Excerpt from the newspaper “THE LIBERATOR,” Vulpios 17, Year 20
Written by Albert Urpen, People’s Representative
PARLIAMENTARY ANECDOTES
All know the tale of how Ostven, in the Assembly, brandished a shattered golden watch, brought as a trophy from a castle he and his followers had plundered; and how Henscher then declared it no accident that those who know not the worth of a single minute of productive labor for the Republic should be found smashing timepieces—though in truth, the minutes marked by that clock were somewhat shorter, and thereby less precious, than the Republican minutes to which Henscher undoubtedly referred.
Yet Masden says that Henscher works all day for the Republic only because he knows not what else to do with himself, and that the Republic would fare better were Henscher not to labor for her at all; and further, that Henscher’s notion of Republican freedom means that the Republican government knows better than the “free citizens” themselves how they must act in order to be free. But a free man feels neither bound nor obliged to respect such Henscherian “laws,” and may rightly deem those who force them upon him to be tyrants, and treat them as such.
Citizens, place your trust in us, and in Masden—our Masden—by whose genius and supreme secret stratagem the Universities of Vorena and Eustata, a full year before the Night of Emergence into the public sphere, were already operating wholly under the system of the Republic, while not a single outward sign existed to betray this to the tyrants.
