It has appeared to me that progress should be something else besides a continual parricide; therefore I have investigated the dust-heaps of humanity, and found a treasure in all of them.

It is a tremendous and poetical image, the image of a kind of cosmic parricide.

For he is not gone to his own province of Crete, he has flown to Macedonia, which belonged to another, he has accounted everything his own which you have wished to be yours, he has enlisted new legions, he has received old ones, he has gained over to his own standard the cavalry of Dolabella, and even before that man was polluted with such enormous parricide, he, of his own head, pronounced him his enemy.

Well, then! when the ball of Executive Power pierces the sash of Legislative Power, it is visible parricide!