Israel in Europe

Chapter XXIII Anti-Semitism

We have followed the fortunes of the Jewish people from the moment of its first contact with the nations of the West to the last quarter of the nineteenth century. We have seen that this contact was from the beginning marked by mutual antipathy, enfeebled at times, invigorated at others, always present. Some Jewish writers have endeavoured to show that the hatred of the Gentile towards the Jew in the Middle Ages was an artificial creation due entirely to the efforts of the Catholic Church; that it flowed from above, and that the masses of Christendom, when not incited by the classes, were most amicably disposed towards Israel. This view is hardly tenable. It is inconceivable that the Church, or any other authority, could have succeeded so well in kindling the conflagrations which we have witnessed, if the fuel were not ready to be kindled. It is also a view contrary to the recorded facts. We have seen in the earlier Middle Ages popular prejudice spontaneously manifesting itself in the insults and injuries which were heaped upon the Jews, and restrained with difficulty by the princes and prelates of Europe. In the time of the Crusades also it was not St. Bernard who fanned the fury of the mob against the Jews of the Rhine, but an obscure monk. The exhortations of the saint were disregarded; but the harangues of the fanatic found an eager audience, simply because they were in accord with popular feeling. During the same period bishops and burgomasters strove to save the victims, in vain.

Again, the persecution of the Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century would never have attained the dimensions which it did attain, were it not for the deep-rooted animosity which the bulk of the Spanish people nourished against them. Castile was then the home of chivalry and charity. The pretensions of the Pope to interfere in the affairs of the kingdom had met with scornful opposition on the part of the Castilian nobles. Three centuries before an Aragonese monarch had given away his life in defence of the persecuted heretics of Provence. Less than two centuries before Aragon was one of the few countries that refused to comply with the joint request of Philip the Fair of France and Pope Clement V. to persecute the Knights Templars. At the time when the Inquisition was established in Spain both Castile and Aragon were hailing the revival of culture. Under Ferdinand and Isabella, as well as in the subsequent reigns, the Castilians and the Aragonese vigorously resisted an institution so contrary to the principles of freedom dear to them. Nor was in Spain the danger of dissension sufficiently great to justify recourse to so terrible an instrument of concord. The Spaniards less than any other people had reason to sacrifice liberty of conscience for the sake of political conquest. It is, therefore, highly improbable that the Holy Office would ever have gained a firm footing in Spain, but for the fact that its way was paved by the popular prejudice against the Jews and the Moors, and its success assured by the persecution of those races. Though the Spaniards hated the Inquisition bitterly, they hated the Semites more bitterly still; and of the two the Jew more bitterly than the Moor.

We have also seen that neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation, both movements directly or indirectly hostile to the Church, brought any amelioration to the lot of the Jew. In every country Jew-hatred existed as the product of other than ecclesiastical influences. Here and there, under exceptionally favourable conditions, the Jews may have been tolerated; they were not loved. This negative attitude was liable to be at any moment converted into active hostility. All that the Church did was to turn the feeling to account, to intensify and to sanctify it. Lastly, we have seen that the emancipation of the Jews did not come about until the end of the eighteenth and the middle of the nineteenth century—a period no longer of protest against the Church, but one of rebellion against all the prejudices of all the ages. It was not until the gospel of humanity, in its broadest sense, was accepted that the secular clamour against the Jewish portion of the human race was silenced; and even then not without difficulty. But, though the plant of anti-Judaism was cut at the root, the root remained, and it was destined in our own day to put forth a new shoot.

Writers have expended much ingenuity in defining the origin and the nature of modern anti-Semitism. Some regard it as a resuscitation of mediaeval religious bigotry; others as the latest manifestation of the old struggle between Europe and Asia; a third school, rejecting both those theories, interprets it as a purely political question arising from the social and economic conditions created by the emancipation of the Jews; while a fourth sect have attempted to show that the modern revival is “the fruit of a great ethnographical and political error.” Those who see in anti-Semitism nothing but a revival of mediaeval religious rancour ignore the conflict between Jew and Gentile before the rise of the Mediaeval Church, or even before the rise of Christianity. Those who explain it as a purely racial struggle forget the Crusades and the Inquisition and the superstitious horror of usury. Those who interpret it simply as a question of modern European politics disregard both those periods of history. Finally, whatever may be said of crude ethnographical theories and of nebulous nationalist creeds, it would be doing them too much honour to suppose that they are the real causes of anti-Semitism. Men do not slaughter their fellow-men for the mere sake of an abstract hypothesis, though priests may. All these things do nothing but give a name and a watchword to a movement born of far less ethereal parents. In our day the political activity which has used anti-Semitism as an instrument has only done what clerical activity had done in the past. It has availed itself of a force not of its own creation. The fact is that every human action is the result of manifold motives. The complexity of the motives is not diminished by the multitude of the actors. There is a strong temptation to simplify matters by singling out one of those motives and ignoring the rest. But, though truth is always simple, simplicity need not always be true. There may be new things under the sun. Anti-Semitism, however, is not one of them. Its roots lie deep in the past.

Viewed, then, in the light of two thousand years’ recorded experience, modern anti-Semitism appears to be neither religious, nor racial, nor economical in its origin and character. It is all three, and something more. We find in it all the motives which led to the persecution of the Jews in the past. In antiquity the struggle was chiefly due to racial antagonism, in the Middle Ages chiefly to religious antagonism, in the nineteenth century we might expect it to assume chiefly a nationalist garb. But, as in antiquity religious antipathy was blended with racial hatred, as in the Middle Ages economic rivalry accentuated religious bigotry, so in our time religious, racial, and economic reasons have contributed to the movement in various degrees according to the peculiar conditions, material and moral, prevailing in each country where anti-Semitism has found an echo. If it were possible to unite all these causes in one general principle, it would be this: every age has its own fashionable cult, which for the time being overshadows all other cults, gives a name to the age, explains its achievements, and extenuates its crimes. Every age has found in the Jew an uncompromising dissenter and a sacrificial victim. The cult par excellence of the nineteenth century is Nationalism.

What is this dreadful Nationalism? It is a reversion to a primitive type of patriotism—the narrow feeling which makes men regard all those who live in the same place, or who speak the same language, or who are supposed to be descended from a common ancestor, as brethren; all others as foreigners and potential foes. This feeling in its crudest form is purely a family-feeling, in the worst sense of the term. It grows into a larger allegiance to the tribe, then to the race, and that in its turn develops into the broad patriotism which manifests itself now as Imperialism, now as Catholicism.

There is yet a third form of patriotism—the purest and noblest of all: loyalty to common intellectual ideals. The Greeks attained to this lofty conception, and an Athenian orator, in enumerating his country’s claims to the admiration of mankind, dwells with just pride on this product of its civilisation. Athens, he says, “has made the name of the Hellenes to be no longer a name of race, but one of mind, so that Hellenes should be called those who share in our culture rather than in our nature.”229 Isocrates in making this statement, however, gave utterance to a dream of his own rather than to a feeling common among his countrymen. The Macedonian Empire strove to convert that philosophical dream into a political fact. Alexander and his successors studded Asia with Greek theatres, Greek schools, Greek gymnasia, and the East was covered with a veneer of pseudo-Hellenic civilisation. But their success was only partial, superficial and ephemeral. The intellectual unity could not go deep and therefore did not last long. The barriers—social, religious and racial—which separated the Hellene from the Barbarian proved insuperable; and the Isocratean ideal of a nationality based on community of intellectual aims remained an ideal. Hellenism demanded a degree of mental development to which mankind has never yet attained. Hence its failure as a political bond. This was not the case with Imperialism and Catholicism. They both appealed to more elementary and therefore less rare qualities in man. Hence their success. Rome achieved more than Greece because she aimed at less.

The Roman Empire represented the first, the Roman Church the second variety of this broad patriotism. Civis Romanus was a title which united in a common allegiance the Italian and the Greek, the Jew and the Egyptian, the Spaniard, the Briton and the Gaul. Catholic Rome inherited the imperial feeling of Pagan Rome, but dressed it in a religious form. The dictatorship of the Caesars was divided between the Christian Emperor and the Pope: the former inheriting their political power, the latter the spiritual and moral. Charlemagne wielded the authority of an Imperator Romanus, his papal contemporary that of a Pontifex Maximus. Then came the decay and fall of the Carlovingian fabric; and, gradually, the Papacy built up a spiritual empire with the débris of the secular. All Catholics were subjects of that Empire. In the Middle Ages Europe presented a picture of wonderful uniformity in sentiments, ideals, customs, political and social institutions. All countries, like so many coins issued from one mint, seemed to be cast in the same mould, stamped with the same effigy and adorned with the same legend. National consciousness was in the Middle Ages practically non-existent, or, if it did exist, in the later centuries, it was obscured by the religious sentiment. As in modern Islam we find Arabs, Persians, Indians, Malays, Chinese, Syrians, Egyptians, Berbers, Moors, Turks, Albanians—nations differing widely in origin and language—united by the ties of a common creed, so in mediaeval Christendom we find English, Scotch, French, Italian, German and Spanish knights all forming one vast brotherhood. The reader of Froissart cannot fail to notice this community of feeling and the marvellous ease with which gentlemen from all those nations made themselves at home in one another’s countries. The chronicler himself, in his style and mental attitude, supplies a striking example of this cosmopolitanism. By the mediaeval Christian, as by the modern Mohammedan, the human race was divided into two halves: true believers and others. The universal acceptance of Latin as the medium of communication was another token and bond of brotherhood among the Christians of mediaeval Europe, as the use of Arabic, as a sacred tongue, is a token and a bond of brotherhood among the Mohammedans of the present day.

This feeling of international patriotism, which found its highest development and expression in the Crusades, began to fade as soon as Catholic faith began to decay. Disintegration followed both in the Church and in the State. Loyalty to one ideal and to one authority was gradually superseded by local and later by racial patriotism. Various political units succeeded to the Unity of mediaeval Europe, the vernaculars ousted the Latin language from its position as the one vehicle of thought, and the old cosmopolitan universities of Paris and Bologna were replaced by national institutions. Since the fifteenth century nationalism has been growing steadily, but in the eighteenth its growth was to some extent checked by humanitarianism. The great thinkers of that age extolled the freedom and the perfection of the individual as the highest aim of culture, describing exclusive attachment to one’s country and race as a characteristic of a comparatively barbarous state of society: a remnant of aboriginal ancestor-worship. Nationalism, accordingly, did not reach its adolescence until the nineteenth century. Then the zeal for peace was eclipsed by the splendour of the French exploits in war, and the doctrine of universal freedom was forgotten in Napoleon’s efforts at universal dominion. These efforts aroused in every country which Napoleon attacked a passionate protest which resulted in successful revolt. But the triumph was won at a tremendous cost. Each nation in proportion to its sense of what was due to itself was oblivious of what was due to others. The principles of the brotherhood of men and of universal toleration were denied, the narrow jealousies of race which the philosophers of the preceding century had driven from the realm of culture were re-installed, and Nationalism—arrogant, intemperate, and intolerant—arose on the ruins of Humanitarianism. This evolution, or revolution, has added a new element in social troubles, and has brought into being a new set of ideas.

For the last hundred years ethnographical theory has dominated the civilised world and its destinies as theological dogma had done during the Middle Ages. Consciously or not, the idea of race directs the policy of nations, inspires their poetry, and tinges their philosophy with the same prejudice as religion did formerly. Aryan and non-Aryan have become terms conveying all but the odious connotation of Christian and infidel; and in place of the spiritual we have adopted a scientific mythology. The fiction of our Aryan origin has flattered us into the benevolent belief of our mental superiority over the Mongol, and of our moral superiority over the Semite. To dispute this tenet is to commit sacrilege. But even within the bosom of this imaginary Aryan fold there are schisms: so-called Celtic, Germanic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, and Slavonic sects, divided against one another by the phantom barriers of ethnographical speculation as frantically as in older days Christendom was divided by the metaphysical figments of Arian, Manichaean, Nestorian, and what not. In the name of race are now done as many great deeds and as many great follies are committed as were once in the name of God. The worship of race has, as the worship of the Cross had done before, given birth to new Crusades which have equalled the old in the degree to which they have disturbed the peace and agitated the minds of men, and in the violence of the passions which they have excited. Nationalism more than any other cause has helped to bring discredit upon the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity—to prove the eighteenth century dream of world-wide peace a glorious impossibility—and to show the enormous chasm which still gapes between the aspirations of a few thinkers and the instincts of the masses.

Though common to all European countries, the creed of the age found articulate exposition first in Germany, and gave rise to various academic doctrines which attempted to account for the genesis and evolution of Nationalism in scientific or pseudo-scientific terms. But names do not alter facts. Ethnographical speculations are in this case mainly interesting as having supplied a plausible explanation for the rise of anti-Semitism. Those who are able to see through new guises, and to detect what old things they conceal, know that anti-Semitism is little more than a new Protean manifestation of Jew-hatred. Divested of its academic paraphernalia, the movement is revealed in all its venerable vulgarity—a hoary-headed abomination long since excommunicated by the conscience of civilised mankind.

This reactionary movement began in Eastern Germany and Austria. In those countries the Jews are very numerous,230 very wealthy, and very influential. Both countries are famous as hot-beds of racial fanaticism. In Germany Nationalism was begotten of the independence secured by the Thirty Years’ War in the seventeenth century, was nursed by the patriotic preachers and poets of the eighteenth, was invigorated by the wars for emancipation from Napoleon’s rule, and was educated by Hegel and his disciples. The Jews in Germany, as elsewhere, are the one element which declines to be fused in the nationalist crucible. Their international connections help them to overstep the barriers of country. Their own racial consciousness, fostered by the same writers, is at least as intense as that of the Germans; but it does not coincide with any geographical entity. They are, therefore, regarded as a cosmopolitan tribe—“everywhere and nowhere at home.” They are distinct not only as a race, but as a sect, and as a class. Accordingly, the reaction against tolerance includes in its ranks clerics and Christian Socialists, aristocrats, as well as Nationalists, that is, the enemies of dissent and the enemies of wealth, as well as the enemies of the alien and the enemies of the upstart. And the term “Jew” is used in a religious or a racial sense according to the speaker. In both Germany and Austria we saw that the philosophical gospel of social liberty was very slowly applied to practical politics, and that, even when it had been accepted, it was subject to reactions. When Jewish manumission was finally accomplished, the Jews by their genius filled a much larger place in the sphere of national life than was deemed proportional to their numbers. And this undue preponderance, rendered all the easier by the superior cohesion of the Jewish over the German social system, was further accentuated by specialisation. The Jews, whose training in Europe for centuries, owing partly to their own racial instincts and Rabbinical teaching, but chiefly to the conditions imposed upon them from outside, had been of a peculiar kind, showed these peculiarities by their choice of fields of activity. They abstained from the productive and concentrated their efforts to the intellectual, financial, and distributive industries of the countries of which they became enfranchised citizens. Jews flooded the Universities, the Academies, the Medical Profession, the Civil Service, and the Bar. Many of the judges, and nearly one-half of the practising lawyers of Germany, are said to be Jews. Jews came forth as authors, journalists, and artists. Above all, Jews, thanks to the hereditary faculty for accumulation fostered in them during the long period when money-dealing was the one pursuit open to them, asserted themselves as financiers. It is impossible to move anywhere in Berlin or Vienna without seeing the name of Israel written in great letters of gold not only over the shops, but over the whole face of German life. Success awakened jealousy, and economic distress—due to entirely different causes—stimulated it. What if the competition was fair? What if the Jews were distinguished by their peaceful and patriotic attitude? What if they supplied the least proportion of criminals and paupers? What if German freedom had been bought partially with Jewish blood, and German unity achieved by the help of Jewish brains and Jewish money?

The landed gentry, richer in ancestors than in money or intelligence, had every reason to envy the Jew’s wealth, and much reason to dislike the Jew’s ostentatious display of it. They could not respect in the Jew a gifted arrivé. They saw in him a vulgar parvenu—one who by his “subversive Mephistophelian endowment, brains,” demolishes the fences of creed and caste, and invades the highest and most exclusive circles, thus acting as a solvent in society. If he is wise, the proud nobleman of narrow circumstances makes his pride compensate for his poverty, and magnanimously despises the luxuries which he cannot procure. If, as more often happens, he is foolish, he enters into a rivalry of vanity with the upstart, and the result is a mortgaged estate—mortgaged most likely to his rival. In either case, he can have little love for the opulent and clever interloper. The animosity of the aristocracy is shared by the middle classes, and for analogous reasons. The German professional man, and more especially his wife, resents his Jewish colleague’s comparative luxury as a personal affront. The excessive power of money in modern society, and the consequent diminution of the respect once paid to blood or learning, naturally enable the Jewish banker to succeed where the poor baron fails; and the Jewish professor or doctor, though many of these latter are poor enough, to outshine his Christian competitor. This excessive power of money is due to causes far deeper than the enfranchisement of the Jews. It is the normal result of Germany’s modern development. The influence of the nobles depended largely on their domains of land; and when industries arose to compete with agriculture, the importance of land necessarily declined. At the same time, industry and commerce began, with Germany’s expansion, to divert more and more the attention of the intelligent from the path of academic distinction—once the only path to honour open to the ambitious burgher—into that of material prosperity. Chrematistic enterprise has introduced a new social standard, and an aristocracy of wealth has come to supplant the old aristocracies of birth and erudition. This social revolution, through which every country in the world has passed and has to pass, was unhesitatingly ascribed to the Jew, who was thus accused of having created the conditions, which in reality he had only exploited.

If from the aristocratic and the cultured classes we turn to the rural population, we find similar causes yielding similar results. In the German country districts it is objected to the Jews not cultivating the land themselves, but lying in wait for the failing farmer: “Everywhere,” says an authority, “the peasant proprietor hated the Jew,” and he proceeds to sketch the peasant tragedy of which that hatred was the consequence. The land had to be mortgaged to pay family claims; the owner had recourse to the ubiquitous and importunate money-lender; the money-lender, whose business it is to trade upon the necessity of the borrower, took advantage of the latter’s distress, and extorted as much as he could. “The Jew grew fat as the Gentile got lean. A few bad harvests, cattle-plague, or potato-disease, and the wretched peasant, clinging with the unreasonable frantic love of a faithful animal to its habitat, had, in dumb agony, to see his farm sold up, his stock disposed of, and the acres he had toiled early and late to redeem, and watered by the sweat of his stubborn brow, knocked down by the Jewish interloper to the highest bidder.”231 In the Austrian country districts it is urged that the presence of the Jew is synonymous with misery; his absence with comparative prosperity. In Hungary, the late M. Elisée Reclus—the famous author of the Nouvelle Géographie Universelle—informs us, “The rich magnate goes bankrupt, and it is almost always a Jew who acquires the encumbered property,” and another witness adds: “The Jew is no less active in profiting by the vices and necessities of the peasant than by those of the noble.” In Galicia, especially, we are told that the land is rapidly passing into the hands of the Jews, and that many a former proprietor is now reduced to work as a day-labourer in his own farm for the benefit of a Jewish master. All this is an absurdly exaggerated version of facts in themselves sad enough. The Jews as a whole are by no means a wealthy community, and the gainers by the supposed exploitation are the few, not the many. And if, as is the case, the condition of affairs in agricultural states is bad, who is to blame? Wherever there is agrarian depression there are sure to be money-lenders enough and Shylocks too many. It does not appear that Christian money-lenders have ever been more tender-hearted than their Jewish confrères. Why then set down to the Jew, as a Jew, what is the common and inevitable attribute of his profession? The ruin of the borrower does not justify the slaughter of the lender. Philanthropists would be better employed if, instead of bewailing in mournful diatribes the woes of the bankrupt peasant and inveighing against the cruelty of his oppressor, combined to establish agricultural banks where the farmer could obtain money at less exorbitant interest. This measure, and measures like this, not slaughter and senile lamentation, would be a remedy consonant both with the nature of the evil and with the dictates of civilisation and justice. Until something of the sort is done, it is worse than futile to demand that dealers in money, any more than dealers in corn, cotton, or cheese, should work from altruistic motives. But nothing rational is ever attempted. Instead, everywhere the nobles ruined by their own improvidence and extravagance, the peasants by their rustic incompetence, and both by the exactions of a wasting militarism, complain of the extortion of the Jewish usurers. It was inevitable that the old-world monster of Jew-hatred, never really dead, should have raised its hoary head again. All the elements of an anti-Jewish movement were present. The only thing that lacked was opportunity. The deficiency was not long in being supplied.

The Franco-German war and the achievement of German unity fanned the flame of patriotism. As in the time of Napoleon the First, so in that of Napoleon III., a great national danger created a strong fellow-feeling between the different members of the German race; a great national triumph stirred up an enthusiasm for the Empire which was indulged in at the cost of individual liberty. Despotism throve on the exuberance of nationalism. The Germans were led back from the constitutional and democratic ideals of 1848 to an ultra-monarchic servility which made it possible for the present Kaiser’s grandfather a few years after, prompted by Bismarck, to assert openly the ridiculous old claim to divine right. Thus the ground was prepared for any anti-alien and anti-liberal agitation. Other causes came to accelerate the movement. The war had involved enormous pecuniary and personal sacrifices. The extraordinary success, instead of satisfying, stimulated German ambition. It aroused an extravagant financial optimism and self-confidence. Germany, intoxicated with military victory, was still thirsting for aggrandisement of a different kind. Economy was cast to the winds, and a fever of wild speculation seized on all classes of the community. Companies were floated, and swallowed up the superfluous capital of the great as well as the savings of the humble. Sanguine expectation was the temper of the day. Berlin would vie with Paris in elegance and with London in suburban comfort, and every one of its citizens would be a millionaire!

Then came the terrible crash. The bubble burst, and the magnificent day-dreams were dispelled by misery. A succession of bad harvests, and the rapid increase in American corn competition, by impoverishing the agricultural class, added to the general depression. The disillusioned public wanted a victim whereupon to vent its wrath. Those who promoted the companies had to suffer for the folly of those who were ruined by their failure. A great many of the former, by selling out at the right moment, rose to affluence. The discontented public, naturally enough, noticing these large fortunes in the midst of the general wreck, jumped to the conclusion that the few had enriched themselves by robbing the many. “Exposures” followed, and among the implicated financiers there were found many Jews. It was then in order to fill Jewish pockets that the heroes of Germany had bled on the battlefield, and the burghers of Germany had been bled at home! The nationalist ideal of Germany for the Germans, then, was to lead to a Germany for the Israelites! All those trials had been endured and all those triumphs achieved in order to deliver up the Fatherland to an alien and infidel race—a race with which neither the intellect nor the heart of Germany has any affinity or sympathy! This was the cry of anguish that succeeded to the paeans of self-glorification, and those nationalists who uttered these sentiments forgot that their very nationalism had been largely created and fostered by Jewish thinkers. They also forgot that it was a Jewish statesman, Lasker, who, at the cost of all personal and party interests and of his popularity, had alone had the courage to expose in the Prussian Chamber the evils of extravagant speculation, in 1873, and to urge both the public and the Government to turn back, while there was yet time, from the road to ruin which they pursued. But it has been well said: “Who would think of gratitude when a scapegoat is required?”

A tongue was given to the popular indignation in a pamphlet by an obscure German journalist, Wilhelm Marr by name, who seized the opportunity of attaining to fame and fortune by a plentiful effusion of his anti-Jewish venom. The work anathematized the Jews not only as blood-sucking leeches, but as enemies of the Germanic race, and as forming a distinct and self-centred solecism in German national life. The Coryphaeus was ably supported by a crowd hitherto mute. The opponents of industrial and the opponents of religious liberalism, men of rank, men of letters, and high ecclesiastics joined in the chorus, and another “black day” (July 30, 1878) was added to the Jewish calendar. In Adolph Stöcker, a Christian Socialist and court preacher, and a staunch Conservative in the Prussian Diet, the new crusade found its Peter the Hermit. He was the first man of position to preach from the pulpit and to declare in the press that Hebrew influence in the State was disastrous to the Christian section of the community, that Semitic preponderance was fatal to the Teutonic race. As though the printing presses of Germany were only waiting for the signal, a whole library of anti-Semitic literature was rapidly produced, and as rapidly consumed. Some of the most popular journals opened their columns to the campaign, Jewish journalists opposed violence with violence, and the feud daily assumed larger dimensions, until by the end of 1879 it had spread and raged over the whole of the empire.

“It is not right that the minority should rule over the majority,” cried some. Others accused the Jews, loosely and without adducing any proofs, of forming a freemasonry and of always placing the interests of their brethren above those of the country. That there was some kind of systematic co-operation among the Jews seems probable. It is also probable that there was a certain degree of truth in the charge of “clandestine manipulation of the press” for the purpose of shielding even Jews unworthy of protection. But for this the Germans had only themselves to thank. By attacking the Jews as a tribe they stimulated the tribal feeling among them. The social isolation to which they condemned the Jew intensified his gift of reciprocity. To the German Christians the Jew, however patriotic and unexceptionable he may be as a citizen, as a man is a Jew—an alien, an infidel, an upstart, a parasite. His genius is said to be purely utilitarian, his religion externally an observance of empty forms, essentially a worship of the golden calf, and worldly success his highest moral ideal. German professors analysed the Jewish mind and found it Semitic, German theologians sought for the Jewish soul and could find none. Both classes, agreeing in nothing else, concurred in denouncing the Jew as a sinister creature, strangely wanting in spiritual qualities—a being whose whole existence, devoid of faith of any kind, revolves between his cash-book and the book of the Law. Perhaps the most remarkable consequence of all was the growth of an anti-Semitic school of exegesis of the Old Testament.

These, then, were the grievances of the orthodox: the Jew’s want of religious feeling. Free-thinkers denounced him for a superabundance of that very feeling. Stöcker, with unctuous smartness, said, “the creed of the Jews stands on the blank page between the Old and the New Testament.” Duhring ponderously objected to “the tenacity with which the inherited religious manner of viewing things is rooted in the Jewish mind.” These charges, mutually exclusive though they were, were gladly espoused by those who only needed some theory whereby to dignify their spite. The Jew’s own foibles—his arrogance and love of display—supplied that minimum of excuse which has ever been deemed sufficient for persecution. The Jews, said their accusers, hold in their hands the golden key which opens all doors, and flourish it insolently before their less fortunate neighbours. They have killed the ancient simplicity and frugality of German life by their ostentatious luxury, and corrupted German idealism by their inordinate pursuit of material comfort. German idealism has been killed by nationalism and militarism. But, of course, no German patriot can be expected to see this. What, however, surprises one is that it does not seem to have occurred to those who denounce the Jew as the promoter of materialism that they have the remedy in their own hands. Let them cease to worship mammon, and mammon’s ministers will be discredited. As it is, they inveigh against the Jew for enjoying the very things which they themselves hunger after. In Germany, as elsewhere, Christian panegyrists of plain living and high thinking would perhaps like the Jewish millionaire better if they resembled him less.

Prince Bismarck, in the prosecution of his great political object of a united Germany had courted the support of the Liberal party, which, on its side, was not unwilling to help a man who, no matter how anti-Liberal his domestic policy might be, was, in the main, the hierophant of the German nation’s aspirations. Thus, in 1866, there came into being the National Liberal Party. Their position was, however, a false one, as their support of Bismarck and their Liberal tendencies could not be reconciled for a long time. But, while the alliance lasted, the Liberals were instrumental in introducing many legislative measures in the direction of progress, including certain reforms as to banking and commerce. These innovations gave offence to several classes of the population, and the fact that one of the leaders of the National Liberal Party, Lasker, and a great many of its members were Jews, was a brilliant opportunity for the reactionary elements.232 The Conservatives caught at the opportunity for discrediting the obnoxious reforms by describing them as deliberately intended to serve the interests of the Jews. Prince Bismarck, now hostile to a party for which he had no further use, transferred the weight of his political and personal influence to their adversaries and tried to lure the extreme Conservatives and Catholics, as well as the working classes, by invigorating the anti-Jewish agitation. The organs of these three parties were filled with diatribes against the Jews, and in October, 1879, the first anti-Jewish society was founded in Berlin and Dresden, with the object “to unite all non-Jewish Germans of all persuasions, all parties, all stations, into one common league, which, setting aside all separate interests, all political differences, shall strive, with all earnestness and diligence for the one end viz., to save our German fatherland from becoming completely Judaised, and render residence in it supportable to the posterity of the aborigines.”233 In accordance with this patriotic programme the society christened itself “The Anti-Semitic League,” partly because there was a sound of learning in the word and partly to make it clear that the race, and not merely the religion, of the Jew had aroused animosity.234 Prince Bismarck on being interrogated about the movement is said to have answered, “As a Minister of State, I condemn it; but as a Prussian, as a German, as a Christian, as a man, I cannot help but approve of it.” This speech, when compared with the speaker’s utterances of thirty years before,235 affords sufficiently painful evidence of the long stride which German statesmanship had taken backwards.

Thus the pedantry of the schools joined hands with the prejudice of the streets, social and political interests combined with national vanity, economic jealousy, scientific sophistry, and religious bigotry to bring into being a movement so utterly incongruous with modern, and especially with German, ideas.

In 1880 and 1881 the warfare continued with systematized vigour and increasing violence. Judenhetze, under its less vulgar name, became a virulent epidemic. Both Catholic and Lutheran clerics, mortally hostile in everything else, joined forces against the common enemy, and vied with each other in their efforts to gain the goodwill of the Christian Socialists. The Social Democrats were the only party to denounce the anti-Semitic agitation and to take under their protection the persecuted people; an attitude which earned them the sincere detestation of the ultra-Conservatives. Herr Marr, the great anti-Jewish pamphleteer, however, devoted a whole masterpiece to the demonstration of the fact that the Social Democrats, whom he elegantly called “red mice,” were in every way to be preferred to the Jewish “golden rats.” But the movement, none the less, continued progressing. Meetings were held at which the “Semites” were furiously attacked. The members of the “German” League passed solemn resolutions to eschew all intercourse, social or commercial, with the enemies of the Teutonic race, and Herr Stöcker and his followers, in their zeal for “the strengthening of the Christian Germanic spirit,” presented a petition to the Prussian Chambers, praying:

“That immigration of foreign Jews into Germany might have some restrictions placed upon it.

“That the Jews might be excluded from all posts of supreme authority, and that in courts of justice a certain limitation of their power be instituted.

“That Christian schools, though used by Jewish scholars, should remain distinctively Christian, and that Jewish teachers only be employed where the nature of the subject taught renders it desirable.

“That a census or report of the Jewish population be forthwith prepared.”236

The anti-Semitic Leagues, though disapproving of violence in their manifestoes, in practice were only too ready to encourage the most sordid passions and the basest prejudices of the poor and ignorant masses, so that, while anti-Semitism led to stormy scenes in the Prussian Diet, it translated itself into more stormy riots outside. Pamphlets and duels were the order of the day among the upper classes, sanguinary encounters between the Jewish and German mobs among the lower. The Liberals protested, the Crown Prince Frederick tried to save the Jews from this dastardly persecution, and the movement was publicly denounced by many distinguished Germans, such as Virchow and Mommsen, as a subversion of the principles of humanitarianism promulgated by German philosophy, as a blasphemy against German ideals, and as a stain on German civilisation. But Jew-baiting was not checked before many thousands of Jews were compelled to leave their country—the country to which they gave Mendelssohn the philosopher and Mendelssohn the composer, Heine and Börne, Offenbach and Auerbach, Ense, Ewald, Jacoby, and a host of other great men, including Lasker, who a few years before had done his utmost to avert the financial catastrophe for which his co-religionists now suffered.

A German who has played an active part in his country’s history from 1848 onwards does not hesitate to ascribe “the disgraceful orgies of the Jews’ Chace, begun on a large scale at Berlin on the New Year’s night of 1880–81,” to Prince Bismarck’s direct inspiration. “There was evidently,” he says, writing not long after those events, “more method in those ugly rushes and riots than may be generally suspected.... The German citizens of Hebrew origin, or of the Mosaic faith, belong, in their great majority, to the Liberal and Radical camp. Several of them have achieved the most honourable prominence in the progressive parties to which they attached themselves. The great statesman whose ideal is his own Dictatorship under cover of the King’s personal Government, finding these popular leaders of Semitic blood as stumbling-blocks in his path, did not scruple to dally coquettishly with the organisers and approvers of the Jews’ Hunt. An underhand alliance was struck up, in old Roman fashion, between out-and-out partisans of Caesarism and certain shady leaders of a misguided rabble. A Court Preacher, Stöcker, acted as the go-between and spiritual head of the crusade. The same man is now in the German Parliament a chief exponent of this cross-breed between princely absolutism and professed philanthropic care for the multitude.”237

Soon, however, a discrepancy became apparent between the leaders of the nationalist and the leaders of the religious and economic forces. While anti-Semites, strictly so called, clamoured for a revival of the ancient disabilities which doomed the Jew to political servitude and social ostracism, the Christian Socialists were not prepared to go so far. This moderation was partly due to the fact that the anti-Semites had manifested symptoms of wishing to include Christianity in their denunciation of Judaism as a Semitic creed—a tendency which, of course, could inspire no sympathy in orthodox theologians and Court Preachers. The schism was temporarily healed in 1886: but it was reopened three years later. However, this divergence of views did not affect the rank and file of the anti-Jewish agitators. They cared little for intellectual theories; but were frankly actuated by the blind and unreasoning instincts of their mediaeval ancestors. Again the populace found allies among the impecunious and the unscrupulous, who supplied it with food for its credulity, and among the Catholic clergy, who inflamed its fanaticism. The mediaeval charge of ritual murder was once more revived, and it led to the destruction of Jewish houses and the burning of Jewish synagogues.

Prince Bismarck’s retirement, in 1890, and the abandonment of his anti-Liberal programme did not mend matters. The Conservatives endeavoured to gain the popular ear by coming forth as the champions of national unity and of the Christian faith, and by denouncing the Jews as the enemies of both. ♦1892♦ This change of attitude brought about a reconciliation with the nationalist anti-Semites, whose rabid programme was fully accepted. And now the two sections united brought to bear all their strength against the Jews. Christianity and stupidity, respectability and sansculottism, were found marshalled in one compact phalanx as in the days of yore. In the autumn of 1893 a Bill was brought into the German Diet, asking that the Talmud should be subjected to an official examination, and it was seriously proposed that the old Commission appointed for that purpose by the Emperor Maximilian at the instigation of Pfefferkorn at the beginning of the sixteenth century should be roused from its sleep of ages. But the alliance was too grotesque to be effective. The saner section of the Conservatives was shocked at the unprincipled tactics and the excessive fury of their allies, and, though the lower orders of their supporters in the country were not troubled by such delicacy, yet the extreme anti-Semitic party lost, through its own extravagance, much of its influence among the educated. Herr Stöcker was expelled from Court, and soon after from the ranks of the Conservative party. The Catholics also were shamed into breaking all connection with the scandalous demagogues, and thus the anti-Semitic distemper, though still an element of discord in the Reichstag, has ceased to be an element of danger—for the present. But, if the paroxysm is over, the disease is not cured. Indeed, individual anti-Semites still display a degree of fervour that would have done credit to Herr Marr himself on the hey-day of his frenzy. The leader of these loyal Jew-haters is Count Puckler, whose speeches are sold in the streets of Berlin, and read by many Germans with profound approval. All that is needed is some encouragement from above, and then we may again see many volunteering to translate the prophet’s visions into deeds of blood.

From Germany Anti-Semitism found its way to the neighbouring states. In the Austro-Hungarian Empire politicians and publicists caught the rabies and spread it without delay. As early as 1880 an attempt was made to establish in Hungary an anti-Semitic league after the German pattern, and, though the healthier and more enlightened portion of the nation was loth to forget the liberal traditions of the past and the services rendered by the Jews in the struggle for Hungarian independence, the obscurantist elements among the people and the aristocracy, in the Church and the official classes,—the vulgar high and low—were not disinclined to listen to the dictates of bigotry and superstition. An opportunity for a declaration of the latent prejudice offered in 1881, when a Catholic Professor of Hebrew gravely accused the Jews of secretly holding the destruction of the Gentiles as a religious tenet; the ritual murder of Christians being only one method for carrying out this moral obligation. Despite exposure and open repudiation, the worthy Professor’s utterances tallied so well with preconceived ideas that the prehistoric fiction found many eager believers. ♦1882♦ The disappearance of a Christian girl from a Hungarian village in the next year strengthened the belief and led to brutal outrages on the Jews at Buda-Pesth, Zala and elsewhere, the riots being only quelled by the proclamation of martial law. This measure, as was natural, was turned into an instrument of attack on the Liberal Government, already unpopular, as sheltering the enemies of mankind. An inquiry was instituted into the alleged murder, many Jews were arrested, and evidence was manufactured. But in the trial which ensued the plot was stripped of all its shameful vestments of perjury, forgery, and intimidation, and the prisoners were acquitted.

While the anti-Semites were covering themselves with contempt and ridicule in Hungary, in Austria the movement attained serious dimensions. The campaign, begun with occasional pamphlets, followed the development of German anti-Semitism. In Austria, as in Germany, Liberalism had been undermined by that worst form of racial intolerance known as Christian Socialism, which was and is nothing but the old spirit of clerical reaction masquerading in the guise of anti-Semitic prejudice and pseudo-democratic demagogy.238 In Austria, as in Germany, the operations were conducted by two bodies of men—the racial and the religious enemies of the Jew. The two bodies met on the common ground of objection to the Jews’ acquiring land. The anti-Semites proper did not like to see the land falling into the hands of non-Austrians, and the Christian Socialists objected to its falling into the hands of infidel financiers. The agitation was gradually organised, and in 1882 two leagues were formed in Vienna. Austrian, like German, anti-Semitism was immediately exploited for party purposes. Many politicians, though themselves free from anti-Semitic prejudice, were ready to adopt a cause which promised to add to their own strength or to weaken their opponents. They, therefore, loudly preached a doctrine which they despised, excited passions which they did not share, and advocated principles which in all probability they would have shrunk from acting upon. Thus the support of the anti-Semitic leagues was solicited by the Radical Nationalists on one hand, and by the Liberal Government on the other. The Nationalists being less insincere in their prejudices, won the victory which they deserved, and the coalition between them and the Christian Socialists derived additional strength from the anti-clerical policy of the Liberal party, which compelled many Catholics who had hitherto stood aloof, to join the ranks of anti-Semitism. ♦1892♦ Henceforth the agitation was conducted under the auspices of the Roman Church. The clerical press disseminated the seed in the cafés, and the priests fulminated against the Jews from the pulpit. The time-dishonoured charge of ritual murder was not forgotten, and the Hungarian Upper House, in 1894, rejected the Liberal Bill which placed Judaism on a footing of equality with other denominations.

The Liberals had succeeded in offending both the Radical Nationalists and the Clericals. They offended the former by advocating Jewish rights, and the latter by combating the tyranny of the Church. The alliance between those two enemies of Liberalism was, in 1895, blessed by the Pope, who hoped to gain over, or at least to control, the Radicals by drawing closer the bonds which united them with the Clericals. The Vatican, disappointed in the long-cherished hope of recovering its temporal power by the help of the Catholic monarchs, was induced to court the democracy. Thus the spiritual tribunal which has always taken its stand on the lofty platform of obedience to authority, in the pursuance of secular ends did not hesitate to lend its sanction to the advocates of violence and revolt. The anti-Jewish agitation, hallowed by the Vicar of Christ, carried all before it. The anti-Semites secured a vast majority in the Municipal Council of Vienna, notwithstanding the opposition on the part of the Emperor, who dissolved the council twice, only to be met each time with an even greater anti-Semitic triumph; and in the Parliamentary Elections of 1897 the allied powers of Radical Nationalism and Clericalism secured a strong position in the Austrian Reichsrath. This was the meridian of anti-Semitic popularity in Austria. But here, as in Germany, the unseemly and unnatural coalition between rabid Nationalism and respectable Clericalism could not last long, and, while it lasted, could command but little respect. Three years afterwards the General Election showed a decline of public confidence in the allies, and many of the Radical Nationalists deserted the ranks to form an independent and anti-Clerical party, while, on the other hand, the Vatican thought it expedient to withdraw its sanction from the Christian Socialists.

Austro-Hungarian anti-Semitism, however, though much weakened, is not dead, and it would be taking too sanguine a view of human nature and human intelligence to hope that the prejudices, the passions, and the sophisms which have led to the recrudescence of Jew-hatred will not assert themselves again. In point of fact, there are ample signs to confirm this pessimistic forecast. On October 21, 1904, the Diet of Lower Austria witnessed a scene which a spectator pronounced “unparalleled for vulgarity and demagogic impudence even in this country of crazy Parliamentarism.” The anti-Semitic and Christian Socialist parties, which still command an overwhelming majority both in the Diet and in the Vienna Municipal Council, had organised a torch-light procession in honour of the sixtieth birthday of Dr. Lueger, the anti-Semite Burgomaster of Vienna. The Premier instructed the police to prohibit the demonstration. Thereupon the outraged worshippers of the great hero of Christian Socialism brought in a motion in which they accused the Premier of having yielded to Jewish pressure and to the terrorism of the Social Democrats, the champions of the Jews, and of “having thereby given proof of shameful cowardice.” The motion was carried amid loud acclamations in honour of Dr. Lueger who, on his followers asserting that the reason for the Government’s attitude was “the jealousy caused in the highest circles by the Burgomaster’s popularity,” modestly assured the House that “he was not jealous of the Emperor and repudiated the supposition that he envied the reverence and affection which surrounded the Monarch’s person.” At the end of the sitting Dr. Lueger was enthusiastically cheered in the streets, while a Social Democratic Deputy was insulted and spat upon.239 This demagogue, who by the volume of his voice, the character of his wit and the extent of his power over the Viennese mob, recalls vividly the Cleon of Aristophanes, a year later warned the Austrian Jews openly and with impunity that the Kishineff tragedy might repeat itself in Vienna. Even more recently twenty thousand Christian Socialists, Clericals and anti-Semites, headed and inflamed by Dr. Lueger, made a violent demonstration outside the Hungarian Delegation building, as a protest against the policy of the “Judaeo-Magyars.”240 Within a week of this outburst Dr. Lueger, in company with Herr Schneider, a militant anti-Semite Deputy, paid a visit to Bucharest, where he was fêted by all classes of Roumanian society, from the King downwards: a glorification of this arch-enemy of the Jews as significant as it is natural in a country where Jew-hatred is at its height. Clearly, Austrian anti-Semitism is anything but dead.

The reply of the Austrian Jews to the anti-Semites is characteristic of the movement. Hitherto they had been content to identify themselves politically with their Christian compatriots. But the continued antipathy on the part of the latter has recently forced them to adopt a purely Jewish attitude. On the initiative of the Jewish representatives of Galicia in the Reichsrath and in the Galician Diet, the Jews of that province have resolved to create a Jewish organisation for the defence of the political rights and economic interests of their community.241 Thus modern Jew-haters foster by their own efforts the very tribalism which they condemn, just as their mediaeval ancestors compelled the Jews to adopt money-lending as a profession and then denounced them for so doing.

In France the power of the Jews since the establishment of the Third Republic increased steadily, and their number was to some extent swelled by the arrival of brethren driven by anti-Semitism out of Germany. Yet, as late as 1881 a writer felt justified in stating that “the effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is apparent in almost all the large states of the world with the single exception perhaps of France.”242 This comparative immunity from the general delirium, however, was not to last much longer. Nationalism, clericalism, and economic jealousy in France, as elsewhere, were at work, and demagogues ready to make use of these forces were not wanting.

Ernest Renan, in 1882, aimed some of his delicately-pointed shafts of irony at “the modern Israelite with whom our great commercial towns of Europe have become acquainted during the last fifty years.... How careless he shows himself of a paradise mankind has accepted upon his word; with what ease he accommodates himself to all the folds of modern civilisation; how quickly he is freed from all dynastic and feudal prejudice; and how can he enjoy a world he has not made, gather the fruits of a field he has not tilled, supplant the blockhead who persecutes him, or make himself necessary to the fool who despises him. It is for him, you would think, that Clovis and his Franks fought, that the race of Capet unfolded its policy of a thousand years, that Philip Augustus conquered at Bouvines and Condé at Rocroi!... He who overturned the world by his faith in the kingdom of God believes now in wealth only.”243 That Renan, the high-priest of Idealism, should feel aggrieved at the materialism of the modern representative of his beloved Semitic race is not surprising. It is, however, surprising that the Jew, who has so often been persecuted for his obstinate adherence to his traditions and for his detachment from his surroundings, should be taken to task by Renan for the ease with which “he accommodates himself to all the folds of modern civilisation.” Either Renan is right or the anti-Semites. One and the same body of men cannot very well be both obdurate and accommodating. It is, however, the Jew’s special privilege to be denounced by one half of the world for the possession of a certain quality, and by the other half for the lack of it. Consistency has never been a marked characteristic of Jew-haters, and, perhaps, it is not reasonable to expect it from men under the spell of so engrossing a pastime as the excommunication of their fellows.

Of course, Renan himself, his mellifluous mockery notwithstanding, was the very antithesis of a Jew-hater. Nationalism had no greater enemy and Liberalism no warmer champion than Renan. He never tired of asserting that ethnographical facts possessed only a scientific importance, and were devoid of all political significance.244 So far as the Jews were concerned, he proclaimed with enthusiasm the services rendered by them to the cause of civilisation and progress in the past, and emphatically expressed his conviction that they were destined to render equally brilliant services in the future: “Every Jew,” he said, “is essentially a Liberal, while the enemies of Judaism, examined closely, will be found to be, in general, the enemies of the modern spirit. This,” he added, “applies especially to the French Jews, such as they have been made by the Revolution; but I am persuaded that every country which will repeat the experiment, renounce State religion, secularise the civil life, and establish the equality of all the citizens before the law, will arrive at the same result and will find as excellent patriots in the Jewish creed as in other creeds.” “The work of the nineteenth century,” he declared on another occasion, “is to demolish all the ghettos, and I do not congratulate those who elsewhere seek to rebuild them.”245

But at the very moment, when Renan was giving utterance to these noble sentiments, there was preparing in his own country an agitation precisely similar to that which had “elsewhere sought to rebuild the ghettos.”

The slumbering prejudice against the Jew was in France first awakened by the Panama scandals, and immediately afterwards there was formed in Paris a union with the object of freeing the country from the financial tyranny of Jews and other non-Catholics and foreigners. The Vatican, ever on the alert, saw in the movement an opportunity of strengthening the clerical interest in a state which had so sadly neglected its traditional rôle of the Pope’s champion, and from an eldest daughter of the Church had turned into its bitterest enemy. The Pope, therefore, bestowed upon the union his blessing. ♦1882♦ But the institution after a brief career ended in a bankruptcy from which not even Papal prayers could save it. Like Julius Caesar’s spirit, however, the union even after its dissolution continued to harass its rivals. Its failure, attributed to the machinations of the Jews, put fresh life into the anti-Semitic agitation. Publicists interpreted the popular feeling and gratified the national amour propre by describing in sombre colours the pernicious influence of the Jewish plutocracy on the life of France, and by tracing to that influence the undeniable immorality of French society.246 The discomfiture of that brilliant and weak adventurer, Boulanger, brought about, as it was, chiefly by the efforts of a Jewish journalist of German extraction and connections, drew down upon the Jews, and especially upon foreign Jews, the wrath of General Boulanger’s supporters. An anti-Semitic League was founded in Paris, with branches in the provinces. The Royalists and the Nationalists, the warriors of the Church and the warriors of the army, the desperate defenders of lost causes, who had nothing more to lose, and the zealots for new causes, who had as yet everything to win, all rallied round the standard of anti-Semitism, which derived additional popularity and glory from the alliance of France with Russia, the persecutrix of Israel. ♦1892♦ Soon after an anti-Semitic journal made its appearance in Paris, and its columns were filled with scandals, scented out with truly inquisitorial diligence, and with attacks on Jewish officers. Anti-Jewish feeling daily grew in bitterness, the term “Juif” came to be accepted as a synonym for variety of villainy, and the position of the Jewish officers in the French army became intolerable, till the ferment culminated in the arrest and conviction of Captain Dreyfus. ♦1894♦

All the prejudices and passions of the past and all the conflicting interests of the present were now gathered up into a storm almost unparalleled in the history of contemporary Europe. The most popular newspapers vied with each other in pandering to the lowest feelings and most ignorant prejudices of the vulgarest classes of the French nation. From one end of France to the other nothing was heard but execrations of the Jewish traitor. The modern Frenchman was not unwilling to forgive the Jew his supposed enmity to Christianity, but what patriot could forgive him his supposed treachery to the French army? The hatred of the race, expressed with eloquent virulence in Parliament and in the press, found even more vigorous expression with dynamite, ♦1895♦ and an attempt was made to blow up the Rothschild Bank in Paris. Meanwhile the Captain’s friends worked with untiring earnestness, patience, and ability to establish his innocence. A series of disclosures ensued; the public, led by the late M. Zola, Colonel Picquart, and other advocates of justice, began to feel qualms on the subject, and the demand for a revision of the trial grew daily louder. By this time the Dreyfus affair had been drawn into the mad vortex of party politics, and this accounts for the extent and depth of an agitation hardly intelligible when viewed in relation to the comparatively small number of French Jews.247 To be or not to be revised, that was the question, and upon the answer the rival parties staked their reputations and their political ideals. The Liberals defended Dreyfus not so much because they believed him to be innocent, as because he was attacked by the Clericals. The Clericals, on the other hand, denounced the Dreyfusards as enemies of their country and of its army—the Christian Faith was tactfully kept in the background—a distinguished Academician wrote a book on Nationalism in which he analysed Zola’s genius and character, and proved to his own satisfaction, and to the satisfaction of thousands of readers, that Zola was not a Frenchman.

But in the midst of all this clamour, riot, vilification and assault, the demand for a revision continued persistently to gain ground, and the Liberals, representing the sanest and healthiest element in the Republic, finally prevailed. ♦1898♦ The new trial at Rennes brought to light the forgeries and perjuries by which the conviction of the Jewish captain had been secured. None the less, the sentence was not revoked. The verdict of the new court-martial was an attempt to save judicial appearances by finding the prisoner guilty, and to save justice by recommending him to mercy. Dreyfus was restored to his family, but not to his honour. However, public opinion both in France and abroad had forestalled the verdict of the Court by acquitting the prisoner of the crime and by pitying in him the victim of a foul conspiracy. Nationalism, Clericalism, Royalism, and all the legions of anti-Semitism received a severe blow by the triumph of the Dreyfusards; but, though their star was no longer at its zenith, it had not yet set. The agitation in favour of a complete reversal of Captain Dreyfus’ sentence continued, and the demand for a new revision of the case was pronounced by the Nationalists as a fresh development of the “anti-national” policy of the Liberals, and as a conspiracy on their part for the purpose of inflicting a new humiliation on the Army by constraining it to proclaim the innocence of a man it had twice condemned as a traitor. A joint manifesto, bearing the signatures of the Patriotic League, the National Anti-Semitic Federation, and the French Socialist Party, was issued appealing to the French public “to frustrate the efforts of the occult Sectarians, Internationalists, and financial powers.”248

At the same time anti-Semitic sentiments found applauding audiences in the French theatres, as was shown in December, 1903, by the success at the Paris Gymnase of Le Retour de Jérusalem—a play which flattered the feelings of the audience by dwelling on the familiar points of the anti-Semitic creed: the Jews’ clannishness, their readiness to help their own co-religionists, their sans patrie; and justified its prejudices by emphasising that natural incompatibility of temperament which is supposed to doom Jew and Gentile to everlasting alienation. Nevertheless, the wiser section of the French people carried the day in the end. ♦1906 July 12–13♦ The Court of Cassation, the highest tribunal in France, after two years’ examination, quashed the verdict of the Rennes court-martial, declaring that there never was any foundation for any of the charges brought against Captain Dreyfus. The French Government thereupon submitted to Parliament a Bill providing for the complete rehabilitation of all the victims of the conspiracy. The Bill was passed by an overwhelming majority. Captain Dreyfus was promoted to the rank of Major and presented with the Cross of the Legion of Honour, Col. Picquart was made a Brigadier-General, the remains of M. Zola were transferred to the Pantheon, and in the gallery of the Senate were erected busts of the two Senators who first stood out in favour of the innocence of Dreyfus. Thus France wiped out the stain on its national character, and the drama which had agitated the world for twelve years came to a happy end. This end, however, satisfactory as it is, must be regarded as a victory of justice due to special political causes rather than as a proof of a revolution of the popular attitude towards the Jews, or as a guarantee against a recrudescence of French anti-Semitism in the future. The “Jewish Peril” is one of those evil spirits which are in the habit of vanishing and re-appearing from time to time, always with a fresh face and changed garb, but always the same.

The Jewish Question from France passed to the French colony of Algeria. In 1870 an Act, known as the Crémieux Decree, enfranchised the Jewish inhabitants of the colony en masse. For twenty-five years the measure excited little or no protest. But, as a result of the anti-Jewish agitation in the mother country, it suddenly became the subject on which elections were passionately fought and the barrier that divided local politicians into two opposite parties: Judaisants and Anti-Juifs. A Commission appointed to inquire into this sudden revulsion of feeling, reported that the alleged reasons were “usury” and the unwillingness of the Jews to assimilate themselves to the French. Usury, it was recognised by sensible Frenchmen, is inevitable in a country still in the Algerian stage of economic development. Moreover, the official inquiry proved that all the Jews are not usurers, and that all the usurers are not Jews; that, in fact, the mass of the Jewish inhabitants of Algeria are very poor.249 None the less, these allegations bring into vivid relief the essential antiquity of modern anti-Semitism.

The modern version of Jew-hatred, as was only natural, was welcomed in both Roumania and Russia. Both countries are still mediaeval in most respects; but the foreign doctrine of Nationalism, concealing, as it does, a very old instinct under a new euphemistic name, presented nothing incongruous with indigenous bigotry. Economic considerations deepened the bitter feeling against the Jew, as has been narrated.

Italy and Greece have declined to listen to the new creed of intolerance. There are few Jews in those countries. Besides, both the Italians and the Greeks, though sensitively attached to their national ideals, have too keen a sense of proportion, and the Greeks, at all events, too much commercial ability to entertain any jealousy of the Jew.

England has not failed in this, as in former ages, to follow, after a lukewarm and sluggish fashion, the Continental evolution of the feeling towards the Jew. In popular literature and art the Jew had never ceased to figure as an object of derision and repugnance. What reader of Dickens need be reminded of the execrable Mr. Fagin, trainer of juvenile criminals and tormentor of poor Oliver Twist, or of Cruikshank’s portrait of that and other Israelites? But these pleasant creations, however grossly they may sin against truth, were as innocent of any deliberate intention to stir up a hatred against the Jew as Shakespeare’s and Marlowe’s personifications of evil in the characters of Shylock and Barabas. The taint of malignant anti-Semitism made its first unmistakable appearance in England during the Eastern Crisis of 1876–1878. A Jew was then Prime Minister, and that Jew opposed the pro-Bulgarian policy of the Liberal party. To that party the conflict between the Sultan and his Christian subjects was then, as it still is, a conflict between the Cross and the Crescent, between Europe and Asia, between Aryanism and Semitism. What mattered to the Liberal politicians that Islam, in point of fact, since its first missionary zeal spent itself many centuries ago in Asia and Africa, has never tried, and does not want, to kill Christianity? What mattered to them that Christianity, in point of history, is a Semitic creed, and in its original Eastern form nearer to Islam than to the product of the Western temperament which passes under the same name? What mattered to them that the Turks, after five or six centuries of constant marriage to women of the subject races, have, ethnographically speaking, become more European than the Bulgarians, who, in point of blood, are more Turkish than the modern Turks? What mattered to them that the Turks are not Semites at all? What mattered to the opponents of the Jew that the doctrine of the integrity of the Ottoman Empire had been promulgated before Disraeli left school, and that his Eastern policy of a regenerated Turkey was a policy evolved by as good Christians as themselves long before Disraeli became a power in the land—by men like the Duke of Wellington and Sir Stratford Canning—and carried on by contemporary diplomatists and statesmen like Lord Salisbury, Sir Henry Layard, and Sir Henry Elliot? These are mere facts. The Liberal party wanted broad principles and a euphonious war-cry. Disraeli was opposed to Russia’s ambition, and Disraeli was a Jew. What could be easier than to connect the two things? The enemy of Russia was an enemy of Christianity, of Aryanism, of Europe. If any doubt was possible, it could easily be dispelled by a reference to Disraeli’s romances. There, as elsewhere, in season and out of season, Disraeli preached the greatness of his persecuted race with a sincerity, a courage and a consistency which, in the eyes of the neutral student, form the noblest trait in his character; in the eyes of a political opponent, the most conclusive proof of his Jewish hostility to Christianity. Accordingly, we find Mr. Gladstone, in 1876, confiding to the sympathetic ear of his friend, the Duke of Argyll, the following philosophical reflection: “I have a strong suspicion that Dizzy’s crypto-Judaism has had to do with his policy: the Jews of the East bitterly hate the Christians, who have not always used them well.”250

At the same time other politicians vented their prejudice against the Jews, and against Disraeli’s “Jewish aims” in various books,251 pamphlets, speeches and articles, while soon after, when the eloquent tongue was for ever silenced, and the man who had bent Europe to his will was no longer able to defend himself, reverend ecclesiastics took pains to trace, with an enthusiasm and an acumen worthy of a less ignoble task, the origin and development of the great statesman’s “deceitfulness,” of his “political dishonesty,” of his “disregard of morality in the pursuit of personal ambition,” of his “theological and political scepticism,” of his “jealousy for the spiritual and intellectual supremacy of the Semitic race,” and the rest of his virtues, from his early home education under his Jewish sceptic of a father and his vulgar Jewess of a mother, through his school life, his apprenticeship in a solicitor’s office, the various stages of his literary and political career, up to the moment of his death. It was, however, pointed out with an air of charitable patronage not unamusing, when the relative magnitude of the author and the subject of the criticism is considered, that “it would be harsh and unfair to judge him by our ordinary standard of political morality,” for “Mr. Disraeli started on his public career with little or no furniture of moral or religious principles of any kind.”252 The writer repeated the favourite explanation of Disraeli’s opposition to Gladstone’s Eastern policy, namely, that it arose from the fact that “the ‘bag and baggage’ policy cut rudely across his cherished convictions respecting the ‘Semitic principle.’ The Turks, indeed,” the learned theologian naïvely observes, “do not belong to the Semitic race; but their theocratic polity is the product of a Semitic brain, and was, therefore, sacred in the eyes of Lord Beaconsfield.”253 In the writer’s opinion Disraeli’s dearest ideal, when it was not his own pre-eminence, was the pre-eminence of the Jewish nation, his whole career being a compound of selfishness and Semitism.

While chivalrous theologians made these interesting post-mortem investigations into the character of the champion of Semitism, learned professors made equally interesting studies in the character of anti-Semitism. And while the former denounced that representative of the race as one who had made “self-aggrandisement the one aim of his life,” the latter endeavoured to justify the conduct of its enemies on the ground of Hebrew “tribalism,” “materialism,” “opportunism,” “cosmopolitanism,” and other vices ending in —ism.254

As these charges are still brought against the Jews by their enemies in England, it may be not irrelevant to answer some of them once for all. No one with a biographical dictionary on his book-shelf requires to be told that the Jewish people, far from specialising in material aims, has never shirked its due share in the world’s intellectual work, though it has seldom been accorded its due share of the world’s recognition. Look wheresoever we like, in science, art, music, philosophy, letters, politics, we everywhere find the Jew generously contributing to the common fund of human knowledge. From Higher Criticism, which was initiated by a Jew in the third century, and Comparative Philology, also originated by a Jew in the ninth, through Spinoza’s philosophical work in the seventeenth, and Mendelssohn’s in the eighteenth, down to the psychological labours of Steinthal, who died in 1892—to mention only a few of the best known names—we find proofs which speak for themselves, and abundantly refute the calumny that the Jews are a race of mere money-mongers and money-grabbers. In the Dark Ages the conditions under which Israel was doomed to live were by no means favourable to the development of spiritual qualities. Mediaeval Europe, as a rule, did not allow more than three outlets to Hebrew activity. The Jew could only become a merchant, a financier, or a physician, and in all these three professions he achieved the distinction to which his superiority entitled him. Imaginative by nature, cosmopolitan by necessity, a reasoner and a linguist by education, with all his faculties sharpened by persecution, and all his passions disciplined by adversity, the Jew could not but assert himself among his narrow-minded and ignorant contemporaries. Accordingly we find the mediaeval Jew foremost in Medicine, Commerce, and Finance. As to medicine, enough has already been said. As to commerce, the supremacy of the Jews has never been disputed. Their financial pre-eminence is equally recognised. But it is not often recalled that the Jews, in order to facilitate the transmission of their wealth amidst the violence and extortions of the Middle Ages, were the first to invent the admirable system of paper currency—an invention which, Alison the historian asserts, had it been made earlier, might have averted the downfall of the Western Roman Empire. But, apart from chrematistic pursuits, even in the Middle Ages the Jews, prevented by persecution and social isolation from tying themselves permanently to any particular country, and forced to lead a nomad existence, used their opportunities of travel not only for the purpose of commerce, but also for the transmission of knowledge. Thus, consciously or not, the mediaeval Jew became the great middleman by whose agency what learning there was found its way from country to country. In Spain, before the holy war against the race deprived it of the conditions necessary for the development of its genius, we have seen the Jews distinguishing themselves in literature, scholastic philosophy, science, and diplomacy. After their expulsion the Spanish exiles influenced the culture of the countries over which they spread in many ways; Baruch Spinoza being only the greatest star in a great constellation. Even in England, where few of those refugees contrived to penetrate, we find their spiritual influence in King James’s translation of the Bible, which in many places bears the traces of David Kimchi’s Commentary.255

The place of Israel in the mediaeval world has been described with equal justness and eloquence by Lecky: “While those around them were grovelling in the darkness of besotted ignorance; while juggling miracles and lying relics were themes on which almost all Europe was expatiating; while the intellect of Christendom, enthralled by countless persecutions, had sunk into a deadly torpor, in which all love of inquiry and all search for truth were abandoned, the Jews were still pursuing the path of knowledge, amassing learning, and stimulating progress, with the same unflinching constancy that they manifested in their faith. They were the most skilful physicians, the ablest financiers, and among the most profound philosophers; while they were only second to the moderns in the cultivation of natural science, they were also the chief interpreters to Western Europe of Arabian learning.”256

In modern Europe also we have seen how varied and how beneficial has, since their emancipation, been the activity of the Jews in other than financial departments. In face of these facts how ineffably ridiculous seems the anti-Semite’s homily on “A Jew of the Coheleth type” who “pursues gain with an undivided soul, whereas the soul of the Christian or the Idealist is divided,” and his calm, self-sufficient pronouncement that “much of the best Christian and Idealist intellect is entirely given to objects quite different from gain or power.” The remark, of course, is true in so far as the two “types” are concerned. But, unless the writer means to make the astounding assertion that, other conditions being identical, the one type is peculiar to the Jews, and the other to the Christians—that the ordinary Jew is born a materialist, and the ordinary Christian an Idealist,—his statement is pointless. It becomes worse than pointless when he proceeds to emphasise the “compact organisation” of Jewish, as contrasted with the “loose texture” of Christian society, and to proclaim that “in this respect the Gentile, instead of starting fair, is handicapped in the race.”257 The only logical inference to be drawn from these premisses is that the balance must be redressed by oppressing the Jew. But the author shrinks from drawing that inference. Mediaeval and Continental anti-Semites have been more consistent and courageous.

Such was the genesis of English anti-Semitism. However, the bulk of the public took little or no notice of these utterances. The English people is not intellectual enough to be moved by literary theories. Its very slowness in discarding old errors is a guarantee against precipitancy in embracing new ones. But, when a grievance is presented to it in the more tangible form of a practical and mischievous fact, then the English people begins to think.

The persecution of the Jews in Russia, Roumania, Hungary, and Germany threatened to flood England with a crowd of refugees more industrious than the English workman, more frugal, and far more temperate. The consequence would have been a fall in wages. The danger was too practical to be ignored; fortunately, both for the English workman and for the Jew, it was temporarily averted by the Jewish charitable associations, which directed emigration into safer channels. But, though the immediate cause for alarm disappeared, the anti-Jewish feeling remained; and was fed by the influx of new crowds from Eastern Europe at a later period. Again the Board of Guardians, the Russo-Jewish Committee and other organisations exerted themselves strenuously to prevent the immigrants from becoming in any case a burden to the British rate-payer. With that object in view, measures were taken that those victims of oppression who remained in England should be enabled without delay to earn their own bread by that industry for which they might be best fitted; but, wherever it was possible, a home was found for them in countries less populous than England and more suitable for colonisation. At the same time, by means of representations addressed to Jewish authorities, and published in Jewish papers abroad, regarding the congested state of the British labour market, efforts were made to stem the tide of further immigration.258 But these efforts have not proved entirely successful. So that the interminable cycle of prejudice and platitude, interrupted for a while, has again resumed its ancient course. As in the early days of the nineteenth century, so now, at the commencement of the twentieth, our libraries are slowly enriched with volumes of exquisite dulness. We are called upon to fight the old battle over again. The enemy appears under many colours; but all the legions, though they know it not, fight for the same cause. And, though their diversity is great, none of the banners are new.

First comes our ancient friend, the theologian, Bible in hand; as valiant of heart as ever, and as loud of voice. He is a worthy descendant of St. Dominic, though perhaps he would be horrified if he were told so. But History is cruel, and the records of the past remain indelible. What student of history can fail to catch the note of familiarity in our modern missionary’s oratory?

“Jesus is the Way”: saith the preacher, “Although the Jews have the law, they cannot come to God, because Jesus is the Way. Although they have the Old Testament, they do not know the truth, because Jesus is the Truth and Life!” and after several sentences rich in emphasis, fervour, and capital letters, comes the old, old conclusion: “adoption and true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it. Israel, in its present state, the Christless Israel, shows this to the whole world. Notwithstanding the great activity and energy of the religious life of the Jews, they have—we say it with great sorrow—no life indeed—what they have is all carnal—and this accounts for the phenomenon that they have not been of much spiritual use to the world since Christ’s coming. In Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.”259

So speaks the advocate of conversion. His hope in the future is as great as his forgetfulness of the past. “The great God,” he informs us with touching assurance, “is, in His providence, now rapidly preparing the way for the final and only possible solution.” Ah, my good friend, it is very natural in a Christian to believe that “true spiritual life there is none, where Christ has not kindled it,” it is very pleasant to point the finger of scorn at “Christless Israel,” it is very well to prophesy that “in Christ alone will Israel live again and be a blessing to the world.” But how are we to convince Israel that it is so? This ancient nation which, having defied the onslaughts of centuries, has lived so long, seen so much, suffered so much, and survived so much, is it likely to succumb to our timeworn arguments? Or would you advise us to bid the Jew once more choose between baptism and the stake? This argument also has been tried and found inadequate. Convert the Jews! You might as hopefully attempt to convert the Pyramids.

Thus far the apostle. Next comes the patriot—a student of statistics, sad and, so far as religious bias goes, quite sober. In tones of sepulchral solemnity he warns us that, if England is to escape the fate of the Continent, namely, “of the Jews becoming stronger, richer, and vastly more numerous; with the corresponding certainty of the press being captured” by them, “and the national life stifled by the substitution of material aims for those which, however faultily, have formed the unselfish and imperial objects of the Englishmen who have made the Empire”—if these dire calamities are to be averted, England must “abandon her secular practice of complacent acceptance of every human being choosing to settle on these shores.” Should nothing be done to check the evil, there is bound to ensue an outbreak against the race “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption.”260

The appeal to the Empire is quite modern, although, if the author had any intelligent conception of his own case, he might have seen that Imperialism is the very last thing in the world he should have summoned to the support of his narrow Nationalism: the two things differ as widely as the author differs from Julius Caesar. If the British Empire were confined to Englishmen, it would soon cease to be an empire. Equally novel is the interpretation of our expansion as due to an unselfish zeal for somebody else’s good—the author does not state whose. But the specific charge brought against the Jewish race as one “the members of which are always in exile and strangers in the land of their adoption” is hardly worthy of the author’s originality.

The prophet objects to the Jews as not having been “of much spiritual use to the world.” It is hard to dispute the statement, because it is impossible to know the particular meaning which the prophet attaches to the word “spiritual.” His position is unassailable. The patriot, however, denounces the Jews as the promoters of “material aims,” and thereby convicts himself either of gross ignorance or of deliberate distortion of facts. What the world of thought owes to the Jews has already been described with a fulness of detail which will probably appear superfluous to most educated people. As regards the assertion that the Jew still looks upon himself as one in exile and a stranger in a foreign land, we propose to deal with it when we come to consider the attitude of the Jews towards the Zionist movement. Here it is sufficient to point out that the term “Jew” is far too wide to warrant any sweeping generalisation. There are Jews and Jews, just as there are Christians and Christians. History abundantly proves that the Jew in the past retained most of his clannishness where he was most grievously oppressed. As to modern Judaism, since the day of Moses Mendelssohn there has set in a disintegration which renders a comprehensive and confident pronouncement only possible to those who consider prejudice an adequate substitute for knowledge. But there is no necessity for such a universal pronouncement. If we want an answer to the question, “Can the Jew be a patriot?” we need only glance at the history of modern Europe. Did not Jews fight with the Germans against the French in the days of Napoleon, with the Hungarians against the Austrians in 1848, with the Austrians against the Prussians in 1866, with the Germans against the French and the French against the Germans in 1870, with the Roumanians against the Turks in 1877? Or can man express his devotion to his country in a more unambiguous manner than by dying for it? Unless, indeed, the perfidious Jew even in dying is actuated by some ulterior motive.

But why should we look further than home? In 1831 Macaulay wrote: “If the Jews have not felt towards England like children, it is because she has treated them like a step-mother.” England has ceased to treat the Jews like a step-mother. How far has England’s change of attitude towards the Jew affected the Jew’s attitude towards England? On Sunday, December 28, 1902, Lord Roberts attended a special service, at the Central Synagogue in Great Portland Street, held for Jewish members of the regular and auxiliary forces who fell in South Africa fighting for England. The day was well chosen; for on the same day is performed the annual celebration in remembrance of the warlike exploits of the Maccabees—a coincidence which disproves in a practical manner the dogmatic generalisation that “a man’s heart cannot belong to two nations,” and which shows that the English Jew, at all events, can be both a Hebrew and an Englishman: he can cherish the ideals of the past and yet live in the realities of the present. The soldiers in whose memory the ceremony was held formed a portion of a force counting more than 1,200 officers and men, who took a creditable part in the war. This number assumes new significance, when we consider that the total Hebrew population of Great Britain that year did not exceed 180,000,261 and that with us every soldier is a volunteer. The Jew has done as much for the English mother as any of her Christian sons: he has laid down his life in defence of her cause. Moreover, to join the army, the Jew must necessarily sacrifice something besides life—something that he holds higher than life—some of his religion, and particularly the ceremonial rites, such as the dietary laws and the Sabbath. But foremost English Rabbis, like the late Simeon Singer, maintained that duty to England justified and even consecrated this sacrifice.

Nor was this most unequivocal proof of patriotism a solitary instance. For the last ten years the Feast of Dedication has been associated with a celebration for the men serving in the Regular and Auxiliary Forces. On December 13, 1903, the Rev. Francis L. Cohen, to whose initiative the custom is due, inaugurated the second decade of these celebrations at the New West-end synagogue in the presence of 38 officers and 167 men, and also a number of new Jewish officers, including a Major-General and a General. The preacher dwelt on the promptitude with which Jewish Britons responded to the call during the last war. He referred to the 127 Jews who then “gave their lives for the flag they all honoured and loved,” and announced that, as a testimony “to the pride and joy wherewith the Jews hail their privilege of sharing in the voluntary burden of their common country’s defence,” they sought to endow a trophy “to be competed for from year to year at the great annual meeting of the National Rifle Association, such as might stimulate others of their fellow-citizens to perfect themselves in the military use of that weapon which might at any moment again be required to protect the immunity of their Sovereign’s territories.”262 The truth is that religion has long ceased to be the principal force in the composition of nations. In the present stage of the world’s development sympathy with one’s co-religionists does not exclude loyalty to one’s country, any more than loyalty to one’s country prevents hatred of one’s co-religionists in other countries.

The continuance of oppression and persecution in Eastern Europe has kept the stream of emigration flowing. As was natural, great numbers of the hunted race turned to England as to the one European country where liberty has not yet been seriously endangered by the revival of intolerance. But the welcome which they met with in this sanctuary of freedom has not been unanimous. The “Alien Invasion,” as it is termed, has roused considerable anxiety and apprehension in certain bosoms. We are told by the melancholic patriot, in a more recent and more popular publication,263 that it is a menace to the nation, that “British right of asylum hitherto has been as profitable to the Empire as to the immigrants,” but that “it is otherwise to-day.” We are exhorted to reconsider our position, and to ask ourselves whether we are right in “permitting free import of the sweepings of foreign cities to contaminate our English life, to raise rents, and lower the standard of existence.” We are, lastly, advised to shut our doors to “undesirable aliens.” The question thus put admits of but one answer. If these aliens are undesirable, we ought not to desire them. No one would cavil with our advisers were it not that under the mask of a movement for the exclusion of “undesirable” individuals there seems to lurk in some quarters a retrogressive animosity against the Jewish race as a whole, or a wish to stir up such an animosity. The melancholic patriot opportunely reminds us that “the foreigners who settle in England are almost entirely of the Jewish race, and it is therefore impossible to discuss the question of foreign immigration without raising the Jewish question.” Thus, having thrown off the mask, he proceeds to give utterance to candid and undisguised anti-Semitism:

“The peculiarity of this race is that they refuse assimilation by intermarriage, equally with Russians in Russia, with Arabs in Tunis, or with the English in England, just as rigidly as did their ancestors refuse intermarriage with Gentiles in the days of Nehemiah.” The matter presented in this form offers the interesting point of being not new. The aloofness of the Jew has already been shown to have been the fundamental cause of his sufferings. Had the Jews not formed a “peculiar people” they would not have been made the milch-cows and the scapegoats of the nations through the ages. But it can also be shown that at the present day this is only partially true in the countries which have genuinely adopted the Jews. It is estimated that there occur far more marriages in England between Jews and Christians than between Protestants and Catholics. By the Jewish law marriage between a Jew and a proselyte is perfectly lawful. The barrier is thus, after all, one of religion rather than of race. Naturally an inclination towards such intermarriage would not prevail on either side except in comparatively rare cases. Yet the strange fact remains that such mixed marriages are at least as common in the lower as in the upper classes of Jewish society.

Besides, though the clannishness of the race in the past explains its persecution, does it excuse it? Is it an argument that a modern statesman in a free country should accept as justifying exclusion? Moreover, if the Jews really are so black as the author paints them, is it not rather unpatriotic of him to wish to see them intermarrying with us, and thus contriving “to contaminate our English life” far more effectively than they will be able to do if they continue to be a people apart? However, consistency in reasoning is not, as has already been remarked, the anti-Semite’s forte.

The oracle supplies us with seven reasons—mystic and ominous number—why “the immigration of the poorest Jews from Russia and Poland is a national evil.”

1. “They lower the Englishman’s standard of comfort, and are unduly addicted to the calling of usury.”

2. The competition is injurious to the Englishman because it is “not to determine the survival of the fittest, but to determine the survival of the fittest to exist on a herring and a piece of black bread.”

3. “They subsist contentedly on a diet which is insufficient to sustain the meat-eating Anglo-Saxon.”

4. “Their habits of huddling together under circumstances of unmentionable filth destroy the possibility of dealing with the housing question, and set at naught our municipal sanitary laws.”

5. “They lower the wages of unskilled women and unskilled labourers.”

6. “They raise rent.”

7. “They enlarge the area of the sweating system.”

The usury charge has been answered by experience and Economic Science ages ago. But the patriot contributes to the discussion quite a fresh element when he describes the Jewish immigrants as paupers and, in the same breath, as usurers. He does not deign to explain how men who, as he later asserts, are induced to leave their homes by destitution and are drawn to London by the “magnetism” of the Jewish charities, how these penniless beggars can “adopt money-lending as a means of livelihood.” If they are paupers they cannot be money-lenders, and if they are money-lenders they cannot be paupers. To starve and to lend at the same time is a feat that even a Jew is hardly capable of.

As to sweating and sanitation, these are matters for which legislation, if it is worth the name, ought to be able to devise far less drastic remedies than that proposed by statistical patriotism. The remaining reasons, when pruned of repetition and reduced to their logical dimensions, resolve themselves into this: We do not want the Jew, because he can work harder than we, for less wages than we, and can live more frugally than we. In other words, because for the purposes of the struggle for existence he is better equipped than we. He is too formidable a rival.

But on this point also the enemies of the Jew are at fatal variance. Another writer pronounces the explanation of the Jewish immigrant’s success as due to his lower standard of living and greater capacity for labouring, paradoxical. “It is,” he says, “as though one were to maintain that of two pieces of machinery the worse did most work and required less fuel.” He seeks and finds the true reason of the displacement of the English craftsman, not in the “alleged frugality of the foreign comer” or in “his readiness to do more for his money,” but in “the Jewish system of out-door poor relief... which makes rivalry and successful competition an impossibility.” As an instance, he quotes the fact that poor children who attend the Jews’ Free School in Bell-lane are partially fed and clothed by a charitable Hebrew family. The writer, though apparently resenting even competition in philanthropy as something monstrous and dishonest, yet is charitable enough to admit that “it may be good, it may be bad; fair or unfair to other schools.”264 One would think that schools were shops competing with one another as to which of them will attract the greatest number of customers and not disinterested institutions for the education of the community. Furthermore, one would think that the fact quoted alone ought to move good Christians to an emulation of the Jewish rival and thank him for the example of beneficence which he sets them, instead of turning that very example into a new reproach and adducing it as a reason for excluding him from the country. Finally, one would think that, instead of reviling the Jew for assisting his less fortunate co-religionists, a true patriot might be induced, in sheer rivalry, to assist his own. But what actually happens is this. We tell the Jew, “We let our own unemployed starve, and you don’t. This is not fair to our poor unemployed.” Verily, the ethics of anti-Semitism are as wonderful as its logic.

The same narrow-minded dread of the alien competitor is at the present day exhibited in South Africa. At a meeting in Cape Town on Sept. 23rd, 1904, the speakers began by denouncing the Indians as Asiatics, but they soon extended their objections to Jews, Greeks, and Italians. The Jews were accused of working on Sundays, the Greeks of keeping their shops open later than the natives, the Italians of sending large sums of money (their hardly earned savings) out of the Colony to their homes. A writer commenting on this report sensibly remarks: “Against stupidity of this sort argument fights in vain.”265 And his opinion will be shared by most sane people in England. Yet many of these people will probably be ready to approve the exclusion of the Jewish immigrant, not seeing that what is rightly condemned as stupid intolerance in one country can hardly be justified as enlightened statesmanship in another.

Time was when thrift, extreme frugality, success in life, and clannishness were the causes of the Englishman’s hatred for the Scotch competitor, when the latter after the Union began to emigrate to the South. Those aliens were, like the Jews, accused of “herding together” and of living on little, were envied for getting on in the world, and were denounced for pushing one another on. The clamour has passed away, and no sober Englishman of to-day would dream of reviving it. Patriotic bigots in those days advised the exclusion of the Scotch “undesirable,” and had a goodly following among people who, having failed in life themselves, could not forgive the foreigner his success. “But,” as a writer on the subject pertinently asks, “would it have been well for England, even in a purely commercial point of view, if the Scotch had been legally excluded? Have not her children reaped benefits from the labours of those whom their forefathers desired to forbid the country?”266

To such considerations, however, our modern patriot is nobly invulnerable. He soon forgets even his seven reasons, feeble and contradictory as they are, in his Nationalist enthusiasm. The Jewish millionaire is as hateful to him as the Jewish pauper. He describes the Jews as a race gifted with indomitable cunning and an extraordinary capacity for perceiving “with lightning glance the exact moment to corner a market,” as “a powerful, exclusive and intolerant race” of experts “in the flotation of companies,” as adepts “in the art of deluding the public by the inflation of worthless securities with an artificial and effervescent value,” as a tribe whose “undue economic predominance” has been promoted by—O ye shades of King John and Torquemada—“the mild spirit of Christianity!”

To descend from the ludicrously sublime to the sublimely ludicrous: “Jewish ascendancy at Court is so conspicuous as to be the subject of incessant lamentation on the part of full-blooded Englishmen.” Surely the end of the British Empire cannot be very distant when the King goes to Newmarket “accompanied by a Jewish financier,” “is the guest of a Jewish financier,” and when, highest horror of all, “in the published names of the dinner party on the first night every one was a Jewish financier, or his relation, with the exception of the King’s aide-de-camp and the Portuguese Minister”—the latter, if not a Jew, an alien!

The patriot then warns us in tones irresistibly reminiscent of Lewis Carroll: “The time has come to speak out about this alien influence. There is danger ahead.... There are ugly rumours to the effect that wealthy members of the Jewish community have placed the King of England under undue obligations. If this be true, it is the duty of the people of England to extricate their Sovereign from the toils of the modernized version of Isaac of York. If it be untrue, there is the less reason for Jews occupying their too prominent position at Court. No sincere lover of his country can contemplate without anxiety the gradual disappearance of the old families and the ascendancy of the smart Semites who treat as trenchermen and led captains what remains of English society. The efficiency of the British nation requires the ascendancy of the Anglo-Saxon, not the Semitic, element in it. It is time to restrict the immigration of potential money-lenders from Eastern Europe.” The Jeremiad concludes with a truly ominous reminder: “In 1290 the Jews were expelled from England.”

Continental anti-Semitism can show nothing superior to these lamentations of our “full-blooded” “Anglo-Saxon.” In them we have all the hereditary features of Jew-hatred exaggerated by insular distrust of everything foreign and by provincial lack of sense of proportion or humour. This manifesto, however, despite its limitations, is a fair specimen of a kind of literature common enough on the Continent, though still rare in these backward islands. Those interested in the subject will find in the German anti-Semitic pamphlets and in the Russian Panslavist newspapers the prototypes of all the arguments, sentiments and self-contradictions of which those embodied in this lugubrious production are pale copies. But the pamphlet is more than a literary curiosity. Like the proverbial straw which, of no importance in itself, yet deserves notice as indicating the direction of the current, this product of a provincial mind is worthy of some attention as a sign of the times. Already there have been found Englishmen illiberal enough to overlook all the good points in the character of poor Jewish immigrants—their untiring industry, sobriety and self-sacrifice—and to ridicule, in supreme bad taste, the pathetic devotion which impels these wretched wanderers to seek solace for their sufferings in prayer and in the study of the Book which has been the only source of comfort to millions of their people for the last twenty centuries and to millions of our own for more than half that time.267

From another point of view also the pamphlet is a document, even more valuable, because more candid, than a less crude performance would have been. It forms a hyphen of connection between pure anti-Semitism—a small matter in England as yet—and another tendency entirely different in origin, far more widely spread, and shared by persons who, in other respects, have little in common with the provincial patriot. This is the tendency towards a reaction of which the anti-alien agitation is one symptom, and the clamour for protection another; both pointing to a change of sentiment in favour of the political ideals fashionable before the reign of Queen Victoria.

Until the nineteenth century England was essentially a Tory country. The few ruled the many, and their rule was based on the assumption—no doubt largely justified in those days—that the many were not fit to rule themselves. A seat in the House of Commons was virtually a family heirloom; patronage filled the Church, and favouritism controlled the army and the navy. The whole of English public life—civil, religious, and military—was under the sway of an oligarchy, and fair competition was a thing unknown. It was the reign of Protection in the broadest acceptation of the term. Then came the awakening of the masses—an awakening the first token of which had already appeared in the transference of a literary man’s homage from a noble patron to the general public—and gradually the lethargic acquiescence in the decrees of an aristocratic Providence was supplanted by healthy discontent. The fruit of this deep and slow evolution was the series of reforms which, by transferring to public opinion the power which was formerly vested in a privileged class, turned England from a pure aristocracy into a moderate kind of democracy. The rotten boroughs were swept out of existence, and, by the removal of religious disabilities, the English Parliament and the English Universities became truly representative institutions. Along with these changes came the demand for free competition in another sphere—commerce—and the agitation resulted in the repeal of the Corn Laws. In every department of life the individual claimed and, in part, obtained freedom of initiative and action. Laissez-faire became the motto of the Victorian era, and the free international exchange of goods promised at last to realise the ideals of international friendship and reciprocity which the eighteenth century had preached but proved unable to practise.

We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It looks as though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus far has spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The House of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives, but it has lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the respect which was once paid to it. Laissez-faire is only mentioned to be derided, the principle of free competition is openly assailed, internationalism is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to humanity as proofs of morbid sentimentality; while protection is confidently advocated in commerce and industry. How has this change of sentiment come about? One of its causes may be found in the growth of the Imperial idea. The history of all nations shows that national expansion, though often achieved by individual enterprise, can only be maintained by organised effort, by concentration of power in a few hands, and by a proportionate diminution of individual freedom. Democracy and Empire have never flourished together. That the one may prosper, the other must perish. For this reason we find the true democrat necessarily what is now called amongst us a Little Englander; the true Imperialist as necessarily a dictator. The anti-democratic reaction in England was inevitable, owing partly to the expansion of Greater Britain itself, and partly to the development of other countries on Imperialist and despotic lines. For it is now less possible than ever for England to develop uninfluenced by the example of her neighbours. And the example set by those neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant nationalism in their relations with foreigners, and with regard to domestic matters despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this inevitable reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more specific causes.

For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity—an unchallenged commercial and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston described Prussia as a country of “d——d professors,” and Matthew Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset perambulator.

But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she could produce other things than “d——d professors”; France likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own “unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands; whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts made in every part of England to revise and to improve our commercial and industrial methods and by special education to qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us—too intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent enough to diagnose the real cause of the change—have come to the conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete, and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy, and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation. Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven out by the cult of nationalism.

As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected. They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards despotism and nationalism—control over the individual and hostility to the foreigner—reaction against free competition on the one hand and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration into England concludes his study of the problem with the following illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word ’free’—are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us to abandon our long-played rôle of philanthropist among nations, and so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”268

As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists; not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the adversaries of the Jew.

The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled labour market.”269 Five out of the seven members recommended the exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced “undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the economic position of the districts in which they settled in great numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on their recommendation.

Both objections—moral and economic—had been anticipated outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables the better.”270 Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion would be urged because some of them at times obstructed thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is abominable!”271

On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London and the consequent dispossession of the native working population by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903), Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding, of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later (March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”272

In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade the House that the proposed measures were not directed against aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers, because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident in almost every other civilised country—in fact, that many more destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this country for having maintained them—men like Dalou, one of the greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made, inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own; and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years, he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British race.

Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects, was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill, that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which, having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their religion—people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted from their homes to death—finally expressed his conviction that behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country, there was kindled an anti-Jewish feeling, warning those members of the Conservative party who participated in this agitation that they had raised a devil which they would find it very difficult to lay.

This statement, naturally enough, provoked many contradictions; but the speaker, in reply, justly asserted that the fact was patent to all readers of the newspapers which supported the Bill.

Other Liberal orators followed, some of whom described the Bill as an example of panic legislation, and others as partly prompted by an agitation directed against the Jews. Among the latter was Mr. Trevelyan, who remarked that the measure aimed almost as much at those who managed to prosper as at those who were poverty-stricken, and that all the evidence went to prove that the great mass of these aliens were sober and industrious people who in the long run became good citizens. He maintained that among many people outside the House there was a frankly anti-Semitic movement which he dreaded and deplored, and that this petty and evil step was in exactly the same direction as that in which the Governments of Russia and Roumania had been going.

The long debate ended with a division, in which the amendment was negatived by a Government majority of 124, and the Bill was read a second time. But its triumph was far from being assured by this victory. Outside the House there was as much divergence of opinion on the merits of the measure, its scope, and its probable effects as there was inside, and the rival parties spared no pains to present the motives of their adversaries in the least flattering colours. Thus, while the advocates of the Bill denounced the opposition to it as “a net constructed with the primary purpose of catching votes,”273 its opponents derided it as “an attempt on the part of the Government to gratify a small but noisy section of their supporters, and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.”274

The English Jews were not left unmoved by the fresh calamity which threatened their suffering brethren. As early as May, 1903, while the Royal Commission was still carrying on its investigations, Mr. Israel Zangwill, at a mass meeting of Zionists, foretold the recommendations of the Commission, and expressed the fear that the exclusion of undesirable aliens might prove only the beginning of worse things. “The Jews came over to England with the Conqueror,” he said, “but all their services to him and his successors did not prevent their expulsion two and a quarter centuries later. He did not wish to be an alarmist, but nobody who had been caught in a crowd of mafficking hooligans could doubt the possibility of anti-Jewish riots even in London.”275 And when, a year later, the speaker’s prediction as to the result of the Commission’s work was fulfilled, he again, at another Zionist meeting, said that England “was catching the epidemic which rages everywhere against the Jew.”276 This statement was reported to Mr. Balfour, who replied that “he believed it to be quite untrue,” declaring that “the Aliens Bill is designed to protect the country, not against the Jew, but against the undesirable alien, quite irrespective of his nationality or his creed. I should regard the rise and growth of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious national misfortune.”277 In a letter to The Times Mr. Zangwill reiterated his assertion, and, while absolving Mr. Balfour himself from anti-Semitism, he insisted that the Aliens Bill was inspired by anti-Semites—a statement which he once more repeated emphatically in the course of an interview with a newspaper representative.278

Nor was the indignation confined to Jews only. Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Jews’ Society in Exeter Hall the Rev. Peter Thomson declared that the Jew had been rather a blessing to the East-end than otherwise, and, as the best testimony of this, he quoted the Chairman of the City of London Brewery Company, who had lamented that the dividends had gone down because of the immigration of the Jews into the district where their public houses were situated, concluding that he himself had no blessing for the Aliens Bill.279

A few days later (May 19) a deputation of the Jewish community sought an interview with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs and through Lord Rothschild, who introduced it, drew attention to the clauses of the Bill which would press harshly and unjustly on the numerous Jewish immigrants into this country, pointing out that the investigations of the Royal Commission had proved that the advent of the aliens was not a source of disadvantage, but of benefit to England, that the increase of the alien population was insignificant when compared with that of America, and that the Bill provided no machinery for the exclusion of the really undesirable, such as existed in America, but proposed to establish in this country a loathsome system of Police interference and espionage. The deputation further offered on behalf of the Jewish community to enter into a bond that the Jewish immigrants admitted should not become a public charge during the first two years of their residence, and to assist the authorities in excluding criminals who might be of the Jewish persuasion.

The Under-Secretary thanked the deputation for the very moderate tone in which they had set forth their case, disavowed any intention on the part of the Government to encourage anti-Semitic feeling in England, said that all, from the Prime Minister downwards, recognised the debt which England owed to the Jews, admitted that those members of the race who came here were both healthy and law-abiding, but, he maintained, the Bill sought to exclude the diseased, bad characters, and the destitute.

These assurances, however, failed to reassure the Jews. Many of them continued to apprehend danger; a few even began to regard expulsion as not improbable in the future. This fear has found a voice in literature. In a novel280 published while the fate of the Aliens hung in the balance, the Jews are banished from England by a wicked Home Secretary, and then are brought back again, because “England can not get along without Jewish money and Jewish brains.” The expulsion is, of course, hardly more convincing than the reason given for the restoration. The authoress, herself, in the preface, describes her book as “a story of the impossible,” but she considers that “a warning—even in the form of fiction—may not be out of place.” The danger may be imaginary and the warning rather premature; none the less, the book bears witness to a genuine feeling of alarm. Such a book could not have been written a generation ago.

Mr. Balfour was, no doubt, quite sincere in repudiating any anti-Semitic bias on his own part and on the part of his immediate followers. The idea of a cultured English gentleman of the present day actuated by religious or racial rancour is too grotesque to be seriously entertained for a moment, and it is further disproved, if disproof were needed, by the attempt which, as will be narrated in the sequel, the Conservative Government, in true Imperial spirit, made to provide a home in a British possession for those Jews whose presence it deemed undesirable in the United Kingdom. Another proof that Jew-hatred is not yet sufficiently powerful in this country to imperil the peace of the Jews was furnished, about the same time, by one of our most distinguished prelates, Bishop Welldon, who in a sermon preached at Westminster Abbey on Good Friday, 1904, exhorted his hearers to an imitation of Christ’s example, and to a practical demonstration of their faith by contributing to the East London Jews’ Fund: “That was,” he said, “the best return they could make for the crucifixion of their Lord and Master. The Jews gave him strife, and encompassed his death; we gave them sanctuary and kindness, and without one word of reproach. They gratefully acknowledged the noble citizenship of Jews in all parts of the world. In return they offered them on this anniversary day of our Lord’s Passion what was to Christians the holiest, dearest examples of the life and character of the Crucified Redeemer.”281 In the following year the Bishop of Stepney issued an appeal in connexion with Holy Week and Good Friday on behalf of the East London Fund for the Jews. The thoughts of the season, he said, would be incomplete unless they gave a place to those “whose rejection of their own Messiah has been one of the great tragedies of history.” There are more than 100,000 Jews in East London parishes, and in some parishes they form the majority of the population. Following the method suggested some time ago by the Upper House of Convocation, the diocese of London treats the East-end Jews as neighbours and parishioners, and by the tact and patience of the fund’s workers “the barrier of prejudice, built up by long years of persecution at the hands of Christians, is being rapidly removed.”282 While such sentiments prevail in England, the Jews need not fear for their liberties.

Yet, that the apprehensions of the Jews and of all friends of freedom are not wholly unjustified, that Sir Charles Dilke and those who agree with him in suspecting that anti-Semitic prejudice is not so uncommon in the Kingdom at large as it is among the upper ranks, are not the victims of a hypochondriacal dread of phantoms, was demonstrated with deplorable opportuneness by an event which even a temperate pessimist cannot but regard as a rude and practical version of the creed which is elsewhere preached in a more refined form. While Mr. Akers-Douglas at Westminster was giving the finishing touches to his prescription for the Alien complaint, the people of Limerick were actually trying remedies of a more drastic and homely nature.

The Jews had hitherto been conspicuous in Ireland chiefly by their absence. With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, the island knew the Jew from hearsay only, and his name was to the ordinary Irishman what it was to the Englishman in the days of Gower and Chaucer—a symbol for a vile abstraction. In 1871 there were only six Jews in Cork, two in Limerick and one in Waterford. But of late years persecution on the Continent has forced some of its victims to seek an asylum in Ireland as in England, though to a much smaller degree. The increase in the Jews’ numbers, slight though it was, proved sufficient to arouse a feeling of alarm and suspicion among the ignorant masses both in the towns and in the open country. Craftsmen, tradesmen, ploughmen, and clergymen, all began to look with jealousy upon the clever, thrifty, and infidel new-comers from beyond the sea. This was especially the case at Limerick, where lately had sprung up a diminutive colony of thirty-five Jewish families, which was by the Chief Secretary for Ireland described as a “well-conducted section of the community, engaged for the most part in small trades, and dependent for their livelihood on the goodwill of their customers.”283

Yet, small as this colony was, it soon attracted attention. The Catholic inhabitants of that great centre of picturesque and somnolent decay were not pleased at the comparative success of their wide-awake neighbours. The animosity spread from the town to the adjacent villages. The Irish peasant, proverbially improvident and free from any comprehension of the nature of a bargain, was ready to buy from the Jewish peddler his goods, and strongly disinclined to pay for them. The goods were usually sold on the instalment system, and this, in an imaginative mind, created a pleasant illusion which, however, was rudely shattered when the day of reckoning came. Then the peasant realised that the goods were not a free gift, and bitterly resented the hardship of being made to discharge his debt. It has been stated by the Irish peasant’s advocate that over three-quarters of the civil bill processes at quarter sessions in the island were those of Jews against such unsophisticated debtors for arrears of payments for goods purchased.284 The statement has been shown to be a romantic exaggeration on an unusually ambitious scale. In plain prose, among 1387 civil bills entered for the county and city of Limerick during the year 1903 only 31 were issued by Jews, while in the Easter sessions of 1904, out of a total number of 320 civil bills, eight only belonged to Jews.285 None the less, it is quite conceivable that often the peddler’s anxiety to obtain his money, brought into collision with the peasant’s unwillingness to part with his, led to strained relations between the two parties. In the circumstances it was perfectly natural that the Jew should be denounced for “usury and extortion.” Irish patriots saw in this new oppressor of their innocent fellow-countrymen a kind of camp-follower of the foreign conquerors. Poor Ireland was described as a carcase whose bones were picked by the Russian and Polish jackals of what had been left on them by the Norman lion and the Anglo-Saxon wolf, and Byron was quoted with considerable effect:

So, when the lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last,286

The hatred for the creditor was soon extended to his creed. Milesian patriots, indeed, vigorously repudiated the charge of religious intolerance, protesting, as the Russians did before them, that the animosity against the Jew was “merely financial and not religious,”287 and there seems no reason to doubt that economic distress in Ireland, as in Russia and elsewhere, had contributed its usual share to a hostility which springs from many sources. But the assertion that the prejudice was due “merely” to financial causes is amply disproved by facts. These show that the Catholic clergy was sorely scandalised at the humble prosperity of the unbelievers, and thus there was laid up a quantity of combustible material which only awaited a spark for explosion. This spark was supplied at the beginning of 1904 by Father Creagh, a holy monk of the Redemptorist Order, inspired by a religious fervour and a credulity rare in these days and gifted with great eloquence of the kind which once incited the mobs of Europe to outrages. Like many another mediaeval saint, this priest was impelled by the purest of motives—piety and patriotism—to preach a crusade against those whom his untutored conscience taught him to regard as the enemies of his people and of his God: “It would be madness for a man to nourish in his own breast a viper that might at any moment slay its benefactor with a poisonous bite. So it is madness for a people to allow an evil to grow in their midst that will eventually cause them ruin.” Thus began the preacher, and then proceeded to anathematise the Jews as usurers who enslaved the people, as sinners who rejected Jesus, as the secular persecutors of Christianity, as the monsters who “slew St. Stephen, the first martyr, and St. James the Apostle, and ever since, as often as opportunity offered, did not hesitate to shed Christian blood, and that even in the meanest and most cruel manner, as in the case of the holy martyr, St. Simon, who, though a mere child, they took and crucified out of hatred and derision towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their back and the bite out of their mouth.”288

Having endowed the Jew with the most diabolical character imaginable and traced to him the woes of the Catholic Church in France, the preacher concluded by exhorting his congregation to have no dealings with the people whom God had cursed. As a result of this atrocious sermon, no Jew or Jewess could stir abroad without being insulted or assaulted, and, when the priest’s exhortations reached the open country, there also, as in the city of Limerick, the Jews fell a prey to a series of brutal attacks, until the preacher, alarmed at his own success, urged his flock to desist from stoning the unbelievers but try to starve them. The good people readily obeyed. They not only ceased to deal with the Jewish peddlers, but, improving on their pastor’s precepts, refused even to pay what they owed to them for goods purchased in the past. And while Catholic customers shunned the Jewish tradesmen, Catholic tradesmen in some cases refused to sell to the Jews the necessaries of life. With the exception of two or three families, the small Jewish colony of Limerick was reduced to utter penury. People hitherto in comfortable circumstances were forced to sell the very furniture of their houses in order to buy food, while the majority of them were saved from starvation only by the charity of some Protestant gentlemen, who, however, were obliged to observe the utmost secrecy in rendering assistance for fear of drawing down upon themselves the pious wrath of the Redemptorist monks and of the six thousand brethren of the Confraternity of the Holy Family, whose fanaticism the prophet continued to inflame with his historic fictions. This state of things did not end until, public opinion being roused in England, the Government was induced to take adequate measures for the protection of the Jews against violence, and philanthropists hastened to their relief. Such was the position of the Jews in a part of Ireland in the year of grace 1904.

Meanwhile the unblessed Bill, after having been safely piloted through the stormy debate on the second reading, suffered shipwreck in the relatively calm harbour of Grand Committee. Every one of its clauses was subjected to severe criticism, until nothing was left of the essay in legislation so carefully elaborated by the Home Secretary. This catastrophe was by the advocates of the measure attributed to “the obstructive tactics to which its opponents resorted.”289 A more philosophical explanation of the failure of the Bill, and one probably as remote from the truth, would be that the Government, yielding to the importunity of some of its followers, promised a measure which it had no power to pass and no great desire to see passed. Be that as it may, few perhaps regretted the failure of an attempt to shut out from this country all strangers indiscriminately, for no better reason than that they are poor and persecuted, thus conspiring with the very Governments whose conduct we condemn and gratuitously forswearing those traditions of freedom, tolerance, and hospitality which will probably in the estimation of future ages stand much higher than a great many things which we now value as our chief titles to the world’s respect.

These sentiments will naturally be received with derision by persons who, fortified by copious draughts of statistics, boast a healthy immunity from “sentimentality,” profess a truly primitive contempt for abstract ideas, and glory in their emancipation from “the capacity for being fascinated by magic words—such as the word ‘free.’”290 Strong-minded persons of this type confess that “they cannot see what benefit accrues to the community by the advent of such immigrants that can possibly compensate the injury to our own people of a hard-working class.”291 Robust thinkers of this school consider obstruction with a barrow of fruit by a poor lad an offence sufficiently serious to justify exclusion, and this, too, while they denounce the Roumanian Government’s policy as “directed to the suppression, expulsion, and political extermination of the Jews.”292 The statistical mind has its own way of looking at things, and it is able to discern a difference in principle between “expulsion” and “exclusion” which is too subtle for the mere layman’s eye. It is, therefore, not surprising that statisticians should have continued their self-appointed mission of enlightening the world on the enormities of the foreign immigrant. The Immigration Reform Association, immediately on the defeat of the Bill, announced its determination “to continue, and, if possible, to extend its work,” and made an appeal to the public for funds.293 The magazines continued to be filled with articles on the same melancholy topic, and a daily newspaper carefully chronicled under the standing heading “Our Foreigners Day by Day” all cases, however frivolous, which tended to bring into strong relief the foreigner’s criminality. Members of Parliament felt it to be their duty to denounce to their constituencies the Radical Party, which, by its “most persistent obstruction,” had obliged the Government to withdraw the Bill, and to ask them to demand its reintroduction.294 In brief, no efforts were spared to influence that powerful assemblage of thoughtless dogmatists known as the reading public, and to guide that monstrous machine which, propelled by prejudice and fed by newspaper paragraphs, constitutes what we cynically call public opinion.

The Government also benevolently promised, both through its members and in the Speech from the Throne, that the Opposition would be given an early opportunity of reforming their manners with regard to the question. Naturally. For, according to the Board of Trade alien immigration returns, the number of foreigners who arrived in the United Kingdom during the twelve months which ended on December 31st, 1904, showed few signs of decline. It was, therefore, plain that the Aliens Bill was not dead; but that the same measure, or a measure conceived in the same spirit, would, unless some power hitherto undiscovered removed the grievance, be again submitted to Parliament at some future date. And this is what actually happened. On April 18, 1905, the Home Secretary brought in a new Bill which differed from its predecessor chiefly in being better adapted to the purpose for which it was intended. And yet, though the arguments by which it was supported and the object at which it aimed remained the same, it met with an entirely different reception. The public had, in the meantime, been so successfully “educated,” and the feeling in favour of legislation for the restriction of the entrance of aliens had grown so strong, that the Opposition, mindful of its party interests, refrained from opposing the measure with the vigour which it had displayed in the previous year, and the Bill, a few months afterwards, became law. ♦1905 Aug. 11♦ That being the case, it is well to form a clear idea as to the merits and the meaning of the measure.

The Aliens Act is avowedly levelled only at the criminal, the pauper, the diseased, and the prostitute. So far it is a measure unobjectionable in theory, however impracticable it may prove in application. Those charged with the execution of its provisions may, if they can, prevent the arrival of these truly undesirable immigrants. No one desires them. But this only touches the fringe of the matter. The exclusion of such immigrants affords no remedy for the congestion and competition which form the principal grounds of complaint against the alien immigrants. The bulk of these are Russian and Polish Jews and, as a class, are, by the late Government’s own admission, neither criminal, nor destitute, nor diseased, nor immoral. They are not a burden on the British tax-payer. They crowd neither the British workhouses nor the British hospitals. The evils complained of can, therefore, be remedied not by the exclusion of the few bad characters, but only by refusing an asylum on British soil to the industrious and temperate victim of Russian or Roumanian tyranny, who, when allowed the opportunity, is, in the vast majority of cases, transformed, within a few years, into a valuable British citizen. And the Act, accordingly, while professing to be directed against undesirable characters, makes no distinction whatever between the undesirable and the merely unhappy. It provides nominal protection for political refugees, it is true, but the subordinate officials, to whose discretion the matter is practically left, are empowered to prohibit from landing men and women whose sole crime is that, accustomed to a frugal life, they are willing to accept a wage which the English working man and woman refuse. Is this a cause sufficient to justify exclusion? That is the real question at issue, honestly put. The talk about criminals, paupers and prostitutes is only a disingenuous effort to clothe a selfish economic matter with a semblance of morality. It is not their vices but their virtues that render Jewish immigrants really undesirable. Is that right? The answer to this question would have been easy enough a few years ago. But now, when the whole principle of free competition is under reconsideration, the answer which the majority of Englishmen will be disposed to make to it must ultimately depend on their decision concerning that principle.

How far can the Act be fairly regarded as a symptom of anti-Semitic feeling? There can be no doubt that its authors and many of its supporters, entirely free from religious or racial prejudice themselves, intended it simply as a remedy for an economic complaint. But whatever the late Government’s intentions may have been, and whether in this matter it acted as a leader or a follower, it has in effect provided anti-aliens and anti-Semites, avowed or secret, with the very weapon which they wanted, as they showed by their eager participation in the movement which, if it did not dictate the measure, certainly assisted in its production. Again, it would be unfair and untrue to charge all, or even the bulk, of the anti-alien agitators with anti-Semitism. The great majority of them were and are animated by no special prejudice against the Jews as such, and, if they teach the masses any lesson, it is to hate and to despise all foreigners impartially. But as by far most of these foreigners who come to England happen to be Jews, it is impossible to dissociate the anti-alien from the anti-Jewish campaign. On the Continent the haters of the Jew on racial or religious grounds are few in comparison with those who persecute him from enlightened motives, economic and social. Yet we brand them all as anti-Semites, justly in the main, if somewhat loosely; for differences in motive are of little practical importance when they lead to agreement in action. In England also the few enemies of the Jew have recognised in the enemies of the undesirable alien natural allies, and the two forces, however widely they may differ in their origin, coalesce into practical anti-Semitism—a coalition which has found, as we have seen, a common vehicle of expression in the provincial patriot’s pamphlet. Other signs of anti-Semitism, in the strict sense of the term, are not wanting; the most sinister of them hitherto being the Limerick affair. It is, of course, easy to overrate the significance of these cases. It is not so easy to overlook them.

Even more ominous than these specific cases is the slow formation in the British Isles of an atmosphere favourable to the dissemination of any illiberal epidemic whose germs may chance to grow at home or to be imported from abroad. Narrow nationalism is daily becoming more aggressive, more unscrupulous, and more unashamed of itself. Public opinion is daily showing a more ready acquiescence in the sacrifice of the claims of man to the claims of the Englishman—this is called patriotism—and of the claims of right to the claims of policy—this is called Imperialism. Patriotism is a noble sentiment, and the imperial is a noble ideal. But nobler than either patriotism or Imperialism are justice and freedom. With these the love of country and the love of Empire are things for which one may well be content to live and happy to die. Without them they are merely fair masks for things whose real names are worship of self, worship of pelf, the deification of brute force, low lust of conquest abroad, which sooner or later leads to slavery at home; substitution of the little and the local for the great and the eternal. It is a gradual approximation towards that standard of conduct which has turned Germany from a high school of humanistic culture into a barrack, and which threatens to turn England from a school of political liberty into a shop. A ledger is a respectable book enough, but an indifferent substitute for a moral code. And we seem to take pride in quoting the ledger and in ridiculing the moral code.

The whole controversy in Parliament and in the press on the Alien question is an illustration of this attitude. In vain you will seek amid the conflicting arguments for any clear apprehension of the principle involved. The same politicians and publicists who denounced the late Government for endeavouring to exclude the undesired alien from England, denounced it also for not excluding the undesired alien from South Africa. The same calumnies from which they defended the Jew they themselves would level at the Chinaman, and while they appealed to the ideal of freedom in order to stigmatise the Government’s attempts to protect the native of England against competition, they anathematised that Government for not protecting the native of South Africa against similar competition; objecting not so much to the conditions under which the yellow man was imported as to the colour of his skin. Even the most liberal of our public men are apt to use the terms “white man” or “alien” in a manner which shows that they are far from being proof against the prejudices which they condemn in others. At no other time, perhaps, has more painfully been demonstrated the ominous absence of consistent principle from British statesmanship. The two political parties, devoid of any sincere faith in the maxims which they profess, are ready to deny one day what they may defend the next, and to exchange creeds at a moment’s notice for a moment’s gain. In such a state of the national temper and of political morality anti-Semitism would find only too congenial a soil. The present writer, after a careful study of the whole history of the modern movement against the Jews, cannot but concur with those who maintain that the seeds of anti-Semitism are already amongst us. These seeds may still lie too deep for germination, but there are sufficient reasons to fear that in England, as on the Continent, any accident may, sooner or later, bring them near the surface and aërate them into life. The day on which this may happen will be a black day not for the Jews only.

The meaning of anti-Semitism, as it prevails abroad, can be read by the light of its results. By their actions thou shalt know them. But the actions of the anti-Semites, deplorable as they are, are less deplorable than the social conditions which they illustrate. Anti-Semitism is a movement retrogressive in a twofold sense. Retrogressive inasmuch as it shows that the current of European humanism is flowing backwards, and retrogressive inasmuch as it has actually checked the gradual and voluntary assimilation of the Jew. It is a resurrection of the mediaeval monster of intolerance with a fresh face, and its effects are those which attended mediaeval persecution.

Among the worst Jews it has brought back to life the class of vulgar apostates which had vanished with the emancipation of the race—lineal descendants of those renegades who in the Dark Ages poisoned the shafts of persecution, who slandered their own race, befouled the nest in which they had been nursed, reviled their own God, and treated their own brethren with a contempt which none deserved more richly than themselves. Such a specimen of reversion to a type which one had fondly imagined to be extinct is the editor of a well-known French journal, than whom no one distinguished himself more unenviably in the anti-Dreyfus campaign. He was only one of many Jews who, ashamed of their despised race, strive to conceal the guilt of their origin by joining the ranks of its most rabid foes, and who, by their excessive zeal, betray what they would fain disguise. Readers of M. Anatole France’s Histoire Contemporaine will remember the exquisite portraits of Hebrew anti-Semites, such as Madame de Bonmont—“une dame catholique, mais d’origine juive”—her brother Wallstein, M. Worms-Clavelin, the prefect, and, above all, the prefect’s wife, who educated her daughter in a Catholic convent, and who “a garni avec les chapes magnifiques et vénérables de Saint-Porchaire ces sortes de meubles appelés vulgairement poufs.”

Among the best Jews it has brought about a reaction against the ideals established by Mendelssohn’s teaching. It has originated a call back to orthodoxy, to narrowness, to exclusiveness. Israel at the present day is essentially a religious brotherhood; anti-Semitism forces it to become once more a nation. Even those Jews who in time of prosperity might feel inclined to quit the Synagogue, are in the day of adversity driven back to it from a sense of chivalry. Persecution strengthens the feeling of fraternity, and the liberal instincts of the individual are sacrificed for the sake of the community, as in the days of old. But, if separatism is fatal to the Jews themselves, it is hardly a blessing to humanity at large. From the other point of view, the Gentile, anti-Semitism is not less an evil. Disraeli once said that “Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”295 The saying, when stripped of its quasi-apocalyptic garb, will be found to conceal a great truth in it. Hatred towards the Jew has always abounded whenever and wherever barbarism has abounded. The amount of anti-Semitism in a country has generally been proportionate to the amount of bigotry, mental depravity, and moral callousness it contained. That so many now are willing to advocate anti-Semitism marks the precarious and superficial character of our civilisation.

I have already said that I consider anti-Semitism as a proof and an illustration of a tendency to turn back the hand on the dial. It is a coincidence, not perhaps wholly devoid of significance, that the age which has witnessed the revival of Jew-hatred is also the age of revived mediaevalism under other aspects—art, literature, and religion. The step from Romanticism to Romanism is a very short one. Indeed, the two things may be regarded as only two different manifestations of one mental disposition: the disposition to a mediaeval interpretation of life and its problems. More significant still are the attempts made in these days to whitewash the great tyrants of the past whose principles reason and experience have taught us to abhor. Most significant circumstance of all, the apologists of the Inquisition, whom the sarcasms of the eighteenth century had shamed into silence, and Napoleon’s cannon cowed into feigned toleration, have, within the last thirty years, taken heart again, and ventured to abuse that liberty of speech which they owe to the triumph of Rationalism by preaching the cause of Obscurantism. Learned Jesuits and Benedictines in many parts of Europe have, since 1875, not only publicly acknowledged and defended the abominations of the Holy Office, but actually expressed an undisguised longing for its restoration to the power of roasting every one who dares to think for himself.296 That they may succeed is a fear which even the most fantastic of pessimists would feel unable to cherish. But their mere existence forms in itself a considerable check on too sanguine optimism.