contributes powerfully to this end. Some of the subtlest disintegrating
propaganda during the last seven years has emanated from the so-called
"Capitalist press." The _Daily Herald_ is only the brass band of the
Revolution. It is to the journals inspired and patronized by the
Intelligentsia that we must turn to find the doctrines of Illuminism set
forth with the most persuasive eloquence.[761]

More than eighty years ago a Frenchman endowed with extraordinary
prophetic instinct foretold not only the danger that would one day come
from Russia, but that the press would facilitate the destruction of
civilization:

When our cosmopolitan democracy, bearing its last fruits, shall
have made of war a thing odious to whole populations, when the
nations calling themselves the most civilized on earth shall have
finished enervating themselves in their political debaucheries, ...
the floodgates of the North will open on us once again, then we
shall undergo a last invasion not of ignorant barbarians but of
cunning and enlightened masters, more enlightened than ourselves,
for they will have learnt from our own excesses how we can and must
be governed.

It is not for nothing that Providence piles up so many inactive
forces in the East of Europe. One day the sleeping giant will arise
and force will put an end to the reign of words. In vain, then,
distracted equality will call the old aristocracy to the help of
liberty; the weapon grasped again too late and wielded by hands too
long inactive will have become powerless. Society will perish for
having trusted to words void of sense or contradictory; then the
deceitful echoes of public opinion, the newspapers, wishing at all
costs to keep their readers, will push [the world] to ruin if only
to have something to relate for a month longer. They will kill
society to live upon its corpse.[762]

To-day the newspapers, no longer the echoes of public opinion but its
supreme directors, throw open their columns to every form of
disintegrating doctrine and close them to arguments that could
effectually arrest the forces of destruction.

What is the hidden influence behind the press, behind all the subversive
movements going on around us? Are there several Powers at work? Or is
there one Power, one invisible group directing all the rest--the circle
of the _real Initiates_?

14

PAN-GERM