Instead of which, he attended a meeting of a revolutionary society of Dresden, and delivered an address appealing to the king of Saxony--the royal personage whose servant and pensioner he was--to establish universal suffrage, to abolish the aristocracy and the standing army, and to constitute a republic with His Majesty as president. Needless to say, His Majesty did not follow this recommendation from his operatic conductor; and next year the people of Dresden rose, and built barricades in the streets, and Wagner joined the revolutionists and actively took part in organizing their forces. When the Prussian troops marched in and put down the insurrection, three men were proscribed in a royal proclamation as “politically dangerous persons,” and condemned to death. One was Roeckel, assistant conductor of the opera house, who was captured and spent the next twelve years in a dungeon; another was Michael Bakunin, who became the founder of the Anarchist movement; and the third was Richard Wagner, royal operatic conductor. Germany’s greatest living genius spent his next twelve years as a political exile in France and Switzerland. He utilized the time, in part to pour out political pamphlets, and in part to embody his revolutionary view of life in his greatest art work. Those who are interested in the pamphlets may find extracts in “The Cry for Justice.” Here is a sample from a manifesto entitled “Revolution,” published in the Dresden “Volksblaetter”: Arise, then, ye people of the earth, arise, ye sorrow-stricken and oppressed. Ye, also, who vainly struggle to clothe the inner desolation of your hearts with the transient glory of riches, arise! Come and follow in my track with the joyful crowd, for I know not how to make distinction between those who follow me. There are but two peoples from henceforth on earth--the one which follows me, and the one which resists me. The one I will lead to happiness, but the other I will crush in my progress. For I am the Revolution, I am the new creating force. I am the divinity which discerns all life, which embraces, revives, and rewards. The art work in which Wagner embodied these revolutionary ideas is known as “The Ring of the Nibelung.” It consists of four long operas, based upon the old German mythology. It begins with a charming fairy story and ends with a grim tragedy; and from first to last it is a study of the effects of economic power upon human life.