the greatest of her revolutions.  Only one in the future will be able to equal it; if man in remote times was able to free his body, now he requires the great revolution to free his mind.  The races who go furthest in their intellectual development will be the ultimate survivors; they will be masters of the earth, destroying all others.  The least wise in those days will probably be far superior to the most cultivated intellects of the present times.  Each individual will find his happiness in the happiness of his fellows, and no one will try to exercise compulsion on his neighbour.  No laws or penalties will exist, and voluntary associations will supply through the influence of reason the present power of authority.  This will be in the future—­far, very far off.  But what do centuries matter in the life of humanity!  They are like seconds in our existence.  On the day when man shall be transformed into this superior being, with the full development of all his intellectual faculties, now so embryonic, this earth will no longer be the vale of tears spoken of by religion, but the paradise dreamed of by the poets.”

In spite of the enthusiasm with which Gabriel spoke, his hearers did not appear to share these illusions.  They were silent, and their attitude was one of coldness before the immense distance of that future to which their master confided all his hopes of universal prosperity.  They wished for it at once, with the eagerness of a child who is shown a dainty which is afterwards put out of its reach.  The sacrifices, the slow work for the future, struck no chord in their minds.  From Gabriel’s explanations they only drew the fact that they were unhappy, but that they had the same right to happiness and comfort as those privileged few whom they had formerly respected in their ignorance.  As a certain portion of human felicity belonged to them they wished to possess it at once, without delay or resistance, with all the fervour of one claiming what belongs to him.  Luna remarked in this silence a certain rebellion, like those ironical gestures with which his companions in Barcelona had received his illusions about the future and his anathemas against violence of action.

These ardent neophytes outdistanced their teacher; they listened to him with respect, but they were obliged to isolate themselves from him in order to digest his teachings in their own fashion.  Don Martin was the only one who followed him in his visionary excursions into the future.  The bell-ringer, the organ-blower, the shoemaker and the Tato now went up nightly to the bell-ringer’s house, without summoning the master, and there they gave vent to their hatred of everything existing, under the forgotten old prints, yellow and wrinkled, which pictured the inglorious episodes of the Carlist war.