Alistair grew more and more inclined to believe it. More and more he came to feel that he had no quarrel with the Church of Rome. It had never persecuted him. On the contrary, it had treated him with consideration at a time when he had received no consideration from those who owed it to him most. He would have been glad enough to believe that a restored Papal State would afford him the city of refuge for which he yearned, and if he raised objections the tempters easily swept them away. “Was not the press muzzled?” he would ask. “Was there not a censorship of books?” And the answer would be that the democratic press was equally muzzled, only it was muzzled by a golden muzzle. A paper could not be launched, except at a cost only within the means of the very rich. It could not be carried on at all without the revenue derived from the pill-makers and the soap-makers; and the pill-maker would permit nothing to appear in it that might by any possibility offend his bilious customers. The rich man would not tolerate any paper that did not pander to the passionate greed which was fast becoming more than a disease--a veritable possession. And there was a censorship of books as well, a censorship administered, not by educated men, but by policemen hounded to their work by rabid zealots in whom sexual perversion took the form of prudery. There were commercial censorships and voluntary ones. A tradesman, sitting in his office, held in his hands the fate of half the books brought out in England. The committees of the Free Libraries were more intolerant than any Roman congregation. Were not their shelves choked with the rubbish of evangelical serialists, and barred to the masterpieces of De Maupassant and D’Annunzio? The real censorships of books in every age had been exercised by human stupidity. The Index Expurgatorius of ignorance and spite was vaster than the British Museum Catalogue. Stuart found himself more than half committed to the cause already. His effort on behalf of Don Juan, slight and unsuccessful as it had been, had brought him a letter of thanks from the Prince, and an invitation to call on him if Lord Alistair should ever find himself in Rome. Des Louvres continued to speak hopefully of the Pretender’s prospects. And in the meanwhile it became more and more clear to Alistair that Don Juan’s cause, and all these romantic causes and whispering conspiracies centred in the one supreme cause and the one secular conspiracy represented by that immemorial figure, crowned with the triple crown of Ra, grasping the keys of Sheol and Amenti, and pursuing in the name of the Crucified One the empire of the Conqueror. In the same measure that Alistair Stuart was attracted to the camp of these rebels against the established order he was repelled from that rival camp whose red flag was the symbol of an international Jacquerie.