Let us beware above all of giving them too much force; their despotism is too dangerous, we must flatter the people by gratuitous justice, promise them a great diminution in taxes and a more equal division, more extension in fortunes, and less humiliation. These phantasies [_vertiges_] will fanaticise the people, who will flatten out all resistance. What matter the victims and their numbers? spoliations, destructions, burnings, and all the necessary effects of a revolution? nothing must be sacred and we can say with Machiavelli: "What matter the means as long as one arrives at the end?" Were all these the ideas of Mirabeau, or were they, like the other document of the Illuminati found amongst his papers, the programme of a conspiracy? I incline to the latter theory. The plan of campaign was, at any rate, the one followed out by the conspirators, as Chamfort, the friend and confidant of Mirabeau, admitted in his conversation with Marmontel: The nation is a great herd that only thinks of browsing, and with good sheepdogs the shepherds can lead it as they please.... Money and the hope of plunder are all-powerful with the people.... Mirabeau cheerfully asserts that with 100 louis one can make quite a good riot.[616] Another contemporary thus describes the methods of the leaders: Mirabeau, in the exuberance of an orgy, cried one day: "That _canaille_ well deserves to have us for legislators!" These professions of faith, as we see, are not at all democratic; the sect uses the populace as revolution fodder [_chair à révolution_], as prime material for brigandage, after which it seizes the gold and abandons generations to torture. It is veritably the code of hell.[617] It is this "code of hell" set forth in the "Projet de Révolution" that we shall find repeated in succeeding documents throughout the last hundred years--in the correspondence of the "Alta Vendita," in the _Dialogues aux Enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu_ by Maurice Joly, in the Revolutionary Catechism of Bakunin, in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and in the writings of the Russian Bolsheviks to-day. Whatever doubts may be cast on the authenticity of any of these documents, the indisputable fact thus remains that as early as 1789 this Machiavellian plan of engineering revolution and using the people as a lever for raising a tyrannical minority to power, had been formulated; further, that the methods described in this earliest "Protocol" have been carried out according to plan from that day to this. And in every outbreak of the social revolution the authors of the movement have been known to be connected with secret societies.