"Remember what your own Heraclitus said: 'The best follow after fame.'"
"Yes, Fame is the Being of Man in Non-Being. It is the immortality of man made real," he quoted himself. "But—"
She hastened to continue his quotation. "'Hence it has always so mightily stirred the greatest souls and lifted them beyond all petty and narrow ends.'"
"The ends are great—but the means, how petty! The Presidency of a Working-Men's Union, one not even to be founded in Berlin."
"But yet a General German Working-Men's Union. Who knows what it may grow to! The capture of Berlin will be a matter of days."
"I had rather capture it with the sword. Bismarck is right. The German question can only be solved by blood and iron."
"Is it worth while going over that ground again? Did we not agree last year in Caprera when Garibaldi would not see his way to invading Austria for us, that we must put our trust in peaceful methods. You have as yet no real following at all. The Progressists will never make a Revolution, for all their festivals and fanfaronades. This National League of theirs is only a stage-threat."
"Yes, Bismarck knows our weak-kneed, white-livered bourgeois too well to be taken in by it. The League talks and Bismarck is silent. Oh, if I had a majority in the Chamber, as they have, I'd leave him to do the talking."
"But even if their rant was serious, they would allow you no leadership in their revolution. Have they not already rejected your overtures? Therefore this deputation to you of the Leipzig working-men (whom they practically rejected by offering them honorary membership) is simply providential. The conception of a new and real Progressive Party that is seething in their minds under the stimulus of their contact with socialism in London—you did write that they had been in London?"
"Yes; they went over to see the Exhibition. But they also represent, I take it, the old communistic and revolutionary traditions, that have never been wholly lulled to sleep by our pseudo-Liberalism. But that is how history repeats itself. When the middle classes oppose the upper classes, they always have the air of fighting for the whole majority. But the day soon comes, especially if the middle classes get into power, when the lower classes discover there never was any real union of interests!"