rwent a change. It will be noticed that the
year of 1746, when Diderot and d'Alembert are said to have embarked on
their task, coincided with the decadence of French Freemasonry under the
Comte de Clermont and the invasion of the lodges by the subversive
elements; thus the project propounded with the best intentions by the
Freemasons of 1737 was filched by their revolutionary successors and
turned to a diametrically opposite purpose.

But it is not to the dancing-master Lacorne and his middle-class
following that we can attribute the efficiency with which not only the
_Encyclopedie_ but a host of minor revolutionary publications were
circulated all over France. Frederick the Great had seen his
opportunity. If I am right in my surmise that Ramsay's speech had
reached the ears of Frederick, the prospect of the _Encyclopedie_
contained therein may well have appeared to him a magnificent method for
obtaining a footing in the intellectual circles of France; hence then,
doubtless, an additional reason for his hasty initiation into Masonry,
his summons to Voltaire, and his subsequent overtures to Diderot and
d'Alembert, who, by the time the first volume of the _Encyclopedie_
appeared in 1751, had both been made members of the Royal Academy of
Prussia. In the following year Frederick offered d'Alembert the
presidency of the Academy in place of Maupertuis, an offer which was
refused; but in 1755 and again in 1763 d'Alembert visited Frederick in
Germany and received his pension regularly from Berlin. It is therefore
not surprising that when the _Encyclopedie_ had reached the letter P, it
included, in an unsigned article on Prussia, a panegyric on the virtues
and the talents of the illustrious monarch who presided over the
destinies of that favoured country.

The art of Frederick the Great, as of his successors on the throne of
the Hohenzollerns, was to make use of every movement that could further
the design of Prussian supremacy. He used the Freemasons as he used the
philosophers and as he used the Jews, to carry out his great scheme--the
destruction of the French monarchy and of the alliance between France
and Austria. Whilst through his representatives at the Court of France
he was able to create discord between Versailles and Vienna and bring
discredit on Marie Antoinette, through his allies in the masonic lodges
and in the secret societies he was able to reach the people of France.
The gold and the printing presses of Frede