Many a father and mother, many a sound-minded, uncorrupted young person, and thousands of teachers and publicists have cried out against luxury. Many a financier, observing the manner in which the people earned and flung away their money, has warned against luxury. Many an economist, knowing that the nonessential industries were consuming men and materials that were necessary to the stabilizing of essential industries; knowing that men are making knick-knacks who should be making steel; knowing that men are engaged in making gew-gaws who should be working on the farm; that materials are going into articles that are made only to sell and never to use, and that materials are thus diverted from the industries that support the people's life—every observer knowing this crazy insistence on luxurious nonessentials has lifted up a strong voice against it.
But, according to these Protocols, we have been starting at the wrong end. The people, it is true, buy these senseless nonessentials which are called luxuries. But the people do not devise them. And the people grow tired of them one by one. But the stream of varieties continues—always something else being thrust at the people, dangled before their eyes, set bobbing down the avenue on enough mannikins to give the impression that it is "style"; newspaper print and newspaper pictures; movie pictures; stage costumes enough to force the new thing into "fashion" with a kind of force and compulsion which no really worthy essential thing can command.
Where does it come from? What power exists whose long experience and deliberate intent enable it to frivolize the people's minds and tastes and compel them to pay most of their money for it too? Why this spasm of luxury and extravagance through which we have just passed? How did it occur that before luxury and extravagance were apparent, all the material to provoke and inflame them had been prepared beforehand and shipped beforehand, ready for the stampede which also had been prepared?