thought, and the substitution of other rallying points of an unwholesome and destructive nature, are assisted, as we saw in the last article, by the propaganda for luxury. Luxury is recognizedly one of the most enervating influences. Its course runs from ease, through softness, to flabbiness, to degeneracy, mental, physical and moral. Its beginnings are attractive, its end is lasciviousness in some form, testifying to the complete breakdown of all the strong fiber of the life. It may make a theme for a more complete study some day, this lure to lasciviousness through luxury, and the identity of the forces that set the lure.
But now, to conclude this general view of the method, rather this part of the method, the confusion itself, which all these influences converge to produce, is expected to produce another more deeply helpless state. And that state is, Exhaustion.
It needs no imagination to see what this means. Exhaustion is today one of the conditions that menace the people. The recent political conventions and their effect upon the public fully illustrate it. Nobody seemed to care. Parties might make their declarations and candidates their promises—nobody cared. The war and its strain began the exhaustion; the “peace” and its confusion have about completed it. The people believe little and expect less. Confidence is gone. Initiative is nearly gone. The failure of movements falsely heralded as “people’s movements” has gone far to make the people think that no people’s movement is possible.
So say the Protocols:
“To wear everyone out by dissensions, animosities, feuds, famine, inoculation of diseases, want, until the Gentiles see no other way of escape except an appeal to our money and power.”—Protocol 10.“We will so wear out and exhaust the Gentiles by all this that they will be compelled to offer us an international authority, which by its position will enable us to absorb without disturbance all the governmental forces of the world and thus form a super-government.
“We must so direct the education of Gentile society that its hands will drop in the weakness
