... my book has already reached the fourth edition, but it is only definitely known to me now and in a manner worthy of belief, and that through Jewish sources, that these protocols are nothing other than the strategic plans for the conquest of the world under the heel of Israel, and worked out by the leaders of the Jewish people ... and read to the Councils of Elders by the "Prince of Exile," Theodor Herzl, during the first Zionist Congress, summoned by him in August, 1897, in Basle. This is the first time Nilus has so much as hinted at the date of the alleged secret conclave of the Elders of Zion, at the close of which, according to the story of 1905 so elaborately contradicted in 1917, the protocols were stolen by a woman. It is perhaps as well to remark in passing that the first Zionist Congress was held in the open and its proceedings freely reported in the press. Now, Herzl stands among the foremost of the intellectual Jews of modern times. All his known work is characterized by clear, clean-cut reasoning and direct and forceful statement. All his known writings are characterized by these qualities. Whatever we may think about Zionism, it must be admitted that the great Austrian journalist and critic never lacked the courage of his convictions, as may be seen by anybody who will take the trouble to read his writings or the evidence delivered by him before the British Royal Commission on Alien Immigration, in 1902. If Herzl wrote these documents he adopted the disguise of the style and method of a much inferior mentality. Unless we are to believe that he deliberately adopted a style of writing and method of reasoning entirely unfamiliar and unlike his publicly acknowledged work, for the express purpose of hiding his authorship of the protocols--which, if we credit the story that they were presented to a secret conference of the leaders of the alleged conspiracy, is an impossible hypothesis--we are warranted in saying that, whoever wrote them, it was not Theodor Herzl. It would be as reasonable to ascribe a Walt Whitman chant to Emerson, or a Bernard Shaw satire to Jonathan Edwards, as to ascribe these crude, meandering pages to the crystalline intellect of Theodor Herzl. I do not find in them any suggestion of the trained mind of a scholar and writer of Herzl's attainments; rather, they seem to me to belong in about the same intellectual category as the ordinary propaganda literature of the numerous sects, ancient and modern, based upon peculiar interpretations of Biblical prophecies. Since the outbreak of the World War in 1914, and throughout the whole chapter of revolutionary events following thereupon, there has been a steady flood of such literature. Even the much-discussed forecast of Bolshevism does not in any material respect differ from many similar "prophecies" that have appeared in recent years.