"Ye see me only in your cells, ye see me only in the grave, Ye see me only wand'ring lone beside the exile's sullen wave! Ye fools! Do I not also live where you have sought to pierce in vain? Rests not a nook for me to dwell in every heart, in every brain? Not every brow that boldly thinks erect with manhood's honest pride? Does not each bosom shelter me that beats with honor's generous tide? Not every workshop brooding woe, not every hut that harbors grief? Ha! Am I not the breath of life that pants and struggles for relief?" Ah, poor, panting, struggling, misery-laden Ireland! How God laughs with glee to see his shackles weight your misery! The scene is shifting, the stage is dark'ning--a strange eclipse obscures the shafted light! Darker, darker! Now a low, red fire gleams like a winking eye along the foreground; it runs, it hisses like a snake; there another leaps up, there another; France, Germany, Italy--the continent blazes with the fires of the Commune! That spirit which, drunken with blood, reeled from the guillotine at '93, to be crushed beneath the upbuilding of the Empire, has once more arisen. And out of the hot hells of Fury, and Jealousy, and Hate, out of the pitiless struggle between "vested rights" and wrongs with high ancestral lineage, and the great outcrying of a piteous ignorance against an oppression whose injustice it feels but cannot analyze, grows the sublime idea which priests have anathematized and States have outlawed--"the sacred dogma of =Equality.=" In so far as that ideal was made possible of conception, in so far as the masses began to understand something of the causes of their ills, in so far the purpose of Liberty was served: no matter that the arms of Oppression were triumphant, the dawn of the thought of equal liberty upon the mass of the unthinking was a far greater victory than any triumph of arms. So when the fires died down, and the low reflection gleamed for an instant over those quiescent Indian valleys and Altaian ranges, where the main plot of old centuries had been laid, and then paled out before the white flare lighting the tableau of the second act, Liberty stood with chained hands lifted toward her enemy, while a proud look, playing like an iridescent flame in her eyes, said, plain as lips could speak it, "I have unbound their thoughts; they will one day unbind my hands." Slowly the curtain falls on the fair prisoner and the glowering God.