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"The great events of the day occupy my thoughts much at present. The old illusory France has collapsed; and as soon as the new, real Prussia does the same, we shall be with one bound in a new age. How ideas will then come tumbling about our ears! And it is high time they did. Up till now we have been living on nothing but the crumbs from the revolutionary table of last century, a food out of which all nutriment has long been chewed. The old terms require to have a new meaning infused into them. Liberty, equality, and fraternity are no longer the things they were in the days of the late-lamented guillotine. That is what the politicians will not understand; and therefore I hate them. They want only their own special revolutions—revolutions in externals, in politics, etc. But all this is mere trifling. What is all-important is the revolution of the spirit of man."

Thus in 1870 wrote Ibsen, greatest in his day of the rare originative geniuses who "carry in their brains the ovarian eggs of the next generation's or century's civilization." And now at last, after nearly fifty years, the fulfilment of that prophecy is at hand. Not Prussia merely, but the most of monarchist Europe has collapsed. The old ideas are tumbling about our ears at a rate which possibly Ibsen himself did not foresee. Even that hoariest and most impregnable of them all, the idea of the absolute State, though propped and buttressed during the past five years as never before in history, is everywhere visibly tottering—where it has not already tumbled. A new age is indeed upon us!

Probably no proof of failure less complete and terrible than the recent cataclysm could have shaken man's mystic devotion to the State. However it has oppressed,