It is easy enough for us to write that sort of sentence. The revolutionary leaders have been dead for almost one hundred and fifty years and we can poke as much fun at them as we like. We can even be grateful for the many good things which they bestowed upon this world. But the men and women who lived through those days, who one morning had gaily danced around the Tree of Liberty and then during the next three months had been chased like rats through the sewers of their own city, could not possibly take such a detached view of those problems of civic upheaval. As soon as they had crept out of their cellars and garrets and had combed the cobwebs out of their perukes, they began to devise measures by which to prevent a reoccurrence of so terrible a calamity. But in order to be successful reactionaries, they must first of all bury the past. Not a vague past in the broad historical sense of the word but their own individual “pasts” when they had surreptitiously read the works of Monsieur de Voltaire and had openly expressed their admiration for the Encyclopédie. Now the assembled works of Monsieur de Voltaire were stored away in the attic and those of Monsieur Diderot were sold to the junk-man. Pamphlets that had been reverently read as the true revelation of reason were relegated to the coal-bin and in every possible way an effort was made to cover up the tracks that betrayed a short sojourn in the realm of liberalism. Alas, as so often happens in a case like that when all the literary material has been carefully destroyed, the repentant brotherhood overlooked one item which was even more important as a telltale of the popular mind. That was the stage. It was a bit childish on the part of the generation that had thrown whole cartloads of bouquets at “The Marriage of Figaro” to claim that they had never for a moment believed in the possibilities of equal rights for all men, and the people who had wept over “Nathan the Wise” could never successfully prove that they had always regarded religious tolerance as a misguided expression of governmental weakness. The play and its success were there to convict them of the opposite. The author of this famous key play to the popular sentiment of the latter half of the eighteenth century was a German, one Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. He was the son of a Lutheran clergyman and had studied theology in the University of Leipzig. But he had felt little inclination for a religious career and had played hooky so persistently that his father heard of it, had told him to come home and had placed him before the choice of immediate resignation from the university or diligent application as a member of the medical department. Gotthold, who was no more of a doctor than a clergyman, promised everything that was asked of him, returned to Leipzig, went surety for some of his beloved actor friends and upon their subsequent disappearance from town was obliged to hasten to Wittenberg that he might escape arrest for debt.