But he shook off this rare sombre mood, and awoke to the full consciousness that Friedland was fled. Well, better so. The stupid fool would come back soon enough, and to-day, with Prince Puckler-Muskau, Baron Korff, General de Pfuel, and von Bülow the pianist, coming to lunch, and perhaps Wagner, if he could finish his rehearsal of "Lohengrin" in time, he was not sorry to see his table relieved of the dull pomposity and brilliant watch-chain of the pillar of Prague society. How mean to hide one's Judaism! What a burden to belong to such a race, degenerate sons of a great but long-vanished past, unable to slough the slave traits engendered by centuries of slavery! How he had yearned as a boy to shake off the yoke of the nations, even as he himself had shaken off the yoke of the Law of Moses. Yes, the scaffold itself would have been welcome, could he but have made the Jews a respected people. How the persecution of the Jews of Damascus had kindled the lad of fifteen! A people that bore such things was hideous. Let them suffer or take vengeance. Even the Christians marvelled at their sluggish blood, that they did not prefer swift death on the battle-field to the long torture. Was the oppression against which the Swiss had rebelled one whit greater? Cowardly people! It merited no better lot. And he recalled how, when the ridiculous story that the Jews make use of Christian blood cropped up again at Rhodes and Lemnos, he had written in his diary that the universal accusation was a proof that the time was nigh when the Jews in very sooth _would_ help themselves with Christian blood. _Aide-toi, le ciel t'aidera._ And ever in his boyish imagination he had seen himself at the head of an armed nation, delivering it from bondage, and reigning over a free people. But these dreams had passed with childhood. He had found a greater, grander cause, that of the oppressed German people, ground down by capitalists and the Iron Law of Wages, and all that his Judaism had brought him was a prejudice the more against him, a cheap cry of Jew-demagogue, to hamper his larger fight for humanity. And yet was it not strange?--they were all Jews, his friends and inspirers; Heine and Börne in his youth, and now in his manhood, Karl Marx. Was it perhaps their sense of the great Ghetto tragedy that had quickened their indignation against all wrong? Well, human injustice was approaching its term at last. The Kingdom of Heaven on earth was beginning to announce itself by signs and portents. The religion of the future was dawning--the Church of the People. "O father, father!" he cried, "if you could have lived to see my triumph!" V There was a knock at the door. His man appeared, but, instead of announcing the Countess Hatzfeldt, as Lassalle's face expected, he tendered a letter.