SECRET SOCIETIES AND REVOLUTION.
MRS. WEBSTER, whose book on the World Revolu- tion we review elsewhere, has added to the debt of gratitude already due to her. Her book on the French • Revolution was not only eminently readable, and what Bacon would have called " luciferous " ; it had also the inestimable advantage that it was fully documented. By this we do not mean that there were huge appendices filled with unreadable State papers, speeches, and the like, but that whenever she was making a point of importance she quoted the actual words of the actors in the drama, and did not rely upon dead summaries. When she wanted to make us understand the deeds of Saint-Just or Robespierre, or whoever was the revolutionary she was handling, she would not put a dull analysis into the mouth of the revolutionary. She gave us spring water, not dippings from a stagnant pond. In her new book Mrs. Webster has followed this admir- able example. As before, we get the actual words and the actual facts, and also, as before, there is always chapter and verse for her statements. If we want to know more, we can look up the references. And here we should like to intervene with a petition. It is that Mrs. Webster should reprint Robison's book on the conspiracy side of the revolution in full with an introduction giving us all that is known as to the author and the circumstance under which he wrote his book. This and fall annotations of the text should provide a book of deep interest to all students of the revolutionary period. The original book is by no means easily accessible, and a reprint should command a good market. Though on the whole we approve so strongly of Mrs. Webster's method of exposition, we feel bound to make certain criticisms on one or two points. We agree with the immense importance of showing that a plot has existed and still exists against civilization, and we think she has done great service in insisting that we ought to take this vastly important fact into consideration and deal with it. Unfortunately, however, she runs, we will not say her theory, because we do not think it is a theory, but her facts too hard—certainly a good deal too hard for the consumption of the ordinary Englishman. If you want to convince Englishmen, as she certainly does, you must practise a certain economy of truth if you have got to deal with such matters as plots or conspiracies. There is no greater non-conductor of intellectual sympathy to the Englishman than talk of mysterious and underground and sensational workings. Credo quid impossibile is not an Englishman's motto. He can only with the greatest difficulty be got to take a plot seriously ; and if he hears other people talking about one, he immediately says that they are suffering from a touch of conspiracy mania. Yet invincible ignorance of this matter is often quite as dangerous as is the gullibility of the Southerner who delights to believe in a plot per se, although the evi- dence is of the flimsiest or of the most ridiculous kind. We have got to take the world, or rather the English world, as it is, and therefore we cannot but regret that Mrs. Webster, while illuminating us about the Illuminati, had not, to borrow and transpose an inimitable phrase from the rich repertory of Quarles, "screwed her divine theorbo " six notes lower instead of six notes higher.
Mrs. Webster's mother thought in the present volume is the Secret Society. She believes that the Lodges of the Illuminati—a kind of sublimated form of Continental but not British freemasonry—probably played a very great part in the making of the French Revolution. Further, she thinks that the Society of the Illuminati, though apparently stamped out by Napoleon, was not destroyed, but merely went to earth. It revived after 1815, and in 1848 made another attempt to destroy our civilization. It had a third try under Marx's First Internationale in the period from 1868 up to the Commune, when it received another great check. Its fourth attempt was the Revolu- tion in Russia. That attempt, though it appears to be breaking down at Moscow, is alive in Ireland, throughout Europe, and also in the United States of America, among those sections of Society who think that Demolition is the first word of Progress, and that killing is no murder when you dislike the dead man's views. We are ourselves inclined to believe in the evidence of a world-wide plot set 'forth by Mrs. Webster. Therefore we feel it is very important that the world in general, and especially the English-speaking world, should be thoroughly well instructed on this matter. At the same time, we cannot help feeling that Mrs. Webster's book will not get the attention it deserves because of its sensational character, and because of the vehement way in which she presses the evidence upon our attention.
We shall not be surprised if Mrs. Webster is disgusted and annoyed with such criticism. Nothing is more exasperating than to try to awaken a man to a danger which he cannot be persuaded to understand or even to recognize as in existence. Still, we should be doing a good cause a great wrong if we did not point out this fact. Therefore, once more, though we fully realize the danger, we cannot help saying that we think Mrs. Webster attaches too much importance to the Illuminati. They existed ; they exist. They did evil work ; they are doing it now. But, all the same, they did not do as much harm as they claim to have done. They as often as not made the claim of the fly on the wheel. Like the Jesuits, they have employed secret and mysterious methods when open means would have been quite as easy and as efficient. But though this sounds childish, it has enabled them to claim as theirs a great many acts with which they have had nothing whatever to do. It was a conscious part of the scheme of the Illuminati to claim a hand in any dark, difficult, or mysterious movement, any convulsion of the social equilibrium, even if the cause in reality was religion or economics rather than that crazy creed of revolution for revolution's sake to which the Illuminati were sworn.
But though we may regret the touch of over-vehemence, let no one suppose that we do not greatly value Mrs. Webster's work on most substantial grounds. She gives us information about the work of the Illuminati in the past, and about their opinions, which we know not where to read elsewhere. Further, she gives us very valuable warnings in regard to the present activities of these fantastic and criminal lunatics and their secret and parasitic organizations. One is naturally reluctant to believe that there are people who really love and practise evil for love of evil. It seems reasonable to think that men only do wicked things out of selfishness, or panic, or lust, or greed— all explicable desires, but to ingeminate wickedness kir wickedness' sake sounds like the ravings of Satan's "Evil, be thou my good." We are bound to say, however, that the history of the Illuminati does seem to prove the existence of a certain small section of the popu- lation who are really depraved, who are moral invert. We may pity them, and analyse them, but we cannot explain them away or talk them out of existence. They are dangerous though crazy, and we must take due pre- cautions.
People will naturally ask whether Mrs. Webster is able to give any explanation of the rise of the Secret Societies, and what was the cause of their existence. She hazards no theories on this point—partly, perhaps, because she had not been able to make up her mind, and partly because she does not set out to deal with origins, but to tell us for practical and political purposes the story of the plot against civilization—the plot which the Secret Societies have undoubtedly professed to carry out. How far they have been successful, or how far they have merely boasted of the successes of others, is a different matter.
In spite of our lesser knowledge, we feel inclined to step in where Mrs. Webster has refused to tread. The Secret Societies of the modern world, as we know from Goethe's poem (translated, by the way, by Walter Scott), arose in Germany, and they arose because of the dreadful oppressions of the petty tyrants of mediaeval Germany. When the mediaeval anarchy gave place to the semi-order of the seventeenth century, there was a pause in the activity of the Secret Societies. But in the seventeenth century began that terrible growth and usurpation of State power of which Louis XIV. affords us the prime example. The personifica- tion of the State into something which must be obeyed implicitly by men, which marked the political philosophy of the age, had a comparatively innocent origin, but it grew into a cancer. That hideous thing which later the French called Etatisme produced a social and political atmosphere in which a free man could hardly breathe. Only a man with the nature of a slave could endure that appalling miasma. Rather than die of moral suffocation, men formed secret organizations for the destruction of the system which was asphyxiating them. They disguised their antagonism to the State, however, under the fan- tastic nonsense of Rosicrucianism and of the bogus mediaevalism and tawdry ritual which was supposed to have existed in the Guilds and in the Vehmgericht. One of the worst things about Secret Societies is that they incite a tyrannical state to persecute them, and so intensify the evil. Next, in dangerous times Secret Societies are like derelict blasting power. The stuff is per se useful, but evilly disposed persons may get hold of it and use it not for legitimate but for criminal purposes. The Secret Societies of Germany were comparatively harmless up till about 1770 or so. Then Weishaupt, a Prussian with criminal instincts and lunatic perversions, 'got hold of them and gave them a revolutionary turn. He shunted Continental Freemasonry on to Antinomian and. Revolu- tionary lines.
Before we leave the subject of Secret Societies we must note that, though Mrs. Webster shows what a bad influence certain sections of the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe have played in fomenting revolution, her investigations have led her to the conclusion that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the work which, published under the heading of The Jewish Peril in 1919, created so much discussion here and in America, was not what it professed to be or what its Russian discoverer, if he was a discoverer, asserted it was—i.e., a Jewish production—but was largely based upon the secret instructions drawn up by Weishaupt for the Society of the Illuminati. Mrs. Webster tells us that in reading The Protocols of the Elders of Zion she constantly found passages which had a strange ring of familiarity. By degrees the conviction grew m her mind, "But this is simply Illuminism!" Inspired by this idea, she has drawn up in parallel columns :potations from the Protocols and quotations from the writings of Weishaupt, and of writers like Barruel and Robison, who profess to give, and probably do give, descriptions of the theories and creeds of Illuminism. The parallel passages set forth deserve to be read as a whole, and we must therefore refer our readers to them. Our own strong impression is that Mrs. Webster is getting on the right track in connecting the Protocols and Illuminism. Whether the Protocols in their present form were drawn up by those whom we might call Illuminist Revivalists, or whether they were the skilful work of some Russian police agent who had discovered the inner doctrine of the Illuminati, and, wanting to link the revolutionary movement with the Jews, improved his "copy," we do not know. For our- selves, we have always felt that the evidence for the authenticity of the Protocols set forth by Professor Nilus was wholly inadequate, and indeed pointed directly to fraud—not necessarily on the part of Nilus, but of some one in the alleged chain of communication. On the other hand, the internal evidence, both as regards the style and matter, appeared to us to be quite inconsistent with the theory of wholesale forgery by an "agent provocateur." They bore the marks of fanatic frenzy, not of faking. It is difficult to suppose that members of the Russian Secret Police would be capable of such a dramatic repre- sentation of revolutionary metaphysics. The moue hard is not made like that. The theory that the Protocols were a kind of salad or compilation from the writings of the Inner Circle of the Muminati seems to harmonize these two theories of origin.
The subject is in any case interesting, but we think it is also of practical importance. We fully expect that we shall have to endure the activities of Secret Societies for another generation at least. We must therefore make up our minds how to deal with them. In our opinion, it will be very foolish to rush either to the conclusion of severe suppression or, again, of a "Let it alone and chance it" policy. The via media of watchfulness and very prompt and very stern action the moment conspiracy blossoms into crime is the ideal. Better even than that is publicity pushed to the furthest possible point. If members of some of the Secret Revolutionary Societies could be placed upon their trial and the fullest publicity given to their criminal nonsense, so that an atmosphere of disgust, indig- nation, ridicule, and general disillusionment were created, we believe that the movement would die of universal odium and contempt. Possibly it would grow up again, for men love ritual and secrecy for their own sake, and ritual and secrecy lend themselves to crime. Secret Societies, in fact, are like the "gob fire" in a mine. It is always burning, but as long as the fire is kept within certain strict limits and is well looked after, no great harm is done, and the mine can be quite well and safely worked. But every now and then the "gob fire," for some reason or other, blazes up—generally because the attention of those whose duty it is to watch it has been relaxed. Then there is trouble, and, unless a great effort is made, death and destruction. So it is with the State and the Secret Societies.
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