I am the most gracious Baroness’s most obedient
Baron Detlev Liliencron
Captain retired
Well, between the date of that letter and our meeting in Hamburg three years had passed, during which the most gracious Baroness had chosen “Away with weapons” as a watchword, which probably went against the grain of the most obedient and conservative Captain retired. None the less we got along together all right.
From Hamburg we went home by way of Berlin again, but stopped there only from one train to another. During this delay we conferred once more with Dr. M. Hirsch, who promised that he would do his best to establish a Berlin Peace Union.
I have not yet told of one encounter which took place in those Berlin days. Because it was the one that made the deepest and most lasting impression on me, because it remained interwoven with my further thought and activity, I have reserved speaking of it to the end.
On the forenoon of the eighteenth of March—it was the day after my reading—we made the acquaintance of a man with whom we had already had intellectual relations for a long time,—Moritz von Egidy. I would remind the reader of his letter of November, 1891, which I quoted among the other documents addressed to me on the occasion of the Congress at Rome. Now I was to see face to face the man who had offered to join with me in “putting his hand to the latch of the gate that admits us to the age of completion.”
One forenoon during our stay in Berlin—I had just written to Egidy to ask when we might see him—his card was handed to us. He came in, and—but of this man, this creature of light who was snatched away all too soon from the world of his day, I will not speak incidentally, but devote a special chapter to him.
XXXV
MORITZ VON EGIDY
His confession of faith · Further development · Candidacy for the Reichstag · From his address to the electors · On the fear of revolution · Idealists in act · My first meeting with Egidy · Visit at his home · Consistency of preaching and practice · A letter from Egidy
Von Halbheit halte den Pfad rein,