THE HIDDEN HOARDS.

A Study of Secret Societies.
SECRET SOCIETIES AND SUBVERSIVE MOVEMENTS. By Nesta E. Webster. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co. 7 dols.

Mrs. Webster is well known for her profound studies in the history of the French Revolution. Her historical studies have convinced her that the political and economic causes usually as signed in standard histories are not sufficient to explain the persistent revolutionary and subversive trend to he noticed throughout the centuries of the Christian era and breaking forth into violent eruption whenever and wherever external conditions are favorable. The author has come to the conclusion that an occult force of occult doctrine and sectaries secretly banded together has uninterruptedly been at work to undermine the very foundations of Christian civilisation. With an immense amount of erudition, delving into hundreds of books unknown to or unheeded by the ordinary historian, she follows up these esoteric teachings from the Jewish Talmud and Cabala through the heresies of the Essenes and Gnostics to the corrupt portion of the Knights Templars, then into Rosicrucianism, early Freemasonry and particularly the Illuminism of Adam Weishaupt and his associates. The final chapters are particularly concerned with exposing the Jewish influence at work in the great subversive movements of the nineteenth and twentieth century. There is one great difficulty necessarily inherent in a work of this kind; irrefragable documentary proof of how great has been the share of secret societies and secret doctrines in bringing about revolutionary movements is practically impossible, for the very reason that the prime movers have taken the greatest pains to leave no documentary evidence of their doings. Thus the critical opponent may always claim with a great show of reason that the thesis of the book is not proved. Mrs. Webster, however, has accumulated so great a mass of material, her inferences and conclusions are, as a rule, so moderate and well balanced that the book cannot fail to leave a profound impression.

 Freeman's Journal 17 September 1925,