Page:The council of seven.djvu/177

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heroic attempt to adjust the balance of power. Certain minds in the world of public affairs—and it is only one world among many—are now in full control of the wires which hold society together. These minds stand for negation. At the beck of private ambition of an ignoble kind, they are prepared to override all that is human, all that is divine. So long as they can fill the world with war and the rumor of war they thrive. In the end, of course, Fate itself will deal with them, but only at an awful cost to the helpless and the innocent. Had society had the power in 1912 to remove Wilhelm II and the small group of men around him, it is almost certain that the cataclysm which has so nearly destroyed the civilization of the West would have been averted."

Saul Hartz took leave to doubt it.