“Not outside the moral law. Take the case of the teeming, helpless millions of my Chinese compatriots for whom I speak, of those millions of unlucky creatures who know themselves impotent to deal with the marvelous physical forces now controlled by the western mind. For months, through the agency of your terrible engine the Universal Press, you have been inciting your Government to shatter Peking. For months, to this end you have been organizing public opinion by means of false news and distorted facts. Once the die is cast the yellow and black races are powerless to cope with the airships, the poison gases, the high explosives, the dread magics the civilization of the West is able to hurl upon them. Not a month ago you caused to be wiped out of existence, by means of bombs rained from the clouds, a native village in the heart of Africa. Not a year ago a similar thing occurred in Afghanistan in Upper India.” “You would hold me responsible for that?” “Indirectly--yes. Or to look nearer home, consider the case of Ireland.” “The example is not altogether well chosen,” Saul Hartz spoke with a scorn he did not try to conceal. “If your precious Society will condescend to read our newspapers, it will see that we are committed to a policy of conciliation.” “Ireland and her affairs have long been a political cat’s-paw for the Newspaper Ring, the secret power which sways the destinies of mankind.” “Cheap generalizations,” said Saul Hartz, contemptuously. “The Society does not share your view. By the light of what has happened since, it now sees that Ireland and her affairs were a card played with Luciferian skill to precipitate the world catastrophe. A masterstroke of policy on the part of antichrist, no doubt. The scheme was crowned with every success. By the irony of fate, however, that catastrophe has made it possible to restore the moral law to the world.” “Of which your Society is the embodiment, I presume?” “That is so,” Lien Weng bowed gravely. “It is based entirely on the moral idea.” “In other words,” said Saul Hartz, “it murders people of whom it doesn’t approve from the highest motives. A scheme delightfully convenient, yet not altogether new.” “The Society makes no claim to novelty. It has existed in a rudimentary form in the Celestial Empire and throughout many Eastern lands for thousands of years. In the oldest of all existing civilizations it is the last resort of the weak against the strong. Those whose minds are developed on disparate lines from that implacable ‘efficiency’ which enables the brain of the modern western business man to dominate the physical world and make life a hell for those who arouse its predatory instincts, are now banded together in self-defense against the common enemy of the human race.” “Who and what is the common enemy of the human race?”