Padding; Behold a Pale Horse pp. 108-112

Sometimes, when looking at student papers I'll find some strange things. Usually, the problem is that a student feels the need to write to the minimum length so they'll add whatever they can to their work. As long as it stays on the subject, it's fine, but I'll still deduct for what is often irrelevant commentary. The problem is that most of my students are taught in high schools that they need to write for length. I don't know why this lesson is drilled into them, because, as a college instructor I don't grade on length. The lengths that I assign are general guidelines. If the assignment says 1000 words, I'll take an 800-word essay if it is good.  My colleagues are like this as well, there's no hard and fast rule. 

This is even less the case with a work like Cooper's. There is no minimum word count for a book. Sure, there are definitions: a novel is a certain length (around 40k words) and a novella is between 10k and 39k. These aren't definitions that serve any other purpose than to categorize writing. If Cooper turns in his book and it doesn't contain a certain amount of pages they won't reject it, it'll just be categorized as something else. 

I bring all of this up because this entire chapter is a mystery to me. Cooper presented very little context for the last chapter's "oath," and here he presents no introduction. The chapter title is the only thing that we are given "Secret Treaty of Verona: Precedent and Positive Proof of Conspiracy."

That's it, the rest of the chapter is just quoting the Veronese treaty and then a document dealing with American foreign policy. This document could be interesting because it is a "secret" but a secret then and a secret now are two different things. Because of monarchical rule in the past, a secret treaty just meant a treaty between aristocrats. The Treaty of Verona was merely one of several meetings and solutions to questions that were raised about the state of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars.  

The other problem that I sometimes run into while grading is the student that crams anything into their paper. Just any thought that pops in their head will end up on the page and sometimes it makes for an interesting read though almost always a terrible grade. I would like to say that this is an example of the latter, but the trouble with the Treaty of Verona is that Cooper had to find this. This isn't a document a person might just have on hand. 

This leads me to the hypothesis that Cooper is merely using everything that he has in order to inflate the book. Conspiracy theorists, pseudoscientists, and misinformation peddlers; have this mistaken impression that "more = better." Their book will be taken more seriously the thicker it is. If Cooper's work has as many pages as a copy of Herodotus then the book must be as serious as that. I would love if there was some other reason for this inclusion but without Cooper, as unreliable as he is, has to introduce it properly, otherwise we're just reading a treaty.

The claim in the chapter title is that this is proof of the conspiracy, but it's not. We can read it, this treaty is about settling a question concerning Portugal and Spain; it thanks the Pope for having intervened already in the matter, and that the Spanish conflict, once ended will probably require another congress to meet. Then the ambassadors from the four involved nations sign it. 

The second half of the chapter is the words of Senator Robert L. Owen commenting on why he has read the treaty into the Congressional Record. It's an interesting twist because Owen is using this to present a long argument for women's suffrage. Treaties like those of Verona, can only be signed by the aristocracy and there is some anti-democratic language in this treaty when it argues in Article 2 that the popular press is the "most powerful means used by the pretended supporters of the rights of nations to the detriment of those of princes, the high contracting parties promise reciprocally to adopt all proper measures to suppress it, not only in their own states but also in the rest of Europe."

Remember, in the last book when Robison was arguing against the Illuminati and the German Union's attempt at teaching literacy throughout Europe? This is that. The powers of Austria, France, Prussia, and Russia; promise to do their best to quell the democratic rumblings in Europe. Owen's argument appears to be that exclusion of the population is how such aristocratic governments work thus to combat that, on principle, we should grant the vote to the other half of the population. Owen's argument is a little clunky but his point is that the more people participate in government the less likely such censorship can happen, thus giving women suffrage is necessary for the continuing existence of the United States. 

Buried at the end of the chapter, is Cooper's reason for inclusion. You could criticize me for being so hard on him in the beginning, but the conventions of writing are such that you have to introduce a 4-page quotation that spans two different documents, then you close it out. Cooper's commentary is profoundly uninteresting because he is claiming that the signatories of the treaty are secretly the Black Nobility, but they aren't. These are not the defenders of the Pope in 1870 against the Savoy. The names here are not even Italian, but people like Cooper see the phrase "Black Nobility" and think of evil. The members were never secret and it was a term of honor to be named a defender of the Vatican at the time. The ultimate problem is that the United States is not mentioned in the treaty nor does the treaty apply to the US. Owen was using it as an example, but that's the only relationship that exists. 

Is it padding? In a normal document, yes. However, in a conspiracy document, it could be relevant. Even for a conspiracy document, Cooper has not done the work to tie it in with his omni-conspiracy. 

That's all of Chapter 4. Chapter 5 we return to Cooper's writing as opposed to his long quoting with "Good-bye USA Hello New World Order."