Page:The council of seven.djvu/185

 of what has happened since, it now sees that Ireland and her affairs were a card played with Luciferian skill to precipitate the world catastrophe. A master stroke of policy on the part of antichrist, no doubt. The scheme was crowned with every success. By the irony of fate, however, that catastrophe has made it possible to restore the moral law to the world."

"Of which your Society is the embodiment, I presume?"

"That is so," Lien Weng bowed gravely. "It is based entirely on the moral idea."

"In other words," said Saul Hartz, "it murders people of whom it doesn't approve from the highest motives. A scheme delightfully convenient, yet not altogether new."

"The Society makes no claim to novelty. It has existed in a rudimentary form in the Celestial Empire and throughout many Eastern lands for thousands of years. In the oldest of all existing civilizations it is the last resort of the weak against the strong. Those whose minds are developed on disparate lines from that implacable 'efficiency' which enables the brain of the modern western business man to dominate the physical world and make life a hell for those who arouse its predatory instincts, are now banded together in self-defense against the common enemy of the human race."

"Who and what is the common enemy of the human race?"