comparison will find that it is a textual _précis_ of the speeches made by the Golden Calf worshippers in Goedsche's "Biarritz." It is consoling to note that none of these scandalous fabrications made any durable appeal to the relatively sober mentality of those happy pre-war days. No reputable newspaper noticed them. Even M. Drumont, while appropriating all the theories of Gougenot des Mousseaux in his "France Juive"--without acknowledgment, by the way--does not mention Goedsche or any of his malicious plunderers. Now it needs but a very cursory glance at these forgeries and their raw material in the treatises of the literary scaremongers to perceive at once the fraud which has been practised on the public by Nilus's book. But before I press this point home, let us see whether Nilus himself has any reasonable explanation to offer of the _provenance_ of his documents. It should be borne in mind that these documents consist of a number of so-called "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion," in which, as in the Goedsche romance, certain Jewish teachers are made to avow to their disciples the dark designs of Jewry for the corruption and subjugation of Christendom. Nilus does not refuse to say how he came by these Protocols. On the contrary he gives us no fewer than three explanations. Unfortunately for him, they are not only elusive and incredibly melodramatic, but they are also hopelessly contradictory. Two of them will be found in the English edition. According to one, the Protocols came from a deceased friend unnamed, who received them from a woman, also unnamed, who stole them from "one of the most influential and most highly initiated leaders of Freemasonry ... at the close of a secret meeting of the initiated in France."[38] According to the other, there was no woman intermediary and no despoiled French Freemason, but the whole business was done by the deceased friend himself, who rifled the safes of "the Headquarter Offices of the Society of Zion in France."[39] The inconsistency of these two stories may conceivably be explained, but it is not so easy to account for the third story, which Nilus relates in a third and enlarged edition of his work published in 1911. Here he tells us that the documents came not from France, but from Switzerland, that they were not Judeo-Masonic, but Zionist, and that they were the secret Protocols of the Zionist Congress held in Basle in 1897.[40] From these conflicting statements it is perfectly clear that Nilus is not a witness of truth, and the damaging conclusion suggested by a comparison of his Protocols with the Goedsche fiction and its progeny of forgeries becomes irresistible.