“If a man knows no Latin, he belongs to the vulgar.” That was Schopenhauer, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and we see here that at the end of the century the class connotations of Latin remained. Vladimir, a worldly and well-educated statesman, knows Latin, while Verloc, a minor agent used by the forces of power, knows only the vernacular languages (English and a bit of French).

This is a different construction of the connection between voice and power that Verloc wants to draw in the paragraph above; here, Vladimir insists on the importance, not just of volume, but of content.

Just as important is the line that Verloc draws between the effete ruling class, represented by Vladimir and his fellow Latin speakers, and “the million” — although Verloc has earlier given voice to highly reactionary sentiments, we can recognize in his diatribe about Latin a distinct sympathy for the kind of class struggle that he pretends to engage in as an agent provocateur.

Vladimir begins to quote the Latin epigram vox et praetera nihil, “voice and nothing more”, but then taunts Verloc for his ignorance and ill-breeding, telling him he wouldn’t understand because he’s never studied Latin.

Anarchists frequently engaged in so-called “propaganda of the deed” to spread their ideas — that is, the assassination of prominent public figures and political officials. Here Verloc boasts of foiling such a scheme.

Vladimir’s insistence that Verloc work harder for his pay is of a piece with contemporary reactionary rhetoric about the poor laws, and incipient forms of social security: they encourage laziness, and disincentivize work.

Further confirmation of Vladimir’s expensive and fashionable tastes.

There is more than a little hypocrisy in Vladimir’s reproach to Verloc that he has become fat.

Vladimir confirms what the reader now understands clearly: Verloc is an agent provacteur, posing as an anarchist radical in order to strengthen the hand of reactionaries in England, and to serve the interests of continental despotism.

The “deadened” way that Verloc declares himself an anarchist confirms the arbitrariness of his assignment to that particular ideology. Anarchists were, of course, by far the most violent of the radical sects, responsible for a number of shocking assassinations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Verloc suggests that he was caught by French authorities because of an unwise decision to confide the plot in a woman with whom he was infatuated. The reader will immediately wonder what this implies about Verloc’s relationship with Winnie.

Rifle technology was an obsession of mid-nineteenth century European militaries; contemporary accounts credited Prussian advances in rifle technology with Prussia’s shocking defeat of Austria in 1866.

The idea of a foreign mole within the French military also recalls the notorious Dreyfus Affair.

We now understand something of Verloc’s mission; he is an agent provocateur, working for one of England’s European rivals, with a mission of stirring up anarchist violence in order to spur an authoritarian crackdown.

The motives for this rather baroque plan are still obscure, but the basic thought seems to be that England’s relative freedom makes it a safe haven where dangerous radicals (like, for example, Karl Marx) can freely traffic their dangerous ideas to Europe. Other European governments want this freedom curtailed, and hope to use the panic of a terrorist attack to accomplish this.