DREAMERS IN CONGRESS "By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down; yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion." By the river of Bâle we sit down, resolved to weep no more. Not the German Rhine, but the Rhine ere it leaves the land of liberty; where, sunning itself in a glory of blue sky and white cloud, and overbrooded by the eternal mountains; it swirls its fresh green waves and hurries its laden rafts betwixt the quaint old houses and dreaming spires, and under the busy bridges of the Golden Gate of Switzerland. In the shady courtyard of the Town Hall are sundry frescoes testifying to the predominant impress on the minds of its citizens of the life and thoughts of a little people that flourished between two and three thousand years ago in the highlands of Asia Minor. But, amid these suggestive illustrations of ancient Jewish history, the strangest surely is that of Moses with a Table of the Law, on which are written the words: "Who brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage." For here, after all this travail of the centuries, a very modern Moses--in the abstract-concrete form of a Congress--is again meditating the deliverance of Israel from the house of bondage. Not in the Town Hall, however, but in the Casino the Congress meets, and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform, over which rise the heads and festal shirt-fronts of the leaders. A strangely assorted set of leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naïvely that the pen is mightier than the millionaire's gold. Only one of them hitherto has really stirred the world with his pen-point--a prophet of the modern, preaching "Woe, woe" by psycho-physiology; in himself a breezy, burly undegenerate, with a great gray head marvellously crammed with facts and languages; now to prove himself golden-hearted and golden-mouthed, an orator touching equally to tears or laughter. In striking contrast with this quasi-Teutonic figure shows the leonine head, with its tossing black mane and shoulders, of the Russian leader, Apollo turned Berserker, beautiful, overpowering, from whose resplendent mouth roll in mountain thunder the barbarous Russian syllables.