AGE OF CONFLICT II
IVOR BENSON
The SOURCE and TECHNOLOGY of ILLEGITIMATE POWER
The plan, I think, is the old one of world dominion in a new form . . . the money-power and revolutionary power have been set up and given sham but symbolic shapes ("Capitalism" or "Communism") and sharply defined citadels ("America" or "Russia") . . . Such is the spectacle publicly staged for the masses. But what if similar men, with a common aim, secretly rule in both camps and propose to achieve their ambition through the clash between those masses? I believe any diligent student of our times will discover that this is the case.Douglas Reed
The art of music above all the other arts is the expression of the soul of a nation, and by a nation I mean . . . any community of people who are spiritually bound together by language, environment, history, and common ideals and, above all, a continuity with the past.Vaughan Williams
We print the diagram above with its explanatory notes because we believe that what the worldwide counter-revolutionary movement needs more than anything else is a composite or total view of its field of operations, as a corrective to the present appalling fragmentation.
Too often those who fight a common enemy on different fronts do not even know each other, each convinced that he alone is fighting the real battle against the real enemy; some wholly engrossed with economic and monetary issues; others with drug abuse and pornography; some convinced that any effort outside party politics is a sheer waste of time if not counter-productive; some see it as a purely cultural struggle; others as a religious struggle; and others again as a struggle that will be won or lost in the universities, etc.
Meanwhile, there is good reason to believe that the problem of fragmentation is already solving itself, as different groups and individuals, defending various values, find themselves converging on a more clearly identifiable enemy.
The message of our diagram should be self-evident. No matter how we see our own immediate battle-front, let us not forget that the ultimate enemy, the fountainhead of social and political evil in our times, is an illegitimate Money Power which can survive and expand only by exploiting the morally poisonous principle of usury.
THE CENTER: An illegitimate Money Power drawing its main strength from usury; a global usurocracy: the Supercapitalist - Communist - Zionist nexus.
The source of all great power in the 20th century is money, as in other ages (like that of Alexander the Great) it was the possession of superior fighting forces. And the source of power from all other sources, is the morally indefensible principle of usury, the most destructive single product of which is the issue of money for all ordinary purposes as interest-bearing debt.
In the Holy Bible usury is condemned as "an abomination: not be practiced on a brother." Usury is also defined as a means of gaining power over others:
"And thou shalt lend onto many nations, but thou shalt not borrow: and thou shalt reign over many nations, but they shall not reign over thee" (Deuteronomy 15:16); and
". . . thou shalt lend onto many nations, and thou shalt not borrow. And the lord shall make thee the head, and not the tail; and thou shalt be above only, and thou shalt not be beneath" (Deuteronomy 28:12)
This is the Levitical priesthood speaking, not God of the New Testament (see Douglas Reed, The Controversy of Zion).
And upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity . . . (Luke 21:25)
ECONOMICS: A falsified science of economics and a fraudulent monetary system.
What would be the first requirement of an illegitimate money power secretly exploiting an evil principle, advantageous to itself and antagonistic to the interest of the millions who labor to supply goods and services?
Precisely what we have: a "science" of economics so complicated, so labyrinthine and steeped in obscurity that it remains for vast numbers of highly intelligent and well-educated men and women an intellectual TERRA INCOGNITA.
This "science" has given rise to a monetary system progressively concentrating in a few hands wealth of a magnitude hitherto unimaginable, some of it in the form of money and possessions, but most of it a most oppressive lien on the productive powers of mankind - of which lien America's rapidly increasing national debt is only a tiny portion.
Political policies inspired and informed by this pseudo-science have been carefully calculated to grind the mass of mankind to the common level of wage-slaves, preventing by a variety of means (progressive income tax, death duties, inflation, etc) the emergence of powerful independent individuals capable of serving as nuclei of popular resistance.
The same arcane "science" of economics prevents those who work and produce, the real generators of value, from understanding that inflation - the progressive loss in the purchasing power of money - is deliberate policy, being one of the unavoidable consequences of a legalized form of theft (not unlike coin-clipping and counterfeiting) whereby governments and those most favored by governments, including major banks, are in possession of a grossly unfair share of things of real value - that is, goods and services.
Far worse than usury on money already in existence is fiat money, money created out of nothing, nearly always as interest- bearing debt. The final battle for Christianity will be over the money problem, and until that is solved there can be no universal application of Christianity.-- Balzac
MASS MEDIA: Ownership and control of main channels of access to the public mind.
What would be another important requirement, of an illegitimate money power secretly exploiting an evil, anti-social principle of conduct? What could we reckon to be the second most important requirement? Reply: The maximum possible control of all avenues of access to the public mind - the newspapers and news magazines, the wire services, radio and television, the book trade, access to the public platform. Alexander Solzhenitsyn has encapsulated the truth about the media in two short sentences:
"Such as it is, the press has become the greatest power within the Western countries, more powerful than the legislature, the executive and the judiciary; one would like to ask: by what law has it been elected and to whom is it responsible?"
Malcolm Muggeridge puts it this way:
"Future historians will surely see us as having created in the media a Frankenstein monster which no one knows how to control or direct, and marvel that we should have so meekly subjected ourselves to its destructive and often malign influence".
The press is, of course, very effectively controlled by those who own it, as a British Royal Commission found. The simple answer to Solzenitsyn's rhetorical question is that the press isn't elected at all and is answerable only to those who own it, nearly all of them sensitive to the requirements of a highly concentrated money power.
And how is the control of the media exercised? By several means: FALSIFICATION, MISINTERPRETATION and SUPPRESSION — the last being perhaps the most important of all, since it needs only a small quantity of truth to overthrow a vast quantity of falsehood; not to mention DEFAMATION which is the favorite weapon used against those who challenge the monopoly of public misinformation.
Who ever knew truth to be put to the worse in a free and open encounter — John Milton
POLITICS: Financial control and manipulation of party politics.
What next? Supplied with unlimited funds and the control of mass media, what is the next most important requirement of an imperialism of illegitimate money power?
In the Western world, obviously, the control of party politics, the control of parliaments which make the laws; better still, the control of chief executives, presidents, dictators, etc. who have been largely FREED from the necessity of consulting parliaments. There are two kinds of people who do not understand that "democracy" as practiced in most of the countries of the West is a swindle:
1- Those who are so stupid and irresponsible that they do not even try to understand; and,
2- Those who, participating in the modern party political fiasco, enjoy the patronage of their country's secret rulers.
Immigration control policies in all Western countries (Britain, Europe, the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand), policies obviously in conflict with NATIONAL interest, are intelligible only as aspects of a single, worldwide plan of population control — which can thus be described as one policy severally applied, revolutionary and conspirational in character.
As a result of the implementation of this policy, there have been mass infusions of unassimilable population minorities into all the countries of the West, some legally as immigration labor and many others under the description of refugees seeking asylum from political persecution in their ancestral homelands.
There is good reason to believe that this invasion of population elements from India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the West Indies, etc, has been financed and organized as a geo-political operation designed to disrupt the ethnic, cultural and political unity and integrity of all the countries of the West, the main purpose being to pre-empt any collective resistance to the planned new international economic order.
The policy being applied simultaneously in so many countries has two aspects: one OVERT and the other COVERT, the one in terms of what the law allows and the other in terms of what the law is supposedly powerless to prevent. A fraudulent device is thus used to circumvent public opposition to the importation of unassimilable population elements.
Simultaneously a strict enforcement of an ingeniously devised and highly complex system of immigration regulations makes it almost impossible for White persons born in the Third World (India, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, West Indies, etc) to return to their ancestral homelands in Europe.
The West's White peoples are being boxed COLLECTIVELY but only experience their imprisoned condition separately and INDIVIDUALLY — hence the absence of collective awareness and response; it is only when they want to move that they find out they are prohibited from doing so.
The thesis here offered is that the immigration laws and procedures in Western countries are separate components of a single global population control plan, and that this plan is only an aspect of a money-powered revolutionary operation that has been gathering force since shortly before the turn of the 20th century.
Democracy as practiced today is a fraudulent misrepresentation wearing the disguise of an "ideal". The masses will always be ruled by the few; and the only question ever to be settled is WHICH FEW. Those who rule will always do so on behalf of a nation; the only question ever to be settled is WHICH NATION.
The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, DE FACTO any more than DE JURE. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the BANKER of the backer. Throned above all, in a manner without parallel in all the past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic.G. K. Chesterton
INTERNAL POLICY: Undermining of private enterprise capitalism; progressive state interference.
The mystery of mysteries of 20th century politics, an enigma all mummified and wrapped in mystery, is the weird relationship of supercapitalism, or international finance capitalism, and communism, or Marxism.
These two quite indisputable facts of history, although not generally known:
1- The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia could never have taken place without massive financial support from the West, including Wall Street;
2- The industrial and military might of the Soviet Union is almost entirely a creation of Western high finance and big business, especially American.
Inside most of the countries of the so-called free or "non-socialist" world precisely the same motives have been powerfully at work during the greater part of this century, systematically undermining the private-enterprise capitalist system, replacing it, piece by piece, with elements of pure socialism. And not surprisingly, therefore, most Western governments can be seen to be implement-ing in all kinds of ways Karl Marx's own ten points of policy calculated to bring the whole world under a socialist imperium.
What this means, quite simply, is that in the West the method of socialist revolution by stealth had been chosen, as being more likely to succeed, in preference to violent revolution as used in Russia and elsewhere.
There can be no doubt, therefore, that those who control finance capitalism in its greatest concentrations, often with governments as their main clients, saw instantly in the Marxist doctrine an ingenious method of converting great money power into political power, while at the same time harnessing to their purpose all the energies of supercapitalism's potentially most dangerous opponents, the intellectuals. For Marxism gave them the means of presenting, in idealistic and ideological disguise, motives of gross power appetite which, for obvious reasons, cannot bear exposure.
This helps to explain why the politics of the super-rich is invariably leftist, or socialist, and why their animosity is concentrated against conservatives who, among other things, are dedicated to the preservation of free-enterprise capitalism.
POSTSCRIPT: The dismal performance of state-owned enterprises has stopped nationalization in the West, but private-enterprise capitalism continues to wither as high-interest debt-financing draws ownership of property and resources increasingly into the hands of large financial institutions.
FOREIGN POLICY: Financial and technological support for Marxist regimes; hostility towards all forms of nationalism and anti-communism
It would be hard to imagine any worldwide news blackout to compare with the suppression of information about the transfer of Western wealth and technology to the Soviet Union. A few sentences from a statement made by Dr. Antony Sutton on 15 August 1972, before one of the sub-committees of the Republican Party at Miami Beach, Florida, and TOTALLY BLACKED OUT by the wire services and the media, will have to suffice:
"In a few words, there is no such thing as Soviet technology. Almost all — perhaps 90-95 percent came directly or indirectly from the United States and its allies. In effect, the United States and the NATO countries have built the Soviet Union, its industrial capabilities and its military power. This massive construction job has taken 50 years. Since the Revolution in l9l7. It has been carried out through trade and the sale of plant, equipment and technical assistance".
The details, fully documented, can be found in the massive three-volume series, WESTERN TECHNOLOGY AND SOVIET ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT, which Dr. Sutton produced for the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, California.
Another aspect of foreign policy which places an oppressive burden on those who work and produce, mostly in the form of taxation and inflation, is so-called "foreign aid" (or "aid to under-developed countries" or "less developed countries"), which Professor P.T. Bauer, of the London School of Economics, has correctly described as "a gigantic confidence trick which impoverishes the poor in the developed countries and enriches the rich in the under-developed countries". In this way, an illegitimate money power further enriches itself and promotes political purposes which bring no advantage whatever to those who work and produce.
"Some of these groups envisage the Third World as a weapon in what is in effect an undeclared, one-sided civil war in the West. Some of these groups have consistently and effectively promoted the cause of wealth transfers from the West".P.T. Bauer
CULTURE: Subversion of culture: (literature, art, music etc); undermining of cultural institutions and traditions: (church, family, nation, etc.) and traditions.
What more is needed to give an illegitimate money power the security IT needs? Quite a lot, as we shall see.
Organ-transplant surgeons encounter a problem called "rejection" - which means that the living organism is programmed by nature to reject anything that does not truly belong; and the surgeon's answer to "rejection" is immuno-suppressive drugs, which have the effect or REDUCING the organism's vitality.
Likewise, before a population can be made to tolerate a system, or an ordering of its existence which it is instinctively programmed to reject, means must be found to reduce it to a condition of attenuated vitality. Winston Churchill showed that he understood this when, in an article on the Bolshevik Revolution written in 1922, he stated that there could be no world government as envisaged by the communists except "on a basis of arrested development."
So, what has been done in our century to reduce mankind, especially Western man, to a condition of "arrested development"?
Answer: Culture distortion — culturally subversive, hypnotic music like the drug-linked "rock", disco and all the other similar types of so-called "pop" or popular music; pornography; theater and cinema ingeniously laced with debilitating ethical poison; the boosting and encouragement of decadence in every imaginable form.
In short, the almost complete replacement of a people's own indigenous cultural heritage with forms of entertainment calculated to plant confusion and paralyze the will at source.
Cultural subversion is massively encouraged by the media of the money establishment, the most degraded, drug-sodden "artists" being held up as models to be admired and emulated by the young.
Music is uniquely related to the will. — Arthur Schopenhauer
SCIENCE: Falsification of science, especially anthropology and psychology.
Science itself must be controlled and manipulated it is to be prevented from placing obstacles in the path of an imperialism of illegitimate money power. Truth in some of the academic disciplines - like mathematics, physics, chemistry, geology, etc - these the money power needs and must have, for obvious reasons; what it does not want and must exclude at any price is truth which explains mankind to itself, truth that LIBERATES and strengthens.
Scientific truths about the movement of heavenly bodies in renaissance times were never more effectively falsified or suppressed than are the genuine products of scientific inquiry today in all those disciplines which explore man himself: anthropology, ethnology, genetics, psychology, history - to name only a few.
The suppression and falsification, and attendant defamation of those who refuse to submit, can be traced back to their source in the money power, which finally decides who shall be appointed to a university teaching post and who shall not, whose work shall be published and whose condemned to neglect and oblivion.
Thus, instead of the honest anthropology of men like Professor Carleton Coon, Sir Arthur Keith, Dr. John Baker, we have the fraudulent psychology of men like Carl Gustav Jung, William James, Thomas Szasz, H.J. Eysenck, we have the vindictive, anti- Western and anti-Christian swindle of Sigmund Freud.
Modern psychotherapy is not merely a religion that pretends to be a science, it as actually a fake religion that seeks to destroy true religion. — Thomas Szasz
HISTORY: Falsification and suppression of history.
Can people be fully and accurately informed about what has happened in the past without being strengthened in their ability to cope with the present? Of course not! It goes without saying that the falsification and suppression of news goes hank-in hand with the falsification and suppression of history, especially of recent history - since, obviously, people will lose all confidence in the media if they discover today that they were lied to or prevented from getting at the truth five, ten or twenty years ago.
The control of written history - historiography - has become a major feature of modern political warfare, in which it is those who don't know or are wrongly informed who are overthrown. Unless we know what happened in the past we cannot know what is happening now - for it is only what happened in the past that gives meaning to much of what is happening now. And if we don't know what happened in the past and is happening now, we have no way of helping to determine what will happen in the future, for ourselves as individuals and for our community. Hence,
"Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past"— George Orwell, 1984
Control of the study of history in our time, especially the history of our century, is exercised also by means of a system of intellectual terrorism designed to suppress information of the kind that arms us in our minds against an enemy whose great power in the world is little more than a power to deceive.
AGITATION: Incitement and support of internal communist revolutionary activity.
There must be few countries in the world, if any, where the nexus between the capitalist super-rich and a Marxist-Communist, supposedly anti-capitalist, revolutionary underground has been more clearly established than South Africa.
Likewise, there must be few places where it has been easier to study that weird alliance of the circumcised and the uncircumcised - the excluded, using their great newspaper chains to give the maximum of sympathetic publicity to a communist revolutionary underground that has always been overwhelmingly Jewish at the leadership level. The support which the South relied on to give the leftist radicals was acknowledged in one short sentence:
"Our press has done a wonderful job!"Abram Fischer, Communist underground leader
This statement, which formed part of one of Fischer's regular analyses of the revolutionary situation, clearly referred to the local 'capitalist" newspapers and reflected no more than what any intelligent observer could see for himself.
The nexus between supercapitalism and communism has been harder to conceal in South Africa than in most other countries, for the reason that in South Africa there was no proletariat of the kind to be found in most other industrially developed countries, no underworld of snarling and envious drop-outs, no proletariat as prescribed by Marxist doctrine and Leninist revolutionary science. Therefore, communist revolution had to take the form of a "Black nationalist" exercise — and the White activists found they had to do most of the insurrectionary dirty work with their own hands, the blacks having proved to be insufficiently motivated for elaborately planned operations of the kind required.
And investigations have fully exposed unbroken lines of communication and funding between the revolutionary underground in South Africa and all the centers of great financial and political power outside South Africa — on both sides of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains.
We see the present undeclared war against South Africa as only one small portion of what Professor Bauer has dared to call "an undeclared and one-sided civil war in the West" — a war aimed not only at White people in South Africa but at ethnic entities and their cultures wherever they may be. There is only one world-revolution in progress, no matter from what quarter being promoted and directed, and all peoples of Western European provenance, wherever they may live, are as much the targets and intended victims of the revolution as the South Africans.
The West has been crippled by a corrosive and corrupt ideology-morality that causes our political-intellectual elites to declare themselves in sympathy with and in support of the very elements that boldly proclaim their goal to be the destruction of the West.Richard Clark
RELIGION: Massive financial support for aberrant trends which have the effect of secularizing and politicizing religion.
There can be no doubt that the greatest possible source of resistance to illegitimate power is to be found in a people's religion, whose central purpose it is to give the individual a spiritual and intellectual form base from which to relativise all the pressures and influences he encounters, and secure a deep-rooted sense of purpose and direction.
Thus, religion, by whatever name it is called, must always be at the core of a people's culture, nourished by and giving nourish-ment to all the arts. From which it follows that religious error must have the most destructive consequences when exploited by powers whose purposes are anything but religious. All the more so when error is of a kind which, like today's social gospel heresy, defeats religion's central purpose, and substitutes for inner illumination a set of spurious brain-spun "ideals" indistinguishable from those which activate Marxist trade union leaders and unscrupulous politicians.
The result has been a secularization and politicization of Christianity in the West, with the setting-up, at very great cost, of a worldwide organization centered on the World Council of Churches. To borrow an expression from the American poet Ezra Pound, "there is no mediaeval description of hell which exceeds the inner filth" of the mentalities of some of the ministers and prelates for whom every species of cruelty and villainy is condoned, even incited, if perpetrated under the banner of universalist political objectives prescribed by the money power.
Not surprisingly, these same churchmen can be relied on to block "by diseased will or sodden inertia: (Ezra Pound's words) any cleansing of a monetary system that gives to them so much power and importance; they will quote you the Bible on every sin in the calendar but never against the fountainhead of every species of sin - the practice of usury.
Christianity holds at its core a symbol which has for its content the individual way of life of a man, the Son of Man, and it even regards this individuation process as the incarnation and revelation of God himself.C.G. Jung
THE COMMUNIST - SUPERCAPITALIST - ZIONIST NEXUS
The world is governed by very different persons to what is imagined by those who are not themselves behind the scene.Benjamin Disraeli
Even the briefest survey of the forces which are shaping the history of the 20th century, creating social and political conditions correctly described by Spengler as "anarchy become a habit", would be incomplete without a closer look at the relationship of those supposed mighty opposites - capitalism and communism.
The key to the riddle is the word CAPITALISM. Most people, most of the time, make the mistake of supposing that the word capitalism means one thing; in fact, the word as commonly used has two sets of meaning, as different as chalk and cheese. If we are to understand why governments representing capitalist states adopt the most weirdly ambivalent attitudes towards communism, we must first learn to separate in our minds the two sets of meaning which that one word capitalism has been called on to represent.
Thus, two words are needed: CAPITALISM meaning what that word originally meant and what the dictionary says it means; and SUPERCAPITALISM, meaning the wholly changed form of what was once correctly called capitalism.
CAPITALISM as originally and correctly understood means private ownership of property and resources and competitive free enterprise in the supply of goods and services.
SUPERCAPITALISM, which can be defined as highly concentrated finance-capitalism, is not only different from capitalism, it is the antithesis of capitalism and sooner or later acquires the character of being actively ANTI-CAPITALIST.
For it is not possible to continue CONCENTRATING ownership and control of property and resources without at the same time REDUCING the number of those who own and control property and resources. Likewise, there can be no huge concentration of ownership and control without a corresponding inhibition or suppression of competitive free enterprise. What we have seen in the West is a progressive degeneration of capitalism into a form of supercapitalism, or anti-capitalism, which the less it resembles the original capitalism the more it resembles socialism, or communism.
Just enough genuine capitalism has remained in most of the countries of the West, and especially in the United States of America, to confuse the picture and make it harder for most people to see that capitalism has been largely replaced by what is essentially ANTI-CAPITALISM. In other words, the weak and struggling capitalism that survives serves as a camouflage for an all- powerful anti-capitalism which dominates both economics and politics.
Modern supercapitalist regimes like that of the United States, and communist regimes like that of the Soviet Union, have their differences and their oppositions of interest but these are unimportant when compared with what they have in common. Both are irreconcilably antagonistic towards nationalism. Therefore, BOTH ARE ESSENTIALLY REVOLUTIONARY, having set themselves in fierce antagonism towards those political forms which are essentially evolutionary. Since NATIONALISM is inseparably joined to a people's cultural heritage, it follows that all attacks on nationalism must include cultural sabotage and subversion - which is what we see today on both sides of the Iron and Bamboo Curtains, promoted with equal zeal by supercapitalists and communists. There is only one genuine nationalism they support and that is Zionism, which is an internationally dispersed Jewish nationalism. Of course, they also support all sorts of spurious "nationalism" which they themselves set up and use, like "Black nationalism" in Africa, and even these are nearly always heavily laced with Marxism.
The reason why Western supercapitalism lives in constant dread of nationalism can be easily explained:
The fundamental issue in any state is whether or not there shall be an authority superior to economics. Which shall rule — politics or economics? And there can be no doubt that nationalism, in spite of all the ailments to which it is heir, energized by the instincts and will of the population, means that politics is the master and that economics, no matter how important it may be, has been relegated to its proper and natural subordinate status.
Since there is no way in which communism can be effectively resisted and defeated except by nationalism, it follows that supercapitalism is totally committed to co-existence with communism, and that supercapitalism can have no other long range aim except that of ultimate convergence with communism.
Likewise — and this is most important — there is only one political weapon that supercapitalism can use against nationalism, and that is a communist ideology that marshals the forces of the underworld and of rootless intellectualism, holding them ready to be aimed like a battering ram against any nationalist target.
An all-important factor with a binding and directing influence on all the other components of the 20th century world-revolution is that of Zionism, which can be described as a geographically dispersed but intensely united and passionately motivated Jewish nationalism.
The Jewish people have come to the fore as a dominant influence in world affairs at a time when most Jews attach little or no importance to a religion which for close on two millennia was a powerful binding force.
Professor Hannah Arendt puts it like this: "Twentieth century political developments have driven the Jewish people into the storm center of events". The developments she describes correspond with the consolidation of Jewish power and influence on a global basis, a process that has continued at an accelerating pace since the turn of the century.
The essentially nationalistic character of Zionism is frankly admitted by Jewish scholar Do. Gideon Shimoni, who writes:
"Zionism embodies a progressive nationalism comparable with socialism according to the formula 'Socialist in content and nationalist in form'".
What is that, if not NATIONAL SOCIALISM?
The world-revolution can thus be described as a struggle in which one powerful nation is bent on the overthrow of all other nations. No one must lightly dismiss the question of race; it is the key to world history and it is precisely for this reason that written history so often lacks clarity — it is written by people who do not understand the race question, and what belongs to it.Benjamin Disraeli
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Guide to Further Reading
This guide covers books more directly of political concern and is far from being comprehensive; the contents overlap considerably on various subjects. Readers will find that most of the books listed below also carry bibliographies. The present writer does not necessarily agree with all the opinions expressed in each book listed here.
Under the heading of CULTURE shown on the previous pages and its explanation in the pages that follow, the writer has drawn attention to the subversion of cultural institutions through literature, music, art. Although the list below does not give titles from the great works of our literature — the Classics, Shakespeare, Milton, etc, down to our own times — it is hardly necessary to state that here lies the richest field of understanding, dealing as it does with all those values which give meaning and purpose to existence for the individual and for society.