way.  The condition of the world has, however, steadily grown worse and worse; the laboring classes have become more and more desperate.  The farmers’ sons could, for generations, be counted upon to fight the workmen; but the fruit has been steadily ripening.  Now the yeomanry have lost possession of their lands; their farms have been sold under their feet; cunning laws transferred the fruit of their industry into the pockets of great combinations, who loaned it back to them again, secured by mortgages; and, as the pressure of the same robbery still continued, they at last lost their homes by means of the very wealth they had themselves produced.  Now a single nabob owns a whole county; and a state is divided between a few great loan associations; and the men who once tilled the fields, as their owners, are driven to the cities to swell the cohorts of the miserable, or remain on the land a wretched peasantry, to contend for the means of life with vile hordes of Mongolian coolies.  And all this in sight of the ruins of the handsome homes their ancestors once occupied!  Hence the materials for armies have disappeared.  Human greed has eaten away the very foundations on which it stood.  And of the farmers who still remain nearly all are now members of our Brotherhood.  When the Great Day comes, and the nation sends forth its call for volunteers, as in the past, that cry will echo in desolate places; or it will ring through the triumphant hearts of savage and desperate men who are hastening to the banquet of blood and destruction.  And the wretched, yellow, under-fed coolies, with women’s garments over their effeminate limbs, will not have the courage or the desire or the capacity to make soldiers and defend their oppressors.”

“But have not the Oligarchy standing armies?” I asked.

“Yes.  In Europe, however, they have been constrained, by inability to wring more taxes from the impoverished people, to gradually diminish their numbers.  There, you know, the real government is now a coterie of bankers, mostly Israelites; and the kings and queens, and so-called presidents, are mere toys and puppets in their hands.  All idea of national glory, all chivalry, all pride, all battles for territory or supremacy have long since ceased.  Europe is a banking association conducted exclusively for the benefit of the bankers.  Bonds take the place of national aspirations.  To squeeze the wretched is the great end of government; to toil and submit, the destiny of the peoples.

“The task which Hannibal attempted, so disastrously, to subject the Latin and mixed-Gothic races of Europe to the domination of the Semitic blood, as represented in the merchant-city of Carthage, has been successfully accomplished in these latter days by the cousins of the Phœnicians, the Israelites.  The nomadic children of Abraham have fought and schemed their way, through infinite depths of persecution, from their tents on the plains of Palestine, to a power higher than the thrones of Europe.  The world is to-day Semitized.  The children of Japhet lie prostrate slaves at the feet of the children of Shem; and the sons of Ham bow humbly before their august dominion.