gratification of pride, and the satisfaction of selfish tastes and appetites, however refined and sublimated. "I looked around me--the world was full of misery--and the same disposition which had plunged me into a dungeon was crushing the hearts and hopes of millions of my race. My bosom softened by bereavement yearned toward my suffering fellows, and the path of duty, peace and happiness seemed open to my desolate and despairing heart. Resolution followed conviction; the world was my field; liberty, equality and fraternity were my objects. Not France alone, with her miserable millions, but Russia with her serfs, Poland with her wrongs, the enslaved Italian, the oppressed German, the starving son of Erin, the squalid operative of England, the priest-ridden slave of Jesuit Spain, and the oppressed but free-born Switzer. Great men and good men I found had already, with superhuman skill, constructed a system, a machine for the amelioration of mankind's condition, which needed only the co-operation of boundless wealth to set it in motion. That wealth was mine! The common house for the laborer, the asylum for the insane, for the orphan, the Magdalen, the destitute, the sick, the friendless, the deserted, the bereaved, or the asylum for the victim of his own vices, or the vices of others, for the depravity which originates in misery, ignorance or fate--all these my riches could sustain. Around me, in the accomplishment of this design, the uncounted wealth intrusted to my stewardship has already gathered the mightiest minds in every department of intellect, and the best hearts; and if but a few years are vouchsafed us to carry out the system we have adopted, all Europe, despite her throned and sceptred tyrants, impiously claiming the right to oppress by the will of God, shall be free! Silently but surely, the principle of human liberty is ceaselessly at work, undermining thrones and overthrowing dynasties. The hush that precedes the tornado even now broods over Europe; nations slumber the heavy sleep that preludes the earthquake. The hour of revolution is at hand--of social regeneration, disenthrallment, redemption, over all the world. In every capital of Europe the mine is prepared--the train laid to be lighted, and from this solitary chamber the free thought on the lightning's pinion flies to Vienna, St. Petersburg, Rome, Madrid, Berlin, London, over mountain and plain--over sea and land--through the forest wilderness and the thronged city; taken up by the press, it makes thrones totter and tyrants tremble--tremble at an influence which emanates they know not whence and contemplates a purpose they know not what--an influence whose mystery they are impotent to penetrate, and whose shadowy but awful right they are powerless to resist!"