I am giving you what he told me as well as I could make it out. Away behind all

the Governments and the armies there was a big subterranean movement going on,

engineered by very dangerous people. He had come on it by accident; it

fascinated him; he went further, and then he got caught. I gathered that most of

the people in it were the sort of educated anarchists that make revolutions, but

that beside them there were financiers who were playing for money. A clever man

can make big profits on a falling market, and it suited the book of both classes

to set Europe by the ears.

 

He told me some queer things that explained a lot that had puzzled me—things

that happened in the Balkan War, how one state suddenly came out on top, why

alliances were made and broken, why certain men disappeared, and where the

sinews of war came from. The aim of the whole conspiracy was to get Russia and

Germany at loggerheads.

 

When I asked why, he said that the anarchist lot thought it would give them

their chance. Everything would be in the melting-pot, and they looked to see a

new world emerge. The capitalists would rake in the shekels, and make fortunes

by buying up wreckage. Capital, he said, had no conscience and no fatherland.

Besides, the Jew was behind it, and the Jew hated Russia worse than hell.

 

“Do you wonder?” he cried. “For three hundred years they have been persecuted,

and this is the return match for the _pogroms_. The Jew is everywhere, but you

have to go far down the backstairs to find him.