“None at all,” he replied. “’Wisdom cries in the streets, and no man regards her.’  The small voice of Philosophy was unheard amid the blare of the trumpets that heralded successful knavery; the rabble ran headlong to the devil after gauds and tinsel.”

“Have there been,” I asked, “no later notes of warning of the coming catastrophe?”

“Oh, yes,” he replied; “ten thousand.  All through the past century the best and noblest of each generation, wherever and whenever they could find newspapers or magazines that dared to publish their utterances, poured forth, in the same earnest tones, similar prophecies and appeals.  But in vain.  Each generation found the condition of things more desperate and hopeless:  every year multiplied the calamities of the world.  The fools could not see that a great cause must continue to operate until checked by some higher power.  And here there was no higher power that desired to check it.  As the domination and arrogance of the ruling class increased, the capacity of the lower classes to resist, within the limits of law and constitution, decreased.  Every avenue, in fact, was blocked by corruption. juries, courts, legislatures, congresses, they were as if they were not.  The people were walled in by impassable barriers.  Nothing was left them but the primal, brute instincts of the animal man, and upon these they fell back, and the Brotherhood of Destruction arose.  But no words can tell the sufferings that have been endured by the good men, here and there, who, during the past century, tried to save mankind.  Some were simply ostracised from social intercourse with their caste; others were deprived of their means of living and forced down into the ranks of the wretched; and still others”—­and here, I observed, his face grew ashy pale, and the muscles about his mouth twitched nervously—­“still others had their liberty sworn away by purchased perjury, and were consigned to prisons, where they still languish, dressed in the hideous garb of ignominy, and performing the vile tasks of felons.”  After a pause, for I saw he was strangely disturbed, I said to him: 

“How comes it that the people have so long submitted to these great wrongs?  Did they not resist?”

“They did,” he replied; “but the fruit of the tree of evil was not yet ripe.  At the close of the nineteenth century, in all the great cities of America, there was a terrible outbreak of the workingmen; they destroyed much property and many lives, and held possession of the cities for several days.  But the national government called for volunteers, and hundreds of thousands of warlike young men, sons of farmers, sprang to arms:  and, after several terrible battles, they suppressed the revolution, with the slaughter of tens of thousands of those who took part in it; while afterwards the revengeful Oligarchy sent thousands of others to the gallows.  And since then, in Europe and America, there have been other outbreaks, but all of them terminated in the same