The Constantinople correspondent of the Times has unearthed the literary
source of the notorious Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, produced by a Russian official, Sergei Nilus, in 1905 as the secret programme of a band of Jewish conspirators seeking to overthrow civilization. The pamphlet, which wo discussed at length on its republication here last year, proves to be in the main a free adaptation of a French political pamphlet of 1865 attacking the Second Empire. This work, Dialogue aux Enters entre Machiavel et Montesquieu, was published anonymously at Brussels ; but the author, Maurice Joly, a Parisian lawyer, was traced and sent to gaol. The Times correspondent has shown by many quotations that the larger part of Nilus's book is a shameless plagiarism of the French original. The Protocols, therefore, are not what they profess to be. Machiavelli's imaginary plan for strengthening Napoleon III.'s despotism has been transformed, by Nilus or another, into a plan for setting up a Jewish world-despotism, which, as we said at the time, is " a piece of malignant lunacy."
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