suspicion of complicity if they and their friends had
adopted a more straightforward course from the time the Protocols
appeared. When some years ago a work of the same kind was directed
against the Jesuits, containing what purported to be a "Secret Plan" of
revolution closely resembling the Protocols,[872] the Jesuits indulged
in no invectives, made no appeal that the book should be burnt by the
common hangman, resorted to no fantastic explanations, but quietly
pronounced the charge to be a fabrication. Thus the matter ended.

But from the moment the Protocols were published the Jews and their
friends had recourse to every tortuous method of defence, brought
pressure to bear on the publishers--succeeded, in fact, in temporarily
stopping the sales--appealed to the Home Secretary to order their
suppression, concocted one clinching refutation after another, all
mutually exclusive of each other, so that by the time the solution now
pronounced to be the correct one appeared, we had already been assured
half a dozen times that the Protocols had been completely and finally
refuted. And when at last a really plausible explanation had been
discovered, why was it not presented in a convincing manner? All that
was necessary was to state that the origin of the Protocols had been
found in the work of Maurice Joly, giving parallels in support of this
assertion. What need to envelop a good case in a web of obvious romance?
Why all this parade of confidential sources of information, the pretence
that Joly's book was so rare as to be almost unfindable when a search in
the libraries would have proved the contrary? Why these allusions to
Constantinople as the place "to find the key to dark secrets," to the
mysterious Mr. X. who does not wish his real name to be known, and to
the anonymous ex-officer of the Okhrana from whom by mere chance he
bought the very copy of the _Dialogues_ used for the fabrication of the
Protocols by the Okhrana itself, although this fact was unknown to the
officer in question? Why, further, should Mr. X., if he were a Russian
landowner, Orthodox by religion and a Constitutional Monarchist, be so
anxious to discredit his fellow Monarchists by making the outrageous
assertion that "the only occult Masonic organization such as the
Protocols speak of"--that is to say, a Machiavellian system of an
abominable kind--which he had been able to discover in Southern Russia
"was a Monarchist one"?

It is evident then that