"Well, that's just your chance!" cried the Countess. "Here is a new party waiting to be called out of chaos, nay, calling to you. An unformed party is just what you want. You give it the impress of your own personality. Remember your own motto: Si superos nequeo movere Acheronta movebo."
Lassalle shook his head doubtfully. He had from the first practically resolved on developing the vague ideas of the Deputation, but he liked to hear his own reasons in the mouth of the Countess.
"The headship of a party not even in existence," he murmured. "That doesn't seem a very short cut to the German Republic."
"Do you doubt yourself? Think of what you were when you took up my cause—a mere unknown boy. Think how you fought it from court to court, picking up your Law on the way, a Demosthenes, a Cicero, till all the world wondered and deemed you a demigod. You did that because I stood for Injustice. You were the Quixote to right all wrong. You saw the universal in the individual. My case was but a prefiguration of your real mission. Now it is the universal that calls to you. See in your triumph for me your triumph for that suffering humanity, with which you have taught me to sympathize."
"My noble Countess!"
"What does your own Franz von Sickingen say of history?
"'And still its Form remains for ever Force.'
The Force of the modern world is the working-man. And as you yourself have taught me that there are no real revolutions except those that formally express what is already a fact, there wants then only the formal expression of the working-man's Force. To this Force you will now give Form."
"What an apt pupil!" He stooped and kissed her lips. Then, walking about agitatedly: "Yes," he cried; "I will weld the workers of Germany—to gain their ends they must fuse all their wills into one—none of these acrid, petty, mutually-destructive individualities of the bourgeois—one gigantic hammer, and I will be the Thor who wields it." His veins swelled, he seemed indeed a Teutonic god. "And therefore I must have Dictator's rights," he went on. "I will not accept the Presidency to be the mere puppet of possible factions."
"There speaks Ferdinand Lassalle! And now, mon cher enfant, you deserve to hear my secret."