themselves been born peasants, so that this proletarian mass in the Russian towns, though less than a tenth of the whole nation, was peculiarly open to propaganda against its masters. And an attack successfully conducted, on that weakest point of modern Capitalism, might easily succeed and then spread to neighbouring industrialized centres in Poland, Germany, and so westward.
Now the attack on this international phenomenon, an attack directed against Industrial Capitalism, required an international force. It needed men who had international experience and were ready with an international formula.
There are two, and only two, organized international forces in Europe to-day with a soul and identity in them. One is the Catholic Church, and the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church, for reasons which I will discuss in a moment, cannot and never will directly attack industrial capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system in flank and indirectly destroy it in the long run wherever the Faith has a strong hold upon masses of people. But it will not and cannot directly attack it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to attack it precisely because our sense of property means nothing to him, is to him something strange, and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was present, he was on the spot. The Church was not.
Of the two international forces present, therefore, the Jews alone could act.
Here I must digress and say why the other great international force, the Catholic Church, has not been able—and will never be able—to attack Industrial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though, as I have said, it acts indirectly as a solvent of this evil and will destroy it wherever society remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only in its abstract doctrine, but acting as the expression of our European civilization, is