study is not one of Mr. Ford's strong points, but, even so, he must be aware of the fact that it is one of the commonest things in history to encounter charges of conspiracy directed against religious and political sects, supported by more or less plausible arguments and believed by considerable numbers of people. Were it necessary to my purpose, and did time permit, I could quite easily fill a considerable volume with illustrations of this fact. For example, there exists a great literature devoted to the object of proving that the Vatican is the headquarters of such a conspiracy to bring about or to attain world domination. Thousands of books and pamphlets have been written to convict the Jesuits of such a conspiracy, many of them far more convincing than these protocols. Pamphlets aiming to convince the American people that the Knights of Columbus is an organization aiming at the overthrow of the American Republic and the establishment of the temporal sovereignty of the Pope over the United States have been circulated by the million. It is a matter of court record that this charge has been supported by the publication of what purported to be exact copies of oaths pledging the members of that organization to the end stated. Let me say at once that I do not credit these sensational stories and charges. I have confined myself to charges made against one of the two great sections of Christianity for reasons which seem to me peculiarly cogent. The charges made against the Jews have produced the most terrible results in the countries where the Roman Catholic Church is strongest, and no leader of the Christian religion has such strong reason for denouncing such appeals to prejudice and hatred as the head of that Church.

Belief in widespread conspiracies directed against individuals or the state is probably the commonest form assumed by the human mind when it loses its balance and its sense of proportion. I venture to hazard the opinion that of all the cranks who have pestered Mr. Ford since he has attained a conspicuous position, those who imagined themselves to be the victims of conspiracies have outnumbered all the others. These protocols are either preposterous forgeries deliberately wrought for the purpose of fostering anti-Semitism in Russia, or they are the pitiable ravings of a familiar type of monomaniac.

Concerning the authorship of the protocols, there has been much conjecture, especially on the part of those who have seriously regarded them as an authentic expression of Jewish opinion. It has been whispered in those places where the so-called Jewish question is discussed, that they are the work of the well-known Zionist leader, Dr. Theodor Herzl. This is the theory which Nilus himself advances in the introduction to the edition of 1917. He says:

This is the first time Nilus has so much as hinted at the date of the alleged secret conclave of the Elders of Zion, at the close of which, according to the story of 1905 so elaborately contradicted in 1917, the protocols were stolen by a woman. It is perhaps as well to remark in passing that the first Zionist Congress was held in the open and its proceedings freely reported in the press. Now, Herzl stands among the foremost of the intellectual Jews of modern times. All his known work is characterized by clear, clean-cut reasoning and direct and forceful statement. All his known writings are characterized by these qualities. Whatever we may think about Zionism, it must be admitted that the great Austrian journalist and critic never lacked the courage of his convictions, as may be seen by anybody who will take the trouble to read his writings or the evidence delivered by him before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, in 1902. If Herzl wrote these documents he adopted the disguise of the style and method of a much inferior mentality.

Unless we are to believe that he deliberately adopted a style of writing and method of reasoning entirely unfamiliar and unlike his publicly acknowledged work, for the express purpose of hiding his authorship of the protocols—which, if we credit the story that they were presented to a secret conference of the leaders of the alleged conspiracy, is an impossible hypothesis—we are warranted in saying that, whoever wrote them, it was not Theodor Herzl. It would be as reasonable to ascribe a Walt Whitman chant to Emerson, or a Bernard Shaw satire to Jonathan Edwards, as to ascribe these crude, meandering pages to the crystalline intellect of Theodor Herzl. I do not find in them any suggestion of the trained mind of a scholar and writer of Herzl's attainments; rather, they seem to me to belong in about the same intellectual category as the ordinary propaganda literature of the numerous sects, ancient and modern, based upon peculiar interpretations of Biblical prophecies. Since the outbreak of the World War in 1914, and throughout the whole chapter of revolutionary events following thereupon, there has been a steady flood of such literature. Even the much-discussed forecast of Bolshevism does not in any material respect differ from many similar "prophecies" that have appeared in recent years.

It cannot be denied that Bolshevism actually conforms in a notable degree to the specifications contained in the protocols, which I have already summarized in the preceding chapter. Shall we, then, conclude that the charge is proven and declare the case closed, or is it necessary to examine the evidence further and more critically? I think that a very brief period of honest reflection will convince any fair-minded and intelligent person of the injustice of the rendering of a verdict holding the Jews responsible for Bolshevism upon the basis of such evidence. Let me direct the attention of my readers to a coincidence of dates which once more directs suspicion against Prof. Sergei Nilus and against the alleged stolen protocols. I have already pointed out that in 1903, in the first edition of his book, Nilus did not use the alleged protocols, though he claims that they had been in his possession for two years prior to that time. That this is a suspicious circumstance will, I think, be readily conceded by the open-minded. In 1903 the Russian Social Democratic party was split into two factions, and the word "Bolshevism" came into use as the designation of the policy of one of these factions. In 1905 the first Russian revolution took place. In the period between the split in the Social Democratic party in 1903 and the outbreak of the revolution in 1905 the leaders of the Bolsheviki had been active in formulating and propagating their theoretical and political views. During the revolution a sharp conflict occurred between the Bolsheviki and other factions of the Russian Socialist movement, and the Socialist press gave much space to the controversy.

It will be seen from this brief historical sketch that when Nilus published a second edition of his book, late in 1905, he could find in the Russian Socialist press all the materials for such a general description of Bolshevism as that contained in the protocols. Of course, if we believe that the documents are genuine, that they are authentic translations of documents