system, as Marx and Engels perceived, was the principal obstacle to exploitation by a financial autocracy.
Moreover, it is by no means improbable that this order of things would have been brought about by the violent overthrow of the French monarchy--indeed, of all monarchies; the Templars, "those terrible conspirators," says Eliphas Lévi, "threatened the whole world with an immense revolution."
Here perhaps we may find the reason why this band of dissolute and rapacious nobles has enlisted the passionate sympathy of democratic writers. For it will be noticed that these same writers who attribute the King's condemnation of the Order to envy of their wealth never apply this argument to the demagogues of the eighteenth century and suggest that their accusations against the nobles of France were inspired