A loan is an issue of Government paper which entails an obligation to pay interest amounting to a percentage of the total sum of the borrowed money. If a loan is at 5 per cent., then in 20 years the Government will have unnecessarily paid out a sum equal to that of the loan in order to cover the percentage. In 40 years it will have paid twice, and in 60 thrice that amount, but the loan will still remain as an unpaid debt.—"Protocols," p. 77.
Montesquieu.—"How are loans made? By the issue of bonds entailing on the Government the obligation to pay interest proportionate to the capital it has been paid. Thus, if a loan is at 5 per cent., the State, after 20 years, has paid out a sum equal to the borrowed capital. When 40 years have expired it has paid double, after 60 years triple: yet it remains debtor for the entire capital sum."—"Geneva Dialogues," p. 250.
But generally speaking "Protocols" 20 and 21, which deal (somewhat unconvincingly) with the financial programme of the Learned Elders, owe less to the "Geneva Dialogues," Nos. 18-21, than to the imagination of the plagiarist author who had for once in a way to show a little originality. This is natural enough since the "Dialogues" in question describe the actual financial policy of the French Imperial Government, while the "Protocols" deal with the future. Again in the last four "Geneva Dialogues" Machiavelli's apotheosis of the Second Empire, being based upon historical facts which took place between 1852 and 1864, obviously furnished scanty material for the plagiarist who wished to prove or, very possibly, had been ordered to prove in the "Protocols" that the ultimate aim of the leaders of Jewry was to give the world a ruler sprung from the House of David.
The scores of parallels between the two books and a theory concerning the methods of the plagiarist and the reasons for the publication of the "Protocols" in 1905 will be the subject of further articles. Meanwhile it is amusing to find that the only subject with which the "Protocols" deal on lines quite contrary to those followed by Machiavelli in the "Dialogues" is the private life of the Sovereign.
9
