Absolute Terror not only physically removes the more dangerous opponents of the tyranny but it reduces the survivors to morbid obeisance, to a sort of unwilling, servile, unconscious idolatry of the tyrant. The tyrant, when he attains the stature of Hitler or Stalin, becomes the Omnipotent Father in the subconsciousness of all his subjects, including those hostile to him. This makes it all the more difficult for the rebel to raise his hand in patricide. Those who insist that the modern tyrants are mere gangsters overlook the aura of mystic power which is created around the figure of a ruler daily greeted by choruses of adulation and abasement from tens of millions of his people. It is no more to be resisted than the rhythm of tom-toms. When the Lion of Judah, Emperor Haile Selassie, declared formal mobilization of his ragged soldiers, he had two batteries of war drums, one in major, one in minor key, beating their defiant message all day and all night from his palace in Addis Ababa. The pulsations of the drums at the Ghibi more than two miles away came to me in my room in the stables of the Imperial hotel with a mesmeric force that made me long to follow their rhythmic directions. The same effect is obtained in the great tyrannies by the mass salutations of the tyrant worshipers. Never in history have there been such vast numbers of people to add the influence of the multitude to the herd instinct to conform. The greatest tyrannies of long ago, when the human tribe was a fraction of its size today, the Roman Empire, the Mongol Khanates, or even the Indian Mogul Kingdoms, disposed of power over small populations compared with the more than 250,000,000 now ruled by Hitler or the 200,000,000 by Stalin. In this day of electric communications the huge bulk of such aggregates does not become unmanageable. The more territory Hitler conquers, the more loot he has, the more permanent resources to exploit, and the more people to enslave at work useful for the Nazis. Our only hope against him is for his military defeat at the hands of ourselves and our friends. Q. _You have made discouragingly plain why there are so few political assassinations in Germany, but couldn’t somebody like the fellow who killed King Alexander and Barthou in Marseilles be found?_