ost fecund
truths."

The revolutionary explosion might well have finally shattered these
illusions but for the Grand Orient. We have already seen the identity of
theory between French Masonry and French Socialism in the nineteenth
century. It was thus that, although in France one experiment after
another demonstrated the unreality of Socialist Utopias, the lodges were
always there to reconstruct the mirage and lead humanity on again across
the burning desert sands towards the same phantom palm-trees and
illusory pools of water.

Whatever the manner in which these ideas penetrated to this
country--whether through the Radicals of the last century, adorers of
the Encyclopaedist Masons of France, or through the British disciples of
German Social Democrats from the time of the First Internationale
onwards--it is impossible to ignore the resemblance between the theories
not only of French but of modern British Socialism and the doctrines of
illuminized Freemasonry. Thus the idea running through Freemasonry of a
Golden Age before the Fall, when man was free and happy, and which
through the application of masonic principles is to return once more,
finds an exact counterpart in the Socialist conception of a past halcyon
era of Liberty and Equality, which is to return not merely in the form
of a regenerated social order, but as a complete Millennium from which
all the ills of human life have been eliminated. This idea has always
haunted the imagination of Socialist writers from Rousseau to William
Morris, and leads directly up to the further theory--the necessity for
destroying civilization.

I cannot find in Mr. Lothrop Stoddart's conception of the revolutionary
movement as the revolt of the "Under Man" against civilization, the
origin of this campaign. In reality the leaders of world-revolution have
not been "Under Men," victims of oppression or of adverse fate, nor
could they be ranged in this category on account of physical or mental
inferiority. It is true that most revolutionary agitators have been in
some way abnormal and that the revolutionary army has largely been
recruited from the unfit, but the real inspirers of the movement have
frequently been men in prosperous circumstances and of brilliant
intellect who might have distinguished themselves on other lines had
they not chosen to devote their talents to subversion. To call
Weishaupt, for example, an "Under Man" would be absurd. But let us see
what is the idea on w