TOPICS OF THE DAY.

CONSPIRACIES AND COMMON SENSE.

HENAULT : "During this execution, Durand, you

Must in the mid's: keep your battalia fast ;

And, Theodore, to sure to plant the canon

That may command the streets ; whilst Revellido, Mezzana, Ternon and Betrosi, guard you.

This done, we'd give the general alarm,

• Apply petards, and force the ars'nal gates ; Then fire the city round in several places, Or with our canon (if it dare resist) Batter 't to ruin. But above all I charge you

• Shed blood enough, spare neither sex nor age, Name nor rendition.

• • "Never did so profound repose forerun

Calamity so great : nay, our good fortune Has blinded the most piercing of mankind : Strengthen'd the fearfull'at, charmed the mast euspectful,

Confounded the most subtle : for we live, We live, my friends, and quickly shall our life Prove fatal to these tyrants.. • •

" Without the least remorse then let's resolve With fire and sword t' exterminate these tyrants, And when we shall behold those curst tribunals, Stain'd by the tears and sufferings of the innocent, Burning with flames rather from Heav'n than ours, The raging, furious and unpitying Soldier Pulling his reeking dagger from the bosoms Of gasping wretches ; death in every quarter : With all that sad disorder can produce, To make a spectacle of horror : then, Then let's call to mind, my dearest friends, That there's nothing pure upon the earth, That the most valu'd things have most allays, And that in change of all those site enormities, Under whose weight this wretched country labours. The means are only in our hands to crown them" (Otway, "Venice Presere'd ; or, a Plot Discovered.") THERE is nothing which makes people lose their heads so quickly and so completely as talk about con- spiracies, and, above all, political conspiracies. This dread of conspiracies is double-edged. It makes men quite as stupid and confused on the negative as on the positive side. Almost as much harm has been done and as much nonsense talked in pooh-poohing all such things as con- spiracies and declaring that no wise man ever pays any attention to such old women's tales and so forth, as in finding a conspiracy in every four or five men who get their heads together, or descrying a conspirator under every furze bush, and a dire plot in every silly love-letter written in cipher. Suspicion which clouds the mind, and therefore must be strictly controlled, clouds it inversely as well as directly. At the present moment we are suffering quite as much, perhaps even more, from the man who won't hear a word about conspiracies, laughs at all precaution and neglects the plainest warnings, as from the wildest conspiracy-mongers. In spite, however, of the fact that conspiracies have been made too much of in certain quarters and that some wild talk has been indulged in, there can be no sort of doubt that we are face to face with a triple ring of conspiracies—conspiracies inside the United Kingdom against our own social and political order, such as the murder-conspiracy in Ireland, and the conspiracy for the destruction of public works and property like the Liverpool burnings of last Sunday ; conspiracies for the destruction of the British Empire, and, finally, conspiracies, by which we should suffer with the rest, for the destruction of the whole social order throughout Europe—i.e., the conspiracy in which Lenin and Trotsky are the leaders.

Jones, who likes comfort and quiet, stands in front of the fire at his club and roundly denounces what he calls mere sensational panic. "My dear Smith, you surely don't believe in all this fantastic talk about con- spiracies ! Nothing of the kind. There has always been a certain amount of row in Ireland and there always will be, but take it from me, all this conspiracy-mongering is got up by the police to magnify their office. It is just the same in regard to the alleged foreign conspiracies. There is a certain amount of unrest on the Continent—it would be very odd if there were not—but, believe me, nothing more. I always said when people gassed away about spy-hunting and German plots and so forth that there was nothing in it, and, as you see, I proved to be right. There wasn't anything in it. So don't let's worry ourselves now. I have the greatest contempt for all this panic, which is largely newspaper flap-doodle ' and not worth attending to. You may be perfectly sure that if there was anything real in it the Government would be doing a great deal more than they are doing now. They think it convenient to frighten us a little so as to keep themselves in power, but beyond this there is nothing.' So ends Noodle's oration—new version.

Now, this bovine kind of talk, this lulling of people into a false security, has got to be dealt with seriously. It is easy to see how it arises. It grows up because it is dis- agreeable to be worried by the thought of conspiracies, and became it sounds so pleasantly heroic to accuse other people of panic and to remain magnificently cool oneself. Such impotence of mind is as misleading as the wildest rhetoric. The wise man is he who takes the moderate line and trims the boat between the two dangers of capsizing through panic and capsizing through indifference. After all, there is no great courage or virtue in angrily refusing to note that a high wind and cross-currents are likely to have serious consequences if neglected. With so much of preface, let us deal with the realities of the situation with which the nation finds itself confronted.

Can anyone doubt that there is a conspiracy in the south and west of Ireland inspired by the bitterest hatred against this country ? We see its fruits in murder, cruel and treacherous, throughout the land. We see it in the attempt to destroy the Liverpool Docks and the detailed plans for the ruin of Manchester's Electric Works. We see it in the typhoid poison plot and in other plans involving every crime from assassination to arson. And remember that this conspiracy is no mere nationalism carried to the extreme point. The Irish movement, in spite of the ministerial compliments to the true Ireland and so forth, unquestion- ably embraced, until a very few days ago, the mass of the population of the south and west, including the majority of the bishops and priests and the fiercer adherents of the Roman Church in Ireland. It is inspired by the desire to ruin this country. The conspiracy for social and communistic revolution which exists within England and Scotland is quite another matter. It affects a very small portion of the people, certainly not more than 100 men in each million of the population. Since, however, the plan is to seize and keep power by means of bloodshed and other forms of terrorism, it must be ranked as a conspiracy. Remember that the success of Lenin and Trotsky and their colleagues in Russia has given hope to the most hopeless of the revolutionaries, whose motto is Kill and spare not. We shall be making a great blunder if we say No one can think it possible to create a revolution here."

Next comes what we may call the Russian conspiracy against the British Empire. That conspiracy at Petro- grad and Moscow is so open and plain as hardly to deserve the name of a conspiracy. Throughout our Asian and African Empire, however—that is, in India and in Egypt and many of our African colonies—it is a real menace. The leaders of the Soviet do not hate Britain particularly, but they realize, as they told Mrs. Sheridan, that she is the obstacle in the path of Corn- munism. Just as Napoleon openly declared that he could not establish his world empire without first destroy- ing England ; just as Kaiser Wilhelm and his German colleagues realized that they must break Britain in order to give Germany her place in the sun, so the Bolsheviks have come to the conclusion that the British Empire has got to go. Not only inside India, but even in the wild tribes along the frontier, the Bolsheviks have active agents at work. Owing to our weakness and folly in placing our Indian Empire in the hands of a man who thinks that panic and the payment of political blackmail are a good foundation for an empire, these agents are making astonishing progress Every rivet in the Indian ship of state has become loose and is ready to let in the water which will sink the vessel. Finally, there is great world-wide conspiracy against what is so absurdly called the reign of Capitalism. This conspiracy is, of course, quite as strongly urged against the Continental Powers, and the United States, as agalu4 us. How are we to deal with those conspiracies Certain11

not by panic or wild attempts to substitute a white terror for a red terror, or, again, by copying the evil and cynical devices of the revolutionary. His plan is always to control men's physical and mental forces by appealing to the evil instincts rather than to the good instincts of human nature—the most intense of these being fear, lust, and hate. We must not stand on the defensive with our conspirators. On the contrary we must conduct a stern and open offensive against them, but never one which will borrow their poisoned weapons from the terrorists. Instead, we must use the broadsword of truth and honour.

The first thing is to understand the nature of a revolu- tionary conspiracy and the means by which it is worked. By its nature, it is minority rule, and it has all the vices of oligarchic and aristocratic rule in all countries and in all ages. It acts by violence and terror—by keeping people in awe of the central authority, by holding them in servi- tude, and, above all, by the very old means of cutting off the heads of the tallest poppies whenever a head is reared in any sphere above the dead and dreadful level of communistic misery. Whatever may be the condition of Communism, it never has meant, and never can mean, anything but levelling down, and levelling down with a steam-roller. When the Bolsheviks and Communists talk about political justice, let us remember the great Lord Mansfield's terrible words as to what that means in practice : What is political justice ? Who is she ? Where is she ? Did you ever see her ? Do you know her colour ? Her colour is blood."

And now as to the way in which revolutionary conspiracies work. Not only is their watchword "political justice" with its colour of blood, but blood is the colour of their flag and of the instruments by which they make their way— murder in its thousand forms, from secret poisoning to the shooting of their victims in platoons, drowning them in batches, driving them to die in frozen forests or waterless deserts. Murder is the conspirator's panacea, his wade- mecum, his last resort, his universal solvent. Killing, he feels, is not only the only remedy for the evils of the State, but is also his only safeguard, the essential prop to that giddy, reeling throne upon which he has poised himself. Collapse he knows is certain, unless he can make the wheels go round, and in his scheme of things the only effective motive power is human blood. Otway, with a poet's inspiration, realized and set this forth in the play of Venice Preserv'd ; or, a Plot Discovered, admirably presented this week by the Phoenix Society. The speeches of Renault, the arch-plotter, ooze with blood. He preaches killing as the only remedy. " Kill ! Kill ! Kill ! " is the chorus of his speeches. Their quint- essence is to be found in the passages which stand at the head of this article—passages which might be described as the Plotter's Hand-book. Every successful conspirator from Robespierre and Saint-Just to Trotsky and Lenin has learnt these lessons and put them into practice. Yet they have never achieved anything except a temporary success. Too late the conspirators have always found that ruling by killing is like living upon one's capital. You can make a splendid splash and carry all before you for a certain time, but in the end the pile of corpses you have raised falls by its own weight. Life and human instinct always react against death. To put it in another way, when by the extremity of torture and terror you have got mankind with its back to the wall, and when nothing more is left for men to fear, Terror loses its driving power. It ceases to terrify. Then the revolutionary finds his spell is broken. He has spent his last farthing and made his last stake. The magic word, once so omnipotent, does not even raise an echo. None obeys it more.