When we examine Nilus's added matter the revelation of fraud becomes still more remarkable. The main difference between Nilus and his German and Czech fore-runners is that he works out in detail the alleged Autocratic and Bolshevist philosophy of his Elders of Zion. He pictures these fabulous personages as genuine believers in Autocracy, but more intent on Jewish political domination than on merely mercenary exploitation. Accordingly, he attributes to them the design of practising a sort of State Bolshevism when their domination shall have been accomplished—that is to say, the creation of a paternal Jewish autocracy basing itself on a carefully controlled communistic system. It is by this ingenious device that he endeavours to show that the Jews are the arch-enemy at both extremes of the social organism.

Now, whence comes the autocratic philosophy he puts into the mouths of his Jewish Elders? It is exclusively a Russian doctrine. Nilus knows this very well, and he does not waste time in the hopeless task of finding counterblasts to democracy in Jewish political literature. He goes straight to the fountain-head of Russian obscurantism in the person of the late Procurator of the Holy Synod, Konstantine Petrovich Pobyedonoszeff! This expedient has the appearance almost of a practical joke, for Pobyedonoszeff was not only a pure Muscovite and a fanatical Greek Christian, but so conspicuous an anti-Semite and oppressor of Jews, Stundists, and other Russian allogenes that he earned for himself the sobriquet of "the modern Torquemada." Nilus's Jewish Antichrist is, in short, nothing more than the austere super-Christian Procurator masquerading, like Edward Alleyn's Barabas, in a false nose and a prodigious property beard.

The evidence of this jumps to the eyes if we take the trouble to compare the first part of "The Jewish Peril" with Mr. Robert Crozier Long's translation of Pobyedonoszeff's "Reflections of a Russian Statesman,"[43] especially the chapters on "The New Democracy" and "The Great Falsehood of our Time." Many parallel passages might be quoted, but it will, perhaps, suffice if I extract one, fundamental to both writers, in which Nilus makes the Jewish Elder plagiarise the argument of the Christian Procurator, in part almost textually:—

POBYEDONOSZEFF.NILUS.
"Forever extending its base, the new Democracy now aspires to universal suffrage. By this means, the political power would be shattered into a number of infinitesimal bits, of which each citizen acquires a single one. What will he do with it then; how will he employ it?... Each vote representing an inconsiderable fragment of power, by itself signifies nothing.... The extension of the right to participate in elections is regarded as progress, and as the conquest of freedom by democratic theorists who hold that the more numerous the participants in political rights, the greater is the probability that all will employ this right in the interests of the public welfare. Experience proves a very different thing. The history of mankind bears witness that the most necessary and fruitful reforms emanated from the supreme will of statesmen or from a minority enlightened by lofty ideas and deep knowledge, and that, on the contrary, the extension of the representative principle is accompanied by an abasement of political ideas".[44] "It suffices to give the populace self-government for a short period for this populace to become a disorganised rabble.... Is it possible for the mass to discriminate quietly and without jealousies to administer the affairs of State? Can they be a defence against a foreign foe? This is impossible, as a plan broken up into as many parts as there are minds in the mass loses its value, and therefore becomes unintelligible and unworkable. Alone an autocrat can conceive vast plans clearly, assigning its proper part to everything in the mechanism of the machine of State. Hence we conclude that it is expedient for the welfare of the country that the Government of the same should be in the hands of one responsible person. Without absolute despotism civilisation cannot exist, for civilisation is capable of being promoted only under the protection of the ruler, whoever he may be, and not at the hands of the masses".[45]

In the second part of "The Jewish Peril," where the Elders of Zion are made to expound their State Bolshevism, the sources are not quite so clear. It is practically certain, however, that they are not Jewish. Had Nilus waited a few years he would, perhaps, have been able to quote convinced Bolshevist writers of Jewish birth like Radek and Zinovieff, but when he wrote in 1905 there were no such exponents of pure Leninism. The great split of 1903 found all the leading Russo-Jewish Socialists, such as Martoff, Axelrod, Trotsky, Martinoff, Liber, Dahn, and the whole of the Bund, ranged with the Mensheviks against Lenin.[46] The result was that, in reproducing Bolshevist ideas, Nilus must have been dependent on Gentile pamphleteers. It is not easy to identify these ephemeral writings with certainty, but many interesting parallels of this section of the Protocols may be found in Bucharin's "Programme of the Communists," which codifies all the early Bolshevist literature.[47] And Bucharin, be it noted, is just as little a Jew as was Pobyedonoszeff. This, of course, explains the alleged prophetic character of the Protocols which the Morning Post and its friends hold to be convincing evidence of their genuineness. If the Bolsheviks have acted on some of the principles attributed the Elders of Zion, they have done so not because they were of Jewish origin, but because they were exclusively the work of Lenin and his bodyguard of Gentile proletarians.

So much for the literary history of the Protocols. Their political history is not less discreditable. They were not published because they were discovered—whether in the pages of Goedsche or elsewhere—but they were discovered because they were wanted for the ignoble purpose of a pogrom-weapon. In the first edition of his book, published in 1901, Nilus knew nothing of them, but was absorbed by the more abstract aspects of the problem of Antichrist. In 1905 occurred the Russian Revolution, and this was followed by the incendiary conspiracy of the Okhrana to stir up pogroms all over Russia and drown the new Constitution in a welter of Jewish blood.[48] Nilus appears to have been employed by the Okhrana in this wicked campaign. At any rate, the Protocols first appeared at this date in the shape of small pamphlets or broadsheets and they were only afterwards collected and incorporated in a second edition of Nilus's work as a dénouement of his theory of the Judeo-Masonic nature of Antichrist. Nor has their rôle as a pogrom-weapon been confined to the year 1905. Quite recently abstracts of them were widely circulated in Denikin's and Koltchak's armies. They were printed in the Eparchial Library at Rostoff, and were distributed by the remnants of the organisation of Black Hundreds known as the Union of the Russian People. How effective they were for their murderous purpose we know from the horrible massacres of inoffensive Jews and Jewesses which dogged the foot-steps of Denikin's armies throughout South Russia.

But this was not the only sinister movement with which the Protocols seem to have been associated. The year in which they were first published in Russia was also the year of a very serious Russo-German intrigue against the Triple Entente; and here again these Protocols—or, rather, their argument—appear as one of the main weapons of the plotters.

It will be remembered that in July, 1905, the basis of an anti-British Alliance was secretly agreed upon by the Tsar and the Kaiser at Bjoerkoe.[49] A few months later, while the Treaty was still incomplete, Count Lamsdorf proposed to the Tsar that advantage should be taken of "the new friendly relations" with Germany to conclude an agreement between the two countries for combating the alleged Jewish and Masonic peril.[50] Now, the secret Memorandum in which this precious scheme was set forth, and which the Tsar formally approved in January, 1906, is virtually a reproduction of the anti-Semitic argument which the alleged "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are designed to prove. It is true that the Protocols themselves are not mentioned, but Count Lamsdorf is none the less positive, with the fabricators of those documents, that the Jews are the soul of the Revolutionary movement in Europe, that their "principal aim is the all-around triumph of anti-Christian and anti-Monarchist Jewry," that their millionaires subvention this movement with "gigantic pecuniary means," and that they are abetted in this enterprise by the Freemasons. The Protocols are, indeed, little more than a dramatic version of Count Lamsdorf's Memorandum. It is difficult to resist the conclusion that in some occult way—perhaps not so very occult—Nilus's book was intended to serve the sinister ends of the pro-German foreign policy of Count Lamsdorf in the same way as it served the bloody purposes of the pogrom-mongers. It should be especially noted in this connection that the book is as anti-British as it is anti-Jewish, and that it was published in December, 1905, that is to say, at the very time that the Tsar had the Lamsdorf scheme under consideration.

The more recent history of the Protocols is even more unsavoury. It is incredible, but it is nevertheless a fact, that these crazy forgeries have played a part behind the scenes in the international combinations for assisting the anti-Bolshevist reaction in Russia, which have filled so much of the public mind during the last two years, and which have cost this country close on £100,000,000. There was a moment when the Great Powers were disposed to leave the Russians to fight out their quarrels among themselves. Various objections to this policy were urged by the friends of Admiral Koltchak and General Denikin, and among them was the argument that there was, in fact, no civil war in Russia, that Bolshevism was not Russian, but exclusively alien, the work of international Jews who were themselves the instruments of a world-wide and deep-laid Jewish conspiracy against Christendom and the political order of Europe. Bolshevism was, in short, a European menace. Russia was pictured as the first instalment of the Jewish conquest of Europe, which had already sent its éclaireurs to Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, and Budapest, whence they were advancing to the Rhine and the Alps. In support of this argument, Russian Intelligence Officers, armed with doctored typewritten translations of the Nilus Protocols, with the anti-British passages carefully expunged, were sent to London, Paris, Rome, and Washington, where they circulated this precious literature confidentially among Cabinet Ministers, heads of public departments, and persons of influence in society and journalism. That this campaign was not fruitless is attested by many curious facts, which, unfortunately, cannot be more particularly referred to at this moment without a breach of confidence. Overt evidence of the mischief that was wrought is, however, not wanting. It may be found, for example, in certain oracular utterances of Mr. Winston Churchill in a Sunday paper, in the anti-Semitic outbursts of the Morning Post, and the itching of the Times and the Spectator to do likewise, and, finally, in the discreditable propaganda leaflets distributed in the interior of Russia by the air service of the British armies at Archangel and Murmansk.[51]

Why the Protocols were circulated thus secretly is clear. Their political purpose had nothing to gain, and, indeed, everything to lose from public criticism and discussion. Nevertheless, they leaked out. A copy got into the hands of an official of the United States Department of Justice, and he, anxious for further information, and following some tactless office rule, sent it to the President of an important Jewish organisation in New York for his observations. The President promptly replied that it was a forgery of a very familiar type, and took no further notice of it. In June, 1919, the present writer, while in Paris, heard of the circulation of the Protocols as a pogrom pamphlet in Denikin's country, but he also attached no special importance to it. Later on came the first intimation of the proposed publication of the Protocols in Western Europe. It came in very characteristic shape. One day the members of a certain Jewish Delegation in Paris received a visit from a mysterious Lithuanian who had been connected with the Russian Secret Police. He professed himself anxious to serve the Jewish community, and said that he was in a position to prevent the publication of an exceedingly dangerous book, which, if it saw the light, would probably involve the whole house of Israel in ruin. Quite naturally, he wished to be paid for this service, but the sum was a mere trifle, a matter of £10,000. He was asked for a sight of the volume, and he produced it. It was, of course, "the Protocols." Needless to say, no business was done. It was possibly only a coincidence that in the following December a German edition was published under the title "Die Geheimnisse der Weisen von Zion," and two months later the English edition saw the light under the title "The Jewish Peril: Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." The German and English publication would have been simultaneous but for the fact that difficulty was experienced in finding a reputable London publishing house to take the Protocols seriously.