"Outrages?"
"I did not mean that either. The means you have adopted have often been violent, though the end always was good. But no really useful reform can be brought about in such a way, I am sure."
The man turned his face and fixed his luminous eyes upon hers.
"It may be so," he said; "but even now I see no other way."
Zoe pointed to the almost invisible battleships.
"Ah!" continued Séverac Bablon, "that was a problem of a different kind. In every civilised land there is a power above the throne. Do you think that, unaided, Prussia ever could have conquered gallant France? The people who owe allegiance to the German Emperor are a great people, but, in such an undertaking as war, without the aid of that people who owe allegiance to me, they are helpless as a group of children! Had I been in 1870 what I am to-day, the Prussian arms had never been carried into Paris!"
"You mean that a nation, to carry on a war, requires an enormous sum of money?"
"Which can only be obtained from certain sources."
"From the Jews?"
"In part, at least. The finance of Europe is controlled by a group of Jewish houses."