The curtain darkened, and the next scene of the drama was displayed. It was laid in the Council Hall; but inasmuch as the Council was not in session, and the Tsar was not yet captured, it possessed a certain unreality for me which the audience did not seem to share. With considerable interest I watched the ten about the Council table. At the head sat a figure of enormous girth, dressed in white, with a black, or probably mull robe about the shoulders. The face, appalling in its grossness, must be that of Lembken, titular ruler of the Federation, a fat old man with huge paunch and shrunken throat, on which the sagging cheeks hung like a dewlap. A fit head for such a people! Beside him sat a man of about the same age, perhaps sixty years, but lithe and lean and muscular, and with the keenest, cruelest face that I ever had seen. His whitening hair was brushed back from his forehead, and his expression was so full of sinister and malignant power that I knew this could be none other than Sanson, the devil of this devil’s world, who ruled the superstitious multitude by the terror of “Science become Faith,” as old Sir Spofforth had so aptly phrased it. And, as I looked at him, I seemed to see the features of Herman Lazaroff, as he might have been in his old age. There was the same self-confidence, become arrogance, and self-assertion grown with power, the same demoniac energy and will, trained by its use upon a servile multitude. Thus Lazaroff might have been, if he could have had his wish to live again. What struck me, as I gazed upon the strong, clean-shaven faces about the Council board, was that they seemed to reproduce the aspect and gestures of the degenerate emperors of Rome. Was history repeating itself; a state-fed mob, state-governed industries, the fist of autocracy beneath the glove of impotent democracy, and those terrific incarnations of cruelty and insane pride in power? I saw the Tsar, a dwarfish, wretched figure in a tinsel crown, dragged, groveling, to Lembken’s feet, while Lembken assumed an attitude of inflexibility; and then once more the curtain darkened. “Praise your Boss!” hooted the funnels. “He is the people’s friend. That’s how he deals with kings! He shows no mercy to the people’s enemies. The Tsar is a low-grade moron. His heredity is horrible. He cannot pass Test 1 upon the Binet board. He is a wretched brach, and will now work in the leathers till he dies, producing for you.” “Hurrah!” screamed the spectators. “Out with him! To the Rest Cure!” And the absurdity of the display came home to none except myself. These citizens were in deadly earnest. How shrewd the mind that had contrived a pabulum so well calculated to appeal to the mob palate! The contrived crudeness, the planned abuse betrayed an intimate and assured acquaintance with the people’s psychology. “Praise louder!” whispered the intimate voice beside me. “Why do you not praise when the others do?”