth had special friends in the University of Würtemberg; and in spite of the Liberal tendencies of the King of that State, the taxation in that country was specially heavy. When, then, in 1845, Roth went to Würtemberg, so many citizens of that State consented to emigrate to Transylvania in the following year that the Government at Vienna and the Magyars at Pesth became alike alarmed. Ferdinand was persuaded that this was a Protestant invasion, and probably, also, a Communistic attempt. The Magyars, on the other hand, cried out that this was part of an attempt to Germanize Transylvania. Roth defended his cause, and refuted the charge of Protestant propagandism by showing that Roman Catholic families were among the emigrants; while, as to the idea of a Communistic proletariat, many of those who had emigrated were well provided with money, and some had been encouraged by the former impulse given to the movement by the Viennese Government. But a vague prejudice, once excited, is rarely got rid of by mere statements of fact; and the Governments, both at Vienna and Pesth, threw such difficulties in the way of the emigrants, that they had to suffer great misery on their journey; and these sufferings tended (with other grounds of prejudice) to excite much indignation against Roth. Nor would the Magyars, at any rate, feel more friendly to him when they found that an organ of the Croatian patriots at Agram claimed him as an ally against the overbearing demands of the Magyars. Thus, then, it is clear that, during the period from 1840 to 1846, there was a general awakening both in Germany and Hungary of strong national feelings. In Germany those feelings, gathering round a common language and literature, prepared the way directly for a movement towards freedom; while in Hungary the divisions of races and languages hindered the full benefits of the revival, and gave a handle to the champions of despotism. Yet whether among Magyars, Croats, Roumanians, or Saxons, the movement was in itself a healthy one, tending to newer and more natural life, and weakening the traditions of Viennese officialism. CHAPTER V. DESPOTISM RETIRING BEFORE CONSTITUTIONALISM, 1844-DECEMBER, 1847. The Bandiera insurrection. Its results.--Career of Cesare Balbo, "Le Speranze d'Italia."--Vincenzo Gioberti. "Il Primato degli Italiani."--The insurrection of Rimini. "Ultimi casi di Romagna."--The risings in Galicia.--History of Cracow since 1815.--Causes of the failure of the Galician movement.--The seizure of Cracow. Palmerston's utterances thereon.--Change in Charles Albert's position.--The Ticino treaties.--Mistake of Solaro della Margherita.--"Long live the King of Italy!"--D'Azeglio's policy.--Aurelio Saffi.--Death of Gregory XVI.--State of Roman Government.--Parties in the Conclave.--Election of Pius IX.--His character and career.--The amnesty. Its effect.--Ciceruacchio. His work.--The Congress at Genoa.--Charles Lucien Bonaparte.--Death of Confalonieri.--State of Milan.--Pio Nono's reforms.--The clerical conspiracy.--The occupation of Ferrara. Its effect on Italian feeling.--State of Tuscany.--The Duke of Lucca.--Absorption of Lucca in Tuscany.--The struggle with Modena.--The massacre of Fivizzano.--Occupation of Parma and Modena by Austria.--State of Switzerland.--Position of Bern and Zurich.--The Concordat of Seven.--The refugee question in 1838.--The Aargau monasteries.--The Sonderbund.--The Jesuit question.--Metternich's feelings, real and pretended.--Palmerston's attitude.--Relations between Metternich and Guizot.--The decision of the Swiss Diet.--The Sonderbund war.--Effect of the Federal victory.--The Schleswig-Holstein question.--The official view and the popular view.--Metternich's way out of the difficulty.--Effect of the movement on Germany and Prussia.--State of Europe at outbreak of Sicilian insurrection. The divisions of opinion, which had been hindering progress in Hungary, had, in the meantime, been growing less prominent in Italy; so that the more active political leaders in the latter country were, for a time at least, aiming at a common programme. Yet this point had only been reached after much suffering and failure. Conspiracies with various objects had been rife in Italy, especially in the Papal States; but, though some passing attention was attracted by the cruelties exercised in their suppression, these risings had left apparently little mark on the country. But an insurrection took place in 1844 which proved a turning-point in Italian politics. The character and circumstances of the leaders excited a sympathy which impressed their memories on the hearts of their countrymen; while the failure of the rising led to a change in the general tactics of the Italian Liberals. The rising in question was that organized by the brothers Emilio and Attilio Bandiera. These youths were the sons of a Venetian nobleman who was an admiral in the Austrian service, and who had attracted attention in 1831 by violating the terms of the capitulation of Ancona, and attempting to seize the exiles who, under protection of that treaty, were on their way to France. Emilio and Attilio had been compelled, while still boys, to enter the service of Austria; but they soon began to feel a loathing for the foreign rulers of their country; and, while in this state of mind, they came into contact with some of those who were already acting with the Giovine Italia. At last, in 1842, Attilio Bandiera wrote to Mazzini expressing the esteem and love he had learned to feel for him, his desire to co-operate with him, and his belief that the Italian cause was but a part of the cause of humanity. This correspondence with Mazzini was maintained by means of another naval officer in the Austrian service, Domenico Moro; in the following year a passing struggle in Southern and Central Italy gave new hopes to the brothers. They fled from their ships and met Domenico Moro at Corfu. But a stronger influence than the fear of Austrian tyranny was put forward to hinder the brothers Bandiera from their attempts. Their mother wrote from Venice calling on them to return, and denouncing them as unnatural for their refusal. Even this pressure, however, they resisted, and they prepared to make their first rising in March, 1844. The desire to free the Neapolitans, already distracted by so many insurrections, gave rise to this attempt, of which Cosenza was the head-quarters. Unfortunately, the plan of the rising had not been understood by some of the insurgents, and a preliminary effort was easily suppressed by the Neapolitan troops. Nothing daunted by this, the Bandiere planned a new march on Calabria. It was, unfortunately, on this occasion that the correspondence of the Bandiere with Mazzini was opened by the British Postmaster-General, and communicated by him to the Austrians. When, then, the brothers, accompanied by many recruits from various parts of Italy, marched upon Cosenza to deliver the prisoners who had been taken in the former unsuccessful attempt, they found guides prepared to deceive them; and in a wood near Cosenza they were met by a large body of gensdarmes, who had been warned of their coming. They repelled the attack, however, and retreated to Corfu to gather new forces; but the authorities had filled the minds of the inhabitants with the belief that the Bandiere and their followers were Turks. The people rose against them; and when they again marched on Cosenza they were easily overpowered and imprisoned, and soon after condemned to death. The brothers received the news of their condemnation with cries of "Long live Italy! Long live Liberty! Long live our country!" And, to the priests who tried to exhort them to repentance, they answered that they had acted in the spirit of Christ in trying to free their brethren. The effect of their death, and of all the circumstances of their rising, was deep and wide; and their memory seems to have lived longer than that of any previous martyrs for Italian freedom. The bullets with which they were shot were collected as sacred relics; and it was felt that a new impulse had been given to the struggle against Austrian tyranny. But with the indignation at the treachery by which the Bandiera brothers had suffered, and with the reverence for their memories, there arose in Italy a passing wave of suspicion against Mazzini and the leaders of the Giovine Italia, as people who wasted the lives of the heroic youth of Italy in useless and ill-organized attempts. It was at this period that two books, written in 1843, began to attract attention. These were the "Speranze d'Italia" of Cesare Balbo and the "Primato" of Vincenzo Gioberti. Cesare Balbo was the son of that Count Prospero Balbo who was supposed, in the reign of Victor Emmanuel I., to have supplied a Liberal element to the Government. There had been, however, little in Count Prospero's career to inspire any reasonable confidence in him. He served under Victor Amadeus till the fall of Piedmont before the French; but after the establishment of Napoleon's power he had returned to Piedmont and become head of the University of Turin. After the restoration of the House of Savoy he had taken office again under Victor Emmanuel, and had played the somewhat doubtful part, described above, in the movement of 1821. Cesare had been presented by his father, when a boy, to Napoleon; and though Count Prospero had considered it a dangerous step, the young man had accepted office in Napoleon's Council of State in Turin, and subsequently had served under the same ruler in Tuscany. Although shocked at the kidnapping of Pius VII., he did not abandon the service of Napoleon until the fall of the French Empire in 1814. Yet, after the restoration of the House of Savoy, he entered the army of the King of Sardinia, and fought, first against Napoleon, and then against Murat. In 1821 he managed to remain on friendly terms with Santa Rosa, while he was at the same time advising Charles Albert to break with the Revolutionists, and was also trying to hinder the proclamation of the Spanish Constitution at Alessandria. Such was the man who now tried to tell Italy of her hopes. While appealing to Gioberti as his master, and declaring his preference for a moderate party, Balbo dwelt on the want of national independence as the chief source of the evils of Italy, and particularly on the control exercised by the Austrians over the Pope. He urged his countrymen to put aside the old ideas of Dante, and not to go back further than 1814 for their conception of Italian Unity. He then proceeded to examine the different schemes for attaining this unity, and, rejecting alike the schemes of Monarchists and Federalists, as well as the plan for a closer unity put forward by the Republicans of the Giovine Italia, he pointed out as the only real hope for Italy the possibility of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the consequent chance that Italy might be freed in the scramble which would follow. It is well to dismiss this book of Balbo's first, because its only worth is that it shows what scraps of comfort were caught at eagerly by Italians at this period; but, as a matter of fact, its publication was slightly later than that of the "Primato" of Vincenzo Gioberti, to which Balbo alludes in the preface to his book. Gioberti has already been mentioned as having been a contributor to the journal of the Giovine Italia. Previously to that time, he had chiefly been known as a writer on ecclesiastical or theological subjects. Before the age of twenty, he had written a philosophical treatise on Man, God, and Natural Religion; and early in life he had also written on the "Wickedness of the Popes," and had tried to prove that that wickedness was due to their temporal power. At the University of Turin, the Professor to whom he looked up with the greatest reverence was driven from his post by the Jesuits, and this event awakened in Gioberti his bitter hostility to that Order. Gioberti's connection with the Giovine Italia brought him under the suspicion of the Piedmontese Government; and he was banished from the country shortly before Mazzini's expedition to Savoy. In that expedition, however, Gioberti had refused to join; and he remained at Paris, where many of the Italian exiles were gathered. Among these, two of the most prominent were Pellegrino Rossi and Terenzio Mamiani. Both of these writers may have confirmed him in his dislike of the Jesuits; though they may also have exercised some influence in alienating him from the Republicans. He returned, indeed, at this period to those philosophical writings for which he was much better fitted than for the active life of politics; and, in 1842, he was offered a Chair of Philosophy at Pisa. But Solaro della Margherita, the Minister of Charles Albert, succeeded in persuading the Grand Duke of Tuscany to withdraw this appointment. Such had been Gioberti's career up to the time when he brought out the book which, by a curious combination of circumstances, was to make his name famous. This book, "Il Primato Morale e Civile degli Italiani," professes to show why, and how, the Italians should take the lead in the affairs of Europe. The writer begins with a glorification of Italy, though, at the same time, he complains that she has too often neglected her mission; and he maintains, in this connection, the necessity of combining philosophy with political discussion. Very early in the argument he goes back to Romulus; but, not content with the comparative antiquity of that allusion, he thinks it necessary to deduce the origin of civilization from Noah. He then considers the relation between the Papacy and the Empire after the time of Charles the Great, and the attitude of various Italian writers and patriots towards the Papacy. He incidentally notices the fascination of Abelard for Arnold of Brescia as one of the causes of that reformer's hostility to the Papacy, and as a warning to Italians not to yield to the influence of French ideas. It is to the Guelphs that Gioberti looks for the embodiment of the political wisdom of the Italians of the Middle Ages. Without the Papacy, there could be no real political unity for Italy, since through its influence alone could there be produced a union of morality, religion, and civilization. He deprecates all revolution, all encouragement of invasion, all imitations of foreign ideas. Unity, in the complete sense in which it was known in England and France, was, says Gioberti, an impossibility, because of differences in Government and dialect between the different States of Italy. He expresses a belief that Alfieri would have repented of his attacks on Popes and Kings if he had lived to see the dignified resistance of Pius VII. to Napoleon. The Pope would be obliged to act by peaceful means; and while forming an Italian Navy, and developing Italian colonies, he should carry on his work through a Federal Union, of which he would be the President. But, as the Pope must act by pacific means, there would be need of a military leader also for Italy; and he must be found in Piedmont. Literature had been slower in growth in Piedmont than in other parts of Italy; but in proportion to its backwardness in this respect was its superiority in military matters. Further, the House of Savoy had been softened by religion, and had never produced a tyrant. But moderate reforms were necessary in order to make the leadership palatable; especially a modification of the censorship of the Press, and greater encouragement to science and literature. In urging that Italy must take the lead of Europe, not merely in matters of civilization, but in thought, he dwells emphatically on the connection between philosophy and politics. But, above all, Italy should hold this position because she has never fallen into the errors of Protestantism. Passing from the independent States of Italy, he dwells on the necessity of a union between Lombardy and Piedmont; and then, after discussing what qualities the different parts of Italy will contribute to the general character of the whole, and dwelling on the possible union among the literary men of Italy, he concludes by insisting that religion can be the only uniting force; and therefore that the Head of the Christian World must be the Head of the Italian League. This curious book attracted considerable attention; but although many expressed admiration for the author, few committed themselves definitely to its doctrines. The idea of a Pope as a liberator and uniter of Italy clashed with all the experiences which Italy had had of the Government of Gregory XVI., and Gioberti was forced to modify his words, and to deny that he looked to the Pope then on the throne to carry out his programme. This explanation led him into a controversy with the Jesuits, which must considerably have increased his popularity. A third writer, who attracted some attention, though far less than Balbo and Gioberti, was Giacomo Durando, already mentioned as one of the conspirators of 1831. He demanded a league between Peoples and Princes, but utterly denied that any initiative of Italian independence could come from the Pope. His idea was a Kingdom of Italy divided into three parts--Northern, and presumably Central, Italy to be under the House of Savoy; the city of Rome and some islands to be left to the Pope; and Southern Italy to the King of Naples. He did not, however, desire that the League should make war upon Austria, but that it should wait, and be ready to resist attacks from that Power. But while these writers were trying to formulate, in a literary manner, the programme of the Constitutional Liberals, the more fiery members of that party were anxious to show that they too could do something in the way of a political movement of a more determined kind; and it was in the Papal States, again, as the centre of the worst government of Italy, that this new programme of insurrection was put forward. A man named Pietro Renzi undertook to formulate the demands of this section of the party. The petition drawn up by Renzi went back to the time of Pius VII., to show that hopes of reform had once been held out, even in the Papal States. It dwelt on the fact that, from the time of the insurrections of 1821 to the death of Pius VIII. in 1831, there had been a steady growth of tyranny; that in 1831 the Papal Government would have fallen but for the intervention of Austria; that, when Gregory XVI. had been restored to his power, demands had been made for reform in the Papal Government which had been steadily opposed; that the Pope and Cardinal Albani were now encouraging robbers and murderers on the ground of the support which such men gave to the faith. "For eight or ten years past," Renzi declared, "it had not been the Pope or Rome or the Cardinals who had been governing the people of the Legations; but a sanguinary faction of the brutalized populace has been wearing the dress, and performing the functions of government." Many young men had been driven from the universities, or shut out from liberal professions, by the influence of the Jesuits; and the clergy had usurped the control of all education. The leaders of the new party, therefore, demanded twelve concessions.--1. A general amnesty for all political offences from 1821 to that time. 2. Publicity of Debate; trial by jury, and abolition of confiscations and capital punishment for political offences. 3. That laymen should not be subjected either to the Inquisition nor any other ecclesiastical tribunal. 4. That political offences should be tried by the ordinary tribunals. 5. That municipal councils should be freely elected subject to the approval of the Sovereign; that these municipal councils should elect the provincial councils, and the provincial councils the Supreme Council of State. 6. That the Supreme Council should reside in Rome, superintending the public funds, and should have a deliberative power in some matters, a consultative in others. 7. That all offices, civil, military, and judicial, should be held by laymen. 8. That public instruction, other than religious, should be taken away from the clergy. 9. That the censorship of the Press should be only employed in the case of offences against God, the Catholic Religion, and the Sovereign, and the private life of citizens. 10. That foreign troops should be dismissed. 11. That the Civic Guard should be instituted, and entrusted with the maintenance of the laws and of public order. 12. That the Government should enter on all those social reforms which are required by the spirit of the age, and of which all the _civil_ governments of Europe have given an example. Renzi resolved to enforce this programme by a sudden attack on Rimini, in which he was completely successful; but an ally of his, who had raised a revolt simultaneously in the lower Romagna, was compelled to retire before the Swiss troops of the Pope; and Renzi, apparently panic struck, retreated into Tuscany. Unfortunately, a reaction was then taking place there. Fossombroni had died in 1844, Corsini, the Minister who was most in sympathy with Fossombroni's policy, resigned in 1845; and the chief of the Jesuit party took his place. The Grand Duke Leopold himself was at first disposed to be friendly to Renzi; but, as the best protection to him, he advised his escape to France. Renzi soon returned, and Metternich, alarmed at the intensity of Italian feeling, denounced the Duke for protecting rebels, and, under the influence of Austrians, Jesuits, and of the Pope, Leopold consented to surrender Renzi to Gregory XVI. The attention of the country was still further directed to this attempt by a pamphlet which came out immediately after, and which was written by a young Piedmontese nobleman, Count Massimo Tapparelli D'Azeglio. In this pamphlet D'Azeglio complained that the Rimini movement had been much misrepresented; but that the action of the insurgents had no doubt been a blunder, because the movement had been purely local, and they had not considered how to use the forces of the whole of Italy. He then proceeded to denounce the corruptions of the Papal Government, and the cruelties which had followed the suppression of this rising; particularly the gross injustice of imprisoning a lawyer because he had defended some of the prisoners. After a denunciation in detail of the evils of the Papal Government, he goes on to repudiate the use of secret societies, as having failed in their purpose; calls on the Italians to unite in peaceable protest against abuses, rather than in insurrection; and points to the Tugendbund of Germany as a model for Italian combinations. The pamphlet had little that was new in it, but attention was fixed upon the author, by the fact that he was immediately banished from Tuscany by the Grand Duke, and was, shortly after, welcomed in Piedmont. Metternich's protest against this welcome might have been more decided had he not been hampered by the events which were occurring in Galicia. Ever since the insurrection of 1830, there had been a steady feeling of sympathy towards the Poles, not merely as an oppressed nation, but as _the_ nation whose restoration was the chief duty and necessity of the champions of liberty. Kossuth declared, at a somewhat later time, that there was a close connection between the liberties of Hungary and those of Poland. Mazzini had been eager to co-operate, where it was possible, with the exiled Poles. Robert Blum had shown a special enthusiasm for their cause, and was ready to help in a rising in Posen. Every Slavonic race looked on the wrongs of the Poles as the typical instance of the oppression of the Slavs by the Great Powers of Europe; while, at the same time, they honoured them as the most famous fighters in the cause of Slavonic freedom. But it was in France that the greatest enthusiasm was felt for the Poles, and the most complete organization of the exiles existed. There a special military school was founded for them in 1843; and in 1846, after a preparation of three years, the democratic section among the Poles resolved to strike a decisive blow against Austria. The city of Cracow, on the borders of Galicia, was the one part of Poland which still maintained a nominal freedom. The political independence of Cracow had been secured by the Treaty of Vienna. The Austrian Government even then wished to absorb it into their own dominions; but, under pressure from Russia, Francis consented that Cracow should be a free town, governed by its own elected Chamber of Representatives, and surrounded by a district which was not to be occupied by Austrian troops; and it was also to exercise complete control over its army and police. The usual Austrian interpretation of liberty, however, was soon to be applied to the Republic of Cracow. Although free trade between Cracow and Warsaw had been secured by a regular treaty, the protecting Powers, as they were called (Austria, Russia, and Prussia), began soon to insist on prohibitive duties being introduced on the frontiers of Cracow. Its University, dating from the fourteenth century, had been secured in its properties and liberties by the Treaty of Vienna; but, unfortunately, a large portion of the lands from which the University drew its income lay within the dominions of the three protecting Powers, each of whom refused, under various pretexts, to give up its share of the land. As to the liberties of the University, the Austrian Government, in 1817, had declared that it would inflict a fine of 100 ducats on any parent who sent his sons to the University of Cracow; in 1822, the Russian Government followed this example by a decree forbidding Polish youths to study in any foreign country, under which title they specially included Cracow. In the meantime, the organizing Commission, which had been appointed by the Powers, was gradually destroying the Constitution which had been established by the Treaty of Vienna. The right to modify laws sent from the Senate was first taken from the Chamber of Representatives; while, as to the control of the finances, which had been specially mentioned in the Treaty, the House of Representatives was informed that the accounts were only to be shown to the Chamber in order to convince them that the Senate had spent the money, and that the Treasury was empty; though the Commission graciously allowed the Chamber to examine and make observations on the accounts, and assured them that these observations should be sent to the Senate. The self-government of the University was, in a similar manner, gradually taken from it; and, under the excuse of a riot in 1820, the great Powers, six years later, sent a Russian colonel to act as supreme ruler of the University. The insurrection of 1830 in Warsaw had, of course, given excuse for further interference with the liberties of Cracow; and, in 1831, Russian soldiers, for a time, occupied the city. It is hardly necessary to add that the liberty of the Press, which had been specially guaranteed by the Treaty of Vienna, had been gradually crushed out; and a new Commission, appointed by the three Powers in 1833, revised the Constitution of Cracow, thereby setting aside the claims of England and France to have their opinions considered in any revision of the Treaty. Torture was revived for the purpose of extorting revelations of crimes which had never been committed. The judges had, indeed, retained, for a time, the independence secured them by the Treaty; but in March, 1837, the Conference, as it was called, of the three Powers abolished the offices of Mayors of the Commune and Judges of First Instance, and transferred their duties to officers of police. In December of the same year, the protecting Powers decided that the question of the amount to be expended on the police and militia should not be submitted to the Chamber. Then the Chamber, at last, attempted an appeal to the two Powers whose opinions had been wholly ignored by the other signatories to the Treaty of Vienna; but the appeal was, apparently, in vain, and there seemed no remedy left but insurrection. The centralizing principles of the Austrian Government, on this as on later occasions, paralyzing their power of action in emergencies, Cracow was seized and occupied by the democratic leader Tyssowski. The Government Boards in Galicia were little able to make head against the movement; and, if Tyssowski had known how to appeal to the popular sympathies, he might have been completely successful. Unfortunately, however, the leaders of the insurrection had not yet been able to establish that sympathy with the peasantry of Galicia which alone would have enabled them to carry out a really popular insurrection; and, instead of trying to enlist the sympathies and interest of the peasants on behalf of the movement, Tyssowski's only idea was to terrorize them into obedience. He issued a proclamation, announcing that the whole Empire, during the time of revolution, is one and common property in the hands of the revolutionary Government. Every priest who opposed the rising was to be deprived of his office; anyone who refused to subscribe to the national cause was to be seized and brought before a Governor chosen by the insurgents; every inhabitant, on pain of death, was to go to the place appointed him, as soon as he knew of the outbreak of the insurrection. The peasantry, alarmed at hearing that many of them had been condemned to death for their unreadiness to assist the revolution, appealed to the officials to defend them; nor could they be conciliated by hearing that the insurgents were about to abolish all feudal dues and titles of rank, and to secure a certain amount of land to every peasant. These offers from unknown people could not induce the peasants to make friends with those who were threatening them with death. From more than seventy districts representatives came from the peasants to the official authorities at Tarnow to ask for military help against the revolutionary leaders; and they were advised to defend themselves and to arrest the agitators. On February 18th, 1846, the insurrection broke out, and one of the first actions of the conspirators was to fire on the peasants who had refused to join them. Then the peasants, stirred to desperation, rose; and a general massacre of the nobles began. The dark and underground methods of the Austrian Government, and the centralizing principle which had drained out the strength of the different local governments, had brought a double Nemesis on its founders. For while on the one hand the powerlessness of the local boards caused the early successes of the insurgents, on the other hand the world at large thought that the massacre of the nobles of Galicia must have been organized from Vienna, as a part of the regular Austrian policy.[7] This belief was likely to be further strengthened by the events which followed. While Mieroslawski and some of the leaders of the insurrection surrendered to the Prussian troops, which had been despatched to prevent a rising in Silesia and Posen, Metternich struck the final blow at the independence of Cracow. The account given above shows that there was little independence left to be destroyed in that unfortunate city; but somehow the actual destruction of liberties never excites so general a horror, especially in the diplomatic world, as the final removal of the _forms_ of liberty. And Lord Palmerston, who does not seem to have responded to the previous appeal from the Assembly of Cracow, now addressed indignant remonstrances to Metternich, and uttered the remarkable words, "If the treaties of 1815 are null on the Vistula, they may be null on the Rhine and the Po." Thus the occupation of Cracow seemed to many to be an abandonment by Metternich of the semi-legal position which till then he had, in the eyes of diplomatists, maintained; while his supposed complicity in the massacre in Galicia roused against him the feelings of those humanitarians who do not understand the wickedness of choking out the moral and intellectual life of a nation, but who shrink with horror from any physical cruelty. It is, therefore, no unnatural inference that the delay which Metternich showed in making any stern protest against Charles Albert's new position in Italy may have been due to the paralysis caused by the storm of indignation roused against Austria by the Galician massacres and the annexation of Cracow. Charles Albert profited by this weakness. He had been shifting as usual in his policy, encouraged on the one side in moderate reforms by the Liberal minister, Villamarina, and dragged, on the other side, into extreme clericalism by Solaro della Margherita. But, just about the time when D'Azeglio arrived in Piedmont, events were occurring which riveted on Charles Albert the hopes of many who had not hitherto believed in the sincerity of his desire for reform; and the same circumstances gave him that position of champion of Italian independence which, in the eyes of perhaps a majority of Italians, he continued to maintain till the fall of Milan in 1848. The chief cause of this change of feeling is to be found in the following circumstance. In the year 1751 a treaty had been made between Austria and Piedmont by which the former granted to the latter the right of sending through Lombardy the salt which they were selling to the Republic of Venice. In consideration of this boon the King of Sardinia renounced his trade with the Swiss cantons; and the treaty was renewed in 1815, after Venice had passed under the Austrian rule. In 1846 Ticino, desiring to open a trade in salt with Marseilles, asked the Piedmontese Government to allow them to transmit their salt through Piedmont, and Charles Albert consented. The Austrian Government had for some time past looked with suspicion on Charles Albert. Metternich had never forgotten his passing outburst of Liberalism in 1821; and the continual search of the Italian Liberals for some leader in the War of Independence was naturally drawing people's eyes to Piedmont. Few, and comparatively unimportant, as were the reforms that he introduced, they were enough to increase the suspicions of Metternich; and, reformer or not, the King of Sardinia was necessarily an enemy to the House of Austria. Moreover, Charles Albert had recently given a tolerably clear hint of his own feelings; for he had struck a medal representing a lion (the well-known badge of the House of Savoy) trampling on an eagle; and on the reverse side of the medal appeared, "_J'attends mon astre_." The concession to the Canton Ticino lighted the spark which had been smouldering in the breasts of the Austrian rulers. For of all the States of Europe, this little canton had become specially obnoxious to Austria in the last few years; and not long before this Metternich and Charles Albert had worked together to stamp out its freedom, and deprive it of the right of sheltering those Italian exiles who were dear to the Italian-Swiss from similarity in race and language. Metternich had failed in that effort, and the Liberals had risen in the canton and overthrown the Conservative Government and Austrian influence together. Any sign, therefore, of friendliness shown by Charles Albert to the Ticinese was a special cause of alarm to the Austrians. They declared at once that the treaty of 1751 had been violated; in April, 1846, they increased the custom duties on the wine sent from Piedmont to Lombardy; and in order to mark the hostility of the Act more plainly the same decree declared that there would be no change with regard to the wines coming from several of the other Italian States. Solaro della Margherita, though his Conservatism naturally inclined him to sympathize with the Austrian Government, was a man who valued the independence and dignity of Piedmont; and he therefore consented to Charles Albert's proposal at once to lower the duties between Piedmont and France, in order to facilitate the commerce between those countries. The meaning of this act could not be misunderstood; and the Austrian ambassador, alarmed at the sudden defiance, made a proposal to recall the duty on Piedmontese wines, on condition that Charles Albert would consent to withdraw his concession to Ticino. Solaro della Margherita, in his anxiety for a friendly understanding with Austria, did not perceive that such a concession would give up the whole principle at stake, since it would admit the right of Austria to forbid Charles Albert to make what terms he pleased with the canton; so Solaro actually urged the King to agree to the proposal. But Charles Albert stood firm, and, greatly to Margherita's horror, D'Azeglio succeeded in persuading the people to get up a demonstration in Turin, at which cries were heard of "Long live the King of Italy!" Charles Albert, however, though showing some signs of his usual irresolution, did not draw back from his policy of hostility to Austria; and he set himself to promote a railway which should connect Lombardy and Venetia more closely with Piedmont. The Austrians made some difficulty with regard to this railway, and it was on this occasion apparently that the point was carried against the rulers of Lombardy, to a great extent, by the energies of a Venetian lawyer, Daniele Manin, a name afterwards memorable in the records of Venice. In the meantime D'Azeglio had been working hard to convince the rest of Italy that Charles Albert was preparing to put himself at the head of an Italian movement and to attack Lombardy. In Tuscany Professor Montanelli had already formed a Society for promoting the unity of Italy. Demonstrations were being made against the Jesuits, and petitions for changes in taxation and education were drawn up. But it was in the Papal States that D'Azeglio most hoped to gain ground; and in Forli he came in contact with Aurelio Saffi, who, with D'Azeglio's encouragement, prepared an address from the people of Forli to one of the clerical rulers, calling attention to the growth of Italian feeling and the desire for action against the foreigner. The authorities became alarmed and Saffi's arrest and imprisonment were determined on, when the death of Gregory XVI. suddenly changed the whole position of affairs; and Charles Albert's newly-won fame was for a time dimmed by that of another hero of the popular imagination; while Gioberti's teaching, hitherto admired only in a small circle, and laughed at by many, was suddenly accepted as the utterance of an inspired prophet, and as embodying the conception of a profound statesman. The state of Roman government at the death of Gregory XVI. was as follows:--The management of affairs was entirely in the hands of cardinals, or of laymen appointed by the Pope. The nobles and the rich were indeed conciliated to some extent by appointments which seemed a concession to lay feeling. The provincial councils, nominated by the Pope, laid taxes partly on property and partly on articles of consumption. The study of political economy was prohibited in the schools; and the study of law and medicine was but little provided for. The press was under a triple censorship, that of the Inquisition, of the Bishop, and of the Governor of the province. The police, though vigorous in repressing political conspirators, were utterly unable to check highway robbery. In the tribunals which were administered by the clergy, the grossest corruptions prevailed. As a natural result of all this, the ablest and best men of the States were to be found, not in Rome, but some in France, some in Tuscany, and some in Piedmont. The government of Rome and its immediate neighbourhood was corrupt; and the government of the Legations in some cases became so cruel as to excite shame even in the Pope himself. And Monsignore Savelli, one of the worst of these tyrants, had been guilty of such a combination of corruption and cruelty that Gregory had been compelled to remove him from office. Such was the state of affairs when Gregory XVI. died. Tremendous expectation was roused in the different provinces of the Papal States; an insurrection broke out in Ancona; and a colonel, who had distinguished himself for cruelty in that town, was killed. The cardinals at once despatched Savelli to suppress the rising. In the meantime the Conclave met, and the ambassadors of the different Powers began to intrigue for their respective candidates. Cardinal Lambruschini was one of the most powerful members of the sacred college; but he was hated for his injustice and partisan distribution of offices; and no sooner had the Conclave opened than attacks were made on him by Cardinal Micara, on this very ground. Lambruschini had been appointed by the influence of the Austrian Court, and might have been supposed to be their candidate. But whether it were that even the Austrians desired certain concessions to the policy of reform, which they had themselves supported after the rising of 1831, or whether it were that their influence was weakened by the events which had recently occurred in Galicia, they do not seem to have used very great pressure on behalf of Lambruschini. On the other hand, there had recently arrived in Rome, as French ambassador, that same Pellegrino Rossi who had formerly been driven into exile by the success of the Austrians in 1815, who had contributed to the Conciliatore of Confalonieri, and who had played so important and influential a part among the Italian exiles in Paris. Rossi declared in favour of reform in the church, and demanded the election of someone who both wished and knew how to reform prudently and efficiently. The person naturally marked out as the candidate of the Liberals was Cardinal Gizzi, who had been known for milder government than that of any of the other Cardinals, and who had been singled out for exceptional praise by Massimo D'Azeglio. But where a bitter conflict of interests arises between the leading candidates, it is only natural that some unknown man should slip in; and, as the reformers were probably more in earnest and more united than the majority of the opponents of reform, other Liberal candidates were withdrawn; Giovanni Mastai Ferretti was elected Pope on June 16th, 1846, and, out of respect for Pius VII., took the name of Pius IX. He was then fifty-four years old and had been originally intended for the Papal guard; but, being liable to epileptic fits, he had been refused admission. He had thereupon become a priest, and had, as already mentioned, distinguished himself in 1831 by the honesty with which he had carried out the terms of the surrender of Imola. He was so little known, however, to the general public that a rumour arose, after his election, that it was really Cardinal Gizzi who had been chosen. Nor were his future opponents startled at the choice. Princess Metternich wrote of him in her diary that he was a man of exemplary piety, "_toute fois sans être exalté_." Nor was it till a month later that Pio Nono took the step which was the foundation of his future popularity. It was then that he issued a general amnesty in favour of all those who had been condemned for political offences. The amnesty, indeed, was carefully guarded; for only those were admitted to it who would sign a declaration confessing their previous offences, and promising future improvement. Mamiani and others refused to sign this declaration, and it would have been obvious to anyone who had thought over the question that this was a demand which could not be accepted by any men of spirit and consistency. But men's minds had been excited by previous events; and the teaching of Gioberti led, not only the Romans, but Italians in all parts of the peninsula, to place a meaning upon this amnesty which was certainly not intended by the Pope himself. This belief in the reforming intentions of the Pope was further increased by the bitter hostility that he excited in that extreme party which had thriven under Gregory XVI., and which was urged on by Lambruschini, who, in his disappointed ambition, began to throw discredit on the election of his rival and to plot against his authority. The appointment of Cardinal Gizzi as Secretary of State roused the hopes of the Liberals still further, and commissions were appointed to examine into the question of reforms. Yet Gizzi, who was the only cardinal with the most remote claims to the confidence of the Liberals, does not seem to have desired anything more than some slight administrative reforms. And it may be doubted whether the enthusiasm for Pius IX. would long have been sustained, had it not been fostered and directed by a man of a very different type from any of the philosophical writers on the politics of Italy. This was Angelo Brunetti, better known by his nick-name of Ciceruacchio. He was a man of poor birth, and simple habits, who by hard work had made a certain amount of money, while, by personal beauty, a peculiar kind of eloquence, and a thorough honesty of character, he had gained a special influence among the poorer classes in Rome. A kind of imaginative enthusiasm had evidently possessed his whole mind; and this was kindled to the highest degree by the idea of a reforming Pope. It was to Ciceruacchio, then, rather than to any utterance of the Pope himself, that the popular conception of Pius IX. was due. A kindly priest, wishing to do more justice than his predecessors, was reflected in Ciceruacchio's mirror as the liberator and reformer of Italy. The myth quickly grew. Demonstrations in honour of the Pope were organized by Ciceruacchio; and, as each new difficulty or hindrance arose in the path of progress, he was ready to assure his countrymen that these hindrances were all due to the wicked cardinals, and that Pius IX. was eager to remove them. And so, while the other princes of Italy were being asked to concede various limitations on their power, in Rome was heard continually the cry of "Viva Pio Nono Solo." Thus it came about that this quiet and unpretending priest found himself magnified in the popular imagination into a leader of heroic proportions, half saint, half crusader. It was impossible for him to resist altogether the fervour of popular enthusiasm, and it soon spread far beyond the limits of the Roman State. In December, 1846, a Congress, nominally intended for scientific discussion, met at Genoa. These congresses had already begun to give opportunity for the expression of political opinion, and two circumstances tended to increase the importance of this particular meeting. One was, that 1846 was the centenary of the expulsion of the Austrians from Genoa, at the close of their temporary occupation during the Austrian War of Succession. The other was the presence in this Congress of Charles Lucien Buonaparte, Prince of Canino. He had already gained some reputation as a student of physical science, but his interest in politics was even greater than his zeal for learning; and he now came to the Congress to invite the men of science to carry on their discussions in the Papal States. From this he naturally passed to the praise of Pius IX. and of Charles Albert, and to the denunciation of Austria and Metternich. Such an oration, especially when delivered on a non-political occasion, naturally excited the alarm of the Austrian Government; and that alarm was still further increased by the reappearance in Lombardy of the old feeling of irritation against Austrian rule. An attempt on the part of the Austrian Government to seize upon the funds of the Benevolent Societies of Lombardy, in order to appropriate them for their own purposes, had caused such a storm of indignation in the provincial Lombard Councils, that the Government had been compelled to withdraw the proposal. And as if this awakening of life had not been sufficiently significant, it was followed in December, 1846, by a still more alarming sign of popular feeling. Count Confalonieri had been released from the prison at Spielberg by Ferdinand on his accession to the throne in 1835, but had been deprived of his civil rights, and sent to America. The news now reached Milan that, hearing of the new hopes aroused by the accession of Pius IX., Confalonieri had set sail for Italy, but had died on the way. Instantly a demonstration was organized in his honour, and Count Gabrio Casati, Podestà of Milan, took part in the funeral procession. Bolza, one of the group of Austrian officials who ruled Milan, took note of all who attended the ceremony; and when it was followed by a proposal to form a committee for erecting a statue to Confalonieri, Bolza threatened to prohibit the committee altogether. He was not, however, able to hinder the growing popular feeling in Milan, and early in the following year, 1847, the bitterness was increased by a famine. Grain riots followed; and the Governor of Milan, as the only method for relieving the distress, prohibited the export of grain to foreign parts, except to the German provinces of Austria. Again that terrible canton of the Ticino protested against this infringement of a commercial treaty, made between herself and Austria; and again the Austrian Government was compelled to yield, and to re-open the grain trade with the Ticinese. Hymns to Pio Nono were answered with cheers in the Milanese theatre; while the Viceroy and his family were received, in the same theatre, in dead silence. In the meantime, Pio Nono's reforms, if not important, were numerous. On March 12th, 1847, came out a modification of the censorship of the press, of which the most important point was that the censorship was to be administered in future by four laymen and one ecclesiastic. On April 14th, a Council of State was formed, to be chosen by the Pope from delegates elected by the provinces; and this Council was to be allowed to propound opinions on certain questions of State. Finally, on July 5th, the Pope granted a civic guard to Rome, and promised one to the provinces. Metternich had now become thoroughly alarmed, and, whether he sanctioned or not the attempt which was now made in Rome, there seems to be little doubt that the friends of Lambruschini did actually organize a conspiracy against the Pope. The anniversary of the amnesty of 1846 was the occasion of the discovery of this conspiracy. A popular demonstration had been prepared in honour of the day; but when the organizers of this demonstration appeared, their first act was to call out the civic guard to arrest the conspirators. Ciceruacchio paraded the streets, attended by a great number of people. Several of the conspirators were seized and imprisoned, others fled, and none attempted any resistance. How far Metternich had sympathized with this conspiracy can never be known; but its failure seemed to decide him to strike the blow which he had been meditating. It has already been mentioned that the Austrians had succeeded in introducing into the Treaty of Vienna a clause, permitting them to occupy some part of Ferrara. Pius VII. had protested against this, as an injury to the Holy See. Cardinal Consalvi had expressed this protest in the following words:--"This clause," he said, "is an unprovoked aggression, deprived of all that could make a war legitimate under the rights of nations; an aggression against a weak and innocent State, which had solemnly proclaimed its neutrality in the war that agitates other States; an act outside every human right; and a treaty that is the consequence of an aggression of such a kind is essentially null and void." Such a protest, and the fact that it was disregarded, emphasized the important truth that treaty rights, as understood in Europe, are simply the rights of the strong to divide the territories of the weak. Pius IX. had committed no act of aggression against Austria; and nothing new had arisen to justify the enforcement of a clause which had been allowed to remain in abeyance so long. When the Powers of Europe had desired to compel Gregory XVI. to reform his dominions after the insurrection of 1831, Metternich had shrunk, with holy horror, from the idea of putting pressure on an independent Prince; but now that Pius IX. had introduced reforms far short of those recommended by the Powers in 1833, Metternich seized the opportunity to despatch Austrian forces to Ferrara. A cry of indignation arose from all parts of Italy. The Milanese seized the opportunity of the appointment of an Italian Archbishop of Milan to organize an Italian demonstration. A league was formed for commercial purposes between Rome, Sardinia, and Tuscany; and it was supposed that Pius IX. and Charles Albert would declare war upon Austria. Neither of those Princes, however, were ready for the emergency. Pius IX. hardly knew yet what attitude he should take up towards the Italian movement. Charles Albert was as usual hesitating between different policies. But fortunately, besides the moral objections to the occupation of Ferrara, it appeared that there were diplomatic doubts about the interpretation of the clause which excused it. And, while the mere cowardice and injustice of an insult to a weak State might have passed unavenged, the wrong interpretation of the word "_place_" in the clause of a treaty could not be permitted without a protest. Lord Palmerston, however, had shown on more than one occasion his loathing of the policy of Metternich; and he was doubtless glad enough of this diplomatic excuse for forwarding the cause of Constitutional Liberty. Lord Minto was despatched to Italy to encourage the various princes to stand firm in the cause of reform; and in December, 1847, the Austrian troops consented to withdraw from Ferrara, after having succeeded, by their occupation of it, in consolidating against them an amount of Italian feeling such as they had hardly aroused till then. The first and most startling expression of this feeling, and of the consequent determination of the Italians to break loose from Austrian influence, came from a prince whom Metternich had probably hardly recognized as an opponent. Leopold of Tuscany, however much disposed to avoid collision with his kinsman, the Emperor of Austria, could not altogether free himself from the rush of reforming zeal which was spreading through Italy. That triumph of Austrian and Papal policy in Tuscany, which had been signalized by the surrender of Renzi and the expulsion of Massimo d'Azeglio, had lasted a comparatively short period, and even during that period the reaction had not been complete. The influence of the Jesuits had increased in Tuscany after the fall of Corsini, and that influence has always excited an hostility which no other form of tyranny has produced; and the University of Pisa, under the influence of Cosimo Ridolfi, was specially zealous in protesting against their influence. As Ridolfi gained ground in Leopold's Council, Metternich had become alarmed, and tried to counteract his influence and to drive him from office. Leopold, however, refused to yield to this pressure, and, as the reforming movement spread, he advanced further and further in his sympathies with Italian freedom. Freedom of the press was granted; many new journals were started; and when the civic guard was conceded, great demonstrations were held in Florence, and an attempt was made to revive the memories of Francesco Ferruccio and other heroes of the past. Professor Montanelli, already known as a writer, now took a prominent part in the political movement, organized a deputation to Pius IX. to entreat him to grant liberty of the press, to expel the Jesuits, and to declare war upon Austria. Domenico Guerrazzi, who had assisted at the foundation of Young Italy, seconded the efforts of Montanelli, and Leopold became, almost against his will, marked out as a reforming sovereign. The movement now spread beyond Tuscany and affected the dominions of the Duke of Lucca. This Duke was one of those eccentric princes who combined despotism and a reliance on Austria with a certain love of playing at Liberalism with foreign exiles. This game was not carried on with any of those ambitious objects which had led Francis of Modena to play with rebellion in 1831; but it rather arose from a love of clever literary lions, coupled with those tendencies to eccentricity which might be natural to a prince with no great responsibilities and a certain amount of cleverness. When, however, the Liberal movement spread to Lucca, he dropped his dilettantism and proposed to suppress Liberalism by force. Finding that the people rose against him, he consented to yield all which Leopold of Tuscany had granted; but his subjects were unwilling to trust a prince who was the ruler of so small a State under the influence of Austria, and who had only yielded to reform under sudden pressure; so they continued to make further demands. The Duke, weary of the struggle, and very likely desirous to avoid bloodshed, took advantage of a clause in the Treaty of Vienna which constituted the Grand Duke of Tuscany his heir, and resigned his dominions forthwith to Leopold. At the same time, he desired to exempt from this surrender the two towns of Pontremoli and Bagnone and to hand them over to the Duke of Modena. Leopold accepted the territory of Lucca; but, by the same clause which had constituted him the heir to the Duke of Lucca, he was bound, on acquiring the territory, to surrender to the Duke of Modena the district of Fivizzano. Now, of all the princes of Italy, none had been more utterly subservient to Austria than the Duke of Modena, and the people of Fivizzano therefore resented the proposal to annex them to Modena. The Duke of Modena thereupon called on the Austrian Marshal Radetzky to help him to enforce his demands; and, while Leopold of Tuscany was preparing to fix a day for the surrender of Fivizzano, the Duke of Modena marched his troops into the town and massacred the unarmed inhabitants. Both the Pope and the Grand Duke protested against this cruelty; and Leopold, wishing to keep Fivizzano in consequence of the people's preference for his rule, offered to make Charles Albert and the Pope arbiters between him and the Duke of Modena. In the meantime the citizens of Pontremoli and Bagnone sprang to arms in order to resist the entrance of the Duke of Modena. The Austrians had by this time sent forces to assist the Duke; but though they were able to secure the submission of Fivizzano, the Duke of Modena was forced to surrender Pontremoli and Bagnone. Less than a fortnight after this treaty the Duchess of Parma died, and the Duke of Lucca succeeded to her territory. Here he immediately found himself confronted by a new insurrection; but, unwilling to trouble himself further, he fled to Milan, leaving the Austrian troops to occupy Parma. This occupation and the despatch of forces to Modena tended to strengthen the bitterness which had already been roused by the occupation of Ferrara, so that, when the Austrians consented to the evacuation of that town, they merely incurred the shame of a diplomatic defeat without lessening the causes of Italian bitterness against them. But the evacuation of Ferrara was not the only diplomatic defeat which the year 1847 brought to Metternich. The blow which was to be recognized by all Europe as one of the most fatal which the cause of despotism had yet sustained was to come from a little State which seemed to stand outside the ordinary politics of Europe. The territory of the Swiss Confederation had been increased by the Treaty of 1815; but this had by no means led to such a complete strengthening of Switzerland as the most patriotic Swiss would have desired. The aristocratic party had been restored in several of the cantons, and the customs duties on the frontiers of the separate cantons had been renewed. But what specially alarmed the Liberals of Switzerland was a clause, which the Papal Nuncio had introduced into the Treaty of Vienna, giving the monasteries of Switzerland an independent position. It must be remembered that the early struggles of the Swiss cantons against the House of Austria had been connected with the throwing off of the influence of the monks, who had been patronized by the Hapsburgs; and in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the combination of the Roman Catholic cantons had tended to strengthen the influence of foreign Powers in Switzerland, and in some cases had even endangered the unity of the Confederation. The extreme Roman Catholic party in Switzerland were, therefore, naturally inclined to oppose reform, and to weaken the Confederation. And after the July Monarchy of France had begun to show its Conservative tendencies, the Liberals of Switzerland began to fear that their reforms might be checked by outside influence. As early as the year 1831, Metternich, already alarmed at the Polish and Belgian risings, as well as at the movements in Italy and Germany, remarked that there was still another question to which the Cabinets must devote their attention, "the moral anarchy which reigns in Switzerland." And the expedition of Mazzini in 1833-4 increased the alarm of the Austrian Government. In the steady-going canton of Bern there was always an element of moderate Conservatism, which led the Government to shrink from sympathy with the insurrectionary plans of other parts of Europe; and they even called upon the other cantons to assist them in suppressing the revolutionary movement. But the sturdier Liberals of Zurich protested against this circular, and led the way in internal democratic changes, in which they were followed by several other cantons. Utterances like those of Metternich tended to draw the reformers together; and in March, 1832, while Metternich was no doubt meditating the Frankfort Decrees, which he carried out a few months later, the seven Liberal cantons formed a league in which they bound themselves to stand by each other in case of an attack on their freedom. The cantons which entered into this concordat were Bern, Zurich, Luzern, Solothurn, St. Gallen, Aargau, and Thurgau. This league was considered by its opponents to be a violation of the Swiss Confederation, though the champions of it would probably have pleaded its purely defensive character. But the Roman Catholic party felt themselves justified in retaliation; and they formed, in November, 1832, an opposition league called the Sarnerbund. This Bund steadily set itself to oppose reform; but the men of Schwytz, who were at that time its leading spirits, did not confine themselves to argument, but invaded Luzern in 1833. Thereupon the Diet interfered, occupied Schwytz, and dissolved the Sarnerbund. The reforming party now began to spread their ideas, and the new University of Zurich, which was founded at this time, became a fresh centre of intellectual life. The fugitives from other countries gathered more and more to Switzerland, and the excitement roused in that country by Mazzini's expedition to Savoy led to the foundation of a society called Young Europe. The great object to which the reforming party in Switzerland now devoted its attention was the breaking down of the authority of the clergy, and the placing education and marriage under the State instead of under the Church. Their scheme was embodied in fourteen articles which excited the indignation of the Roman Catholic cantons; on the appeal of the Roman Catholics to Gregory XVI., he declared these articles heretical; and a little later Louis Philippe intervened to prevent the canton of Bern from enforcing them in the Roman Catholic district of the Jura. The struggle had now risen to great bitterness; and, at this period, the bitterness was much intensified by the domestic character of the quarrel. The Radical party and the Roman Catholic party struggled fiercely against each other in several of the cantons; and there were changes in the government, backwards and forwards, which temporarily affected the contest. The two changes, however, which were of a permanent character, and which had a vital effect on the destinies of Switzerland, were that which took place in 1838 in Bern and that in Luzern in 1841. Bern, though reckoned, on the whole, among the Liberal cantons, in consequence of its undoubted Protestantism, was yet under the control of a timid and moderate party. This may have arisen from the fact of its important position in the Confederation; for though Bern divided at this time with Luzern and Zurich the honour of being the meeting-place of the Diet, yet it seems to have assumed, even at this period, a certain superior and initiative tone. Whether it was due to the sense of responsibility inspired by this position, or to some other cause, certain it is that the tone adopted by the Government of Bern in matters of foreign policy by no means satisfied the sterner Radicals of Switzerland. The proposal of Bern for an anti-revolutionary proclamation in 1830 had been defeated by the protest of Zurich; but when in 1838 Bern considered, not unfavourably, the demand for the expulsion of a refugee, the Radicals became furious. This was one among many instances of that curious irony of history by which great principles have to be asserted in defence of persons who are in themselves unworthy of protection; for the exile, whose surrender was now demanded by Louis Philippe, was Louis Napoleon Buonaparte, who had recently made his attempt on Strasburg. But the Radicals of Bern rightly felt that the principle of asylum was more important than the character of any particular refugee; and when Louis Napoleon left Switzerland to avoid being surrendered, the reforming party rose in indignation, and Bern became the centre of determined Radicalism from that time. The change in Luzern seems to have been due to an extension of the suffrage which threw the power more distinctly into the hands of the Roman Catholics, who were a majority in the canton; and thus Luzern became the centre of the Roman Catholic movement. But before that change had taken place, new elements of bitterness had been introduced into the discussion. Neuhaus, the new leader of the Bern Government, had been chosen president of the Confederation; and he had used the troops of the Confederation to help the Aargau Protestants in suppressing the monasteries in that canton. The majority of the Swiss Diet had, however, been unwilling to support Neuhaus in this action, and had even condemned the suppression of the Aargau monasteries. The Aargau Protestants, however, had refused to yield, except as to the restoration of two very small monasteries. The feeling on both sides had now risen to its highest point, and on September 13th, 1843, the six cantons of Luzern, Uri, Schwytz, Unterwalden, Zug, and Freyburg formed the alliance known as the Sonderbund. They appealed to the old treaties on which the Confederation was founded, and maintained that even the terms of the Confederation fixed by the Treaty of Vienna had not been observed in the matter of the protection of the rights of the Roman Catholics. The compromise to which the Diet had assented in the Aargau question, and their non-interference on behalf of some monasteries at Thurgau, excited a special protest from the Sonderbund, and they demanded that the Diet should set these things to rights. So far the Sonderbund could scarcely be logically condemned by those who had joined the Protestant Concordat of Seven in 1832. But the Roman Catholic cantons went on to say that, if their demands were rejected, they would consider that the principles of the Confederation were so completely violated that they would secede from it. The formation of the Sonderbund excited their opponents; and it was declared that France, Austria, and the Pope were intriguing against Switzerland. The Jesuits, as usual, were supposed to be the centre of the intrigues; and the cry was raised that they ought to be expelled from the Confederation. Hitherto they had chiefly settled in Schwytz and Freyburg; but it was believed that if a cry rose against them they would become less safe in those cantons; and Luzern, as one of the three chief towns of the Confederation, was supposed to be a safer resting-place; therefore, on September 12th, 1844, the Assembly of Luzern passed a resolution inviting the Jesuits to settle in Luzern. Strange to say, Bern and Zurich had somewhat changed places during this period; for while the indignation against the former Government of Bern, caused by their abandonment of the right of asylum, had produced a strong and permanent Radical feeling in that canton, the bitter hostility to Christianity shown by some of the leading Radicals of Zurich had, on the other hand, scandalized the more moderate Liberals, and produced a Government less keenly Radical than that which now ruled in Bern. At this crisis, unfortunately, the Government of Bern took a step which could scarcely have tended to the order and unity of Switzerland. They appointed a committee to attack the Jesuits, and organized volunteer regiments, which they despatched against Luzern. And the want of confidence in the central power, which had been proclaimed by the Sonderbund, seemed to be almost justified by the action of the Diet at their next meeting; for that body, while condemning the Bernese volunteers, refused to take any steps to hinder their march. The attack of the volunteers was, however, successfully repelled by Luzern; and the Sonderbund soon after proceeded to form a council of war for its own protection. In the meantime, Metternich had become more and more alarmed at the progress of affairs in Switzerland. The defeat of the efforts of Austria and Sardinia to defend the Conservative cause in the Ticino, and the subsequent alliance between the Ticinese and Charles Albert, had strengthened the fears which had been previously aroused in the Austrian Government by the shelter given by the Swiss to the European Revolutionists. Even in 1845 Metternich had despatched troops to the frontier of Switzerland; he looked upon the struggle of the Catholic cantons as a means for carrying out his policy of weakening the union of Switzerland; and, through the help of Solaro della Margherita, he succeeded in rousing Charles Albert's sympathies for the cause of the Sonderbund. But to others he frankly said that he was not fighting in the least for the Jesuits--"They do not make us hot or cold;" and instead of resting his appeal to the Diet on so doubtful a ground, he earnestly entreated Louis Philippe to prevent the violent substitution of a unitary and propagandist government "for the cantonal government of Switzerland." To say the truth, it was for the stability of Austrian government in Italy that Metternich was now alarmed; and Mentz had warned him that a strong and united government in Switzerland would be dangerous to Austria in Lombardy. When, then, the election of a Radical government by the canton of St. Gallen made the character of the coming Swiss Diet tolerably certain, Metternich thought that the time had come for decided action; and he desired that before the meeting of the Diet, Austria, France, Russia, and Prussia should declare that they would not suffer cantonal authority to be violated. England, however, Metternich well knew would be opposed to him. Ever since the recognition of Greek independence in 1830 Metternich had become aware that a statesman had arisen in England who, though inferior to Canning in width of sympathy and capacity for sudden and ready action, yet was Canning's equal in strength of will, and in the thorough grasp of the two convictions that Constitutionalism was better than Despotism, and that Metternich was a dangerous politician who should always be opposed. Palmerston, indeed, had not accomplished any such brilliant stroke of foreign policy as the breaking up of the Holy Alliance, or the defeat of Absolutism in Portugal, and had only played a late and subordinate part in the Greek question. But he had helped to save Belgium from the clutches both of France and Holland. He had uttered as decided a protest as was, perhaps, possible to him, against the Frankfort Decrees. And he had recently intimated plainly his opinion about the annexation of Cracow. The occupation of Ferrara had not at that time taken place; but Palmerston's utterance about the Treaty of Vienna on the Po had sufficiently indicated to Metternich the line which English feeling was taking with regard to Italian policy. But, though certain of the hostility of Palmerston, Metternich fully hoped to counterbalance that danger by securing France to his side. With Guizot he had long been on terms of cordial friendship; and each had sympathized with the other in various points of their political career. But, unfortunately for Metternich, in the Italian question Guizot had not seemed entirely sympathetic with Austria; for the Lombard exile, Pellegrino Rossi, who was now French ambassador at Rome, was the special friend and _protegé_ of Guizot; and as it was primarily for the sake of Austrian rule in Italy that Metternich cared about the Swiss question, he might find that here, too, French opinion did not coincide with Austrian. It soon appeared that Louis Philippe shrank from an alliance with Austria. He declared that any declaration by the four Powers, instead of hindering any outburst in Switzerland might hasten it; and Guizot was directed to propose that, instead of a common action by the four Powers, Austria should undertake alone the defence of the Sonderbund, France merely occupying some position in the territory of the Confederation. Metternich, however, remembered that during the intervention in the Papal States, in 1831-2, a French general had seized on Ancona, and had attempted a demonstration there, at first of a Republican character, and throughout entirely anti-Austrian. And he feared that, if he consented to Guizot's proposal, the French Radicals might turn the occupation of Swiss territory to their advantage. While France and Austria were thus wasting their time in wrangling, the Swiss Diet met. Ochsenbein, an even more energetic man than Neuhaus, had been chosen President of the Confederation; and on the 20th July, 1847, the Diet had declared that the Sonderbund was incompatible with the Treaty of Confederation. This was speedily followed by the dismissal from the service of the Confederation of all those who held office in the cantons of the Sonderbund; and finally, in September, the Diet decreed that the Assemblies of Luzern, Schwytz, Freyburg, and Valais should be invited to expel the Jesuits from their territory. The Sonderbund probably felt that a direct military resistance to the whole forces of the Diet would be hopeless, and therefore they resolved to make a separate attack on some of the smaller cantons. With this view they prepared to march their troops from Luzern against Aargau, which they considered one of the centres of Protestant tyranny; and about the same time the canton of Uri resolved to invade the Ticino. In both these cases the Sonderbund hoped to rouse a popular insurrection on their side, but in this they were singularly mistaken. Previously to 1815 Uri had exercised a special authority over Ticino, and had used it to thrust in German officials in place of Italian. The Treaty of Vienna had secured Ticino from these tyrannies; but the Ticinese remembered them, and resented this new invasion. The troops of Uri were indeed able to gain one or two successes; but the people of Ticino rose against them, and, after a short, sharp struggle, succeeded in driving them out of the canton. The expedition to Aargau proved equally unsuccessful, and, in the meantime, the Federal Diet was organizing its forces under the command of General Dufour, a Genevese. They resolved that Freyburg, as the nearest of the Sonderbund cantons to Bern, and as geographically separated off from its allies, should be the first object of attack; and on November 7, Rilliet, the commander of the first division of the Federal forces, issued the following order of the day to his troops:-- "You are the first Federal troops who have entered the Freyburg territory. Your bearing at this moment will give the tone to the whole division. Consider that you are entering on a Federal territory, that you are marching against members of the Federation, who for centuries have been your friends, and will be so again. Consider that they are rather misled than guilty. Consider that they are neighbours, and that you ought to be fighting under the same flag. Therefore be moderate; refute the slanders of those who are driving them on. Listen not to false rumours, nor to foolish provocations to violence. Listen only to your leaders, and leave to your opponents the responsibility of having fired the first shot against the Federal flag. Soldiers! I rely on you as on myself; and do you trust in God, who marches before the flag of good, right, and honour." To the Freyburger Rilliet appealed to receive the Federal troops as brothers and friends, and as obeying the God whom Protestants and Catholics alike worship. "Lay down your arms," he said, "not before us, but before our flag, which is yours also." These appeals were not without result. At one of the first towns at which the Federal troops arrived in the canton of Freyburg, the townsfolk threw off the authority of the Cantonal Boards, raised the Federal flag, and admitted the Federal troops. Two slight skirmishes took place after this between the Federal forces and those of the canton; but the former were easily victorious. On November 12 the Federal troops appeared before the town of Freyburg; and on the 14th it was surrendered to them. Large numbers of the citizens received them with cries of "Long live the Confederates! Down with the Sonderbund! Down with the Jesuits!" The leaders of the Sonderbund at Luzern were startled at this sudden collapse, and resolved to apply for foreign help; and it was on November 15, 1847, that the descendants of Reding and Winkelried appealed to the descendants of Leopold of Hapsburg for help against their fellow-confederates. Metternich would gladly have intervened; and he hastened to assure the Sonderbund that the Emperor of Austria considered their cause a just one. Still, however, he desired the co-operation of France; but Guizot hesitated, and when Palmerston announced that any demonstration in favour of the Sonderbund would be met by a counter-demonstration by England on the side of the Federal Diet, the French Government distinctly refused to have any share in intervention. In the meantime the Sonderbund was rapidly breaking down. The Protestant party had gained the upper hand in the little canton of Zug, and persuaded the Government to surrender to the Diet even before the Federal troops had appeared in the canton. The occupation of Zug was speedily followed by a march to Luzern. On November 23 the Federal troops encountered the forces of Luzern and drove them back after a sharp fight. On the following day the War Council of the Sonderbund fled from Luzern and the Federal troops entered it. After this defeat there was no further serious resistance; by November 29 the last canton of the Sonderbund had surrendered to the Diet, and on December 7 the Diet passed a formal resolution refusing to admit any mediation from the Great Powers. So ended the Sonderbund war; and whatever harshness the Diet and the Protestant cantons may have shown in the earlier part of the struggle towards their Catholic neighbours, they had at least consistently upheld the principle of national independence, and by their vigour and determination they had saved the unity of Switzerland and defeated Metternich. Nor were these the only defeats which the ruler of Europe sustained in the year 1847. In Germany, too, there were signs that the old system was giving way. Metternich, indeed, had hoped that the King of Prussia had been about to abandon the policy which he had followed from 1840 to 1843; for in 1846 a meeting had taken place between Metternich and the King in which Frederick William had shown signs of alarm at the popular movement. But this change of feeling had been only temporary, for an event had occurred soon after which had given a new impulse to German national feeling, and re-awakened thereby the popular sympathies of the King of Prussia. On July 8, 1846, the King of Denmark, Christian VIII., issued a proclamation in which he declared that he should consider the provinces of his Crown as forming one sole and same State. This was felt to be undoubtedly aimed at the independence of Schleswig-Holstein. That Duchy had, since the middle of the fifteenth century, been recognized as a separate province, of which the King of Denmark was duke (till that time Schleswig had been a fief of Denmark and Holstein of Germany). In the seventeenth century a practically absolute Government had been established in Denmark; but in 1830 the liberties of that country had been restored, and soon after a cry had arisen from some of the Radical party at Copenhagen in favour of the conquest of Schleswig. But the object of the popular party and that of the King were entirely unlike; the Democratic party desiring to assert what they considered a national principle by the separation of Schleswig from Holstein and its absorption in Denmark; the King wishing to absorb Schleswig-Holstein whole into the Danish dominions, without consideration for anything but selfish aggrandizement. As a compromise between his own aims and those of the people of Copenhagen, Christian, in 1831, conceded separate assemblies to Holstein and Schleswig; but he had followed this up by steadily trying to Danize the Duchies. Danish officers were introduced into their army and navy, even into their private ships; Danish teachers were appointed in the University of Kiel; the liberty of the Press was continually interfered with, and arms were removed from the forts of Schleswig-Holstein to Copenhagen. Thus it became evident that the proclamation of July, 1846, was merely another step towards the complete denationalization of the Duchies. Metternich was in a difficult position. On the one hand he was bound by the Treaty of Vienna to assert the rights of Austria to protect Holstein as a member of the German Confederation; on the other hand he knew that by so doing he was strengthening that German national feeling which he so much dreaded. "In the University of Heidelberg," wrote Metternich, "in the municipal councils of German towns, in the gatherings of professors and of choral societies, the cry is being raised for the Fatherland." The professors of Heidelberg had sent a special address to the Holsteiners, and it was clear on every side that German sentiment was rising to boiling point. Under these circumstances Metternich tried to steer between the dangers of encouraging popular feeling and that of neglecting to assert the legal influence of Austria. Finally, he persuaded the Federal Diet, on September 17, 1846, to pass two resolutions--First, that, apart from his letter of July 8, the King of Denmark should respect all the rights which he had promised to respect in a private letter of August 22; but, secondly, that, "while the Confederation pays just honour to the patriotic sentiments shown on this occasion by the Confederated German States, it regrets the passionate accusations and irritations which were produced by this circumstance." So for the moment Metternich hoped to stave off the natural results of this outburst of popular feeling. But he could not prevent the effect which that outburst would produce on the more impressionable character of the King of Prussia. One of those who had had much opportunity of observing that king remarked that whoever was a favourite with him for the time and managed to indulge his fancies had the game in his own hands; and the Ministers who then enjoyed the confidence of Frederick William were eager to encourage him in complying with the popular feeling. So, in spite of Metternich's warnings, the King of Prussia, in January, 1847, had summoned to Berlin the representatives of all the Provincial Estates to discuss affairs. "The King," said Princess Metternich, "has promulgated this Constitution without force and without virtue, which is nothing to-day, but which to-morrow may change into thunder and destroy the Kingdom." But the concessions which the King of Prussia was making only embodied a feeling which was stirring in various parts of Germany. A terrible famine in Silesia was quickening the desire of the poorer classes for some change in their condition; the booksellers and literary men were uttering various demands for freedom of the Press; and when a meeting of the Baden Liberals at Offenburg tried to formulate these demands, the organizers of the meeting were threatened with a prosecution which never took place. Such, then, was Metternich's position towards the close of 1847; discredited as a champion of legality by the annexation of Cracow, looked on with suspicion by many orthodox Catholics in consequence of his attempt on Ferrara, his power as a ruler and his reputation as a diplomatist alike weakened by the result of the Sonderbund war. The result of these various failures was seen in the attitude both of kings and peoples. The King of Prussia was breaking loose from Metternich's control; France was suspicious and England hostile; Charles Albert was assuming more and more an attitude of defiance to Austria; the Pope was drifting gradually into the position of a champion of Italian Liberty; German national feeling, which Metternich had hoped to stamp out in 1834, was bubbling up into new life under the triple influence of the Schleswig-Holstein question, the King of Prussia's reforms, and the growing Liberalism of Saxony and Baden; while Hungary, which had seemed hopelessly divided, was gradually solidifying into opposition to Austrian rule. Such were the chief points in the spectacle which presented itself to Metternich as he looked upon Europe. Yet he was far indeed from thinking of yielding in the struggle, or of abandoning in the slightest degree his faith in his great system. He was still prepared to crush Switzerland and Charles Albert, to lead back the Pope and the King of Prussia into wiser courses, to quench the spirit of German enthusiasm, to wear out Hungarian opposition, to recover the friendship of France, and to defy the enmity of England. Such results seemed still possible when, in an Italian island to which Metternich had not recently given much attention, there first broke out that revolutionary fire which, under judicious guidance, was to spread over Europe and overthrow the system of Metternich. FOOTNOTE: [7] I feel that some explanation is needed for the rejection of what was once one of the most deeply-rooted traditions among all Liberals who interested themselves in the politics of this period. I must, therefore, state that my chief authority for my account of the paralysis of the Austrian Government in the Galician insurrection, and their consequent innocence of any organized massacre, is Dr. Herbst, the well-known leader of the German Liberals in the Austrian Reichstag, who was in Galicia at the time of the insurrection. CHAPTER VI. FIRST MUTTERINGS OF THE STORM. SEPTEMBER, 1847-MARCH, 1848. State of Naples and Sicily under Ferdinand II.--The birds and the King.--The conspiracy.--The September rising and its results.--Christmas in Naples.--The 12th of January in Palermo.--The insurrection spreads to Naples.--The first Constitution of 1848.--The effect in Rome--in Tuscany--in Genoa.--The editors of Turin.--"Voleva e non voleva."--The government of Milan.--The Milanese view of their rulers.--Count Gabrio Casati--Ficquelmont.--The "Panem et Circenses" policy.--Giambattista Nazari--His speech in the Congregation.--Its effect.--Rainieri and Spaur on Nazari.--The grievances of different parts of Lombardy.--Condition of Venetia.--Charles Bonaparte in Venice.--Daniele Manin.--Niccolo Tommaseo.--Manin's programme.--Moncenigo's treachery.--Manin's imprisonment.--The tobacco massacres at Milan.--Their effect.--Metternich's programme of Italian reform.--"Viva il sangue Palermitano!"--The "Administrators" in Hungary.--The programme of Kossuth and Deak.--The Constitutional victories in Hungary.--State of Vienna.--The division of classes.--The ruling trio.--Effect of Ferdinand's accession in Vienna.--The "Lese-Verein."--Hye-Andrian.--Kuranda and Schuselka.--The German movement in Vienna considered morally.--The Archduke John's toast.--The relations between rich and poor.--The anti-Jesuit feeling.--The illegal soup-kitchen.--The "Professional" opposition.--Die Sibyllinische Bücher.--"The Austrian has no fatherland."--The censorship.--Metternich's policy in Switzerland--in Lombardy. The failure of the struggles for liberty in Naples and Sicily in 1821 had not prevented continual abortive insurrections from breaking out after that period; and, while these attempts produced no immediate results except the strengthening of tyranny, they were yet gradually teaching Sicilians and Neapolitans the two great lessons of confidence in each other and distrust of the Bourbons. Francis had succeeded to Ferdinand I., and Ferdinand II. again to Francis; and, unless there were some slight variety in the forms of cruelty and tyranny, the change of kings may be said to have brought no change to the peoples whom they governed. Corruption and espionage prevailed both in Naples and Sicily. The only perceptible distinction between those two countries was that the clergy exercised rather more tyranny in Naples, while in Sicily robbery and brigandage were more rife. The Bourbons, like the Hapsburgs, sought to keep alive the disunion between the different races of their subjects, thus hoping to increase their own power; and so Sicilian Ministers were brought to govern Naples, and Neapolitan commissioners sent to Sicily. The desire for reform awakened by the accession of Pius IX. was a bond between all the different countries of Italy, and the King of Naples recognized this by suppressing all newspapers in his dominions that praised Pius IX. But Ferdinand was not to be left altogether without warning before the blow against his power was actually struck. In June, 1847, he paid a visit to Sicily to inspect the military defences of the island. In visiting Messina he found several statues of himself, but the ears of all of them had been stopped up. The King was alarmed; for, whether he understood or not this significant practical joke, he saw at least that some insult was intended. Perhaps he was able to accept the explanation of his courtiers that "the birds had chosen the ears of the royal statues to build their nests in." At Palermo he received another hint as to the nature of the birds who had paid this homage to royalty, for there he was met by a petition for freedom of the Press. He angrily rejected this request, and refused to make any inquiry into the growing misery of the Sicilians. More soldiers and stronger forts, he considered, were the only needs of the country. Yet at this very time an insurrection was preparing of a far more dangerous character than the spasmodic outbursts in Messina and Calabria which had disturbed the repose, but scarcely endangered the throne, of Ferdinand's predecessors. The Sicilians and Neapolitans had now learned to act together, and planned a simultaneous rising in Calabria and Sicily. The revolutionists were to march upon the nearest fortified places, and eventually to seize Naples, where they were to proclaim the Unity of Italy. According as circumstances guided them, they were either to compel the King to accept the Constitution, to depose him in favour of his son, to choose a new dynasty, or, if necessary, to proclaim a Republic; but in any case they were to assert the unity and independence of Italy. Some hint of an approaching outbreak seems to have reached the ears of the King or his Ministers; for in August two artillery officers and some other citizens were arrested in Palermo. "But," says La Farina, the Sicilian historian, "nothing could be discovered, since the Sicilians knew better than any nation how to stand firm in preserving silence in all tortures: an ancient virtue not yet destroyed by modern corruption." The miserable local jealousies which had hindered the former struggles for liberty had for a time disappeared; but there was still in this conspiracy, as in every other, the natural division between the impetuous and the prudent, between the party of speedy action and the party of delay. And while the fiery spirits of Messina and Calabria were eager for an immediate rising, the citizens of the two capitals, Palermo and Naples, were in favour of slower action. At Messina, therefore, the first outbreak took place. On September 1 some officers met at an inn in that town to celebrate the promotion of one of their generals by a dinner. The conspirators seized this opportunity for an outbreak, and surrounded the inn as if from mere curiosity; but when sufficient numbers had gathered they suddenly unfurled the tricolour flag and raised the cries of "Viva Italia!" "Viva Pio Nono!" "Viva la Costituzione!" The officers at last became alarmed, and, rushing out, summoned the soldiers and ordered them to fire. They hesitated to obey, and listened to the appeal of the conspirators, who urged their common cause and the duty of Neapolitans and Sicilians to stand together against their common oppressor. Discipline, however, proved stronger than patriotism; the soldiers fired, and several Sicilians fell, amongst them Giovanni Grillo, the youth who had played the part of the birds in stopping the ears of the King's statues. The insurgents retreated; but a shoemaker named Sciva, who was at work near the scene of action, left his shop and rushed forward to rally them; and a priest named Kriny also fought gallantly in their ranks. The movement, however, had been too hastily organized; the insurgents were either forced to fly or were arrested on the spot, and Sciva, the shoemaker, was condemned to death. The authorities, indeed, hoped to persuade him to save his life by betraying his friends; but he refused, even on the scaffold, to accept a pardon on such terms, and died bravely. Kriny, as a priest, had his sentence commuted from death to imprisonment. Grillo died of his wounds. Desperate efforts were made by the Government to obtain information as to the details of this conspiracy. Three hundred ducats were offered to anyone who would kill the chief conspirators; a thousand to anyone who would arrest them. But, though the leaders of the insurrection were hidden in the houses of very poor men, no one could be found to betray them, even for the sake of so large a reward. Even where the Government had made sure of their prey, it sometimes slipped through their hands. One of the insurgents was brought wounded to a house, and his hiding-place was discovered and surrounded by soldiers; but, by a false alarm, the guards were frightened away and the wounded man conveyed elsewhere. The owner of the second place of refuge was arrested, but the fugitive was again enabled to escape. His wound brought on fever, and he remained hidden for fifteen days without food, sucking the end of a sheet for nourishment; he was then so exhausted that his friends thought him dead and carried him to a church; but he revived, and was at last shipped to Marseilles, where he recovered. A people so vigorous and determined were obviously not far from freedom. The heroism of the Sicilians had strengthened the courage of the Neapolitans; and on Christmas Day the latter rose to the cry of "Evviva Palermo!" This demonstration, however, was only the forerunner of the Revolution; for it was still from Sicily that the first successful action was to come. So little did the Sicilians care to conceal their intentions that a pamphlet was circulated fixing January 12 as the day for the actual rising. The police, thinking that they would be able easily to suppress the movement, began to make arrests; but their efforts were in vain. La Farina, who afterwards became a member of the Sicilian Assembly, gives the following account of the rising:-- "On the night that preceded the 12th January, 1848, the streets of Palermo were silent and deserted; but in the houses the citizens were wakeful, agitated by fears and hopes. At the dawning of the new day the soldiers were in arms in fortified places and in their own quarters; some battalions of infantry and gensdarmes occupied the public places of the prefecture of police and of the royal palace, where the General De Majo, the Lieutenant of the King, General Vial, Commandant of the Piazza, and other royal officers, were assembled in council. The cannons of Castellamare were drawn out for a festival, for it was the birthday of Ferdinand II., and the roads were extraordinarily full of people; all were waiting for the conspirators to appear, for the sign to be given, for the first cry to break out, when Buscerni, a bold and ready youth, weary of delay, raised on high a musket that he had held concealed, and cried resolutely, 'To arms! To arms!' Then Pasquale Miloro came out armed into the street of the Centorinari; the abbot Ragona and the priest Venuti exhorted the people to rise in the name of God. There ran up to them, in arms, the advocate Tacona, Giuseppe Oddo, Prince Grammonte, Baron Bivona, Lo Cascio, Pasquale Bruno, Francesco Ciaccio, Giancinto Carini, Amodei, Enea, and a few others. Giuseppe La Masa bound to a stick a white pocket-handkerchief, a red one, and a green ribbon, and waved the three Italian colours. Santa Astorina went about distributing tricolour ribbons and cockades." "At the sight of the arms, and of the small number of those who bore them, the crowd grew thin and dispersed; the shops were closed, and the few eager men remained alone. A few of the unarmed remained with them to divide the honour and perils of the attack; and among these, distinguished by the loftiness of their mind and remarkable probity, were Vincenzo Errante and the Baron Casimiro Pisani. They were not disheartened; they stood firm and bold in their resolve; the bells of the Church of Orsola sounded an alarm, those of the Convent of the Gangia answered them; the Revolution had become irrevocable. Small bands were forming themselves here and there. They had neither rules, orders, nor plans; they did not barricade the streets; they did not make trenches, as is usual in other cities; they did not make head in any one position; troops of children preceded them, dancing and singing; they drew near to the troops, watched their motions and acts, and returned to warn the insurgents even while the blood was dropping from the blows that they had received. One band of the insurgents put to flight a military patrol in the street of the Albergava; others had the same fortune in the Raffadale street, at the church of San Gaetano, near the gate of St. Antonino, in the street of Calderari, and in other places. Thus passed the whole day; two of the insurgents, among whom was L'Amodei, were dead, and ten soldiers; the wounded were more numerous. The insurgents withdrew within the Piazza of Fiera Vecchia, which since the morning had been the centre of the movements and the seat of a committee formed of the first insurgents. There were not more than fifty who had firearms; a company of infantry would have been sufficient to disperse them; but the soldiers remained immovable in the positions which they had taken up, because, remembering the year '20, they had determined not to advance into the populous quarters of the city. To this it is necessary to add that all the houses were lighted for the festival, and that the balconies of the windows were crowded with men, women, and children, who all clapped their hands and gave loud Vivas to Italy, the Sicilian Constitution, and Pio Nono; a spontaneous, unexpected, and universal agreement of the people which made the rulers lose their heads and the soldiers their hearts. In the night the insurgents were recruited from the country districts and the neighbouring communes. The first to arrive were sixty countrymen from Villabate; then others from Misilmeri and from other places. By the next day Fiera Vecchia contained about 300 men armed with guns, and as many more armed with scythes, billhooks, knives, spits, and those iron tools which the popular fury changes into arms. The fortress of Castellamare bombarded the city; the artillery of the royal palace was dragged along the Cassero; but the insurgents attacked, stormed, and destroyed the police commissariats and made themselves masters of the military hospital of San Francesco Saverio; the soldiers who remained prisoners were embraced as brothers, and provided with every accommodation which they needed." Brilliant as these successes sound, the victory was not yet complete; and to diplomatists, at any rate, the result seemed still uncertain. The Consuls of Austria, France, and Sardinia tried to persuade the insurgents even now to yield, on condition of obtaining a pardon. An attack made by La Masa on the Royalist forces was repelled, and several of the revolutionary committees fled from Palermo. But many of the leaders stood firm, and Mariano Stabile declared that Sicily should recover her ancient liberties, and that Ferdinand and not the people was the rebel. At the same moment the bells sounded, and the Royalist artillery was brought to bear upon the city. For three hours the struggle lasted; but at the end of that time the Royalists were driven back. The Neapolitan soldiers, grown savage by their defeats, began to sack private houses and commit various acts of cruelty; and when the foreign Consuls went again to the Governor's palace to ask for mercy to the insurgents, they were fired upon. In the meantime new insurgents were pouring in from the country districts, and the revolution was developing a government. Mariano Stabile was made secretary of the Governing Committee, and Ruggiero Settimo, an old man of seventy who had held office under the original Constitution of 1812, and who had helped to proclaim the Spanish Constitution in Sicily in 1820, was chosen President. Nor was the movement any longer confined to Sicily. The Neapolitans had risen in Salerno. The King, in a panic, had dismissed Del Caretto, the head of the police, from office; and General Ruberti, the Commandant of the fortress of St. Elmo, had told the King that he would not fire upon the people. A demonstration in favour of the Constitution of 1820 had taken place; and when the rain threatened to disperse the people, the umbrellas which were opened displayed the Italian colours. Alarmed at the risings in Naples and Sicily, and uncertain on whom he could depend, Ferdinand, on January 29th, conceded a Constitution to Naples. At the same time he entreated Lord Minto to intervene between him and the Sicilians. Neither Neapolitans nor Sicilians, however, were entirely satisfied. In the Kingdom of Naples the Constitutionalists met with much opposition from the supporters of the old system, and some skirmishes followed between these two parties. In Sicily the Liberals demanded that the granting of a Constitution should be followed by an adhesion to an Italian Confederation. They therefore answered Lord Minto's appeal by a renewed attack on the fortress of Castellamare, which they succeeded in capturing after four hours' fighting, and thus destroyed the last hold of Ferdinand over Palermo, and left in his hands no important Sicilian position except the citadel of Messina. The hopes thus raised were soon increased by the appointment of two men who had recently suffered imprisonment for their liberal opinions. These were a lawyer named Bozzelli, who became Prime Minister, and the new head of the police, Carlo Poerio, who belonged to a family which had given many champions and sufferers to the cause of Liberty, and who had himself been imprisoned in the previous year. When, then, the Constitution was actually promulgated on February 12, the hopes of the Neapolitans had risen to their highest pitch. The Constitution itself was but a poor affair, far less encouraging to popular hopes than its Spanish predecessor of 1820. It was founded, indeed, on the French Constitution of 1830, and the Parliament was therefore composed of two Houses, the upper one nominated by the King. A nominal freedom of the Press was secured, but carefully limited, especially in matters treating of religion. And there seems to have been hardly any security for Ministerial responsibility. But the granting of a Constitution against his will by a Bourbon King was, whatever its deficiencies, a fact which naturally supplied a spark to the combustible material to be found in all parts of Italy. The news of the movement in Sicily had already kindled new hopes in Rome. There matters had been proceeding more slowly than in the first months of Pius IX.'s rule. Even Ciceruacchio had begun to think that a more definite programme might be accepted by the Pope; and on December 27, 1847, he drew up a list of the reforms which he thought especially needed in Rome. In these, while professing continued zeal for Pio Nono, he put forward requests of a kind not likely to be conceded; such as the removal of the Jesuits, the abolition of monopolies, and the emancipation of the Jews; while other demands were so vague that the Pope might easily have seemed to concede them without much trouble. For instance, Ciceruacchio required that the Pope should show confidence in the people, that individual liberty should be guaranteed, and that restraint should be put on excessive exercise of power. The Pope, though not disposed to accept the exact programme of Ciceruacchio, was influenced by this address, and on December 31, 1847, he issued a decree promising separate and independent responsibility to each of the Ministers. When, then, the news arrived of the Sicilian insurrection, the enthusiasm in Rome rose to the greatest height; and when the Pope next appeared in public, people scattered flowers in his way, and Ciceruacchio displayed a banner bearing the words, "Santo Padre fidatevi nel Popolo" (Holy Father, have confidence in the people). Still, it was rumoured that the wicked cardinals were holding back the good Pope, and that they were opposing the armaments voted by the Council of State. During the excitement caused by this fear the news arrived that the Sicilians had been successful, and that Ferdinand had granted a Constitution to Naples. Again the Romans rose, and this time with the cry of, "Away with the men of bad faith! Long live the secular ministry! Give us arms!" A Minister appeared on the balcony, promising the people a secular ministry and increase of the army. This was actually conceded a few days later, and Ciceruacchio once more called upon the people to have confidence in the reforming Pope. The news of the Sicilian and Neapolitan movements steadily spread northwards, and in Tuscany they chimed in with the new belief that Leopold was a reforming sovereign. But matters took here a rather different complexion from that which they had assumed in Rome. The zeal of the Tuscans had been kindled by their struggle with the Duke of Modena, and the free life of Tuscany had attracted many democratic Italians; while, on the other hand, though Leopold might have wiped out the memory of the surrender of Renzi, he could not cease to be a Hapsburg, and could never attract to himself the same imaginative enthusiasm which was kindled by the dream of a reforming Pope. At any rate, the first spark of a revolutionary movement had been kindled by Guerrazzi in Leghorn, before the success of the Sicilians had been known; and though Ridolfi had suppressed the movement and imprisoned Guerrazzi, the bitterness caused by it still remained. And even when the news of the Neapolitan Constitution reached Florence, the Tuscan reformers hastened to congratulate, not the Neapolitan Ambassador, but a representative of the revolutionary Sicilians who happened to be in Florence. But Leopold was ready to yield with a much better grace than Ferdinand; and when, on February 17, the Constitution appeared it was found, in the matter of religious liberty, to be considerably in advance of the Neapolitan Constitution. In the Kingdom of Sardinia the city of Genoa supplied the same kind of element which the Tuscans found in Leghorn. The questionable manner in which that city had been annexed to Piedmont had left, no doubt, a continual soreness and readiness for revolution among the Genoese; while, on the other hand, its important geographical position and great commercial reputation had led Charles Albert to push forward its development as much as possible. It soon came to the front during the movement for reform, and its citizens tried to urge on Charles Albert whenever he hesitated. As he drifted gradually in the direction of bolder action, the Genoese were ready to encourage festivals in his honour, and on the occasion of a demonstration in November, at Genoa, a citizen had called out to him, "Charles Albert, cross the Ticino and we will follow thee." When, then, the news arrived of the Sicilian rising, the Genoese sent to Turin a petition for the expulsion of the Jesuits and the concession of a national guard. In the meantime the editors of leading newspapers in Turin were meeting to decide on the policy which they should support, and Count Cavour, who had hitherto been disinclined to Liberal movements, proposed that they should demand a Constitution. D'Azeglio, Durando, and others, supported the proposal, and Cavour was despatched to present it to the King. While Charles Albert was still hesitating, the news of the Neapolitan Constitution arrived. The people of Turin at once made a demonstration in honour of the event, and Pietro di Santa Rosa[8] proposed in the Municipal Council that that body should support the petition for the Constitution. The Municipal Council, though previously a reactionary body, accepted the proposal by a large majority. But Charles Albert still hesitated. On February 7th, he held a meeting of his Council, in which he at first refused to discuss the question whilst the crowd was gathering outside. On their dispersal, he began to consider the proposals, and the discussion lasted for eight hours. When the sitting of the Council was concluded, the representatives of the Municipality arrived, but were received very coldly by Charles Albert. While things were still in this state, a message arrived from the Governor of Genoa that, unless the Constitution was proclaimed, it would be necessary for the King to place Genoa in a state of siege. At last he consented to grant what was called a Statuto, of which the terms seemed at first very indefinite, while the delays in carrying it into execution irritated the more decided reformers. But the faith of Charles Albert's admirers was as robust as that of the admirers of Pius IX. Banquets were held in his honour, and those who took part in these exulting demonstrations had at least the excuse for their joy that the promise of the Statuto had roused the irritation of the Austrians; and Radetzky even threatened to occupy Alessandria. But Radetzky and the Austrians had enough to think of nearer home. The Government of Milan was at this time in a very peculiar condition, seeing that there were not less than seven people who were, in different ways, responsible for the maintenance of order in the town or its neighbourhood. Of these, the nominal head was probably Rainieri, the Viceroy; but he seems to have been a man of less vigour than some of those who acted under him; and though willing enough to do acts of violence, yet not able altogether to control his subordinates. The second, probably, in nominal importance was Spaur, the Governor of Milan: a Tyrolese nobleman, credited, even by his opponents, with some remains of honourable feeling, but crushed in spirit by his habit of constant deference to the Court, and to Metternich. Next came Torresani, the head of the police, a man who must have been in some respects pleasanter to deal with than the other rulers; for, though not disinclined to cruelty and tyranny, he managed to cover them with a certain Italian wit and courtesy which must have been rather a relief, as a contrast to the tone of some of his colleagues. Thus, for instance, on one occasion the Town Council remonstrated with him for the action of the police in a riot, and urged that he should take measures for preserving order among his subordinates; Torresani chose to interpret the idea of order in his own fashion, and the next day issued a stern public notice against disorderly meetings, while at the same time he sent a polite note to the Council, pointing out that, by this proclamation, he had met their wishes for the preservation of order. But if Torresani could soften by witticisms the necessary savageries of his position, any deficiencies in roughness on his part were amply atoned for by his subordinate Bolza, who was looked upon as the completest embodiment of the spirit of cruelty in the Government. On the other hand, the craft and treachery of the system were best represented by a Bohemian named Pachta. He was one of those men whose complete loss of reputation in private affairs fits them to become useful engines of despotism. He had been known previously as having swindled a lady out of some jewels which she had entrusted to him; and he had plunged so heavily into debt, that nothing but his favoured position protected him from arrest. He held some nominal office in the Council at Milan; but his real duty was to act as a spy upon his colleagues. Indeed, it may be said that that description might, with more or less force, apply to all the rulers of Milan, and to many others of the Government officials. A spy was set by the Home Government upon Torresani, and another to watch that spy. Rainieri was entrusted with one set of police, Spaur with another, Pachta with another. But while all these men divided the civil administration of Milan, there stood at their back the one man who did enjoy more of the permanent confidence of the Government than anyone else in Lombardy. This was the celebrated Field-Marshal Radetzky. It is somewhat strange that this man, who has been considered, by many of those interested in these movements, as one of the most complete embodiments of Austrian cruelty, was yet looked upon by the Milanese at this time mainly as a theatrical buffoon. In the caricatures which are preserved at Milan, Rainieri generally appears as a hypocrite, sometimes cunning, sometimes maudlin; Bolza as a ferocious ruffian; while in Pachta and Torresani the appearance of cruelty is modified by a slightly idiotic expression. But Radetzky is invariably the theatrical blusterer, who might have supplied Shakespeare with a model for Ancient Pistol. Such was the Government with which Lombardy was blessed under the Metternich system. On the other hand, the only official embodiment of popular feeling during the longest period of this rule had been the Town Council of Milan. The Central Congregation which had embodied the Austrian idea of a Lombard Constitution had been deprived of all freedom of utterance; but the Town Council was no doubt considered a more harmless body, and therefore had been allowed a certain amount of freedom. Since 1838 this Council had been presided over by Count Gabrio Casati, who has probably received more praise and more blame than he deserved. He seems to have been a man by no means deficient either in courage or patriotism; and had he continued to exercise his office during a period when passive resistance and formal protests were still useful weapons, he might have left a reputation somewhat like that of Speaker Lenthall or Lord Mayor Beckford in our own History. As it is, he was called on by circumstances to play a part in the struggle against Austria for which he was unfitted; and, while he has received undue praise from those who have accepted him as the embodiment of Milanese heroism, he has, on the other hand, been somewhat too fiercely condemned by those who noted his actual shortcomings, and could not make allowance for the difficulty of his position. During the first years of his office he did his best to bring before Metternich and his colleagues the evils which prevailed in the Government of Lombardy; and when the growth of the Italian movements led to the demonstrations in favour of the Italian Archbishop of Milan, and the solemn funeral to Confalonieri, Casati showed his sympathy with the popular feeling, and protested against the various acts of cruelty which were perpetrated in the suppression of these movements. Indeed, so prominent a part did Casati play in these matters that Sedlnitzky, the head of the Viennese police, wrote to Spaur to tell him to keep his eye on Casati, and to see that on the next occasion a Podestà of better principles was elected. In October, 1847, Metternich added a new element to the confusion of the Milanese Government by sending a new agent to share the authority of the other rulers of Lombardy. This new emissary was Count Ficquelmont, whose work was of a much more definite character than his official position. This work was, in fact, the carrying out of that part of Menz's programme which had been modelled on the Circus shows of the Emperors of Rome. This was to be effected by the introduction of Fanny Ellsler and other people of a similar character to the pleasure-loving population of Milan. But the mission only succeeded in eliciting new signs of discontent. Ficquelmont and his protegées appear in the collection of Milanese caricatures; and a popular agreement to abstain from theatre-going was so rigorously carried out that, on one evening, only nine tickets were sold for the principal theatre in Milan. But, before this remarkable abstention had come into force, a new character had been given to the Lombard resistance to Austrian rule. The Central Congregation of Lombardy had suddenly awakened to life; and the grievances under which the country suffered had been placed before their rulers at Vienna with a clearness previously unknown. The author of this sudden change affords one of those curious instances of men who do a great and important work for their country, and then pass suddenly into obscurity before their reputation has spread beyond narrow limits. Giambattista Nazari was a lawyer of Treviglio. All that seems to be known of him previously to his election to the Central Congregation was that he was a man of moderate fortune, with a large family; but both those facts may be taken as adding something to the courage of his public action. Treviglio is a town in the district of Bergamo; the people of that district, presumably with Austrian sanction, had accepted Nazari as their representative, and on December 8 or 9, 1847, he came forward in the Central Congregation to give, for the first time since 1815, free and peaceable expression to the wants of the people of Lombardy. "Illustrious Congregation," he said, "it does not require much shrewdness to discern that for some time past there have been in this province manifest signs of discontent shown by all classes of citizens, as the rulers themselves ought to have known every time that they have tried to deaden its effects. And from whence does the agitation which has thus been produced arise--an agitation which increases the more they try to restrain it? From whence comes this universal disquiet? From whence this suspicion between governors and governed? The latter have, perhaps, just reasons to complain; and if they have, who ought to present those reasons to the Prince? For my part, I do not see that anyone can be better interpreters of the desires of our country than we; since, even in our private condition, we are sharers of the good and evil which are the fruits of good and evil institutions; and since, moreover, we have the precious office of discovering the needs of the populations and of presenting them at the Imperial Throne. In order, then, that that agreement between ruler and people which alone can secure the quiet of the State may be restored, I am resolved to propose that you should choose as many men as there are provinces in Lombardy, and give them a commission to examine specially into the present conditions of the country; and when they have discovered the causes of discontent, to refer them to the whole Congregation in order to give fitting opportunity for petitions. This I say and advise, from a desire for the public good, from affection for my Prince, and from a sentiment of duty. For as citizen I love my country, as subject I desire that the Emperor should be adored and blessed by all, and as deputy I should think that I had failed to keep my oaths if I did not say what was imposed on me by the duty of not being silent." On December 11 this protest of Nazari's was presented in due form to the rulers of Milan, and produced from them the sternest rebukes. The awkward point of the protest was that, both in form and substance, it was undoubtedly legal, and could not therefore be wholly disregarded. Accordingly, Rainieri told Spaur that it was desirable that a commission should be appointed; but that, instead of being composed of representatives chosen from the Lombard provinces, it should be limited to those few people who were noted for their zeal and attachment to the Austrian Government. Further, such commissioners were not to assume that discontent existed, nor even to make mention of such discontent in their discussions. At the same time, Nazari was to be told that he had acted irregularly in bringing forward his motion, and Torresani was to be directed to keep a special watch on this dangerous agitator. Spaur thereupon addressed the Congregation, telling them that the Viceroy had consented to Nazari's proposal, provided that the Congregation limited itself strictly to the powers entrusted to it by the Constitution; and, further, that the Government was occupying itself with the wishes of the Lombard provinces, and that the Viceroy had left to Spaur's decision the appointment of the members of the Commission. Spaur concluded with a rebuke to Nazari for the want of confidence that he had shown in him, as President of the Congregation, in not communicating to him his intended motion. Nazari answered that he had wished to take upon himself the sole responsibility of his act; and that, as to the proposed previous application to Spaur, he would rather be wanting in confidence than respect; for that if he had told Spaur of his intention, and Spaur had tried to persuade him to be silent, he would have been compelled to be rude enough to disobey him. In the meantime the motion had created the greatest enthusiasm, and many Milanese hastened to pay their respects to Nazari; four thousand visiting cards were left on him, and petitions flocked in from various places in support of his movement. In the Provincial Congregation of Milan, indeed, the supporters of Nazari encountered the same kind of official obstruction which their leader had met with in the Central Congregation of Lombardy, for the President refused to join his colleagues in signing the petition. Thereupon the members of that body threatened to resign; and the Viceroy, who had just declared Nazari's protest irregular, urged the President to yield. But the movement had spread far into the provinces. Many of the provincial towns had their own causes of grievance against the centralizers of Vienna. Pavia had been deprived of its arsenal; Brescia had been compelled to close its armourers' shops, Bergamo its ironmongeries; Cremona had lost one trade, Salo another; Como and other towns had lost their linen trade. Everywhere there had been signs of the sucking out of the strength of the country by the Central Government at Vienna. Nazari's protest, therefore, naturally attracted sympathy far beyond Milanese circles; and amongst other petitions came one from the old Lombard capital of Pavia asking that it might be specially represented on the Commission proposed by Nazari, and suggesting special reforms needed in Lombardy and Venetia. But by far the most remarkable of the Lombard petitions produced by Nazari's protest was one which was apparently signed by the Lombards irrespective of their provincial divisions. In this the petitioners call upon the Central Congregation to keep alive the courage which had been shown by Nazari's protest. They remind the deputies of the promises previously made by the Austrian Government, and the breach of them. They declare that "The Lombards were formerly distracted by discordant hopes, but are now almost miraculously unanimous in their desires;" and they call on the deputies "to speak out the whole truth, to proclaim that they have faith in God, and that they leave to others the infamy of lying."... They call upon them "To declare the abuses of the Tribunals which are concealed by secret bribery; the arrogance of the police, the puerile corrections of the censorship; but above all to proclaim the great truth of nationality, to demand a federal union, and to remind Austria of her proclamation of April 16, 1815, in which she promised to conform the institutions of Lombardy to the character of the Italians. Ten million Italians are now united by an agreement between princes and people, defended by a flourishing army, and sanctioned by the authority of the Pope." The petitioners then proceed to call attention to the success of Hungary in its Constitutional struggle; and they point out that, while Austria had held out hopes of a special representation for Lombardy and Venetia, she had, in fact, drawn the power more and more to Vienna, while the Press had been subjected to the most petty persecutions. "An invisible network of information, conjectures, suspicions, has surrounded all the citizens. The Government is arbitrary both by ignorance and violence. It is only the representatives of the people who can explain _that_; and they must show that all these evils spring from the first great falsehood of a people that has not the life of a people, of a kingdom that has not the life of a kingdom. Lombardy is governed by foreign laws and foreign persons. It is taxed for the benefit of Austrian industries, while a barrier of customs duties separates it from Italy." It is worth noting that now, for the first time, the leaders of Italian political movements began to consider the special grievances of the poor. As Mazzini had roused the working men to care for the liberty and unity of their country, so a common suffering had gradually taught the wealthier leaders to care for the troubles of their poorer neighbours; and these petitions enumerate a number of taxes which specially weighed on the poor. The tax on salt was the material burden most generally felt; while the lottery, with its deliberate encouragement of the spirit of gambling, increased the moral loathing of the Lombards for the Austrian rule. But the crushing out of national feeling and intellectual life were still the two main complaints of these petitioners; and, besides the more general proofs of these mentioned above, the petitioners dwelt with great emphasis on the conscription which carried off the youth of the country for eight years. And they finally demand that the representatives of the people should ask for "A complete and irrevocable separation in every branch of the administration; that they should be governed by a person, not by a foreign people;" and that "their own nationality, history, language, and brotherhood with other Italians should not be considered as crime and rebellion." They finally close with the words, "To-day you can still speak of peace. The future is in the hands of the God of Justice." The petition of Nazari had, as already mentioned, produced effects in the Lombard provinces; but it had also called out sympathy, though a little more slowly, in the neighbouring province of Venetia. There the hand of Austria seemed to have weighed more heavily than even in Milan. Perhaps the absence of old traditions of internal freedom, and the terrible corruption which had hastened the fall of its independence, may have had something to do with the silence of Venice. Perhaps, too, the sense of the singular baseness of the crime, by which they had become possessed of the Venetian district, may have goaded the Austrians into greater tyranny than even that which they exercised in their other dominions. But, whatever was the cause, there seems to be no doubt, as one of the historians of the time puts it, that Venice was then reckoned "the least sturdy city in the kingdom, and the one least disposed to movement." But even Venice could not be shut out from the influence of the Italian spirit, and the first sign of awakening life was called out, curiously enough, by a Buonaparte. The Prince of Canino, who had already succeeded in turning Scientific Congresses at Genoa and Milan into opportunities for political demonstrations, had come, in September, 1847, to Venice to preside in the Geological Section of the Congress. There he had introduced a discourse on Pius IX., which was received with loud applause; and when the Austrian police compelled him to leave the State, people followed him on his road with cheers of sympathy. But the spark which Charles Buonaparte had lighted required other hands to keep it alive; and it appeared that there was no one in the Venetian Congregation bold enough to take up the part which had been played at Milan by Nazari. Under these circumstances, Daniele Manin, the lawyer, who had already opposed the Austrian Government about the Lombardo-Venetian railway, came forward to take upon himself the office from which the official members of the Congregation had shrunk. He presented a petition calling on the members of the Venetian Congregation to imitate the example of Nazari, ending his appeal with the words, "It is unjust and injurious to suppose that the Government has granted to this kingdom a sham national representation." This address of Manin's was sent to the Congregation on December 21st. On the same day Niccolo Tommaseo addressed a letter to Baron von Kübeck, one of the Viennese ministry, asking for permission to print a discourse which he had just delivered at Venice on the Austrian press law. In this discourse he had shown that the Austrian law was in theory more liberal than the Piedmontese law, but that it was not carried out, a fact which he illustrated by the signatures to a petition which was then being circulated in favour of the proper enforcement of the Austrian law. "If this petition be granted," said Tommaseo, "the country will find peace, and Austria an honourable security." He ended with a remarkable warning--"If the movements of the brothers Bandiera alarmed the Austrian Government, how much more will there be danger now that the altar is no longer on the side of the throne?" Tommaseo had already been marked out by the Government as a dangerous person. He had been the first to introduce Mazzini to the public by securing the publication of his article on Dante which had been refused by the "Antologia," and he had joined with Mazzini in the revolutionary struggle of 1833. It was therefore as a pardoned man that he had been allowed to return to Venice; and the authorities were doubly indignant that he should venture to come forward again. But Manin's attempt to stir up the Venetian Congregation attracted the hostility of the Government more than Tommaseo's petition. He had already protested against a new form of official cruelty--the shutting up of a political prisoner in a lunatic asylum; and Palffy had threatened to let the prisoner out and shut up Manin instead. But it seemed for a time as if his attempt to stir up the Venetian Congregation would fail, for he could get no member to present his petition for him. Nothing daunted, however, he printed it, and sent it himself to the Congregation. This act soon attracted attention, and several provincial governments sent in similar petitions. Still the Venetian Congregation would not stir; so, on January 8, Manin sent in a second petition, in which he no longer confined himself to vague appeals, but set forth the necessary programme of reform. He demanded that the laws should be published and obeyed, that no obedience should be required to unpublished laws, and that the territories of Lombardy and Venetia should form a separate kingdom, not a province, "still less a mere outlying village of Vienna. We ought to be governed," he said, "according to our character and customs; to have a true national representation, and a moderately free press which could control and enlighten the chiefs of the Government and the representatives of the nation."... "The germs planted by the laws of 1815 had not developed, and only a madman or an archæologist would refer to them as a guide." He then proceeded to demand that the Viceroy of Lombardo-Venetia should be completely independent of all but the Emperor; that the finances and the army should also be separated from the government at Vienna; that the communal governments should be more independent than at present, and that trials should be by jury, and should be oral and public; that the power of the police should be limited, and that a moderate law should be substituted for the existing censorship of the Press; that a civic guard should be granted; that citizens should be made equal before the law; that Jewish disabilities and feudal tenures should be abolished, and that there should be a general revision of the laws. Manin's petition alarmed the timid spirits of the Congregation; and one of them named Moncenigo sent it to Governor Palffy. Manin had already protested against the appointment of this Moncenigo on the sham Commission of Enquiry which the Viceroy had granted; and no doubt personal irritation combined with political cowardice to prompt Moncenigo's breach of confidence. But, whatever its motives, this act of servility produced a protest from another lawyer, who, while denouncing Moncenigo's act as unworthy of the dignity of a commissioner, alluded to the period of Napoleon's rule as one of greater freedom than had ever been allowed by Austria. The police had in the meantime been preparing a report for the criminal tribunal; and on January 19, 1848, Manin was suddenly seized and carried off to prison on the charge of disturbing the public peace. In the meantime the Milanese movement had been assuming a more serious character. Demonstrations at the theatre, or abstentions from it, songs and other public expressions of opinion, were continually alarming the authorities. That separation, too, between the altar and the throne, to which Tommaseo had called attention, was even more marked in Milan than in Venice; and Radetzky a little later ordered his soldiers not to attend the sermons or the confessional of the Milanese clergy, "since they are our enemies." But this ferocious commander was resolved at all hazards to drive the Milanese to extremities; and he soon found an opportunity for carrying out his plans. One of the most universal forms of protest against the Government in Lombardy was the determined abstention from tobacco on the ground that it was a Government monopoly. This protest began on January 1, 1848, and it seemed at first as if it would be allowed to pass without remark. But Radetzky, in spite of the advice of Torresani, ordered his soldiers to appear in public, smoking. This order was carried out on January 2, 1848. In some parts of the town this demonstration provoked nothing but a few hisses from the crowd; but in one part, where the police and soldiers had collected in large numbers and many citizens had gathered to watch the smokers, the soldiers suddenly turned upon the crowd with their bayonets and charged them. Casati remonstrated with Torresani, but could get no redress, and was even himself assaulted by the police when he appealed to them. This, however, was merely the preliminary of Radetzky's proceedings. The following afternoon a much larger force of soldiers appeared in Milan, and every one of them was smoking. The crowd gathered as before, and was, as usual, largely composed of boys. Suddenly two of the sergeants gave a signal, and the soldiers, drawing their swords, rushed upon the crowd, wounding many boys seriously and killing an old man of seventy-four. The crowd fled at the attack; but the soldiers followed them, breaking into the shops in which they took refuge, destroying what they found there, and killing or wounding those whom they came across. In one place they broke into an inn, gave the hostess several severe wounds in the head, besides beating violently a little girl of four years old. Throughout the city these scenes of barbarity continued during the greater part of the day, and naturally aroused the most tremendous indignation. Similar smoking demonstrations took place in Brescia, Cremona, and Mantua; but in these places they seem to have passed off without a riot. In Pavia and Padua, on the other hand, the smokers came into collision with the students, who fought with their bare fists against the soldiers' swords. In Milan the indignation was not confined to the opponents of Austria. Monsignore Oppizzoni, who was on the whole a supporter of the Government, headed a deputation to the Viceroy in which he used these words:--"Your Highness, I am old, and have seen many things. I saw the profanation of the Jacobins and the cruelty of the Russians; but I never saw nor heard of before such atrocious acts as have happened in the days just past." Companies of ladies met at the Casa Borromeo to collect funds for the wounded. In all the principal cities of Lombardy funeral rites were performed for those who had died in the riots; and the people refused to walk in the Corso Francesco, which had been the scene of the principal massacre, and went instead to another street, which they renamed the Corso Pio Nono. Even some of those who had served the Austrian Government raised a protest against these atrocities. Count Guicciardini, for such a protest, was deprived of his office; while the Councillor, Angelo Decio, declared that he would resign if the Government would not put a restraint on the undisciplined soldiers. The Viceroy, taken aback at this sudden outburst of indignation, promised reforms and dismissed some of the troops from Milan. But the saner members of the Austrian Government had completely lost hold of affairs, and Radetzky had become the sole ruler of Milan. He harangued his troops in one of those bombastic addresses whose absurdity seemed to take even a deeper root in men's minds than the atrocity of his acts. "Let us not," he said, "be forced to open the wings of the Austrian eagle which have never yet been clipped." This calm ignoring of Austerlitz and Marengo specially tickled the fancy of the Milanese; more particularly as Radetzky was credited, whether justly or unjustly, with having played a somewhat ignominious part in the latter battle. A few utterly inadequate and trivial reforms were won from Metternich by the spectacle of the Sicilian revolution, the growing popularity of the Pope, and the Neapolitan Constitution. On January 18 it was proposed that the Viceroy should transfer himself from Milan to Verona; that he should be surrounded by persons better informed than his subordinates were; that the Government of Milan should be made more strong; and that some of the members of the Central Congregation of Milan should be summoned to Vienna. How absurdly unlike these concessions were to the real wishes and needs of the Lombard people it is scarcely necessary to point out; but, had the concessions been far more important, they would have been utterly worthless while they were accompanied by the closing of the clubs, the arrest of suspected persons, and, above all, while Radetzky still ruled Milan. It was to a population excited by this state of things that there came the news of the Neapolitan Constitution. The Milanese at once flocked to the Cathedral to return thanks, and on the walls of Milan were written up the words, "Viva il sangue Palermitano! Seguiamo l'esempio di Sicilia! Il pomo e maturo." And near these inscriptions was drawn the picture of a house in ruins, and over it, "Casa d'Austria." New riots followed, and the Universities of Pavia and Padua were closed by authority. But it was felt that the electric current had now spread right through Italy from Palermo to Milan; and, on the very day before the University of Pavia was closed, a secret circular was issued by the friends of Italy at Milan urging that further demonstrations should be abandoned for the present on the ground that "the cause of Italy is now secure." And though Metternich was still disposed to dispute that view, though he still held to the opinion which he had uttered in August, 1847, that "Italy was a mere geographical expression," he yet felt the shock of the Sicilian insurrection, and was willing to secure friends in other parts of the Austrian dominions by more important concessions than those which he had made to Lombardy and Venetia. _The_ most important, or at least the most obvious, of these popular victories had been gained in Hungary. There, indeed, Metternich had ingeniously contrived to defeat his own purpose, to weaken that division which had been gradually growing between the different sections of his opponents in Hungary, and to throw into the hands of Kossuth far more power than he had previously possessed. At the close of the Diet which had met in 1843 these elements of division were more various and more prominent than at any other period of the struggle. Besides the quarrel between Magyar and Slav, there had grown up a difference of opinion between the Magyar champions of reform. For while Kossuth was advocating the strengthening of the county governments as the great hope for Hungarian liberty, Baron Eötvös was urging the necessity for making the central parliament stronger at the expense of the local bodies. But Metternich, as if determined to consolidate the various elements of opposition against him, shortly after the dissolution of the Diet, took a step which, while it seemed to justify Kossuth's belief in the importance of county governments, silenced at the same time all those who were opposed to Kossuth, whether on grounds of race or party, and roused the dislike to Metternich's system to a height not previously known in Hungary. Mailath, the popular Chancellor of Hungary, was removed, and his successor, Apponyi, was directed to supersede the Hungarian County Assemblies by administrators appointed by himself. No step could possibly have been taken more likely to defeat Metternich's own objects; for if there was one institution round which all the peoples of Hungary rallied, it was their County Governments. Kossuth felt the strength of his position, and tried to remove the causes of division. For the moment he seemed even disposed to abandon his extreme anti-Slavonic policy, and opposed a proposal for compelling the use of the Hungarian language in elementary schools. The opposition to the Administrator system in the counties seemed to Kossuth an opportunity for bringing forward the whole body of reforms which he had long desired. The movement for relieving the peasants of their burdens had naturally widened the circle of those who took interest in political affairs; and a famine which was quickening the political feeling of the Silesian peasants and of the artizans of Berlin had also spread to Hungary, and was making the ordinary grievances of the peasant doubly grievous to him. Along with the demands for the relief of the peasantry from their burdens, Kossuth and his friends now put forward proposals for Constitutional reforms. Deak, though no longer a member of the Assembly, gave his assistance in putting their plans into shape, and for the first time there was formed, in 1847, a complete programme of the Hungarian Liberals. Their demands were: Publicity of parliamentary debates; a parliamentary journal in which speeches were to be published in full; triennial elections and regular yearly meetings of the Diet; improvement of the government of the towns and enlargement of their right of election to the Diet; universal taxation of all classes; the abolition of forced labour of the peasant, and of other restrictions on his mode of life. But while it was of importance that the reformers should thus be able to put into shape their programme of reform, it was round the "Administrator" question that the real fight gathered, and Metternich was urged to make at least some concessions on this point. When, then, the Diet met in 1847, Kossuth found himself supported by many who might have shrunk back from parts of his policy before. Count Batthyanyi had formerly acted with Szechenyi; but he now arrived at the conclusion that the opposition of that nobleman to Kossuth was unwise, and he drifted more and more into the position of the Leader of Opposition in the House of Magnates. Eötvös, too, however much he may have retained his belief in the importance of a centralizing line of policy, yet could not refuse to stand by his countrymen in defence of County Government against the Administrators of Metternich. Batthyanyi and Eötvös were thus willing to suspend their special grounds of opposition to Kossuth; but it was still impossible for them to carry with them the House of Magnates; and Kossuth's great influence in the country was increased by the fact that the centre of reform was rather to be found in the class of professional men to which he belonged than in the nobles who had been previously looked to as the leaders of the country. The Diet of 1847, therefore, saw a repetition of the struggle of the two Houses which had formed so prominent a part of the parliamentary history of 1839. In the Lower House Kossuth carried a measure for enforcing municipal taxes on nobles, and it was thrown out by the House of Magnates, who called upon the Lower House to limit themselves to votes of thanks or to express their grievances in general terms. But neither the land question nor the question of parliamentary liberty were felt by the Hungarian leaders to be as important at this crisis as the rescue of the counties from the tyranny of Metternich's Administrators; and it was the struggle on this point which was brought to a crisis by the news of the Sicilian Revolution and of the growing discontents in Milan. Again Metternich was disposed to make concessions, and again his concessions were so framed as to be utterly inadequate to the occasion. He declared that the Administrators should only be appointed under exceptional circumstances; and that the present Administrators should be withdrawn when the exceptional circumstances in the counties were removed. This proposal was unwelcome to all parties; and so much force did the discontent of the country gain that on February 29 a motion in favour of reform in the representation was carried in the House of Magnates. When this resolution had passed the House of Representatives Szechenyi entered in his diary the words, "Tout est perdu." In the meantime the Hungarian movement had been keeping alive hopes which in late years had begun to show themselves in Vienna. In that centre of the Metternich system it was not wonderful that political death had been more complete and unmistakeable than in any other part of Europe. While in other parts of Europe the press was interfered with, here Count Sedlnitzky, the head of the police, had it completely under his control. In other parts of the Empire national feeling was discouraged. Here, for even reminding the Austrians of the popular efforts against Napoleon, Hormayr was driven from the Archduchy of Austria. In other parts of the Empire local affairs might sometimes be interfered with, but were often passed over as unimportant; in Vienna officials were thrust into the place of the elected Town Council. Nor was there any assembly at all fitted to be the mouthpiece of Austrian discontent in communications between the people and the Government. The only assembly which met at Vienna, except the Town Council, was that of the Estates of Lower Austria. This assembly represented mainly the aristocracy, even the richer burghers not possessing more than a nominal voice in their councils. Therefore, even if this body had possessed as much freedom as was allowed to the Hungarian Diet, they could not have rallied the people round them, because they did not understand their wants and had no sympathy with them. Indeed, the barrier between rich and poor, noble and serf, seems to have been more marked, or at any rate more painfully felt, in the province of Lower Austria than in any part of the Empire, except, perhaps, Bohemia. For in Vienna there was rapidly growing up all the miseries of a city proletariate. The protectionist tariff made dear the articles of food, while the absolute suppression of public discussion, and the obstacles thrown in the way of any voluntary organization, prevented even the benevolent men among the wealthier classes from understanding anything of the wants of the poor. So far were the Government from interfering to correct this evil that, when, in 1816, the citizens of Salzburg petitioned for a reduction of taxes, on the ground that people were dying of hunger in the streets, Francis rebuked the citizens for the arrogance of this appeal, and marked Salzburg out for special disfavour in consequence. But the crushing out of genuine education was so complete that the poorer classes in Vienna were for a long time unable to see how their misery was increased by the arrangements of the Government. They saw that no leader in the well-to-do classes seemed to concern himself in their affairs. For while healthy political and intellectual life was repressed in Vienna, that town was not, after all, an unpleasant abode for those who gave themselves up to mere self-indulgence. Menz's precedent of the Roman circus was followed here also; and Vienna became known as the "Capua der Geister." Thus, deprived alike of sympathy and power of self-help, the poor could only show their bitterness in occasional bread-riots, the reports of which were carefully excluded from the papers of the Government. One result of this utter depression was that the Viennese eagerly caught at any signs of moderation, or the most superficial tendency to Liberalism, in any of their rulers; and, being at the centre of affairs, they were naturally able to get hints of differences among the official people which were unknown to the citizens of other towns. Thus they knew that the Government, which to outsiders seemed wholly concentrated in Metternich, was, at least nominally, divided between three persons--Metternich, the Archduke Louis, and a Bohemian nobleman named Kolowrat. The third of this trio was credited with the desire for a certain amount of liberty; and it was supposed to be by his encouragement that the National Bohemian Museum was founded in Prague and became a centre of Slavonic culture. Kolowrat's Liberal sympathies would not have counted for much in any other place or time. But the fact that he was an opponent of Metternich was enough to gain him some sympathy from the Viennese; and when, after the death of Francis, Metternich tried to get rid of Kolowrat, he only increased the general sympathy for one who was thus marked as his opponent. The death of Francis, an event hardly felt in the rest of Europe, was of considerable importance to Vienna; not so much from any actual changes which it produced as from the new hope which it aroused. A dull flame of a sort of loyalty to the House of Hapsburg still lingered in the breasts of the Viennese; and the sole consolation which reconciled them to their abject condition was the belief that they were at least carrying out the wishes of the Head of that House. Such a consideration, if, from one point of view, it may be described as a consolation, yet increased the sense of despair of any redress of grievances. But the accession of the Emperor Ferdinand changed this feeling. He at least was credited with the desire for a milder policy; while the fact that he had suffered for years from epileptic fits made it easier to believe that he was not responsible for the failure to carry out his own plans; and thus a heavier burden of hatred was thrown upon Metternich. It was not, indeed, confined to his political opponents. The Archduchess Sophia, the wife of the Heir Apparent, had reasons of her own for disliking him; and his own arrogance, backed by the arrogance of his wife, roused against him the opposition of that aristocratic part of the community which was inclined to favour his general policy. On the other hand, the admission of the Archduke Francis Charles, the heir to the throne, to the Council of the Emperor, tended to increase the belief in the Liberal tendencies of Ferdinand. But the concession in 1842 of the permission to establish a Reading and Debating Society was considered by the Viennese the greatest triumph of Liberal principles. The formation of this Society was sanctioned by Ferdinand, while Metternich was temporarily absent on a journey for his health. Ferdinand was induced to consent to it, by his respect for his former tutor Sommaruga, who had taken a part in its formation. This Society speedily became a centre of all kinds of discussion; and Sedlnitzky, the head of the police, soon began to suspect and hamper it, and thereby to point out to the rising reformers their natural leaders. Professor Hye, a man, as it afterwards appeared, of no very great strength of purpose, praised this Society as a power in the State which had been gained by the spirit of Association. A police spy at once hastened to the Court; the Council was called together; and a proposal was made to deprive Hye of his professorship. Archduke Louis had the good sense to oppose this proposal; but the fact that it had been made speedily got wind, and attracted a certain amount of sympathy to Hye. Newspapers and pamphlets, too, somehow gained ground under the new _régime_; and three writers especially acquired an influence in stirring up public feeling not unlike that which had been exercised by Balbo, Gioberti, and others in Italy. A writer named Andrian took up the question of reform from the aristocratic side, stirred up the Landtag in Bohemia to assert the Constitutional rights of which they had never been entirely deprived, and also influenced the Estates of Lower Austria to strengthen their body by admitting a more complete representation of the citizens. Schuselka, on the other hand, called upon the Emperor to turn from the nobles as untrustworthy, and rely for his help on the citizens. But the man who seems to have drawn most support and attention to his opinions was Ignatz Kuranda. He did not venture to propound his ideas in Austria, but started a paper in Leipzig called the _Grenz Boten_. To this all Austrians who desired reform, whether from the aristocratic or democratic point of view, hastened to contribute. And the Government soon became so much alarmed at these writings that they demanded that both Kuranda and Schuselka should be expelled from all the States of Germany. It was a sign, perhaps, that Metternich's power was beginning, even at that time, to wane, that he was unable to obtain this concession; and then the paid writers of the Government set themselves to answer the reformers. This attempt, of course, only produced new writers on the side of Kuranda; and so the movement gathered additional force. But however excellent the awakening of intellectual freedom might be, no steady movement of reform could be inaugurated at this period which did not sooner or later gather round the national principle. Neither Vienna nor the Archduchy had any traditions of national life; while the Austrian Empire, which, in its separate form, was not half a century old, was the very negation of the national principle. While, therefore, the Viennese looked for lessons in Constitutional freedom to the neighbouring State of Hungary, their only hope of sharing in a national life seemed to rest on their chance of absorption in Germany. Hence arose a movement in many ways hopeless and illogical, and the cause of much injustice to other races; but which, nevertheless, supplied a strength and vigour to the reformers of Vienna which they would otherwise have lacked. They have been denounced for wishing to sacrifice the position of their city as the capital of a great Empire by consenting to its absorption in another nation, in which it would play, at best, only a secondary part. Yet the desire to take a share in the common struggles, common traditions, and common hopes of men of the same language and race is surely a nobler aspiration than the ambition to be the centre of a large number of jarring races, held together by military force or diplomatic intrigue. Circumstances and History had made the desire of the Viennese impossible of execution; but this desire had none the less an element of nobility in it, which should not be disregarded. The first to give prominent utterance to the new aspiration was the Archduke John, who, at a banquet in Cologne, proposed a toast which he afterwards to some extent tried to explain away, but which was long remembered by the Germans. "No Prussia! No Austria! One great united Germany, firm as its hills!" At that period, the most satisfactory bond between Austria and Germany would have been found in the Zollverein which had been established by Prussia. A German named List came to Vienna in 1844 for the purpose of encouraging this union; and a banquet was held in the Hoher Markt at Vienna at which List gave the toast of "German Unity," which was welcomed with loud cheers, while the health of Metternich, proposed by the American Consul, was received in dead silence. In the meantime, the discussions on public affairs were growing more and more keen; and, as the news arrived of the various rebuffs to Metternich mentioned in the last chapter, the reformers gained heart. Yet it still seemed doubtful whether they could enlist the sympathy of the poorer classes on the side of Constitutional liberty. The Estates of Lower Austria, however willing to make certain concessions to popular feeling, showed none of that care for the improvement of the condition of the poor which had been prominent in the Hungarian Diet, and also in the Lombard petition. The horrible contrast between wealth and poverty, during the distress of 1846 and 1847, is illustrated by the following facts:--In the year 1846 a widow in Vienna killed one of her children and set it before the others for food. About the same time, a Viennese banker gave a dinner at which strawberries were produced costing in our money about a pound a-piece! This awful contrast would naturally prevent the poor from feeling any keen sympathy for reform movements inaugurated by the wealthier classes; yet, in this very year 1846, some of the poorest citizens of Vienna began, for the first time, to show a strong desire for the removal of Metternich from office. The ground of this new outburst of feeling was the belief that Metternich's championship of the Sonderbund arose from his strong sympathy with the Jesuits. It is difficult to discern the exact ground of the bitter feeling of the poor of Vienna against this Order. The Emperor Francis had disliked and discouraged the Jesuits as much as their bitterest opponents could wish; nor had Ferdinand been able to secure them any prominent position in the State; while Metternich's real feeling towards them was, as before remarked, by no means so friendly as the Liberals supposed. The citizens of Vienna could therefore hardly believe that these men were the pampered favourites of fortune; and the only explanation of the universal hatred towards them must be that their air of mystery and power made them natural objects of suspicion to men who had been driven desperate by poverty, and who were not able to discover the causes of their misery. Whatever the reason may be, there is little doubt that Metternich's supposed sympathy with the Jesuits on this occasion roused bitterness against him in the hearts of many whose poverty had hitherto made them callous about questions of government. But a more reasonable bond between the poorer classes and the reforming leaders was soon to be established. The discussions of the Viennese Reading and Debating Club had been concerned during these terrible years with the condition of the poor; and, on April 10, 1847, the leaders of the Club held a meeting to prepare for the organization of a soup-kitchen. They soon formed a Committee, under the leadership of the future Minister Bach, and issued an appeal for help. For issuing this appeal without the previous sanction of the censorship the Committee received a stern rebuke from Sedlnitzky; and though, after some discussion, the police allowed the appeal to appear, the officials complained continually of the independent action of this Committee, and tried to hamper it in every way. It was not merely, however, as the centre of efforts for the relief of the poor that the Debating Club and those who supported it attracted the sympathy of the reformers. Both there and in the University there were ever-growing signs of political life. Professor Hye had fiercely denounced the annexation of Cracow, and had encouraged his pupils to debate the subject of the freedom of the Press; and Professor Kudler had promoted the study of political economy. The books of both these professors were prohibited by the Government, and, in consequence, were widely read. More prominent still, as champions of University Reform, were the leaders of the medical profession. The Court physicians had succeeded, for a time, in bringing the Medical Faculty under the complete supervision of the Government; but in 1844 the students undertook to draw up new rules which should emancipate their course of study from this subservient position; and, after three years' struggle, in September, 1847, they won the day, and established a government for their Faculty which was independent of Metternich. This new institution attracted the sympathies of the freest spirits of Vienna, and the growth of clubs was favoured by the leading medical professors. It was obvious that the great movements which were stirring in Italy would affect the feeling of the Viennese; but the result was perhaps less in Vienna than in other parts of Europe, because of the dislike felt for the Germans by the Italians. And, in spite of the growing desire for a German national life, the Viennese could not throw off the coarse Imperialism which naturally connected itself with the position of their city; nor could they get rid entirely of the old theory of Joseph II., that enlightenment and culture must necessarily come to all races from the Germans. But the desire to reconcile the love of liberty with the instinct of domination showed itself curiously enough in a pamphlet which appeared in 1848 called "Die Sibyllinische Bücher," by Karl Möring, an officer in the army. Möring, like Schuselka, called on the Emperor to become a citizen king, and to break down all monopolies and oligarchical distinctions. But, while this writer wished to let the Italians go as being unnaturally connected with the Empire, he desired to compensate the Emperor for this loss by the annexation of the Balkan provinces; and he uttered the warning that, unless freedom were granted, the Austrian Empire would break up, and Magyars and Czechs on the East and West would found separate kingdoms. "The Empire," says Möring, "can reckon thirty-eight million subjects, but not one political citizen; not one man who, on moral and political grounds, can be proved to be an Austrian.... The Austrian has no Fatherland." This pamphlet produced a great effect, for it appealed at once to the two great rival aspirations of the Austrian Liberals; and perhaps it attracted all the more attention from the fact that the writer was a captain in the army. Metternich, however, steadily refused to believe in the extent of the discontent, and rebuked Sedlnitzky for the warnings that he brought. It was evident that Metternich was determined to fight to the last, and, if possible, to ignore to the last the dangers that were surrounding him. Kolowrat, after a fierce struggle, succeeded in securing a new College of Censorship, which he thought would be more favourable to literature; but no sooner was it established than Sedlnitzky succeeded in turning it into a new engine of oppression, and so heavy a one that the booksellers feared that their trade would be entirely crushed out. And, while Metternich and his followers were prepared to deal in this manner with the people of Vienna, he at least was equally determined to crush those other opponents whom he considered the most troublesome at the moment. On January 12, 1848, the Austrian Government had, in concert with France and the German Confederation, threatened Switzerland with a commercial blockade, to be followed by armed intervention, if the Swiss attempted to make any change in their Constitution without the consent of the three Great Powers; and Metternich was preparing for a conference to devise means for carrying out this threat. With his Lombard subjects he was prepared to deal still more summarily; and, on February 22, the following Edict was issued for that province. In case of riot, sentence of death was to be given in fifteen days by a Commission, without appeal to the Emperor. Everyone who wore certain distinctive badges, sung or recited certain songs, wore or exhibited certain colours, applauded or hissed certain passages in a drama or concert, joined in a crowd at a given place of meeting, whether for the purpose of raising subscriptions or of dissuading from acting with certain persons, might be imprisoned, banished, or fined to the extent of 10,000 lire. Such were the measures by which Metternich was hoping to crush out the growing freedom of Europe, when the shock of the French Revolution once more disturbed his calculations. FOOTNOTE: [8] I do not know what relation he was to the more celebrated Santa Rosa of 1821. CHAPTER VII. THE DOWNFALL OF DESPOTISM. MARCH, 1848. Character of the French Revolution of 1848.--Its unlikeness to the revolutions in the rest of Europe.--Position of South German States.--Würtemberg.--Bavaria.--Baden.--Struve and Hecker.--The Offenburg Meeting.--Bassermann's Motion.--The procession to Carlsruhe.--The risings in Würtemberg--in Bavaria--in the small States--in Saxony.--Effect of French and German risings in Vienna.--Kossuth's speech of March 3.--Its importance.--Its effect on Vienna.--Dr. Löhner's Motion.--The "Eleven Points."--Effect of the reform movement on the rulers of Austria.--The Meeting at Heidelberg.--Heinrich von Gagern.--Division between Students and Professors in Vienna.--The deputation of March 12.--The meeting of March 13.--The "first free word."--The "Estates."--The insurrection.--The workmen's movement.--Pollet.--The fall of Metternich.--Intrigues of Windischgrätz and the Camarilla.--Kossuth in Vienna.--Austria "on the path of progress."--The insurrection in Berlin.--Its character and success.--Bohemia in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.--Policy of Ferdinand II. and III.--of Maria Theresa--of Joseph II.--The language question.--The March movement in Prague.--Gabler.--Peter Faster.--The language revives.--The first meeting at the Wenzel's-bad.--The two petitions.--The mission to Vienna.--Contrast of Metternich's treatment of Lombardy with that of other parts of the Empire.--The secret proclamations.--The final concessions.--Augusto Anfossi.--His programme.--The rising of the 18th of March.--The appeal to O'Donnell.--The "Five Days."--Flight of Radetzky.--Difference of Venetian movement from the other movements.--Manin's imprisonment and its effects.--His release.--The Civic Guard.--Death of Marinovich.--Magyars and Croats.--Venice free.--Palffy's treachery.--General summary of the March risings. The reign of Louis Philippe had indirectly produced stirrings of thought in France which were at a later period to have their influence on Europe; and which, indeed, may be said to be affecting us at this moment. But the time for this influence had not yet arrived; and the immediate result of that reign had been in some measure to confirm France in the secondary position in European affairs to which the fall of Napoleon had naturally brought her. The foreign aggression, which had been favoured by the Ministers of Charles X., had given place to intrigues like those relating to the Spanish marriages; the despotic policy which had forced on the revolution of July, 1830, had made way for manipulation and corruption; and aristocratic pretensions for the arrogance of bourgeois wealth. Attempts at reform were defeated rather by fraud than by force; and, though the immediate cause of the revolution was an act of violence, it was to the cry "A bas les corrompus" that the revolutionists rushed into the parliament of Louis Philippe. The questions, therefore, with which France had to deal, vitally important as they were, were not those which were agitating Europe at that period. And, if the subjects in which France was interested were not yet ripe for handling by the other nations of Europe, still less could the watchwords of the European revolution be inscribed on the banner of France. The principle of nationality, the development, that is, of a freer life by the voluntary union of men of the same race and language, was not one which could interest the French. The first movement for distinctly national independence in Europe had been the rising of Spain against the French in 1808; the second, the rising of Germany in 1813; and, though there might be in France sentimental sympathies with Greeks and Poles, these were due rather to special classical feeling in the one case, and traditions of common wars in the other, than to any real sympathy with national independence. France, at the end of the previous century, had offered to secure to Europe the Rights of Man, and had presented them instead with the tyranny of Napoleon; the rights of nations had been asserted against her, and the national movement would be continued irrespective of her. It may sound a paradox, but is none the less true, that this absence of French initiative in the European revolution of 1848 is most strikingly illustrated in those countries which seemed most directly to catch the revolutionary spark from France, viz., Würtemberg, Bavaria, and Baden. The States of South Germany had, ever since 1815, been a continual thorn in the side of Metternich. A desire for independence of Austria had combined with an antagonism to Prussia to keep alive in those States a spirit with which Metternich found it very hard to deal. Würtemberg had been the first to hamper his progress towards despotic rule; while the size of Bavaria and its importance in the German Confederation had enabled its rulers to maintain a tone of independence which Metternich could not rebuke with the same freedom which he used towards the princes of less important States. But it was in the smallest and apparently weakest of the three States of Southern Germany that the movement was being matured which was eventually to be so dangerous to the power both of Austria and France. The Grand Duchy of Baden had had, since 1815, a very peculiar history of its own. The Grand Duke had been one of those who had granted a Constitution to his people not long after the Congress of Vienna. A reaction had, however, soon set in; no doubt, to some extent, under the influence of Metternich. But it was not till 1825 that the opposition of the people of Baden seemed to be crushed and a servile Parliament secured. Again a Grand Duke of Liberal opinions came to the throne in 1830; but he, in his turn, was forced to bend to Metternich's power, and to submit to the Frankfort Decrees in 1832; and in 1839 Metternich succeeded in getting a Minister appointed who was entirely under his control. But these public submissions on the part of the official leaders made it easier for a few private citizens to keep alive the spirit of opposition in Baden. In 1845 Gustav Struve had come forward, not merely to demand reform in Baden, but also to prophesy the fall of Metternich. For this offence he was imprisoned; but he continued to keep alive an element of opposition in Mannheim, where he founded gymnastic unions, and edited a journal in which he denounced the Baden Ministry. But, though Struve seems to have been one of the first to give expression to the aspirations of the Baden people, the man whom they specially delighted to honour was a leader in the Chamber of Deputies named Hecker, a lawyer of Mannheim, who had gained much popular sympathy by pleading gratuitously in the law courts. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1847; and he soon began to distinguish himself by his championship of German movements, and, more particularly, by his sympathy with the reform movement in the German Catholic Church and with the German aspirations of the people of Schleswig-Holstein. By an accidental circumstance, he and another Baden representative named Izstein attracted a large amount of attention to themselves; for, happening to stop at Berlin in the course of a journey, they were suddenly, and without any apparent reason, ordered to leave the town. This was believed to be the first occasion on which a representative of the people had been treated in this contemptuous manner; and thus the names of Hecker and Izstein became more widely known in Germany than those of the other leaders of the Baden movement. The struggle in Switzerland naturally had its effect in Baden; and the Grand Duke began once more to assert those Constitutional principles which he had held when first he came to the throne. He did not, however, keep pace with the desires of the reformers; and so, on September 12, 1847, the Baden Liberals had met at Offenburg, and demanded freedom of the Press, trial by jury, and other reforms, amongst which should be mentioned, as a sign of Struve's opinions, the settlement of the differences between labour and capital. It was for their action at this meeting that the reformers had been threatened with the prosecution which never took place. But, in the meantime, the rush of German feeling was adding a new element to the reform movement in Baden. Amand Goegg had been trying to revive the demand for a German National Assembly. The religious reforms of Ronge, which had excited so much interest in Saxony, also attracted sympathy in Baden. Struve's gymnastic unions kept alive the traditions of Jahn; and song, as usual, came to the help of patriotism. These causes so hastened the movement for German unity that, on February 12, 1848, Bassermann moved, in the Baden Chamber, that the Grand Duke should be petitioned to take steps for promoting common legislation for Germany. This motion, coming from a man who was never reckoned an advanced Liberal, naturally hastened the awakening of German feeling; and on February 27 the Baden Liberals met at Mannheim, and decided to summon a meeting at Carlsruhe, at which they intended to put forward the demand for a really representative German Parliament. Thus it was on ground already prepared that there now fell the news of the French Revolution; and when, on March 1, the leaders of the procession from Mannheim entered Carlsruhe, wearing the black, red, and gold of United Germany, the Ministry were ready to make concessions; and, on March 2, the Second Chamber of Baden demanded the repeal of the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819, of the Frankfort Decrees of 1832, and of the Vienna Decrees of 1834; and they further required that the Government should take means to secure representation of the German people in the Bundestag. While Baden was striking the keynote of German unity, the other small States of Germany were preparing to take it up. In Würtemberg the Ministers had grown, in latter days, somewhat tyrannical; and, when the citizens gathered in Stuttgart to demand freedom of the Press and a German Parliament, the President of the Council advised the King to summon troops to his aid. But the King was more Liberal than his Ministers; he consented to call to office a Liberal Ministry; and the Chamber which was now formed speedily decreed the abolition of feudal dues. In Bavaria the power exercised by Lola Montez over the King had long been distasteful to the sterner reformers. She had attempted, indeed, to pay court to the Liberals; but she had given such offence to some of the students of Munich as to provoke a riot which led to the closing of the University. The nobles and Jesuits would now have gladly sacrificed the King's favourite to the people; but the Baden rising had fired the Bavarian Liberals with a desire for much greater reforms. Their hatred of the Jesuits quickened their zeal; for that body was supposed to divide with Lola Montez the conscience of the King. Animated by these various causes of indignation, the Bavarian Liberals were ready enough for action; and on the news of the Baden movement they broke into the arsenal at Munich, provided themselves with arms, and demanded a German Parliament. The King consented to summon, at any rate, a Bavarian Parliament for the present; but, unable to fall in readily with the popular movement, and resenting the opposition to his favourite, he abdicated a few weeks later in favour of his son. The spark, once lighted in the South, spread among the smaller States of Germany. In Hesse Cassel the Elector tried to offer some opposition; but the citizens of Hanau marched upon Cassel and compelled the Elector to yield. In Hesse Darmstadt the Grand Duke yielded more readily, under the influence of his Minister, Heinrich von Gagern. In Nassau the movement received additional interest from the seizure by the victorious people of the Johannisberg, which belonged to Metternich. But the most interesting of the struggles was that in Saxony. Robert Blum was present at a ball in Leipzig when the news arrived of the French Revolution. He at once hastened to consult his friends; and they agreed to act through the Town Council of Leipzig, and sketched out the demands which they desired should be laid before the King. These were: "A reorganization of the Constitution of the German Bund in the spirit and in accordance with the needs of the times, for which the way is to be prepared by the unfettering of the Press, and the summoning of representatives of all German peoples to the Assembly of the Bund." The Town Council adopted this address on March 1, and sent a deputation with it to Dresden; and, on the 3rd, the people gathered to meet the deputation on their return. The following is the account given by the son of Robert Blum:-- "By anonymous placards on the wall, the population of Leipzig was summoned, on the evening of March 3, to meet at the railway-station the deputation returning from Dresden. Since the space was too narrow in this place, the innumerable mass marched to the market-place, which, as well as the neighbouring streets, they completely filled. In perfect silence the thousands awaited here the arrival of the deputation, which, at last, towards nine o'clock, arrived, and was greeted with unceasing applause. Town Councillor Seeburg spoke first of the deep emotion of the King; after him spoke Biedermann. But the crowd uproariously demanded Robert Blum. At last Blum appeared on the balcony of the Town Council House. His voice alone controlled the whole market-place, and was even heard in the neighbouring streets. He, too, sought, by trying to quiet them, to turn them away from the subject of the address and of the King's answer. But the people broke in uproariously even into his speech with the demand, 'The answer! The answer!' It could no longer be concealed that the petitions of the town had received harsh rejection. Then came a loud and passionate murmur. The masses had firmly hoped that the deputation would bring with them from Dresden the news of the dismissal of the hated Ministers. But Blum continued his speech, and they renewed their attention to him. 'In Constitutional countries,' said he, 'it is not the King, but the Ministers who are responsible. They, too, bear the responsibility of the rejection of the Leipzig proposals. The people must press for their removal.' He added that he would bring forward in the next meeting of the Town Representatives the proposal that the King should dismiss the Ministry, 'which does not possess the confidence of the people.' Amidst tremendous shouts of exultation and applause, the appeased assembly dispersed." [Illustration: ROBERT BLUM.] Blum was as successful with his colleagues as with the crowd; and the Town Council now demanded from the King the dismissal of his Ministers, the meeting of the Assembly, and freedom of the Press. The King tried to resist the last of these three proposals, pleading his duty to the Bund. But even the Bundestag had felt the spirit of the times; and, on March 1, had passed a resolution giving leave to every Government to abolish the censorship of the Press. The King seemed to yield, and promised to fulfil all that was wished; but the reactionary party in Dresden had become alarmed at the action of the men of Leipzig; and so, on March 11, when the men of Leipzig supposed that all was granted, General von Carlowitz entered their city at the head of a strong force, and demanded that the Town Council should abstain from exciting speeches; that the Elocution Union should give up all political discussion; that the processions of people should cease; and, above all, that the march from Leipzig to Dresden, which was believed to be then intended, should be given up. These demands were met by Blum with an indignant protest. "Five men," said he, "who manage the army cannot understand that, though their bullets may kill men, they cannot make a single hole in the idea that rules the world." The Town Councillors of Leipzig were equally firm. Carlowitz abandoned his attempt as hopeless; and on March 13 the King summoned a Liberal Ministry, who abolished the censorship of the Press, granted publicity of legal proceedings, trial by jury, and a wider basis for the Saxon parliament, and promised to assist in the reform of the Bund. In the meantime the success of the French Revolution had awakened new hopes in Vienna. Soon after the arrival of the news, a placard appeared on one of the city gates bearing the words, "In a month Prince Metternich will be overthrown! Long live Constitutional Austria!" Metternich himself was greatly alarmed, and began to listen to proposals for extending the power of the Lower Austrian Estates. Yet he still hoped by talking over and discussing these matters to delay the executions of reforms till a more favourable turn in affairs should render them either harmless or unnecessary. But great as was the alarm caused by the South German risings, and great as were the hopes which they kindled in the Viennese, the word which was to give definiteness and importance to the impulses which were stirring in Vienna could not come from Bavaria or Saxony. Much as they might wish to connect themselves with a German movement, the Viennese could not get rid of the fact that they were, for the present, bound up with a different political system. Nor was it wholly clear that the German movement was as yet completely successful. The King of Prussia seemed to be meditating a reactionary policy, and had even threatened to despatch troops to put down the Saxon Liberals; and the King of Hanover also was disposed to resist the movement for a German parliament. It was from a country more closely bound up with the Viennese Government, and yet enjoying traditions of more deeply rooted liberty, that the utterance was to come which was eventually to rouse the Viennese to action. The readiness of the nobles to accept the purely verbal concession offered by Metternich in the matter of the "Administrators" had shown Kossuth that there could be no further peace. But he still knew how and when to strike the blow; and it was not by armed insurrection so much as by the declaration of a policy that he shook the rule of Metternich. On March 3 a Conservative member of the Presburg Assembly brought forward a motion for inquiry into the Austrian bank-notes. Kossuth answered that the confusion in the affairs of Austrian commerce produced an evil effect on Hungarian finances; and he showed the need of an independent finance ministry for Hungary. Then he went on to point out that this same confusion extended to other parts of the monarchy. "The actual cause of the breaking up of peace in the monarchy, and of all the evils which may possibly follow from it, lies in the system of Government." He admitted that it was hard for those who had been brought up under this system to consent to its destruction. "But," he went on, "the People lasts for ever, and we wish also that the Country of the People should last for ever. For ever too should last the splendour of that Dynasty whom we reckon as our rulers. In a few days the men of the past will descend into their graves; but for that scion of the House of Hapsburg who excites such great hopes, for the Archduke Francis Joseph, who at his first coming forward earned the love of the nation,--for him there waits the inheritance of a splendid throne which derives its strength from freedom. Towards a Dynasty which bases itself on the freedoms of its Peoples enthusiasm will always be roused; for it is only the freeman who can be faithful from his heart; for a bureaucracy there can be no enthusiasm." He then urged that the future of the Dynasty depended on the hearty union between the nations which lived under it. "This union," he said, "can only be brought about by respecting the nationalities, and by that bond of Constitutionalism which can produce a kindred feeling. The bureau and the bayonet are miserable bonds." He then went on to apologize for not examining the difficulties between Hungary and Croatia. The solution of the difficulties of the Empire would, he held, solve the Croatian question too. If it did not, he promised to consider that question with sympathy, and examine it in all its details. He concluded by proposing an address to the Emperor which should point out that it was the want of Constitutional life in the whole Empire which hindered the progress of Hungary; and that, while an independent Government and a separate responsible Ministry were absolutely essential to Hungary, it was also necessary that the Emperor should surround his throne, in all matters of Government, with such Constitutional arrangements as were indispensably demanded by the needs of the time. This utterance has been called the Baptismal speech of the Revolution. Coming as it did directly after the news of the French Revolution, it gave a definiteness to the growing demands for freedom; but it did more than this. Metternich had cherished a growing hope that the demand for Constitutional Government in Vienna might be gradually used to crush out the independent position of Hungary, by absorbing the Hungarians in a common Austrian parliament; and he had looked upon the Croatian question as a means for still further weakening the power of the Hungarian Diet. Kossuth's speech struck a blow at these hopes by declaring that freedom for any part of the Empire could only be obtained by working for the freedom of the whole; he swept aside for the moment those national and provincial jealousies which were the great strength of the Austrian despotism, and appealed to all the Liberals of the Empire to unite against the system which was oppressing them all. Had Kossuth remained true to the faith which he proclaimed in this speech, it is within the limits of probability that the whole Revolution of 1848-9 might have had a different result. The Hungarian Chancellor, Mailath, was so alarmed at Kossuth's speech that he hindered the setting out of the deputation which was to have presented the address to the Emperor. But he could not prevent the speech from producing its effect. Although Presburg was only six hours' journey from Vienna, the route had been made so difficult that the news of anything done in the Hungarian Diet had hitherto reached Vienna in a very roundabout manner, and had sometimes been a week on its way. The news of this speech, however, arrived on the very next day; and Kossuth's friend Pulszky immediately translated it into German, and circulated it among the Viennese. A rumour of its contents had spread before the actual speech. It was said that Kossuth had declared war against the system of Government, and that he had said State bankruptcy was inevitable. But, as the news became more definite, the minds of the Viennese fixed upon two points: the denunciation of the men of the past, and the demand for a Constitution for Austria. So alarmed did the Government become at the effect of this speech, that they undertook to answer it in an official paper. The writer of this answer called attention to the terrible scenes which he said were being enacted in Paris, which proved, according to him, that the only safety for the governed was in rallying round the Government. This utterance naturally excited only contempt and disgust; and the ever-arriving news of new Constitutions granted in Germany swelled the enthusiasm which had been roused by Kossuth's speech. The movement still centred in the professors of the University. On March 1 Dr. Löhner had proposed, at one of the meetings of the Reading and Debating Society, that negotiations should be opened with the Estates; and that they should be urged to declare their Assembly permanent, the country in danger, and Metternich a public enemy. This proposal marked a definite step in Constitutional progress. The Estates of Lower Austria, which met in Vienna, had, indeed, from time to time, expressed their opinions on certain public grievances; but these opinions had been generally disregarded by Francis and Metternich; and, though the latter had of late talked of enlarging the powers of the Estates, he had evidently intended such words partly as mere talk, in order to delay any efficient action, and partly as a bid against the concessions which had been made by the King of Prussia. That the leaders of a popular movement should suggest an appeal to the Estates of Lower Austria was, therefore, an unexpected sign of a desire to find any legal centre for action, however weak in power, and however aristocratic in composition, that centre might be. Dr. Löhner's proposal, however, does not seem to have been generally adopted; and, instead of the suggested appeal to the Estates, a programme of eleven points was circulated by the Debating Society. When we consider that the Revolution broke out in less than a fortnight after this petition, we cannot but be struck with the extreme moderation of the demands now made. Most of the eleven points were concerned with proposals for the removal either of forms of corruption, or of restraints on personal liberty, and they were chiefly directed against those interferences with the life and teaching of the Universities which were causing so much bitterness in Vienna. Such demands for Constitutional reforms as were contained in this programme were certainly not of an alarming character. The petitioners asked that the right of election to the Assembly of Estates should be extended to citizens and peasants; that the deliberative powers of the Estates should be enlarged; and that the whole Empire should be represented in an Assembly, for which, however, the petitioners only asked a consultative power. Perhaps the three demands in this petition which would have excited the widest sympathy were those in favour of the universal arming of the people, the universal right of petition, and the abolition of the censorship. The expression of desire for reform now became much more general, and even some members of the Estates prepared an appeal to their colleagues against the bureaucratic system. But the character and tone of the utterances of these new reformers somewhat weakened the effect which had been produced by the bolder complaints of the earlier leaders of the movement; for, while the students of the University and some of their professors still showed a desire for bold and independent action, the merchants caught eagerly at the sympathy of the Archduke Francis Charles, while the booksellers addressed to the Emperor a petition in which servility passes into blasphemy. These signs of weakness were no doubt observed by the Government; and it was not wonderful that, under these circumstances, Metternich and Kolowrat should have been able to persuade themselves that they could still play with the Viennese, and put them off with promises which need never be performed. Archduke Louis alone seems to have foreseen the coming storm, but was unable to persuade his colleagues to make military preparations to meet it. In the meantime the movement among the students was assuming more decided proportions; and their demands related as usual to the great questions of freedom of speech, freedom of the Press, and freedom of teaching; and to these were now added the demand for popular representation, the justifications for which they drew from Kossuth's speech of March 3. But, while Hungary supplied the model of Constitutional Government, the hope for a wider national life connected itself more and more with the idea of a united Germany. Two days after the delivery of Kossuth's speech an impulse had been given to this latter feeling by the meeting at Heidelberg of the leading supporters of German unity; and they had elected a committee of seven to prepare the way for a Constituent Assembly at Frankfort. Of these seven, two came from Baden, one from Würtemberg, one from Hesse Darmstadt, one from Prussia, one from Bavaria, and one from Frankfort. Thus it will be seen that South Germany still kept the lead in the movement for German unity; and the President of the Committee was that Izstein, of Baden, who had been chiefly known to Germany by his ill-timed expulsion from Berlin. But, though this distribution of power augured ill for the relations between the leaders of the German movement and the King of Prussia, yet the meeting at Heidelberg was not prepared to adopt the complete programme of the Baden leaders, nor to commit itself definitely to that Republican movement which would probably have repelled the North German Liberals. The chief leader of the more moderate party in the meeting was Heinrich von Gagern, the representative of Hesse Darmstadt. Gagern was the son of a former Minister of the Grand Duke of Nassau, who had left that State to take service in Austria, and who had acted with the Archduke John in planning a popular rising in the Tyrol in 1813. Heinrich had been trained at a military school in Munich. He had steadily opposed the policy of Metternich, had done his best to induce the Universities to co-operate in a common German movement, and had tried to secure internal liberties for Hesse Darmstadt, while he had urged his countrymen to look for the model of a free Constitution rather to England and Hungary than to France. During the Constitutional movement of 1848 he had become Prime Minister of Hesse Darmstadt; and he seems to have had considerable power of winning popular confidence. Although he was not able to commit the meeting to a definitely monarchical policy, he had influence enough to counteract the attempts of Struve and Hecker to carry a proposal for the proclamation of a Republic; and his influence steadily increased during the later phases of the movement. It was obvious that, in the then state of Viennese feeling, a movement in favour of German unity, at once so determined and so moderate in its character, would give new impulse to the hopes for freedom already excited by Kossuth's speech; and the action of the reformers now became more vigorous because the students rather than the professors were guiding the movement. Some of the latter, and particularly Professor Hye, were beginning to be alarmed, and were attempting to hold their pupils in check. This roused the distrust and suspicion of the students; and it was with great difficulty that Professors Hye and Endlicher could prevail on the younger leaders of the movement to abstain from action until the professors had laid before the Emperor the desire of the University for the removal of Metternich. This deputation waited on the Emperor on March 12; but it proved of little avail; and when the professors returned with the answer that the Emperor would consider the matter, the students received them with loud laughter and resolved to take the matter into their own hands. The next day was to be the opening of the Assembly of the Estates of Lower Austria; and the students of Vienna resolved to march in procession from the University to the Landhaus. In the great hall of the University, now hidden away in an obscure part of Vienna, but still retaining traces of the paintings which then decorated it, the students gathered in large numbers on the 13th of March. Various rumours of a discouraging kind had been circulated; this and that leading citizen was mentioned as having been arrested; nay, it was even said that members of the Estates had themselves been seized, and that the sitting of the Assembly would not be allowed to take place. To these rumours were added the warnings of the professors. Füster, who had recently preached on the duty of devotion to the cause of the country, now endeavoured, by praises of the Emperor, to check the desire of the students for immediate action; but he was scraped down. Hye then appealed to them to wait a few days, in hopes of a further answer from the Emperor. They answered with a shout that they would not wait an hour; and then they raised the cry of "Landhaus!" Breaking loose from all further restraint, they set out on their march, and, as they went, numbers gathered round them. The people of Vienna had already been appealed to, by a placard on St. Stephen's Church, to free the good Emperor Ferdinand from his enemies; and the placard further declared that he who wished for the rise of Austria must wish for the fall of the present Ministers of State. The appeal produced its effect; and the crowd grew denser as the students marched into the narrow Herren Gasse. They passed under the archway which led into the courtyard of the Landhaus; there, in front of the very building where the Assembly was sitting, they came to a dead halt; and, with the strange hesitation which sometimes comes over crowds, no man seemed to know what was next to be done. Suddenly, in the pause which followed, the words "Meine Herren" were heard from a corner of the crowd. It was evident that someone was trying to address them; and the students nearest to the speaker hoisted him on to their shoulders. Then the crowd saw a quiet-looking man, with a round, strong head, short-cropped hair, and a thick beard. Each man eagerly asked his neighbour who this could be; and, as the speech proceeded, the news went round that this was Dr. Fischhof, a man who had been very little known beyond medical circles, and hitherto looked upon as quite outside political movements. Such was the speaker who now uttered what is still remembered as the "first free word" in Vienna. He began by dwelling on the importance of the day and on the need of "encouraging the men who sit there," pointing to the Landhaus, "by our appeal to them, of strengthening them by our adherence, and leading them to the desired end by our co-operation in action. He," exclaimed Fischhof, "who has no courage on such a day as this is only fit for the nursery." He then proceeded to dwell at some length on the need for freedom of the Press and trial by jury. Then, catching, as it were, the note of Kossuth's speech of the 3rd of March, he went on to speak of the greatness which Austria might attain by combining together "the idealist Germans, the steady, industrious, and persevering Slavs, the knightly and enthusiastic Magyars, the clever and sharp-sighted Italians." Finally, he called upon them to demand freedom of the Press, freedom of religion, freedom of teaching and learning, a responsible Ministry, representation of the people, arming of the people, and connection with Germany.[9] In the meantime the Estates were sitting within. They had gathered in unusually large numbers, being persuaded by their president that they were bound to resist the stream of opinion. Representatives as they were of the privileged classes, they had little sympathy with the movement which was going on in Vienna. Nor does it appear that there was anyone among them who was disposed to play the part of a Confalonieri or Szechenyi, much less of a Mirabeau or a Lafayette. Many of them had heard rumours of the coming deputation; but Montecuccoli, their president, refused to begin the proceedings before the regular hour. While they were still debating this point they heard the rush of the crowd outside; then the sudden silence, and then Fischhof's voice. Several members were seized with a panic and desired to adjourn. Again Montecuccoli refused to yield, and one of their few Liberal members urged them to take courage from the fact of this deputation, and to make stronger demands on the Government. But before the Assembly could decide how to act the crowd outside had taken sterner measures. The speakers who immediately followed Fischhof had made little impression; then another doctor, named Goldmark, sprang up and urged the people to break into the Landhaus. So, before the leaders of the Estates had decided what action to take, the doors were suddenly burst open, and Fischhof entered at the head of the crowd. He announced that he had come to encourage the Estates in their deliberations, and to ask them to sanction the demands embodied in the petition of the people. Montecuccoli assured the deputation that the Emperor had already promised to summon the provincial Assemblies to Vienna, and that, for their part, the Estates of Lower Austria were in favour of progress. "But," he added, "they must have room and opportunity to deliberate." Fischhof assented to this suggestion, and persuaded his followers to withdraw to the courtyard. But those who had remained behind had been seized with a fear of treachery, and a cry arose that Fischhof had been arrested. Thereupon Fischhof showed himself, with Montecuccoli, on the balcony; and the president promised that the Estates would send a deputation of their own to the Emperor to express to him the wishes of the people. He therefore invited the crowd to choose twelve men, to be present at the deliberations of the Estates during the drawing up of the petition. While the election of these twelve was still going on, a Hungarian student appeared with the German translation of Kossuth's speech. The Hungarian's voice being too weak to make itself heard, he handed the speech to a Tyrolese student, who read it to the crowd. The allusion to the need of a Constitution was received with loud applause, and so also was the expression of the hopes for good from the Archduke Francis Joseph. But, however much the reading of the speech had encouraged the hopes of the crowd, it had also given time for the Estates to decide on a course, without waiting for the twelve representatives of the people; and, before the crowd had heard the end of Kossuth's speech, the reading was interrupted by a message from the Estates announcing the contents of their proposed petition. The petition had shrunk to the meagre demand that a report on the condition of the State bank should be laid before the Estates; and that a committee should be chosen from provincial Assemblies to consider timely reforms, and to take a share in legislation. The feeble character of the proposed compromise roused a storm of scorn and rage; and a Moravian student tore the message of the Estates into pieces. The conclusion of Kossuth's speech roused the people to still further excitement; and, with cries for a free Constitution, for union with Germany, and against alliance with Russia, the crowd once more broke into the Assembly. One of the leading students then demanded of Montecuccoli whether this was the whole of the petition they intended to send to the Emperor? Montecuccoli answered that the Estates had been so disturbed in their deliberations that they had not been able to come to a final decision. But he declared that they desired to lay before the Emperor all the wishes of the people. Again the leaders of the crowd repeated, in slightly altered form, the demands originally formulated by Fischhof. At last, after considerable discussion, Montecuccoli was preparing to start for the Castle at the head of the Estates when a regiment of soldiers arrived. They were, however, unable to make their way through the crowd, and were even pressed back out of the Herren Gasse. The desire now arose for better protection for the people; and a deputation tried to persuade the Burgomaster of Vienna to call out the City Guard. Czapka, the Burgomaster, was, however, a mere tool of the Government; and he declared that the Archduke Albert, as Commander-in-Chief of the army, had alone the power of calling out the Guard. The Archduke Albert was, perhaps next to Louis, the most unpopular of the Royal House; he indignantly refused to listen to any demands of the people, and, hastening to the spot, rallied the soldiers and led them to the open space at the corner of the Herren Gasse, which is known as the Freyung. The inner circle of Vienna was at this time surrounded with walls, outside of which were the large suburbs in which the workmen chiefly lived. The students seem already to have gained some sympathy with the workmen; and, for the previous two years, the discontent caused by the sufferings of the poorer classes had been taking a more directly political turn. Several of the workmen had pressed in with the students, in the morning, into the inner town; and some big men, with rough darned coats and dirty caps over their eyes, were seen clenching their fists for the fight. The news quickly spread to the suburbs that the soldiers were about to attack the people. Seizing long poles and any iron tools which came to hand, the workmen rushed forward to the gates of the inner town. In one district they found the town gates closed against them, and cannon placed on the bastion near; but in others the authorities were unprepared; and the workmen burst into the inner town, tearing down stones and plaster to throw at the soldiers. In the meantime the representatives of the Estates had reached the Castle, and were trying to persuade the authorities to yield to the demands of the people. Metternich persisted in believing that the whole affair was got up by foreign influence, and particularly by Italians and Swiss; and he desired that the soldiers should gather in the Castle, and that Prince Windischgrätz should be appointed commandant of the city. Alfred Windischgrätz was a Bohemian nobleman who had previously been chiefly known for his strong aristocratic feeling, which he was said to have embodied in the expression "Human beings begin at Barons." But he had been marked out by Metternich as a man of vigour and decision who might be trusted to act in an emergency. Latour, who had been the previous commandant of the Castle in Vienna, showed signs of hesitation at this crisis; and this gave Metternich the excuse for dismissing Latour and appointing Windischgrätz in his place. To this arrangement all the ruling Council consented; but, when Archduke Louis and Metternich proposed to make Windischgrätz military dictator of the city, and to allow him to bring out cannon for firing on the people, great opposition arose. The Archduke John was perhaps one of the few Councillors who really sympathized with Liberal ideas; but several of the Archdukes, and particularly Francis Charles, heartily desired the fall of Metternich; and Kolowrat shared their wish. This combined opposition of sincere reformers and jealous courtiers hindered Metternich's policy; and it was decided that the City Guard should first be called out, and that the dictatorship of Windischgrätz should be kept in the background as a last resource. In the meantime the struggle in the streets was raging fiercely. Archduke Albert had found, to his cost, that the insurrection was not, as he had supposed, the work of a few discontented men. The students fought gallantly; but a still fiercer element was contributed to the insurrection by the workmen who had come in from the suburbs. One workman was wounded in his head, his arm, and his foot; but he continued to encourage his friends, and cried out that he cared nothing for life; either he would die that day, or else "the high gentlemen should be overthrown." Another, who had had no food since the morning, entreated for a little refreshment, that he might be able to fight the better; and he quickly returned to the struggle. In those suburbs from which the workmen had not been able to break into the inner town, the insurrection threatened to assume the form of an attack on the employers. Machines were destroyed, and the houses of those employers who had lowered wages were set on fire. It was this aspect of the insurrection which encouraged the nobles to believe that, by calling out the Guard, they would induce the richer citizens to take arms against the workmen; and this policy was carried still further when, on the application of the Rector of the University, the students also were allowed the privilege of bearing arms. But the ruse entirely failed; the people recognized the City Guard as their friends, and refused to attack them; and the rumour soon spread that the police had fired on the City Guard. It was now evident that the citizen soldiers were on the side of the people; and the richer citizens sent a deputation to entreat that Metternich should be dismissed. But the Archduke Maximilian was resolved that, as the first expedient proposed by the Council had failed, he would now apply some of those more violent remedies which had been postponed at first. He therefore ordered that the cannon should be brought down from the castle to the Michaelerplatz. From this point the cannon would have commanded, on the one side the Herren Gasse, where the crowd had gathered in the morning, and in front the Kohlmarkt, which led to the wide street of Am Graben. Had the cannon been fired then and there, the course of the insurrection must, in one way or other, have been changed. That change might have been, as Maximilian hoped, the complete collapse of the insurrection; or, as Latour held, the cannon might have swept away the last vestige of loyalty to the Emperor, and the Republic might have been instantly proclaimed. But, in any case, the result must have been most disastrous to the cause both of order and liberty; for the passions which had already been roused, especially among the workmen, could hardly have failed to produce one of those savage struggles which may overthrow one tyranny, but which generally end in the establishment of another. Fortunately, however, the Archduke Maximilian seems to have had no official authority in this matter; and, when he gave the order to fire, the master gunner, a Bohemian named Pollet, declared that he would not obey the order, unless it was given by the commander of the forces or the commander of the town. The Archduke then appealed to the subordinates to fire, in spite of this opposition; but Pollet placed himself in front of the cannon, and exclaimed, "The cannon are under my command; until there comes an order from my commander, and until necessity obliges it, let no one fire on friendly, unarmed citizens. Only over my body shall you fire." The Archduke retired in despair. In the meantime the deputation of citizens had reached the castle. At first the officials were disposed to treat them angrily, and even tried to detain them by force; but the news of the concession of arms to the students, the urgent pressure of Archduke John, and the continued accounts of the growing fury of the people, finally decided Metternich to yield; and, advancing into the room where the civic deputation was assembled, he declared that, as they had said his resignation would bring peace to Austria, he now resigned his office, and wished good luck to the new Government. Many of the royal family, and of the other members of the Council, flattered themselves that they had got rid of a formidable enemy, without making any definite concession to the people. Windischgrätz alone protested against the abandonment of Metternich by the rulers of Austria. Metternich had hoped to retire quietly to his own villa; but it had been already burned in the insurrection; and he soon found that it was safer to fly from Vienna and eventually to take refuge in England. He had, however, one consolation in all his misfortunes. In the memoir written four years later he expressed his certainty that he at least had done no wrong, and that "if he had to begin his career again, he would have followed again the course which he took before, and would not have deviated from it for an instant." When, at half-past eight in the evening of March 13, men went through the streets of Vienna, crying out "Metternich is fallen!" it seemed as if the march of the students and the petition of Fischhof had produced in one day all the results desired. But neither the suspicions of the people, nor the violent intentions of the Princes, were at an end. The Archdukes still talked of making Windischgrätz dictator of Vienna. The workmen still raged in the suburbs; and the students refused to leave the University, for fear an attack should be made upon it. But, in spite of the violence of the workmen, the leaders of the richer citizens were more and more determined to make common cause with the reformers. Indeed, both they and the students hoped to check the violence of the riots, while they prevented any reactionary movement. The Emperor also was on the side of concession. He refused to let the people be fired on, and announced, on the 14th, the liberties of the Press. But unfortunately he was seized with one of his epileptic fits; and the intriguers, who were already consolidating themselves into the secret Council known as the Camarilla, published the news of Windischgrätz's dictatorship, and resolved to place Vienna under a state of siege while the Emperor was incapable of giving directions. The news of Windischgrätz's accession to power so alarmed the people that they at once decided to march upon the castle; but one of the leading citizens, named Arthaber, persuaded them to abandon their intention, and, instead, to send him and another friend to ask for a Constitution from the Emperor. A struggle was evidently going on between Ferdinand and his courtiers. Whenever he was strong and able to hold his own, he was ready to make concessions. Whenever he was either ill, or still suffering from the mental effects of his illness, the Government fell into the hands of Windischgrätz and the Archdukes, and violent measures were proposed. Thus, though Arthaber and his friends were received courteously, and assured of the Constitutional intentions of the Emperor, yet at eleven o'clock on the same night there appeared a public notice declaring Vienna in a state of siege. But even Windischgrätz seems to have been somewhat frightened by the undaunted attitude of the people; and when he found that his notice was torn down from the walls, and that a new insurrection was about to break out, he sent for Professor Hye and entreated him to preserve order. In the meantime the Emperor had, to some extent, recovered his senses; and he speedily issued a promise to summon the Estates of the German and Slavonic provinces and the Congregations of Lombardo-Venetia. But the people had had enough of sham Constitutions; and the Emperor's proclamation was torn down. This act, however, did not imply any personal hostility to Ferdinand; for the belief that the Austrian Ministers were thwarting the good intentions of their master was as deeply rooted, at this time, in the minds of the Viennese as was a similar belief with regard to Pius IX. and his Cardinals in the minds of the Romans; and when the Emperor drove out in public on the 15th of March, he was received with loud cheers. But, as Ferdinand listened to these cheers, he must have noticed that, louder than the "Es lebe der Kaiser" of his German subjects and the "Slawa" of the Bohemians, rose the sound of the Hungarian "Eljen." For mingling in the crowd with the ordinary inhabitants of Vienna were the Hungarian deputation who had at last been permitted by the Count Palatine to leave Presburg, and who had arrived in Vienna to demand both the freedoms which had been granted to the Germans and also a separate responsible Ministry for Hungary. They arrived in the full glory of recent successes in the Presburg Diet; for, strengthened by the news of the Viennese rising, Kossuth had carried in one day many of the reforms for which his party had so long been contending. The last remnants of the dependent condition of the peasantry had been swept away; taxation had been made universal; and freedom of the Press and universal military service had been promised. Szechenyi alone had ventured to raise a note of warning, and it had fallen unheeded. In Vienna Kossuth was welcomed almost as cordially as in Presburg; for the German movement in Vienna had tended to produce in its supporters a willingness to lose the eastern half of the Empire in order to obtain the union of the western half with Germany. So the notes of Arndt's Deutsches Vaterland were mingled with the cry of "Batthyanyi Lajos, Minister Präsident!" Before such a combination as this, Ferdinand had no desire, Windischgrätz no power, to maintain an obstinate resistance; and, on March 16, Sedlnitzky, the hated head of the police, was dismissed from office. On the 18th a responsible Ministry was appointed; and on the 22nd Windischgrätz himself announced that national affairs would now be guided on the path of progress. In the meantime that German movement from which the Viennese derived so much of their impulse had been gaining a new accession of force in the North of Germany. In Berlin the order of the Viennese movements had been to some extent reversed. There the artizans, instead of taking their tone from the students, had given the first impulse to reform. The King, indeed, had begun his concessions by granting freedom of the Press on the 7th of March; but it seemed very unlikely that this concession would be accompanied by any securities which would make it a reality. The King even refused to fulfil his promise of summoning the Assembly; and it was in consequence of this refusal that the artizans presented to the Town Council of Berlin a petition for the redress of their special grievances. The same kind of misery which prevailed in Vienna had shown itself, though in less degree, in Berlin; and committees had been formed for the relief of the poor. The Town Council refused to present the petition of the workmen; and, in order to take the movement out of their hands, presented a petition of their own in favour of freedom of the Press, trial by jury, representation of the German people in the Bundestag, and the summoning of all the provincial Assemblies of the Kingdom. This petition was rejected by the King; and thereupon, on March 13, the people gathered in large numbers in the streets. General Pfuel fired on them; but, instead of yielding, they threw up barricades, and a fierce struggle ensued. On the 14th the cry for complete freedom of the Press became louder and more prominent; and the insurgents were encouraged by the first news of the Vienna rising. The other parts of the Kingdom now joined in the movement. On the 14th came deputations from the Rhine Province, who demanded in a threatening manner the extension of popular liberties. On the 16th came the more important news that Posen and Silesia were in revolt. Mieroslawsky, who had been one of the leaders of the Polish movement of 1846, had gained much popularity in Berlin; and he seemed fully disposed to combine the movement for the independence of Posen with that for the freedom of Prussia, much in the same way as Kossuth had combined the cause of Hungarian liberty with the demand for an Austrian Constitution. In Silesia, no doubt, the terrible famine of the previous year, and the remains of feudal oppression, had sharpened the desire for liberty; and closely following on the news of these two revolts came clearer accounts of the Viennese rising and the happy tidings of the fall of Metternich. The King of Prussia promised, on the arrival of this news, to summon the Assembly for April 2; and two days later he appeared on the balcony of his palace and declared his desire to change Germany from an Alliance of States into a Federal State. But the suspicions of the people had now been thoroughly aroused; and on March 18, the very day on which the King made this declaration, fresh deputations came to demand liberties from him; and when he appealed to them to go home his request was not complied with. The threatening attitude of the soldiers, and the recollection of their violence on the preceding days, had convinced the people that until part at least of the military force was removed they could have no security for liberty. The events of the day justified their belief; for, while someone was reading aloud to the people the account of the concessions recently made by the King, the soldiers suddenly fired upon them, and the crowd fled in every direction. They fled, however, soon to rally again; barricades were once more thrown up; the Poles of Posen flocked in to help their friends, and the black, red, and gold flag of Germany was displayed. Women joined the fight at the barricades; and, on the 19th, some of the riflemen whom the King had brought from Neufchatel refused to fire upon the people. Then the King suddenly yielded, dismissed his Ministers, and promised to withdraw the troops and allow the arming of the people. The victory of the popular cause seemed now complete; but the bitterness which still remained in the hearts of the citizens was shown by a public funeral procession through Berlin in honour of those who had fallen in the struggle. The King stood bare-headed on the balcony as the procession passed the palace; and on March 21 he came forward in public, waving the black, red, and gold flag of Germany. But while the movements for German freedom and unity were strengthening the cause of the Viennese and destroying the hopes of Metternich, two other movements for freedom, which might have helped to produce a newer and freer life in Europe, were preparing the way, against the wishes of their leaders, for that collision of interests between the different races of Europe which was to be the chief cause of the failure of the Revolution of 1848. Of these movements the one least known and understood in England is that which took place in Bohemia. In order to understand it we must recall some of the events of earlier Bohemian history. Bohemia, like Hungary, had, in the sixteenth century, freely elected Ferdinand I. of Austria as her King. Nor had the Bohemians, at that time, the slightest desire for closer union with any of those other Kingdoms which happened to be under the rule of the same Prince; nay, they would have avoided such union, even in matters where common action seemed the natural result of common interests. Ferdinand I., indeed, and some of his successors, did undoubtedly desire a closer bond between the different territories subject to the House of Austria; but, during the sixteenth century, their efforts in this direction were, in the main, defeated. The continual wars against the Turks, indeed, did necessitate common military action; and, to that extent, they paved the way for a closer union; but, in spite of this ground for fellow feeling, no public recognition of any common bond between Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary could be obtained at that period from the Estates of Bohemia. The seventeenth century, however, had produced a great change in the relations between Bohemia and the House of Austria. The ill-fated and ill-organized struggle for liberty and Protestantism, which was crushed out in 1620 at the Battle of the White Hill, was followed by a change in the objects aimed at by the House of Austria in their government of Bohemia. Considering his military successes, it must be admitted that Ferdinand II. was even generous in his action towards Bohemia, so far as the forms of Constitutional Government were concerned. For in 1623 he restored its old Constitution, re-established its independent law-courts, and declared that he had "no intention of destroying or diminishing the rights of our faithful subjects of this Kingdom." But, alongside of the restoration of Constitutional forms, there went on an organized system of oppression by which Ferdinand II. was endeavouring to crush out the Protestant faith and the Bohemian language. While, on the one hand, the old Bohemian nobles were banished or executed, the German Dominicans and members of other Roman Catholic orders were at the same time destroying all the Bohemian literature on which they could lay their hands; and some Bohemians tried to save these relics of the past by carrying them to Stockholm, where, it is said, the remains of their early literature can still be found. Without any direct change in the law, German officials were gradually introduced into the chief offices of State in Bohemia; and German became the language of ordinary business relations. Thus, by a natural process, the Bohemian language underwent the same change of position which the English language experienced in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; that is, it ceased to be a literary language, and became merely a popular dialect of peasants and workmen. But Ferdinand II. soon found that he could not carry out completely his purpose of Romanizing and Germanizing Bohemia without departing from that Constitutional line which he had attempted to follow in 1623. He could not trust a Bohemian Assembly to carry out his plans; and in 1627 he issued an ordinance which remained in force till 1848. By this edict the King claimed the right to add to, alter, or improve the Government of the country at his own pleasure. Yet even this he claimed to do in virtue of a previously existing royal right; the judges took advantage of this admission to interpret the new ordinance in the light of Ferdinand's previous promises to respect the Bohemian Constitution; and this interpretation was justified by the fact that Ferdinand, in the very same year in which he issued the ordinance, reiterated the Constitutional promises which he had made in 1623. The explanation of this apparent contradiction is that Ferdinand II. cared more for the unity of the Roman Catholic Church than for centralizing the Government of the Austrian dominions; and the same might be said of his successor, Ferdinand III. Nevertheless, from motives of convenience, both these Princes resided very little in Prague and much in Vienna; and thus those court officials who give the tone in these matters to the Government gradually gathered together, rather in the Archduchy of Austria than in the Kingdom of Bohemia; while the process of centralization was still further encouraged by that denationalizing movement which dated from the Battle of the White Hill. With the growth of an alien aristocracy there naturally grew up that union of class bitterness with race bitterness which intensifies both; and the difference of faith between the conquerors and conquered added another element of division. An attempt of the peasants to shake off the yoke of their conquerors led to the destruction of privileges which they had hitherto possessed; and thus the Estates of Bohemia became even more aristocratic than those of the neighbouring countries. Under such circumstances the gradual absorption of the Government of Bohemia in that of the other lands of the House of Austria seemed the natural consequence of the Austrian policy in the seventeenth century; and Maria Theresa propounded a plan for a Central Assembly in which Bohemia, Hungary, and Galicia were to share a common representation with the Archduchy of Austria. These schemes, like all measures for moderate unification in the Austrian dominions, received a fatal shock from the impetuous policy of Joseph II. The claim to Germanize Bohemia by force awoke in that country, as it had done in Hungary, a desire for new national life and a zeal for the old national literature. The opposition to Joseph did not, indeed, take so fierce a form in Bohemia as it assumed in Hungary and the Netherlands; but it was strong enough to induce Joseph's successor, Leopold II., to restore the old Constitution of Bohemia. In Bohemia, as in Hungary, the spirit of national independence had now embodied itself in the desire to preserve and revive the national language; and in 1809 a new impulse was given to this desire by the discovery of a parchment which had been wrapped round the pillars of a hall, and which was found to contain some old Bohemian poems. These poems were believed to belong to the thirteenth or fourteenth century; and the Bohemians held them to be superior to anything which had been produced by the Germans at that period. As a matter of course, German scholars at once came forward to try to disprove the authenticity of these poems; and the fight raged hotly. The expulsion of the Bohemian language from its literary position seemed to many to have deprived this struggle of any living interest. But writers were arising who were determined to show that that language could still be made a vehicle of literary expression; and they even hoped to make it the centre of a Slavonic movement. For the Bohemian language had a kind of offshoot in the North of Hungary among the race of the Slovaks; and the interest which the poet Kollar and the philologer Szaffarik were stirring up in the Slovak dialect was adding new force to the Bohemian movement. The historian Palacky increased the effect which was produced by these writers; and, what is more remarkable, men whose names showed an evidently German origin became fascinated by this new movement. Count Leo Thun entered into a controversy with Pulszky about the worth of the Slavonic languages; and one may still see in Prague the statue of Joseph Jungmann, who was one of the first founders of unions for reviving the national language. A struggle of the Bohemian Estates in 1837 to maintain their control over taxation was sufficient, though unsuccessful, to increase considerably the interest felt by their nation in their political life. And thus it came to pass that, when, in March, 1848, the news of the French Revolution came to Prague, it found the Bohemians ready for the emergency. A young man named Gabler, who had been in Paris in 1846, was requested by some friends who were gathered in a café to read the account of the French rising and explain its details. On the following day more people came to the café to hear the news; discussion began, and suggestions were made as to the best way of adapting the French movement to the needs of Bohemia. German was still the language of intercourse between educated people in Prague; and the discussions were at first carried on in that language. But among those who came to the meetings was a publican named Peter Faster; and, while the discussion on various questions of reform was going on, Faster broke out suddenly into a speech in Bohemian. Instantly, the whole assembly joined in the national cry of "Slawa." Other speeches followed in the same language; the fashion quickly spread; and soon all adherents of the new movement began speaking the national language. A committee was now formed for the preparation of a petition; and a unanimous summons was circulated, calling on the Bohemians to meet at the Wenzel's-bad on March 11. This bath-house stands in a garden at some little distance from the main streets of Prague, and it was overlooked by barracks. One picquet of cavalry was seen in the streets, the rest remained in the barracks. Slowly the streets near the bath-house filled; at about half-past seven the doors opened; and half an hour later appeared Peter Faster, a lawyer named Trojan, and others. They announced that they had called the meeting for the purpose of proposing a petition to the Emperor. The petition[10] was adopted with little trouble, and a committee of twenty-five was appointed to present it. The petition was as follows: "A great event in the West of Europe is shedding its light, like a threatening meteor, over to us. It has scarcely begun; but this great movement which we guessed afar off is carrying away Germany's allied States with it. There is much excitement near the frontiers of Austria; but Your Majesty and the allied Princes have controlled the movement, while you have magnanimously placed yourselves at the head of it, to warn it from a dangerous abyss and from bad ways. The time has become new and different; it has brought the people nearer the Princes, and lays on the people the duty of rallying round their Princes, offering confidence and entreating for confidence in the days of danger. "Prague's faithful people, touched by the universal movement, ruled by the impulse to go before the monarchy in loyalty and truth, lays at the feet of Your Majesty its most heartfelt thanks for being allowed to speak from their full heart to their beloved King and Master. May their words find echo and just appreciation. Our confidence in God and our conscience leads us to hope that it will. "New and unwonted is the benevolence of this high permission; if we are less choice in our words and expressions, if we seem immodest in the extent of our petitions, our King's fatherly consideration will graciously put a right construction on our acts. Two different national elements inhabit this happy Kingdom, this pearl in your Majesty's illustrious imperial crown. One of them, the original one, which has the nearest right to its land and King, has hitherto been hindered in its progress towards culture and equal rights by institutions, which, without being hostile or denationalizing, yet naturally involve a partial wiping out of original national feeling as the condition of obtaining recognition as citizens. "The free development of both nations, the German and Bohemian, which are united by fate, and both of which inhabit Bohemia, and a similar striving after the objects of a higher culture, will, by strengthening, reconciling, and uniting them in brotherhood, lay the foundation of the welfare of both nations. "Bohemia has not yet reached that high position which it ought to have attained, in order to meet forcibly the serious events which are developing themselves; and this failure arises from the superiority which has hitherto been granted to the German element in legal and administrative arrangements. It is not mere toleration, it is the equalizing of the two nationalities by legal guarantees which can and will bind both nations to the throne. "But the guarantees for this excellent and sacred result, so much to be desired by every patriot, whether German or Bohemian, do not consist in the cultivation of language only. It consists in the essential alterations of the institutions, which have hitherto existed, in the removal of the barriers which hinder intercourse between Prince and People, and at the same time in universal, benevolently guarded, popular instruction by school and writing." After more to the same effect, and after dwelling at some length on the need of publicity in national affairs, the petitioners formulate their demands in eleven points. The first and second of these are concerned with the equalization of the races and with the Constitutional development hinted at in the previous petition; but they also include a proposal for the restoration of the union between Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, to be effected by an annual meeting in common of the Estates of the three provinces. The third is concerned with communal freedom and the condition of the peasantry. The fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh relate to those ordinary securities for civil and religious freedom which were being demanded at this time by all the nations of Europe. The eighth clause of the petition demands "the appointment to offices of men who know completely and equally both the languages of the country." The ninth is concerned with the popularization of the military service. The tenth with the redistribution of taxation, especially the abolition of taxes on articles of consumption; while the eleventh deals with the equalization of education between German and Bohemian, and the freedom of teaching at the universities. The gathering at this first meeting was rather small; but the news of the movement rapidly spread. On the 12th a meeting of the Town Councillors was held in the Rath Haus; and, on the 15th, the students met to draw up a petition of their own. They had soon caught the excitement of the time; and had been stirred up by a German-Bohemian named Uffo Horn to take separate action. Guided and restrained by Gabler, they consented to help in preserving order, and embodied their petition in eight clauses. In these they not only demanded the ordinary liberties of teaching for which other universities were contending, but also pleaded for the right to full instruction both in Bohemian and German; for the power to visit foreign universities; for the development of physical education, and for the right to form unions among the students, after the fashion of those recently sanctioned by a statute of the Munich University. It is worth noting that they also demanded that the test of fitness for State service should be made severer. The news of the rising in Vienna came to encourage and strengthen the Bohemian movement; and on March 18 the students of Prague sent a letter of exulting congratulation to the students of Vienna on their services to the cause of freedom. But the Bohemian movement was not yet to be turned out of that quiet course which distinguished it among the Revolutions of the period; and on Sunday, March 19, the deputation that was to bear the wishes of the Bohemians to the Emperor met in the streets of Prague to hear a silent mass before starting for Vienna. Prague, like Vienna, has been so much altered in recent years that it is difficult to realize the exact scene of this event. At the top of the long avenue which now ornaments the Wenzelsplatz there was, in 1848, a large gate called the Rossthor; and this was closed on March 19 so that no traffic should disturb the service. Within the gates stood a statue of St. Wenzel; and round this the deputation gathered, wearing scarves of the Bohemian colours, white and red, edged with the Austrian black and yellow, to show their zeal for the unity of the Empire. Outside the group formed by the members of the deputation stood the newly-formed students' legion and some others of the National Guard. The Archbishop took the leading part in the mass; but, after it was over, the Bishop of Prague gave out a Bohemian hymn, which was heartily joined in by the people. To impress the citizens still further with the solemnity of the occasion, Faster and Trojan had issued an address, declaring that the deputation left their families and property under the protection of the citizens of Prague; and, on the other hand, a committee chosen by the citizens appealed to the deputation to impress upon the Emperor the danger of delays and unfulfilled promises, and expressed a desire for a closer union between the Peoples of the Austrian Empire. When the ceremonies were over, the deputation started, led by Faster and Trojan. Faster took charge of the petition from the citizens of Prague; Trojan carried the petitions from the provincial towns of Bohemia; while a chosen band of the students were to present the University petition. The people who were gathered at the station joined in Bohemian songs; and the ladies showered flowers and ribbons as the train moved off. After the departure of the deputation, the citizens' committee set themselves to check any violent movement among the workmen, by making special arrangement for providing work for the resident workmen in Prague. Soon came the news that the deputation had been warmly welcomed in Vienna. A great part of the National Guard had turned out to greet them; the Emperor had addressed them in Bohemian; and Count Kolowrat had said that, though he was seventy-one years old, and had served the State for fifty years, yet his last days were the happiest, because he could now advise according to his heart. In striking contrast to this, the most peaceable of all the March risings, was the movement which was going on at the same time in Lombardy. It seemed, indeed, as if the Austrian Government were determined to drive the Lombards into violent action. In Vienna Metternich was at least talking about extending the power of the Estates; in Hungary Kossuth was able to speak freely in the Presburg Diet; in Bohemia the Government seemed to drop into the hands of the people almost without an effort; but in Lombardy the savage proclamation of February had been followed on March 2 by an announcement from Spaur that the people must abandon all hope of any reform in the organic institutions of Lombardy which could imply a relaxation of the union with other parts of the Monarchy; and so rigorously were the repressive laws carried out that on March 11 there were 700 political prisoners in Milan. Yet, in spite of this tremendous rigour, there were still signs of the irrepressible aspirations of the Lombards. On March 10, a feast was held in Brescia in honour of the proclamation of the French Republic; and the Italian soldiers quartered in that town showed sympathy with this demonstration. Even during the actual rising at Vienna, Metternich still showed his determination to hold down Lombardy by force; he suddenly recalled Spaur and Ficquelmont from Milan, and sent Count O'Donnell, a man of fiercer type, to take the place of Spaur. Even Metternich's idea of Lombard reform was not changed by the rising in Vienna; for on March 16 there appeared in Milan a proclamation which must either have been prepared by Metternich just before his fall, or adopted by the Camarilla directly after it; and in this the Lombards were offered exactly the same programme of reform which had been proposed to them in January. But in the meantime the people were not idle. The Italians in Vienna managed to keep up a secret correspondence with their countrymen in Lombardy, and to warn them that new troops might be sent against them; while the Milanese managed to circulate secret proclamations which stirred the hopes of their fellow Lombards. On the 16th or 17th of March one of these proclamations appeared, containing a final protest against all the tyrannies exercised by Austria in Lombardy since 1815, down to the massacres of 1848. The composers of the proclamation concluded by finally declaring their resolution "to feel as Italians, to think as Italians, to will once for all to be Italians; to resolve to break once and for all the infamous treaty that has sold our liberties without our consent; to exercise our rights as men, our revenge as Italians." Thus, by some mysterious freemasonry, the champions of liberty in Milan had gradually been drawn together and prepared for action; and when on the 17th of March the news arrived that the Viennese insurrection had succeeded, that liberty of the Press had been granted, and that the Congregations of Lombardy as well as the estates of the other parts of the Empire were to be called together, the news gave the signal for insurrection. The Congregations which, up to the time of Nazari's speech, had been so silent and helpless, and whose uselessness had been further proved by the failure of that very protest, could not be accepted as the representatives of national life; and the suggestion of freedom of the Press while Radetzky remained in Milan could only supply a subject for a caricature. The leading spirit in the Milanese movement, so far as it is possible to single out any individual, was Augusto Anfossi. He had been born in Nice and educated by the Jesuits. That education, in this as in so many other cases, had produced the most violent reaction; and Anfossi's first claim to distinction was a bitter attack on his former teachers. In consequence of this, he had been compelled to fly to France; and he had served for a time in the French Army; but his hopes had been raised by the accession of Charles Albert; and he had returned to Piedmont to experience the disappointment shared by the other Liberals of that period. The punishments which followed the risings of 1831 had driven him again into exile; and he had then joined in the rising of the Egyptians against the Turks. But the movements of 1848 once more called his attention to Piedmont; and he now hastened to Milan and drew up a proclamation which was adopted and issued by the leaders of the insurrection. How little these leaders could have foreseen the actual result of the struggle may be gathered from the contents of the proclamation; for, eloquent and enthusiastic as are its opening words, its demands fall far short of the claim for that complete independence which the Lombards were for a time to achieve; while so little did the Milanese recognize the determined savagery of their opponents that the seventh demand made in this proclamation was that "neutral relations should be established with the Austrian troops, while we guarantee to them respect and the means of subsistence." But the only really important point in the proclamation was its final summons to the people to meet at three p.m. the next day in the Corsia dei Servi; and this appeal roused not merely the hopes, but the impatience of the people. Three hours before the time appointed, while Casati and the Municipal Council were deliberating in the Broletto, or town-hall, they heard loud shouts in the streets of "Death to the Germans!" and "Long live Italy!" Then a crowd bearing sticks covered with the Italian colours entered the Broletto, and required that Casati and the leading Councillors should come with them at once to O'Donnell, to demand the establishment of a Civic Guard, and the placing of the police under the municipal authorities. Cesare Correnti, one of the Council, urged the leaders of the movement to trust to the municipality; but Enrico Cernuschi, one of the organizers of the movement, refused to yield to this suggestion; and a man named Beretta seized Casati by the arm to lead him to the Governor. O'Donnell was startled at this sudden demonstration: and Casati, on his part, was equally astonished at the position into which he had been forced. He shook hands with O'Donnell and encouraged him to look on him as a friend; and it was, perhaps, in reliance on this help that O'Donnell ventured at first to refuse the proposals to subject the police to the Municipal Council and to surrender their arms to the Civic Guard. Cernuschi, however, insisted that O'Donnell should not only yield these points, but that he should sign his name to his concessions. O'Donnell, in terror, consented; and then Casati desired to send a messenger to Torresani, the head of the police, to secure his approval of the concessions. But the movement had gone far beyond Casati's control; and, while his messenger was hastening to put the matter before Torresani in proper diplomatic form, Cernuschi and his friends had rushed to an armourer's shop to avail themselves of their new privilege. But, as they still wished to place the Municipal Council, as far as possible, at the head of their movement, they carried their arms to the Broletto, where they demanded to be enrolled in the new Civic Guard. In the meantime, Torresani had refused to act without Radetzky's authority, and Radetzky was furious at the news of O'Donnell's concessions. Hearing that one of his officers, who was ill in bed, had offered to give his sanction to these concessions, the savage General threatened to have him dragged from his bed and shot, if he did not at once recall the order; and troops were despatched to the Broletto to suppress the movement. Casati, indeed, had fled from the scene of action, and taken refuge in a private house; but the people, who had brought the arms to the Broletto, closed the gates against Radetzky's force; and, though they had only fifty guns with them, they prepared to defy the Austrian cannon, backed by more than 2,000 soldiers. The proposal to capitulate was rejected with scorn; and, from seven to nine p.m., this little band, many of them boys, defended the Municipal Council Hall. But it was impossible to conquer against such odds; and at last the Austrian soldiers broke in, attacked all whom they found there, whether armed or unarmed; hurled down into the streets some boys whom they found on the roofs, hung one little child, and marched off the rest of their prisoners to the castle, to be tortured by Radetzky. But, as they were actually on their way to the castle, the victorious soldiers met some of their comrades who were flying before the citizens. Augusto Anfossi had been, in the meantime, reducing into order the gallant, but undisciplined defenders of their country; and, before the morning of the 19th, stones and wood had been put together and fastened with iron; and thus secure barricades had risen in many of the streets. Amongst other interesting materials for the barricades may be mentioned O'Donnell's carriage, which had been seized for this purpose. Radetzky, startled at the vigour of the opposition, wrote to Ficquelmont that "the nature of this people is changed as if by magic; fanaticism has infected every age, every class, and both sexes." In his alarm he offered to grant the demand which had been made in the morning, that the police should be placed under the command of the Municipal Council. Casati would, even then, have accepted this as a settlement of the struggle; but he was now quite powerless. For, while he was signing decrees, and appointing as head of the police a man who was still prisoner to the Austrians, the bells throughout Milan were ringing for a storm. At no stage of the struggle were there greater efforts of heroism than on this 19th of March. At the bridge of San Damiano two men held at bay a whole corps of Austrians; not far from the Porta Romana another champion carried off some youthful scholars, one after another, on his shoulders, in the face of a body of Croats. Guns were often wanting, but the insurgents used swords and sticks instead. The Tyrolese fired from the tower of the cathedral upon the people, and the cannons from the Piazza Mercante played upon them; but three cannoneers were killed, and at last the cannon were captured by the Milanese. The 19th of March was a Sunday; and, as the congregation came out from mass in the church of San Simpliciano, they were attacked by the Austrians and driven back into the church. Food was brought them from neighbouring houses; and they retained their position till four o'clock in the afternoon, when they succeeded in making their escape. Nor were there wanting touches of the Milanese humour to relieve the terrors of the fight; boys sometimes exhibiting a cat, sometimes a broomstick with a cap on it, as a mark for the Austrians to fire at. But the fiercest fight raged at the Porta Nuova, on the south side of the town, where Augusto Anfossi commanded in person. There a band of Austrian grenadiers brought their cannon to bear on the defenders of the city; and Anfossi had a long and fierce struggle before he could drive them back. At last, however, he made his way to the gate; and, lifting on high the Italian flag, he kissed it, and planted it on the arch of the gateway. On the 20th the Austrians began to show signs of giving way. The Tyrolese fled down the giddy staircases of the Cathedral tower and escaped through secret passages; and the family of Torresani fell into the hands of the insurgents. But the Milanese, though they had seen their children spitted on the bayonets of the soldiers, their women insulted, and the prisoners tortured by Radetzky, were ready to take charge of the family of one of their worst tyrants, and to protect them from violence. Even the brutal Bolza, when he became a prisoner in their hands, was carefully guarded from ill-treatment; and he is said to have been so much impressed by this unexpected magnanimity that he died penitent. Again offers of compromise were made by the Austrians, and a truce of fifteen days was proposed till the officers could hear from Vienna. Again Casati hesitated; but again his hesitation had no effect on the struggle. On the 21st the Genio Militare, one of the chief barracks of the city, was attacked by the insurgents. The struggle was continued for some time with great fierceness on either side; but at last a cripple, named Pasquale Sottocorni, came halting up on his crutch and set fire to the gate; then the defenders, unable to hold out any longer, surrendered to the people. This day was also memorable for the capture of Radetzky's palace, and in it of the wonderful sword with which he had threatened to exterminate the Milanese. In the meantime the other towns of Lombardy had been hastening to send help to their capital. At Como, immediately on the arrival of the news of the Viennese success, bands had collected with lighted torches, crying, "Long live Italy! Long live independence!" The guards were redoubled, but refused to act. The people surrounded the Town Council House, demanding a Civic Guard, which was quickly granted; in a short time Como was free, and the soldiers of Como were on their march to Milan. It was on March 18 that the news of the Milanese rising reached Bergamo; and the people at once rose, crying, "Long live Milan!" and "Death to the Germans!" The Archduke Sigismund, who was in the town, was compelled by the people to hold back his troops, while a Capuchin monk led the citizens to Milan. In Brescia the rising seems to have been almost simultaneous with that of Milan. The first attack was made on the Jesuits; but religious hostility was quickly merged in a desire for national independence, and the cry soon rose for a civic guard. Prince Schwarzenberg, who was in command of the terrible fortress which frowns upon Brescia, hoped easily to overawe the city. But the people gathered in the Piazza Vecchia, and after a fierce struggle, drove back the soldiers. Schwarzenberg was compelled to yield to the demands of the people; the municipal authorities in vain endeavoured to hinder the movement; and in a short time many of the Brescians had united with the country folk of the neighbouring district and were marching to Milan. At Cremona about 4,000 soldiers had laid down their arms before the citizens had attacked them. In the meantime Augusto Anfossi had been dangerously wounded, and was obliged to abandon the defence; but his place was taken by Luciano Manara, a youth of twenty-four, who led the attack on the Porta Tosa, on the east side of Milan. Arms had now been freely distributed among the insurgents, and a professor of mathematics from Pavia superintended the fortifications and assisted Manara in the attack. For five hours the assault continued, Manara rushing forward at the head of his forces and effecting wonders with his own hand. Recruits from the country districts co-operated from outside the city with the Milanese insurgents within. At last the gate was set on fire, the position was captured, and the name of Porta Tosa was soon afterwards changed to that of Porta Vittoria. The Austrian soldiers had now become heartily tired of the struggle. Radetzky had arranged his troops in so careless a manner that he was unable to supply them properly with food, and sixty Croats surrendered from hunger. Radetzky was now convinced of the uselessness of continuing the struggle; and, though he had just before been threatening to bombard the city, he now decided to abandon it. So, on the evening of the 22nd of March, the glorious Five Days of Milan were brought to an end by the retreat of the Austrians from the city. This rising had for the time being freed the greater part of Lombardy; but there was yet another Italian city under the Austrian rule, which was achieving its own independence in a somewhat different way. The risings in Vienna, Berlin, Prague, and Milan, though they produced many acts of heroism, and some of wise forethought, did not call to the front any man of first-rate political capacity, nor could they be said to centre in any one commanding figure. In Venice, on the other hand, the movement centred from first to last in one man. The imprisonment of Daniel Manin had been the point of interest to Venetians, the typical instance of their grievances; and more than one circumstance tended to strengthen this feeling. Manin's sister had died from the shock of hearing of her brother's arrest; and his wife had organized a petition for his release which had been signed by the Podestà of Venice and ninety-nine other persons of well-known character. His own legal ability had enabled Manin to dwell more forcibly on the points of illegality in his arrest. But when he and his friends urged his claim to be either tried or set free, the authorities pleaded that they could not release him until they heard from Vienna. This answer must have tended still more to mark him out as a victim of that centralizing force which was endeavouring to crush out Italian feeling; while the fact of his descent from the last Doge of Venice added a touch of historic sentiment to the other points of interest in his case. Manin's arrest had been quickly followed by that of Tommaseo, and in any talk among the patriots of Venice the discussion of these arrests was sure to arise. In Venice, too, the same kinds of demonstrations of popular feeling took place during January and February which had shown themselves in Milan. Whenever German music was performed in public all the Italians left the place. Men went about in black gloves; women refused to appear in gala costume at public ceremonies; and even those who went to the theatre attended there not so much for the sake of the performance as to applaud passages about a betrayed country, or to get up cheers for the Neapolitan Constitution. Such was the state of feeling when, on March 16, a boat arrived from Trieste, bringing news from Vienna. The chief informant brought with him the fragments of a portrait of Metternich which had been torn to pieces as a symbol of his fall. Then the Venetians rose and demanded the release of Manin and Tommaseo. The Governor referred the petitioners to the criminal court; but the crowd resolved to take matters into their own hands, and broke into the prison to rescue the two leaders. Manin, however, refused to leave the prison until the president of the tribunal had signed the order for his release. The president readily complied with this request; and Manin and Tommaseo were carried home on the shoulders of the people. The Venetians then proceeded to attack the fortress; the Croat soldiers rushed out to repel them, and succeeded in driving them back. But the next day there was a new gathering in the streets. Palffy, the Military Governor of Venice, appealed to Manin to preserve order; but Manin replied that he could only do so if a civic guard were granted, and if the soldiers were recalled to their barracks. The head of the police remonstrated against the proposal for the Civic Guard, and asked that it should, at any rate, be placed under his authority. Thereupon Manin seized his gun and said that if the police interfered with the Civic Guard he would himself head a revolt. Palffy was a Hungarian, and so was Zichy, the Civil Governor of Venice; and neither of them were disposed to push matters to extremities. Although, therefore, Palffy was at first inclined to make difficulties, and to appeal to the Governor of Lombardy for orders, he yielded at last, and the municipal authorities began to organize the Civic Guard. But the fears of the Venetians were not yet over. Marinovich, the Governor of the Castle, was a hard man, who had irritated the workmen of the arsenal against him; and the authorities had persuaded him to resign his command and to leave Venice. But, on March 22, while Manin and his friends were deliberating on the next step to be taken, a messenger came to announce to them that Marinovich had suddenly returned to the arsenal, and had there been attacked and killed by the workmen. Thereupon Manin at once decided that the Civic Guard should be sent to seize the arsenal. The Admiral Martini tried to offer opposition; but Manin succeeded in entering with some of the guard, and then rang the workmen's bell and demanded arms for the workmen of the arsenal. It was well for the Venetians at this time that there was so great a hostility between Magyars and Croats. On a previous day, the Croats had desired to fire on the unarmed crowd; but a Hungarian officer, named Winckler, had thrown himself in their way, and had declared that they should fire first at him. When the news came of Marinovich's death, Zichy proposed that the Croats should act with the Civic Guard; but the Croat soldiers refused, desiring instead to bombard the town. This latter proposition, however, was defeated, not only by the Hungarian officers, but by many of the soldiers; for the garrison contained many Italians, who seized this opportunity for joining the cause of their countrymen. During the confusion that arose from this division of opinion, the head of the Civic Guard went to Palffy to demand that the defence of the town should be placed in the hands of the citizens. Palffy hesitated; but, in the meantime, Manin was proclaiming the Venetian Republic in the Piazza of San Marco. Palffy consented to resign his authority to Zichy, and by 6.30 p.m. Zichy had signed the evacuation of Venice by the Austrian troops. Palffy now desired to leave Venice as soon as possible. The chief of the Civic Guard tried to prevent his escape; but Manin trusted to Palffy's honour, and allowed him and some of his followers to depart in a steamer which was to stop at Pola with despatches, ordering the recall of the Venetian fleet which was stationed there. But no sooner was Palffy safely out of Venice than he compelled the captain to change his course, to sail to Trieste, and to surrender to the Austrian authorities. Of course, Manin had made a mistake in trusting so implicitly to the honour of an enemy. Perhaps we should thank God that there are people who are capable of those mistakes. Manin, at least, does not seem to have changed his line of conduct in consequence; for when, a few days later, a steamer full of Austrian private citizens came near Venice, and the Venetians wished to go out to attack them, Manin prevented them from doing so, saying, "Let us leave such conduct to Metternich." Thus, then, in this wonderful month of March, 1848, the whole system of Metternich had crumbled to the ground. The German national feeling, which he had hoped to crush out, was steadily ripening and embodying itself in a definite shape. The feeling for that "Geographical Expression" Italy had proved strong enough to drive Radetzky from Milan and Palffy from Venice. The rivalry between the Bohemians and Germans of the Austrian Empire seemed, for the moment, to have been merged in a common desire for liberty; and the Hungarian opposition, which Metternich had hoped to manipulate, had shaken him from power and from office, and had secured liberty to Vienna and practical independence to Hungary. Of the terrible divisions and rivalries which were to undermine the new fabric of liberty, the story will have to be told in the succeeding chapters. But the vigour, heroism, and self-sacrifice which had been brought to light in this early part of the movement will always make the March Risings of 1848 memorable in the history of Europe. FOOTNOTES: [9] The word "Anschluss" seems hardly to imply so complete a union as was afterwards aimed at by the German party in Vienna. [10] This petition must be given at length in order that students of the Revolution may realize the peculiar character of the Bohemian movement, since this is the only one of the March risings in which the claim of an oppressed people to live in peaceable equality beside their former oppressors was, for the time, successfully established. CHAPTER VIII. THE STRUGGLE OF THE RACES--APRIL TO JUNE, 1848. Apparent unanimity between races of Austrian Empire in the March risings.--Unreality of this appearance.--Local aspirations.--The Serbs of Buda-Pesth.--The Magyar politics in Pesth.--The first Hungarian Ministry.--Szemere's Press Law and its failure.--The answer of the Ministry to the Serb petition.--Position and History of the Serbs in Hungary.--Treatment by Magyars and Austrian Kings.--Growth of Serb literature.--The deputations from Neusatz and Carlowitz.--Velika-Kikinda.--Position and character of Rajaciç.--Of Stratimiroviç.--The summoning of the Serb Assembly.--Croatian movement revived.--The Croats and the "twelve points."--Joseph Jellaciç.--Pillersdorf and the Bohemian deputation.--The meeting at the Sophien-Insel.--The second petition.--The Germans of Bohemia and Moravia.--Opening of the Vor-Parlament at Frankfort.--Blum's influence.--Struve's proposals and their effect.--The Slavonic question at Frankfort.--The Polish phase of it.--The Bohemian question evaded by the Vor-Parlament.--The Committee of Fifty and Palacky.--The discussion between the National Committees in Prague.--Schilling's insults.--The appeal to the Austrian Government and its failure.--The summons of the Slavonic Congress.--The difficulties in Vienna.--The April Constitution.--The Galician movement.--The rising of May 15 and the flight of the Emperor.--Effect of the May movement on Bohemian feeling--on Hungarian feeling.--The Serb meeting of May 13.--The Roumanian meeting of May 15.--The Saxon opposition to the Union.--The alliance between the Magyars and the Szekler.--The fall of Transylvanian independence.--The first collision with the Roumanians.--Their position, and character of their rising.--Alliance between Croats and Serbs.--The attack on Carlowitz of June 11.--The Slavonic Congress at Prague.--The difficulties in Prague.--Windischgrätz and the Town Council.--The quarrel between the students of Prague and the students of Vienna.--The Slavonic petition.--The rising of June 12.--The fall of Prague and its consequences. Few points were more remarkable in the March Risings of 1848 than the apparent reconciliation between those champions of freedom who had been separated from each other by antagonism of race. Gaj and his friends had hastened to Vienna to join in the general congratulations to that city on its newly won freedom. The Slavonic students of Prague had been equally sympathetic; and members of the different races of Hungary had expressed their satisfaction in the successes of Kossuth. But this sudden union was necessarily short-lived; for it sprang from a hope which could not be realized; the hope, namely, that the Germans and Magyars would join in extending to each of the Slavonic races of the Empire those separate national freedoms which those two great ruling races had secured for themselves. Thus proposals soon began to be made for the formation of a district which was to be called Slovenia, after the Slovenes who inhabited the province of Krain, and other south-western provinces of the Austrian Empire. At the same time, the Slovaks of North Hungary desired to be formed into a separate province, in which they could freely use the Slovak language and profess the Lutheran creed, undisturbed by Magyar language or Magyar Calvinism. Lastly, on March 15, Ivan Kukuljeviç, who, next to Gaj, was the most distinguished of the Croatian patriots, carried, in the Agram Assembly, an address to the Emperor, asking him to summon the old parliament of the three kingdoms of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. But, though all these demands contained within them the seeds of future quarrels, the first actual outbreak was not to come either from Slovenes, Slovaks, or Croats. The first token of the "rift within the lute," which, if it could not "make the music" of Liberty "mute," would at least weaken its sound and introduce discord into its harmony, showed itself in connexion with a branch of the Slavonic race to which little allusion has yet been made. Those who have visited Buda-Pesth will remember how, when they had left the modern magnificence of Pesth and crossed the suspension-bridge which joins it with Buda, they have come to a pause at the foot of the steep rock which confronts them. Then, if, instead of ascending to the fortress of Buda, they turned southwards along the shores of the Danube, in a short time they would have found themselves in a district in complete contrast with the rest of the capital, where an air of poverty, hardly found elsewhere in the town, is combined with an originality and picturesqueness of decoration which is neither German nor Magyar. Little cottages, coloured yellow, blue, or white, are built up against the rock in all kinds of irregular ways; in some places the rooms are below the street, and the gay appearance is increased by signs outside the shops, showing what articles can be procured there. The bright handkerchiefs on the heads of the women, and the gay colours worn by both sexes, give a somewhat Eastern aspect to the streets and market-place. Such is the Raitzenstadt, the quarter of the Serbs, long looked down upon by their Magyar countrymen. There, on March 17, the representatives of about a hundred districts of the neighbourhood gathered to prepare a petition for leave to use their national language in national affairs. This roused the fierce opposition of the Magyar youth of Pesth; and the Committee of Safety which had just been formed found itself unable to protect the Serbs from violence. If, indeed, the spirit of Kossuth's speech of March 3 had been still triumphant, compromises might have been found which would have hindered the claims of the Serbs from provoking actual war. But the sudden outburst of statesmanlike feeling which produced that speech was not of long duration; and, even if Kossuth had desired to conciliate the subject-races of Hungary, there were those at his back who would never have consented to such tolerance. The fiery youth of Pesth supplied an element to the Magyar revolution very different from that which generally found expression in the Diet at Presburg; and this element had been so necessary to Kossuth's purposes that it was impossible to disregard its influence. Three days before the Serb meeting a great gathering had been held in a café at Pesth, which had been followed on the 15th by a march of the Hungarian students, headed by the poet Petöfy, to the Town Council, to demand the concession of twelve points. Some of these points were being secured on that very day by the deputation which had gone to Vienna; others were already conceded in principle by the Diet at Presburg; one of them, the proposal for the union of Transylvania with Hungary, was to be the seed of future mischief, but was, at present, acceptable to all parties of the Magyars. It was not so much, then, by political theories that the youth of Pesth were distinguished from the quieter spirits of Presburg; it was rather the fiery manner in which they made their demands, and the dogmatic intolerance with which they insisted on particular formulas. Moreover, the Presburg policy, if one may so call it, was weakened in its effect by that attempt to reconcile hopeless opposites which is the great difficulty of all moderate parties. Count Louis Batthyanyi, when he was appointed as the first responsible Minister of Hungary, thought himself bound to form his Ministry, so far as possible, by a combination of the different representatives of the rival parties; and he not only hoped to find a basis for common action between the growing Conservatism of Szechenyi and the growing Radicalism of Kossuth, but he even gave a place in his Ministry to Count Esterhazy, who sympathized to some extent with the Camarilla at Vienna. Baron Eötvös, who had been the champion of centralization when Kossuth was arguing for County Government, was also a member of this Ministry; while Meszaros, the War Minister, might be supposed to combine opposite principles in his own person; for, while he had contributed to Kossuth's paper, the "Pesti Hirlap," his last public action had been to serve under Radetzky in his attempt to suppress the liberties of Milan. Batthyanyi, indeed, hoped that, by introducing Deak into the Ministry, he should secure an influence which should reconcile these various incongruous elements; but such a task was beyond even Deak's powers. By his honourable abstention from the Diet of 1843, he had deprived himself of his former influence; and, though he accepted the place offered him by Batthyanyi, and honestly tried to work with his different colleagues, yet, as the movement became more and more revolutionary, he fell further into the background. The weakness of this Coalition Ministry was first brought into prominence by Bartholomaus Szemere, a cold, hard man, who had had little previous influence on politics. He was appointed to draw up the new regulations with regard to freedom of the Press; and produced a law which was of so reactionary a character that the students of the Pesth University burnt it publicly in front of the Town Hall, and sent a deputation to the Diet to entreat them to repeal the law and to change the seat of government to Pesth. Batthyanyi consented to the repeal of the law; but rejected, for a time, the other proposal of the students; and the Ministry remained at Presburg, weakened by the sense that the strongest element of Magyar feeling was centred in Kossuth and the Pesth party, and that this feeling would eventually overpower the more moderate patriots. Under these circumstances it was natural that the weak Ministry at Presburg should sacrifice to their fiery opponents the claims of those races with which neither party had any deep sympathy; and when, on March 24, the Serb petition came before the Ministry, they answered that the Hungarians would not endure that any nationality except the Hungarian should exist in Hungary. But the Serbs of the Raitzenstadt were but the feeble representatives of a much more powerful body, which was scattered over various parts of Hungary and found its chief centre in the province of Slavonia. It was during the sixteenth century that the great immigration of the Serbs into Hungary had taken place. All the important history of this race had been connected with their struggle against the Turks; and it was as fugitives from Turkish tyranny that they took refuge in Hungary. They arrived just about the time when Hungary had accepted the rule of the House of Austria, and, finding that Ferdinand I. was more zealous than his Magyar subjects in resistance to the Turks, and that some of the Magyars were even willing to call in the Turks to their assistance, the Serbs naturally became the champions of the House of Austria against the Magyars. As a reward for this loyalty, the Austrian rulers granted various privileges to their new subjects; and, in 1690, Leopold I. gave special invitation to the Serbs to come over from the Turkish provinces and to settle in the district assigned to them. To those who lived in that district was granted the right of choosing the Patriarch of their own Church, their own Voyvode, or military leader, and their own magistrates; while those living actually on the frontier were placed under a special military government which was administered from Vienna, and were rewarded for their military services by freedom from taxation. The Magyars, indeed, did not abandon the hope of drawing the Serbs to their side; and when, in the beginning of the eighteenth century, Rakoczi[11] attempted to set up an independent principality in Transylvania, he appealed to the Serbs to assist him in his attempt. But their gratitude to the House of Austria, strengthened in this instance by a dislike to the Calvinism of Rakoczi, kept them firm in their championship of the Austrian cause. The House of Austria, on the other hand, showed as little gratitude to the Serbs in the early part of the eighteenth century as they did to the Magyars in the nineteenth; and Joseph I. and Charles VI. steadily violated the promises which had been made by Leopold. The concession of religious liberty was found to be not inconsistent with a vigorous Jesuit propaganda for the crushing out of the Greek faith. A small émeute in a Serb town gave excuse for further interferences with liberty; and, as the Magyars gained in strength, Charles VI. resorted to the mean device of submitting to the Diet of Presburg the list of privileges which he had granted to the Serbs, and asking if the Diet would be pleased to approve them; and, on receiving the refusal which he had expected, he declared that he could not uphold these privileges against the wish of the Hungarian Diet. The Serbs in Hungary were, in many cases, reduced to the position of serfs; the districts of the Banat and Batschka, which had formed part of the Serb settlement, were given up to Hungary in 1741 by Maria Theresa; the Voyvodeschaft was abolished, and so, at a later period, was the Patriarchate also. Maria Theresa, indeed, would have desired to redress some of the grievances of the Serbs; but the need which she felt for the help of the Magyars, first in the War of Succession, and afterwards in the Seven Years' War, compelled her to disregard the interests of the subject-races when they clashed with those of her more powerful allies. In spite, therefore, of several insurrections and continual meetings of Congresses, the Serbs failed to recover their former privileges; and a few concessions which were made to them by Leopold II. were speedily withdrawn by Francis. During the latter part of the eighteenth century a new hope came to the Serbs in the growing development of their national literature. A school was founded at Carlowitz by the Patriarch of the Serbs; printing-presses were set up, and writers were gradually produced by this education, one of whom, named Obradoviç, composed the first essay in the Serb dialect: while Karadziç, another writer, gathered up the old songs, proverbs, and stories of the country and tried to reduce the dialect into grammatical forms. The movement of Szaffarik and Kollar in North Hungary gave new hopes to the Serbs and other Slavs in the development of their literature; and it was whilst this feeling was growing that Gaj put forward his plan for the Illyrian language. Gaj's movement was, to some extent, an apple of discord among the Serb national party; for, while some of them were eager to join in any union of the Slavs, many of the more powerful of the clergy objected altogether to the abandonment of the old Cyrillic alphabet which had been introduced by the Bishops Cyril and Methodius, who converted the Slavs to Christianity. And while, as was mentioned in a former chapter, Gaj was suspected by the Roman Catholics of wishing to swamp them in a union with the members of the Greek Church, the Greek clergy among the Serbs, on the other hand, feared a movement which seemed likely to have its centre in the Roman Catholic province of Croatia. Thus there had grown up two centres of the Serb movement in two towns situated within a few miles of each other. Neusatz, or Novi Sad, the most important town of Slavonia, was the centre of the literary and trading part of the Serb community; and Carlowitz, or Karlovci, was the head-quarters of the Metropolitan, and the centre of the clerical section of the Serb national party. It was from Neusatz, then, that, on April 8, 1848, a deputation arrived at Presburg and declared that, while they were in sympathy with the March movement, and had no desire to separate from Hungary, they yet wished for protection for their national language and customs. They therefore demanded the re-establishment of the Patriarchal dignity and of the office of Voyvode; requesting, further, that the power of the latter officer should be extended over the territories which the Serbs had reconquered from the Turks. Kossuth answered that the Magyars would do their best to respect national feeling, and to give the Serbs a share in the freedom which the Magyars had won; but that only the Magyar language could bind the different nationalities together. Batthyanyi echoed the words of Kossuth in an even stronger form. "Then," the Serbs answered, "we must look for recognition elsewhere than at Presburg." "In that case," answered Kossuth, "the sword must decide." "The Serbs," retorted one of the deputation, "were never afraid of that." And so the glove was thrown down. A few days later came a deputation from Carlowitz with the same object; for the clergy, however little sympathy they might feel with Gaj's movement, feared, as heartily as the citizens of Neusatz could do, the interference of the Magyars with Serb independence. The Magyars seem to have learned already the tyrannical arts of Metternich; for they met the petition of the clergy with the threat that they would extend to the Roumanians the liberties granted to the Serbs; and they were, no doubt, proportionately disappointed when the deputation answered that they were perfectly ready to share their rights with the Roumanians. The quarrel thus begun soon led to an actual outbreak. In the town of Velika-Kikinda, in the Banat, there had arisen one of those disturbances which are the natural marks of a revolutionary period. The peasantry, excited by the changes in their position, had begun to expect still further advantages. A worthless adventurer had become a candidate for one of the village judgeships, and had promised that, if elected, he would recover for the peasantry, without compensation to the present possessors, all the lands that their lords had taken from them. He was elected, but was, of course, unable to carry out his promises; and the disappointed peasantry rose in indignation and made a riot. The soldiers were called out to suppress the movement, but were repelled and disarmed; the magistrates' houses were broken open, and two of them were killed. Thereupon the Magyars sent down a Commissioner to inquire into the riot; the people were ready to surrender the murderers to justice; but the Commissioners seized the opportunity to declare that all the Serb villages in the neighbourhood were concerned in a communistic rising; and, in consequence, they placed them under martial law. The Serbs now despaired of getting any justice from the Magyars, and determined to appeal from them to the Emperor. They desired, however, still to act legally; and they therefore resolved that the petition to the Emperor should be drawn up by an Assembly which had been convoked in a legal manner. The only official leader to whom they could appeal was their Metropolitan, Rajaciç. He was an old man, and unwilling to bestir himself in politics. He hesitated, therefore, to comply with the request of his countrymen; but a man of more determined spirit was ready to take the lead among the Serbs. This was George Stratimiroviç, one of those erratic characters who add picturesqueness to a revolutionary movement. He came from a Serb family which had settled in Albania; but he had been brought up in Vienna in a military school, and had entered the Austrian Army, which he had been compelled to leave on account of an elopement. Since that time he had started a popular journal, and had joined in the Serb deputation to the Hungarian Diet. His fiery and determined character had attracted the more vigorous politicians among the Serbs; and, though only twenty-six years of age, he was chosen President of the National Serb Committee which was now being formed. The impulse given to the movement by Stratimiroviç was further quickened by the alarm which was roused among the Serbs by the appointment of a new Governor to the fortress of Peterwardein, which overlooked Neusatz. This decided the National Committee to act at once; and, gathering together the Serbs from those other provinces of Hungary which had once been under their rule, they organized in Neusatz a deputation which was to rouse Rajaciç to a sense of his duty. Along the road to Carlowitz they marched with banners and flags, singing the old national airs, and telling of the exploits of Voyvodes and Patriarchs who had saved their country in former times. Rajaciç was greatly impressed by this deputation; and, after notifying his decision to the Count Palatine, as the legal ruler of Hungary, he summoned the Assembly to meet on the 13th of May. In the meantime, the attitude of the Croatians was alarming the Hungarian Diet. As mentioned above, they had determined from the first to claim a separate Assembly for Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia, and also a separate national guard. Kossuth and some of his friends seemed more disposed, at this time, to make concessions to the Croats than to the Serbs. But the bitter struggles of 1843 to 1846 had destroyed the hope of smoothing over the breach with soft words; and, even while Kossuth was promising to sanction the use of the Croatian language in Croatian affairs and to protect their nationality, he was at the same time denouncing their separatist tendencies as shown in their desire for a separate Assembly. The Croatians, on their part, resented fiercely the visit of certain youths from Pesth, who came to demand their acceptance of the "twelve points." The growing sympathy between the different subject-races of Hungary had led the Croats to protest against the proposal to absorb Transylvania in Hungary. The question of the abolition of the forced labour of the peasants, and of the introduction of peasant proprietorship, was complicated in Croatia by the existence of village communities which managed the land on the old tribal system; and therefore the Croats maintained that it was impossible to pass the same land laws for Hungary and for Croatia. The question of religious equality was connected in the minds of the Croats with the fear of an invasion by Magyar Protestants to denationalize Croatia. But the great cause of the Croatian dislike to the "twelve points" lay not so much in their objection to any particular reform as in their resentment at the arrogant attempt to thrust upon them whole-sale formulas concocted at Buda-Pesth. On the other hand, the Magyars considered that they had a special grievance, both against the Croats and against the Emperor, in the sanction which Ferdinand had given on March 23, without waiting for Magyar approval, to the election of Joseph Jellaciç as Ban of Croatia. Jellaciç was colonel in one of the regiments stationed on that military frontier which was specially under the control of Vienna; and he was chiefly known for his share in a not very successful campaign in Bosnia; while rumour connected his appointment with the favour of the Archduchess Sophia. This appointment, therefore, was doubly distasteful to the Hungarian Diet, as being at once an exercise of court influence and an assertion of the independence of Croatia against the power of the Magyars. But while these various causes were working together to undo the harmony which had been established in the beginning of March, another race struggle was coming to a head, in a different part of the Austrian Empire, which was to have as vital an effect on the history of that Empire as any produced by the struggle between the Magyars and the subject-races of Hungary. We left the Bohemian deputation enjoying their welcome from Ferdinand and Kolowrat in Vienna, and sending happy messages to their fellow citizens in Prague; and on March 24 Pillersdorf, who was now the most important Minister at Vienna, announced the concession by the Emperor of most of the demands of the people of Prague. There were, however, three exceptions on very vital points. The Emperor declared that the equalization of nationalities was already secured by a previous ordinance, and therefore needed no new legislation; that the special law court for Bohemia, which the petitioners wished to see established in Prague, must be left to the consideration of the Minister of Justice; and that the proposal to reunite Moravia and Silesia to Bohemia must be decided by the local Assemblies of the respective provinces. Some of the quieter citizens of Prague were willing to accept this answer; but the more determined patriots called upon their friends to attend a meeting on the Sophien-Insel, a green island which lies just below the Franzensbrücke in Prague, and which is used by the citizens as a great place for holiday gatherings. Here the more vigorous spirits of Prague uttered their complaints against the Emperor's answer. They pointed out that the local Estates, to which Ferdinand wished to refer some of the questions submitted to him, were mediæval bodies, having no real representative character; and that only an assembly freely elected by the whole people would be competent to decide on these questions; that, as to the ordinance to which the Emperor referred for securing equality between Bohemians and Germans, that ordinance had ceased for two hundred years to have any effect; and that a law passed in a formal manner was therefore necessary as a guarantee for the desired equality; while with regard to the question of the union between Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia, the claim for that union rested on the historical, national, and geographical connections between those lands. The petitioners, accompanied by the national guard, then marched to the house of the Governor of Bohemia, and induced him to sign their new petition. On April 8 Ferdinand answered this petition in a letter, promising complete equality between the German and Bohemian languages in all questions of State Administration and public instruction. He further promised that a Bohemian Assembly should be shortly elected on the broadest basis of electoral qualifications, and should have the power of deciding on all the internal affairs of Bohemia. Responsible central boards were to be set up; and the new Assembly was to consider the question of the establishment of independent district law courts, and the abolition of the old privileged tribunals; while the question of the union between Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia was to be decided by a general Assembly, in which all three provinces would be represented. Public offices and legal boards in Bohemia were to be filled exclusively by men who knew both the German and Bohemian languages; and the Minister of Public Instruction was to make provision for the thorough education of Bohemian and German teachers. There seemed to be nothing in these concessions which was likely to irritate either the German or the Bohemian party; but the work of Germanizing Bohemia, so ruthlessly inaugurated by Ferdinand II. after the Battle of the White Hill in 1620, could not be entirely undone by the March insurrection of 1848. Several towns in Bohemia had been completely Germanized, and they looked with the greatest suspicion on the movement for restoring the Bohemian language to its natural place as an educational and literary power; while they regarded, with hardly less suspicion, any attempt to weaken the hold of Vienna on Prague, or to restore in any degree a Bohemian national life. The towns of Saatz and Reichenberg, particularly, seem to have retained the German impress most thoroughly, and were extremely jealous of the claim of Prague to take the lead in a Bohemian movement. In Moravia the German party were able to appeal to some feeling of provincial independence against the absorption of that province in Bohemia; while the Germans who had been born in Bohemia, but who had subsequently settled in Vienna, naturally caught the infection of that intense German feeling which connected itself with the March movement in Lower Austria. It must not be supposed, however, that this division of feeling ran strictly parallel with the lines of hereditary descent. Men of undoubtedly German name and German origin had accepted heartily the language and traditions of the conquered people; while names that were as certainly Slavonic were found among the leaders of the German party. Another element of confusion of the party lines arose from the change which had come over the religious feelings of the two races respectively. In Prague at any rate, especially among the aristocracy, the championship of that cause of Bohemian independence which had been dear to the followers of John Huss, and to the subjects of the Winter King, was often connected in 1848 with strong Roman Catholic sympathies. This irregularity in the division of parties might have been expected to soften the bitterness of the growing antagonisms; and, if the discussion of the question at issue had been confined to the Germans and Bohemians of the Austrian Empire, there seems some reason to hope that, under freer institutions, the bitterness of local and national divisions might have been weakened, and a satisfactory solution of the claims of the different races might have been arrived at. But a new element of discord was now to be introduced into the struggle; and the great movement for the unity and freedom of Germany became for a time a source of tyranny, and a new and more fatal cause of division between the races of the Western half of the Austrian Empire. This collision is the more to be regretted because, until its occurrence, the leaders of the German movement had exhibited the same dignity and moderation of temper which had been shown in the early phases of the Bohemian movement. On March 31, the very day of the meeting in the Sophien-Insel, the representatives of the German nation arrived in Frankfort, to open that Preparatory Parliament which was to be the first step towards German unity. One who saw this opening scene has thus described it:--"Under a wavy sea of German flags, through a crowd of green trees of freedom, covered with flowers and crowns, walked the members of the Preparatory Parliament. They were surrounded and accompanied by thousands of excited women, as they went from the Imperial Hall of the Roman Emperors to their work in that Church of St. Paul, which from thenceforth for nearly a year would contain the best men of Germany, the holiest hopes of the nation." Nor were their early efforts unworthy of the nation whom they represented; for it seemed likely that the wisest men would be able to get their due influence in the Assembly. And this was the more remarkable, because the ease with which they had accomplished the first steps of their work seems to have led many of the Assembly to fear that there was some deeper plot in the background; and both in the city and among the members of the Assembly a rumour spread that troops were on the march to put down their meeting. A panic seized the Deputies, and bitter reproaches were interchanged. Violence seemed likely to follow, when Robert Blum came forward to reconcile the opposing factions. "Gentlemen," said he, "from whence shall we get freedom, if we do not maintain it in our dealings with each other, in our most intimate circle?" He went on then to point out, that the immediate causes of quarrel were mere matters of form and not of principle; and that it was the duty of the Assembly to maintain the reputation of the German people for calm decision. For any tumults that were made in that Parliament would be settled out of doors not by shouts, but by fists, and perhaps by other weapons. "We will first," he continued, "reverence the law which we ourselves have made, to which we voluntarily submit. If we do that, gentlemen, then not only will the hearts of our people beat in response to us, but other nations too will stretch out their arms in brotherly love to the hitherto scorned and despised Germans, and will greet in the first representative body, which has come here, the full-grown true men, who are as capable of obtaining freedom as they have shown themselves worthy of it." The influence of his clear voice, powerful figure, and determined manner added to the natural effect of his eloquence in bringing the Assembly to a wiser state of mind.[12] Another sign of the power which these men showed, of responding to appeals which were addressed to their higher instincts, was given in answer to one of the Baden representatives, who called on them to accept as their fundamental maxim that "Where the Lord does not build with us, there we build in vain." At these words all the Assembly rose to their feet. The same triumph of gentle and moderating influences was shown in their reception of a programme presented to them by Struve on behalf of the Committee of Seven. This programme contained fifteen propositions, in which the desire for liberty and national life which animated all sections of the Assembly was combined with Republican aspirations, so strong among the Baden leaders, and with those Socialistic proposals which were as yet entirely in the background of German politics. Thus, for instance, the list begins with a proposal for the amalgamation of the army with the Civic Guard, in order to give a really national character to the army; while another clause proposes equality of faiths, freedom of association, and the right of communities to choose their own clergy and their own burgomasters. On the other hand, the 12th clause aims at the settlement of the misunderstandings between labour and capital by a special Ministry of Labour, which should check usury, protect workmen, and secure them a share in the profits of their work; while the 15th clause proposes the abolition of hereditary monarchies, and the introduction into Germany of a Federal Republic on the model of the United States of America. This medley of various ideas which Hecker and Struve desired to force upon the Assembly was finally referred to a Committee, which in the end would sift out what was practicable and embody it in a law. Even in the burning question of the relations between the Frankfort Parliament and their antiquated rival the Bundestag, Blum's influence was used in moderating the violence of the disputes between those who wished to drive the older institution to extremities and those who wished to make for it a golden bridge by which it could pass naturally into greater harmony with modern ideas. So far, then, the German national movement had, on the whole, been guided wisely and moderately; but when the discussions began about the basis of the election of the future Assembly there quickly appeared that German national arrogance which was destined to inflame to so intolerable an extent the antagonism of feeling between the rival races in Bohemia. It was, indeed, unavoidable that the German movement in Austria should be met by some expression of friendliness and some attempt at common action on the part of the Frankfort Parliament; but the desire to welcome all Germans into the bosom of the newly-united Germany became at once complicated with the question of the best way of dealing with those districts where Slavs and Germans were so closely mixed together. This question, indeed, would in all probability have been summarily answered by the German Parliament in favour of absolute German supremacy and of the absorption of Bohemia in Germany; but the Slavonic question in the South could not be considered apart from that other phase of it, which was concerned with the mutual relation between Poles and Germans in the Polish districts of the Kingdom of Prussia. Even the most extreme champions of German supremacy were influenced in their decision of this _North_ Slavonic question by their desire to restore an independent Poland as a bulwark against Russian oppression; and they could not deny that the claims of the Poles to the possession of Posen, at any rate, were as justifiable morally and historically as their claims to that part of their country which had been absorbed by Russia. They were desirous, therefore, of making concessions to Slavonic feeling in Posen; and this desire was increased by the connection which Mieroslawsky had established between the struggle for Polish freedom in Posen and that for German freedom in other parts of Prussia. Under these circumstances they could not wholly disregard in Bohemia the feeling which they humoured in Posen; and thus it came to pass that the Preparatory Parliament, unwilling either to abandon German supremacy or to violate directly the principle of unity and autonomy of race, came to the conclusion so common to men under similar difficulties, to throw the burden of the decision on others. They therefore passed a vague resolution which might be differently interpreted by different readers, while they left the practical decision of the question to the Committee of Fifty which was to govern Germany from the dissolution of the Preparatory Parliament on April 4 till the meeting of the Constituent Assembly on May 8. It was this Committee, therefore, which undertook the decision of the relations to be established between Bohemia and the new free Germany. The new body proved bolder than the Preparatory Parliament; for it took a step which, though it may have been intended in a conciliatory spirit, yet involved the distinct assertion of the claim to treat Bohemia as part of Germany. They invited the Bohemian historian Palacky to join with them in their deliberations, and thus to sanction the proposal that Bohemia should send representatives to the German Parliament. Palacky answered by a courteous but firm refusal of the proposal, based partly on the grounds of previous history, partly on the needs of Bohemia, and partly on the necessity of an independent Austrian Empire to the safety and freedom of Europe. He pointed out that the supposed union between Bohemia and Germany had been merely an alliance of princes, never of peoples, and that even the Bohemian Estates had never recognized it. He urged that Bohemia had the same right to independence which was claimed by Germany; but that both would suffer if extraneous elements were introduced into Germany. He urged that an independent Austria was necessary as a barrier against Russia, but that Germany could be united only by a Republican Government; and, therefore, Austria, which must necessarily remain an Empire, could not consent to a close union with Germany without breaking to pieces. In spite, however, of this rebuff, the German leaders at Frankfort were so eager to secure their purpose in this matter that they sent down messengers to Prague to confer with the Bohemian National Committee. A long discussion ensued, turning partly on the independence of the Austrian State, partly on the nationality of Bohemia. The Bohemians urged that the Germans were endeavouring to force upon them traditions which they had rejected for themselves; that the Frankfort Parliament had repudiated the old Bund on account of its unrepresentative character; and yet they demanded that Bohemia should recognise a union which rested on the arrangements which had been destroyed, a union about which the Bohemians had never been consulted as a nation. The Germans, on their side, attempted to advance certain arguments of expediency in favour of a closer union between Bohemia and Germany. But a certain Dr. Schilling, who does not seem to have been one of the original messengers from Frankfort, declared, with brutal frankness, the real grounds of the German proposal. If Austria did not become German, he said, the Germans of Austria would not remain Austrian. The five million Germans in Austria would not stay to be oppressed by the twelve million Slavs. The freedom and culture of Bohemia was, he declared, entirely German. The idea of freedom could not be found among the Slavs; and it was therefore necessary, in the general interests of freedom, that Bohemia should be absorbed in Germany. Palacky bitterly thanked Schilling for the frankness of his speech; and expressed his regret at hearing that the Germans would not stay where they could not rule, and where they were obliged to be on an equality with others; while another of the Bohemians exclaimed that the Bohemians had shown their love of liberty by their resistance to the attempts to Germanize them. But Schilling seemed entirely unable to appreciate the feelings of his opponents; and, with a naïve contempt for logic, he declared that, _because_ Nationality was just now the leading idea of the Peoples, _therefore_ all the Slavs who belonged to the German Bund must be absorbed in Germany! Kuranda, the former champion of Viennese liberty, tried to soften the effect of Schilling's insults. He abandoned any claim based on the old German Bund, and declared that the Assembly at Frankfort was not so much a German Parliament as a Congress of Peoples, a beginning of the union of humanity. But this ingenious change of front could not destroy the effect of Schilling's words; and perhaps the Bohemians could not understand why a Congress of the Peoples should find its centre at Frankfort any more than at Prague. But though the Bohemians had failed to convince the German Committee that Bohemia had as much right as Germany to a separate existence, they still hoped that the Austrian Government would protect them from an attack which seemed directed both against their national rights and against the integrity of the Austrian Empire. So they despatched to the Minister of the Interior a protest against the proposal to hold elections for the Frankfort Parliament in Bohemia. Such elections, they declared, would lead to a breach of the peace of the country, to Communistic and Republican agitations, and to attempts to break up the Austrian Empire. The Bohemian Assembly, they urged, would disavow the legal right of such representatives when they were elected; and thus any really satisfactory alliance between Austria and Germany would be hindered by this attempt. The Ministers in Vienna were, no doubt, troubled in their mind about this question of the relations between Germans and Bohemians. On the one hand, they desired to conciliate a people whose national interests led them to seek protection in a union with the rest of the Austrian Empire. But, on the other hand, they felt it difficult to disregard the intense German feeling which was growing in Vienna, and which was shared by important towns in Bohemia. Therefore, after, no doubt, considerable deliberation, the Ministry resolved to announce to the Bohemians that they might either vote for the representatives in the Frankfort Parliament or abstain from voting, as seemed best to them. This seems, of all conclusions, the most unreasonable which could have been arrived at. The union with Germany might or might not be defensible; but it was obviously a step which must be taken by the whole nation or by none. Of all possible political arrangements, none could be more intolerable than the permission to certain citizens of a country to retain their civil rights and residence in that country, and at the same time to be free to claim, _according to their own fancy_, the special protection secured by citizenship in another State. The National Committee of Prague, finding that the Government at Vienna were unable or unwilling to protect them, resolved on stronger measures of self protection; and on May 1 they issued an appeal to all the Slavs of Austria to meet on the 31st of the same month in Prague, to protest against the desire of the Frankfort Parliament to absorb Austria in Germany. This appeal was signed by Count Joseph Matthias Thun, whose relative, Count Leo Thun, had taken an active part in forming the National Committee; by Count Deym, who had headed the first deputation to Vienna; by Palacky and his son-in-law Dr. Rieger; by the philologer Szaffarik, and by less well known men. But at the same time the Bohemian leaders were most anxious to try to maintain the connection with Austria and to observe a strictly deferential attitude towards the Emperor. They therefore appealed again to the Emperor and his Ministers to withdraw the indirect sanction which they had given to the proposed Bohemian elections to the Frankfort Parliament. They pointed out that Austria had never belonged, in regard to most of her provinces, to the German Bund; and that the question of whether or no Bohemia should join herself to Germany was clearly one of those internal questions with reference to which she had been promised the right of decision. They further urged that the Emperor had acted on a different line with regard to the union between Moravia and Bohemia; and although the claim for this latter union rested on old treaties and laws, he had decided that it should only be restored by a vote of the respective provincial Assemblies, and the Bohemians had been perfectly willing to accept a compromise on the subject. How much more reasonable then was it that the Bohemians should claim the right of deciding on the question of an entirely new relation between their country and Germany? Again they warned him of the violence which might be the consequence of such elections; and they entreated him to consider also that any attempt on the part of the Frankfort Parliament to make a Constitution for all the lands of the Bund, would be a violation of the independence of the Emperor of Austria and of all his subjects. This last argument might, at an earlier stage, have produced an effect on some at least of the Ministers to whom it was addressed; for they had already announced that Austria could not be bound by the decisions of the Frankfort Parliament. But affairs in Vienna were at this time hastening towards a change, which was materially to affect the relations of that city with the other parts of the Empire. The Ministry, which had been formed after the fall of Metternich, was little likely to satisfy the hopes of the reformers. Kolowrat and Kübeck, who had been supposed to be rather less illiberal than Metternich, but who had worked with him in most of his schemes, were prominent in this Ministry; and another member of it was that Ficquelmont who had hoped to pacify Milan by help of dancers and actresses. Only one member of the Ministry, the Freiherr von Pillersdorf, had any real reputation for Liberalism; and even he had been a colleague of Metternich, and had done little in that position to counteract Metternich's policy. Finding it impossible, therefore, to put any confidence in the official rulers of their country, the Viennese naturally turned their attention to the formation of some Government in which they could trust. On March 20 a special legion had been formed composed of the students of the University; and a Committee was soon after chosen from those professors and students who had played a leading part in the Revolution. This Committee, which was at once the outcome and the guide of the Students' Legion, became the centre of popular confidence and admiration. Thus then there arose, in the very first days of the Revolution, a marked division of interest and feeling between the real and nominal rulers of Vienna. Some such antagonism is perhaps the scarcely avoidable result of a revolution achieved by violence, especially when the change of persons and forms produced by that revolution is so incomplete as it was in Vienna. Those who, by mere official position, are allowed to retain the leadership of followers with whom they have no sympathy, are constantly expecting that reforms which were begun in violence must be necessarily continued by the same method; while the actual revolutionary leaders can hardly believe in their own success, and are constantly suspecting that those who have apparently accepted the new state of things, are really plotting a reaction. In Vienna these mutual suspicions had probably stronger justification than they have in most cases of this kind. The courtiers, who had plotted against Metternich, had as little desire for free government as the Jacobins who overthrew Robespierre; and Windischgrätz was gradually gathering round him a secret council, who were eventually to establish a system as despotic as that of Metternich. On the other hand, it cannot be denied that the gallant lads who had marched in procession to the Landhaus on March 13, and who had defied the guns of Archduke Albert, were unwisely disposed to prefer violent methods of enforcing their opinions. Thus, when, on March 31, a law regulating the freedom of the Press was issued, as distasteful to the Viennese as Szemere's had been to the Hungarians, the Viennese students at once proposed to follow the example of the students of Pesth, and burn the law publicly. Hye persuaded them to abandon this attempt; and he, with Fischhof, Kuranda, Schuselka and other trusted leaders, went on a deputation to Pillersdorf, to entreat him to withdraw the law. Pillersdorf assured them that this law was only a provisional one, and that amendments would soon be introduced into it; but, a few days later, Count Taaffe, another member of the Ministry, publicly contradicted Pillersdorf's statement, and spoke of the Press law as being a permanent one, though he promised that it should be mildly administered. Perhaps the students may be excused if they felt no great respect for such a Ministry. Nor were their feelings conciliated by what they considered a growing tendency on the part of the Ministry to make concessions of local liberties to the provinces. After the first enthusiasm for Kossuth had a little subsided, the Viennese began to reflect that the concession of a separate ministry to Hungary might be a dangerous source of weakness to the central Government; while the growing demands of the Bohemians seemed likely to injure both the position of Vienna, and the cause of German unity. But the Viennese were in many cases aiming at the two incompatible objects of maintaining the position of Vienna as the capital of the Austrian Empire, and gaining for it a new position as the second or third town of United Germany. But a more reasonable cause of discontent arose from the fact that, while parliaments were conceded to Hungary and Bohemia, the Constitution which had been promised in March to the Austrian Empire was as yet unrealized. Dr. Schütte, a Westphalian by birth, organized a demonstration in favour of a mass petition. Schütte was arrested by the police, and banished from Vienna as a foreign agitator; and, while this irritated the students still further, the Ministry on their side were alarmed at finding that they had failed to secure the one advantage which they had hoped to reap from the power of the students. The men who had succeeded in retaining office after the March Rising, had trusted that the intellectual youths, who had fought for freedom of the Press and freedom of teaching, would have discouraged the coarse socialistic agitations of the workmen, and have separated themselves altogether from their movements. But, though the extremer forms of Socialism found little favour among the leaders of the University, the sympathy between the students and the workmen grew ever closer. If the workmen complained of an employer, the students went to him and warned him to behave better; if any poor man needed money, the students organized the collection; if the cause of a workman was suffering by the undue length of a trial, the students called upon the judges to do their duty; if the workmen wished to state some special grievance in the form of a petition, the students composed the petition for them, or found a lawyer who would do it gratuitously. Reductions of the hours of labour and higher wages frequently resulted from these efforts. This combination naturally alarmed the authorities, and they showed their fears both by coercion and concession. On the one hand they arrested Schütte and other agitators; on the other hand they consented on April 25 to issue the long promised Constitution. The Constitution, however, at once disappointed the petitioners. The proposed Parliament was to consist of two Chambers; the Upper Chamber to be composed of Princes of the royal House, of nominees of the Emperor, and of 150 landlords chosen by the landlords; and the assent of both Chambers and of the Emperor was to be necessary before the passing of a law. This Constitution was objected to both by the students and the workmen; the former condemning it on the ground of its aristocratic character, the latter becoming discontented when they found that the issue of this document did not free them from the payment of rent. The revolutionary enthusiasm of the students was further whetted by the events which were taking place in Galicia. That unfortunate province had been so hampered by the effects of the abortive movement of 1846, that it had not been able to join in the March insurrection of the rest of Southern Europe. But by the beginning of April even the Galicians had taken heart; and they sent a deputation to the Emperor asking for a State recognition of the Polish language, a separate army for Galicia, and the concession of the different liberties which were then being demanded throughout the Empire. Even the Preparatory Parliament of Frankfort had passed a resolution in favour of the reconstitution of Poland; and the students of Vienna were prepared to be far more generous in their recognition of Galicia's claim to a share in Polish independence, than the Frankfort Parliament had been in its attitude towards Posen. So alarming did the movement appear to the Austrian Governor of Galicia, that he forbade any emigrants to return to his province unless they could prove that they had been born there. The Galicians rose in indignation, and imprisoned the Governor; but he was set free, and, after a sharp struggle, the insurrection was suppressed. But, if their Polish sympathies tended to rouse the revolutionary fervour of the Viennese students, their anger, on the other hand, was kindled by the growing tendency of the rich merchants to abandon the position which they had taken up in March, to accept the April Constitution, and to fall into more peaceable methods of action. Even the Reading and Debating Club, which had been the first centre of the Liberal movement, was now the object of hostile demonstrations on the part of the students. The Students' Committee had been strengthened by the adhesion of many of the National Guard, and had received the name of the Central Committee; Hoyos, the commander of the National Guard, was alarmed at this sign of revolutionary feeling, and forbade his subordinates to take part in any political movement. The Central Committee entreated him to withdraw this prohibition, to which Hoyos answered that he would withdraw his prohibition if the Central Committee would dissolve itself. The Committee met to consider this proposal; but, while they were still sitting, a report arrived that the soldiers and the National Guard had been called out to put them down by force. The truth appeared to be, that the soldiers had been called out to suppress a supposed attack by the workmen; but that, finding that no such attack was intended, the military leaders seemed disposed to turn their hostility against the University. Thereupon the students at once rose and marched to the Castle. It seems that their exact object was at first uncertain; but on someone demanding of them their intentions, Dr. Giskra, one of their leaders, answered with, a shout, "Wir wollen eine Kammer" (we want a single Chamber.) The cry was taken up by the students; Pillersdorf advised the Emperor to yield, and on May 16 Ferdinand issued a proclamation granting a one Chamber Constitution. But whether the shock had been too much for his feeble health, and had struck him with a panic, or whether he yielded to the advice of his courtiers, Ferdinand suddenly resolved to leave Vienna, and on May 17 he fled secretly to Innspruck. These events produced a somewhat peculiar effect on opinion in various parts of the Empire. In Bohemia the extreme national feeling had been hitherto represented by the Swornost, a body corresponding almost exactly to the Students' Legion in Vienna; and they had been held somewhat in check by the noblemen and citizens, who had organized the March movement. But the Vienna rising of May 15, and the flight of the Emperor, roused the indignation of men like Count Thun and Count Deym; and they decided to take the important step of breaking loose altogether from the Viennese Ministry, summoning a special Bohemian assembly in June, and inviting the Emperor to take refuge in Prague. The Swornost, on their part, felt some reluctance to take any steps which seemed to condemn the abolition of the Upper Chamber by the Viennese; but the bitter hostility, which the Germans of Vienna had so repeatedly shown against the Bohemians during the months of April and May, prevented the possibility of any understanding between the Democrats of Prague and those of Vienna; and thus the students of Prague were ready to approve, not only the assertion of Bohemian independence, but even the proposed deputation to the Emperor. Kossuth, on his part, saw in these events an opportunity for increasing the growing friendliness between the Magyars and the Emperor; and he induced the Hungarian Ministry to invite Ferdinand to Pesth. This attitude of the Magyar leaders was due to one or two causes. In the first place the Viennese, as mentioned above, had been growing alarmed at the separate position granted to Hungary, and had feared that they would lose their hold over that kingdom altogether. This naturally produced an attitude of hostility on their part, which provoked a counter-feeling of antagonism in the Magyars; and thus the latter became more friendly to Ferdinand as the representative of the anti-democratic principle, and therefore the opponent of the ruling spirits of Vienna. There was also a second reason of a stranger kind, which placed the leaders of the Magyar movement in hostility to the Democratic party in Vienna. In spite of the strong German feeling which prevailed among the leading Democrats of Vienna, it was the opinion of some of those Hungarians who were best acquainted with that city, that the change from indirect to direct elections, which was one of the results of the May rising, would tend to increase the power of the large Slavonic population of Vienna. But the great cause of the growing sympathy between the Magyars and the Emperor was the attitude taken up by the latter in the questions at issue between Hungary and Croatia. Although the appointment of Jellaciç, as Ban of Croatia, had been considered as an undue exertion of the power of the Court to the disadvantage of the Magyars, yet the independent tone which Jellaciç had adopted since his appointment, seemed to alarm the Emperor as much as it did Batthyanyi or Kossuth. Immediately after his appointment, Jellaciç announced that "the Revolution has changed our relations to our old ally, Hungary"; and that "we must take care that the new relation shall be consistent with independence and equality"; and he had then proceeded to summon the Assembly of Croatia, Slavonia and Dalmatia to meet at Agram in June. This independent attitude had brought rebukes upon Jellaciç from Ferdinand and the Hungarian Ministry alike; and the Croatian Council, while appealing to the Emperor to strengthen the hands of the Ban, had threatened that, if pressed too hard by the Magyars, they would take measures to defend themselves. It was not unnatural, therefore, that at this moment the Croats should be more disposed to sympathise with the Democrats of Vienna; and that Kossuth should try to draw closer the bond between the Emperor and the Magyars. It might indeed seem that the appeal of the Bohemians to the Emperor under these circumstances would have brought them out of sympathy with the Slavs of Croatia and Slavonia; but not only did the Emperor refuse to go to Prague, but the Tyrolese followed up that refusal by a sharp rebuke to the Bohemians for their proposal of a Slavonic Congress in Prague. Though, however, the Slavs of Hungary looked forward to the Slavonic Congress, and were willing to accept Prague as the centre of their political deliberations, it was in the Hungarian provinces themselves that the most vigorous action in defence of their rights was at present to be found. For while the Croatian Council were protesting against the Emperor's rebuke to Jellaciç, the Serbs were gathering for their Conference of May 13 in Carlowitz, and resolving to send deputies to the Croatian Assembly, and to the Emperor himself, and also to choose representatives for the Prague Congress. Crnojeviç, who had been sent by the Magyars to enforce martial law on the Serbs of the Banat and Bacska, after the riot at Kikinda, denounced the meeting, and called on Rajaciç to prevent it. Rajaciç would have hesitated about further action, but Stratimiroviç and his more fiery friends answered the threat by burning Crnojeviç's letter publicly; and the meeting took place in defiance of his warning. From every district where the Serb language was spoken, there came to Carlowitz representatives wearing the old national costume. Carlowitz is little more than a village; and it would have required a large city to provide for the crowds who arrived on this occasion. Hundreds, therefore, lay out by night in the streets, to wait for the meeting in the morning. In the garden which lies between the Archbishop's library and the small room where the archives of Carlowitz are kept, there met on May 13 the Assembly of the newly-roused Serb people. Rajaciç appeared, accompanied by some of the clergy, and presented to the Assembly the old charters which had been granted by the Emperor in 1690 and 1691, and on which the liberties of the Serbs were based. Physicians, lawyers, and young students denounced the abolition of their Voyvodeschaft, claimed back the provinces which Maria Theresa had abandoned to Hungary, and demanded the removal of all hindrances to the development of their life, language, and history. They then proceeded to revive the old dignity of Patriarch in the person of Rajaciç and to choose as their Voyvode a man named Suplikaç, who was then serving in the army in Italy. Finally they appointed a committee to prepare rules, and gave it the power to call the Assembly together when circumstances required it. Hrabowsky, the commander of the fortress of Peterwardein, had been uncertain what attitude he should assume towards this movement. Sometimes he seemed to be personally friendly to the Serbs; but, in his official position, he felt doubtful whether to support the extreme Magyar authority, or to wait for orders from Ferdinand; and this confusion of mind led him to give doubtful and contradictory answers to the Serb deputations which waited on him. Under these circumstances, the Serbs were compelled to rely, even more markedly than before, on the support of their own countrymen, and of those races whom a common oppression had driven into sympathy with them. It was not only to the Croatians and Bohemians that they now appealed; even the Germans of the Bacska were expected to look with friendly eyes on the Serb movement, and Stratimiroviç believed that beyond the old Serb provinces there were races to whom they might look for alliance. For while the Serbs were still discussing their grievances and the remedies for them, the Roumanians were meeting in their village of Blasendorf to make their protest against Magyar rule. They, like the other Peoples of the Empire, had been disposed to sympathise with the March movement; but when it became known that the Magyars at Pesth had put forward as one of their twelve points the union of Transylvania with Hungary, the Roumanians became alarmed. Had the Transylvanian Diet met under the extended suffrage now granted in Hungary, the Roumanians would have had a majority in the Diet; and the influence of this majority would have been far more important under the new parliamentary system than in the old days of centralised officialism. If, on the other hand, they were to be absorbed in Hungary, they naturally feared that the fanaticism of the Magyars in enforcing the use of the Magyar language, would be directed with even greater vigour against the despised Roumanians, than it had been against Serbs and Croats; and that the Greek Church to which the Roumanians belonged, and which had always been at a disadvantage in Transylvania, would be crushed, or, at any rate, discouraged. The tradition of their Roman descent recorded in the Libellus Wallachorum, had given some of them hopes for leadership in Transylvania, and had strengthened, even in the less ambitious, the desire for a dignified equality. Animated by these motives, they met on May 15 at Blasendorf. This little capital of the Roumanian race lies in one of the large open plains of Transylvania. It is still little more than a straggling village of low huts; but it is apparently as important to the Roumanians as Carlowitz is to the Serbs and Hermannstadt to the Saxons. Crowds of the strange figures, whom one may still see in the villages of Transylvania, flocked in to this meeting, covered with their rough sheep-skins and dark, flowing hair, and showing in their handsome faces at once the consciousness of the new life that was awakening, and their pride in those dim traditions of the past, which were supposed to unite them with the glories of ancient Rome. Even here, too, there were found some of the ruling race, who were prepared to make common cause with this, the most despised and oppressed of the races of Hungary; for a Magyar noble named Nopcsa was prominent in the meeting. But now, as ever, the chief hope for the Roumanians was in their clergy, and specially in their bishops; and Lemenyi, the bishop of the United Greeks,[13] appeared side by side with the more popular and influential Schaguna. Speaker after speaker dwelt on the great traditions of the Roumanian nation, and their determination to obtain an equality with the Magyar, Szekler, and Saxon. They avowed their loyalty to Ferdinand, and declared that they had no desire to oppress any other nation; but that they would not suffer any other nation to oppress them; that they would work for the emancipation of industry and trade, for the removal of the feudal burdens, for the securing of legal justice, and for the welfare of humanity, of the Roumanian nation, and of the common fatherland. They then proceeded to ask for a separate national organization, for the use of the Roumanian language in all national affairs, and for representation in the Assembly in proportion to their numbers. They further demanded a Roumanian national guard to be commanded by Roumanian officers. They claimed to be called by the name of Roumanian, instead of the less dignified epithet of Wallach. They also asked for an independent position for their Church; for the foundation of a Roumanian University; for equality with the other races of Hungary in the endowment of their clergy and schools. These were the chief points of their petition; but along with these came the demands for the ordinary freedoms of the time, and for the redress of special local grievances. At the close of the petition, came the prayer which specially explained the urgency of their meeting at that time. They entreated that the Diet of Transylvania should not discuss the question of the proposed union with Hungary until the Roumanians were fully represented in the Diet. This petition Schaguna carried to Vienna on behalf of the meeting. In the meantime the Saxons were preparing to express their opposition to the proposed union with Hungary in a separate protest of their own. The peculiar organization which the Saxons had enjoyed had become very dear to them; and they had hoped to retain their old institutions under the new Government. But when they appealed to the Hungarian Ministry, Deak told them that they had no right to make conditions; and it soon became evident that, in the larger matter of the union of Transylvania with Hungary, they would have as little chance of a fair hearing as in the smaller question of their own race organization. Count Teleki, the Governor of Transylvania, had announced, on May 2, that the union was practically settled already; and that only questions of detail had now to be arranged. This direct attack on the legal power of the Transylvanian Diet naturally alarmed the Saxons, and Count Salmen, the Comes der Sachsen or Chief Magistrate of the Saxon colony, organized the opposition to the proposed union. Hitherto the Saxons, with the exception of a few generous-minded men like Roth, had been as bitterly scornful of the Roumanians as any Magyar or Szekler could be; but now the sense of a common danger drew these races together; and the Saxons offered to allow the Roumanians to hold office in the Saxon towns and villages, and to be admitted to apprenticeships by the tradesmen of those towns. The opposition of the Saxons to the Magyars was, no doubt, strengthened by the sympathy of the former with that German feeling which would lead to the strengthening of the influence of Vienna; and they declared that they would rather send representatives to a Viennese Assembly than to a Diet at Presburg. And while, on the one hand, common danger to their liberties was drawing together the Saxons and the Roumanians, the sympathies of race and a common antipathy to aliens was drawing together the Magyar and the Szekler. As early as May 10 Wesselenyi issued an appeal to the Szekler to arm themselves as guardians of the frontiers, and to be prepared to suppress any rising of the Roumanians; and on May 19 Batthyanyi appealed to them to march to Szegedin. But it was not to the Szekler alone that the Magyars trusted to enforce their will on the Transylvanian Diet. The fiery young students of Pesth hastened down, on May 30, to Klausenburg, where the deputies were gathering for the final meeting of the Diet. A Roumanian deputation, coming to entreat the Parliament not to decide till the Roumanians were adequately represented in it, were contemptuously refused a hearing, and one of their leaders was roughly pushed back. Banners were displayed bearing the words, "Union or Death!" and the young lawyers from Pesth filled the galleries of the Assembly, and even crowded into the Hall. The Saxon representatives, more used to quiet discussion, or to commercial transactions, than to the fiery quarrels in which the Magyar and Szekler delighted, tremblingly entered the Hall; and, unable to gain courage for their duties, they gave way to the storm, and voted for the union. Thus ended the local independence of Transylvania, which was to be revived twelve years later by the Germanizing Liberalism of Schmerling, and then to be finally swept away in the successful movement for Hungarian Independence. The bitterness roused by the passing of the Act of Union was not long in leading to actual bloodshed. The immediate quarrel, however, arose out of a matter connected, not with the race contest, but with the new land laws of the country. The Hungarian Diet had decided that the peasant should not only be freed from his dependence on the landlord, but should be also considered by his previous payment of dues to have earned the land on which he had worked. Naturally, disputes arose as to the extent of the land so acquired; and in more than one case the peasants were found to be claiming more than their own share. It was to redress a blunder of this kind that, on June 2, a party of National Guards, composed partly of Szeklers and partly of Magyars, entered the Roumanian village of Mihalzi (Magyar, Mihacsfalva). The exact circumstances of such a collision as that which followed will always be told differently by the most honest narrators; but it seems probable that the Roumanians, in some confused way, connected this visit with the recent struggle about the Union; and it is certain that the race-hatred between the Szekler and the Roumanians soon became inflamed. The National Guard fired, and several of the Roumanians fell. The others fled; but their previous resistance soon produced a rumour of a general Roumanian insurrection. The Magyars were seized with a panic; the Roumanian National Committee was dissolved, and several of their clergy and other leaders were imprisoned. Had the Roumanians been now organized by Austrian officers it is possible that less might have been heard of the savagery of the new warfare. Had some of their own leaders, who afterwards tried to control them, been ready at this time to take the lead, many of the actual cruelties might never have taken place. But just at this time the Emperor answered the deputation of May 15 by referring the Roumanians to the Magyar Ministry for the redress of their grievances, and declaring that equality could only be carried out by enforcing the Act of Union. This rebuff was accompanied by a letter from Schaguna written somewhat in the same sense; and thus, finding that some of their leaders had deserted them; that others were imprisoned; that the Emperor was discouraging their complaints; that the Magyars were denouncing them as rebels, and the Szekler making raids on their territory, the Roumanians began to defend themselves by a warfare which rapidly became exceptionally barbarous and savage. In the meantime the other subject races of Hungary were preparing in their own way for resistance to the Magyars. The Croatian Assembly at Agram, finding themselves discouraged by the Emperor, were disposed to strengthen their union with the Serbs of Slavonia; and, on June 6, Gaj and Jellaciç both supported proposals at Agram for uniting the Serbs and Croats under one rule. Rajaciç, who happened to be passing through Agram, heartily responded to these proposals; and it was resolved that the relations between the Ban of Croatia and the Voyvode of the Serbs should be left to be settled at a later period. But the Serbs, though heartily desiring sympathy with the Croats, were not disposed to trust to alliances, however welcome, or to Constitutional arrangements, however ingenious, for the settlement of their grievances against the Magyars; for they, too, had been forced to abandon peaceable discussions for actual warfare. Crnojeviç, not having been found sufficiently stern in the Magyar service, was being driven into more violent courses by the addition of a fiercer subordinate; and the cruelties inflicted on the Serbs of the Bacska had so roused their kinsmen in other parts of Hungary that an old officer of the military frontier had crossed the Danube at the head of his followers and seized the town of Titel. At the same time the Serbs sent a deputation to Hrabowsky, the Governor of Peterwardein, to complain of the cruelties of the Magyar bands. Hitherto Hrabowsky had seemed to hesitate between the two parties; but he now grew angry in the conference with the Serb deputation, and disputed the right of the Serbs to stay in Hungary. The Serbs, alarmed at these threats, began once more to gather at Carlowitz; and they now tried to draw recruits from friendly neighbours. Stratimiroviç had succeeded in persuading some of the regiments from the frontier to take up the Serb cause; but he perhaps relied still more on the help of those Serbs from the principality of Servia, who were now flocking in across the border to defend their kinsmen against the Magyars. Of the leaders of these new allies the most important was General Knicsanin, who helped to organize the forces in Carlowitz. The Serbs of Carlowitz had, however, not yet entered upon actual hostilities, when, on June 11, during one of the meetings of their Assembly, Hrabowsky suddenly marched out of Neusatz, dispersed a congregation who were coming out of a chapel half way on the road between Neusatz and Carlowitz, and reached the latter town before the Serbs were aware of his intention. The Serbs, though taken by surprise, rushed out to defend their town, with a Montenegrin leader at their head. The contest continued for several hours; but at last Hrabowsky and his soldiers were driven back into Neusatz. Two days later ten thousand men were in arms in Carlowitz to defend their town and their race. But while the Slavs in Hungary were girding themselves for this fierce war, they had not forgotten the more peaceable union proposed to them by the Bohemians; and on May 30 representatives from the different Slavonic races of the Empire had been welcomed in Prague by Peter Faster and other Bohemian leaders. On June 1 the National Committee of Prague, while deliberating on the future Constitution of Bohemia, were joined by several of their Slavonic visitors; and out of this combination the Congress was formed. It was speedily divided into three sections: one representing Poles and Ruthenians, one the Southern Slavs (that is not only the Serbs and Croats, but also the Slovenes of Krain and the adjoining provinces), and the third the Bohemians, Moravians, Silesians, and the Slovaks of North Hungary. Many of the members of the Congress appeared in old Bohemian costumes, and from the windows of the town waved the flags of all the different Slavonic races. At 8 a.m. on June 2 the members of the Congress went in solemn procession through the great square called the Grosser Ring, so soon to be the scene of a bloody conflict, to the Teynkirche, the church in which Huss preached, and where his pulpit still stands. In front of the procession went the Students' Legion, singing patriotic songs; two young men followed, one in the Polish dress, the other bearing a white, blue, and red flag, which was supposed to symbolize the union of the Slavonic peoples. A division of the Swornost corps followed these; then came the Provisional Committee, and then the representatives of the three sections of the Congress. The Poles were led by Libelt, a leader in the recent rising in Posen, and the Bohemians by the philologist Szaffarik. At the altar, which was sacred to the bishops Cyril and Methodius, the presiding priest offered thanks to God for having put unity and brotherly love into the hearts of the Slavs; and he prayed that the Lord of Hosts would bless the work to the salvation of the nation, as well as of the whole fatherland. From the church they proceeded to the hall in the Sophien-Insel. That hall had been decked with the arms of the different Slavonic races. At the upper end of it was a table covered with red and white, the Bohemian colours; and the choir began the proceedings with an old national song. The Vice-President, after formally opening the Assembly, resigned his seat to Palacky, who had been chosen President. Palacky then rose and addressed the meeting. He spoke of the gathering as the realisation of the dreams of their youth, which a month ago they could hardly have hoped for. "The Slavs had gathered from all sides to declare their eternal love and brotherhood to each other. Freedom," he continued, "which we now desire, is no gift of the foreigner, but of native growth, the inheritance of our fathers. The Slavs of old time were all equal before the law, and never aimed at the conquest of other nations. They understood freedom much better than some of our neighbours, who cannot comprehend the idea of aiming at freedom without also aiming at lordship. Let them learn from us the idea of equality between nations. The chief duty of our future is to carry out the principle of 'What thou wouldst not that men should do unto thee, that do not thou to another.' Our great nation would never have lost its freedom if it had not been broken up, and if each part had not gone its own separate way, and followed its own policy. The feeling of brotherly love and freedom could secure freedom to us. It is this feeling and Ferdinand that we thank for our freedom." For himself, Palacky continued, he could say, "Lord now lettest Thou thy servant depart in peace, for mine eyes have seen the salvation which Thou hast prepared for us before the face of the whole world. A light for the enlightenment of the peoples, and the glory of the Slavonic race." Then, addressing the Assembly, he concluded with these words: "Gentlemen, in virtue of the office entrusted to me by you, I announce and declare that this Slavonic Assembly is open; and I insist on its right and duty to deliberate about the welfare of the fatherland, and the nation, in the spirit of freedom, in the spirit of unity and peace; in the name of our old, renowned Prague, which protects us in its bosom; in the name of the Czech nation, which follows our proceedings with hearty sympathy; in the name of the great Slavonic race, which expects from our deliberations its strengthening and eternal regeneration. So help us God." Other speeches followed from representatives of the different Slavonic races; and petitions to the Emperor were prepared in favour of the demands made by the Serbs at Carlowitz, and of the rights of the Poles and Ruthenians; while plans were drawn up for the equalization of the rival languages in the schools. But while these peaceable discussions were proceeding in the Slavonic Congress, more fiery elements were at work in other parts of the city. During the months of April and May there had been signs of various kinds of discontent among different sections of the population. Workmen's demonstrations about wages had attracted some attention; while one public gathering, approaching to a riot, had secured the release of an editor, supposed to have been unjustly arrested, and had hastened the resignation of Strobach, the Mayor of Prague. But the most fiery agitations were those which had been stirred up among the students by a man named Sladkowsky, with the object of weakening as far as possible the German element in Prague. So alarming did these demonstrations become that Count Deym resigned his seat on the National Committee; and Count Leo Thun, the Governor of Prague, threatened to dissolve the Swornost in order to hinder further disorder; but the opposition to this proposal was so strong that he was obliged to abandon it. The great cause of the students alarm was the appointment of Windischgrätz to take the command of the forces in Bohemia. His proceedings during the March movement in Vienna were well known; and the fear caused by his arrival was still further increased by the threatening position that he had taken up; for he had mounted his cannon on two sides of the city; namely, on the commanding fortress of the Wissehrad, on the South, from which he could have swept a poor and crowded part of Prague; and in the Joseph's barrack, on the North-East. The members of the Town Council tried to check the demonstrations of the students, and to persuade them to appeal to Windischgrätz in a more orderly manner. In order to give dignity to the proceedings, the Burgomaster consented to accompany the students on the proposed deputation. Windischgrätz, however, answered that he was responsible to the King, and not to the Council; though, when Count Leo Thun appealed to him, he consented to withdraw the cannon from the Joseph's barrack, declaring that there was no need for its presence there; but that he had been determined not to yield to the students. While the students succeeded in further irritating against them a man whose haughty and overbearing spirit was naturally disposed to opposition, they were still more rash and unfortunate in their relations with some whom they had had greater hopes of conciliating. The aristocratic leaders of the Bohemians, while asserting the independence of Bohemia, and the need for protecting Slavonic liberties, were most anxious to make as many concessions to German feeling as could be made consistently with these objects. One of the noblemen, who had been fiercest in his denunciations of the rising of May 15th, even thought it well to send to Vienna a long explanation and modification of his protest; while Palacky and other leading nationalists inaugurated a feast of reconciliation in which many of the German Bohemians took part. So successful had this policy appeared to be that the town of Saatz, which had been the first to express alarm at the Bohemian attitude towards the Germans, declared on May 20 its sympathy with the Prague address to the Emperor, and its desire for union between the German and Bohemian elements in Bohemia. But the students seemed doomed to weaken the effect produced by their more moderate countrymen. They combined a strong Czech feeling with a great desire for democratic government; and while they thought they could enlist the sympathies of the Vienna students by the latter part of their creed, they seemed to be unaware that Germanism was to the students of Vienna what Czechism was to them. On June 5th, the very same day on which the Slavonic Congress was deciding to send its petition to the Emperor, more than a hundred students of Prague started on a deputation to their comrades in Vienna. But on their way, they thought it necessary to attack and insult the German flag, wherever it was displayed. They arrived in Vienna to find the Viennese students suspicious even towards those who had been their champions, and still smarting from the recollection of a struggle between their Legion, and the National Guard, who had attempted to suppress them. It was while they were in this state of irritation, that the Czech students appeared in the Hall of the University; and, unfortunately, at the same time, there arrived from Prague the representatives of two German Bohemian Clubs. Schuselka, Goldmark, and other Viennese leaders, urged a reconciliation between the two races; but the news of the insults to the German flag so infuriated the Viennese students, that they drove the Czechs from the Hall, and ordered them to leave Vienna within twenty-four hours. The unfortunate deputation returned to Prague to find that the Slavonic Congress was approaching its final acts, and was preparing two appeals, one to the Emperor, and one to the Peoples of Europe. The latter appeal was based on a general complaint of the oppressions from which the Slavs suffered. It demanded the restoration of Poland, and called for a European Congress to settle international questions; "since free Peoples will understand each other better than paid diplomatists." In the appeal to the Emperor, the Congress went into greater detail, as to the special demands of the different Slavonic races of Austria. The Bohemians, indeed, mainly expressed their thanks for the independence which now seemed legally secured. The Moravians suggested an arrangement which would combine the common action of Moravia and Bohemia with a provision for Moravian local independence. The Galicians pointed out how much they had been left behind by the other Austrian provinces in the struggle for freedom, and proposed an arrangement for securing equality between the Polish and Ruthenian languages in Galicia, and for granting to Galicia the same provincial freedom that had already been secured to Bohemia. The Slovaks of North Hungary demanded protection for their language against the Magyar attempt to crush it out; equal representation in the Hungarian Assembly; official equality between the Slovak, Ruthenian, and Magyar languages; and freedom for those Slovaks who had recently been arrested and imprisoned by the Magyars, for defence of their national rights. The Serbs, of course, demanded the acceptance of the programme put forward at Carlowitz; and the Croats the recognition of the legality of the acts of Jellaciç, and of the municipal independence of the Assembly of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia. Lastly, the Slovenes desired that the provinces of Steiermark, Krain, Carinthia, and some neighbouring districts, should be formed into a separate kingdom, in which the Slovenian language should be the official one. All the Slavs combined in the desire that Austria should be a federal State, and in the protest against that absorption in Germany, the fear of which had led to the calling of the Congress. But sober and rational as was the tone of the Slavonic Congress, as a whole, there were turbulent spirits in Prague, who were determined that the matter should not end peaceably. The extremer representatives of Polish feeling desired the separation of Poland, and disliked any plan which would reconcile Galicia to remaining part of Austria. On the other hand, there had appeared in Prague at this period an adventurer named Turansky, who while professing to be a champion of the Slovaks of North Hungary, seems undoubtedly to have acted as an "agent provocateur." Such men as these were easily able to act upon the excited feelings of the students; and were further aided in stirring up violent feeling by a strike among the cotton workers which was just then going on. Finally, the outburst came on June 12. The Slavonic Congress at Prague, already preparing to break up, met on that day to celebrate a last solemn mass. Once more they all gathered in front of the statue of S. Wenzel; but now the numbers were so great that they spread down the whole length of the Wenzels Platz. In spite of the peaceable intentions of the majority, a number of the workmen had come bearing arms. The mass went off quietly enough; but several of those who had attended it, had had their national feelings excited to the utmost; and, as they left the Wenzels Platz, they marched back singing Bohemian songs, and howling against Windischgrätz. As they passed under the Pulverthurm into the narrow and busy Zeltnergasse, which leads to the Grosser Ring, some soldiers, as ill luck would have it, came out of the neighbouring barrack. The house of Windischgrätz was in the street, and the crowd were hooting against him. Under these circumstances a collision was unavoidable. The crowd were dispersed by the soldiers; some of the students attempted to rally them, and were arrested; the workmen then tried to rescue the students; the soldiers charged, and drove them back under the Pulverthurm, and round into the wider street of Am Graben, and right up to the National Museum, which was the head-quarters of the Swornost. After a fierce struggle the soldiers stormed the Museum, and captured many of the students; but the panic had now spread to other parts of the town. Sladkowsky, at the head of the workmen, broke into the depôt of the Town Watch, and seized arms; while others rushed into the country districts round Prague, and spread the rumour that the soldiers were trying to take away all that the Emperor had granted, and to restore the feudal dues. In the meantime the leaders of the March movement were greatly startled at hearing of the outbreak. Some of them had already been alarmed at the growing tendency to disturbances in Prague; several of them hastened out to check the riots, and some of them even fought against the insurgents. Count Leo Thun, the Governor of Prague, hastened down to the Grosser Ring to try to still the disturbance; but the students seized him, and carried him off prisoner into the Jesuit College near the Carlsbrücke. They seem to have had very little intention of violence; but they thought to secure by this means his promise of help in a peaceful settlement of the contest. He refused, however, to promise anything while he was kept a prisoner. Some of the students went to the Countess to try to get her to persuade her husband to yield; but though she was so alarmed for his safety that her hair turned white from fear, she firmly refused to comply. Meanwhile, one of the more moderate men went to Windischgrätz to entreat him to give up the students who had been taken prisoners, on condition of the barricades being removed. But Windischgrätz demanded that Count Leo Thun should first be set free. While the discussion was going on, the fight was still raging in the Zeltner Gasse; and Princess Windischgrätz coming to the windows was struck by a shot which mortally wounded her. Windischgrätz hastened to the room where his wife was dying, while the soldiers guarded the house against further attacks. With all his hardness, Windischgrätz was entirely free from the blood-thirstiness of Radetzky and Haynau; and under this terrible provocation he seems to have exercised a wonderful self-restraint. While the Burgomaster and some members of the Town Council were exerting themselves to restore order, Windischgrätz sent an offer to make peace, if Count Leo Thun were released, if guarantees were given for the peace of the town, and if Count Leo Thun and he were allowed to consult together about the restoration of order; and he even promised to await the deliberations of the Town Council on this subject. But the fight was raging so hotly that the Town Council were unable, for some time, to deliberate. At last, however, temporary suspension of firing was secured, and the Burgomaster, with the assistance of Palacky, Szaffarik and others organized a new deputation to Windischgrätz. Windischgrätz insisted on his former terms; and at last Count Leo Thun was set free, giving a general promise to use his efforts for securing peace. The students, however, put forward the conditions, that Bohemia should be under a Bohemian commander who should be in most things independent of Vienna; that Bohemian soldiers, alone, should be used in the defence of Bohemia; that the officers and soldiers should take their oath to the Constitution, both of Bohemia and of Austria; that the gates of Prague should be defended by the citizens and students alone; and lastly that Windischgrätz should be declared the enemy of all the Peoples of Austria, and tried by a Bohemian tribunal. As Windischgrätz was, obviously, one of the people to whom these conditions would be referred, it was not very likely that the last of these requests would be complied with. He seems still, however, to have retained some desire for concession; and on June 15 he withdrew his soldiers from the other parts of the town to the North side of the river. But new acts of violence followed; and Windischgrätz began to cannonade the town. Again the Burgomaster appealed to him; and he consented to resign in favour of Count Mensdorff, on condition that the barricades should be instantly removed. On the 16th the town seemed to have become quiet; but the barricades were not yet removed; the soldiers indignantly demanded that Windischgrätz should be restored to his command, as the conditions of his resignation had not been fulfilled; and the first act of Windischgrätz, on reassuming power, was to threaten to bombard the town, if it did not surrender by six o'clock a.m. on the 17th. The wiser students saw the uselessness of further resistance, and began to remove the barricades; but some stray shots from the soldiers, whether by accident or intention, hit the mill near one of the bridges; some women in the mill raised the cry that they were being fired on; the mill hands returned the fire, and Windischgrätz began at once to bombard the town. The barricades were quickly thrown up again; for four hours the bombardment continued; and, while the students were fiercely defending the Carlsbrücke against the soldiers of Windischgrätz, the fire, which had been lighted by the bomb-shells, was spreading from the mill to other parts of the town. Of such a contest there could be but one result. In the course of the 17th several thousand people fled from Prague; and on the 18th Windischgrätz entered the town in triumph, and proclaimed martial law. The conspiracy had collapsed; but, except Peter Faster, who escaped from the town during the siege, none of the leaders of the March movement were at first suspected of any share in the Rising. Indeed, it was well known that many of them had exerted themselves to suppress it. But Turansky, the agitator above mentioned, suddenly gave himself up to the authorities, and offered to reveal a plot, in which he declared that Palacky, Rieger, and other Bohemian leaders were implicated. The evidence broke down; but it gave excuse for the continuance of the state of siege, for the arrest of many innocent men, and for the refusal to summon the Bohemian Assembly, which was to have met in that very month. This imaginary plot was used as the final pretext for the complete suppression of Bohemian liberty. Turansky was believed, rightly or wrongly, to have been sent by Kossuth to stir up the insurrection; that he had desired the failure of the movement which he stirred up was evident enough; and thus there arose an ineffaceable bitterness between the Bohemians and the Magyars. There also arose out of these events further cause for the bitterness between the Bohemians and the Germans. For, while Prague was still burning, and Windischgrätz was still enforcing martial law, a band of Vienna students arrived in Prague, to congratulate Windischgrätz on his victory over the liberties of Bohemia. The long-simmering hatred between the Germans and Bohemians seems to have found its climax in that congratulation; and from that time forth, whatever might be the political feeling of the leaders on either side, common action between Bohemians and Germans became less and less possible. As for the effect of the fall of Prague on the position of the Slavonic races in Austria, they were deprived by that event of their last help of a free centre of national life round which their race could gather. For Prague had supplied such a centre in a way in which none of the other Slavonic capitals ever could supply it. Its fame rested on a past, which was connected with struggles for freedom against German tyranny, and the leading facts of which were clear and undisputed; while its geographical position prevented it from coming into collision with the other Slavonic races. Agram and Carlowitz might at times look upon each other as rivals; but Prague had no interest in preferring one to the other, or in destroying the independence of either, while the connection in language between the Bohemians and the Slovaks of North Hungary ensured the sympathy of the former for any attempts at resistance to Magyar supremacy. Lastly, wedged in as Bohemia is between the Germans of the Archduchy of Austria, and that wider Germany with which so many of the Austrians desired to unite, it could never cherish those separatist aspirations which would have prevented Lemberg, for instance, from ever becoming the centre of an Austrian Slavonic federation. Thus the fall of Bohemian liberty prepared the way for a complete change in the character of the Slavonic movement. The idea of a federation of the different Slavonic races of the Empire might be still cherished by many of the Slavonic leaders; and, for a short time, the struggle of the Slavonic races against Magyar and German supremacy might retain its original character of a struggle for freedom. But it was unavoidable that this movement should now gradually drift into an acceptance of the leadership of those courtiers and soldiers, who hated the Germans and Magyars as the opponents, not of Slavonic freedom, but of Imperial despotism. FOOTNOTES: [11] Rakoczi is still to a great extent a national hero among the Magyars, as is shown by the name of the Rakoczi March, which is given to one of the national airs; for the Magyars, in the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, were willing to risk the separation of Transylvania from Hungary if thereby they could secure an independent background to their struggles for liberty against Austria, much as the Venetians in 1859 were thankful for the liberation of Lombardy from Austria, though it involved the loss to Venetia of fellow-sufferers under Austrian oppression. [12] English readers may be reminded by this scene of that fiery debate on the Grand Remonstrance, when the members of the House of Commons would "have sheathed their swords in each other's bowels, had not the sagacity and great calmness of Mr. Hampden, by a short speech, prevented it." [13] Out of the various efforts of the Roman Catholics to bring back the Greeks to the Roman Church, there had arisen a community called the United Greeks, which acknowledged the power of the Pope while maintaining the Greek ritual. CHAPTER IX. THE REVOLUTION BREAKS INTO SEPARATE PARTS. APRIL TO OCTOBER, 1848. Attitude of the other races to the Italian struggle.--Inconsistency of Kossuth.--Attitude of the Provisional Government of Lombardy.--Hesitation of Charles Albert.--His two declarations about the Lombard war.--The war adopted by Leopold of Tuscany.--By Ferdinand of Naples.--Confusions of the Pope.--General Durando.--Radetzky at Mantua.--The first battle of Goito.--Mazzini in Milan.--Casati, Charles Albert, and the Italian Volunteers.--The Southern Tyrol.--Venice.--Manin's error.--Durando and Manin.--Charles Albert's attitude towards Venetia.--The Pope's difficulty.--The Encyclical of April 29.--Its effect.--The Mamiani Ministry.--Effect of the Pope's attitude on Charles Albert's position.--The fall of Udine, and its consequences.--Charles Albert and Venetia.--Casati and Mazzini.--The question of the Fusion.--Its effect on opinion.--The Neapolitan Coup d'Etat of May 15.--The recall of the Neapolitan troops from Lombardy.--Pepe and Manin.--Battle of Curtatone.--"The handful of boys."--Second battle of Goito.--Capture of Peschiera.--The vote of fusion.--The émeute of May 29 and its effects.--The struggle and fall of Vicenza.--The Austrian conquest of Venetia.--The vote of fusion in Venice.--The attack on Trieste.--German feeling in Frankfort.--The various difficulties of the Frankfort Parliament.--Effect of Archduke John's election.--Anti-Italian decisions.--The struggle in Italy grows fiercer.--Charles Albert's new blunders.--Mazzini's advice to the Lombard Government.--Charles Albert at Milan.--The final treason.--The Austrian reconquest of Lombardy.--The 8th of August in Bologna.--Repulse of Welden.--The struggle between Frankfort and Berlin.--The question of Posen.--The Schleswig-Holstein war.--The Assembly and the King.--The truce of Malmö.--The fatal vote.--The riots at Frankfort.--The "state of siege."--The Struve-Putsch.--The Vienna Parliament.--The race struggle.--Change of feeling towards the Magyars.--Intrigues of Latour.--Character and policy of Ferdinand.--Jellaciç.--The conference at Vienna.--"We meet on the Danube."--Stratimiroviç and Rajaciç.--Colonel Mayerhoffer.--The Magyar deputation.--The mission and death of Lamberg.--Latour and Pulszky.--Murder of Latour.--Jellaciç and Auersperg.--Blum and Bem.--The battle of Schwechat.--Fall of Vienna.--Death of Blum.--General remarks. The struggle of races described in the last chapter had not been without its effect on the progress of affairs in Italy. Those Austrians, whose one desire was for the unity of the Empire, spoke of Radetzky's camp as the only place where Austria was truly represented; while, on the other hand, the leaders of the different race movements were divided in their feelings about the Italian war. The Germans, both at Frankfort and Vienna, saw with chagrin that Lombardy and Venetia were slipping away from German rule; but they felt, nevertheless, that they could not entirely condemn a struggle for freedom and independence. The Bohemians, especially in the first part of the struggle, would gladly have let the Italian provinces go, if they could thereby have facilitated the federal arrangement of the rest of the Austrian Empire. Among the Croats there seems to have been some division of feeling on the subject. Gaj and the purely national party had some sympathies with Italian liberty; but Jellaciç, and that large body of his followers who mingled military feelings with the desire for Croatian independence, were eager to show their loyalty to the House of Austria by supporting the war in Italy; and they were, moreover, not unmindful of the rivalry between Slavs and Italians in Dalmatia and Istria. The Magyars, in the early days of the March movement, had been more disposed than any race in the Empire to show friendliness to Italy; and Kossuth's Italian sympathies had been specially well known. But circumstances changed the attitude of the Croats and Hungarians to Italy, as the struggle went on; for, while the former desired to recall the Croat forces from Italy to the defence of their home, the latter became more and more desirous of conciliating the sympathies of the Emperor. The wish to preserve a strictly legal position led some of the members of the Hungarian Ministry to dwell upon the claims due to the Austrian Government under the Pragmatic Sanction; and Kossuth, without sympathising with this feeling, was easily induced to give way to his colleagues, by his fear of the encouragement which the recall of Croatian regiments would give to the desire for Croatian independence; and therefore, in spite of his belief in the justice of the Italian cause, he strongly supported the use of Hungarian troops in crushing out the freedom of Italy. But, interesting as the Italian struggle was to all the different races of the Austrian Empire, it was yet working itself out in a way so distinct from either the Austrian or the German movements, that we are compelled to ignore the exact chronological order of European events in order to understand its full significance; and we must therefore now go back to the events which followed the March risings and the flight of Radetzky and Palffy. The centre of interest was still in Milan, where Casati and the Town Council had been changed by the force of circumstances into the Provisional Government of Lombardy. These men had shown, during the siege, a continual uncertainty of purpose and readiness to compromise; and, when Radetzky had been driven from Milan, they showed an equal unreadiness to follow up their advantages. In the people, however, there was no want of willingness to carry on the struggle; and at least one general rose to the occasion. Augusto Anfossi had died of his wounds during the siege; but Luciano Manara, the youth who had captured Porta Tosa, was following up the retreat of Radetzky, placing guards in the villages, and cutting roads. Manara found it very difficult to carry out his plans; partly owing to the distrust shown to him by the General whom the Provisional Government had placed over him, partly to the insubordination of Torres, one of the leaders of the Genoese Volunteers, who was nominally acting under him, and whose defiance of Manara seems to have been at least tolerated by the Provisional Government. For Casati and his friends put their trust not so much in any Lombards as in the help derived from Charles Albert. That Prince, indeed, had hesitated as usual till the last moment. When the news of the Milanese rising had reached Genoa, the Genoese had risen and sent volunteers to assist the insurgents; but Charles Albert had not only forbidden their march, but had sent troops to drive them back from the frontier. So indignant were the students of Turin at this action that they rose against Charles Albert, and would not submit until they were allowed to volunteer. Several officers even threatened to leave the Army if war was not declared on Austria; Parma and Modena were rising at the same time against the Austrian forces, and demanding annexation to Piedmont; while Mazzini and his friends were issuing appeals from Paris to urge their followers to support Charles Albert, if he would venture on war with Austria. At last Pareto, the most democratic of Charles Albert's Ministers, assured him that, if he did not act, a rebellion would break out in Piedmont; and so, on March 23, having demanded of the Austrians the evacuation of Parma and Modena, and having been refused, Charles Albert ordered the Austrian Ambassador to leave Turin, and straightway declared war. Yet even now he left doubtful the exact object of the war; for, while he declared to the Provisional Government that he came "to lend to the Peoples of Lombardy and Venetia that assistance which brother may expect from brother, and friend from friend," he announced to the other Governments of Europe that he had only intervened to prevent a Republican rising. He then despatched General Passalacqua to Milan, announcing that he himself would not arrive there until he had won a victory over the Austrians. But, however ungraciously Charles Albert had done his part, he had succeeded in quickening the enthusiasm of the Italians for a war against Austria. Leopold of Tuscany had announced, two days before, that the hour of the resurrection of Italy had struck, and that his troops should march to the frontier of Tuscany; and, on April 5, he frankly declared the purpose of this march, and ordered his troops to help their Lombard brothers. Riots broke out both in Naples and Rome, and the Austrian arms were torn down. Guglielmo Pepe hastened back to Naples, after twenty seven years of exile, and demanded the immediate departure of the troops for Lombardy. Ferdinand yielded to the popular cry, and consented to make Pepe general of the expedition. Pius IX. was less easy to move. He had become thoroughly scared at the progress of events; and though he had consented to grant a Constitution, much like that of other Princes, he could not reconcile in his mind the contradictions between his position as Head of the Catholic Church and as a Constitutional Italian Prince. The former position seemed to require of him a claim to absolute authority in home affairs, and a perfectly impartial attitude towards the various members of the Catholic Church, whatever might be their differences of race or government. The latter position seemed, on the contrary, to demand that he should adapt himself to the freer life which was growing up in the different Italian States, and that he should become the champion of Italian unity and liberty against the Emperor of Austria. His own inclinations and sympathies would have led him to sacrifice the new office to the old one. He was, as already explained, much more a priest than a prince, much more a Conservative than a Reformer. His priestly training combined with his weak health to make new ideas distasteful to him; and his sense of his duties as Head of the Catholic Church worked in with that very kindliness of disposition which had betrayed him into the position of a reformer, to make him oppose a fierce and dangerous war. Under these circumstances, he looked with alarm on the new impulse which Charles Albert had given to the anti-Austrian feeling throughout Italy. But he was, for the moment, in the hands of stronger men, who were determined on driving him forward. Massimo d'Azeglio was in Rome seconding the efforts of Ciceruacchio for the war; and Giovanni Durando (a brother of the Giacomo Durando who had written on Italian Nationality) was appointed general of the forces which were to march to Lombardy. Even now the Pope refused to recognize the object of their expedition; and as the troops filed past him, on March 24, he blessed them, but only as the defenders of the Roman territories against assailants; and when a young man cried from the ranks, "Holy Father, we are going to fight for Italy and for you," he answered, "Not for me; I wish for peace, not war." Durando, however, issued a proclamation to his troops in which he declared that, since Pius IX.'s approval of the war, "Radetzky must be considered as fighting against the Cross of Christ." Pius IX. angrily repudiated this speech in the Government Gazette, declaring that he would soon utter his own opinions, and that he did not require to express them through the mouth of a subordinate. But nobody took any notice of this protest, and the troops marched to Lombardy. In the meantime Charles Albert was beginning the war in an unfortunate manner. Eager to distinguish himself by an engagement with Radetzky, he was resolved to march after him to Lodi instead of seizing on the important fortress of Mantua. Mantua had attempted to shake off the Austrian yoke at the time when other cities of Lombardy were rising; but a desire to act through the Municipal Council led the citizens to hesitate in their movement. The want of communication with other towns prevented them from being aware of the position of the Austrian troops; and, on the evening of March 22, Benedek, one of the Austrian generals, was able to crush out the incipient rising. But the news of the Piedmontese advance once more stirred the Mantuans to action; on the 29th they rose again, threw up barricades, organized a Civic Guard, and eagerly hoped that Charles Albert would come to support them. When Radetzky found that Charles Albert did not seize on this important fortress, he availed himself of the blunder to march at once to Mantua; and, on March 31, that city fell again into the hands of the Austrians. This victory at once alarmed the Piedmontese, who, under the command of General Bava, set out, on April 8, to Goito, a village a few miles from Mantua. The Austrians occupied the little bridge across the Mincio at the entrance to the village, and the Tyrolese sharpshooters sheltered themselves behind an inn which stands near the bridge on the Mantuan side. The Piedmontese, mistaking the stone ornaments on the inn for sentinels, fired at them; shots were returned by the Austrians, and a fierce encounter followed, during which several of the troops from the Italian Tyrol deserted the Austrian ranks and joined the Piedmontese. The Austrians, finding themselves beaten, attempted to blow up the bridge; but had only succeeded in destroying one arch before they were driven back. By this victory the Piedmontese obtained the command of the whole line of the Mincio from Mantua to Peschiera, and cut off all communication between the two wings of the Austrian army, one of which was in Mantua and one in Verona. The battle of Goito roused the greatest enthusiasm for Charles Albert; and it unfortunately strengthened the Provisional Government of Milan in their determination to rely rather on him than on their own people. How much popular force they might at this time have gained was shown by an event which took place on the very day after the battle of Goito. On that day, April 9, Mazzini arrived in Milan. About eight o'clock in the evening he appeared on the balcony of the Albergo della Venezia, which stands directly opposite the place occupied by the Provisional Government. He addressed a few words to the people, waving the tricolour banner. He spoke in terms of warm approval of the Provisional Government, and praised them for rejecting a truce which Radetzky had proposed, and for endeavouring to secure a complete representation of the Lombard provinces in the Assembly which met at Milan; and when Casati appeared he greeted him warmly. But Mazzini soon found that, neither in the camp of Charles Albert, nor in Milan, were the leaders disposed to welcome the help of the Republican forces. When Mazzini applied to the Provisional Government to grant employment to those who had already had experience in revolutionary wars, he was told that no one knew where they were; and when he answered this objection by producing the men, their services were refused. The Swiss, who flocked in from the Canton Ticino, were in the same way repelled; and even a more illustrious volunteer than any of these found cold reception in Charles Albert's camp; for it was at this period of the war that Garibaldi arrived in Lombardy in the full splendour of the reputation he had won as a champion of liberty in Monte Video. But, when he offered his services to Charles Albert, he was told that he might go to Turin, to see _if_ and _how_ he could be employed. One of the great points of difference between the policy of the Republicans and that of Charles Albert was that the former desired to press forward to the Alps and excite an insurrection against Austria amongst the population of the Southern Tyrol. That population, in spite of its Italian blood and language, had been loyal to Francis of Austria in the time of Andrew Hofer; but the ungrateful policy of the Austrian Emperor had gradually alienated the sympathies of the Italian Tyrolese; and, while even in Frankfort the representatives of the Southern Tyrol were asking for local self-government in their own country, the population were ready to rise on behalf of Garibaldi and Manara. But the dislike of many of the Piedmontese officers to the war, and the hesitation of Charles Albert between war, diplomacy, and complete abandonment of the cause, led the official leaders of the Lombard movement to repel any proposal for so extending the area of the war as to drive the Austrians to extremities, and to make them unwilling to accept a diplomatic settlement of the contest. Many of those who were repelled by Casati and Charles Albert went to find a more generous welcome at Venice. The extremely democratic character of the Venetian insurrection had impressed all observers; and it was specially noted that an artizan, named Toffoli, had been admitted into the Provisional Government of Venice. But, hearty as Manin was in his desire to enlist the sympathies of all classes, he could not help being a Venetian, and not a Milanese. However narrow and aristocratic Casati and his friends might be in their personal feelings, they were the official representatives of a city whose glories were connected with the memories of a time when it was the head of a league of free cities;[14] while Venice, even in its long struggle against the Turks or in its resistance to the papacy in the seventeenth century, could never be taken as the champion of free civic government. Manin and Casati seem alike to have been influenced by these traditions; and while the future Council of Lombardy had been fully constituted by April 13th, it was not till the 14th of that month that the Provisional Government of Venice consented to allow the towns of Venetia to choose representatives, who should take a real share in the government of the province. The consequences of this hesitation were most unfortunate. Treviso, Padua, Rovigo, Vicenza, and Udine had formed Provisional Governments even before they knew that Venice was free; and they would then readily have joined the Venetian Republic; but observing some hesitation on the part of Venice to answer to their appeal, Vicenza offered herself to Charles Albert. This decision excited some indignation in Venice; for Manin had hoped that the old towns of Venetia would be willing, under whatever form of government, to act with the chief city; and whatever errors Manin may have committed in the delay, he was more zealous than either the Milanese or Piedmontese Governments for the protection of the Venetian towns from the Austrian forces. Nor, indeed, was it wholly the result of the above-named hesitation that Manin was not able to secure that co-operation which he desired between Venice and the other Venetian cities. There seems to have been a tendency in the civic governments, and still more in those officers who came to help the Lombards and Venetians, to look rather for orders to Casati and Charles Albert than to the rulers of Venice; and this tendency was still further increased by the anomalous position of the officers of the Papal troops. Durando, the chief of these officers, was vividly conscious that he had come to Lombardy in an independent manner, and in spite of the discouragement of the Pope; and, though he was willing to fight for Venice, he wished to do so in his own manner, and refused to listen to Manin's directions about the plan of operations. He felt no doubt that it was safer to take orders from an established sovereign, like Charles Albert, than from the head of an un-"recognised" revolutionary Government; and while he wished to march to the aid of Padua, he desired to do so as an officer of Charles Albert. But the same motives which led Charles Albert to abandon the Southern Tyrol were making him hesitate, at any rate, about extending his campaign to Venetia. So he forbad Durando to enter Venetia, and sent him instead to protect the Duchies of Modena and Parma. While these conflicting interests were weakening the efforts of the defenders of Lombardy and Venetia, another apple of discord was thrown into the camp by an Encyclical from the Pope. As already mentioned, Pius had discouraged the march to Lombardy, and had promised to state his own opinions instead of accepting those of Durando. His Ministers, feeling the uncertainty of the position in which the Papal troops were placed, urged him to come to a more definite decision on this point. At no time was such strong pressure brought to bear from opposite sides on the feeble mind of Pius IX. On the one hand, disturbances were breaking out in the provinces; and the indignation at the Pope's hesitation was stirred to greater bitterness by the want both of food and of work which was being felt in Rome. On the other hand, two powerful influences were being exerted to induce Pius to abandon the Italian cause. In Germany great bitterness had arisen against the Italian war; and the German Catholics were threatening to break loose from the Papal authority. At the same time, Ferdinand of Naples, who had never heartily sympathised with the struggle for Italian freedom, was trying to inspire the Pope with jealousy of the designs of Charles Albert. To say the truth, Ferdinand was not without excuse in this matter; for, while he was being driven to declare war on Austria, the Sicilian Assembly were deposing him from the throne of Sicily, and discussing a proposal to offer their island to a son of Charles Albert. Therefore the Neapolitan Ambassador was directed to use his influence with Pius IX. for the promotion of a league between Rome, Naples, and Tuscany, which was to counteract the power of Piedmont. Thus, then, those rival instincts, of the Head of the Church and the Italian Prince, were both appealed to, to secure the opposition of the Pope to the war; and however much he may have been terrified by the disturbances in the provinces, those disturbances did not tend to increase his sympathy with the popular movement. Such was his state of feeling, when on April 28th, his Ministers, headed by Cardinal Antonelli, entreated him to give his open sanction to the war. The result of this petition was directly contrary to the desire expressed by the signers of it; for, on April 29th there appeared a Papal Encyclical absolutely repudiating the Italian war. In this document, the Pope complained of the desire of the agitators to draw away from him the sympathy of the Catholics of Germany; and he proceeded to justify and explain the course that he had hitherto followed. He alluded to the demand for reform which had been made in the time of Pius VII., and to the encouragement which that demand had received from the programme presented to Gregory XVI. by the Great Powers. That programme had included a Central Council, improvement in the Municipal Councils, and above all the admission of the laity to all offices, whether administrative or judicial. Gregory had not been able to carry out these ideas completely; and therefore Pius had been compelled to develope them further. In this he had been guided, not by the advice of others, but by charitable feeling towards his subjects. But his concessions had not produced the result which he had hoped; and he had been compelled to warn the people against riots. These warnings had been in vain; and he had been forced to send troops to guard his frontier, and to "protect the integrity and security of the Papal State." He protested against the suspicion that he sympathised with those "who wished the Roman Pontiff to preside over some new kind of Republic to be constituted out of all the Peoples of Italy." He exhorted the Italians to abandon all such theories, and to obey the Princes of whose benevolence they had had experience; and he, for his part, did not desire any further extension of his temporal power, but would use all his efforts for the restoration of peace. The greatest indignation was aroused by this Encyclical; but it was still possible for the Pope to find protection in that superstition which Ciceruacchio had so industriously encouraged. The cry was again raised that the Cardinals were misleading the Pope, and special charges of treason were made against Antonelli. Some of the more zealous patriots even talked of carrying off the Pope to Milan, that he might see for himself the real condition of the war. At the same time appeals were made to the humanity of Pius; it was pointed out to him that, if he disowned his soldiers, they would be liable to be treated as brigands; and instances were quoted of the cruelty of Austrian soldiers to those whom they had captured. Partly moved by humanity, and partly by fear, the Pope at last yielded; and on May 3 he summoned to office Terenzio Mamiani, so lately under suspicion as a half-amnestied rebel; and Mamiani speedily avowed his zeal for the war, declaring it a holy cause. But, in spite of this change of front, the Encyclical produced a dangerous effect on the Lombard war; and its first result was to strengthen the power of Charles Albert, by compelling Durando to place himself more definitely than before under his orders, and by leading the Italians in general to look to the King of Sardinia as their only trustworthy leader. Fortunately, this accession of strength came to Charles Albert at a moment when he was rousing himself from that state of hesitation which had followed the victory at Goito. That hesitation, however, had given time for Radetzky to fortify Mantua more strongly; while Nugent, at the head of another Austrian force, had marched into Venetia. The Venetians, ill-supported, were little able to stand against the invader; and the important town of Udine fell into the hands of the Austrians. This startled both Charles Albert and Casati; and, while the Provisional Government of Lombardy turned to Mazzini for advice, Charles Albert at last consented to allow Durando to advance into Venetia. Durando sent his subordinate officer Ferrari before him; and on May 8, Ferrari encountered the Austrians at Cornuta, and drove them back. He then continued the struggle in hopes of new reinforcements from Durando; but, when Durando had not arrived at four o'clock in the afternoon, the soldiers were compelled to retreat. Then they were seized by a sudden panic, and they cried out that either Ferrari or Durando had betrayed them. The consciousness of the illegal position in which the Papal Encyclical had placed them, still further increased the panic of the soldiers; Ferrari was forced to retreat to Mestre, and Durando to Vicenza. In Vicenza, indeed, the latter defended himself gallantly enough; and the people seconded his efforts. Women, old men, and children, rushed to put out the lighted balls which the enemy threw into the city; and, after a struggle of about twelve hours, the Austrian forces were compelled to retreat. But by this time Charles Albert had again repented of his invasion of Venetia; and, refusing to come to the help of Durando, he turned his attention to the fortress of Peschiera. The zeal of the Milanese Government had been even more short-lived than that of Charles Albert. Mazzini had proposed the formation of a Council of War, to be composed of three men, and to be accompanied by a levée en masse of what were called "the five classes." The Government consented to summon only the first three classes, alleging as their excuse, the distrust which they felt for many of the peasantry. Mazzini also proposed to issue an appeal for volunteers, and to place his own name first on the list. The Government consented; but, before the appeal had been prepared, they had changed their mind and withdrawn their approval from the proposal. The Council of War was changed into a Committee of Defence for Venetia, then into a Committee of aid for Venetia, and finally disappeared altogether. Charles Albert's secretary announced that the King did not choose to have an army of enemies in his rear, and inscriptions on the walls of Milan threatened Mazzini with death. The leaders of the volunteers, who had been pressing forward to the Alps, were discouraged; and General Allemandi, their commander, was so ill supported that he resigned his office. The war seemed to be rapidly changing its character; and the desires of Charles Albert appeared to be more exclusively concentrated on the aggrandisement of his own Kingdom. When he had first entered Lombardy, both he and the Milanese leaders had announced that the form of Government would be left undecided till the victory was won; but they now changed their tone, and prepared for a union between Piedmont and Lombardy. On May 12, the Milanese Government issued a decree that the population of Lombardy should decide by a plebiscite the question whether Lombardy should be immediately incorporated with Piedmont under the rule of Charles Albert. The Republicans, held in check to a great extent by Mazzini, had hitherto refrained from giving prominence to their political opinions. But Mazzini now felt it necessary to protest against this proposal; and all the more strongly because Charles Albert's secretary had hoped, by the offer of the premiership in the future Kingdom of North Italy, to induce him to assist in promoting the fusion between Lombardy and Piedmont. He therefore now issued a protest against the taking of any political vote of this kind while the war was going on; both because it was absurd and unnatural in itself; because it was a violation of the promises of the Government; and because it gave a pretext for foreign intervention, by changing the war of liberation into one of conquest. The champions of Charles Albert were infuriated at this opposition; Mazzini's protest was publicly burnt in Genoa; and the Provisional Government of Lombardy resolved to go on with the Plebiscite. This decision tended undoubtedly to bring great confusion into Lombardy. It weakened the sympathies of those Germans, Austrians, and Hungarians who had been well disposed towards the Italian struggle for independence; while it gave an excuse for the opposition of that larger body of politicians, who had hesitated between Liberal principles and national prejudice, and who were now eager to declare that the war had ceased to be a struggle for Italian liberty, and was merely designed for the aggrandisement of Charles Albert. But, however much Charles Albert's interests might suffer from his changeable policy, he always was helped out of his difficulties by the contrast between his questionable acts, and the unquestionable badness of some other prince. As the Papal Encyclical had come at the right moment to redeem the credit which he had lost by his slackness after the Battle of Goito, so the treachery of the King of Naples served, at this crisis, to throw, by force of contrast, a more favourable light on the ambitious proposals for the fusion of Lombardy with Piedmont. Ferdinand of Naples had reluctantly consented to join in the Italian war. The hearty dislike of Liberty, which he shared with the majority of the Bourbon family, combined with his special jealousy of Charles Albert to increase his desire to abandon this expedition. He feared that a Kingdom of North Italy would be the natural result of the war, even if the popular enthusiasm did not carry Charles Albert into schemes of greater aggrandizement; and he had a not unreasonable grievance against the King of Sardinia in the recent choice by the Sicilians of the Duke of Genoa as their King. The priests in Naples, unlike those in Lombardy and Venetia, were intriguing on behalf of Austria, and had circulated the rumour that St. Januarius was a friend to the Austrian Emperor. In spite of these intrigues, a Liberal majority had been returned to the Neapolitan Parliament; and the King, therefore, resolved to put still further limits on the power of that Parliament, by demanding of the members an oath which would have admitted Ferdinand's right to suppress the Sicilian movement, would have enforced the complete acceptance of the Roman Catholic faith, and would have prohibited any attempt to enlarge or reform the Constitution. This oath the deputies refused; but in spite of the advice of his Ministers, the King resolved to insist upon it. Tumults arose in the city, and barricades were thrown up; but the deputies, while thanking the people for their zeal, urged them to remain quiet, and to pull down the barricades. Some of those who had taken part in the rising withdrew from the streets in consequence of this appeal; but others demanded that the royal troops, drawn up in the piazza of the palace, and near the church of San Francesco, should be withdrawn at the same time. The deputies went to wait upon the King; but whilst they were in conversation with him, they heard the first shots fired by the soldiers upon the crowd. Ferdinand then scornfully told the deputation to go home and consider themselves; "for the Day of Judgment is not far from you." He had one great advantage on his side. That degraded class, the Lazzaroni of Naples, had always been fanatical supporters of the King and St. Januarius; and it is even said, that, while the troops were firing on the people, Ferdinand was exclaiming to the Lazzaroni, "Go forward!" "Naples is yours!" While massacre and outrage were raging in the streets, the deputies sent a message to the French admiral, whose fleet was anchored in the Bay of Naples, to entreat him to intervene in the name of France. But he answered that he had been ordered not to interfere in the affairs of another people. The deputies then passed a resolution, declaring that they would not suspend their sittings, unless compelled by brute force. An officer soon after came to disperse them; and, after a written protest, they yielded to this violence. Every liberty was shortly after crushed out; and, though, for about a month longer, a kind of spasmodic struggle went on and though, after a time, the Sicilians consented to send some help to the insurgents, the movements were too ill-organized to have any permanent strength; and the Government were able to suppress them by repeated massacres. Ferdinand's _coup d'état_ had taken place on May 15. In the meantime, the Neapolitan forces under Pepe had been slowly advancing through the Papal territory collecting volunteers as they went. The slowness of their march had been due in part to the suspicious attitude of the Pope, who feared that the King of Naples might seize on those territories, which had always been a bone of contention between Naples and Rome. Pepe therefore had not yet left the Papal territory, when he received orders to abandon the war, and to return to Naples. At the same time he was told that, if he did not wish to return, he might resign his command to General Statella. Pepe was resolved to advance; but it seemed doubtful how far his authority would outweigh that of the King, and of the subordinate officers who were on the King's side. The Bolognese, who had risen in March to drive out those Austrian troops which had lingered in Ferrara, and to expel the Duke from Modena, now rose to insist that Pepe should lead on his forces to Lombardy. Statella was compelled to fly from the city; and those soldiers who returned to Naples were followed by the curses of the Romagnoli. Several of the officers were willing to act with Pepe; and he passed the Po with two battalions of volunteers, one company of the regular forces, and some Lombards and Bolognese. But many of these deserted him even after he had crossed the Po; and by the time he reached Venice, there remained with him only one battalion of riflemen, whose officer had served under him in 1815. But, however poorly attended, Pepe was heartily welcomed by Manin, and was soon after made Commander-in-Chief of all the land forces of Venice. These were composed not only of Venetians and Neapolitans, but also of Lombards, Romans, and even Swiss. The Neapolitan admiral, too, at first refused to obey the orders of the King, and continued for a time to defend Venice on his own authority. In the meantime, while the resources of the Lombard towns were being drained to support the designs of Charles Albert, he was devoting his energies to the siege of Peschiera. Radetzky, seeing that the weakest part of the Italian army was stationed near Mantua, resolved to march from Verona, which was the headquarters of the Austrians, attack the right wing of the Italian army near Mantua, drive it across the Mincio, and so march to the relief of Peschiera. At a comparatively short distance from Mantua he reached the small collection of scattered houses which formed the village of Curtatone. A band of 6,000 Tuscans, chiefly composed of University students, and commanded by their professors, were marching along the road which lies between Curtatone and Montanara, on their way to join the Piedmontese army at Goito. There were, at that time, open fields on both sides of the road stretching along in an unbroken plain; and no defences had been made; for when Radetzky, at the head of 20,000 men, came upon the Tuscan band, the latter were far from expecting any attack. General de Laugier, who was in command of the Tuscans, resolved to resist; and for six hours this gallant little troop held its own against the overwhelming forces of the Austrians. But superiority in numbers and training at last prevailed; and, fighting inch by inch, the Tuscans were driven back to Montanara, and were either killed or captured. The same "fanaticism" which Radetzky had observed in Milan, seemed to show itself here also; and as his officers marched the young prisoners before him after the battle, he exclaimed in scorn, "Did you take six hours to beat a handful of boys?" But the "handful of boys" had done their work; for, when Radetzky once more marched across the bridge at Goito, with his prisoners, he found Charles Albert at the head of his forces ready to receive him. The fight was fierce; the King and his eldest son, Victor Emmanuel, were both wounded; but at the close of the day, a new battalion dashed forward and compelled the Austrians to retreat. The day before this battle, while the Tuscans were still fighting between Curtatone and Montanara, the fortress of Peschiera had surrendered to Charles Albert; and while he was still exulting over his triumph, there had come to him the news that the Lombard plebiscite had been decided in favour of the fusion with Piedmont. But it was not without much bitterness that it had been so decided. Mazzini's protest against the proposal of the fusion had been temperate and reasonable; but it had been sufficient to attract the attention of the enemies of Italy; and, while Gioberti had come to Milan to arouse sympathy with the movement for the fusion, a Jew named Urbino (who was unknown to the Republican leaders in Milan) was taking advantage of the differences of opinion to stir up riots against the Provisional Government. On May 28 (the day before the actual closing of the poll) an anonymous placard appeared, calling on the National Guard and the people to meet in the Piazza San Fedele, in front of the office of the Provisional Government. A deputation of the National Guard was about to demand the deposition of its captain; and the crowd which gathered in the Piazza San Fedele mixed itself up with the deputation. One of the agitators named Romani, demanded the convocation of a Constituent Assembly and denounced the proposed vote of fusion. Many even in the crowd opposed Romani; and the President, by promises of further security for personal freedom, was able to disperse them. The next day, however, they gathered again, with cries against the Piedmontese, and broke into the civic palace. The students heard of the disturbance, and rushed to the rescue of the Provisional Government. Casati had at first been panic struck; but he now gathered courage, and tried to address the people. Urbino attempted to drown his voice by shouting that the Government had resigned; and he exhibited a list of a new Government, composed of some of the leading Republicans in Milan. Casati snatched the list from his hand, and tore it in pieces. Many voices in the crowd denounced Urbino, and the rioters were speedily arrested or dispersed. The unreality of this demonstration, as an exhibition of any popular feeling, was clear from every circumstance connected with it. The innocence of the Republican leaders might be gathered from a stern protest against the proceedings issued by Mazzini directly after; and the real source of the agitation might not unfairly be inferred from the cries of "Viva Radetzky," which broke out from some of the less cautious agitators. But the Provisional Government either was, or seemed to be, alarmed about the possible consequences of the riot of May 29; and Cernuschi, who had been the first to propose the deputation to O'Donnell which had preceded the struggle of the Five Days, and who had fought gallantly during that struggle, was arrested at midnight on the very night of the riot, and sent to prison. He was soon after set free, from want of any evidence against him; but the bitterness which his arrest had caused against the Provisional Government did not so soon come to an end. This quarrel between the two sections of the national party in Milan tended to strengthen the power of Charles Albert. Casati had originally felt little sympathy for the Piedmontese aristocracy; but his growing distrust of Milanese feeling strengthened the effect produced by the victory at Goito, and the capture of Peschiera, and induced him to rest his hopes for the success of the struggle against Austria solely on Charles Albert, and the Sardinian army. And while the divisions in Milan strengthened Charles Albert's power in Lombardy, the weakness of the cities of Venetia, though due to a large extent to the previous vacillation of Charles Albert, was yet compelling them more and more to appeal to him as the recognised leader of the most important Italian force in the North of Italy. This tendency had been resisted by Daniel Manin, who was strongly opposed to the fusion of Venetia with Piedmont; and when he found that Charles Albert was unwilling to help the Venetians on any other terms, he had been disposed to turn for help rather to France than to Piedmont. But the prestige of Charles Albert's victories in Lombardy were attracting Vicenza and Padua to the scheme of fusion; and nothing but the proof that Venice could save Vicenza could counteract this tendency. Manin and Tommaseo felt so much the importance of this point, that they even left Venice for a few days to go to the help of Vicenza; and the coldness of Charles Albert towards the defence might, if Vicenza had held out, have worked in favour of Manin's views. But Radetzky also saw the importance of this siege, and resolved to lead the attack in person. He appeared before the city on June 9, and on the following day succeeded, after a fierce struggle, in occupying the heights which surrounded it. The defence speedily became hopeless; and, though Durando was afterwards blamed for the surrender, and even suspected of treason, there seems little reason to suppose that the town could have obtained better terms than those which were now granted it, if it had attempted a longer resistance. The garrison was allowed to go out with arms and baggage; the lives and property of the inhabitants were to be safe; and a full amnesty was to be granted for the past; the garrison only binding themselves not to bear arms for three months. The fall of Vicenza seemed to mark the crisis of the struggle in Venetia. Padua, Treviso, and Palmanuova rapidly fell into the hands of the Austrians; and the citizens of Venice now began to believe that, so far from being able to defend the freedom of their countrymen, they could only hope to secure their own freedom by surrendering themselves to Charles Albert. It was while this feeling was at its height, that the Venetian Assembly met on the 3rd of July. Manin recapitulated the circumstances of the war. He had failed to obtain even recognition for his Government from the French Republic. He admitted the growth of the feeling in favour of the fusion; and he advised his Republican friends to suppress for a time the assertion of their special political creed, and to accept the fusion as their only hope of safety. Tommaseo, indeed, protested against the proposal; but Manin's influence, assisted by the growing sense of weakness, prevailed; and on July 4, the representatives of Venetia by 127 votes against six declared their province united to Piedmont. Manin, however, resigned his office, as being unable to act as Minister under a Monarchical Government. But while Charles Albert seemed to be gaining partizans in Lombardy and Venetia by the growing necessities of those provinces, he was exciting against him the opposition of those who might at one time have been favourable to the Italian cause. On June 16, the Sardinian and Venetian fleets had attacked Trieste. As a military incident in the Italian war, this attack was probably of little importance; but its effect on the relations between the German and Italian movements for freedom and unity was of far greater importance than could be estimated by merely military results. For, in Germany more than in almost any other country of Europe, the movement for national freedom and unity was necessitating an amount of self-assertion on the part of the body which represented those ideas, which unavoidably brought it into collision with many whom it ought to have hailed as allies. Both the necessity and desire for this German self-assertion had been evident from the first opening of the Frankfort Constituent Assembly on the 18th of May. Even a small but picturesque incident which took place on the first day of its meeting indicated the strength of the exclusive and defiant German feeling. An old man of seventy-nine had attempted, during the first stormy sitting, to address the Parliament, but his voice had been drowned in the general hubbub. On the following day, the member for Cologne called the attention of the Parliament to the fact that the deputy so unceremoniously treated was the poet Arndt; and thereupon the whole Assembly rose, and expressed to him their thanks for his song on the German Fatherland. This desire to assert its position as the representative of German feeling had been quickened in the Parliament by two signs of resistance to its authority. The fiery Republicans of Baden had returned in indignation to their State, when they found that the Preparatory Parliament would neither establish a Republic, nor declare itself permanent; and, provoked by the arrest of one of their members, they had rushed into open insurrection, which only the influence of Robert Blum had prevented from spreading to the Rhine Province. And, while they were preparing to suppress the Republican opposition, the Frankfort Parliament were startled to hear that an Assembly had met in Berlin, which claimed, like them, to be a National Constituent Assembly; and this rivalry was made the more alarming by the assistance which Prussian soldiers were at that time giving to the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt in suppressing a popular movement in Mainz. The Frankfort Parliament indignantly resolved that, "This Assembly of the Empire has alone the power, as the one legal organ of the will of the German people, to settle the Constitution of Germany, and to decide about the future position of the Princes in the State." And they further resolved that every Prince who would not submit to their decisions "should be deprived, with his family, of the princely rank, and should descend into the class of citizens, and that his crown and family property should become the property of the State." While they thus boldly claimed to rule the internal affairs of Germany, they were equally zealous in asserting her rights against those who desired to infringe them. They had resented the resistance of the Bohemians to the proposed absorption of Bohemia in Germany; and, while they were disposed to make some concessions to the Poles of Posen, they made them in a somewhat grudging spirit, and were eager to retain in Germany all of that province which they could prove, to their own satisfaction, to be Germanized. It was obvious that, while such was their state of mind, the Frankfort Parliament would watch with jealous eyes the movement for Italian liberty. They could not, indeed, deny that the Italians had some claim to freedom; or that the authority exercised by Austria in Lombardy was, both in its origin and character, exactly of the kind most opposed to the ideas embodied in the Frankfort Parliament. But the extreme desire to claim Austria as a part of united Germany naturally led the Frankfort Parliament to look at least with tolerance on the special prejudices of the Viennese. While they were thus divided in their minds between principle and prejudice, the news of the attack on Trieste came like a God-send to those who were looking for an excuse to sacrifice their Liberal principles to the desire for German aggrandizement. The Parliament, therefore, resolved unanimously that any attack on the German haven of Trieste was a declaration of war against Germany. A resolution of this kind naturally prepared the way for more decided hostility to the Italian cause; and another decision at which they soon after arrived gave new force to the anti-Italian feeling. Even if some Viennese Democrats might desire, or at all events approve, the separation of Lombardy and Venetia from the Empire, there could be no doubt that this feeling was not shared by the members of the House of Hapsburg. When, therefore, on June 29, Archduke John was chosen Administrator of the German Empire, the Frankfort Parliament almost unavoidably identified itself with the domineering policy of the Austrian Germans. While, then, they claimed security for German freedom, the Parliament triumphed savagely over the fall of the liberties of Bohemia, refused even provincial independence to the Southern Tyrol, and demanded that Northern Italy should be retained in the Austrian Empire. How far the support of the German Parliament gave any encouragement to Radetzky it may be difficult to say; but it is certain that, during the month of July, his efforts to recover his ground in Italy became more daring in character. No longer confining himself to Lombardy and Venetia, he now marched his troops into Modena, and attempted to restore the Austrian authority in that Duchy. Charles Albert was roused in his turn by this new invasion. His chief general, Bava, rallied his forces, and drove the Austrians first across the Po and then across the Mincio. Charles Albert's whole feeling seems to have been suddenly changed by these successes; abandoning the hesitating policy which he had pursued in the beginning of the war, he now became desperate even to rashness; and, rejecting the advice of General Bava, he tried to push forward to Mantua. Radetzky, during Charles Albert's delays and hesitations, had had time to reinforce his strength, to revive the discipline and vigour of the army, which had been utterly broken during the retreat from Milan, and to choose the best positions for defence and attack. Therefore, on July 24, he was more than ready for Charles Albert's rash attack; and at the battle of Somma Campagna he speedily routed the Piedmontese, and drove them back across the Mincio. But Charles Albert's zeal for action was not yet exhausted, and he marched against Valleggio, in the hope of cutting off Radetzky from Verona. In this march the King seems again to have acted contrary to the advice of his generals; and part of the march was conducted in such tremendously hot weather, and with such bad arrangements for the provision of food, that many of the soldiers died on the road from heat and hunger. A victory gained by General Bava, near Custozza, strengthened the delusions of Charles Albert; but Radetzky soon recovered his ground; the hasty march and the want of food weakened the forces at Custozza, and the Piedmontese were shortly after defeated on the very ground on which they had just been victorious. Charles Albert's assumption of military authority and his defiance of his generals, led to continual confusions and misunderstandings. The result of one of these confusions was that General Sonnaz suddenly left an important fortified position, under orders for which both Charles Albert and General Bava denied their responsibility. On discovering his mistake he hastened back to his position, to find that it had been in the meantime occupied by the Austrians; and when he then attempted to recover it he received one of the most severe defeats of the campaign. In the meantime the Provisional Government of Lombardy were exciting the greatest irritation by their want of vigour in the conduct of the war, and by the discouragement which they gave to the volunteers. As an extreme instance of this latter fault, may be mentioned their treatment of Francesco Anfossi. He was a brother of Augusta, the leader of the Five Days' Rising, and had served with distinction at Brescia; yet, on his arrival at Milan, he was suddenly arrested without any reason being given. When the news of Charles Albert's defeat arrived in Milan, the Provisional Government once more became alarmed, and again called Mazzini to their help. He had had much difficulty in preventing some of his more fiery followers from imitating the example of Urbino, and organizing an insurrection against the Provisional Government. Therefore Casati and his friends knew that they could depend upon his help whenever they should ask for it. His former proposal for a Council of War was now accepted, and he was asked to name the citizens of which it should be composed. Of the three whom he named, there was only one who had been a steady Republican; while one of them had laboured to promote that fusion of Venetia with Piedmont to which Mazzini had been opposed. The duties of this Committee were to fortify the town, and to provision the army. They proclaimed a _levée en masse_, and prepared to fortify the lines of the Adda. They also made special requisitions for corn and rice, and arranged for the bringing in of considerable provisions from the country; though some of these were lost by the refusal of the Piedmontese officers to provide guards for the protection of the convoy. They then despatched Garibaldi to raise volunteers; and in three days he had under arms 3,000 men, and was marching to Brescia. In the midst of these arrangements, the Committee suddenly heard that the Austrians had crossed the Adda, and that Charles Albert was retreating before them. They sent messengers to the Piedmontese camp to learn the intentions of the King; and were dismayed at receiving the answer that he intended to come himself to defend Milan. They then sent messengers to recall Zucchi and Garibaldi from the line of the Adda to the actual defence of Milan. But the management of the defence was now taken out of their hands; and on August 2 the Committee were obliged to resign their authority to the Piedmontese General Olivieri. Olivieri, while urging the Committee of Defence to remain in office, refused their proposal to summon the people to the barricades. But when Charles Albert was attacked by the Austrians under the walls of Milan, the barricades were thrown up in spite of Olivieri. It was, however, then too late to save the Piedmontese from defeat, and, on August 4, the King sent for the Municipal Council, to tell them that he had resolved to come to terms with Radetzky. Restelli, one of the Committee of Defence, denied the failure of food and money which Charles Albert had pleaded as one of his grounds of surrender; and when the Town Council assented to the proposal, Maestri, another of the Committee, denied their claim to speak on behalf of the citizens. The news that the King was intending to desert them, roused the Milanese to fury; and on August 5 Charles Albert promised in writing to stay to defend the city; and General Olivieri even promised to go to Radetzky to obtain good terms. But he did not go; and Charles Albert, after a secret agreement with Radetzky to put the Porta Romana into his hands, fled secretly from Milan on August 6. Many of the Piedmontese officers were so indignant at this desertion, that they offered to remain in the city and share in its defence; and the cry was raised of "Long live Piedmont!" and "Shame to Charles Albert!" But resistance was in vain; and on August 7 Radetzky entered Milan. Garibaldi, who was already on his march to Milan, attempted, with the help of General Medici, to carry on the struggle on the banks of the Lago Maggiore; and Mazzini joined this little band, encouraged them to persevere in their defence, and attempted, though in vain, to form a connection with the defenders of Venice. But the struggle was hopeless. The Lombard cities rapidly fell into the hands of Radetzky; and on August 11, Venice, left alone in her defence, disowned her connection with Charles Albert, and recalled Manin to power. After this defeat thousands of Lombards left their country; and the following extracts from a litany composed at this period express, better than any mere description, their feelings about this catastrophe:--"All Italy is our country; and we are not exiles, because we remain on Italian soil. Yet we are pilgrims, because a vow binds us to go on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, that is to say to Lombardy when it is freed. For the heart of our country is the house of our fathers, the place where we were born, where we have learned to pray, and where love was revealed to us, where we have left our dead at rest, our mothers, our sons, and our brothers in tears. Kyrie Eleison," &c.... They then call on Christ, the Virgin, and the Saints to deliver Lombardy from the Austrians, and invoke them to their aid, by the memory of the special sufferers in the cause of Liberty, among whom they particularly specify the Brothers Bandiera, and the defenders of Milan and Pavia; and they end with a prayer that they may not die until they have saluted Italy "one, redeemed, free, and independent." Radetzky, however, had another enemy to punish besides the Lombards and the Piedmontese. The action of the Pope, however uncertain, and one may even say unwilling, had given a force to the anti-Austrian movement which no other Prince could have given; and, as long as the Liberals ruled in the Papal States, Radetzky considered his work unfinished. About three weeks, therefore, before the surrender of Milan, a body of 6,500 Austrians had crossed the Po, and had once more entered Ferrara. The Bolognese, always the most politically energetic of any of the subjects of the Pope, desired at once to march to Ferrara; but the Pro-Legate, who ruled in Bologna, tried to check the popular movement; and refused to take any more energetic step than the issue of proclamations. He even appealed to the Bolognese to remember the fate of Vicenza as a warning against useless defences. But the people would not listen to him; and a declaration of the Pope that he would defend the frontiers of his State, increased their desire for action. Encouraged by the peaceable action of the Pro-Legate, and by no means alarmed at his proclamations, General Welden entered the Porta Maggiore of Bologna at the head of his forces on the 7th of August. Near that gate a path leads up to a raised piece of ground called the Montagnola, which is covered with grass and trees. To this the Austrian forces made their way; but, in spite of the warnings of the Pro-Legate, Welden's demand for hostages was flatly refused. The people rang their bells, and rushed to the barricades; an old cannon was brought out and carried up to the Montagnola, and by six o'clock in the evening of the 8th of August, barricades had been thrown up near every gate of the city. The Austrians were driven out; and Monsignore Opizzoni, who was in a country house outside the town, was rescued by the citizens, and brought into Bologna. The dreamy, old-world city at once became full of new life; neighbours flocked in from the surrounding districts; and soldiers who had left the city, in the belief that it was indefensible, now returned to its help. The Pro-Legate issued an encouraging address to the citizens; and Welden complained that the rulers of Bologna were unable to control the excited spirits of the city. The Ambassadors of England, France, Prussia, Denmark, Sweden, and even Naples, who were resident at Florence, protested against the renewal of the Austrian attack; the enthusiasm for the Bolognese spread to Venice, where a large subscription was raised for the families of those who had fallen on August 8; and finally on August 15 a meeting took place between Welden and the representatives of the Pope, which resulted in an order to the Austrian forces to recross the Po. In the meantime, whatever help the Austrian generals might have received from the approval of the Frankfort Parliament, that assistance must have lost its value, as the position of the Parliament became weaker and weaker. One great difficulty, as already mentioned, was the growing rivalry of Berlin; and this became the more dangerous to German liberty, as the supporters of the original struggle for freedom continued to lose their influence in the Prussian Court. Camphausen, the new Prime Minister, repudiated the March Revolution as decidedly as Schmaltz had repudiated the popular element in the struggles of 1813. Prince William of Prussia, the brother of the King, who was considered the leader of the reactionary party, had returned to Berlin; and, though he now professed to accept the Constitution, he was believed to mean mischief. The actual liberties, indeed, of the citizens of Berlin had not yet been attacked; but a warning of their future fate was given by the treatment inflicted on Posen. Mieroslawski, the leader of the Polish movement in Posen, had been received with enthusiasm in Berlin during the March rising; and the King had then given permission to the different provinces of Prussia to decide whether or not they should be absorbed in the new Germany. The Posen Assembly had decided by twenty-six votes to seventeen against the proposed absorption; and as a means of carrying out this decision, they had removed certain Prussian officials from office in their province. The King of Prussia had at first seemed to approve this change, and had despatched General von Willisen to secure the Poles in their national rights. But when the German party in Posen offered resistance to this policy, the King yielded to them, withdrew General von Willisen, and sent in his stead General von Pfuel, who placed Posen in a state of siege, and punished all who had taken part in the Polish movement. But, however alarming these signs might be to the more Liberal members of the Frankfort Parliament, the attitude of the majority of that Parliament towards the Poles had not been so generous as to justify them in passing severe condemnation on the Prussian Ministry. It was in another part of Europe, and in a very different struggle, that the power of the Frankfort Parliament over the King of Prussia was to be finally tested. The March rising in Denmark had, unfortunately, like the risings in Pesth and Frankfort, been accompanied with a desire to strengthen their own country at the expense of its neighbours; and an Assembly in Copenhagen had, on March 11, denounced the claims of Schleswig to a separate Constitution as eagerly as the Liberals of Pesth had demanded the suppression of the Transylvanian Diet, and the Liberals of Frankfort the absorption of Bohemia in Germany. The Schleswig-Holstein Estates, however, thought that the time had come for a more definite demand for independence: and, on March 18, they put forward five proposals which they embodied in a petition to the King. These were to the effect that the members of the Estates of both Duchies should be united in one Assembly for the purpose of discussing an Assembly for Schleswig-Holstein; that measures should be taken to enable Schleswig to enter the German Confederation; that in consideration of dangers both from within and without, measures should be taken for a general arming of the people; that liberty of the Press and freedom of public meeting should be granted; and that the Prime Minister of Denmark should be dismissed. The arrival of the bearers of this petition in Copenhagen caused great indignation among the Danes; and, on March 20, a meeting was held to pass five counter-resolutions in favour of the claims of Denmark over Schleswig; and the temper of the meeting was sufficiently shown by the fact that, while the four resolutions which asserted the power of Denmark were easily carried, a resolution proposing a Provincial Assembly for Schleswig was rejected by an enormous majority. War was declared on the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein; and, in order to prevent those Duchies from having due notice of the war, the members of the deputation were detained in Copenhagen until the expedition had actually sailed. On March 27 the Danish forces appeared before Hadersleben; and thereupon the Schleswig-Holstein Estates declared that the Duke of Schleswig-Holstein was no longer free, and formed a Provisional Government. The meeting of the Preparatory Parliament at Frankfort had naturally increased the hopes of the people of Schleswig-Holstein; and they elected seven representatives to take part in the deliberations of that Parliament. But the Schleswig-Holstein question seemed doomed to bring into prominence all the difficulties which hindered the establishment of the freedom and unity of Germany. The old Bundestag had, even before the meeting of the Frankfort Parliament, declared its sympathy with the Estates of Schleswig-Holstein; and, though it expressed its approval of the election of the Schleswig-Holstein representatives to the Frankfort Parliament, it claimed, as against that body, the sole right of directing the Federal forces of Germany. The King of Prussia was, no doubt, glad enough to pit the older body against the representatives of the newer Germany; and it was avowedly under the authority of the Bundestag that, in the month of April, he marched his forces into Schleswig-Holstein. But it soon became clear that neither the representatives of the old League of Princes, nor the Assembly which embodied the aspirations for German freedom and unity, would be able to control the King of Prussia. Early in June he showed an inclination to come to an understanding with the King of Denmark and to evacuate North Schleswig. The leaders of the Frankfort Parliament felt that, in order to control this dangerous rival to their authority, they must create some central Power which should be able entirely to supersede the Bundestag; and it was, to a large extent, under the influence of this feeling, that the Archduke John was chosen Administrator of the Empire. But, however much strength the Frankfort Parliament might gain in Germany by this election, it was hardly to be expected that the choice of an Austrian Prince would lead to more friendly relations between Frankfort and Berlin; and, in July, it began to be rumoured that a truce of a more permanent kind was about to be made between the King of Prussia and the King of Denmark, while the King of Hanover seemed disposed to second the former in his defiance of the Constituent Assembly at Frankfort. At last, in September, the crisis of the struggle came. It then became clearly known that a truce of seven months had been agreed to at Malmö between Prussia and Denmark. During that period both the Duchies were to be governed in the name of the King of Denmark as Duke of Schleswig-Holstein; and the man who was chosen to act in the King's name was Count Moltke, who had been previously protested against by the people of Schleswig-Holstein on account of his tyrannical acts. He was to exercise all power except that of legislation, which, indeed, was to cease altogether during the truce; and he was to be assisted by four Notables, two of them to be nominated by the King of Denmark and two by the King of Prussia. The Frankfort Parliament felt that this truce would sacrifice the whole object of the war; and, on the motion of Dahlmann, they resolved, on September 5, by 238 votes against 221, to stop the execution of the truce. The Ministry, who had been appointed by Archduke John, thereupon resigned, and Dahlmann was empowered by the Archduke to form a new Ministry. At the same time the Estates of Schleswig-Holstein met, and denied that any one had the power to dissolve them against their will, or to pass laws or lay on taxes without their consent. A public meeting of the Schleswig-Holstein citizens declared that they would not submit to the new Government; every one of the four Notables refused to act with Moltke; and, when he applied to the Provisional Government for protection, they sent him a passport to enable him to leave the country. But the Frankfort Parliament very soon began to shudder at its own audacity; and, when Robert Blum urged upon it the desirability of speedily putting in force its decree about Schleswig-Holstein, the Parliament decided that there was no urgency for this motion; and some of the more timid members began to plead the danger of a quarrel with Prussia. Arndt, who had voted for the condemnation of the truce, now changed sides, and urged that the Parliament should accept it, in order to convince the Danes "that they are a brother People;" while even those who still condemned the action of Prussia began to propose all sorts of compromises. At last, on September 16, the Assembly rescinded its former vote, declaring, by 257 against 236, that it was unadvisable to hinder the execution of the truce. The leaders of the German Left had felt that concession to the King of Prussia in this dispute implied the sacrifice of the whole object of the Parliament's existence; and Robert Blum had declared, shortly before the final vote, that it must now be decided whether Prussia was to be absorbed in Germany or Germany to become Prussian. But the decision of the Frankfort Parliament so roused the fierce Democratic feeling in the city that the movement of resistance to Prussia passed out of the control of Robert Blum, and fell under the leadership of far fiercer and more intolerant spirits. Several thousand Democrats belonging to the Frankfort clubs held a meeting, on September 18, at which they called upon the members of the Left to leave the Frankfort Parliament and form a separate Assembly. Zitz, a representative of Mainz, and nineteen other members, accepted this proposal; and, in the meantime, the Frankfort mob, headed by a man who bore the ominous name of Metternich, threw up barricades in the streets, and prepared for a regular insurrection. The Ministry, in great alarm, sent for troops; and Bavarian, Prussian, and Austrian generals alike responded to the appeal. Robert Blum and Simon, the member for Breslau, in vain tried to make peace; entreating the Ministry to withdraw the troops, and the insurgents to pull down the barricades. But the Ministry would not listen to any advice, and the insurgents threatened Blum and Simon with death. Auerswald and Lichnowsky, two members of the Right, were killed in the riot. Many fled from the city; and it is said that, when Archduke John wished, at last, to make a truce, no member of the Ministry could be found to countersign the order for the withdrawal of the troops. The struggle went on fiercely during the 19th; but there was no organization capable of offering permanent resistance to the soldiers; and, by ten o'clock at night, all the barricades had been swept away; and the Ministry soon after declared Frankfort in a state of siege. These events gave a shock to the hopes for combining German freedom with German unity which they never after recovered; and the alternative which Blum had propounded, whether Prussia should be absorbed in Germany or Germany in Prussia, was, from that day, to be exchanged for the question whether Austria or Prussia should absorb Germany. There were some, however, who did not at once give up their hope for a solution more favourable to freedom than either of those alternatives. In several parts of Germany Republican feeling seemed to have been growing for some time past, and the fiercest and most daring of the Republican leaders were still to be found in Baden. The rising which had followed the dissolution of the Preparatory Parliament had, indeed, discredited Hecker and his friends with many of the more moderate Democrats; and this feeling, by alienating the party of Hecker from Robert Blum, had deprived that able and temperate statesman of the power which he might have gained as the head of a united Democratic party. That rising had also, unfortunately, brought about a collision between Baden and Bavaria, and, at least, a feeling of suspicion between Baden and Würtemberg. But, though the Democratic party, as a whole, had been weakened by the Baden rising, and though even the special South German movement, which had seemed, in March, to have gained so strong an influence, had been disunited, yet, on the other hand, a certain form of popular enthusiasm had undoubtedly been roused by Hecker, of a kind which the wiser Democrats had failed to excite; and the attempt of the members of the Right in the Frankfort Parliament to annul Hecker's election, on account of his insurrection, had marked him out as a martyr for liberty. But when the Baden Republicans gathered for action after the Frankfort riots, it was, for some unknown reason, to Struve, rather than to Hecker, that they offered the leadership of the movement. Struve seems to have had fewer gifts for the work of a leader of insurrection than his colleague had possessed. He had been, as was proved by his programme in the Preparatory Parliament, interested rather in the redress of material grievances than in the assertion of Constitutional Liberties; and, though he now proclaimed the Republic from the Town Council House in Lörrach, he rested his appeal to the people mainly on the ground of the burdens still pressing on the cultivators of the land; and he did not allude to the Schleswig-Holstein question, nor did he allege any Constitutional reason for proclaiming the Republic. Blum had seen that Republicanism was not popular in Germany; and, though he looked forward to a Republic as the ultimate goal of his political aspirations, he felt, during the sitting of the Frankfort Parliament, as Mazzini had felt during the war in Lombardy, that any violent attempt to enforce Republican opinions would be dangerous to liberty. Indeed, it was clear that the only possibility for even a temporary success in an insurrection at that time would have lain in an appeal to the national feeling about the Schleswig-Holstein war. The movement, therefore, failed, and failed ignominiously. The Federal troops were sent against the insurgents; at the first collision the latter were easily defeated; and the insurrection was only remembered as the Struve-Putsch. Since, then, the Frankfort Parliament no more embodied the hopes of the Liberals; since Republican risings seemed hopeless; and since it was hardly to be expected from human nature that those who had desired to establish German unity at Frankfort should consent at once to rally round that Prussian Parliament which had helped to defeat their efforts; the eyes of all who would not give up the cause for lost turned instinctively to Vienna. There, ever since July 10, a Parliament had been sitting, which seemed to enjoy securer freedom than could be found in other parts of Germany. This security was partly due to the influence of the same prince who had so much increased the dignity of the Frankfort Parliament; for the Archduke John was the one member of the Royal House who had a genuine respect for liberty. He had consented, not only to open the Viennese Assembly, but, a little later, to get Pillersdorf dismissed from office, on the ground of his having lost the confidence of the people; and, in August, Ferdinand himself was induced to return to Vienna, and thus to give a still further sense of security to the supporters of parliamentary government. Nor was this Parliament without more solid results; for it abolished in Austria that system of feudalism which had already been swept away in Hungary. But, in spite of this apparent success, the seeds of division and bitterness were too deeply sown to allow of lasting liberty in Vienna. The workmen's movements, so often leading to riot, had been one cause of weakness; but the most lasting and fatal cause was that terrible race hatred, which, more than anything else, ruined the Austrian movement for freedom in 1848. The opposition of the Bohemians to the May rising in Vienna had intensified against them the indignation which had already been roused by their attitude towards the Frankfort Parliament; and the June insurrection in Prague had been exaggerated by German panic-mongers into an anti-German "St. Bartholomew." When Dr. Rieger, Palacky's son-in-law, pleaded for delay in the election of the President of the Assembly, on the ground that the Bohemian members had not had time to arrive, he was hooted in the streets, and only saved from actual violence by the intervention of Dr. Goldmark; and, when Rieger protested against the illegal arrest and secret trial of one of the Bohemian leaders in Prague, Bach, who had now become the most popular of the Ministers with the German party, evaded the appeal. Indeed the utterances of the German party in Vienna were marked by a combination of a somewhat arrogant assertion of popular authority, as represented by the Assembly, with contempt for the aspirations of other countries. This combination of feeling was perhaps best illustrated by the meeting of July 29, when a majority of the Assembly, in calling upon the Emperor to return to Vienna, indignantly rejected the word "bitten" (entreat) from the address, and substituted the word "fordern" (demand). On the day of this important assertion of popular rights, the news of Radetzky's victories in Italy was received with loud applause in the Chamber, and a solemn Te Deum was shortly afterwards decreed in honour of these victories.[15] But, offensive as this contrast between the more vulgar side of democratic feeling, and the indifference to the liberties of Italy and Bohemia must seem to the student of this period, there was one direction in which the more generous instincts of the Viennese Democrats were shown; although, even in this matter, the generosity of principle was to be sadly clouded by the savagery of act. The political question which called out this better feeling was the relation of Vienna to Hungary. It will be remembered that the enthusiasm for Hungary, which had been awakened by Kossuth's speech of the 3rd of March, had been considerably damped by the attitude which the Magyar leaders had taken up towards the May rising in Vienna; and the more democratic tone of Jellaciç on that occasion had led the Viennese, for a time, to turn for sympathy to Agram rather than to Buda-Pesth. But no concessions to monarchical feeling which Kossuth might be disposed to make, could reconcile the most influential of Ferdinand's advisers to the independent position which the Magyar Ministers had obtained. The courtiers, indeed, who helped to form the Camarilla, might shrink at first from any sympathy with the daring and independent attitude of the Serbs and Croats. But the party in Vienna which was opposed to Hungarian liberty had been swelled, since March, by the accession of men who were not theoretic opponents of rebellion, but who simply desired that the new free Government should be as thoroughly centred in Vienna as the old system of Metternich had been. The most important representative of this phase of opinion was the War Minister Latour. Ever since he had taken office, in the latter part of April, he had been trying to make use of the discontented races in Hungary to weaken the power of the Magyars and to strengthen the authority in Vienna. Although he could not at once bring round his colleagues in the Ministry to these intrigues, nor persuade the courtiers to sympathize with the national leaders at Agram and Carlowitz, yet there were points in the position of affairs of which Latour was able to make skilful use for the accomplishment of his ends. Of these circumstances one of the most striking was the character of the Emperor. Ferdinand had shown himself, ever since his accession, most desirous of doing justice between the rival races of his Empire. The great difficulty of balancing the claims of German and Bohemian, Magyar, Croat, and Serb, might well have perplexed a stronger brain and weakened a steadier will than that of Ferdinand the Good-natured (der Gütige); and when the painful disease, with which he was always afflicted, is taken into account, it will seem more wonderful that he ever maintained a steady political purpose for however short a period, than that he was constantly hesitating and changing his course, as new aspects of the question pressed themselves on his attention. This confusion and its natural results are well illustrated by a story which, though obviously incapable of proof, yet, none the less, may be supposed to embody the popular feeling about this weak but well-meaning monarch. The story is, that during one of his conferences with a Serb deputation, Ferdinand had listened with tears to the descriptions of the cruelties inflicted by the Magyars; but that, just when he seemed about to give them a favourable answer, he happened to glance at a note from Metternich which was lying beside him on the table, and, taking it up, he read these words: "Die Serben sind und bleiben Rebellen" (the Serbs are and remain rebels). This sentence checked Ferdinand's sympathy, and he at once dismissed the deputation with vague words. Upon this desire to do justice to both sides, and this weakness under the pressure of a stronger will, Latour found it easy to act. A Conference at Vienna between representatives of the rival races was obviously an expedient, which it was easy to recommend to Ferdinand, while it gave admirable opportunities for secret intrigues. Moreover, whatever objections might be entertained by the courtiers to other leaders of the Slavonic races, there was one, at least, who stood on a somewhat different footing. Jellaciç was a personal favourite of the Archduchess Sophia, the wife of Archduke Francis Charles, the next heir to the throne. He had been a colonel in the Austrian army, and his appointment had been looked on at Buda-Pesth as quite as much an assertion of Imperial authority, as of Croatian independence. On the other hand, the fact that he had been entrusted by the Croatian Assembly, on June 29, with almost dictatorial powers, only ten days after he had been declared a traitor by the Emperor, made him a trustworthy representative of the independent nationalists of Croatia; and while, therefore, Latour saw in him a fit tool for his purpose, Ferdinand naturally hoped that a meeting between Jellaciç and Batthyanyi in Vienna might lead to a satisfactory settlement of the quarrels between Hungary and Croatia. In this hope the Emperor was encouraged by Archduke John, who offered himself as a mediator between the contending parties. But, unfortunately, the double responsibility which Archduke John had taken upon himself interfered with the execution of his good intentions; for while he was urging compromises on Magyars and Croats, the burden of his duties as Administrator of the German Empire compelled him to hasten away to Frankfort. And thus Batthyanyi and Jellaciç were left face to face in a city where there were few who desired to reconcile them, and where the most influential people desired to aggravate their divisions. It must be said, however, in justice to Jellaciç, that some of the points on which he insisted in the controversy have been somewhat misunderstood in respect of their spirit and intention. It has been urged, for instance, that in demanding the centralization at Vienna of financial and military administration, he was contending solely for the interests of the Court, and not at all for Croatian independence. This, however, is scarcely just; for Jellaciç had good reason to believe that Slavonic liberty needed protection from the Magyar Ministers of Finance and War, since, in July, Kossuth, as Minister of Finance, had refused supplies for the Croatian army; and even the Serbs, who were still in partially hostile relations with the Court, had discussed the question of placing themselves under the Ministry at Vienna, as a protection against the Magyars. There were, however, other proposals made by Jellaciç, which could scarcely be covered by this explanation, such as the demand that Hungary should take over a share of the Viennese debt, and that more troops should be sent to Italy; and it was natural, therefore, that Batthyanyi should construe the proposal about the War and Finance Ministry, rather as a blow at the liberties of the Magyars, than as an assertion of Croatian independence. It was obvious that for purposes of conciliation the Conference was a hopeless failure; and Batthyanyi, after in vain urging Jellaciç to abandon these proposals, rose in indignation exclaiming, "Then we meet on the Drave."[16] "No," said Jellaciç, "on the Danube." And so they parted with the consciousness that war was no longer avoidable. But though the Conference had failed, so far as regarded its apparent purpose, it had served to complete the change in the policy of the Court, and in the position of Jellaciç. From this time forward he ceased to be the complete champion of Croatian liberty, and became the soldier of the Emperor; and from this time forward, therefore, the German Democrats of Vienna resumed their old faith in Kossuth, and considered his enemies as their enemies. The policy of Latour had been accepted at Court, and Ferdinand was whirled away in the vortex of aristocratic opinion, and official intrigue. On August 4 Ferdinand officially declared his confidence in Jellaciç; about September 1, the Viennese Ministry announced to the Hungarians that the March laws which had secured a responsible Ministry to Hungary were null and void, as having been passed without the sanction of Ministers at Vienna; and Ferdinand endorsed this opinion. In the meantime, even the Serb movement which the Viennese courtiers had looked upon with special suspicion, was passing into hands more favourable to the authority of the Emperor. In the latter part of July, Stratimiroviç had gained great successes in the Banat; and his alliance with Knicsanin, the Servian General, had led him to hope that he might be able to throw off the authority both of Vienna and of Buda-Pesth. But the Patriarch Rajaciç, who had entered with such hesitation into the insurrection, saw his only possibility of safety in placing the movement under the authority of the Emperor. He therefore set himself against the influence of Stratimiroviç; and on his return from Agram to Carlowitz, he was able to use his authority as Patriarch, backed by the influence of Jellaciç, to recover the reins of government, and to limit the authority of Stratimiroviç to military affairs. At the time of the return of Rajaciç, the war had begun to languish; but in the middle of August the Magyars renewed their attacks, and besieged the Serb town of Szent-Tomas. Stratimiroviç marched to the defence, and gained such successes that some of the Magyars raised the cry of treason against their Generals. General Kiss was therefore sent down to take the place of those who had forfeited the public confidence. At first the result of the war was doubtful; for victories were alternately gained by the Serbs and the Magyars; but at last Kiss, by a dexterous movement, succeeded in preventing Stratimiroviç from joining his forces with those of Knicsanin, and thus turned the whole tide of the war against the Serbs. This change of affairs naturally favoured the designs of Rajaciç; Stratimiroviç, finding that much of the popular feeling was turning against him, resigned his authority, and Colonel Mayerhoffer, an Austrian officer, was sent down to take his place. Some of the soldiers of Stratimiroviç were, indeed, indignant at this change; and Rajaciç was obliged to make some advances to reconciliation; but Suplikaç, the Voyvode, backed Rajaciç in his general plans; and by the help of their joint influence, Latour was able to turn the Serb cause into a new prop for the rule of the Emperor. It is pathetic to see how, in spite of irresistible evidence, Ferdinand still clung to the hope that he might succeed in reconciling the leaders of the different races in his Empire, and yet more strange to see how he still believed that Latour would co-operate with him for this object. He now chose as his mediator, a Hungarian named Lamberg, to whom he gave a commission to settle matters between the contending parties, and to restore order in Hungary. Lamberg was known to Batthyanyi, and seems, to some extent, to have enjoyed his confidence; for Batthyanyi declared that he would himself have counter-signed Lamberg's commission, if Latour would only have submitted it to him in time. But Latour, whose object was very different from that of his good-natured master, despatched Lamberg to Buda-Pesth without that sanction which could alone secure him legal authority in the eyes of the Hungarian Ministers. Some days before the arrival of Lamberg in Pesth, a striking proof had been given of the growing sympathy between the German Democrats of Vienna and the Magyars, and also of that fierce race-hatred between Germans and Bohemians which had been stirred up by the circumstances of the June rising in Prague. The Magyars had despatched a deputation to the Viennese Parliament, in the hopes of reviving the old alliance between Buda-Pesth and Vienna. The more generous side of the Democratic spirit had been reawakened in the Germans of Vienna by many of the recent events. Even those who had sympathized with the reconquest of Lombardy had been alarmed at the kind of government which the Austrian generals were trying to introduce into that province; and one of the members of the Assembly asked what should they think if the army which was now in Italy were to stand before the gates of Vienna? This feeling of alarm at the growth of a military power independent of Parliament had naturally been increased by the suspicions of Latour's intrigues with the Serbs and the Croats. When, then, on September 19, the Magyar deputation, among whom were Eötvös and Wesselenyi, asked for an audience from the Assembly, that they might explain their position, the leading German Democrats urged their admission, but the Bohemian leaders protested against it, denouncing the Magyars both for separating from Austria and for oppressing the Slavs. Schuselka attempted to mediate between the two parties, maintaining that though the Magyars had done many indefensible things, yet, as a matter of justice, the Parliament ought to hear their petition; but the Ministerialists, combined with the Bohemians, were too strong for opposition; and, by a majority of eighty, it was decided not to admit the deputation. This refusal of the Viennese Parliament brought to an end the last hope of a peaceable settlement of the Hungarian difficulties. On September 27, Lamberg entered Buda-Pesth, to which the Hungarian Diet had now been transferred. It must be remembered that the Magyars had just been irritated at Ferdinand's denunciations of the March laws of Hungary, and alarmed at his expression of confidence in Jellaciç, who had just crossed the Drave and invaded Hungary. When, then, Lamberg arrived in Pesth, with a commission unsigned by any Hungarian Minister, his arrival was naturally looked upon as a further indication of an attempt of the Austrian Ministry to crush out the liberties of Hungary. A slight thing was sufficient to cause these suspicions to swell into a panic; and the news that Lamberg had at once crossed the Danube, to visit the fortress of Buda, seemed, to the excited Magyars, a sufficient proof of his dangerous intentions. The cry was raised that the fortress was going to be seized and military law established. The fiery students of Pesth hastened out into the streets; and as Lamberg returned across the suspension bridge into Pesth, he was attacked and murdered. Batthyanyi, terrified at this act, resigned his premiership and fled to Vienna; and the Diet of Hungary passed a resolution condemning the murder. Ferdinand was now more easily urged to violent action. On October 3 he declared the Hungarian Diet dissolved, proclaimed Jellaciç Dictator of Hungary, and appointed Recsey Prime Minister in place of Batthyanyi. Jellaciç, however, did not find it easy to assert the authority which was now given him. He had hoped that, in the confusion which followed the death of Lamberg, he would be able to carry Pesth by storm; but he was driven back, and before the end of October the Croats had been expelled from Hungary. In the meantime the suspicions of the Viennese had been increasing, and on the 29th of September Dr. Löhner, one of the original leaders of the March movement, publicly denounced Latour for his intrigues with Jellaciç. These intrigues had now been placed beyond a doubt by certain letters which had fallen into the hands of the Hungarian Ministry. Pulszky, who was at this time in Vienna, took the opportunity to publish these letters in the form of a placard, while he complained to Latour of the permission given to Jellaciç to raise recruits in Vienna, and threatened, if these proceedings continued, to excite a revolution in which the Viennese Ministers would be hung from lamp-posts. There were, indeed, revolutionary elements enough in Vienna at this time. The friendship between the workmen and the students had led to the formation of a special workman's Sub-Committee under the Committee of Safety. This body actually undertook to find employment for all who were out of work, and even to pay them wages while they were out of work. This offer naturally caused a rush of workmen to Vienna, from all parts of the Empire. The attempt to sift and regulate the claims for employment led to new bitterness; and demands for impossibly high wages provoked rebuffs, which were answered by threats of violence. The Ministry tried to induce the workmen to leave the city, by urging them to join the army in Italy; but the students defeated this attempt by reminding the workmen that the war in Italy was a war against liberty. The suspicions of the Ministers were now excited, not only against the workmen, but against the students; and, after a riot in the latter part of August, the Committee of Safety had been dissolved, and the lecture-rooms of the University closed. But this repression, far from weakening the bitterness in Vienna, only drew closer the links between the poorer students and the workmen; for, while the richer students left the city, the poorer ones, finding it difficult to support themselves after the closing of the lecture-rooms, were subscribed for by the workmen. Thus then the suspicions roused by the intrigues of Latour were strengthened considerably by the general condition of Vienna at this period. Latour, however, was resolved not to yield. The defeats which Jellaciç was experiencing in Hungary only made it the more necessary that those who sympathized with him should send him help; and on the 5th of October the news spread through Vienna that an Austrian regiment was about to march to Hungary to the assistance of Jellaciç. The students went to the head-quarters of one of the grenadier regiments, and urged them not to join in the march. An officer, who arrested one of the students, was attacked and wounded; and when one of the grenadiers, who had been wounded in a quarrel, was sent to his barrack, his comrades seemed to consider it as a kind of arrest, and demanded his surrender. The National Guard joined in this demand; and thus a state of confusion arose which made it easy for the students and the workmen to hinder the march of the regiments which were starting for Hungary. An Italian battalion refused to proceed further, and the march was hindered for that day. But General Auersperg, who commanded the forces in Vienna, was resolved to continue the attempt; and so, on the following day, the soldiers were despatched to the station which lies beyond the Tabor bridge. But, when they arrived on the bridge, they found that the students and the National Guard were before them, and that the barriers had been closed against them. Auersperg was alarmed at this resistance, and recalled the troops; but collisions had by this time taken place between the soldiers and the people in other parts of the town; and a fierce fight was raging in the Stephansplatz, and even in the church itself. Then suddenly there rose the cry "Latour is sending us the murderers of the 13th of March;" and a rush was made towards the office of the Ministry of War. Fears had already been entertained by several members of the Assembly, that a personal attack would be made on Latour; and Borrosch, one of the German Bohemian members, Smolka, the Vice-President of the Assembly, Dr. Goldmark, and others, hastened to protect Latour from the vengeance of the crowd. Borrosch, with the same humane ingenuity which Lafayette had shown on a similar occasion, promised that Latour should have a formal trial, if the crowd would spare him. The crowd cheered Borrosch and his friends; and many of them promised that they would protect Latour's life. Borrosch rode off, supposing Latour to be safe; but Dr. Fischhof, feeling that matters were not yet secure, persuaded several members of the National Guard to act as special protectors to Latour; and as the best means of effecting this object, some thirty or forty of them undertook to arrest him. But the excitement of the crowd had been roused anew, and they burst into the War Office. Smolka then entreated Latour to resign. The Minister consented; but the passions of the crowd would not be appeased. The unfortunate man attempted to hide from their pursuit: but they dragged him from his hiding-place, and thrust aside his defenders. Fischhof warded off the first blow that was aimed at him. A student, named Rauch, attempted also to protect him; but all was in vain; and he was dragged down the staircase and into the square in front of the War Office. With his white hair floating about him, he was lifted on to the lamp-post which then stood in the square. He struggled against his enemies, and compelled them to drop him once; but again he was lifted on to the post, and this time the hanging was completed, the crowd tearing his clothes from his body and dipping their handkerchiefs in his blood. This outburst of savagery, instead of satisfying the fury of the people, had quickened their thirst for blood; and their desire for vengeance was now turned against the Bohemian Deputies. Strobach, who had been chosen President of the Assembly, had objected to hold a sitting at all on that day, declaring that executive rather than legislative functions were needed just then. For this refusal some of the members wished to prosecute him; and armed men appeared in the gallery of the Assembly threatening violence to the Bohemian deputies. Those deputies, finding that they could no longer deliberate freely, soon after fled from the city, and issued from Prague a protest against the Reign of Terror, which they declared to be dominating Vienna. In the meantime Ferdinand, having consented, on the day of Latour's death, to the formation of a Democratic Ministry, fled, on the next day, from Vienna to Schönbrunn, and shortly afterwards to Innspruck; and he soon notified his feelings to the Viennese by a proclamation in which he too denounced the reign of violence in Vienna. Hardly had the Viennese recovered from the surprise caused by the flight of their Emperor, than they heard that Jellaciç, having abandoned his hope of conquering Hungary, was marching against Vienna. General Auersperg, who had withdrawn his troops to the Belvedere after the collision between the soldiers and the people, was still assumed by the Viennese to be in some degree favourable to their cause; and they entreated him to repel the attack of Jellaciç, and to call for help from the Hungarians. Auersperg, however, rejected this proposal, withdrew his troops secretly from the city, and, on October 11, openly joined Jellaciç. The Assembly were now anxious to appeal to the Frankfort Parliament for help, and entreated them to send representatives to Vienna. Robert Blum, who had grown weary of the state of affairs in Frankfort, and who believed that the only remaining hope for Germany was in Vienna, consented, in company with four others, to accept this embassy. The Parliament in Vienna still imagined that they could keep within legal forms; but this desire irritated those fiery politicians who felt that the struggle was now on a revolutionary footing; and they therefore desired to overthrow the Assembly, and to establish a more determined body in its place. But Blum, who had been accustomed to hold in check the violent members of his own party in Frankfort, supposed that, in Vienna also, he was bound to resist revolutionary methods; and, though he was ready to encourage the Viennese in the defence of their city, he objected to the proposal for the violent dissolution of the Assembly, on the ground that such a proceeding would give an excuse to the tyrants for a dissolution of the Frankfort Parliament. A man of much more importance in such a siege than Robert Blum could be, arrived about the same time in Vienna. This was Joseph Bem, a Galician of about fifty-three years of age, who had served in Napoleon's expedition to Russia, and had greatly distinguished himself as colonel of the Polish artillery at the battle of Ostrolenka. He had also commanded the Polish artillery in the insurrection of 1830, and had attempted to organize a Polish legion, for the help of the Portuguese, during their struggle against the Absolutist party. He had been wounded in one of these wars, was obliged to use a staff in walking, and was small and delicate in his appearance. He had gained both friends and enemies in Poland, and was known for his strong democratic sympathies. Although he was not appointed to the official headship of the National Guard, he soon became the centre and life of the defence. But he found that the men with whom he had to act did not understand the position in which they were placed; for, when he attempted to urge the National Guard to march out against the army of Jellaciç, they twice refused to follow him, on the ground that they were only intended for the defence of the city. And, if the rulers of Vienna were feeble in their attitude towards their enemies, they were not less feeble in their treatment of the one people, from whom they might have expected help in this emergency. The advance of Jellaciç against Vienna had naturally increased the sympathy of the Magyars for the Viennese, and Pulszky urged the latter to summon the Hungarian army to their rescue. This formal invitation was the more necessary because the Hungarian officers were in many cases confused in their minds as to their strict legal duty in this war. Archduke Stephen, the Count Palatine of Hungary, after professedly assuming the command of the army, had suddenly fled from the country, and thus weakened the legal position, both of his subordinate officers, and of the Hungarian Diet, of which he was the nominal head. Ferdinand had repeated his former dissolution of the Diet in a proclamation of the 20th October; Prince Windischgrätz, professing to act in the name of the Emperor, issued a declaration from Prague forbidding the Hungarian officers to fight against Jellaciç; and soon after, followed up this proclamation by marching against Vienna. General Moga, the Commander-in-Chief of the Hungarian forces, hesitated to resist the Imperial orders; but, whilst the generals were debating among themselves, Kossuth arrived in the Hungarian camp to urge them to advance. After some delay his influence prevailed; and on October 28 began the march of the Hungarian army for the relief of Vienna. In the meantime, all those in Vienna, who really cared to save it, were trying to rouse their fellow-townsmen to action. Robert Blum made an address to the students in favour of making "no half-revolution, but a complete change of the system;" and on the 25th October, three days before the Hungarians had begun their march, Bem had succeeded in persuading the National Guard to make their sortie. But confusion followed this attempt; some of the Guard fled; others were mistaken in the darkness for enemies, and fired on by their comrades. Bem's horse was killed under him, and he was compelled to retreat. Windischgrätz, who had now been appointed to the complete command of the besieging force, demanded the surrender of "the Polish emissary Bem, who in a quite uncalled-for manner, had mixed himself up in the affairs of Vienna." This recognition of the independence of the Polish provinces of the Austrian Empire was not accepted by the Viennese; nor did they consent to surrender any of the other people who were demanded by Windischgrätz. Bem roused the soldiers again to the defence, and drove them to their work with abuse. The Students' Legion distinguished itself by its courage; and some of the workmen seconded them bravely. But Messenhauser, the official leader of the National Guard, declared that the struggle was hopeless, and urged the people to yield. Many were now disposed to abandon the defence; when suddenly, on October 30, there arose a cry that the Hungarians were approaching. Messengers went up the high tower of St. Stephen's Church, and looked out towards the plain of Schwechat, where the Hungarians and Austrians had at last joined battle. The Viennese had been advised by their Hungarian friends to tear up the railway lines; but they neglected this precaution; and thus Windischgrätz had been able to send more troops to Schwechat. But the great weakness of the Hungarians was due to the hesitation of General Moga, and to the want of confidence felt in him by his subordinate officers. Troops were ordered to advance, and then suddenly to halt, without any apparent reason; several of the new recruits ran away; and at last a general panic seized the army, and they fled before the Austrians, continuing to retreat, even after the enemy had ceased to pursue them. The rumours of Hungarian help had encouraged some of the Viennese to oppose the surrender of their city; and this opposition was continued even after the defeat of the Hungarians had been officially announced. This division of opinion between the leaders and a great part of the people, led to riots in various parts of the town. Under these circumstances, Windischgrätz refused to accept the peaceable surrender offered by the leaders, and, instead, bombarded the town, and then entered it, while it was still on fire. Bem managed to escape; and so did three of the representatives of the Frankfort Parliament; but Blum and Fröbel were arrested. The latter was discovered to have written a pamphlet, which implied a desire to maintain the unity of the Austrian Empire; and, on this ground, he was set free. But Blum was proved to have acted as a captain of one of the corps of the National Guard, during the defence; his speech to the students, about the complete change of system, was supposed to imply a desire for a Republican movement; and so on the 8th November he was condemned to death, and on the 9th he was shot. Great indignation was excited in Germany by this execution; and the unpopularity which the Frankfort Parliament had incurred by their assent to the truce of Malmö, was increased by their having refused to interfere to protect Blum from arrest. Yet it seems as if the remarks, made above in the case of Confalonieri, may be applied again to Blum. That Blum should die, and Windischgrätz triumph, was no doubt sad; but Blum's execution was rather the result of a system of Government, than a specially illegal or tyrannical act. Blum had staked his life on the issue of the struggle, by coming to Vienna during the siege. If there were any alternative to his death, it was the one proposed by Socrates to his judges; and in the case of Blum, as in that of Socrates, the actual result was the best for his honour. But, as for the capture of Vienna itself, it is difficult to over-estimate its importance in the history of the Revolution. As the fall of Milan had broken the connection of the Italian struggle with the European Revolution, so the fall of Vienna destroyed the link which bound all the other parts of the Revolution together. Race hatred, and a narrow perception of their own interests, might hinder the Viennese from understanding their true position; but the March rising in Vienna had given to the various Revolutions a European importance, which they would scarcely have attained without it; and the attention of each of the struggling races in turn had been riveted on the city which Metternich had made the centre of the European system. In a still more evident manner was the link broken between Germany and the rest of Europe, and apparently between the most vigorous champions of liberty in the different parts of Germany. This last aspect of the fall of Vienna has been embodied, by a poet named Schauffer, in verses, which appeared a year after the event, and which contain also a worthy tribute to those fiery youths whose determination and enthusiasm were to so large an extent the cause of all that was best in the Vienna insurrections; though their national prejudices, and their want of self-control, contributed largely to the ruin of the movement which they had inaugurated.[17] THE VIENNA LEGION. Their hearts beat high and hopeful, In the bright October days; Not March's glorious breezes Could bolder daring raise. No more with idle drum beats, But with cannons' thundering tone, Marched forth to guard the ramparts, Vienna's Legion. Once more they come to guard it,-- The freedom won by fight; Once more 'tis force must conquer, When blood is shed for right. A steely forest threatens, Ere yet the day be won; But the Fatherland, they'll save it, Vienna's Legion. And, as the Spartans hurled them On the Persian's mighty horde, They burst on the barbarian, To smite with German sword. Their lives into the balance In careless scorn they've thrown; And victory crowns their daring, Vienna's Legion. Thus did they struggle boldly, For many a day and night; Thus were they crushed, o'er wearied By the tyrant's conquering might; Grey warriors wept in anguish O'er many a gallant son; E'en in defeat 'twas victor, Vienna's Legion. Their deeds will well be honoured In the victor's glorious lay; Our youth lay dead in battle, But they would not yield the day. Let others crouch and tremble! No pardon will they own; They dare not live in bondage,-- Vienna's Legion. In the days of bright October They shouted in their pride; Their blows fell thick and boldly, They struck their strokes--and died. The gallant lads have fallen; In blood the Legion lie; But in the grave that hides them Is buried--Germany. FOOTNOTES: [14] To avoid needless controversy, I may add that I am perfectly aware of the tyranny exercised by Milan over Lodi and other small towns; but the fact remains that the real force of the Lombard League, in its struggle against Barbarossa, lay in the _equal_ union of the greater towns of Lombardy. [15] It must be admitted that a protest was made by some of the members against Radetzky's restoration of the Duke of Modena; but then the Duke of Modena was not subject to the Viennese Parliament, and Radetzky, in restoring him, had acted without their authority. [16] The boundary river between Croatia and Hungary. [17] It is also worth noting that the first production of the freed Press of Vienna in March, 1848, was a poem by L. A. von Frankl, in praise of the services of the students to the cause of liberty; but, though this poem gained some celebrity at the time, it does not as easily lend itself to translation as the one translated above. CHAPTER X. THE LAST EFFORTS OF CONSTITUTIONALISM. JUNE, 1848-MARCH, 1849. Difference of the Prussian movement from the other March movements.--The Silesian question.--The Rhine Province.--The Berlin workmen.--The grievances of the other Prussian Liberals.--Hansemann and his concessions.--The proposal of a Workmen's Parliament.--The "German" movement in Prussia.--The fall of Hansemann.--The reaction in Berlin.--The deputation to Potsdam.--"Das Unglück der Könige."--"Brandenburg in the Chamber, or the Chamber in Brandenburg."--The struggle between the Parliament and the King.--The refusal to pay taxes.--The final dissolution.--Value of the resistance of the Prussian Liberals.--The offer of the Crown of Germany to Frederick William.--Consequences of his refusal.--Abdication of Ferdinand of Austria.--The Parliament at Kremsier.--Its character.--Its dissolution.--Difficulties of Pius IX. and of his Ministers.--Rossi as Prime Minister.--The contradictions in his position.--His opposition to Italian ideas.--His murder.--The rising in Rome.--The democratic Ministry.--The flight to Gaeta.--Mamiani's theories.--The Forli petition.--The summons to the Roman Assembly.--Leopold of Tuscany and Guerrazzi.--Flight of the Grand Duke.--Guerrazzi and Mazzini.--Difficulties of Gioberti.--His schemes for restoring the Pope and the Grand Duke.--Their failure.--Radetzky's breaches of faith in Lombardy.--The appeal of the Lombards.--The declaration of war by Charles Albert.--Attitude of the Roman Assembly.--Mazzini's appeal and its effect.--The blunders of Charles Albert and his officers.--Tito Speri at Brescia.--"Defeat more glorious than victory."--The "Tiger of Brescia."--Novara.--Abdication of Charles Albert.--End of the "Constitutional" efforts for freedom. While the Frankfort Parliament had been discussing personal liberties, Constitutional arrangements, and the relation of the different races to each other; while in Italy, Hungary, and Bohemia the questions of national independence and race equality had thrown every other into the background; while in Vienna the republican aspirations of the students, the contest between German and Bohemian, and the discontent of the workmen, had all merged into one common element of confusion, so as at last to make government impossible; in Prussia the condition of the workmen had assumed a position of such paramount importance, during the period from April to August, as to obscure even the most pressing Constitutional questions. The workmen's petition had been the first step in the March movement in Berlin; and the miseries of the Silesian famine had quickened the desire for the improvement of the condition of the poor. This Silesian question, indeed, may perhaps be reckoned as the chief cause of the difference between the Prussian movement, and those which were taking place in the other countries of Europe. In that unfortunate province, the aristocracy seem to have tried to combine the maintenance of their old feudal power with such advantages as they could gain from modern commercial ideas. Thus the millers, who carried on the chief industry of Silesia, still paid enormous dues to the landlords for the use of their mills, while, at the same time, the landlords would start mills of their own in competition with the millers, who were paying dues to them; and, as the landlord was free from those imposts, he was often able to ruin those who were at once his rivals and dependents. Other dues of a peculiar kind were paid for protection supposed to be given by the landlord; others, again, were exacted under the pretext of supplying education to the children; while at the same time excessive preservation of game was hindering the natural development of agriculture. At the same time on the Western side of Prussia, in the Rhine Province, the French influence was colouring the feelings of the population; and the socialistic June risings in Paris excited the sympathies of the citizens of Cologne. All these causes, combined with those new hopes for a change of condition which had been roused by the Revolution, tended to excite the workmen of Berlin to action of a more definitely socialistic kind than was possible even in Vienna; and on May 21 the workmen's union of Berlin called upon all the unions of workmen throughout the Kingdom to send representatives to the capital. This naturally tended to fix the attention of the Prussian politicians on the questions specially affecting the working classes; and Hansemann, a moderate Conservative, promised to bring forward measures for curing the distresses of the workmen. In Berlin, as elsewhere, the suffering classes found that these things were more easily promised than fulfilled; and the disappointment of their hopes produced a continual tendency to riot and disorder. But the discontent roused by these causes was considerably strengthened by other grievances of a different kind. The aristocratic character of the Prussian Constitution which was proclaimed in April, had excited indignation in members of the Prussian Liberal party, who had little sympathy with socialistic agitations. The return of the Prince of Prussia to Berlin was reckoned as a sign of still further reactionary intentions on the part of the Government; while a more justifiable ground of complaint than either of these was found in the cruelties with which General Pfuel was stamping out in Posen a movement originally sanctioned by the Prussian King and Parliament. He had stirred up riots and encouraged the Germans to insult the Poles, some of whom were branded and had their heads shaved; their priests had been murdered, and images desecrated. These cruelties and insults provoked not only anger, but fear; for some of the Prussian Liberals believed that the troops then used against the Poles might end in trampling out the liberties of Berlin. If we add to these causes of discontent that tyrannical conduct of the Prussian soldiers in Mainz, which had so provoked the Frankfort Liberals; the apparent defiance to the French Republic, by the massing of troops in the Rhine Province, combined with the neglect to guard the North-eastern frontier of Prussia against the Russian troops which were fast gathering there; and last, but not least, the sluggishness and hesitation shown in the Schleswig-Holstein war, we shall see how naturally the bitter disappointment of the workmen chimed in with the feelings of suspicion felt by other classes of Liberals. The Berlin students, indeed, endeavoured to prevent the workmen from continually betaking themselves to violence; but they were unable to accomplish much in this direction. The workmen had despaired of peaceable remedies; and on June 8 they broke into the Assembly, attacked the Ministers, and were with difficulty restored to order. This state of things naturally produced a general feeling of suspicion and bitterness among all classes; and while, on the one side, a movement began in Berlin, and some of the other Prussian towns, in favour of a more Conservative Ministry, and the extreme champions of reaction even talked of removing the Parliament to Potsdam, the miseries of Silesia and Posen so roused the feelings of the Prussian Democrats that every step in the Conservative direction, however apparently innocent, gave cause for new outbreaks. Thus when new gates were put up to bar the entrance to the royal castle at Berlin, they were seized and carried off by the crowd; and when a deputation of thirty starving workmen, bearing the German flag, with the red flag by its side, were repulsed by the Ministers, there arose a cry for the general arming of the people; and when this was refused, the workmen stormed the armoury and carried off about 3,000 weapons. The Ministry now became alarmed for the peace of Berlin; and, in spite of a decision of the Assembly to the contrary, they sent for three new battalions of militia, and prosecuted the men who had taken part in the attack on the armoury. The time, however, had not yet come for a complete reaction; and it was therefore unavoidable that concessions should be made to so strong a popular movement. So on June 23 Camphausen fell; Hansemann, who had promised relief to the workmen, formed a Ministry; and on the same day a scheme was brought forward in the Prussian Parliament, for abolishing the feudal dues. Hansemann further promised to develope municipal government; and he repudiated the attacks which Camphausen had made on the March movement. Then proposals were brought forward, with the approval of the Minister of Trade, for a Commission of Enquiry into the condition of the Silesian workmen. But the workmen were determined, to a great extent, to keep matters in their own hands; and the proposal for a conference of their unions had now grown into a demand for a Workmen's Parliament which was to meet in August, and to carry out a great many points of the modern socialistic programme; such as the guarantee of work for all; the care by the State for those who were helpless or out of work; the regulation of hours of labour; and the support by the State of workmen's associations. And if the programme of Hansemann did not prevent workmen from insisting on their extremer demands, neither did it suppress the riotous methods by which they asserted their claims. Many members of the Assembly were still alarmed by hearing of attacks on machinery in Breslau, and by seeing demonstrations of workmen in Berlin; and the provision of special work on the railways produced just as much, and just as little satisfaction, as such temporary expedients usually do. In the meantime the growing collision between the power of Prussia and the power of the Assembly at Frankfort was exciting new divisions in Berlin. During the months of June and July the democratic feeling in Prussia had been strongly in favour of Frankfort as against Berlin; while, on the other hand, the military party desired more and more to assert the independence of the King of Prussia against any central Parliament, and more particularly against one which had given its highest post to an Austrian prince. The workmen's movement thus, by a natural process, began to be coloured by the desire of the more cultivated Liberals for a united Germany; and the special demands of the workmen began to fall into the background as the larger questions of the freedom and unity of the whole country came more prominently to the front. The fears of the Ministry were naturally increased by this alliance; and early in August several members of the Prussian Left were suddenly arrested; and amongst them Rodbertus, one of the more moderate members who had helped to place Hansemann in power. The new quarrel threatened to be as bitter as the old one; collisions took place in various parts of the kingdom between the Prussian soldiers and the champions of German unity; and when the members of the Left began to demand the dismissal from the army of reactionary officers, and to make demonstrations against the Ministry, the Ministers met them by passing a law for the suppression of public meetings, while the fiercer reactionists circulated a petition in favour of making the Prince of Prussia the Commander-in-Chief of the forces. The truce of Malmö brought the crisis to a head; and the members of the Left resolved that if the Ministry would not remove the reactionary officers, the Liberal members would leave the Assembly. Thus the Schleswig-Holstein crisis consolidated completely the different elements of opposition; and on September 16 a vote of want of confidence in the Hansemann Ministry was carried in the Assembly. The greatest enthusiasm was roused by this vote; the members who voted for it were carried on the shoulders of the people, and it seemed, for a moment, as if a constitutional solution had been found for the difficulties of Prussia. But the riots at Frankfort, and the triumph which they secured to the reactionary party in Parliament, gave new courage to the King of Prussia in resisting the opposition; and he entrusted the formation of a Ministry to General Brandenburg, a man of more fiercely despotic principles than any who had recently held office. New prosecutions were begun; and, for the first time since the March insurrection, a newspaper was seized and confiscated. The Liberals, however, were not disposed to yield; and, as if to strengthen their alliance with the champions of provincial and class liberties, they carried by a small majority a motion in favour of securing special rights to the province of Posen, and adopted unanimously a report for finding work for the spinners and weavers in certain parts of the kingdom; while demonstrations were made in favour of sending help to Vienna in its struggle against Windischgrätz. The fall of Vienna, however, enabled the King of Prussia to take another step towards absolutism, and General Brandenburg was appointed Minister in spite of the opposition of the Liberals. The King himself had withdrawn to Potsdam: and the Assembly resolved almost unanimously to send a deputation to the King, to entreat him to dismiss this Ministry. The deputation had to wait for a long time in a dark gallery, the King refusing at first to receive them otherwise than through the Ministers; but a Ministerial despatch arrived, calling attention to this deputation; and thus the King's scruple was removed, and he consented to hear them. When the address was completed he took it up, folded it, and prepared to withdraw; but Johann Jacoby exclaimed, "We are not come here merely to present the address, but to explain to Your Majesty the true condition of the country. Will you not grant us a gracious hearing?" The King refused, upon which Jacoby uttered the memorable words: "It is the misfortune of Kings that they will not hear the truth." Then Frederick William withdrew in great anger, and refused to have any further communication with the deputies. On November 6 he announced that, if the Assembly did not accept the Ministry, they would be dissolved by force; and two days later he declared unconditionally that he should remove the Assembly by force to the town of Brandenburg; or, as he epigrammatically put it, the choice was between "Brandenburg in the Chamber, or the Chamber in Brandenburg." Von Unruh, the President of the Chamber, read this announcement to his colleagues, but declared that he would not carry it out without the sanction of the Assembly; and, when General Brandenburg tried to speak, in order to command the closing of the Assembly, the President informed him that he was out of order, and, if he desired to make an explanation, he must ask leave to speak. Brandenburg then declared that the further sitting of the Parliament was illegal; and, accompanied by seventy members, he left the House. The Assembly then, by 250 votes against 30, decided to continue their sitting. They further resolved that "the Assembly finds at present no reason for changing their place of deliberation; that it cannot grant to the Crown the right to remove, to adjourn, or to dissolve the Assembly against its will; that the Assembly does not consider those officials who have advised the Crown to take this step capable of presiding over the Government of this country; and that those officials have become guilty of grave violations of their duty to the Assembly, the country, and the Crown." They further resolved that, although they were obliged to adjourn, the President and Secretaries should remain all night at their post, as a sign of the permanence of the Assembly. On November 9 General Brandenburg answered this defiance by a letter, in which he declared that these resolutions were illegal, and that he held Von Unruh and others responsible for the consequences. In the meantime Brandenburg had appealed to the Civic Guard to prevent the Members from attending the meetings; but the commandant of the Civic Guard denied the right of the Ministers to send him this order, and further protested against the proposal to remove the Assembly to the town of Brandenburg. The Town Council tried to reconcile the Parliament to the King; but Von Unruh, while declaring his desire to avoid bloodshed, denied that the Assembly could yield on any point, and the Members issued an appeal to the country in which they denounced the illegal conduct of the King and his Ministers, but urged the people to maintain a strictly legal position in the defence of their liberties. The address concluded with these words: "The calm and determined attitude of a People that is ripe for freedom will, with God's help, secure the victory of freedom." The situation had become terribly dangerous; for General Wrangel, soon after his return from Schleswig-Holstein, marched his troops into the market place, in front of the building in which the Parliament was sitting, and on November 11, Von Unruh and the other Members, coming to hold their meetings, found the doors locked, and the soldiers guarding the place. They then adjourned to the Hotel de Russie, where they declared Brandenburg guilty of High Treason, and called on the people to refuse to pay taxes. Deputations came in from Magdeburg, Breslau and Frankfort, declaring their sympathy with the Assembly; and the Civic Guard refused to give up their arms to Wrangel. Wrangel now declared all public meetings prohibited, announced that the Civic Guard was dissolved; and declared Berlin in a state of siege. But the addresses of sympathy came in more freely than ever; and it was rumoured that Silesia was actually in a state of insurrection. Even several citizens of Brandenburg itself sent an address to the Assembly, declaring that they would resist the transfer of the Parliament to their town. The opposition between the bourgeoisie and the workmen, which had been caused by the riots of June, July and August, had now entirely disappeared in a common zeal for Constitutional freedom; and the Town Council permitted the Assembly to meet in their Hall. But even there Wrangel would not leave them in peace, and soon after they were driven from this refuge also. Even the ex-Minister Hansemann became an object of denunciation to the Court party; and on November 15 the Assembly put into a formal vote the proposal which they had already hinted at, that no further taxes should be paid. This vote was carried just after they had been driven from the Town Council House to another meeting place. The next day soldiers were called out, who threatened the Civic Guard with violence, but finally marched off without firing; and some soldiers and officers were dismissed for not consenting to act against the people. Taxes were beginning to be refused in various parts of Prussia; several arrests were made in Cologne; and Düsseldorf was declared in a state of siege. The soldiers were forbidden to read the National Zeitung; while on the other hand printers and publishers offered to print the decrees of the Assembly without any compensation for loss of time. Attempts to enforce the payment of taxes led to riots in Bonn and Breslau; and in Coblenz the people attacked officers for speaking evil of the National Assembly. The Government tried, in some cases, to cut off the payment of deputies; but the people insisted on making the payment, in spite of this prohibition; and even a Government official in Düsseldorf declared his belief that if the Brandenburg Ministry lasted three or four days more, none of the official boards would consent to act. One of the Roman Catholic bishops of Silesia appealed to his flock not to refuse taxes, as otherwise they would be damned for "refusing to give to Cæsar the things that were Cæsar's." To this appeal several Roman Catholics of Silesia retorted by an address in which they expressed their fear for the spiritual condition of the clergy, since they had never paid taxes at all. On November 27, the Government resolved on a new act of violence. While the deputies were met at the Hotel Mylius, Major von Blumenthal entered at the head of a band of soldiers, and ordered the deputies to leave the Hall.[18] Jacoby asked him what he wanted. The Major answered, "I come in the name of the law." Jacoby: "Of what law?" Major: "In the name of the highest law." Jacoby: "Of what law do you speak?" Major: "I speak in the name of the Constitutional law." Jacoby: "There is no law that forbids us to meet in an hotel in the day-time." Elsner: "Even Wrangel's proclamations contain no prohibition of this kind; we are no club."[19] Major: "That does not concern me. I act under the authority of my board." Jacoby: "What is your name?" Major: "I am the Major Count Blumenthal." Jacoby: "Who has given you this authority?" Major: "The board set over me." Several voices: "Name the board." Major (after a pause): "Gentlemen, do not embarrass me." Jacoby: "Well, then, I declare to you that you are not acting in the name of law, but of force; and it is a sad thing that the soldiers are misemployed for such acts of violence." The Major then ordered them once more to leave the Hall, and seized on the parliamentary papers. Jacoby denounced this seizure as robbery, and attempted to make a copy of the documents. The Major snatched the papers from Jacoby's hands; upon which the latter exclaimed, "Go on with your robberies, and scorn all laws; some day you will be brought to account for this." Then the deputies, still refusing to leave the Hall, were driven out by the soldiers. In the meantime, the members of the Right had been meeting at Brandenburg; and at last von Unruh and many of his friends joined them there; but demanded, at the same time, that the Assembly should accept all the resolutions passed in Berlin between the 4th and the 15th of November. But, on December 5, the King finally dissolved the Parliament, announcing that it should meet on February 26 in Berlin, and that he would then issue a new Constitution. The Liberal members all flocked to Brandenburg to protest against this dissolution; and the King found it necessary to suppress meetings even in Brandenburg, as dangerous to his authority. It was impossible in the then state of Germany that any organized insurrection could produce a satisfactory result. On the one hand the Republican leaders had weakened their cause by spasmodic and useless appeals to insurrection, at times when Constitutional action would have been perfectly possible; while in Prussia itself, the differences between the workmen and the bourgeoisie made the permanent coherence of a Constitutional party almost impossible. On the other hand, the Parliament at Frankfort, abandoned by many members of the Left, had been growing ever more and more timid, and had not only passed a resolution condemning the resistance of the Prussian Parliament, but had even sent Bassermann, one of the Frankfort Ministers, to Berlin, to persuade the Parliament to yield. Under these circumstances, the passive resistance of Von Unruh and his friends was, in all probability, the wisest and most dignified course which was open to the champions of liberty; and when the Assembly actually met again in February, the leaders of the Left were received with enthusiasm by the people, as men who had deserved well of their country. If the King of Prussia had heartily accepted the new condition of affairs, he might even now have done something to secure a better future for Germany than any that it has since achieved; for the Frankfort Parliament had come to the conclusion that the only hope for the unity of Germany lay in its acceptance of the King of Prussia as its head. They had repudiated the connection of Germany with Austria; Archduke John had resigned his post as Administrator of the Empire; and on March 28, 1849, they finally resolved to offer the crown of Germany to the King of Prussia. But the flavour of freedom and independence which still lingered, even in these later months, about the Frankfort Parliament, made this offer distasteful to a King whose liberalism, always superficial, had now quite evaporated. The Frankfort Parliament had been the result of a popular movement; and it had elaborated a free Constitution, which it desired to treat as a necessary part of the proposed monarchy. Under these circumstances, therefore, Frederick William IV. refused to accept the crown of Germany, unless it were offered to him by the Princes of Germany; and by this refusal he put an end to the hope that the German question might be settled in a peaceable and Constitutional manner. In the meantime, experience was showing that it was almost as difficult in Austria as in Prussia to reduce parliamentary government to a mere tool of despotism. The members of the Bohemian party in the Viennese Parliament had withdrawn from its sittings after the murder of Latour; and had attempted to find a free place for deliberation in Olmütz. About the same time Ferdinand, grown weary of the struggles of parties and races, unsatisfied as to the contending claims of Kossuth and Jellaciç, and unable to reconcile himself to the proceedings either of Windischgrätz, or of the Viennese Democrats, listened to the advice which the clique around him were pressing upon him, and consented to resign his throne, not to his brother and lawful heir, but to his nephew, Francis Joseph, who, being a mere boy at the time, would fall easily under the power of the Camarilla, who were governing Austria. The advisers of Francis Joseph, however, still thought that they could keep up an appearance of parliamentary government; and they, therefore, summoned a parliament to meet at Kremsier in Moravia early in December. It soon became apparent, however, that the men who met in the Kremsier Parliament were by no means less zealous for freedom, hardly even less democratic than those who met at Vienna. Those Bohemian members, who had objected to the rule of terror in the Viennese Assembly, had appealed, even from Olmütz, to the Emperor not to deal too harshly with Vienna; and they now showed themselves as zealous for freedom as any German could be. Men, too, like Borrosch, Löhner, Schuselka and Fischhof, who had not acted with the Bohemians at Vienna, were ready to take part in the Kremsier Parliament. On the motion of Schuselka, that Parliament, early in January 1849, abolished all privileges of rank; the right of summary arrest was also taken away, and trial by jury secured; while the freest criticisms were passed on the action of the Austrian Government in Vienna, Hungary and Italy; and Rieger specially denounced the desire of the Ministry to crush out all feeling for the special nationalities. The Parliament began to attract the attention of many who were at first disposed to speak of it with scorn; and even those courtiers who had hoped to use it as a weapon against the Magyars, became alarmed at its evident democratic leanings. Acting under their advice, Francis Joseph, on March 7, announced that this Parliament, from which he had hoped so much, had driven off still further "the restoration of peace and law, and of public confidence," and had raised the hopes of "the not wholly conquered party of disorder." He therefore dissolved the Parliament, and announced, as the King of Prussia had done, that he would settle the Constitution without their help. The Bohemian leaders united with the Germans to protest against this final act of violence; and so ended for about ten years all hopes of Constitutional Government in Austria. In the meantime affairs in Italy had been also hastening in the direction of a more violent solution of difficulties than had been wished for in the early days of the movement. In spite of his apparent abandonment of the policy embodied in the encyclical of April 9, in spite even of his acceptance of Mamiani as Minister, Pius was still hesitating between two different policies. He was disposed to rely continually on Cardinals who were out of sympathy with his Ministers; and he was particularly anxious to assert that, in introducing a Parliament, he had not surrendered his absolute authority as Pope. This conflict of feelings in Pius IX. led to a curious exhibition at the opening of the Roman Parliament of June 4, 1848. On this occasion the Pope entrusted Cardinal Altieri with a discourse which had not had the approval of Mamiani. Mamiani, on the other hand, as Prime Minister, read to the Chamber a discourse in which he declared that the Pope abandoned to the wisdom of the deputies the care of providing for temporal affairs, and spoke of entrusting the papal volunteers in Lombardy to the leadership of Charles Albert. In spite of the action of Altieri, Mamiani declared that his speech had been approved by the Pope; but the Papal Nuncio in Vienna repudiated the language of the Papal Prime Minister. This continual jar between the Pope and his Ministers naturally excited distrust in the Assembly; and when the Austrians crossed the Po and occupied Ferrara, the cry for war rose, not only in the Assembly, but also in popular meetings out of doors; and the feebleness of the papal protest against this second occupation of Ferrara, increased the distrust of the Pope which was now growing in Rome. At last, in August, Mamiani, finding his position impossible, resigned; and, for a time, an old man named Fabbri was accepted as Minister by the Pope, as a kind of stop-gap. But he, too, speedily found the position impossible, and resigned his post. It was under these circumstances that Pius IX. called to his counsels the man whom he had previously desired to employ, the former ambassador of Guizot, Pellegrino Rossi. Rossi was known for his previous services to the cause of liberty, in the early part of the century; for his careful study of Roman law, and for his attempt to devise a Constitution for Switzerland. He was a personal friend of Pius IX., and had desired even a wider Constitution than that which the Pope had granted. He was further known to have gained respect from some of the Italian exiles in Paris. On all these grounds he naturally seemed to Pius a fit person to be trusted with his confidence. But though a man of sterling honesty, he was the worst possible Papal Minister at this juncture. His friends expected him to be welcomed as a former sufferer in the cause of Italian liberty. He was, on the contrary, hated as a friend of Guizot, and as the former representative of Louis Philippe. Sterbini, one of the fiercest democrats in Rome, declared that, if Guizot's friend appeared in the Assembly, he would be stoned. And, while he was hated by the Jesuits for his desire for secular Government, and for his Protestant wife, an outcry was at once raised against his Ministry by the Liberals, when it was found that it contained two Cardinals. While, too, in his own way, he wished for the freedom and independence of Italy, his way was exactly opposite to that which was then desired by the people. Professor Montanelli, who had been taken prisoner by the Austrians at Curtatone, but who had since been allowed to return to Tuscany, was propounding there his scheme for a Constituent Assembly, which was to embrace all Italy. And this proposal, welcomed eagerly in Tuscany, and accepted by the Grand Duke, was being advocated in Rome, especially by Charles Buonaparte, the Prince of Canino. On this plan Rossi threw cold water, desiring to substitute for it a League of Princes, to be begun by a Congress of Ambassadors at Rome. This idea, unwelcome and unpopular in itself, was made more unpopular still by Rossi's eager advances to Ferdinand of Naples, to whom he actually consented to surrender fugitives who had escaped from his tyranny. While, too, he made this alarming concession to the Prince, who was most deservedly hated throughout Italy, he allowed General Zucchi, whom he had sent to Bologna, to refuse Garibaldi entrance into that city on his return from Lombardy; and when Gavazzi, one of the most popular preachers of the Italian war, protested against this act, Rossi ordered him to be arrested. And as if the Clericals, the Republicans, and those who placed Italian unity above any special political creed, were not enemies enough for one man, Rossi proceeded, by special signs of suspicion towards Charles Albert, to irritate against him the powerful party of the Albertisti, who looked to the King of Sardinia as the necessary leader of a movement for Italian liberty. All this was done in the most open and scornful manner. Rossi ridiculed the proposed Constituent Assembly as a Council of Drunkards, and scornfully told Sterbini that every one knows "that there are praises which injure and blame which honours." Rumours were spread of his intention to bombard Rome; and the students mobbed him in the streets. On one occasion when they were following him, he crossed a bridge; and as he passed he handed to the toll-man a much larger sum than was his due, saying, with a wave of his hand towards the students, "Take for them too." Rumours came to him of plots against his life, but he refused to pay any attention to them. At last, on November 15, as he was going down to Parliament, a priest came to him, and told him that he would die if he went. He answered, "The cause of the Pope is the cause of God. God will help me." As he passed through the square, the crowd hooted at him. He warded them off with his stick, and ascended the stair. Suddenly an umbrella struck him; he turned his head, so that his neck became exposed; and, in the same instant, a dagger pierced him, and he fell mortally wounded. So died Pellegrino Rossi, a man who undoubtedly deserved a better fate; but who was thrust upon a position and a time which required a man of genius and humanity; while he had nothing to give but cut-and-dried maxims, enforced with a courage which was too nearly allied to insolence. That the guilt of Rossi's death should be laid to the account of different parties by different people, with equal confidence, was natural enough, considering the variety of enemies which his policy and character had stirred up against him; but it is a strange fact that actual eye-witnesses dispute as to whether it was received with joy or indignation by the people of Rome. It is tolerably evident, however, that all feelings about the actual event were quickly merged in the panic about its consequences. A general demand was made for a popular Ministry; and Galletti, who had been Minister of Police under Fabbri, went to the Pope to ask leave to form a Ministry. The Pope refused, and the people who had followed Galletti soon came to blows with the Swiss Guard. The Guard were driven back, and the crowd succeeded in getting cannon into their hands; but Federico Torre thrust himself in front of the cannon, exclaiming, "Shame to point cannon at the men who gave us the amnesty." Pius had hoped that some of the inhabitants of the Trastevere would have risen on his behalf; but, finding no support from them, he yielded to the demand for a Liberal Ministry, and appointed as his Prime Minister Rosmini, a champion of Charles Albert, and suspected of heresy by the Cardinals. Mamiani, who was at the time absent from Rome, was made Minister of Foreign Affairs, and Sterbini Minister of Commerce and Public Works. On the refusal of Rosmini, the Premiership was given to Muzzarelli. But these appointments, like Ferdinand's acceptance of a Democratic Ministry under similar circumstances, did not express the real feeling of the Pope. He was completely panic-struck by the events which had taken place; and, urged by Cardinals and Ambassadors, he fled secretly from Rome on the night of the 24th of November disguised as a footman, and took refuge at Gaeta, under the protection of the King of Naples. Mamiani had reluctantly accepted the office of Foreign Minister; but he still believed that it was desirable to uphold the authority of the Pope, because, as he expressed it, "the only choice for Rome lay between Pius IX. and Cola di Rienzi." Nor was he shaken in his determination, even when a letter came from the Pope at Gaeta, denouncing the acts of the people, repudiating his Ministers, and appointing as Commissioners of State men of the most violently reactionary character. But, in the meantime, a strong force of public opinion was growing in the Roman provinces, in favour of the election of a Constituent Assembly; and at last Aurelio Saffi, who had been so prominent as a champion of reform in the time of Gregory XVI., succeeded in gathering together, at Forli, representatives of different local Societies, and preparing an Address to the Ministry, which set forth in a concise form those feelings which were floating in the provinces at that time. This address expressed great regret at the flight of the Pope, whose name the petitioners declared they had been wont to reverence as "the symbol of a magnanimous idea." They went on to say, however, that, as Pius IX. had thrown himself into the arms of the worst enemies of Italy, it had become necessary to take steps to prevent civil war and anarchy. As Constitutional Monarchy had been cut short by the departure of the Pope, and as it was impossible to accept Commissioners whom the Pope had appointed since his flight to Gaeta, it was necessary for the Council of Deputies to nominate a Provisional Government which should issue writs for the election of an Assembly by universal suffrage, and should settle definitely the political arrangements of the State, "saving only the rights of the nation united in an Italian Constituent Assembly, such as has been proclaimed by the Tuscan Parliament." This Address produced a great effect in Rome; and Armellini urged his colleagues to accept the proposals of the petitioners. Mamiani, seeing that the Constitutional compromise which he desired had become impossible, refused to remain a Minister of State. A Provisional Government of eight members was then formed, in which Sterbini, Galletti, and Armellini took part; and the new Government on December 29 issued an Address to the Roman people, calling upon them to elect an Assembly for the Roman State, which was to meet in Rome on February 5. In the meantime, the flight of the Pope had startled the other Princes of Italy. Leopold of Tuscany had seemed more ready than most of his brother Princes to accept Constitutional Government, and even to look forward to arrangements for the unity of Italy. Guerrazzi, from what motives it may be difficult to guess, had discouraged Montanelli's plan of an Italian Constituent Assembly, and had warned the Grand Duke that his own position would be destroyed by such an institution. But, when the Pope fled from Rome, Guerrazzi had conceived the idea that Leopold might be chosen President of the new Assembly, and that the combination of Tuscany with the Roman States might prove a check on the ambition of Charles Albert. Leopold, however, seems to have been actuated by very different motives from those to which Guerrazzi appealed. So far from being strongly moved by personal ambition, or by a sense of official dignity, he was particularly inclined to accept the lead of other Princes. He had imitated Ferdinand of Naples in proclaiming Constitutional Government; he had followed Charles Albert in proclaiming war on Austria; and he had accepted first the Italian League, and afterwards the plan of an Italian Constituent Assembly, without a sign, as far as is apparent, of any other motive than the desire to promote the unity of Italy. But this very willingness to act with other Princes made Leopold averse from the idea of standing alone in his policy. It was therefore that flight of the Pope which seemed to Guerrazzi to open a new chance for Tuscany, which awoke in Leopold scruples and hesitations; and when Pius issued from Gaeta his denunciation of the proposals of the Roman Council, Leopold lost heart, and secretly fled from Florence to Siena, leaving a written statement to the effect that the Pope's opposition to the Italian Constituent Assembly compelled him to revoke the decree by which he had just sanctioned that Assembly. On February 8 the news of the Grand Duke's flight was received in Florence, and it was immediately followed by a rising, in which the insurgents demanded the appointment of a Provisional Government composed of Guerrazzi, Montanelli, and a man named Mazzoni. Just about the same time Mazzini arrived in Leghorn. Guerrazzi, who still wished to act in the name of the Grand Duke, tried to forbid Mazzini's entrance; but the Livornese went out to meet him with banners bearing his motto, "Dio e il Popolo." He exhorted them to preserve order, and then went to Florence to urge the Tuscan Ministry to join their country to the Roman State. But Guerrazzi succeeded in preventing the acceptance of this proposal, and Mazzini went on to Rome. Gioberti, on his part, had been much exercised in his mind by the new aspect of affairs. His great desire that the Pope should unite Italy seemed utterly frustrated by the flight of Pius from Rome, and still more by his placing himself under foreign protection. For, though it was to the King of Naples that the Pope first appealed, Gaeta soon became the gathering place of the ambassadors of the extreme Roman Catholic Powers; and, when Gioberti sent messengers to Gaeta, they found the Pope surrounded by men who had no sympathy with the ideas of the Primato. When the Piedmontese envoys offered him a refuge at Nice, and promised that their King would join with other Italian Princes in restoring him to Rome, the Pope answered that he had appealed to the European Powers, and must await their decision; and he further reproached Charles Albert with the sanction which he had given to the idea of an Italian Constituent Assembly, accusing him of intriguing with those who were opposed to the rights of the Church. Though discouraged by this rebuff, Gioberti hoped to find a new mission in the restoration of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, who had now followed the Pope to Gaeta. But in this plan he found himself opposed at once by Guerrazzi, and by the Austrians; while his own colleagues were so indignant at the proposal, that he was compelled to leave the Ministry which he had only just joined. In the meantime, the Austrian conquerors of Lombardy had been supplying justifications for a new Italian war. The capitulation of Vicenza had been violated almost as soon as it had been made, by the infliction of new vexations on those to whom a free pardon had been granted; and the more important capitulation of Milan had been followed by similar breaches of faith. Special burdens had been laid on those who had taken an active part in the struggle against Austria; while some of the regulations of General Welden in Pavia had been so cruel as to excite a protest even from the Viennese Assembly. He had ordered that anyone who went about with arms was to be shot within twenty-four hours, and that his patrols should fire on any group of men more than three in number who were found in the streets at night. The Council of Lombardy had, therefore, appealed to Charles Albert to secure them justice, because Radetzky had acted "in defiance of his own word, in defiance of the orders of his Sovereign, in defiance of the military conventions, in defiance of the mediation of England and France." The stronger Liberals of Piedmont soon began to cry out for war; but, for a long time, Charles Albert and his Ministers hoped to stave off action, and to secure a settlement of these differences by diplomacy. But the rebuffs which Gioberti had received gradually convinced them that no further help was to be found in appeals to foreign Powers; and, urged on by a strong popular feeling, Charles Albert for the last time declared war upon Austria. It might be reasonably doubted how far such a war would excite the sympathies of the Romans. The Piedmontese Ministry had recently attempted to suppress the liberties of Rome; and although that Ministry had fallen, Charles Albert was himself known to be strongly Monarchical in his feelings about the government of Rome. The Roman Assembly, which met on February 5, had, on the 9th, declared the Pope deposed, and had proclaimed the Republic; a step which they might naturally expect to widen the breach between them and the Piedmontese. Some were even disposed to think that Charles Albert had given another sign of hostility in ignoring the former league with Rome, and declaring an Italian war without any consultation with, or notice to the Roman Ministry. But any doubts or hesitations as to the right attitude of Rome towards Piedmont at this crisis were put an end to by Mazzini. He had been chosen by Leghorn as their representative in the Roman Assembly, and had taken his seat on March 6, the whole Assembly rising to greet him. When, then, the news came that Charles Albert had declared war once more on Austria, Mazzini appealed to the Romans to join in the struggle. "There must," he said, "be only two kinds of Italians in Italy: the friends and the enemies of Austria. Republican Rome will make war by the side of Monarchical Piedmont." Mazzini never considered that ready or eloquent speech was a power that he possessed; and, what is more to the point, some of those who loved and admired him held the same opinion; but the intensity of his conviction seemed to take the place of readily-turned phrases or imagery; and, as he went on to speak of the sacrifices that the war demanded of all Romans, there fell upon the table beside him, in showers, the jewels which the ladies in the gallery had plucked off, as their offerings for the good of their country. The Assembly voted war, almost unanimously, and twelve battalions of the National Guard were despatched to Lombardy. The war was little worthy of their enthusiasm. The Piedmontese officers were so little trusted by Charles Albert that he chose a Pole named Chrzanowski as his Commander-in-Chief, while the second in command was that Ramorino who had betrayed Mazzini in the Expedition of 1833-4. The three or four days of the war were mere scenes of mutual distrust, mismanagement, and, possibly, treachery; and it is pleasant to turn for a moment from the Piedmontese battles to the one part of the struggle which redeemed this episode from utter contempt. On March 23, Brescia, from which a portion of the Austrian forces had, for a time, then withdrawn, sprang to arms, drove out the remaining troops, and raised the Italian flag. Tito Speri, a Mantuan, organized the poorer citizens, and led them against the forces of Nugent, which were advancing on the city. After a sharp struggle, the Brescians were driven back with some loss; but, two days later, Speri made another sortie, and, though attacked by the cavalry, succeeded in driving them back, and in occupying the hills which overlook Brescia. He now attempted to treat with the Austrians; but Nugent answered that he would enter Brescia, either by force or by love; to which Speri replied, "Perhaps by force, but never by love!" Rumours came of Charles Albert's defeat, but the Brescians refused to believe it; and Nugent was forced to retreat from Brescia, after having, apparently, concluded an armistice with the citizens. But, on March 30 or 31, Haynau appeared before the city; and, in answer to the appeal of the Brescians to the terms of the armistice, he declared that, if they did not yield in two hours, he would reduce the city to ashes. But the Brescians were resolved, as their own inscription tells us, to teach "that defeat may be more glorious and fruitful than victory;" and they, therefore, refused to yield. On April 1, Haynau bombarded the city; and, after a fierce struggle at Porta Torlunga, in which General Nugent was mortally wounded, Haynau forced his way into the city, and put men, women, and children to the sword--the cruelties of his proceedings gaining for him, among the Italians, the title of "the Tiger of Brescia." But, before Brescia had fallen, Charles Albert, betrayed by his officers, distrusted by his soldiers, and out of heart, had been defeated at Novara; and, in response to a demand which he had made to Radetzky for a truce, he had been asked terms which he considered too dishonourable to accept. His officers, however, told him that his army was in too disorganised a state to be depended on, and he then answered in these words: "For eighteen years I have always used every possible power for the advantage of my people. It is painful to me to find my hopes deceived; not so much for my sake, as for my country's. I have not been able to find on the field of battle the death that I so ardently desired. Perhaps my person is the only obstacle to the obtaining of just terms from the enemy. The continuation of the war having become impossible, I abdicate the Crown in favour of my son, Victor Emmanuel, in the hope that a new King may be able to obtain more honourable terms, and to secure for the country an advantageous peace." So ended the chequered career of Charles Albert, a man of many attractive qualities and noble aspirations, but who, by a fatal weakness of will made more evident by a painfully difficult situation, had been constantly dragged into acts of cruelty and treachery from which a man of stronger purpose would have been saved. With his fall ended the Constitutional struggles of this period; and, during the remaining months of the Revolution, the Peoples of Rome, Venice, Sicily, and Hungary had to depend, in their struggles for liberty, on the force of popular feeling, and on the guidance of those leaders whom they had themselves placed at the head of affairs. FOOTNOTES: [18] The following dialogue is taken from the "Neue Rheinische Zeitung." [19] This alludes to the dissolution of several clubs by Wrangel's orders. CHAPTER XI. THE DEATH STRUGGLE OF FREEDOM.--OCTOBER 1848-AUGUST 1849. Division of Feeling among the Magyar Leaders.--Arthur Görgei.--Ground of his quarrels with Kossuth.--Bem.--The Volunteers.--The Plan of Defence.--The Flight to Debreczin--The Proclamation at Waitzen.--Effect of Hungarian Conscription Law in Transylvania. Puchner and the Roumanians.--Puchner finally adopts their Cause.--Avraham Jancu.--The Saxons and Roumanians.--Bem in Transylvania.--His Character and Work.--The Appeal to General Lüders.--The Russians in Transylvania.--The Capture of Hermannstadt.--Bem and Csanyi.--The Reign of Terror.--The Death of Roth.--Görgei and Dembinski.--Effect of Francis Joseph's coup d'état.--Why it did not produce greater results.--The Race Feuds.--The Constitutional Difficulty.--The Declaration of Independence.--Kossuth's Power and its Causes.--The Struggle in Rome.--The Triumvirate and their Difficulties.--Order and Liberty.--The Danger from France.--A Pacific Candidate.--The Collapse of the Tuscan Movement.--The Final Struggle and Fall of Sicily.--The French Expedition.--The Landing at Civita Vecchia.--Oudinot and Manara.--The Occupation of Civita Vecchia.--The March to Rome.--Guerra! Guerra!--The Repulse of the French.--The Debates in France.--The Defence of Bologna.--Lesseps in Rome.--Lesseps and Oudinot.--French Treachery.--Garibaldi and Roselli.--Further Treachery.--The Fight by the Vascello.--Ledru Rollin's Insurrection.--The Final Struggle for German Liberty and its Failure.--The Final Struggle in Rome.--Mazzini's Proposals.--Decision of the Assembly.--Garibaldi's last Effort.--"Cardinal" Oudinot in Rome.--The Struggle in Venice.--Manin and Kossuth.--Kossuth's Blunder.--Görgei's Policy.--The Russian Invasion of Transylvania.--The Struggle at the Temos Pass.--Bem and Kossuth.--Kossuth's Resignation.--The Surrender at Vilagos.--The Cholera in Venice.--The Final Surrender.--Manin's Stone.--General Estimate of the Struggle and its Results. The battle of Schwechat had brought into prominence the great difficulties with which the Hungarian Government had now to contend. The flight of the Count Palatine, and the resignation of Batthyanyi, had thrown the government into the hands of the Committee of Defence, over which Kossuth's power was nearly supreme. But, however much this concentration of authority in the hands of the most popular leader may have given strength to the civil part of the Executive, yet the revolutionary character which it gave to the movement called out scruples in many military men, who had hitherto been willing to work with tolerable heartiness for the Hungarian cause. The flight of Archduke Stephen deprived the Government of that Constitutional sanction which would have been derived from the presence of an official directly representing the Emperor; while at the same time, Ferdinand's approval of Jellaciç and the dissolution of the Hungarian Diet, placed the Emperor and the Magyars in that condition of direct opposition to each other, which most of the Magyar statesmen had desired to avoid. This change of position considerably affected the feelings of the officers, especially of those who had previously served in the Austrian Army, and in whom the military preference for Monarchical Government was strongly developed. This feeling had shown itself even during the struggle against Jellaciç's invasion; and it was this which had led those Magyar officers, who were friendly to the Viennese cause, to ask for a direct summons from the Viennese Parliament before they would cross the frontier. Finally, it was this feeling which had led to those orders and counter orders, and to that general uncertainty of plan which had ruined the Hungarian cause at the Battle of Schwechat. Kossuth, and all who wished to carry on the war vigorously, felt that a change of generals was necessary, if the freedom of Hungary was not to be destroyed by the internal divisions of the country. General Moga had therefore to be removed; and the question was, who was to take his place? It was under these circumstances that Kossuth called to the front a man whose character and actions have ever since been the favourite debating ground of the students of the Hungarian war.[20] Arthur Görgei had been a lieutenant in the Austrian Army, and, by his own account, had lived away from Hungary until April, 1848, and was "nearly ignorant of his country's customs, and above all, wholly deficient in even a superficial and general acquaintance with civil administration." He had, however, been made a captain in the newly raised regiments of Honveds or Home troops of Hungary, in the summer of 1848. He very soon began to complain of the men who had been placed over his head; and specially at being superseded on one occasion by Moritz Perczel. To Perczel he soon began to show the same insubordinate demeanour which remained ever his characteristic attitude towards his superior officers; and he was only saved by the intercession of friends from being shot for disobeying orders. He had, however, gained credit with some of the fiercer patriots among the Magyars, by his summary execution of Count Eugene Zichy, who had been suspected of treason; and this act, though condemned by the more temperate champions of the cause, was considered to have committed Görgei so strongly to an anti-Austrian policy, that there could be no fear of his lack of zeal in the coming struggle. When then General Moga had shown that, either from military incapacity, or from want of sympathy with the cause, he was not to be trusted with the command of the army, Kossuth turned to Görgei, and offered him the post of which Moga had been deprived. Görgei accepted it; and then there almost immediately began that long series of differences and difficulties which was to ruin the cause of Hungarian liberty. The quarrel between Kossuth and Görgei will always be judged differently by military and non-military critics; for, setting aside those unfortunate peculiarities of character which marked both these leaders, the struggle was one between the ideas of a statesman and the ideas of a soldier. Kossuth had already had experience of the difficulties which arose from putting confidence in officers who are out of sympathy with the cause for which they are fighting; and he was therefore specially alive to any sign of this want of sympathy in the successor of General Moga. Görgei, on the other hand, had that belief, so common in men of his profession, that all political questions were mainly to be judged from the military point of view; and that his admitted ignorance in matters of civil administration did not disqualify him from laying down the law on the most important affairs of Government. Although he shared Kossuth's distrust for General Moga, he sympathised with Moga's preference for Monarchical Government; and although he had fought bravely against the forces of Windischgrätz at the battle of Schwechat, he had previously declared that he did not see the solidarity between the cause of Hungary and that of Vienna; and he held that the oath which the officers had taken to the March Constitution implied their duty to preserve that Constitution in the exact form in which it had been originally granted. But if Görgei went beyond his province in his interference with affairs of civil government, Kossuth no doubt, in turn, hampered Görgei in matters in which he was bound to trust him, so long as he retained him in his command. But in periods of revolution there always arise a large number of questions which, in ordinary times, would be decided on purely military grounds, but which, in that abnormal state of affairs, become necessarily complicated with political considerations. It is this peculiarity of circumstances, for which both statesmen and soldiers find it so hard to make allowance, and which makes it so difficult to judge justly in such a controversy as that which we are considering. The first point of difference between Kossuth and Görgei related to exactly one of those matters in which military and political feeling seem most necessarily and reasonably to come into collision. This was the choice of Bem as a general in the Hungarian army. Bem had succeeded in escaping secretly from Vienna and coming to Hungary. He had, indeed, offered his services to the Hungarians at an earlier period, but Pulszky had persuaded him that he could best serve the cause of Hungary in Vienna; and now that that city had fallen, he hastened back to Kossuth. Kossuth and Bem seem always to have recognized in each other that common faith in the people, and power of calling out popular enthusiasm, which, in different ways, was the great strength of both of them. Bem's conduct in the defence of Vienna had given sufficient pledge of his zeal against the power of Austria, a zeal which had produced such effect on the imagination of his enemies that it was said by the Vienna wits that Francis Joseph ordered the bells of Vienna to be muffled because they would ring out "Bem, Bem!" But Görgei disliked Bem for the very reason for which Kossuth approved of him. He considered him a knight errant who followed revolutionary methods of warfare which were quite unknown to correct military tacticians; and he soon found that his own estimates of the different officers under him were quite opposed to those formed by Bem. Kossuth therefore wisely decided that Görgei and Bem could not work together, and he despatched Bem to take the command in Transylvania. On the next question at issue the balance of opinion will probably be in favour of Görgei. The volunteers who had been raised by the national Government were naturally objects of special favour to them; but they had in some cases shown themselves disorderly; and this disorder was, no doubt, considerably increased by the return to their country of Hungarian soldiers who had been stationed in Galicia and other parts of the Empire. These soldiers had, in many cases, thrown off the authority of their officers, and asserted their national rights at the expense of military discipline. Görgei tried to make special arrangements for so redistributing these recruits as to utilize their services while preventing the growth of any such feelings of insubordination as might be likely to spring from their previous mutiny. In these methods of re-organization the Committee of Defence saw a tendency to discourage patriotic feeling; and Görgei found himself opposed in matters where he justly felt that he should have been allowed some freedom of action. But an even more important question of controversy was the general plan of the campaign. Kossuth and the Committee of Defence were extremely anxious to defend the Western frontier of Hungary, partly in order to weaken the fears produced by the battle of Schwechat; partly, as Görgei believed, to make it easier to draw the line between Hungary and Austria, and so break off political connection between them. Görgei, on the other hand, held that, since Hungary was now threatened on north, south, and west, and, since Windischgrätz's army was better disciplined than the Hungarian soldiers, a defence of the frontier was impossible, and that it would be better to retreat to Raab and defend the principal passes across the White Mountains, while removing the seat of Government beyond the Theiss. In this plan he was at first over-ruled. But his ideas received apparent justification in the defeats which he suffered from Windischgrätz; and, on December 19 he was actually compelled to retreat to Raab. Then followed an episode which has brought much discredit on Kossuth. He issued a sensational address, declaring that the Committee of Defence would be buried under the ruins of Buda rather than desert the capital. Görgei ridiculed the idea of the defensibility of Buda-Pesth; but the Committee of Defence insisted; and Görgei was preparing for battle, when, early in January, 1849, the news suddenly arrived in his camp that the Committee of Defence had left Pesth without waiting for the siege, and had retired to Debreczin. But, if Kossuth had been to blame in these earlier matters of controversy, Görgei now took a step which certainly seems to justify all Kossuth's subsequent suspicions. Görgei was, at this time, stationed at Waitzen, a little north of Pesth; and he there issued a declaration to the army condemning the policy of the Committee of Defence, and calling upon the officers to declare that the army was fighting for the maintenance of the Constitution of Hungary as sanctioned by King Ferdinand V.;[21] that it will oppose all those who may attempt to overthrow the Constitutional Monarchy by untimely Republican intrigues; and that it will only obey orders received from the responsible Minister of War, appointed by the King. A few weeks later Görgei was again defeated by Windischgrätz, who, after the battle, offered him an amnesty, and free life out of Austria. In answer to this offer, Görgei sent a copy of the proclamation drawn up at Waitzen, declaring that this was the ultimatum, both of his army and of himself. By this act it is evident that he called the attention of the General against whom he was nominally fighting to the internal party divisions of Hungary. However brilliant Görgei's military abilities might be, and however unfairly he had been interfered with by the Committee of Defence, it cannot be wondered at that, after this act of treachery, they looked upon him with distrust. In the following month Görgei was deprived of his command and superseded by the Polish General Dembinski. In the meantime a struggle of far greater moral importance, though possibly of less value to military science, was being carried on in Transylvania. The Roumanian movement had been undergoing the same change, which had already passed over the national movements of the Serbs and Croats. As early as June, 1848, the Croatian Assembly had expressed their sympathy with the struggle of the Roumanians; and even from the Italians some utterances of sympathy had been heard, in favour of their kinsmen in Transylvania. The rejection of their petition by the Emperor, and the consequent persecution by the Magyars had led the Roumanians to rely upon themselves; and had induced some of their leaders to look for help rather to the new State which was trying to struggle into existence in Wallachia and Moldavia, than to the Austrian Government. In September, however, a new element was introduced into the struggle by the passing of a Conscription law by the Hungarian Diet. While the Roumanians resented this, as an attempt to make them serve under the military leadership of their persecutors, they also saw that an attempt to enforce a law, passed without the sanction of the Emperor, was a direct defiance of his authority; and at a meeting in the town of Orlat, they protested against this conscription, and declared their preference for the Austrian army, as against the Hungarian. They now openly announced their separation from Hungary, and demanded to be formed into an independent nation. The Hungarians met this demand by authorizing their Commissioner Berczenczei to summon the Szekler to a public meeting, nominally to plan the defence of their country, but really as a counterblast to the demands of the Roumanians. But the Roumanians felt that it was necessary to strengthen themselves by an appeal to a recognized authority; and they saw that the desultory and barbarous warfare, which they had hitherto carried on, would never suffice to win them the rights which they had now resolved to claim; they therefore made advances to Field-Marshal Puchner, the General of the Austrian forces in Transylvania. Latour had for some time past been trying to stir up Puchner to action; but Puchner had hesitated to listen either to the Austrian Minister, or to the Roumanian leaders. He seems to have been a man of much higher type than most of the Austrian generals who were engaged in the struggles of this period; and he shrank alike from the underhand intrigues of Latour, and from the dreadful cruelties of Roumanian warfare. The latter feeling would have had special force with him at this period; because the most urgent appeals for his help came from Urban, a former officer in the Austrian army, who had been the most notorious for his brutalities of all the leaders of the Roumanians. But, while Puchner was unwilling to commit himself definitely to the Roumanian cause, he opposed himself to the reckless persecution which the Magyar Commissioner Vay had carried on against all who had helped in organizing the petition of the Roumanians; and Puchner had even gone to Karlsburg, and successfully petitioned for the release of some of the Roumanian prisoners. He had hoped, however, to combine this merciful and moderate policy with the recognition of Vay's authority, and even with a kind of co-operation with him. But the fiercely revolutionary character, which the Hungarian Diet began to assume after the death of Latour, compelled Puchner into more decided opposition to their proceedings. On the 8th of October, Kossuth issued an order to the towns of Hungary, in which he told them that anyone who did not hang out the Hungarian flag, and express in writing his devotion to the Hungarian cause, and his willingness to obey the committee appointed by the Government, should be shot as a traitor; and this savage proclamation was followed the next day by a command from Commissioner Vay, to the tax collectors of Transylvania, that they should no longer send the taxes to the central office at Hermannstadt, but to the office in Klausenburg, which had hitherto been considered subordinate. As Hermannstadt was at once the military head-quarters of the Austrian army and the chief town of the Saxon settlement in Transylvania, this was a direct attack both on the Imperial power, and on the influence of the Saxons. A few days later the Szekler, in the meeting which had recently been summoned, denounced Puchner for his attempt to hinder that meeting, and formally repudiated his authority. Puchner now felt that the time had come for action; and, on the 18th of October, he issued from Hermannstadt an appeal to all the inhabitants of Transylvania, and especially to the official boards. In this he declared that, since the Count Palatine and his Ministers had resigned their offices, there had been no legal Government in Hungary. The Government of Kossuth, which wrongfully claimed to act for the Emperor, was substituting terror for equality, and had falsely spread the rumour that the Government desired to use the Roumanians to oppress the Magyar and Szekler. In order, then, to put an end to anarchy, and to protect the country from terrorism, he, Puchner, had resolved to take advantage of the Imperial Manifesto of October 3, which had placed Hungary under military Government; and he called upon all boards to act with him in restoring order, and upon the volunteers and national guards to place themselves under his command. Nor were the Roumanians content with this official appeal; for their own national committee issued about the same time, on their own responsibility, an address to the Szeklers and Magyars. In this address they declared that they, like the Szeklers and Magyars, had sympathized with the March movement in Hungary; but that a faction had now usurped the Government of the country, and was aiming, at once, at depriving the King of his crown, and the Hungarian Peoples of their nationality. They hoped that the better part of the Magyars and Szeklers would unite against this faction; but, if they would not, then the Roumanians must declare war on them. They promised, however, to carry on the war in a humane manner, and to spare women, old men, and prisoners. At the same time, they issued an appeal to their countrymen, urging them to abstain from cruelties in warfare, as such practices were unworthy of a free people. The Saxons had, at first, been somewhat unwilling to act with the Roumanians; but the new movement seemed to give an opening for better co-operation. Joint committees of the two races were formed, and Puchner undertook to organize the soldiers of both races. Of the Roumanian leaders who now came to the front, the most remarkable was Avraham Jancu.[22] He had been originally trained as a lawyer; but, after the meeting in September, he went off to organize the National Guard in his own mountains; and, when Puchner had issued his proclamation, Jancu received orders to give his assistance in disarming the Magyars. This process had been begun by the Roumanians, without waiting for orders; and it had, in consequence, been accompanied with many acts of cruelty. Jancu therefore sent down three tribunes with forces to protect the Magyar families from violence; and he also persuaded one or two of the towns to surrender to him, that he might then protect them from ill-treatment. Jancu also won several victories, and became so formidable to his opponents that he gained the name of the "Mountain King." But the humane exertions of Jancu and other tribunes, seconded with all his influence by Puchner, were not sufficient to keep in check the wildness of some of the Roumanian leaders. The cruelties which both the Magyars and Szeklers had committed in the struggle; the summary execution at Klausenburg of three leaders of the Roumanians, before the actual rising had taken place, and the reputed crucifixion of another at Maros Vasarhely, roused the fury of the Roumanians to its highest pitch. The fiercest hatred of the Roumanians was directed against the Szeklers who had been their most determined enemies; and General Gedeon marched against Maros Vasarhely. Its specially isolated position, and the bad roads in its neighbourhood made it an easy prey for a General who had some skill in guerilla warfare. The city fell into the hands of Gedeon, who revenged the wrongs of the Roumanians by inflicting every species of brutality on the Szekler inhabitants. Horrified as Puchner was at these cruelties, he did not wholly understand the character of the men with whom he was working; for, in one of the orders which he issued, he gave a distinct sanction to the practice of burning villages. He seems, indeed, to have intended this form of violence merely to be used as an extreme measure in case of retreat; but the Roumanians did not so understand it; and when, on one occasion, Puchner was sternly rebuking some of the Roumanian leaders for not better preventing the cruelties of their followers, one of them retorted by appealing to this order. Besides the difficulties arising from these cruelties, Puchner had to contend against the continual rivalry between the Saxons and Roumanians. The former were contemptuous towards their allies; and, according to the Roumanian theory, were disposed to take unfair advantage of the Roumanians in the election of the members of the Committee of Management. Nevertheless, the help of the Saxons probably enabled Puchner to secure a more orderly Government than he could have achieved without it; and, amongst others from whom he received this kind of help, was the Saxon clergyman, Stephan Ludwig Roth, who had already been known for his efforts to secure German emigrants to Transylvania. He was appointed by Puchner to govern the district of Mediasch, in the valley of Kokelburg, where he distinguished himself by his humanity to the Magyar families who came under his protection, and showed his large-hearted sympathy by adopting a Magyar child who had been deserted by its parents. Moreover, Bishop Schaguna, who, it will be remembered, had discouraged the first risings of the Roumanians, now joined in with Puchner's plans, and exerted himself to restrain the violence of his countrymen. But while Puchner, aided by men like Schaguna, Jancu and Roth, was endeavouring to check the cruelties which his new followers were too ready to inflict, there was needed on the other hand an equally strong influence to restrain the savagery of the Magyar and Szekler. This was the more necessary, because, whatever injustice these races had committed towards the weaker races of Hungary, in the state in which things then stood, the Magyar cause had become identified with the cause of European freedom. Only in the success of the armies which Kossuth was trying to organize, did there seem even the least remaining chance for the overthrow of that Government which was crushing out the life of Vienna, which had trampled on the freedom of Lombardy, and which threatened to be the complete inheritor of the old system of Metternich. But if the Magyar armies in North Hungary were to achieve either the military or moral success which such a cause required, it was necessary that, in Transylvania also, the same race should deserve and obtain a similar success. For that purpose, they would need a man who would be the equal of Puchner both in generalship and humanity. For under Puchner's leadership, the Saxons and Roumanians were gaining in military prowess, even more than in self-restraint, and Klausenburg had fallen into the hands of the Imperial forces. Such was the state of things, when, on December 15, it was announced that Bem had been appointed by Kossuth Commander-in-Chief of the Transylvanian Army. He at once assembled the officers of the Army which he was to command, and informed them that he required from them unconditional obedience. Those who did not obey, he said, would be shot. Those who did obey he would know how to reward. With these few stern words, he dismissed them. This address was evidently one which might either be delivered by a mere overweening tyrant, or by a man of real genius and strong will, who understood the work that was before him. A few months served to show in which class Bem was to be reckoned. Ignoring the Commissioner, who had been sent down, he armed and reclad his troops; punished disorder with a stern hand, but showed such personal sympathy with his followers, that he became known as "Father Bem;" while his enemies soon learned to distinguish him from the other leaders by his generosity and humanity to the conquered. He seems to have been one of those born leaders of men, who understand when to be stern, and when to be indulgent. On one occasion an officer doubted if he could hold a position. Bem told him that he must either hold it, or be shot; and it was held. On another occasion his troops, seized by the panic natural to undisciplined levies, fled before the enemy, leaving Bem in great danger. He announced afterwards that he might have had to shoot or flog many of them; but he would not do the first, because he thought they might still serve their country; nor the second, because he would not treat them as beasts; and, therefore, he must forgive them. With regard to his military capacity, although the conventional military critics were disposed to discredit it, yet it could not be denied that he taught an undisciplined mob to stand fire before a regular army, to obey discipline, and even to develope a courage and capacity which won special applause and honours for the Szekler nation; that he succeeded in about three months in completely turning the fortunes of the war in Transylvania; and at a later period in holding his own for another two months against the powerful armies of two nations. His personal daring was more like that of a knight errant than of a modern general. On one occasion, after a battle in which he had been worsted, he saw some Austrians carrying off one of his cannon. He darted forward alone, exclaiming, "That is my cannon"; and so cowed his enemies, that they surrendered it at once. On another occasion he sent an aide-de-camp to call up the rear-guard of his Army, and found that they had all disappeared, and that he was continuing the struggle with hardly any followers. As if to mark the cause for which Bem was fighting as more distinctly than ever the cause of liberty, Puchner began, in January, 1849, those negotiations with the Russians which were finally to stamp the Austrian invasion of Transylvania with the anti-national character which other circumstances of the struggle might have made doubtful. In this matter, as in his original adoption of the Roumanian cause, Puchner seems not so much to have taken the lead as to have been driven into his position by unavoidable circumstances. Schaguna, whose prominence among the Roumanians had specially marked him out as an object of hostility to the Magyar Government, fled from Hermannstadt on the first news of Bem's arrival in Transylvania, and is believed to have made the first appeal for Russian help. The Roumanians, whose kinsmen of the Principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) were in some alarm about the intentions of Russia, do not seem to have sympathized warmly with this action of their bishop; but the Saxons were less scrupulous; and the towns of Kronstadt and Hermannstadt sent a formal address to General Lüders, the Russian Commander in Bucharest, asking him to come to their assistance. Lüders answered that the Czar sympathized with the brave defenders of the Austrian throne, and wished to respond to their appeal; but that he was unable to do so without a direct request from the Austrian Commander-in-Chief. Under these circumstances, Puchner felt himself bound to yield to the wishes of the Saxons; some of the Roumanian leaders joined in the appeal; and so, on February 1, formal application was made for Russian help. The Russians do not seem to have come in great numbers, nor with that formal announcement of war which accompanied their later invasion, in June. Bem, at any rate, did not lose courage. Although he had recently been repulsed by Puchner, he rallied his forces; and, on March 11, he defeated the Russians before Hermannstadt, and followed up his victory by the capture of the town. This signal victory secured, for a time, the reconquest of Transylvania by the Magyars; and, if Bem had remained in that province, it is possible that he would not only have retained the territory under Magyar rule, but that he might have made that rule acceptable to the Saxons, and, in time, even to the Roumanians. But behind Bem stood the dark figure of one who had already brought disgrace and injury on the Magyar cause, and who was still further to degrade it on this occasion. This was Ladislaus Csanyi, the intriguer who had introduced into the election of Zala County those elements of bribery and intimidation which had compelled Deak to refuse election. Csanyi now desired to put Hermannstadt to the sword; but Bem interfered, and the Saxons still honour his memory as that of the man who saved their countrymen from massacre and their chief city from destruction. Determined to counteract, so far as he could, the brutal policy of Csanyi, Bem issued a general amnesty to those who had opposed the Magyar Government; but, unfortunately, that Government believed that they needed Bem's military talents more than his civil wisdom; and they despatched him into the Banat, to clear that province also of the enemies of Magyar rule. So, while Bem was succeeding in battle in the Banat, Csanyi was undoing his work in Transylvania. With the approval, apparently, of Kossuth, Csanyi repudiated Bem's amnesty altogether, and established tribunals in Transylvania for the summary execution of his enemies and the confiscation of their goods. There was one victim of this reign of terror whose character and sufferings stand out in a manner which throws a halo over the Saxon cause. Stephan Ludwig Roth had, as above mentioned, distinguished himself by his humanity in the administration of the government of Mediasch under Puchner's rule; and the Magyar officials of the town of Elizabethstadt had sent him an address of thanks for his protection of their town from plunder. But he was hated by the strong partizans of Magyar rule, as the most illustrious embodiment of the feeling in favour of Saxon independence; and his attempts to promote the immigration of Germans into Transylvania had been remembered against him by those who wished to crush out, in Hungary, all national feeling except that of the Magyars. Bem had been so well aware of the hatred which Roth had excited, that he had thought it necessary to give him, in addition to the general amnesty, a special guarantee for his safety. In reliance on this security, Roth had retired to his parish of Meschen, and was living without any apparent fear, when he was suddenly arrested there by the soldiers of Csanyi, and brought, after some delay, to Klausenburg. There he was kept in prison, and, though at first leniently treated, he was, after a time, prevented from holding any communications with his friends. In the meantime, the tribunal which was to decide his fate was not allowed to come to a free decision. The Magyar mob of Klausenburg gathered round the court and demanded his death; and even those of the judges who were convinced of his innocence were terrified into voting for his condemnation. His friends appealed for mercy to Csanyi, but he indignantly rejected all petitions, declaring that Roth had deserved ten deaths. After his condemnation Roth sent the following letter to his children:-- "Dear Children,--I have just been condemned to death, and in three hours more the sentence will be put into execution. If anything gives me pain, it is the thought of you, who are without a mother, and who now are losing your father. But there are good men who will advise and help you for your father's sake. The Hungarian foundling whom I adopted, I entreat you to continue to take care of; only if its parents should wish for it, they have a nearer claim. Except for this, I have nothing more in this world. The children of my church at Meschen, and my Nimisch people I think of in love. May God make these communities become rich in the fruits of godliness, like fruit-trees whose loaded boughs hang down to the ground! In my writing-table are the prospectuses of the school and church newspaper which is to be published. The body of the nation is broken to pieces. I do not believe in any binding together of its limbs any more. So much the more do I desire the keeping alive of the spirit which once lived in these forms. For that purpose I entreat my brother clergy whom I leave behind to take care to carry on this newspaper, in order to keep alive the character, pure manners, and honesty of will of our people. But, if it is decreed in the Counsels of History that it must perish, may it perish in a manner that shall not bring shame on its ancestors! Time flies. I know not if my sick body can honourably support my willing spirit. All whom I have insulted I heartily entreat for pardon. For my part, I leave the world without hate, and pray God to forgive my enemies. So let the end come in God's name! "Klausenburg, 11th May, 1849. "I must add that neither in life nor death have I been an enemy of the Hungarian nation. May they believe this, on the word of a dying man, in the moment when all hypocrisy falls away!" He was shortly after led out to execution. When his sentence was read out to him, in which he was accused of having taken the sword instead of the Bible, and of having led on the Saxon and Wallack hordes, he cried out indignantly, "It is not true. I never carried a sword." He refused to have his hands bound; and, with his face to the soldiers, he fell, after the third shot. The captain in command of the soldiers was so much impressed by the spectacle, that he exclaimed, "Soldiers, learn from this man how to die for one's people." But long before Csanyi's reign of terror had reached this climax, the aspect of affairs in other parts of Hungary had gone through important changes. The removal of Görgei and the appointment of Dembinski had caused great irritation among the friends of the former. This irritation might be somewhat excused by the fact that nearly a month had elapsed between the time when Görgei had sent his proclamation to Windischgrätz and his deposition from command; and the deposition even received an appearance of injustice and hardship from its announcement at the moment when Görgei had just obtained a victory. But the opposition to this change of command would have been almost as certain if the removal had taken place earlier, and under different circumstances. It was looked upon as a blow struck by the politicians of Buda-Pesth at the politicians of the army; and the appointment of a foreigner added an element of national prejudice to the outburst of professional irritation. Moreover, Dembinski seems to have been exactly the kind of officer whom Görgei most disliked. His reputation rested on certain brilliant feats of guerilla warfare in the Polish insurrection of 1830; and of course Görgei and his friends may have been right in thinking that such a man was ill fitted to carry on the more regular warfare which was needed for the defeat of Windischgrätz. But, whatever excuse they may have had for opposition to the appointment, they clearly put themselves in the wrong by their evident determination not to allow Dembinski a fair chance. Görgei, indeed, at first affected to discourage the protests against Dembinski's appointment; but the language in which he did so was so evidently defiant in intention as to call forth a censure from his personal friend, the War Minister Meszaros; nor was it long before Görgei threw off even this slender mask, and openly defied Dembinski's authority. Görgei's faction among the officers was so strong, and the dislike to Dembinski so general, that the commanders of divisions at last agreed to demand the deposition of their chief. Kossuth came down to the camp to inquire into the circumstances; and he found the feeling against Dembinski so violent that he consented to his removal. Görgei seems to have used this opportunity for once more discussing the political situation with Kossuth; and, strange to say, he made to him the very proposal which Batthyanyi had rejected when it was put forward by Jellaciç; namely, that the War and Finance Ministries should be removed to Vienna. If this proposal had been unsatisfactory when Vienna was free, and Ferdinand on the throne, it could have sounded little short of treason to the cause of Hungary, when Vienna was under the absolute rule of Windischgrätz; and it is not wonderful, therefore, that, though Kossuth was willing to remove Dembinski, he preferred appointing General Vetter as Commander-in-Chief to trusting Görgei with the leadership. It was at this crisis that the event occurred which was mentioned in the last chapter, and which hastened on the final phase of the movement. Encouraged, as Görgei believed, by the victories of Windischgrätz, Francis Joseph and his advisers suddenly dismissed the Parliament at Kremsier, and proclaimed a Constitution "octroyè" for the occasion. Hungarians of all parties condemned this act as a violation of their old laws and customs, and an assertion of the arbitrary will of the sovereign. For, indeed, the discontent now aroused was far from being confined to the Magyars; and it would have been strange had it been otherwise. The dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament was, even irrespective of all that followed it, the most barefaced act of despotism that had been committed since the March risings of the previous year. Even Ferdinand of Naples could plead that barricades had been thrown up in the streets before his _coup d'état_ of May 15. The unfortunate June insurrection at Prague had given a plausible excuse for preventing the meeting of the Bohemian Parliament; the murder of Lamberg had, no doubt, seemed to Ferdinand of Austria to supply at least a palliation for his dissolution of the Hungarian Diet; the murder of Latour and the persecution of the Bohemian deputies supplied Windischgrätz with sufficient argument for depriving Vienna of its liberties; and even the violent dispersal of the deputies of Berlin could be defended by the King of Prussia by reference to the previous riots of August. But not a single excuse of this kind could, with the least show of plausibility, be urged in defence of the dissolution of the Kremsier Parliament. Indeed, Francis Joseph betrayed the weakness of his case by pleading in his defence the nature of the subjects that had been discussed in the Parliament; and he could not even pretend that it had either exceeded its powers or exercised them in a disorderly manner. Nor was the Constitution, which was offered as a sequel to this dissolution, any more acceptable than the dissolution itself; and a general protest went up from nearly every race in the Empire. However much the Viennese might, under other circumstances, have liked a Constitution which was centralised at Vienna, they none of them would welcome it when it was combined with the rule of Windischgrätz. The Bohemian leaders felt themselves doubly offended; first by the dissolution of a Parliament to which they had specially trusted for justice; and secondly by the refusal of any real provincial independence to Bohemia. The Croats indignantly denounced the restoration of the military rule on the frontier, and the consequent separation from Croatia of the Slavs who inhabited the frontier district. The Serbs, ever since January, had been complaining of the advance of military rule in the Serb districts, and the gradual diminution of the power of the Voyvode; and they now felt that all their local institutions were still further endangered by the centralisation of the new Constitution. Some of the bitterest protests came from the Roumanians. They had been treated from the first with the greatest contempt by most of the Imperialist officers; and directly after the capture of Hermannstadt by Bem, they found themselves suddenly deserted by the Austrian forces, which were withdrawn into Wallachia. While they were still smarting under this treachery, the news of the new Constitution reached them; and they found that they were as far off as ever from obtaining that separate national organization for which they had so long been pleading; while a part of the Banat, which they considered specially Roumanian, was to be placed, by the new arrangement, under the Serbs. In this state of general discontent, it might have seemed that Kossuth would have had a fair chance of rallying round him all the races of the Empire, in a common desire for local independence, and a common hostility to the rule of Francis Joseph. But the divisions and mutual suspicions between the various races of the Empire had gone too deep to allow of this change. As for co-operation between the Bohemians and Germans, even if such a combination had been possible after the various causes of bitterness mentioned in the preceding chapters, little good could be effected by it at this crisis, when both Prague and Vienna were at the mercy of the conqueror. The important question, therefore, was the attitude to be taken up towards the new Constitution, by the various races in the Kingdom of Hungary; and here it must be owned that it was not wholly the fault of Kossuth, that he did not succeed in combining them in this emergency. Many both of the Croats and Serbs expressed plainly their discontent with the treatment which they had received from the House of Austria, but both Croats and Serbs were paralysed by the leaders whom they had accepted. The Banal Council[23] of Croatia protested against the publication of the new Constitution; but Jellaciç declared that he was bound to see that it was published, and that the Council were only to carry out his orders. In a similar manner, many of the leading Serbs remonstrated with Rajaciç on his acceptance of the vague promises, which were the substitute in the new Constitution, for those ancient liberties which the Serbs claimed as their due. But Rajaciç maintained his authority over his countrymen, and accepted a place of completer subordination to the Austrian General than that which he had hitherto held. On the other hand, Kossuth seems to have neglected the opportunity offered by the general feeling of discontent, which prevailed at this time among the Serbs and Croats; and it was not till months later, when driven to desperation, that he proposed to make those concessions, which had by that time lost all grace. Towards the Roumanians, indeed, Kossuth seemed disposed to make concessions, by which he hoped to draw them away from the Saxons; and he chose a negotiator, whom he thought well fitted for this purpose. But Jancu distrusted Kossuth's emissary, and perhaps also Kossuth himself; and so the negotiation broke down. And if Kossuth failed to draw round him, at this crisis, the different races who were discontented with the new Constitution, it was a much stranger fact that he was unable to maintain the union between the different parties in the Magyar nation itself. This was all the stranger, because just at this time both the personal and political grounds for difference between Kossuth and Görgei seemed to be suddenly removed. Deep as had been Görgei's irritation at the appointment of Vetter, it had naturally been brought to a close by the sudden illness which removed Vetter from the command, and which was followed on March 31 by the appointment of Görgei as provisional Commander-in-Chief; while, as to political opinions, Görgei and Kossuth were both agreed in denouncing the circumstances under which Francis Joseph had been thrust on to the throne of Hungary, and the character and origin of the Constitution which he had just issued. Under these circumstances, it seemed as if there could be no further ground for division between the military party who followed Görgei, and the larger body of Magyars, who accepted Kossuth as their leader. But it soon appeared that this was not the case. Kossuth and his friends naturally argued that as the only member of the House of Hapsburg who claimed the throne of Hungary was admittedly in an illegal position, the only logical course was to depose the House of Hapsburg from the throne of Hungary; and that as the only Constitution by which the rulers of Austria would consent to link themselves to Hungary was admittedly an illegal Constitution, the only logical course was to separate Hungary from Austria. Görgei and his friends, on the other hand, shrank with horror from the idea of fighting without the authority of a King. They had sworn to obey Ferdinand, and to accept the Constitution of March 1848; they therefore insisted on ignoring the abdication of Ferdinand, and the abolition of that Constitution, and continued to fight, in the name of a King who did not wish to reign, and on behalf of a Constitution which had ceased to exist. Kossuth and his friends, however, were resolved to assert their principles; and on April 14 they issued the celebrated "Declaration of Independence." The strongly legal and historical character which had marked the whole Hungarian movement since the time of the meeting of the Diet in 1825, still shows itself even in this semi-revolutionary document. The Declaration goes back to the first connection of the House of Hapsburg with the throne of Hungary, and declares that no House had ever had so good a chance of governing successfully, and had so misused it. After mentioning some of the tyrannies of the earlier Kings of this House, the Declaration dwells on the fact that while Hungary had often had to fight for its freedom, it had always been so moderate in its demands that it had laid down its arms as soon as the King gave a new oath to preserve its freedom; but these oaths had never been kept, and for three hundred years this policy had never been changed. The people, after each promise, had forgotten the wounds of past years, in exaggerated magnanimity; but now the time had come to break the union. The House of Hapsburg had united itself with the enemies of the people, and with robbers and agitators, in order to oppress the people. It had attacked those of its subjects who would not combine against the Constitution which it had sworn to protect, or against the independent life of the nation. It had attacked with violence the integrity of the country, though it had sworn to preserve it. It had used a foreign Power to murder its own subjects and suppress their lawful freedom. Any one of these crimes was sufficient reason for depriving the Dynasty of its throne. The Declaration then goes on to consider the excuses which the Dynasty offered for its conduct. As for the independence secured by Hungary in March, 1848, that was only the confirmation of an old tradition; for the Pragmatic Sanction showed that neither Hungary nor any of the provinces connected with it had ever been absorbed in Austria. Joseph II. alone had ignored this fact, and his name, therefore, never appeared in the list of the kings of Hungary. As for the laws which the Diet had passed in March, Ferdinand had sanctioned them; but he now wished to suppress them. Yet the Hungarians had taken no advantage of the disturbances in different parts of the Austrian Empire to secure greater independence for themselves, but had remained content with what had been granted in March. They had supported the monarchy; but Ferdinand had tried to break his oath as soon as it was made. The Government at Vienna had at first tried to act through the Count Palatine; but, as this combination had weakened their power, they had gradually withdrawn more and more power from him. They had tried to impose customs duties which would have cut off Hungary from the rest of the world; and when this method failed they tried to stir up the different nationalities against the Hungarian Ministry. The proclamation proceeds to say that dates and documents prove that the Archduke Louis, the Archduke Francis Charles, and the Archduchess Sophia had stirred up the movements in Croatia and Slavonia. They attribute Ferdinand's first denunciation of Jellaciç as a traitor to the difficulties caused by the war in Italy; but they accuse him of having played a double part, both in Croatia and Slavonia, and of having helped the Croats and Serbs with money and ammunition at the very time when he was denouncing them as rebels. They charge the Serbs with having committed great cruelties in their rising. They denounce, as illegal, the scattering of Hungarian troops in different provinces of the Austrian Empire, and they declare that it was in consequence of this arrangement that they were unable to save Fiume from Jellaciç. They complain of the order given to the soldiers and commanders of fortresses not to obey the Hungarian Ministry, and to take orders only from Vienna. They complain that the Emperor had made a general of the Slavonic priest who had headed the rising of the Slovaks in North Hungary. They complain of their desertion by the Archduke Stephen, after his promises of support, and of the intrigues of Latour with Jellaciç and with other generals against the liberties of Hungary. Lastly, they complain of the abdication of Ferdinand in favour of Francis Joseph. Yet even Francis Joseph they would have accepted had he claimed his rights in a legal manner; but he had threatened to conquer Hungary by force, and had, for the conquest of Transylvania, called in those Russians who had crushed out the liberties of Roumania. They further stated that, although at first the Hungarians had been driven back, they had now recovered their ground in Transylvania, cleared North Hungary of foes, suppressed the Serb rising, and defeated the Austrians in five battles. Under these circumstances they now declared Hungary independent of the House of Hapsburg, and appointed Kossuth as their President. Kossuth's supremacy in Hungary had been an important fact for a considerable time past, and had been due, not only to his personal qualities, but to the gradual retirement from public life of most of the leading statesmen who had played a part in the earlier phases of the struggle against the ruling powers in Vienna. Batthyanyi had abandoned all direct initiative in Hungarian politics ever since his resignation of the Premiership, and had only attempted to mediate between the contending armies, a mediation which had been scornfully rejected by Windischgrätz. Deak had, from the first, announced that he was unfit for revolutionary propaganda; and, after devoting himself, in the early days of the March Ministry, to the compilation of a code of laws and the administrative work of his office, he had gradually assumed the same position of mediator which Batthyanyi had desired, and with equal want of success. Wesselenyi was now old and blind; and, though he had consented to go with Eötvös on that deputation to the Vienna Assembly which had been repulsed by the Bohemian Deputies, neither he nor Eötvös now took any regular part in public affairs. Szechenyi, horrified at the results which, as he considered, had flowed from his early encouragement of Magyar feeling, lost his reason, and was at this time under restraint. Thus, of the statesmen who had been prominent in Hungary during the struggle against Metternich, Kossuth was the only one who could still be said to be before the public. Kossuth's unrivalled eloquence, and his keen sympathy, both with the intensity and the narrowness of Magyar feeling, had given him a force which none of the other leaders of the movement had ever possessed; and his discovery of the military genius of Bem had secured him an influence in Transylvania which considerably increased the strength of his position. On the other hand, his intolerant attitude towards the subject races of Hungary had marked him out in a special manner as the object of their hatred; while his contempt for ordinary military arrangements, his growing distrust of Görgei, and last, but perhaps not least, the belief among many military men that he was deficient in physical courage, tended to strengthen against him a formidable party in the army which was eventually to prove too strong for him. But, if the divided state of Hungarian feeling threw formidable difficulties in the way of Kossuth, he could find compensations in the condition of the forces opposed to him. Windischgrätz does not seem to have been reckoned, by military critics, a considerable general. Stratimiroviç, whatever military qualities he may have possessed, was continually held in check by the cautious policy of Rajaciç. Puchner, who had succeeded in giving such force to the Roumanian rising, was becoming an object of suspicion to the more conventional Austrian generals, and was shortly to be removed from Transylvania; while a cause of weakness, which was perhaps still more important, was to be found in the withdrawal from the country of a large body of Austrian and Croatian soldiers, who were being despatched against the new Government of the Roman States. For in Italy, too, the champions of liberty were preparing for their final struggle, though under rather different auspices from those under which it was being fought out in Hungary. On the very day when the Declaration of Independence was published in Hungary, Mazzini, Saffi, and Armellini, who had been elected Triumvirs of the Roman Republic, after the failure of Charles Albert's final war, appeared in the Assembly for the first time in their new capacity. They had no light task before them. Apart from the enemies who were threatening the Republic from outside, there were dangers arising from the feelings of the different parties within the Roman State. The deposition of the Pope had undoubtedly given a shock to the feelings of many strong Liberals, of a much keener, and if one may say so, more intelligible kind, than the deposition of the House of Hapsburg could possibly give to any Hungarian leader. Even Castellani, the Ambassador of the Venetian Republic, hesitated to identify the cause of his city with that of the opponents of the Pope; while the feeling among the priests of the Roman States had been shown by a formidable conspiracy in Imola and Ascoli. General Zucchi, who had taken part in this conspiracy, had even attempted to force his way into the Neapolitan territory, in order to put himself under the authority of the Pope. Garibaldi had defeated this attempt, and Zucchi had been sent as a prisoner to Rome; but the conspiracy was not forgotten; and, when the Triumvirs came into power, they found that these outbursts of priestly opposition were provoking savage reprisals on the part of the Republicans. While Saffi had been only Minister of the Interior, and Mazzini only a private member of the Assembly, they had both warned the Government of the probability of this danger; and they now found that a Society had been formed at Ancona which threatened death to the enemies of Liberalism. The Triumvirs first sent down two officers, who tried to organize the local leaders into a committee for preserving public order; but, though their emissaries were satisfied with their own action, the Triumvirs were less easily contented. Felice Orsini was sent down with full powers to put down the insurrection; and, if necessary, to declare Ancona in a state of siege. He at once arrested twenty men, called out the National Guard, put down opposition by force, and carried off his prisoners to Rome, where they were shut up in the Castle of St. Angelo. From Ancona Orsini went on to Ascoli, where he condemned three of the most dangerous persons to be shot, and sequestrated the goods of a cardinal, who had stirred up the clerical insurrection. But the Austrian forces were now advancing into the Roman territory; and Orsini was compelled to retire to Rome. Even in the capital the Triumvirs had to use strong measures to check the fierce feeling against the priests. This feeling had just been roused to an unusual height by special discoveries of priestly cruelty. In sweeping away the various irregular tribunals, which had grown up under the papal tyranny, the Triumvirs had to deal with the question of the Inquisition. They appropriated the former offices of that celebrated institution, as dwellings for the poor; but, in making the buildings available for this purpose, they threw open the secret dungeons, and discovered prisoners who were slowly dying of their imprisonment. One bishop, who had remained there since the time of Leo XII., had absolutely lost the power of walking. The horrible instruments of torture, which were found in the same place, excited still further the indignation of the people; and that feeling found yet a new cause for its expression, when a book was discovered in the library of the Inquisition, containing the secrets of the principal families of Italy, which had been obtained through the revelations of confessors. Several of the fiercer spirits in Rome at once made an attack on the pulpits and confessionals, and burnt some of them in the Piazza del Popolo. These tumults were sternly checked by the Triumvirs; and they succeeded in protecting from the popular vengeance the convent in which the chief Inquisitor lived. But while they protected the persons and private property of the priests, they appropriated the greater part of the ecclesiastical lands to the support of the poor, arranging that every family of three persons should have as much land as could be managed by a pair of oxen. At the same time the jurisdiction of the clergy over the universities and schools was taken away. While the attention of the Government was thus devoted to the restoration of internal order, and the carrying out of necessary reforms, they did not neglect the vigorous measures which were needed for the resistance to foreign enemies. The forces which had been rather carelessly scattered in the outlying provinces of the Roman State, were concentrated by the Triumvirs near Bologna. That gallant little city had been in a state of alarm ever since the early part of February, when the Austrian forces had again attacked Ferrara; and the difficulties of communication between these two cities had increased the alarm of the Bolognese, though it had also strengthened their eagerness for resistance. But even before this Austrian invasion, the Roman Republicans had been alarmed at the threats issued by another Power. Three days after the flight of the Pope, General Cavaignac announced in the French Assembly that he had sent three frigates to Civita Vecchia to secure the safety of His Holiness. This expedition had excited much opposition in France; and, during the subsequent contest for the Presidency, the following letter was addressed by one of the candidates to the editor of a French newspaper:-- "MR. EDITOR, "Knowing that my agreement to the vote for the Expedition to Civita Vecchia has been remarked upon, I think myself bound to declare that, whatever may have been decided about the arrangements suitable for guaranteeing the liberty and authority of the chief Pontiff, nevertheless I cannot approve by my vote a military demonstration that appears dangerous both to the sacred interests that they pretend to protect, and that has a tendency to compromise European peace. "Yours respectfully, "LOUIS NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE. "December 2, 1848." As this pacific candidate had been shortly after elected President of the French Republic, there seemed little fear that an expedition "tending to compromise European peace," would again be entered upon by France; and the Mountain of the French Assembly had lately sent greetings to the Roman Republic. Since then the immediate danger to Rome seemed to come rather from the North than from the West, the Triumvirs watched with much anxiety the hesitating attitude of Guerrazzi and the Tuscan Government. So eager had the leaders of the Roman Assembly been for a union between Tuscany and the Roman States that they had even offered to Montanelli and Guerrazzi places in the first Triumvirate, which had been formed before Mazzini and Saffi had been called to power. Guerrazzi, however, had refused to accept this offer; and, while declaring his desire for union with Rome, he professed his inability to find a means for effecting that union. Indeed, Guerrazzi held an almost impossible position. Though unable to make up his mind to accept a Republican Government, he was yet determined to resist any interference, either by Piedmontese or Austrians, in favour of the former Government of Tuscany. And while he still seemed to cherish Italian ideas, he felt that the defeat of Charles Albert had taken away the hopes for any satisfactory continuance of the War of Independence. Under these circumstances the champions of the restoration of the Grand Duke naturally gained ground in Tuscany. Guerrazzi, distrusted alike by Republicans and Royalists, was unable either to resist this movement, or to guide it according to his own theories; and on April 12 the Municipality of Florence took the matter out of the hands both of Guerrazzi and the Assembly, and decreed the recall of the Grand Duke. This catastrophe, though a subject of regret, could scarcely have caused much surprise to the leaders of the Roman Republic. A feeling of far deeper pain must have been roused by the final failure of the earliest of all the struggles for liberty of this period. The _coup d'état_ at Naples of May 15, 1848, though it had shattered the hopes of the Neapolitans, had only intensified the zeal of the Sicilians in their struggle against Ferdinand. As they had just deposed him from the throne, and proclaimed the Duke of Genoa as their King, they thought themselves safe against the restoration of Neapolitan rule; and the Ambassadors of France and England tried to persuade the King of Naples not to send an expedition to Sicily. He refused, however, to listen to these remonstrances; the expedition sailed; and, by his bombardment of Palermo, Ferdinand won for himself throughout Sicily the title of Il Re Bombardatore, which was quickly shortened into Bomba. Ruggiero Settimo, who had taken part in the struggles of 1812 and 1821, was placed at the head of the Sicilian Government, and Garibaldi was invited to come to defend the island. Garibaldi, however, did not arrive; and the chief defence of the island was entrusted to the Polish General Mieroslawski, who, having failed to save Posen from the hands of the Prussians, had become a kind of knight errant of liberty in other parts of Europe. He brought, however, but little good to the causes which he defended. He quarrelled with the Italian General Antonini, and was so often defeated, that the Sicilians began to fear treachery, and at last compelled him to resign his command. The struggle had, in fact, now become hopeless; and on April 17, 1849, the Sicilian Parliament decided to meet no longer. Then Ruggiero Settimo called his friends together, and declared that he was ready to undergo all his troubles again, if they decided to continue the contest. But they believed that the case was now desperate, and voted for peace. Then Settimo consulted the National Guard, but also in vain; and finding that any further efforts were useless, he resigned his Presidency, and left the island. The separateness of the Sicilian movement lessened, no doubt, in some degree the importance of this defeat; but the gallantry of their struggle had excited much sympathy in Rome; and their fall set free the Neapolitan forces for action against the Roman Republic. This addition to the dangers which were harassing the Republic would not perhaps have been so formidable had not a new and more important enemy begun to show signs of hostility at the same period. The election of Louis Napoleon as President of the French Republic had been hailed with some satisfaction both in Venice and Rome; and, after the Roman Republic had been established, two envoys were sent to Paris, who reminded the President of the share he had taken in one of the insurrections against Gregory XVI. Louis Napoleon replied that the time of Gregory XVI. had gone by in Rome, and that his youth was also gone by. Both remarks were undoubtedly true, nor were they in themselves very alarming; but Ledru Rollin, one of the few Frenchmen who really sympathized with Italy, warned Mazzini that danger was coming; and the nature of the danger soon became apparent. On April 16 Odillon Barrot moved in the French Assembly a proposal for a vote of twelve hundred thousand francs for an expedition to Italy; an expedition, he said, which was not to restore the Pope; but to protect liberty and humanity. On April 20 General Oudinot took the command of the expedition, and told his followers that his object was to maintain the old legitimate French influence, and to protect the destinies of Italy from the predominance of the stranger, and of a party who were really in a minority. So kindly was the tone of the French Ministry towards the Romans, that Colonel Frapolli, one of the envoys of the Roman Republic, obtained the leave of the French President to organize a French Legion, which was to fight for the defence of Rome, and to be commanded by Pierre Buonaparte. But Pierre Buonaparte suddenly resigned his command; the prefect was ordered to hinder the embarkation of the Legion; and a large supply of muskets, which had been bought by the Roman Republic, were confiscated by the French Government. In the meantime Oudinot had set sail, and on April 24 he appeared before Civita Vecchia. About the time when the French troops were landing, there arrived at the same place a very different force. The leader of this force was Luciano Manara, who had fought so gallantly in the "Five Days" of Milan, and who had afterwards been so hampered by Casati and Charles Albert in his attempt to rescue the Southern Tyrol from Austrian rule. He, like others, had been disappointed by the failure of Charles Albert's final war; but he had refused to join in the Genoese insurrection, which followed the defeat at Novara, and had preferred to set out with 8,000 men to help the Roman Republic. The difficulties thrown in the way of their march were, however, so great that only 600 remained with Manara by the time that he reached Civita Vecchia. Oudinot, with extraordinary impudence, disputed the right of the Lombards to interfere on behalf of Rome; and he even tried to persuade them that the cause of Rome was so distinct from that of Lombardy, that the Lombards could consistently join their forces with the French against Rome. Manara indignantly repelled the suggestion; and then Oudinot in vain attempted to exact a promise that the Lombard forces should not act against him until the 4th of May. Manara, having refused this further demand, Oudinot was forced to allow the Lombards to pass; and Manara marched to Rome to tell the Romans how the French Republic was preparing to defend the cause of "liberty and humanity." In spite of this plain evidence of his intentions, Oudinot still attempted to play his double part; and, since his utterance about the government of a party in a minority had alarmed the inhabitants of Civita Vecchia, he authorised the Secretary of the Legation to declare the sympathy of the French for the Romans, and to assure the citizens of Civita Vecchia that the French Army had only come to defend them against the Austrians. Mannucci, the Governor of Civita Vecchia, had wished to oppose the first landing of the French; but he was overborne by the Chamber of Commerce and the Municipal Council, who were convinced that the French could not really intend to destroy the freedom which they so much professed to cherish. No sooner, however, had Oudinot effected a landing, than he announced that he would not protect the Anarchical Government of Rome, which had never been officially recognised. The Municipality became alarmed; and Oudinot again altered his tone, and declared that the French would respect the vote of the majority of the population, and did not desire to impose any special form of Government upon them. In spite of the warnings given by Oudinot's previous proclamation, the Municipal Council consented to admit him into the town; and, no sooner was he there, than he disarmed the battalion which was to have defended the town; and still further showed his zeal for the interests of "Liberty and humanity," by suppressing a printing office in Civita Vecchia, because it had recently printed an address in which the Papacy was condemned. In the meantime the news had spread to Rome; and the Assembly were debating how they should receive Oudinot. So deep was the conviction of the reality of the French zeal for freedom, that Armellini actually suggested that Oudinot should be received as a friend. But, while the Assembly were debating, Mazzini entered the hall, and announced that Colonel le Blanc had confessed that the expedition was sent to restore the Papacy. Thereupon the Assembly voted that the Triumvirs should have power to resist force with force. But another difficulty arose; the officers of the National Guard declared that they did not believe their soldiers would fight. Thereupon Mazzini ordered that the battalions of the Guards should defile next morning in front of the Quirinal, where the Assembly were meeting; and, as the Guards passed, he put to them the question whether they were for peace or war. A loud shout of "Guerra, guerra!" answered his appeal; and the defence was at once resolved on. In every district the heads of the people and the representatives of the Assembly were to organize the defence of every inch of the country. Barricades were thrown up; arms were to be given to all the people; while the municipality undertook to provide them with corn, meat, and other eatables. At the same time all foreigners, and particularly all Frenchmen living in Rome, were to be placed under the protection of the nation. Anyone who injured them was to be punished as having violated the honour of Rome. With regard to the actual soldiers to be used in the first defence of the city, they were arranged as follows:--the 1st brigade, commanded by Garibaldi, guarded the line outside the walls, which extends from the Porta Portese to the Porta San Pancrazio. The 2nd brigade, commanded by Colonel Masi, was drawn up before the Porta Cavalleggieri, the Vatican, and the Porta Angelica. The 3rd, under Colonel Savini, stood in reserve in the Piazza Navona. Colonel Galletti commanded the 4th, which was stationed in the Piazza Cesarini; while a reserve force under General Galletti, in which Manara and his Lombard volunteers were included, was held back for the present, to come up when needed. The whole of the forces were supervised by General Avezzana, who had organized the insurrection in Genoa after the defeat at Novara, and who now acted apparently both as Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief. On April 29 Avezzana took his staff up to Monte Mario, from which point he could see the French army advancing from Civita Vecchia. As they marched along the road, the French saw everywhere a singular inscription painted upon the walls and posts. It ran as follows:--"Article 5 of the preamble of the French Constitution. The French Republic respects foreign nationalities as it intends to make its own respected. It does not undertake any war of conquest. It will never use its own forces against the liberty of any people." Whether as a kind of answer to this challenge, or in contempt of it, Oudinot announced to his troops that they came to liberate Rome from the factious party which had expelled the Pope, and which had answered his words of conciliation with ill-considered provocations. It was at 11.30 a.m. on April 30 that the French and Roman armies first came into collision. Garibaldi advanced from Porta San Pancrazio to meet the French, who were entering the grounds of the Villa Pamfili, and who, hearing the bells of the city ring for the attack, supposed that an insurrection had broken out in favour of the Pope, and that they would have an easy victory. Garibaldi, however, repelled them, after a sharp fight, and made 300 prisoners. But the main attack of the French was in the meantime directed against the Porta Angelica. There one of the French captains had hoped to lead a column into Rome by a secret way near the Vatican. But a fire was poured on the advancing column from the Papal gardens, while the troops from Monte Mario attacked them in the rear. The battle lasted for four hours. The French captain Picarde managed at first to drive back the University battalion; but as he advanced, Colonel Arcioni at the head of a regiment of the Lombard exiles attacked him on one flank, and Galletti at the head of the National Guard on the other; finally Garibaldi, having disposed of his original opponents at the Villa Pamfili, charged the French force, and compelled them to lay down their arms. Several acts of special valour marked this battle. One officer, named Montaldi, having been surrounded by the French, was beaten to his knees, and fought on with only a piece of his sword left. He had fought under Garibaldi at Monte Video, and was a Genoese by birth. Ugo Bassi[24] distinguished himself by riding about the field urging the Romans to battle. His horse was killed under him, and, as he was embracing it with tears, the French came up and took him prisoner. Garibaldi himself was wounded; but would not allow it to be known until the battle was over, when he sent privately for the doctor. On the following day the battle was renewed; the people flocking to the defence of the walls, and the French sharp-shooters being finally driven out from the Pamfili gardens. Garibaldi would now have been able to cut off the French retreat and destroy their army; but the Triumvirs, though they had no faith in Oudinot's promises, believed that, if the French were generously treated, the Republican feeling would awake again in France and overthrow the Government, or defeat their plans; but that, if they were driven to extremities, the French vanity would hinder even the most consistent Republicans from opposing the war. On these grounds, they allowed the French to retreat, granted them a short truce, and set free the prisoners who had been captured. But the hope of any change of feeling in the French was soon found to be utterly vain. A debate, indeed, had been begun in the French Assembly soon after the sailing of the expedition, and a Committee had been appointed to enquire into the object of the expedition; but Jules Favre, the chairman of that Committee, reported that the Government had no intention of making France a party to the overthrow of the Roman Republic; and that it only interfered in order that, under the French flag, humanity might be respected; and that a limit might be placed on the pretensions of Austria. In spite, therefore, of the opposition of Ledru Rollin, the money for the expedition had been voted by 325 against 283. But even Jules Favre could not be entirely blinded by such phrases as these, when considered in the light of Oudinot's actions; and on May 8 the National Assembly invited the Government to take, without delay, the necessary measures for preventing the expedition to Italy from being diverted from the scope assigned to it; and they therefore decided to send Ferdinand Lesseps to negotiate with the Triumvirs for terms of peace. In the meantime, the Roman Republic realized that it had to guard itself against two other enemies. On May 2, a Neapolitan army was found to be on its way to Rome. On the 4th, Garibaldi marched to Palestrina, and, with the help of Manara and his Lombard battalion, utterly defeated the Neapolitan forces. Just at the same time, the Bolognese became aware that the threatened attack of the Austrians was about to become a reality. Ferrara was occupied on May 7; but, even with the Austrian troops present in the city, the Municipal Council of Ferrara voted, by thirty-seven to three, in favour of the Roman Republic. Such a protest was undoubtedly of use in proving the earnestness of the Roman provinces on behalf of the new Government. But something more was expected, from a city so heroic in its traditions as Bologna. On May 6 it had been announced by the President of the Municipality that medals were about to be distributed in memory of August 8, 1848. On May 8 it was announced that the Austrians were advancing upon Bologna. In that city, as in Rome, the internal defence was organized in special districts under special leaders, while the National Guard and the University battalion were to fight side by side with the regular troops. By nine o'clock in the morning of the 8th the Austrians were at the gates of Bologna, and before eleven o'clock fierce struggles had taken place at the Porta Galliera, the Porta San Felice, and the Porta Saragozza. The people indignantly refused every proposal for capitulation, and at about four o'clock the Austrians began to bombard the city. Before the end of the day, the President had resigned his office, believing that resistance was useless; but the Municipality having in vain endeavoured to obtain the terms which they had hoped for, the assault was renewed, and the Austrians discharged rockets into the city from the bell-tower of the Franciscan convent. A special Commission was appointed to carry on the struggle, and the band of one of the regiments, standing under the tree of Liberty in the Piazza San Petronio, encouraged the combatants with music and songs. The struggle, however, was a desperate one, and, on May 10, it was again necessary to send a deputation to ask for a truce. But the combat was soon renewed, and the Bolognese troops were so eager in the attack that the general had to warn them against firing off their pieces needlessly. The pastry cooks were ordered to suspend the making of mere confectionary, in order that there might be more bread for the defenders of the city, and reinforcements were expected from the country districts of the Romagna. General Wimpffen, who was leading the Austrian troops, denounced the defence as "the stupid work of a blind faction;" but the Provisional Government answered that the proclamation signed by Marshal Wimpffen, and forwarded by him to the magistrates, having come without any accompanying evidence, could not be received by them. Weary of acting merely on the defensive, the Bolognese made a sortie from the Porta Maggiore, repelled an attack of the Austrians, and succeeded in joining a body of the Romagnoli, who were coming to the relief of the city. But the chances of uniting with the outside world became less and less; for the Austrian troops drew ever more closely round the city, and, on the 15th, the bombardment was renewed. Then a number of the citizens requested leave to go to Rome, to find out how things were going on there, in order that they might know what was still required of them at headquarters. But this proposal seems to have been a mere utterance of despair; for, on the 16th, it became necessary to abandon the defence and arrange for terms of surrender. While the Bolognese were engaged in this desperate struggle, Ferdinand Lesseps had arrived in Rome, and was rapidly becoming converted to the belief that the Republican Government was the free choice of the people, and that it was better able to maintain order than the Papacy had been; while a conversation with Mamiani had shown him that even the so-called Moderate Liberals were unwilling to act against the Republic. But, though Lesseps was honest enough to confess these facts, his vanity, both personal and national, prevented him from making the natural inference that neither he nor Oudinot were needed in Rome. He, therefore, proposed that the Roman States should request the paternal protection of the French Republic; that the Roman populations should pronounce freely on their form of government; that Rome should receive the French as their friends; and that Roman and French troops should act together in defence of the city. The Assembly rejected these proposals, on the ground that Rome had no need of protection, and that the name of the Roman Republic was not mentioned in the negotiation; and they further complained that, on May 19, while the truce was still in force, the French soldiers had crossed the Tiber. Then the Triumvirs proposed, in their turn, that the Roman Republic should acknowledge the help offered by the French nation against foreign intervention; that the Constitution which had been adopted by the General Assembly should be sanctioned by a popular vote; that Rome should welcome the French soldiers as brothers; but that they should stay outside the city till the Roman Republic called for them. These proposals were accepted, with some modifications, by Lesseps, within the time of the truce; and he left Rome, well satisfied with Mazzini, still better with himself. Great, however, was the indignation of this unfortunate diplomatist, when, on reaching the camp of Oudinot, he found that the general, without waiting for the expiration of the truce, had suddenly occupied Monte Mario! Lesseps was divided between his feelings as a man of honour and his unwillingness to oppose his countrymen. He threatened at first that if the order for assault were not withdrawn, he would himself go back to Rome and give the alarm; but when, on his return to the city, the Triumvirs questioned him about the breach of the truce, he assured them that Monte Mario had only been occupied in order to prevent its falling into the hands of the French reinforcements, which were on their way to Rome. The fact was that, from first to last, Lesseps had been the dupe of the unscrupulous men who were ruling France. While he had been entrusted with apparently peaceful negotiations, secret instructions had been sent to Oudinot to the following effect:--"Tell the Romans that we do not wish to join with the Neapolitans against them. Continue your negotiations in the sense of your declaration. We are sending you reinforcements. Wait for them. Manage to enter Rome by agreement with the inhabitants; and if you should be compelled to assault it, do it in the manner that shall be most likely to secure success." Oudinot fully understood his instructions. On May 31 he scornfully rejected the convention which had been accepted by Lesseps; and on the same day Lesseps received his recall to Paris, and Oudinot received orders to take Rome by force. In the meantime an unfortunate occurrence had called attention to another danger which was threatening the Roman Republic. General Roselli had now been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Roman army; but he found it very difficult to control Garibaldi. After the defeat of the Neapolitan forces, Garibaldi had desired to push on to Velletri. Roselli forbad him to do so; but Garibaldi disobeyed the orders of his chief, and marched forward. Part of the troops who followed him had not learned to stand fire, and fled at the first attack. Garibaldi was in such danger that he was obliged to send to Roselli for fresh troops. With the help of these reinforcements, Garibaldi drove back the Neapolitans; but he then disobeyed Roselli's orders for the second time, marched forward to Velletri, and entered it on May 20. Fierce recriminations followed between the friends of Garibaldi and those of Roselli; Garibaldi and his friends maintaining that, but for Roselli's delay, the victory would have been more complete; the supporters of Roselli declaring that, if it had not been for Garibaldi's rashness, Ferdinand himself, and a great part of his army, would have fallen into the hands of the Romans. Roselli further demanded that Garibaldi should be summoned before a Court-Martial for his disobedience to orders. But the Triumvirs felt that there would be a certain incongruity in such a trial, which could only lead to mischief, and they persuaded Roselli to abandon his proposal. Garibaldi's influence, indeed, was strong, not only among his soldiers, but also among the members of the Assembly; and Sterbini, who seems generally to have suspected all existing Governments, demanded that Garibaldi should be made Dictator, and that Roselli's command should be taken from him. This proposal, however, the Assembly rejected, and, on June 3, declared itself in permanence. On that very day Oudinot gave another proof of his peculiar ideas of French honour. The day before, he had promised to defer the attack until June 4. The grounds of the Villa Pamfili lie at a short distance from the Porta San Pancrazio, and were then more thickly wooded than they are now. On the night of June 2 they were occupied by three companies of Bolognese. These soldiers, trusting to the honour of Oudinot, were sleeping peacefully, when suddenly two French divisions entered the wood. They surrounded and captured 200 of the soldiers; but the remaining 200 retreated fighting, before a body of 8,000 French. Garibaldi hastened up with reinforcements, and the fight lasted from 2 a.m. till 6 p.m. on June 3. Four times were the houses in the grounds of the Villa Pamfili lost and won. The walls shook with the thunder of the French and Roman artillery; and the houses were filled with the dead and wounded of both armies. But the treachery of Oudinot had been successful in securing him so good a position, that the houses at last remained in the hands of the French, although they were so ruined that they afforded them very little protection. [Illustration: IL VASCELLO, ROME (_taken since the siege_).] This struggle seemed only to rouse the energies of the Romans to new efforts. Between the Villa Pamfili and the Porta San Pancrazio, stood an old house which, from its shape, was known as the Vascello or little ship; and it was by the walls of this house that, for nearly a month from this time, General Medici and Garibaldi held their own against the numbers, the training, and the treachery of the French. Nothing could exceed the enthusiasm of the Romans in the defence of their city. The walls were crowded with people during the fight; youths, not able yet to bear arms, rushed into the crash of battle. And girls went, while the cannon was still firing, to search for the dead, to encourage the combatants, and to heal the wounded. But treachery steadily gained ground upon valour. Enrico Dandolo, a young captain in Manara's regiment, was about to attack a company of Frenchmen, when the French captain cried out, "We are friends!" Dandolo ordered the attack to be suspended, and advanced to the Frenchman, holding out his hand. The French at once fired, and Dandolo and more than a third of his company fell dead. Oudinot, however, over-estimated the credulity of the Romans; for on June 12 he demanded to be admitted into Rome, on the ground that his intentions had been misunderstood, and that he wished to secure Roman liberty. When, however, he was reminded of his violation of Lesseps's agreement, he showed his zeal for Roman liberty by proceeding to bombard the city. But there were still some Frenchmen who held different views from Oudinot's on the subject of their country's honour. On the very day when the bombardment of Rome began, Ledru Rollin and his friends, having in vain tried to secure a condemnation of the Roman expedition from the French Assembly, took up arms for a final effort to vindicate the honour of France against its faithless rulers. But the revolutionary force of France had been wasted in the Socialist insurrection of the previous year; and, after a gallant struggle, the champions of French honour and liberty were suppressed by General Changarnier. The failure of this effort must, no doubt, have been terribly disappointing to those Romans who had hoped to the last that France would vindicate herself against those who were dishonouring her. And, as if to bring home to the Romans how isolated their position was becoming as defenders of liberty, there came to them, shortly after, the news of the final downfall of German liberty. Ever since April 24, when the King of Prussia refused the crown of Germany, he had been following a steady course of opposition to the Liberal movements in favour of German unity; and on May 24 he had recalled the Prussian Deputies from the Frankfort Assembly. This had encouraged the other Princes of Germany to dissolve their local parliaments and recall their subjects from the Frankfort Parliament; while the strengthening of the troops near Frankfort seemed to limit the freedom of debate among the few deputies who remained. At last, on June 6, the few remaining representatives of German unity decided to transfer their place of meeting from Frankfort to Stuttgart. The Baden Republicans had in the meantime taken the stronger course of appealing for the last time to insurrection; but both the constitutional and the revolutionary attempt to save the liberties of Germany proved hopeless. On June 18 the remnant of the German Parliament was dispersed by the Würtemberg soldiers; the Baden rising failed, to a great extent from the quarrels between the Polish general Mieroslawski and the Baden general Sigel; and the Prussian soldiers trampled out the last remains of German liberty. In the meantime the Austrians were capturing city after city in the Roman provinces; and the French were pressing nearer to the city. But the enthusiasm of the Romans did not slacken. As Garibaldi went through the hospitals to visit the wounded, several of the sufferers sprang from their beds to embrace his knees, with cries of "Papa, papa"; and the women exerted themselves gallantly to relieve the sufferings of the wounded. The French did not even now seem absolutely certain of victory; for when a sortie, planned by Garibaldi on June 22, had ended in a fiasco, a certain M. Corcelles attempted to reopen diplomatic negotiations. But Mazzini, warned by his experience of Lesseps, sternly repelled all proposals for negotiation; and the struggle was renewed. The state of the Roman Republic was, however, really desperate. On June 24 came the news that, after twenty-five days' struggle, Ancona had fallen into the hands of the Austrians, who had almost immediately violated the understanding on which it had been surrendered. In the meantime the French slowly advanced in the struggle by the Vascello, Medici continually driving them back. Many of the houses were battered down, but the inhabitants were provided by the Triumvirs with fresh lodgings in the deserted houses of the Cardinals. When the French knocked down part of the walls, the citizens picked up the stones to repair them. At last, however, on June 29, Oudinot resolved to make a final effort, and directed his forces against Garibaldi's house, which was known as the Villa Spada. Twice the invaders attacked this house, and twice they were repelled. Then they succeeded in capturing a barricade which had been raised in front of the house; but again the Romans recaptured it. Garibaldi fought in the midst of his followers, singing a war-song; and more than a hundred of his soldiers fell round him. Seven times the barricade was taken and retaken; the gallant Manara was killed; and at last, after twelve hours' fighting, it was discovered that the Porta San Pancrazio was no longer tenable. On June 30 the Roman Assembly met, and Mazzini propounded to them three alternatives. Either they should continue the defence, which now seemed impossible; or they should yield altogether; or, thirdly, they should cut their way out into the provinces, and continue the struggle there. Mazzini strongly urged the third course. While the debate was still proceeding, Garibaldi in his red shirt, covered with mud, sprang into the Assembly. He declared that further defence was impossible, unless they were prepared to abandon the Trastevere, and break down the bridges. Under these circumstances, he supported Mazzini's recommendation, that they should cut their way out into the provinces, and carry on the struggle there. Cernuschi, however, proposed the following resolution:--"The Roman Constituent Assembly abandons a defence which has become impossible, and remains at its post." This motion was carried; the Triumvirs resigned their post to the Municipality, and a new Triumvirate was elected to carry out the terms of peace. Then Garibaldi called round him his followers in the Piazza San Pietro, and addressed them as follows:--"I have nothing to give you but hunger, sufferings, and battles; the bare earth for your bed, and the burning sun for your refreshment. Yet let him who does not yet disbelieve in the fortune of Italy follow me." He then marched out from the Porta San Giovanni, followed by 4,000 men. They made their way to the northern part of the Roman States; but after much suffering and privation, they were forced to abandon the struggle. Ugo Bassi and others fell into the hands of the Austrians, and were shot. Garibaldi and a small remnant of his followers succeeded in escaping from the country. In the meantime the Roman Municipal Council attempted to make terms with Oudinot; but finding it impossible to secure honourable conditions, they declared that they yielded only to force. On July 3 the French troops entered Rome; and while they marched through the city they found all the shops closed, and heard from every side the cries of "Death to Cardinal Oudinot! Death to the soldiers of the Pope! Death to the Croats of France!" On the same day the Roman Assembly proclaimed from the Capitol the Constitution of the Republic. On the next day a regiment of French infantry dissolved the Assembly by force; and soon after a Commission of three Cardinals was appointed to govern Rome. The hopes of Italy now centred in Venice, where, ever since the abandonment of Milan by Charles Albert in the previous August, the Republican Government had struggled alone against Austria. So fierce had been the feeling caused by Charles Albert's treatment of Venice, that it had required all Manin's influence to hinder a violent attack on the Sardinian Commissioner. The Sardinian Admiral, indeed, attempted at first to disregard the orders of Charles Albert, and to continue the defence of Venice, but he was compelled after a time to withdraw. Manin, however, was anxious to secure foreign allies for Venice; and, shortly after his abandonment by Charles Albert, he appealed to France for help. The French Government answered by those vague and cheap promises which meant nothing; while the English Consul at Venice tried to form an Austrian party in the city; and Lord Palmerston worried Manin with all sorts of useless proposals for diplomatic compromises. But if Manin found little help from foreign Governments, he received much encouragement from those Italians who had not yet despaired of their country. In September, 1848, 1,200 soldiers who had served under Durando arrived in Venice; and on October 3 a vessel brought 6,000 guns from Genoa. The Austrian blockade, indeed, pressed ever closer, and on October 10 it had become so close that food could not be brought into the town. But so little did Manin lose heart that on October 11 he declared to the Assembly that Venice was in a better state for defence than when the Dictatorship had been established in August; and the Assembly in turn voted that Manin and the two colleagues who had been appointed to assist him should be entrusted with all political negotiations, saving the ratification by the Assembly of the final treaty. So great was the mutual confidence between Manin and the poorer classes of Venice, that in January, 1849, two Gondoliers were chosen to assist him in the Government. The proclamation of the Republic in Rome had excited both the sympathies and the fears of Manin; for while he saw in it a step towards an Italian Republic, in which Venice might take a part, he also saw that it might hasten an Austrian intervention in the Roman States. The failure of Charles Albert's final effort in April, 1849, so alarmed the Venetians that Manin began to speculate on the desirability of accepting an Austrian Prince as Constitutional Sovereign of Lombardo-Venetia. But the Hungarian Declaration of Independence once more revived his hopes, and from that time his one aim in foreign policy was to secure and strengthen an alliance between Venice and Hungary. Yet the month of May, in which this alliance was concluded, seemed one of the most desperate periods in the fortunes of Venice. The fortress of Malghera, which lies on an island in the lagunes, about two hours' gondola journey west of Venice, was the scene of one of the fiercest struggles between the Austrians and Venetians. General Haynau had effected a landing on this island, and attempted to seize the fortress; but the Venetians on their side let loose the waters to swamp the Austrian trenches, sent boats under the fire of the Austrians to bring food to the defenders, and made expeditions to carry off oxen, even from the country already occupied by the Austrians. So desperate was the resistance that Radetzky treated Haynau's attempt as a failure, and sent General Thurn to take his place. But, partly by breaking a truce, partly by force of superior numbers, the Austrians succeeded in carrying the day; and on May 26, when the fortress had been reduced to ruins, the Venetians were compelled to abandon Malghera, and to retreat to some islands nearer the city. In the following month Manin again tried to enter into negotiations with Radetzky; but a letter from Kossuth encouraged him to stand firm; and he made such demands for independence that the Austrians scornfully rejected them. In spite, however, of the encouragement which he had sent to Manin, Kossuth's own position was one of increasing danger. The Declaration of Independence of April 14 had been followed by the resignation of several Hungarian officers; and Görgei, though unwillingly retaining his command, became more and more antagonistic in his attitude towards Kossuth. This mutual distrust was one of the main causes of a step not very creditable to either party, and which is reckoned by military critics one of the most unfortunate in the war. On April 26, Görgei and General Klapka had, by a desperate march, rescued the fortress of Komorn from the Austrians; and Klapka and others believed that, if Görgei had followed up this success by marching to Raab, he might have been able to reopen communications with Vienna. Kossuth, however, was anxious that Buda-Pesth should not be allowed to remain in the hands of the Austrians, and he therefore desired Görgei to turn his forces to the deliverance of the capital. Görgei, in common with all the military leaders, believed this proposal to be a mistake; but he has frankly recorded his reasons for readily obeying Kossuth's orders. If he had followed up his advantages and marched into Austria, a Republic, he believed, would have been proclaimed in Hungary; and a compromise with the Austrian Government would have become impossible; whereas, by occupying Buda-Pesth, he thought that he should gain a vantage ground which would enable him to persuade both parties to accept the modified Constitution for Hungary which he desired. Hence it came to pass that the greater part of May was taken up by the siege of the fortress of Buda, while Görgei was intriguing with Kossuth's opponents in the Diet, and the Austrians were gaining ground in Hungary. And while he was with difficulty holding his own against Görgei's intrigues, Kossuth was alarmed by the news that a more formidable enemy had once more appeared on the scene. On May 1 the Emperor of Austria had formally appealed to the Russians to assist him against his Hungarian subjects; and in June the Russian forces began to gather near the passes of the Carpathians. On the 17, Colonel Szabò encountered the Russians near the Temos Pass. When he first advanced to meet them, he believed that he had only to do with some skirmishing troops, such as those with whom he had previously dealt. But more and more soldiers pressed in to the attack, and Szabò was compelled to retreat. Two days later Colonel Kiss, at the head of a band of Szeklers, came up to resist the invaders; and, while those who were on the hills above hurled down stones and wood on the Russians, the soldiers below, though only 400 in number, resisted so gallantly that the Russians at first fled before them. At last, however, Kiss was laid senseless by a shot, and his soldiers were seized with a panic and fled in disorder. Bem, who had returned to Transylvania about the end of May, now attempted to rally the Szekler by inspiriting appeals to the memories of their former struggles. On June 25 he recaptured the Saxon town of Bistritz, and then encountered in the open field a combined corps of Russians and Austrians. For seven hours he held out against them; but new reinforcements came up, and he was compelled to retreat. The enormous numbers of the Russians seem to have impressed Bem's followers, and to have increased their original panic. The country was overrun by the enemy; Hermannstadt was captured and recaptured, and when, on August 5, it at last fell into the hands of the Russians, Bem narrowly escaped with his life. Even then he wished to continue the struggle; but on August 7 he was summoned to North Hungary by Kossuth, to advise him in his difficulties with Görgei. After an attempt to supersede Görgei by Meszaros, Kossuth had been compelled to allow the former to resume the command; but he had by no means recovered confidence in him, and he felt ready to clutch at any proposal which would extricate himself and his country from their difficulties. Amongst other suggestions he proposed to offer to Jancu and the Roumanian leaders independent commands in the Hungarian Army, and to concede to them most of the points about which they had been fighting. He had even opened negotiations with Jancu for this purpose; but Bem steadily opposed the scheme, and the negotiations came to nothing. But Kossuth's great hope was to supersede Görgei by Bem. This proposal, however, was opposed, not only by Görgei himself, but also by Csanyi, who seems throughout to have sympathised with Görgei, as against Kossuth. Bem, therefore, returned to the war. Kossuth, left unsupported, became more and more alarmed. Csanyi and Görgei pressed for his resignation; and, while he was doubting, he received the news that Bem had been dangerously wounded in battle. The report, indeed, was exaggerated; and Bem wrote a letter to assure Kossuth of the slightness of his wound, and to encourage him to stand firm. But this letter never arrived, and the next news which Bem received was that Kossuth had abdicated, and Görgei been declared Dictator of Hungary. Bem wrote a letter of remonstrance to Kossuth, and, at the same time, marched towards Lugos, in the Banat, to meet the Russians. Dembinski, who was now in Bem's army, disobeyed his orders, and Bem was defeated. On that very day, August 13, Görgei surrendered at Vilagos with all his forces to the Russian general. This surrender is now believed to have been necessary on military grounds. The advances made by the Austrians during the siege of Buda, and the Russian conquest of Transylvania had placed Hungary at the mercy of the conqueror. Nevertheless, it cannot be doubted that the quarrel between Görgei and Kossuth, and the factions which the former had stirred up in the army, had tended considerably to bring about this result; while, with regard to the terms of surrender, General Görgei has never been able to explain how it was that, while the amnesty was so scrupulously observed towards himself both by the Austrians and Russians, the generals, whose only fault was that they had served under him, were ruthlessly put to death by Haynau. Anyhow, whatever may have been the excuses for the act, the surrender of Vilagos produced a startling close to the Hungarian War. Bem, indeed, hastened back to Transylvania, and attempted to rouse his former followers; and General Klapka held out for a month longer at Komorn. But Bem's efforts were of no avail; Klapka's defence only served to secure rather better terms; and both these generals, as well as Kossuth, were forced to take refuge in Turkey. The news of the surrender of Vilagos did not reach Venice till August 20. There Manin had had much difficulty in still retaining the control which had been necessary for the guidance of affairs; and on August 6 a minority of 28 in the Assembly had protested against his reappointment as Dictator. The cholera had now been added to the other horrors of the siege; provisions were growing scarce; and thus the news of Görgei's surrender came as the last straw to break down the hopes of the defenders of Venice. On the 22nd, therefore, the Government agreed to yield. Manin succeeded in preventing the riots which seemed likely to break out on the news of the capitulation; and on August 30 the final surrender of Venice to the Austrians brought to a close the long struggle for liberty which had begun with the Sicilian rising of 1848. On December 20, 1849, there appeared the following statement in a Swiss paper: "In front of Manin's door was a stone on which his name was engraved. The Austrians broke it to pieces; but the smallest fragments of it have been collected by the Venetians as sacred relics." So ended the revolutionary period of 1848 and 1849. Those Revolutions had displayed, in a way unknown before, the strength and the weakness of the national principle. The enthusiasm for liberty, and the power of generous self-sacrifice, which was kindled by the feeling for a common language and common traditions, had been shown in each of the Revolutions; and they had struck a blow at the merely diplomatic and military settlements of States which produced a lasting effect. But, on the other hand, with the love for men of the same race and language there awoke in all these nations, with terrible force, the hatred and scorn for men of other races and languages; and thus, while the leaders of the movement taught tyrants their danger, they supplied them at the same time with a defence against that danger,--with another justification of the old maxim of tyrants, "Divide et impera." And so the work of the Revolutionists did not fail; but yet it could not achieve all the noble ends for which it was intended. The time which followed the defeat of the Revolutionists was to show both their failure and their success. The dreary period of reaction from 1849 to 1859 could not have been expected by any sane man to be of long duration. But the time of reawakening was not like the time of the first dawn of hope. The work which had been ennobled by the thought of Mazzini, by the sword of Garibaldi, by the statesmanship of Manin, and the eloquent enthusiasm of Ciceruacchio, was to be carried to completion by the intrigues of Cavour, and the interested speculation of Louis Napoleon. In the place of the wisdom of Robert Blum, and the wild popular energy of Hecker, was to arise the stern hard policy of "blood and iron"; and, as Germany had failed to absorb Prussia, Prussia was finally to absorb Germany. The blunders and prejudices of the leaders of the Vienna Revolution were to be reproduced by Schmerling, without their self-sacrifice or generosity. But at the same time Francis Deak, the wise statesman, who had stood aside in dislike of the fiercer and more unscrupulous policy of other Magyar leaders, was to re-establish gradually for his country the freedom which she had lost for a time during the Revolutionary struggle. The race struggles of the Austro-Hungarian Empire were to be renewed in a milder form, and the solution of their difficulties postponed to a distant future; while the yet more dangerous problems of Socialism, which had forced themselves in so untimely a manner on the citizens of Vienna and Berlin, were gradually to assume ever greater prominence in the affairs of Europe. Thus it will be seen that the Revolutions of 1848 to '49 were but the climax of movements of which we have not yet seen the end; but, for good and for evil, they left a mark on Europe, which is never likely to be entirely effaced. THE END. FOOTNOTES: [20] I must admit that my estimate of Görgei is, in many respects, lower than that of men whose opportunities of observing the facts, and whose general candour of judgment entitles their opinion to great respect. I can only plead that the severest judgments which I have passed upon him are founded upon his own memoirs; that is, partly upon the facts narrated in them, and partly upon the tone in which they are written. [21] This was the title of the Emperor Ferdinand in his capacity of King of Hungary. [22] It will observed that the Roumanians used, wherever possible, the old Roman titles, in order to assert their connection with ancient Rome. [23] The Council which advised the Ban. [24] A Bolognese priest, who followed Garibaldi partly in the character of a chaplain and partly as aide-de-camp. See "The Disciples," by Mrs. E. H. King. INDEX. A. Aargau, 152, 155, 160. Agram, Bishop of in Gaj's time, 99; Assembly at, 144-5; May Meeting at, 318-19; contrasted with Prague, 333. Albrecht (Professor), 92. _See_ also Arch Dukes. Alessandria, occupation of, 3; in 1821, 39-40, 43; threatened by Radetzky, 182. Alexander I. of Russia, character of, 3-4; relations with Mme de Krüdener, 7; plan of Holy Alliance, 8; supports Sardinia, 27; attitude in 1820, 32; treatment of Greece, 46-7; death, 49. Alfieri, Vittorio, influence of, 23; Manzoni's feeling to, 25, 54; influence in Piedmont, 35. Allemandi, 350. Alliance, Holy. _See_ Holy Alliance. Altieri, Cardinal, 417. Ancona, in 1831, 61, 118; treatment of by French, 159; by Triumvirs, 464-5; fall of, 485. Andrian, 208. Anfossi, Augusto, conspiracy against Charles Felix, 61; early career, 263; in Milan, 263, 265, 267, 269; death, 337. ---- Francesco, 365. Antologia, of Florence, 54-5. Antonelli, Cardinal, supports Italian war, 346; suspected of treachery, 348. Antonini, General, 469. Apponyi, Chancellor of Hungary, 201. Arch Duchess Sophia, opposed to Metternich, 207; favours Jellaciç, 288; denounced by Hungarians, 460. Arch Duke Albert, in March insurrection, 239, 241. ---- Francis Charles, in Imperial Council, 207; appealed to by merchants, 231; attitude to Metternich, 241; denounced by Hungarians, 460. ---- John, promises to Italy, 21; his toast at Cologne, 209-10; his liberalism, 241; pressure on Metternich, 243; made administrator, 363, 373; forms new ministry, 374; opens Viennese Parliament, 378; intervenes in Croatian question, 383. ---- Louis, helps to govern Vienna, 206; opposes removal of Hye, 207; warns Metternich, 232; his proposal about Windischgrätz, 240; denounced by Hungarians, 460. ---- Maximilian, in March rising, 242-3. ---- Sigismund, 268. ---- Stephen, deserts Hungary, 395, 432; denounced by Hungarians, 461. Arcioni, at defence of Rome, 475. Armellini, in provisional government, 423; Triumvir, 464; feelings to French, 473. Arndt, relations with Stein, 10; professor, 12; in 1816, 12; restored by Frederick William IV., 94; thanked at Frankfort, 361; vote on truce of Malmö, 374-5. Arthaber, 245. Ascoli, Duke of, 34-5. ---- conspiracy in, 464-5. Auersperg, General, in October rising, 391, 393. Auerswald, death of, 376. Austria, Arch Duchy of, relations with Bohemia and Hungary, 250-3. ---- Emperors of. _See_ Francis, Ferdinand, Francis Joseph. ---- Empire of, special evils of in Italy, 20-22; German language in, 89-90; policy of, 132-3; in Switzerland, 151, 159; political character of, 209; Möring's view of, _see_ Möring; Kossuth's view of, 227-8; attitude of Bohemians towards, 298-300; of Viennese towards, 304; proposed federation of, 333; Radetzky's position in, 335. ---- Estates of. _See_ Estates. ---- House of, policy towards Serbs, 281-2; feeling to Italy, 363; deposed in Hungary, 458-61. Avezzana, 474. B. Bach, his soup kitchen, 212; his treatment of Rieger, 379. Baden, from 1815-47, 219-20; movement in in 1847-8, 220-1; programme of leaders of, 232-3; insurrections in, 361, 377-8, 485. _See_ also Struve, Hecker, and Republicans, South German. Balbo, Prospero, supposed liberalism of, 35; in 1821, 38-9; inconsistencies, 120-1. ---- Cesare, early career, 121; Speranze d'Italia, 121-2. Banat, 449, 456. Bandiera Brothers, 118-20, 368. Bassermann, 221. Bassi, Ugo, 475, 487. Batthyanyi, Louis, in 1839, 86; in 1857, 202; Prime Minister, 246; his difficulties, 279-80; his appeal to Szeklers, 316; his interview with Jellaciç, 383-4; feeling about Lamberg, 386; his resignation, 388; attempted mediation, 462 Battles, of White Hill, 250-1; of Goito first, 341; second, 356; of Cornuta, 349; of Curtatone, 355; of Somma Campagna, 364; of Custozza, 364; of Schwechat, 396-7, 432; of Novara, 429. Bava, General, 341, 363-4. Bavaria, treatment of by Metternich, 13; protest against concluding act of Vienna, 18; resistance of to Metternich, 218; revolution of 1848 in, 222; quarrel of with Baden, 377. Beauharnais, 21, 25. Bem, early career, 394; defence of Vienna, 396; relations with Kossuth and Görgei, 436; first campaign in Transylvania, 446-7; contrasted with Csanyi, 449-50; final struggle of, 492-3; flies to Turkey, 494. Bentinck, Lord William, 21, 44. Berczenczei, 440. Bergamo, 197, 268. Berlin, March rising in, 247-9; discontents in, 402-3; riots in, 405-6; struggle of Assembly in, 409-14. Bern, 152, 154, 156. Bible, Metternich's view of, 6. Bini, Carlo, 55. Blasendorf, 312-14. Blum, Robert, first appearance, 92; sympathy with Ronge, 95; victory of, 96; sympathy with Poland, 192; in March rising, 223-5; influence in Preparatory Parliament, 293, 295; hinders May rising, 361; view of Truce of Malmö, 374-5; action in Frankfort riot, 375-6; difference with Hecker, 376-7; his republicanism, 377-8; in Vienna, 393-7; his death and its effects, 397-8. Blumenthal, Major von, 412-13. Bohemia, division of classes in, 204; national feeling in, 206; history of in 17th and 18th centuries, 250-3; revival of language in, 253-4; March rising in, 254-60; race difficulties in, 289-92; relations of to Frankfort Parliament, 295-302; effect on of May rising, 308, 310; peculiarity of its position, 333; feeling towards Italy, 335; triumphed over by Frankfort Parliament, 363; Deputies of in Viennese Parliament, 387, 392; Deputies at Olmütz, 415-16; at Kremsier, 416; treatment of in Constitution of 1849, 455. _See_ also Slavs, Prague, Rieger. Bologna, in 1830, 60; attitude to Corsica, 60; sympathy with Lombards, 354; in August, 1848, 368-9; struggle of in 1849, 466, 477-9. Bolza, 144, 183, 267. Bonn, 412. Borrosch, tries to save Latour, 391; at Kremsier, 416. Bozzelli, 177. Brandenburg, General, 408, 409-10. ---- City, 409, 413-14. Brescia, 189, 261; March rising in, 268-9; Anfossi's service at, 365; Garibaldi's march to, 356; rising in 1849, 428-9. Breslau, 406, 412. Brunetti. _See_ Ciceruacchio. Buda-Pesth, March movement in, 278-9; contrasted with Presburg, 279-80; death of Lamberg in, 388; question of its defence, 438; besieged by Görgei, 491. Bund, constitution of in 1815, 8; effect on of Carlsbad Decrees, 17; strengthened in 1834, 90; proposed reform of, 223. Bundestag, duty of, 9; decrees of in 1830, 50; in Schleswig-Holstein question, 165; action of in March, 1848, 224; relations of with Frankfort Parliament, 295, 372-3. Buonaparte, Charles Lucien, at Genoa, 143; in Venice, 192-3; advocates Italian Assembly, 419. ---- Napoleon I., 1, 2, 20-1. ---- Louis Napoleon, expulsion of from Switzerland, 154; letter on Cavaignac's expedition, 467; elected President, 467, 470; answer to Roman deputation, 470. Buonaparte, Pierre, 471. Buonarotti, 70-1. Burschenschaft, 14-15. C. Camarilla, 244, 381. Camphausen, his policy, 370; his fall, 405. Campo Formio, Treaty of, 20, 23. Canino, Prince of. _See_ Buonaparte, Charles Lucien. Canning, George, his foreign policy, 48; Metternich's opinion of him, 48; treatment of Greece, 49; his death, 50. Capo d'Istria, 47. Carbonari, 4; rise and work of, 29-30; in 1820, 31-2, 33; Mazzini's relations with, 56-8. Carlowitz, importance of to Serbs, 283, 284; May meeting at, 311-12; June attack on, 319-20; contrasted with Prague, 333. ---- General von, 225. Carlsbad Decrees, 17, 221. Carlsruhe, 221. Carpathians, 108, 109. Casati, honours Confalonieri, 144; character and position, 185; behaviour in smoking riots, 197; in March rising, 264-6, 267; in Lombard war, 336; policy of, 337; Mazzini's relations with, 342, 349, 365; action in May rising, 357; feeling to Charles Albert, 358. Castellani, 464. Castlereagh, in 1815, 2; in 1821, 44; suicide, 48. Cavaignac, 467. Cavour, 181. Cernuschi, conduct in March rising, 264; arrested in May, 357-8; his proposal in Rome, 487. Charles Albert, early career, 37; visits hospitals, 39; action in 1821, 40, 41, 42; accession, 61; feelings of Italians to, 62-3; Mazzini's letter to, 63-4; position in Italy, 64-6; conduct in 1846, 136-7, 147; sympathies with Sonderbund, 157; attitude in February 1848, 180-2; action about Lombard rising, 337-8; mistakes and victories, 340-1; Pope's suspicions of, 346; treatment of Venetia, 348-50, 359; action about fusion, 350-1; causes of influence, 351-2; later victories and defeats, 355-6; betrayal of Milan, 356-7; Rossi's suspicions of, 420; Guerrazzi's feeling to, 423-4; rebuked by Pope, 425; last war with Austria, 426, 428, 429; Roman feeling towards, 427; abdication, 429-30. Charles Felix, his politics, 36-7; accession, 41; appeal to Charles Albert, 42; system of government, 43; treatment of Mazzini, 59; conspiracy against, 61. ---- VI. of Germany, treatment of Serbs, 282. Christian VIII. of Denmark, policy of in 1846, 163-4; in 1848, 371-2. Chrzanowski, 428. Ciceruacchio, his myth of Pius IX., 142-3; his suppression of clerical conspiracy, 145; his demands for reform, 178; desires Lombard war, 339. Civita Vecchia, 467, 471, 472-3. Coblenz, resistance to King of Prussia, 412. Cologne, Archbishop of, quarrel of with Frederick William III., 93; released, 94. ---- socialism in, 403. Como, 189; March rising in, 268. Concordat of Seven, 152, 155. Confalonieri, Federigo, position and work, 25-6; in 1821, 36; imprisoned, 44-6; effect of death, 144. Congress of Laybach, 34, 39, 40, 46. ---- of Verona, 48. ---- of Vienna, 2, 3. Consalvi, Cardinal, policy, 3; protest about Ferrara, 146. Constitution, promise of in Bundes-act, 8; granted by King of Würtemberg, 13; promised by King of Prussia, 16; crushed in 1819, 17-18. ---- for Austria, proposed by Kossuth, 227-8; of April 1848, 305-6; of May, 308; of March 1849, 455-8. ---- of Bohemia, old, 251-4. ---- of Germany, devised at Frankfort, 415. ---- of Hungary, 73-5. ---- of Naples in 1848, 178, 199. ---- of Piedmont, 182. ---- of Prussia in April 1848, 403-4. ---- of Sicily, destruction of, 2; in 1820, 33. ---- Spanish, 31; in Naples, 32, 34; in Sicily, 33; in Piedmont, 36, 41, 43. ---- of Tuscany, 180. Corcelles, 485. Cornuta, 349. Correnti, 264. Corsica, 60. Corsini, 128. Cosenza, 119-20. County Assemblies of Hungary, 74. Cracow, 129-32, 134-5. Cremona, 189; March rising in, 269. Crnojeviç, 311. Croatia, early traditions of, 97-8; language movement in, 98-100; internal struggles, 104-5; treatment of by Magyars, 106-7; sympathy of with Saxons, 116; Kossuth's view of in March 1848, 227-8; soldiers of in Milan, 269; in Venice, 271-3; demands of in March 1848, 276-7; opposition of to "Twelve Points," 287-8; relations of with Ferdinand, 310; with Serbs, 318-19; demands of in Slav Congress, 327; feeling in about Italy, 335-6; sympathy of with Roumanians, 439; attitude of to Constitution of 1849, 455; influence of Jellaciç in, 457. Csanyi, 449, 450-1. Curtatone, Battle of, 355-6. D. Dahlmann, in 1837, 92; in 1840, 94; opposes truce of Malmö, 374; subsequent action in Parliament, 374, 376. Dalmatia, 97-8. Dandolo, Enrico, 483. Dante, influence of on Mazzini, 55-6. Darmstadt. _See_ Hesse. Dawkins, Consul, 488. D'Azeglio, Massimo, "I Casi di Romagna," 128-9; championship of Charles Albert, 137-8; praise of Gizzi, 140; demands Constitution, 181; puts pressure on Pope, 339. Deak, in 1832, 81-2; rebuke to Gaj, 100; resignation in 1843, 103; helps in reforms, 201-2; position in first Ministry, 279-80; rebuke to Saxons, 315; attempted mediation, 462; final triumph, 496. Debreczin, 438. De Laugier, 355. Del Caretto, 177. Della Torre, in 1821, 42-3. Dembinski, made commander, 439; quarrel with Görgei, 452-3; dismissal, 454. Denmark, relations of with Schleswig-Holstein, 164, 371-2; war with Germany, 373-5. Dessewfy, in 1825, 76. Deym, Count, 301, 323. Dresden, 223-5. Durando, Giacomo, conspiracy of, 61; book on Italy, 125-6; demands Constitution, 181. ---- Giovanni, made Papal general, 339-40; denounces Radetzky, 340; relations with Charles Albert and Manin, 345; at Cornuta, 349; defence of Vicenza, 349; surrenders Vicenza, 359. Düsseldorf, resistance to King of Prussia, 412. E. Endlicher, Professor, 234. England, policy of in 1815, 2; "madness of," 49; relations of with Cracow, 131-2; Gagern's feeling to, 233; action in Sicily, 469. Eötvös, controversy with Kossuth, 200; in first Ministry, 279; in deputation to Vienna, 387; retirement, 462. Estates of Bohemia, 208, 253. ---- of Lower Austria, 204, 210; promises of Metternich to, 225; action in March rising, 234-9. ---- of Schleswig-Holstein, 371. Esterhazy in Hungarian Ministry, 279. Ewald, protest in 1837, 92. F. Fabbri, 418. Faster, 255, 260, 320, 331. Favre, Jules, 476. Ferdinand of Austria, accession, 85-6; attitude to Croats, 106; contrasted with Kossuth, 107; feeling of Vienna towards, 206-8, 235, 245-6; March deputation to, 234; struggle with Ministers, 244-5; concessions to Viennese, 246-7; to Bohemia, 290; appeal of Bohemians to, 301-2; attitude in May, 308; treatment of Jellaciç, 310; of Roumanians, 318; Palacky's gratitude to, 322; supposed friendship with St Januarius, 352; return to Vienna, 378; attitude towards rival races, 381-5; treatment of Hungarians, 385, 386-7, 388; second flight, 393; abdication, 415-16; denounced by Hungarians, 460-1. ---- I. of Germany, Bohemian policy, 250; opposition to Turks, 281. ---- II. of Germany, Bohemian policy, 251-2. ---- III. of Germany, Bohemian policy, 251-2. ---- I. of Naples, destroys Sicilian Constitution, 2; influence of Filangieri on, 29; attitude in 1816, 29; in 1820, 82; goes to Laybach, 34-5; treachery of, 39; tyranny, 44. Ferdinand II. of Naples, government of Sicily, 169-70; his birthday, 173; concessions, 177-8; joins Lombard war, 338; jealousy of Charles Albert, 346; May coup d'état, 352-3; re-conquers Sicily, 468-70. ---- of Spain, tyranny, 30; in 1820, 31. ---- of Tuscany, 53. Ferrara, Austrian claim to, 3; first Austrian occupation, 146-50; expulsion of Austrians from, 354; second occupation, 368; third attack on, 466; capture of, 477; vote of, 477. Ferrari, 349. Ferrero, action in 1821, 40. Ficquelmont, 186, 261, 302. Filangieri, 29. Fischhof, on March 13th, 235-9; appeals about Press Law, 304; tries to save Latour, 391-2; at Kremsier, 416. Fiume, 461. Florence, 180, 424-5, 468. Forli, 138, 422. Foscolo, Ugo, early career, 23; writes "Jacopo Ortis," 24; "Il Conciliatore," 26. Fossombroni, his policy, 53-4; effect of his death, 128. France in 1815, 2; Mazzini in, 68-9; sympathy with Poland, 129; relations with Poland, 129; with Cracow, 131; in 1848, 215-18, 221, 225, 256; treatment of Roman Republic, 469; ambassador in Sicily, 469. Francis, Emperor of Austria, relations with Metternich, 1; popularity in Rhine Province, 12; treatment of Hungary, 73, 75; death, 85; relations with Gaj, 99; concessions to Cracow, 130; rebuke of Salzburgers, 206; effect of death, 206; dislike of Jesuits, 211; treatment of Estates of Lower Austria, 240; treatment of Serbs, 283. Francis IV. of Modena, character and policy, 41; treachery, 50, 58; attitude to Charles Albert, 64. ---- V. of Modena, 149-50. ---- of Naples, supposed liberalism, 30; tyranny of, 62. ---- Joseph, Kossuth's hopes from, 227; accession, 416; summons Kremsier Parliament, 416; dissolves it, 417; issues new Constitution, 455; hostility to Hungary, 461; appeals to Russians, 491. Frankfort, Decrees at in 1832, 50, 221. ---- Preparatory Parliament at, 292-7. ---- Committee of Fifty at, 297. ---- riots at, 375-6. ---- Constituent Assembly at, proposed, 232; early action of, 360-3; causes of loss of power, 397; failure in Schleswig-Holstein question, 370-5; attitude of towards Prussian Parliament, 414; offers Crown of Germany to Frederick William, 415; fall of, 484-5. Frankl, note to 399. Frederick II. of Prussia, attitude to German literature, 89. ---- William III. of Prussia, in 1815, 2-3; feeling to Holy Alliance, 7-8; relations with Schmaltz, 10-11; scruples, 16; quarrel with Archbishop of Cologne, 93; character and death, 93-4. ---- William IV. of Prussia, character, 94; relations with Metternich, 163; summons to Estates, 165-6; conduct in March rising, 226, 246-9; treatment of Posen, 370; declares war on Denmark, 373; makes truce, 373-4; appoints Brandenburg, 408; interview with Jacoby, 408-9; dissolves parliament, 413-14; recalls deputies from Frankfort, 484; suppresses Baden rising, 485; _see_ also Prussia, Frankfort, Jacoby. Freyburg, Canton, 160-1. ---- Town, 162. Fröbel, 397. Füster, 234. G. Gabler, 254-5, 258. Gaeta, 422, 425. Gagern, Heinrich von, influence in Darmstadt, 222; at Heidelberg, 283. Gaj, his Illyrian movement, 98-9; his answer to Deak, 100; defeat of his work, 100; in March movement in Vienna, 276; suspected by Greek clergy, 283-4; his attitude to Serbs, 319; his feelings to Italy, 335. Galicia, insurrection of, 1846, 132-4, 140; Maria Theresa's treatment of, 253; April rising in, 306-7; demands in Slav Congress, 326; wish for separation, 327. Galletti, General, 474. ---- Minister, 421. Garibaldi, repulsed by Charles Albert, 342; in Lombardy, 366-7; excluded from Bologna, 419; defeats Zucchi, 464; invited to Sicily, 469; defeats Oudinot, 475-6; defeats Neapolitans, 477; quarrel with Roselli, 481-2; struggle by the Vascello, 482-6; popularity, 485; advice to Assembly, 486; final effort, 487. Gavazzi, 419. Gedeon, General, 444. Genoa, treatment of, by England, 2; in 1821, 42-3; in 1847-8, 180-2; sends volunteers to Lombardy, 337; final insurrection in, 474. Germany, aspirations of, 3; religious feeling in, 5; relations of with Bund, 8-9; Stein's feeling towards, 8-10; discontent in, 12-16; condition of from 1819 to 1840, 90-1; literary and religious movement in, 91-6; question of unity of, 12, 210, 221-3, 226, 232, 236, 238, 248-9, 292-4, 407, 415; relations of to Vienna, 209; to Bohemia, 295-302; feeling in to Italy, 335, 346; relations of with Prussia, 376, 378; effect on, of fall of Vienna, 398, 400; fall of liberties of, 484-5. Germany, South, 218-22, 232. Gervinus, in 1837, 92. Gioberti, writes for "Young Italy," 69; early career, 122-3; "Il Primato," 123-5; quarrel with Jesuits, 122, 125; affected by Pius IX.'s election, 138; plans for restoring Pope, 425. Giskra, 307-8. Gizzi, Cardinal, 140-2. Goegg, 220. Goethe, influence on Foscolo, 24; opinion of Manzoni, 25. Goito. _See_ Battles. Goldmark, on March 13th, 237; tries to reconcile Germans and Bohemians, 325; saves Rieger from violence, 379; tries to save Latour, 391. Görgei, early career, 433-4; made commander, 434; quarrels with Kossuth, 434-9; feelings to Bem, 436; removed from command, 439; quarrel with Dembinski, 452-4; political creed, 435, 458-9; captures Komorn, 490; besieges Pesth, 491; made Dictator, 493; his surrender, 493-4. Görres, 12, 17. Greece, rising in, 46-7, 49. Greek Church, 99, 112, 283-4, 313. Gregory XVI., treatment of Gaj, 99; unpopularity of, 125; Renzi's charges against, 126; state of government at death of, 138-9; Metternich's attitude to, 146; denounces Swiss reformers, 153; reforms proposed to him, 347; Louis Napoleon's insurrection against, 470. Grillo, Giovanni, 171-2. Grimm brothers, in 1837, 92. Guerrazzi, literary leadership, 54; liberalism of, 148; imprisoned, 180; plans for Leopold, 423-4; in provisional government, 423-4; opposes Mazzini, 424-5; opposes Gioberti, 425; failure of his government, 467-8. Guizot, relations with Metternich, 150; policy in Switzerland, 162. H. Hanover, constitution granted, 90; abolished, 91; protest of professors in, 91-2. ---- King of, resists March movement, 226; opposes Frankfort Assembly, 373. Hansemann, 403, 405, 407, 411. Hapsburg. _See_ Austria, house of. Haulik, Bishop, 105. Haynau, 428-9, 489-90. Hecker, causes of popularity, 219-20; attitude of at Heidelberg, 233; effect of insurrection, 376-7. Heidelberg, March meeting at, 232. Herbst, Dr., note to 134. Hermannstadt, importance in Transylvania, 441; treatment by Bem, 449; fall of, 492. Hesse Cassel, March rising in, 222. ---- Darmstadt, March rising in, 222; position of Gagern in, 233. ---- Duke of, his action in Mainz, 361. Hofer, Andrew, 10. Holy Alliance, end of, 50. _See_ also Alexander, Krüdener (Mme de), Frederick William III., Metternich. Honveds, 433. Hormayr, 204. Horn, Uffo, 258. Hoyos, 307. Hrabowsky, 312, 320. Hungary, difference from other countries, 73-5; division of races in, 96, 276, 288; relations of with Croatia, 97, 276-7, 287-8; growth of national feeling, 106-7; "nobles" 102-3; compared with Lombardy, 191; feelings of, for county government, 201-3; relations of, with Vienna, 209, 226-30; Gagern's admiration of, 233; responsible ministry in, 246-7; relations of with Bohemia, 250, 253; treatment of by Ferdinand, 384-7; invasion of by Jellaciç, 388-9; position of after Schwechat, 432-3; division of parties in, 433-9; later struggles in, 433-63; relations of with Venice, 489-90; final effort of, 490-2; fall of, 493-4. Hungary, Diet of, in 1825, 75-6; in 1832, 81; in 1840, 100; in 1843, 102; in 1849, 439, 441. Hye, share in debating Society, 207; denounces annexation of Cracow, 212; hesitations in March, 234-5; appealed to by Windischgrätz, 245; attitude about press law, 303-4. ---- House of Magnates of, their concession to Croats, 105. I. Illyrian Movement, 99, 283. Imola, conspiracy in, 464. _See_ also Pius IX. Innspruck, 306, 310, 393. Inquisition, 465-6. Istria, influence of Venice in, 97. Italy, conquerors' promises to, 20-1; condition of, in 1820-30, 52-3; question of unity of, 56-8, 170, 190, 419, 423; contrasted with Hungary, 117-18; position of Charles Albert in, 62-4; relations of with Switzerland, 157, 159; feelings of other races to, 335-6; separateness of struggle in, 336; feeling of Frankfort parliament to, 362-3; of Viennese to, 387, 389-90; feelings in towards Roumanians, 439; final struggles in, 463-88. ---- Young. _See_ Mazzini. J. Jacoby defies King of Prussia, 409; interview with Blumenthal, 412-13. Jahn, 14-15, 16, 94. Jancu, career in Transylvania, 443; suspicions of Kossuth, 457; Kossuth's negotiations with, 492. Jellaciç, elected Ban, 288; in April and May, 310; advances to Serbs, 318-19; feelings to Italy, 335; feelings of Viennese to, 380; position in June, 383; interview with Batthyanyi, 383-4; change of position, 384; invades Hungary, 388; Dictator, 388; his defeats, 390; marches against Vienna, 393; publishes Constitution of 1849, 457. Jesuits, attacks on in Saxony, 95; Gioberti's quarrel with, 122, 125; influence at Rome, 126; in Tuscany, 128, 148; in Switzerland, 156, 157; expulsion of from Rome demanded, 178; from Turin, 181; hatred of in Vienna, 211; in Bavaria, 222; Anfossi's hostility to, 263; attacks on in Brescia, 268; propaganda of against Greek Church, 282; hatred of Rossi, 419. John, Arch Duke. _See_ Arch Duke. Joseph I. of Germany, his treatment of Serbs, 282. ---- II. of Germany, his policy, 5; his agrarian reforms, 81; Germanising attempts of, 89-90; reforms in Transylvania, 110-11; policy in Bohemia, 253; denounced by Hungarians, 460. Jozipoviç, 104-5. Jungmann, 254. K. Kikinda. _See_ Velika Kikinda. Kiss, victory over Serbs, 385-6; struggle with Russians, 491-2. Klapka, captures Komorn, 490; his defence of it, 494. Klausenburg, 316, 441, 444, 446. Knicsanin, 320, 385. Kollar, 254, 283. Kolowrat, relations with Metternich, 206, 241; founds College of Censorship, 214; mistakes in March, 231-2; attitude to Bohemians, 260; in March Ministry, 302. Komorn, 490, 494. Kossuth, 51; character and early career, 83-4; imprisoned, 85; released, 86; starts "Pesti Hirlap," 100; attacks Slavs, 101-2; championship of Jozipoviç, 105; contrasted with Ferdinand, 107; sympathy with Poland, 129; dispute with Eötvös, 200-1; growth of power, 201-3; programme of reform, 201-2; speech of March 3rd, 226-9; its effects, 229, 232, 236, 238; his welcome in Vienna, 246; position of in March Ministry, 279-80; attitude of to Serbs, 284; to Croats, 287-8; to Ferdinand in May, 309; suspected by Bohemians, 332; inconsistencies about Italy, 336; feelings of Viennese towards, 380, 384; treatment of Croatian army, 384; urges advance of Hungarians, 395-6; position after Schwechat, 432; appoints Görgei, 433; quarrels with Görgei, 433-9; relations with Bem, 436; order in October, 441; relations with Csanyi, 449; appoints Vetter, 454; issues Declaration of Independence, 458-62; causes of power, 462; relations with Manin, 489-90; final struggles, 490-2; fall, 493. Kotzebue, 14, 15. Kremsier, Parliament at, 416-17, 454-5. Kriny, 171-2. Krüdener, Mme de, 7. Kübeck in March ministry, 302. Kudler, 212. Kukuljeviç, 276-7. Kuranda, edits "Grenz Boten," 208; argues with Bohemians, 299; appeals against Press Law, 304. L. La Farina, 170, 172, 176. Lago Maggiore, 367. La Masa, 174, 176. Lamberg, 386, 388. Lambruschini, 138, 141, 145. Latour, Governor at Vienna, 240, 242. ---- War Minister, his intrigues, 381-3, 386, 440; sends Lamberg to Pesth, 386; his plot discovered, 389; sends troops to Hungary, 390-1; his death, 381-2. Laybach. _See_ Congress of. Lazzaroni, 353. Le Blanc, Colonel, 473. Leghorn, literary movement in, 54-6; revolution in, 180; Mazzini in, 424. Legion, of Vienna students, 302, 396, 399-400. ---- of Prague, 321. Leipzig, sympathy of, with Dahlmann, 92; riot at in 1845, 95-6; March rising in, 223-5. _See_ also University. Lemberg, contrasted with Prague, 333. Lemenyi, 314. Leo XII., 65. Leopold I., Emperor of Germany, treatment of Illyrians, 99; of Transylvania, 110; of Serbs, 281. ---- II., Emperor of Germany, Bohemian policy, 253; concessions to Serbs, 283. ---- I., Grand Duke of Tuscany, contrasted with his successors, 53. ---- II., Grand Duke of Tuscany, policy, 53; treatment of Renzi, 128; banishes D'Azeglio, 129; becomes a reformer, 148; relations with Lucca and Modena, 149-50; grants Constitution, 179-80; declares war on Austria, 338; motives of action, 423-4; flight, 424; recalled, 468. Lesseps, 479-81. Libelt, 321. Löhner, his proposal in March, 240; denounces Latour, 389; at Kremsier, 416. Lola Montez, 222. Lombardy, effect on of Napoleon's wars, 19; weakness of Central Congregation, 21; condition in 1815, 22; Carbonarism in, 30; state in 1821, 44-6; Menz's plans for, 72-3; in 1846, 143-4; government of, 184-6; grievances of, 189-192; February edict in, 214-15; March risings in, 260-9; war in, 336-68; Austrian treachery in, 426; Charles Albert's last war in, 428-9. _See_ also Nazari. Louis, Arch Duke. _See_ Arch Duke. ---- Napoleon. _See_ Buonaparte. ---- Philippe, his conservatism, 50; attitude in 1833, 60; policy in Switzerland, 153, 154, 159. _See_ also Guizot. Lucca, political position, 52; relations of with Tuscany, 149, 150. Lüders, General, 448. Luzern, 152, 153-4, 156, 160, 162. Lychnowsky, his death, 376. M. Maestri, 366. Magyars, their relations with other races, 96-7; Metternich's hostility to them, 99; their hostility to Croats, 99-102, 107; 1st settlement in Hungary, 108; position in Transylvania, 108, 114; relations with Roumanians, 110, 112, 442-3; opposition to Roth, 115-16; relations with Slovaks, 276; with Slavs, 278, 281-2, 284-6, 310-20; attitude in May, 309; quarrel with Bohemians, 332, 387-8; attitude towards Italy, 335-6; relations with Vienna, 387-9, 395, 397. Mailath, Anton, 86, 201, 229. Mainz, treatment of by Prussians, 361, 404. Malghera, 489-90. Malmö, truce of, 373-5; its effect in Berlin, 407. Mamiani, Terenzio, his banishment, 61; influence at Paris, 123; refuses amnesty, 141; made Minister, 348; policy and fall, 417-18; made Foreign Minister, 421-2; attitude after Pope's fall, 423; interview with Lesseps, 479. Manara, in rising in Milan, 269; difficulties in Lombard war, 337; march to Civita Vecchia, 471; controversy with Oudinot, 471-2; at defence of Rome, 474-7; death, 486. Manin, promotes railway with Piedmont, 137; his petitions, 193-5; imprisonment, 196; its effect, 270; his release, 271; in March rising, 271-4; influenced by Venetian traditions, 343-4; relations with Durando, 345; welcomes Pepe, 354-5; resists fusion, 358; tries to help Vicenza, 358-9; resignation, 359-60; recall, 367; final struggle, 488-90; surrender, 494; his stone, 494-5. Mannheim, 221. Mantua, in March rising, 340; captured by Radetzky, 341; fortification of, 348; movements of Radetzky about, 355. Manzoni, career and aims, 24-5; growth of influence, 54. Margherita, Solaro della, opposed to Gioberti, 123; politics, 137; sympathy with Sonderbund, 157. Maria Theresa, agrarian reforms of, 81; treatment of Transylvania, 110, 115; of Bohemia, 253; of Serbs, 282-3. Marinovich, 272. Maros Vasarhely, 108, 444. Maximilian. _See_ Arch Duke. Mayerhoffer, 386. Mazzini, 51; early career, 55-6; attitude to Carbonari, 56-7; political creed, 57-9; first banishment, 59; first insurrection, 60; letter to Charles Albert, 63-4; personal influence, 66-7; contrasted with other revolutionists, 67-8; founds Young Italy, 68-9; invasion of Savoy, 69-71; impression on Metternich, 71; relation with Brothers Bandiera, 118-20; sympathy with Poland, 129; effect of on working classes, 191; relations with Tommaseo, 194; appeal for Charles Albert, 337-8; visit to Milan, 342; appealed to by Lombard Government, 349; advice rejected, 349-50; protest against fusion, 350-1; opposes May insurrection, 356-7; plan for defence of Milan, 365-6; last struggle in Lombardy, 367; in Leghorn, 424-5; attitude to Charles Albert, 427; work as Triumvir, 464; warned by Ledru Rollin, 470; urges resistance to French, 473; feeling of Lesseps to, 480; repels Corcelles, 485; his final advice to Assembly, 486. Mazzoni, 424. Medici, last effort in Lombardy, 367; defends Vascello, 483-6. Menotti, Ciro, 50. Mensdorff, 331. Menz, 71-3, 157. Meesenhauser, 396. Messina, in 1820, 34; Ferdinand's visit to, 169; September rising in, 171. Meszaros, in Batthyanyi's Ministry, 279; rebukes Görgei, 453; supersedes Görgei, 492. Metternich, Prince, rise to power, 1; system of government, 2; feeling to Alexander, 3-4; to religion, 5-7; opposition to Stein, 8-10; to S. German States, 13; a "moral power," 15; triumph in 1819, 16-18; surprise at movement of 1820, 32; treatment of Lombardy in 1821, 44; of Confalonieri, 44-6; attitude to Greece, 46-7; opinion of Canning, 48; change towards England, 48-9; triumph in 1832, 50-1; policy towards Tuscany, 53; opinion of Mazzini, 71; feelings to Hungary, 73; quarrel with Szechenyi, 78; defeat in 1839, 86-7; attitude to Gaj, 99; denounces Grand Duke of Tuscany, 128; treatment of Cracow, 134; feeling to Charles Albert, 135-6; treatment of Canton Ticino, 136; occupation of Ferrara, 146; attitude towards Switzerland, 151-2, 157, 162, 167, 214; feeling about Jesuits, 157; relations with Guizot, 159; relations with Frederick William IV., 163, 165; attitude to Schleswig-Holstein, 163-5; position at end of 1847, 167; concessions to Lombardy, 199; opinion of Italy, 200; attack on Hungarian County Government, 201-3; how affected by Ferdinand's accession, 207; attack on Grenz Boten, 208; causes of unpopularity, 211; oppression of Lombardy, 214; attitude to S. Germany, 218-19; alarm at French Revolution, 225; hopes to crush Hungary, 228; vague promises of, 231-2; resistance to March rising, 240-1; demands for removal of, 225, 230, 234-5; his fall, 243-4; opinion of Serbs, 382. Metternich, Princess, her opinion of Pius IX., 141; of Frederick William IV., 166. ---- Germain, 375. Mieroslawski, in March rising, 248; enthusiasm for in Berlin, 370; in Sicily, 469; in Baden, 485. Mihacsfalva, 317. Milan, grain riots in 1847, 144; demonstration at, 146-7; government of in February 1848, 182-6; Provincial Congregation, 189; smoking riots, 196-8; Metternich's concessions to, 199; effect of Sicilian revolution in, 199-200; March rising, 262-9; government of, in Lombard war, 336-7; Mazzini's visit to, 342, 349-50; contrasted with Venice, 343-4; May rising in, 356-7; fall of, 365-7. Military frontier, 281, 319, 455. Minto, Lord, 147, 177. Modena, political position, 52; Austrian occupation, 150; insurrection in, 337; defended by Durando, 345; Radetzky's policy in, note to 380. _See_ also Francis IV. and V. Moga, General, hesitations, 396; defeat, 396-7; deposition, 433. Moltke, 374. Moncenigo, 195-6. Montanara, 365. Montanelli, promotes unity in Italy, 138; brings pressure on Pius IX., 148; his scheme of constituent Assembly, 419; joins provisional Government, 424; offered place in Triumvirate, 468. Montecuccoli, 236-9. Monti, Vincenzo, 22, 23. Moravia, relations of with Bohemia, 258, 289, 290, 291; demands of in Slav Congress, 326. Moro, Domenico, 119. Möring, 213. Murat, 21, 29, 32. N. Naples, Carbonari in, 4, 29, 30; struggles for freedom in, 28-9; tyranny in, 169; relations of with Sicily, 169-71, 469; insurrection of in 1848, 177; riots in, 338; coup d'état in, 351-3; struggle of with Rome, 477. ---- Kings of. _See_ Ferdinand, Francis. Napoleon. _See_ Buonaparte. Nassau, revolution of '48, 222-3. Nazari, 186-90. Neuhaus, 155. Neusatz, 284-5. Nicholas of Russia, 49. Nopcsa, 314. Nota, Alberto, 37. Novara. _See_ Battles. Nugent, General, his promises to Italy, 21; his appointment in Naples, 29; his choice of Pepe, 32; his invasion of Venetia, 348; attack on Brescia, 428; death, 429. O. Ochsenbein, 159. O'Donnell, 261, 264; his carriage, 266. Offenburg (meeting at), 166, 220. Olivieri, 356. Olmütz, 415, 416. Opizzoni, opinion of smoking riots, 198; saved by Bolognese, 369. Orsini, preserves order, 464-5. Oudinot, expedition to Civita Vecchia, 470, 472-3; interview with Manara, 471-2; defeated by Garibaldi, 475; his treachery, 480, 481, 482-3; capture of Rome, 487. P. Pachta, 183-4. Padua, 197; relations of with Venice, 344; Durando's wish to assist, 345; desire of for fusion, 358; fall of, 359. Palacky, revives Bohemian language, 254; refusal to Committee of Fifty, 297; speech in Prague Committee, 298-9; summons Slav Congress, 301; speech in Congress, 321-3; feast of reconciliation, 325; action in June rising, 330; accused of plot, 332. Palermo, in 1820, 33-4; in 1847, 170-1; in January, 1848, _see_ Sicily; bombardment of, 469. Palffy, 194, 271, 273. Palma, Count, 40. Palmanuova, fall of, 359. Palmerston, protest about Cracow, 134; policy in Italy, 147; opposition to Metternich, 158; policy in Switzerland, 162; treatment of Manin, 488. Papacy, Metternich's respect for independence of, 50; its effect on Charles Albert, 65; Gioberti's view of, 123-4. Pareto, 338. Parini, Giuseppe, 23. Paris, contrasted with Palermo and Presburg, Preface, 2; treatment of Young Italy in, 68; Polish centre in, 70; revolution in, _see_ France; Mazzini's address from, 337; Rossi's influence in, 418. Parma, political position of, 52; occupied by Austrians, 150; throws off Austrian yoke, 347; defended by Durando, 345. Passalacqua, 338. Pavia, 189, 197, 427. Peasantry, of Poland, 80. ---- of Hungary, 80-3. Pepe, Guglielmo, chosen leader in 1820, 31-2; defeated in 1821, 42; heads Lombard expedition, 338; recalled by Ferdinand, 334; welcomed by Manin, 354. ---- Florestano, 33. Perczel, his quarrel with Görgei, 434. Perthes, 91. Peschiera, 349, 355, 358. Pesth. _See_ Buda-Pesth. Petöfy, 278. Pfuel, General von, 247, 370, 404. Piedmont, Gioberti's view of its position, 124-5; relations of with Ticino, 135-6; share of in Lombard war, _see_ Charles Albert; league of princes against, 346; fusion of with Lombardy, 350-1, 356; fusion of with Venetia, 359-60; relations of with Rome, 427. Pillersdorf, concessions to Bohemians, 289; in March Ministry, 302-4; advice in May, 308; his fall, 378. Pisa. _See_ University. Pius VII., his protest against Treaty of Vienna, 3; effect on Papacy of early career, 65, 124, 126. Pius VIII., 65. Pius IX., election, 140; amnesty, 141; popular belief in, 142-3; reforms, 145; conspiracy against him, 145; uncertainties, 147; effect of his reforms, 169; concessions at end of 1847, 179; hesitations, 335; dragged into Lombard war, 338; confusion of his position, 339; Encyclical of April 29th, 346-7; accepts Mamiani, 348; suspicions of King of Naples, 354; Radetzky's alarm at his reforms, 358; attitude in June 1848, 417-18; appoints Rossi, 418; accepts democratic Ministry, 421; flight to Gaeta, 422; denounces Charles Albert, 425. Poerio, Carlo, 177. Poland, insurrection of 1830, 50; relations of exiles with Italy, 69-71; weakness of, 80; feelings of Liberals to, 129; proposals about in Frankfort Parliament, 306; its share in Slav Congress, 321, 323, 327. Pollet, 243. Portugal, 48. Posen, Blum's feeling to, 129; March movement in, 248-9; relations of with Prussia, 296, 370; with Frankfort Parliament, 362; cruelties of Pfuel in, 404, 405; concessions to, 408. Pozzo di Borgo, 4. Pragmatic Sanction, 97. Prague, in the 17th century, 252; March movement in, 254-60; race difficulties in, 289-90; meeting of Congress at, 320-8; June rising in, 328-33; effect of fall, 332-3. Presburg, influence of contrasted with Paris, preface 2; policy of contrasted with Buda-Pesth, 278-9. Press, Austrian law on, 193-4; demands for freedom of, 195, 212, 220, 221, 224, 236, 305, 371; concessions of in Vienna, 244, 303-4; in Hungary, 246, 280; in Berlin, 247; censorship of, 214, 224, 225, 231. Prussia, position in Europe, 7; hatred of in Rhine Province, 12; position of in Germany in 1837, 93; policy of to Cracow, 130; rivalry of with Frankfort, 361, 375; relations of with Posen, 370; action of in Danish war, 371-5; change of relations with Germany, 376, 496; constitutional struggles in, 402-14. ---- King of. _See_ Frederick William III. and IV. Prussia, Prince William of, 370, 404, 407. Puchner, relations of with Roumans, 440-1; campaign in Transylvania, 442-6; negotiates with Russians, 447-8; deposed, 463. Pulazky, 229, 254, 389, 395, 436. R. Raab, 437, 490. Radetzky, appealed to by Duke of Modena, 150; threatens Charles Albert, 182; Milanese opinion of, 184; hostility of to Lombard clergy, 196; organizes smoking massacres, 197-8; proclamation by, 198-9; in March rising, 265-6, 269; accepted as champion of Empire, 335; retreat from Milan, 337; denounced by Durando, 340; recaptures Mantua, 341; fortifies it, 348; at Curtatone, 355; at Goito, 356; share in May conspiracy, 357; captures Vicenza, 359; defeats Charles Albert, 363-4; reconquers Lombardy, 367; invades Roman States, 368; policy of in Modena, note to 380; treachery of in Lombardy, 426; final struggle against Venice, 490. Ragusa, 98. Rainieri, 182, 184, 188, 198. Rajaciç, timidity, 286; summons Serb Assembly, 287; conduct in Serb Assembly, 311; elected Patriarch, 312; attitude to Croats, 319; struggle with Stratimiroviç, 385-6; checks opposition to Austria, 457. Rakoczi, 281-2. See note also. Ramorino, 70-1, 428. Recsey, 388-9. Regis, Colonel, in 1821, 43; in 1831, 60. Renzi, Pietro, his insurrection, 125-8. Republicans, Italian, in Lombard war, 342; attitude of in Milan, 356-8, 365; government of Rome by, 464-6; defence of Rome by, 473-87. Republicans, South German, 232-3, 361, 376-8, 485. Reichenberg, rivalry with Prague, 291. Restelli, 366. Rhine Province, Prussian tyranny in, 12; in March rising, 248; Socialism in, 403; relations of with France, 404. Ridolfi, 148. Rieger, summons Slav Congress, 301; accused of plot, 332; treatment of in Vienna Parliament, 379; at Kremsier, 416. Riego, Raphael, his insurrection, 30-1. Rilliet, General, 161. Rimini, insurrection of, 127-8. Rodbertus, 407. Rollin, Ledru, warns Mazzini, 470; opposes expedition to Rome, 476; his insurrection, 484. Romagna, insurrection in, 128. Roman States, movement in for Constituent Assembly, 422-3; government of by Triumvirate, 464-7; reconquest of by Austrians, 485. _See_ also Pius VII., Gregory XVI., Saffi, Ciceruacchio. Rome, opening of Parliament in, 417; rising in after Rossi's death, 421; Mazzini in, 427; Triumvirate in, 464-7; relations of with Tuscany, 467-8; French expedition against, 470-3; siege of, 473-7, 481-4; fall of, 486-8. _See_ also Pius IX., Mazzini, Ciceruacchio. Ronge, 94-5, 221. Roselli, 481-2. Rossi, influence at Paris, 122; share in election of Pius IX., 140; relations of with Guizot, 159; appointed Minister, 418; policy, 419; death, 420-1. Roth, Stephen, his pamphlet, 113-14; emigration scheme, 115-16; government in Transylvania, 445; death, 450-2. Roumanians, conquered by Szekler, 108; position in Transylvania, 110; effect on of Joseph II.'s reforms, 110-11; Libellus Wallachorum, 111-12; treatment of by Schaguna, 113; defence of by Roth, 114; May meeting, 312-15; growing sympathy with Saxons, 316; insurrection of, 317-18; struggles of in September and October, 439-46, 448; feelings of to Constitution of 1849, 456; Kossuth's concessions to, 457. Rovigo, relations of with Venice, 344. Ruffini, Jacopo, his suicide, 69. Ruggiero, Settimo, 176, 469-70. Russia, position of in Europe, 7, 10; policy of to Cracow, 130; hatred of in Vienna, 238; feeling of German Liberals to, 296; of Palacky to, 297; fear of in Berlin, 404; invades Transylvania, 448; defeat of by Bem, 449; conquers Transylvania, 491-2. ---- Czar of. _See_ Alexander, Nicholas. Ruthenians, demands of in Slav Congress, 323. S. St. Gallen, 152, 158. Saaz, rivalry with Prague, 291. Saffi, Aurelio, action in time of Gregory XVI., 138; appeal for a Constituent Assembly, 432; made Triumvir, 464; helps in preserving order, 464-5. Salmen, 315. Salvotti, 46. Sand, Ludwig, 15. Santa Rosa, Santorre di, his policy in 1821, 36; relations with Charles Albert, 40; policy, 42-3; final defeat, 43. ---- Pietro di, 181. Sardinia, King of. _See_ Victor Amadeus, Victor Emmanuel, Charles Felix, Charles Albert. Sardinia, position of. _See_ Piedmont. Sarner Bund, 152-3. Savelli, 139. Savoy, invasion of in 1834, 69-71; House of, _see_ Victor Amadeus, &c. Saxons, position of in Transylvania, 108-10, 441; relations of to Roumanians, 110, 112, 444-5; treatment of by Magyars, 114-15; protest against absorption, 315-16; vote on that subject, 317; relations of with Puchner, 445; application of to Russia, 448; treatment of by Csanyi, 449-52. Saxony, King of, in 1815, 2. ---- Prussian claim to, 3; position of in 1837, 92; reform movement in, 95-6; revolution of 1848 in, 223-5. Schaguna, his work for Roumanians, 113; share in May meeting, 314-15; attempt to check Roumans, 318; relations with Puchner, 445; appeal to Russia, 448. Scharnhorst, 11. Schauffer, 398. Schill, 11. Schiller, on German literature, 89. Schilling, insults Bohemians, 298-9. Schleswig-Holstein, question of in 1846, 163-5; in 1848, 371-5; effect of in Prussia, 404-7. Schmalz, his pamphlet, 11; his honours, 12. Schmerling, 317, 496. Schuselka, his pamphlet, 208; demand for his expulsion, 208; appeal against Press law, 304; tries to reconcile Germans and Bohemians, 325; speech to Magyar deputation, 387-8. Schütte, organizes April demonstration, 304-5. Schwarzenberg, 268-9. Schwytz, 152-3. Sciva, 171-2. Sedlnitzky, 185, 204, 207, 212, 214; his fall, 247. Serbs, effect of their entry into Hungary, 97-8; in Buda-Pesth, 277; demands of in March 1848, 278, 280, 284; treatment of in March and April 1848, 284-5; movement for independence, 286-7; May meeting of, 311-12; May insurrection, 319, 320; demands of in Slav Congress, 323; Metternich's opinion of, 382; changed character of movement, 85-6; feeling of to Constitution of 1849, 455-6; influence of Rajaciç over, 457. Sicily, constitution destroyed, 2; attitude of in 1820, 33-4; reconquest of, 44; effect of insurrection, 167; Neapolitan government of, 168-70; insurrection in January 1848, 171-7; offers throne to Duke of Genoa, 346-52; fall of, 468-70. Sigel, 485. Silesia, Prussian, effect of famine in, 166; March rising in, 248; general condition of, 402-3; Roman Catholics in, 412. ---- Austrian, relations of with Bohemia, 258, 289, 290. Silvio Pellico, 26. Simon of Breslau, action in Frankfort riots, 375-6. Sismondi, 26, 69. Sladkowsky, 323, 328. Slavonia, relations of with Croatia, 97-8; centre of Serb movement, 280-4. Slavs, their position in Hungary, 101; attempts to Magyarise, 101-2; in March 1848, 276; relations of with Germany, 296; Congress of, 300-1, 320-8. ---- Southern, connection between, 98-9. Slovaks, relations of with Bohemia, 254; demands of in March 1848, 276; in Slav Congress, 326; relations of with Ferdinand, 461. Slovenes, demands of in March 1848, 276; in Slav Congress, 327. Smolka, tries to save Latour, 391. Socialism, at Frankfort, 294-5; at Vienna, 305, 389; at Berlin, 403; later rise of, 496. Solothurn, 152. Sommaruga, 207. Sonderbund, 155, 159, 160; war of, 160-3. Sophia, Arch Duchess. _See_ Arch Duchess. Spain, popular feeling in, 4, 5; rule of in Lombardy, 20; rising in 1820, 30-1; French invasion of in 1822, 48. Spaur, 182, 188-9, 261. Speri, Tito, 428. Stabile, Mariano, 176. Stände. _See_ Estates. Statella, General, 354. Stein, influence on Czar, 4; opposition to Metternich, 8-10; loss of power, 10; attitude towards Wartburg demonstration, 15; zeal for constitution, 16. Stephen. _See_ Arch Dukes. Sterbini, denounces Rossi, 419; Rossi's feeling to, 420; appointed Minister, 421; in provisional government, 423; opposition to Roselli, 482. Stratimiroviç, character and position, 286; burns Crnojeviç's letter, 311; finds allies for Serbs, 312, 319; overthrow by Rajaciç, 385-6; counteracted by Rajaciç, 482. Strobach, 323, 392. Struve, early efforts of, 219-21; at Heidelberg, 233; his fifteen proposals, 294-5; heads September rising, 377-8. Stuttgart, 485. _See_ also Würtemberg. Suplikaç, 312, 386. Switzerland, struggles in, 151-63; attacks of Austria on, 214; effect of on Baden, 220. Swornost, 308-9, 321, 323, 328. Szabò, 491. Szaffarik, work for Slovaks, 254; effect on Serbs, 283; summons Slav Congress, 301; in Slav Congress, 321; action in June rising, 330. Szechenyi, in 1825, 75-6; political position, 77; quarrel with Metternich, 78; effect of his movement in Croatia, 98; championship of Slavs, 102-3; relations with Batthyanyi, 202; opposition to Kossuth, 203, 246, 279; madness, 462. Szegedin, 316. Szeklers, position in Transylvania, 108-9; attitude to Roumanians, 110; appealed to by Magyars, 316; collision of with Roumans, 317-18, 440; opposition to Puchner, 441; appealed to by Roumans, 442; cruelties, 444; Bem's relations with, 447; resistance of to Russians, 491-2. Szemere, his Press law, 280. Szent-Tomas, 385. T. Taaffe, opposition to Pillersdorf, 304. Tatischeff, 47. Teleki, Governor of Transylvania, 315. Thun, Count Leo, controversy with Pulszky, 254; joins National Committee, 301; threatens Swornost, 323; appeals to Windischgrätz, 324; imprisoned, 329-30. ---- Count Matthias, summons Slavonic Congress, 301. Thurgau, 152, 155. Thurn, General, 490. Ticino, Canton, relations with Piedmont, 135-7, 342; for free trade, 144; attacked by Uri, 160. Tommaseo, his petitions, 193-4; early career, 194; arrest and release, 270-1; tries to help Vicenza, 358; opposes fusion, 359-60. Torres, 337. Torresani, 182-3, 188, 197, 244, 265, 267. Transylvania, position of its Diet, 79; Diet dissolved in 1832, 83; Diet restored in 1839, 86; geographical position of, 107-8; ethnology of, 108-9; Roth's view of, 114; effect on Hungary, 281-2; position of Roumanians in, 313; loss of independence, 316-17; later struggles in, 439-52; conquest of by Russians, 491-2. Treviso, 344, 359. Trieste, Italian attack on, 360. Trojan, 255, 260. Tugend Bund, 11, 129. Turansky, 327, 332. Turin, in February 1848, 181-2. _See_ Santa Rosa, University. Turkey, hostility of House of Austria to, 281; flight of Hungarian leaders to, 494. Tuscany, special position of, 52-4; Guerrazzi's hopes for, 423-4; rising in 1849, 424-5; failure of movement in, 467-8. Tyrol, Italian, 341, 343, 345, 363. ---- German, 266, 267. _See_ Innspruck. Tyssowsky, 132. U. Udine, relations of with Venice, 344; fall of, 348. Universities, their effect on revolutionary movement, 38. ---- of Germany, 14-16. University, of Berlin, 404. ---- of Göttingen, in 1837, 92. ---- of Heidelberg, 164-5. ---- of Leipzig, Slavonic feeling in, 98. ---- of Munich, 222, 259. ---- of Padua, closing of, 199. ---- of Pavia, closing of, 199. ---- of Pisa, 148, 355. ---- of Prague, 258-9, 308-9, 321, 324, 328, 330. ---- of Turin, in 1821, 38-9; in 1848, 337. University, of Vienna, 212, 230, 233-5, 302-4, 305, 307. ---- of Zurich, 153. Unruh, von, struggle with Brandenburg, 409-10; attitude at Brandenburg, 413; effect of his action, 413. Urban, 440. Urbarium, 81. Urbino, 356-7. Uri, 160. Utrecht, Peace of, its effect in Lombardy, 20. V. Varga, Catherine, 113. Vay, 441. Velika Kikinda, effect of riot at, 285-6. Venetia, compared with Lombardy, 192; relations with Venice, 344-5; struggle in, 348-9, 359; fusion of with Piedmont, 359-60. Venice, influence in Dalmatia and Istria, 97; trade of with Piedmont, 135; character of before revolution, 192; movements in, 193-6; March rising in, 270-4, 343; contrasted with Milan, 343-4; relations with other cities, 343-5; Pepe welcomed at, 354-5; vote of fusion at, 359-60; recalls Manin, 367; sympathy of with Bologna, 369; feeling in towards Pius IX., 464; towards Louis Napoleon, 470; final struggle of, 488-90; surrender of, 494. _See_ also Buonaparte (Charles Lucien), Manin. Verona, transference of Viceroy to, 199; Radetzky's relations with, 341, 355, 364. _See_ also Congress. Vetter, 454. Vicenza, relations of with Venice, 344; defence of, 349; fall of, 359; Austrian treachery in, 426. Victor Amadeus, King of Sardinia, his relations with Austria, 26-7. Victor Emmanuel I., King of Sardinia, protest in 1815, 3; his relations with Austria, 27; his despotism, 27-8; attitude in 1820, 35-6; abdication, 41. Victor Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, afterwards King of Italy, wounded at Goito, 356; accession to throne of Piedmont, 429. Vienna, effect of on Lombardy, 189-90; Metternich's government of, 204-8; effect on of Ferdinand's accession, 206-8; double position of, 209; movements in, 210-14, 225-6; March rising in, 229-47; its effect in Bohemia, 259; in Milan, 262; in Venice, 271; relations of with Prague, 325-6; July Parliament in, 378-80; relations of with Hungary, 380, 384, 387; with Bohemia, 379, 392; with Italy, 379-80, 387; October rising in, 390-7; fall of, 397-9; effect of fall on Prussia, 408. ---- Concluding Act of, 17-18. ---- Decrees of 1834, 90, 221. ---- Treaty of, 3, 8, 17, 130, 146, 149, 151, 155, 160, 164. _See_ also Congress. Vilagos, 493-4. Villamarina, 135. W. Waizen, declaration of, 438-9. Wallachia, rising in in 1821, 46-7. Wallacks. _See_ Roumanians. Warsaw, trade with Cracow, 130; insurrection in, 131. Wartburg, Feast of, 14-15. Weimar, Duke of, his policy, 13-16. Welden, General, besieges Bologna, 368-9; cruelty of in Pavia, 426. Wellington, his opinion of Navarino, 49; small effect of his rule, 50. Wesselenyi, position and influence, 79; speech at Presburg, 83; imprisonment and its results, 85-6; appeal to Szeklers, 316; joins deputation to Vienna, 387; retirement from politics, 462. Willisen, General von, 370. Wimpffen, General, 478. Windischgrätz, made commandant of Vienna, 240; proposed Dictatorship of, 240-1, 244-5; protest against deposition of Metternich, 243; announcement on March 22nd, 247; irritation of Bohemians with, 323-4, 328; attitude in June rising in Prague, 329-32; besieges Vienna, 395-7; defeats Görgei, 437-8; his offer to Görgei, 438; rejects mediation in Hungary, 462; military opinion of his generalship, 463. Workmen's movements, in Vienna, 239-40, 305, 389-90; in Berlin, 247, 402, 403, 405-6, 408; in Prague, 323, 328; in Silesia, 402, 405, 406. Wrangel, 410-11. Würtemberg, first two Kings of, 13; protest of against Concluding Act, 18; Roth's relations with, 115; resistance of to Metternich, 218; March rising in, 221-2; quarrel with Baden, 377. _See_ also Stuttgart. Y. Ypsilanti, 40. Z. Zay, his circular, 101-2. Zichy, Governor of Venice, 272, 273. ---- Hungarian Count, his execution, 434. Zitz, action of in Frankfort riots, 375. Zollverein, 93, 210. Zucchi, recalled to Milan, 366; treatment of Garibaldi, 419; defeated by Garibaldi, 464. Zug, Canton, 162. Zurich, 152, 154, 156. _See_ also University. CHISWICK PRESS:--C. WHITTINGHAM AND CO., TOOKS COURT, CHANCERY LANE. * * * * * Transcriber's note: Many old spellings have been preserved; in particular, the spelling of many Slavic names with a ç has been left unchanged. Obvious misspellings and punctuation errors have been corrected, and dashes representing ranges have been regularised as endashes (-) rather than emdashes (--). Additionally: "Raizenstadt" and "Raitzenstadt"; "Voyvodschaft" and "Voyvodeschaft"; "Windischgräts" and "Windischgrätz"; "Buda Pesth" and "Buda-Pesth"; "Krudener" and "Krüdener"; "Pressburg" and "Presburg"; "Gaëta" and "Gaeta"; and "Crnojevic" and "Crnojeviç" have in each case been regularised to the latter form. Instances of a.m. and p.m. in small capitals on page 482 have been regularised to lower case ("from 2 a.m. till 6 p.m."). All references to Madame de Krüdener have been regularised as "Mme"; this was the form used in the main text, except that in this plain text version the superscript typography of "me" has been removed. The index entry for de Krüdener on page 505 has been moved to fit the alphabetical order. Both "Daniele Manin" and "Daniel Manin" were used in the text and have not been changed. A duplicated word on page 319 ("disputed the right of of the Serbs to stay in Hungary") has been removed.