h Revolution have recently been repeated in
Russia. The horrible incidents described in the press[749] were simply
the outward manifestation of a continuous conspiracy of which evidence
was seen some years ago in Portugal under the influence of the
Carbonarios, led by Alfonso Costa, whose utterances at times bore a
striking resemblance to those of Anacharsis Clootz. The late Duchess of
Bedford thus described the war on religion which inaugurated the new
Republic:

One of the most zealous enterprises of this great society [the
Carbonarios] is, in their own words, to exterminate "the Christian myth"
in the minds of the nation of Portugal. The little children in the
schools have badges pinned into their clothes with the words "No God! No
religion!" and a British tourist who made a journey throughout the
country of Portugal met bands of innocent babes carrying banners, on
which the inscription was "We have no need of God."[750]

Is it only a coincidence that last year a Socialist and Communist
meeting in Trafalgar Square displayed a red banner bearing the motto:
"No King, no God, no Law"?[751]

I repeat: It is not an economic revolution which forms the plan of the
real directors of the movement, it is neither the "dictatorship of the
proletariat" nor the reorganization of society by the Intelligentsia of
"Labour"; it is the destruction of the Christian idea. Socialist orators
may inveigh against corrupt aristocracy or "bloated Capitalists," but
these are not in reality the people who will suffer most if the aim of
the conspiracy is achieved. The world-revolution has always shown itself
indulgent towards selfish and corrupt aristocrats, from the Marquis de
Sade and the Duc d'Orleans onwards; it is the gentle, the upright, the
benevolent, who have fallen victims to revolutionary fury.

Socialism with its hatred of all superiority, of noble virtues--loyalty
and patriotism--with its passion for dragging down instead of building
up, serves the purpose of the deeper conspiracy. If the Christian
Intelligentsia can be destroyed or won over and the nation deprived of
all its natural leaders, the world-revolutionaries reckon that they will
be able to mould the proletariat according to their desires. This being
so, the thing we now call Bolshevism forms only one phase of the
movement which is carried on by countless different methods, apparently
disconnected but all tending towards the same end. We have only to look
around us in t