Page:The collected works of Henrik Ibsen (Volume 9).djvu/16

 over the composition of the Supreme Court; but the Liberals were masters of the situation, and carried all before them. One by one the Ministers were dismissed from office and fined. The King ostentatiously testified his sympathy with them, and selected a new Ministry from the Extreme Right. They failed to carry on the government of the country, and matters were at a deadlock. At last, however, King Oscar gave way. On June 26, 1884, he sent for Johan Sverdrup, the statesman who for a quarter of a century had guided the counsels of the Liberal party. Sverdrup consented to form a Ministry, and the battle ended in a Liberal victory along the whole line.

Ten years elapsed between Ibsen's hegira of 1864 and his first brief return to his native land. Before his second visit eleven more years intervened; and during the summer of 1885, which he spent for the most part at Molde, he found the air still quivering with the rancours begotten of the great struggle. In a speech which he addressed to a meeting of workmen at Trondhjem (June 14, 1885) he said that the years of his absence had brought "immense progress in most directions," but that he was disappointed to observe that "the most indispensable individual rights were far less secured than he had hoped and expected to find them under the new order of things." He found neither freedom of thought nor freedom of speech beyond a limit arbitrarily fixed by the dominant majority. "There remains much to be done," he continued, "before we can be said to have attained real liberty. But I fear that our present democracy will not be equal to the task. An element of nobility must be introduced into our national life, into our