at houses of
the councillors, and behind the snowy lace curtains of the Frauengasse
and the Portchaisengasse a thousand slow Northerners spoke of these
things and kept them in their hearts. A hundred secret societies passed
from mouth to mouth instruction, warning, encouragement. Germany has
always been the home of the secret society. Northern Europe gave birth
to those countless associations which have proved stronger than
kings and surer than a throne. The Hanseatic League, the first of the
commercial unions which were destined to build up the greatest empire of
the world, lived longest in Dantzig.

The Tugendbund, men whispered, was not dead but sleeping. Napoleon, who
had crushed it once, was watching for its revival; had a whole army of
his matchless secret police ready for it. And the Tugendbund had had its
centre in Dantzig.

Perhaps, in the Rathskeller itself--one of the largest wine stores in
the world, where tables and chairs are set beneath the arches of the
Exchange, a vast cave under the streets--perhaps here the Tugendbund
still encouraged men to be virtuous and self-denying for no other or
higher purpose than the overthrow of the Scourge of Europe. Here the
richer citizens have met from time immemorial to drink with solemnity
and a decent leisure the wines sent hither in their own ships from the
Rhine, from Greece and the Crimea, from Bordeaux and Burgundy, from
the Champagne and Tokay. This is not only the Rathskeller, but the real
Rathhaus, where the Dantzigers have taken counsel over their afternoon
wine from generation to generation, whence have been issued to all the
world those decrees of probity and a commercial uprightness between
buyer and seller, debtor and creditor, master and man, which reached to
every corner of the commercial world. And now it was whispered that
the latter-day Dantzigers--the sons of those who formed the Hanseatic
League: mostly fat men with large faces and shrewd, calculating eyes;
high foreheads; good solid men, who knew the world, and how to make
their way in it; withal, good judges of a wine and great drinkers, like
that William the Silent, who braved and met and conquered the European
scourge of mediaeval times--it was whispered that these were reviving
the Tugendbund.

Amid such contending interests, and in a free city so near to several
frontiers, men came and went without attracting undesired attention.
Each party suspected a new-comer of belonging to the other.