escribes as "the great
European secret."[797] Elsewhere, a year earlier, he had referred to
Illuminism as the root of all the evil at work. It is now known that at
the moment de Maistre wrote these words an inner ring of
revolutionaries, claiming direct descent from Weishaupt and even from an
earlier sect existing at the end of the fifteenth century, profited by
the fall of Napoleon I to reconstruct its organization and took up its
headquarters in Switzerland with branch offices in London and Paris. The
same secret ring of Illuminati is believed to have been intimately
connected with the organization of the Bolshevist revolution, although
none of the leading Bolsheviks are said to have been members of the
innermost circle, which is understood to consist of men belonging to the
highest intellectual and financial classes whose names remained
absolutely unknown. Outside this absolutely secret ring there
existed, however, a semi-secret circle of high initiates of subversive
societies drawn from all over the world and belonging to various
nationalities--German, Jewish, French, Russian, and even Japanese. This
group, which might be described as the active ring of the inner circle,
appears to have been in touch with, if not in control of, a committee
which met in Switzerland to carry out the programme of the Third
Internationale.

It was thus in Switzerland that at the same time high initiates of
Pan-German secret societies foregathered and that an active centre of
pro-German, anti-Entente, and even Bolshevist propaganda was
established. These Germans, although Monarchists themselves, co-operated
with the secret revolutionary forces in stirring up trouble in the
countries of the Allies. At the same time the conferences of the Second
Internationale, attended by members of the British I.L.P. took place in
Switzerland, and at one of these--the Berne Conference of 1919--the
delegates were entertained by a mysterious "American" millionaire, John
de Kay, living himself in great style, paying for press service at the
rate of 2,000 francs a day, lavishing money on the conference, and at
the same time subsidizing a Pacifist and Defeatest paper named _La
Feuille_.

It is impossible, then, to ignore the role of Germany in the present
outbreak of world revolution. In the British White Paper on Bolshevism
in Russia we find it stated by an Englishman who had been through the
whole of the Revolution in that country that:

The German