ruin for Fox, for Churchill, for the ministers, and for the men who talk
in railway carriages, for shopkeepers and for the government; it was a
menace to the institutions which hold us to the past, that are our
guarantees for the future. The safety of everything one respected and
believed in was involved in the disclosure of an atrocious fraud, and
the disclosure was in my hands. For that night I had the power of the
press in my keeping. People were waiting for this pronouncement. De
Mersch's last card was his philanthropy; his model state and his happy
natives.

The drone of the presses made the floor under my feet quiver, and the
whole building vibrated as if the earth itself had trembled. I was alone
with my knowledge. Did she know; had she put the power in my hand? But I
was alone, and I was free.

I took up the proof and began to read, slanting the page to the fall of
the light. It was a phrenetic indictment, but under the paltry rhetoric
of the man there was genuine indignation and pain. There were revolting
details of cruelty to the miserable, helpless, and defenceless; there
were greed, and self-seeking, stripped naked; but more revolting to see
without a mask was that falsehood which had been hiding under the words
that for ages had spurred men to noble deeds, to self-sacrifice, to
heroism. What was appalling was the sudden perception that all the
traditional ideals of honour, glory, conscience, had been committed to
the upholding of a gigantic and atrocious fraud. The falsehood had
spread stealthily, had eaten into the very heart of creeds and
convictions that we lean upon on our passage between the past and the
future. The old order of things had to live or perish with a lie. I saw
all this with the intensity and clearness of a revelation; I saw it as
though I had been asleep through a year of work and dreams, and had