Page:The council of seven.djvu/186

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"Those who contrive war. Those who preach war. Those who spread rumors of war. The Society has one aim, and one aim only. By every means in its power it ensues Peace."

"Even at the price of murder."

"Murder is a word, a phrase, determined by the man-made statutes of a ballot-box democracy, presided over by the occupant of the Woolsack whom a supine government failed to hang in the year 19—— Human nature does not vary in the matter of its law courts. The man who is hanged is never so finished a criminal as the man who hangs him. Murder, I repeat, is a word, a phrase. Peace is tangible, a possible ideal, a definite object. For many months now, to give one more instance of its activities, the Universal Press, of which you, sir, are the controlling spirit, owing allegiance to none, has been working in a hundred subterranean ways to embroil the United States with Great Britain. What it has to gain by these periodical rifts the stock exchanges of London and New York are best able to say. But the Universal Press, whose power is now manifest in every land of the habitable globe, may yet choose, if unable to surmount the Trust Law, that bulwark and defense of the plain American citizen, to involve the two nations in a fratricidal conflict, with unchallenged world-power a fitting crown for the victor. Antichrist would then be indeed enthroned."

The Colossus again expressed a contempt of such