The next day we visited him in his home. A beautiful, harmonious family circle. A congenial wife—born Princess of something, I have forgotten the name—and ten children. To be sure, not all ten were at home. The oldest son was serving in the navy; one daughter was studying in Sweden; but at any rate there was a fine bunch of Egidy children present, and all seemed to worship their father. One of the daughters acted as his secretary. Charming hours those were which we spent in the plainly furnished home in eager speech and reply, in which the wife and the older children took part, about the loftiest aims of human struggle and labor,—reconciliation, peace, consecration of life. “We are pulling on different ropes,” said Egidy to us, “but it is the same bell.” Later, when on the occasion of his candidacy I wrote to him how desirable it was that such servants of the community, such thinkers who stood above narrow party interests, should be members of the popular assembly, and how different everything would then at once be, he wrote back to me: Everything will not be different at once, but gradually—of course; but the tempo decides. “Gradually” everybody says; the point is whether it is slow step by numbers—One—back again—One—back again—Twooooo (you surely know something of the drillground?) or, of course, rather livelier, try even a bit of quick step for aught I care—no need that it be a double quick with _tambours battants_. And it is coming. It has to come. What phases we may still have to pass through I would not say, in view of the latest phenomena in our public life. As yet I still do not believe in a bloody settlement. The incoming of the new view of the world will come about, not without tears and outcries, but still as a natural process, as a birth. You speak of my working power. Well, yes, I have working power and creative impulse, and how I yearn to be able to bring both “immediately” into service. Inwardly I am so well prepared and equipped that at a second’s notice I could take up my duties. I am sure of myself. If one chooses to speak at all of a value which I may be supposed to represent (as your words do in such a wonderfully pretty way), this value can only be seen in the future. Many have already spoken and written, but if they were put before the “doing” they gave out; they made miserable compromises with shallow unchangeableness and other wretched notions. Honesty, concord, the bringing into concord of preaching and practice, is what the business means for me. And in this matter I will not yield a hair’s breadth from my apprehension of the truth.