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begin in France your work of regeneration ? Pardon if I have dared to submit these thoughts to you whose wisdom is infallible!”
    At these words, he whom the great Copt had addressed as the Apostle of Zurich, bowed as he received the applause of the assembly, and waited a reply.
    He did not wait long.
    ” If you read physiognomy, illustrious brethren, I read the future. Marie Antoinette is proud ; she will interfere in the coming struggle, and will perish in it. Louis Augustus is mild : he will yield to it, and will perish with her, but each will fall through opposite defects of character. Now they esteem each other, but short will be their love ; in a year they will feel mutual contempt. Why, then, deliberate, brethren, to discover whence comes the light ? It is revealed to me. I come from the East, led, like the shepherds, by a star, which foretells a second regeneration of mankind. To-morrow I begin my work. Give me twenty years for it that will be enough, if we are united and firm.”
    “Twenty years?” murmured several voices. “The time is long.”
    The great Copt turned to those who thus betrayed impatience.
    ” Yes,” said he, ” it is long to those who think that a principle is destroyed as a man is killed with the dagger of Jacques Clement or the knife of Damiens. Fools ! the knife kills the man, but, like the priming-hook, it lops a branch that the other branches may take its place. In the stead of the murdered king rises up a Louis XIII. , a stupid tyrant ; a Louis XIV., a cunning despot ; a Louis XV., an idol whoso path is wet with tears of blood, like the monstrous deities of India, crushing with changeless smile women and children, who cast garlands before their chariot-wheels. And you think twenty years too long to efface the name of king from the hearts of thirty millions of men, who but lately offered to God their children’s lives to purchase that of Louis XV. ! And you think it an easy task to make
     
    JOSEPH BALSAMO. 23
    France hate her lilies, which, bright as the stars of heaven, grateful as the odors of flowers, have borne light, charity, victory, to the ends of the world ! Try, try, brethren 1 I give you, not twenty years I give you a century. You, scattered, trembling, unknown each to the other, known only to me, who only can sum up your divided worth, and tell its value to me, who alone can unite you in one fraternal chain I tell you, philosophers, political economists, theorists, that in twenty years those thoughts which you whisper in your families, which you will write with uneasy eye in the solitude of your old somber towers, which you tell one another with the dagger in your hands, that you may strike the traitor who would repeat them in tones louder than your own I tell you that these thoughts shall be proclaimed aloud in the streets, printed in the open face of day, spread through Europe by peaceful emissaries, or by the bayonets of five hundred thousand soldiers, battling for liberty, with your principles inscribed on their standards. You, who tremble at the name of the Tower of London ; you, who shrink at that of the Inquisi-tion, hear me me, who am about to dare the Bastile ! I tell you that we shall see those dreaded prisons in ruins, and your wives and children shall dance on their ashes. But that cannot be until, not the monarch, but the monarchy, is dead until religious domination is despised until social inferiority is extinguished until aristocratic castes and unjust division of lands are no more. I ask twenty years to destroy an old world, and make a new one twenty years twenty seconds of eternity and you say it is too long ! “
    The silence of admiration and of assent followed the words of this dark prophet ; he had obtained the sympathy of the representatives of the hopes of Europe who surrounded him.
    The great Copt enjoyed for some minutes his triumph ; then, feeling that it was complete, he went on :
    “Xow, brethren, now that I am going to devote myself to our cause