“Listen here, Herr Habietnik,” said Leo, laying his hand on the merchant’s arm, “you’re the man to make this dream come true. We are still weeks away from the elections. That’s long enough for the formation of a Citizens’ Party, consisting of the liberal elements, the solid merchants, scholars, lawyers, artists, and industrialists, with the frank and open motto: ‘The repeal of the special legislation against the Jews!’ Take it up today, form a committee of twelve, to include three merchants, three industrialists, three steadily employed office workers, and three men of the free academic professions. Since you have no newspaper at your disposal as yet, print ten thousand posters, organize district committees, make propaganda from street to street and from house to house, and you cannot fail to be successful. I am a stranger and therefore not as familiar with conditions as you; but this enables me to judge more objectively, and I am quite sure that a considerable section of the public will greet the new party with great enthusiasm.” Herr Habietnik was all enthusiasm. That very evening he gathered about fifty downtown merchants, manufacturers, and lawyers, and at one o’clock in the morning there was organized a committee that had at its disposal a fund amounting to millions, pledged by the members of the group. The new party was called “the Party of the Active Citizens of Austria,” stood on a wholly liberal-bourgeois platform, and began its work with an animated and thorough campaign of agitation. No one except Herr Habietnik knew that it was the Frenchman Dufresne who composed the leaflets and proclamations. Their success surpassed their wildest expectations. Formerly the people had been highly suspicious of every attempt to found a democratic bourgeois party, because the Jews would always push themselves to the fore. But this time it was a purely Christian matter--the names of the leaders were sufficient guarantee that this was no conspiracy hatched by exiled Jews--and all the people who had been harmed by the Jewish law crowded the committee headquarters to join the new party. They came in swarms, the merchants, the jewelers, the assistants of the great tailors, the unemployed chauffeurs--they brought their wives, and the rush became ever greater, in spite of the hue and cry raised by the Christian-Socialist papers. The _Arbeiter-Zeitung_ kept quiet, refraining from all aggression. Its chiefs knew that while the Party of Active Citizens would doubtless take many votes from the Social-Democrats, it would, on the other hand, attract all the votes that usually remained uncast, and some of those that would have gone to the Christian-Socialists and Pan-Germans. So it limited itself to an occasional polemic against some plank of the Citizens’ platform; but in doubtful districts there even were some secret combines of the two parties.