The great reformers could fulminate and anathematize to their hearts’ content, but they were rarely able to turn their threats into positive acts of repression. The Roman Church on the other hand not only possessed the power to crush its enemies but it made use of it, whenever the occasion presented itself. The difference may seem trivial to those of us who like to indulge in abstract cogitations upon the theoretical values of tolerance and intolerance. But it was a very real issue to those poor devils, who were placed before the choice of a public recantation or an equally public flogging. And if they sometimes lacked the courage to say what they held to be true, and preferred to waste their time on cross-word puzzles made up exclusively from the names of the animals mentioned in the Book of Revelations, let us not be too hard on them. I am quite certain that I never would have written the present volume, six hundred years ago. CHAPTER IX THE WAR UPON THE PRINTED WORD I find it increasingly difficult to write history. I am rather like a man who has been trained to be a fiddler and then at the age of thirty-five is suddenly given a piano and ordered to make his living as a virtuoso of the Klavier, because that too “is music.” I learned my trade in one sort of a world and I must practice it in an entirely different one. I was taught to look upon all events of the past in the light of a definitely established order of things; a universe more or less competently managed by emperors and kings and arch-dukes and presidents, aided and abetted by congressmen and senators and secretaries of the treasury. Furthermore, in the days of my youth, the good Lord was still tacitly recognized as the ex-officio head of everything, and a personage who had to be treated with great respect and decorum. Then came the war. The old order of things was completely upset, emperors and kings were abolished, responsible ministers were superseded by irresponsible secret committees, and in many parts of the world, Heaven was formally closed by an order in council and a defunct economic hack-writer was officially proclaimed successor and heir to all the prophets of ancient times. Of course all this will not last. But it will take civilization several centuries to catch up and by then I shall be dead. Meanwhile I have to make the best of things, but it will not be easy. Take the question of Russia. When I spent some time in that Holy Land, some twenty years ago, fully one quarter of the pages of the foreign papers that reached us were covered with a smeary black substance, known technically as “caviar.” This stuff was rubbed upon those items which a careful government wished to hide from its loving subjects.