The Bolshevist explosion, which will appear in history I think as the point of departure from which shall date the new attitude of the Western nations towards the Jews, is not only a field in which we can study the evil effect of secrecy, but one in which we can analyse all the various forces which tend to bring Israel into such ceaseless conflict with the society around it.
It merits, therefore, a very special examination, both as an opportunity for the study of our subject and as a turning-point of the first moment in history.
Why did a Jewish organization thus attempt to transform society? Why did it use the methods which we know it used? Why was that particular venue chosen? What aim had the actors in view? What measure of success did they hope to achieve? By what method do they propose to extend their influence? When we can answer those questions we shall have gone far to discovering the almost fatal causes of conflict between this peculiar nation and those among whom they move.
The answers usually given to these questions by the avowed enemies of the Jewish race are always inadequate and often false. When theycontain an element of truth (which they often do) that truth is quite insufficient to account for the full phenomena. But the accretions of falsehood and exaggeration render the whole thing inexplicable—indeed, these explanations of the Russian revolution are very good specimens of the way in which the European so misunderstands the Jew that he imputes to him powers which neither he nor any other poor mortal can ever exercise.
Thus we are asked to believe that this political upheaval was part of one highly-organized plot centuries old, the agents of which were millions of human beings all pledged to the destruction of our society and acting in complete discipline under a few leaders superhumanly wise! The thing is nonsense on the face of it. Men have no capacity for acting in this fashion. They are far too limited, far too diverse.
Moreover, the motive is completely lacking. Why merely destroy and why, if your object is merely to destroy, manifest such wide differences in your aims? One may say justly that there is always a tendency to reaction against alien surroundings, and in so far as that reaction is intense and effective it is destructive of those surroundings. One may point out that such reaction in the case of the Jews, as in the case of all other alien bodies, is in the main unconscious and instinctive. All that is true enough; but the conception of a vast age-long plot, culminating in the contemporary Russian affair, will not hold water, any more than will the corresponding hallucination which led men to believe that the French revolution (a thing utterly different in kind from the Russian) was the mere outward expressionof a strictly disciplined secret body. In the case of the French Revolution everything was put down (by the forerunners of to-day's Anti-Semitic enthusiasts) to the secret agency of The Order of Templars acting unweariedly through six centuries, and finally bringing down the French monarchy. In the case, of course, of the Bolshevist anarchy a still longer range is given to the final result: for "Templars" read "Jews," and for "600" read "2,000" years. It is all smoke.
More serious is the statement that this combination of Jews for the destruction of the old Russian society was an act of racial revenge. There is a great element of truth in that. There is no doubt that the greater part of the Jews who took over power in the Russian cities four years ago felt an appetite for revenge against the old Russian State comparable to that felt by any oppressed people against their oppressors. Probably it was more intense even than any other example that could be quoted. We are all witnesses to the way in which the Russian people, religion, and government, and particularly the person and office of the Emperor—were attacked and decried by the Jews in Western Europe, of the way in which the Jews ceaselessly conspired against the Russian State, and of the brutal repression to which they were subject. When you release a force of hatred so violent it may run to any length. That sudden release, that sudden opportunity for satisfying the thirst for vengeance, must explain a very large part of what followed. But even that does not account for the whole. It would account for mere massacre and mere chaos. It would not account for the attempts—rather pitiful attempts—atconstruction and for the obviously designed system of direction which has continued on the same lines since the Jews first assumed power and is still fully manifest after nearly five years of that power.
Still less is it sufficient to say that the Jew is everywhere the organizer and leader of revolution and that we only see him at work in Russia with greater vigour and thoroughness because the opportunity is there greater.
The Jew is not everywhere a revolutionary. He is everywhere discontented with a society alien to him: that is natural and inevitable. But he does not exercise his power invariably, or even ordinarily, towards the oversetting of an established social order by which, incidentally, he often largely benefits.
You do not find the Jew in history perpetually leading the innumerable revolts which citizens in the mass make against the privileged or the superior conditions of the minority. He has sometimes benefited by these movements in the past; more often suffered. We often find individual Jews sympathizing with the revolutionary side, but we also find many individual Jews sympathizing with the other. The Jew is not, in the history of Europe, the prime agent of revolution: quite the contrary. The great acts of violence, successful and unsuccessful, which have marked our society from the agrarian troubles of pagan Rome to the French Revolution, the land war in Ireland, the Chartist Movement in London, or whatever modern movement you will, have appealed much more to the fighting instincts and political traditions ofourrace than they have to the Jews. They are marked everywhere by anattitude towards property and patriotism which are the very opposite of the Jews' characteristics. The Revolutions of the past were for the better distribution of property and for the betterment of the State. Often they were openly undertaken because patriotism had been offended by defeat in war and because the Nation was thought to be betrayed. Usually they were jingo and always for distribution of wealth.
It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution and of its attempted extension elsewhere that it repudiates patriotism and the division of property. In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly, obviously,Jewish. But why had the Jews a chance of action in Russia which they lacked elsewhere?
What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the whole movement?
There are, I take it, three main factors present in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort.
In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was directed towards, a particular social phenomenon in which that profound instinct in the European, the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell upon the state of affairs calledIndustrial Capitalism, the chief mark of which is the destruction in the mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the atrophying) of that essential part of the European soul—ownership. The Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sympathize with us in that central core of our civic instincts. He has never understood the European sense of property and I doubt if he ever will.
But in RussiaIndustrial Capitalismwas quite new. The resentment against it was keen. Thevictims were the sons of peasants, or had themselves been born peasants, so that this proletarian mass in the Russian towns, though less than a tenth of the whole nation, was peculiarly open to propaganda against its masters. And an attack successfully conducted, on that weakest point of modern Capitalism, might easily succeed andthenspread to neighbouring industrialized centres in Poland, Germany, and so westward.
Now the attack on this international phenomenon, an attack directed against Industrial Capitalism, required an international force. It needed men who had international experience and were ready with an international formula.
There are two, and only two, organized international forces in Europe to-day with a soul and identity in them. One is the Catholic Church, and the other is Jewry. But the Catholic Church, for reasons which I will discuss in a moment, cannot and never will directly attack industrial capitalism. It will undoubtedly attack that system in flank and indirectly destroy it in the long run wherever the Faith has a strong hold upon masses of people. But it will not and cannot directly attack it. The Jew, on the other hand, is free to attack it precisely because our sense of property means nothing to him, is to him something strange, and even, I think, comic. Further, the Jew was present, he was on the spot. The Church was not.
Of the two international forces present, therefore, the Jews alone could act.
Here I must digress and say why the other great international force, the Catholic Church, has not been able—and will never be able—to attack Industrial Capitalism as a whole and directly, though,as I have said, it acts indirectly as a solvent of this evil and will destroy it wherever society remains Catholic. The Catholic Church, not only in its abstract doctrine, but acting as the expression of our European civilization, is profoundly attached to the conception of private property. It makes the family the unit of the State and it perceives that the freedom of the family is most secure where the family owns. It perceives, as do all Europeans, instinctively or explicitly, that property is the correlative of freedom, or, at any rate, of that only kind of freedom which we Europeans care to have: that it is the safeguard of spiritual health (the mark of which is humour), of breadth and diversity in action, of elasticity in the State, of permanence in institutions. Property, as widely distributed as possible, but sacred as a principle, is an inevitable social accompaniment of Catholicism.
Apart from this, it is also a definite feature of Catholic doctrine to deny that private property is immoral. No Catholic can say that private property is immoral without cutting himself off from the Communion of the Church, any more than he can say that the authority in the State is immoral. He cannot be a communist, in abstract morals any more than he can be an anarchist.
Now Industrial Capitalism is a disease of property. It is the monstrous state of affairs in which a very few men derive their vast advantage from the corresponding fact that most men whom they exploit do not own.
But it remains true that the sheet-anchor of Capitalism is a sense of ownership in the mass as well as in the privileged few. The only moralforce remaining to Industrial Capitalism, the only spiritual tie which prevents its dissolution, is this admission by the European mind that property is a right—even property in a diseased and exaggerated form.
The whole of the operations of Industrial Capitalism rely upon the sanctity of property and the sanctity of contract which develops from the sanctity of property. And whenever society loses this sense, industrial capitalism will fall into chaos. The Church cannot deny that one moral principle. Its action will always be towards the dissolution of the great accumulations promoted by capitalism. It always will work indirectly for the establishment of well-divided property, an ideal defined by the voice of its great modern Pope, Leo XIII, who explicitly states it in hisRerum Novarum. But the Church can never take the short cut of destroying Industrial Capitalism root and branch and at once, by erecting against it the doctrine of Communism or (as many people call diluted Communism) "Socialism." It never can do so in theory, and still less will it ever do so in practice. A Catholic society will always tend to be a society of owners: with all the elements of co-operation, with the Guild, with masses of corporate property attached to the State or connected with the city, with the college, with the corporation. For without such corporate property in a State, property is never well founded.
The Jew has neither that political instinct in his national tradition nor a religious doctrine supporting and expressing such an instinct. The same thing in him which makes him a speculator and a nomad blinds him to, and makes himactually contemptuous of, the European sense of property. When therefore we have reached, through Industrial Capitalism, or any other social disease, a state of affairs in which the practical denial of property is possible because the mass of men have lost the desire for it, and when the repudiation of property offers an immediate solution for intolerable evils, then the Jew can appear at once as a leader.
One must find in such a movement an international leader because the disease is international, and still more because the proposed cure of that disease, through Communism,mustbe international if it is to succeed. A Communist society may stand apart from the general society of owners in other countries, but if it is to succeed in competition with them it must convert them to its own creed.
The Jew took international action for granted. He took the narrow and false economic view of property—that it was a mere institution to be modified indefinitely, and, if necessary, abolished. He had an obvious opportunity for leadership accorded to him when international action against property was demanded. Again, our national sense, patriotism, which is incomprehensible to the Jew save on the false analogy of his own peculiar nomadic and tribal patriotism, is a check upon Communism, and, indeed, against revolution of any kind. The process of thought in the patriotic citizen—largely unconscious but none the less efficacious—is somewhat as follows:
"I cannot function save as a citizen of my nation, and, what is more, that nation made me what I am. It is my creator in a sense and so has authority over me. I must even give up my life in its defence if necessary, because but for itsexistence I and those like me could not be. My happiness, my freedom of individual action, my self-expression are all bound up with the existence of the civic unit of which I am a part. If something which appears to me good in the abstract, or which apparently will procure for me a material good, involves danger to that civic unit, I must forego the good, regarding the continued existence and strength of my people as a greater good to which the lesser should be sacrificed."
That, I say roughly, is the expression of the patriotic instinct in the European man. That is what he has felt for many and many a great State in the past and for every polity to which he has ever belonged; that is what he feels to-day for his country.
The Jew has the same feeling, of course, for his Israel, but since that nation is not a collection of human beings, inhabiting one place and living by traditions rooted in its soil, since it has not a strong, visible, external form, his patriotism is necessarily of a different complexion. It has different connotations and our patriotism seems negligible to him.
The implied fallacies current in the modern industrial revolutionary formulæ, in such phrases as "What does it matter to the working man whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?" or, again, "Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great obstacle to the full development of humanity"—all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as verygood sense indeed. For in his case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply tohimvividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary tohim? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these terms, "France, Ireland, England, Russia," are but abstractions? Therealthing in his eyes when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. "England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies.
It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with similar force and say, "No Jew should run any risk for Israel," "no Jew should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in distress," "the idea of Israel is a vague abstraction—all that counts is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements"; if you said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial and local habit, called by us Europeans "the love of our country."
There is more than this in the business. Even those truths which we know to be truths have little effect upon us, unless they enter intothe practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a number of Jews who would admit at once the truth of any nationalist statement made by a European. When a Frenchman, or an Englishman, or a Russian says to him, "My first duty is to my people; I must keep them strong as well as in being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs when it is necessary," there are many Jews who would answer: "You are quite right. The theory is sound. Man can only function as a part of a particular society," and so forth; but it is one thing to recognize a truth and another thing to experience it in one's bones, as it were, and these truths, even where he is admitting them, are truths indifferent to the Jew.
Therefore when, as in the particular case of Russia, a national feeling stood in the way of an abstract ideal, it seemed the most natural thing in the world to the Jew that the national obstacle should go to the wall in order thathisideal of Communism might triumph.
There lay behind this great change in the Russian towns, and the capture of what remains of Russian government by the Jewish Committees, a force most positive. It was the sense of social justice, the indignation against indefensible evils.
That sense of social justice, that indignation against indefensible modern evils, we all feel. There may be men among the wealthier classes of Western Europe who are so ignorant of the past, or so stupid, that they do honestly believe Industrial Capitalism to be an inevitable and even perhaps a good thing. But such men must be very rare. Not only must they be rare, but they cannot have any wide social experience. A man has only gotto live the life of the poor in the great industrial cities for a day to see the enormity of the wrong that has to be righted. There are, of course, not a few but many thousands of individuals who try to find arguments for Industrial Capitalism, either because they benefit themselves through the system and are the richer by it, or because they are the hired servants of those who so benefit—and of this kind are the writers in the capitalist press. But all these, who are hired advocates, or advocates with a direct proprietary interest in the continuance of the modern disease, may be neglected; for they are not in good faith. They are not really arguing that the thing is good in itself, they are only trying to find arguments as lawyers do for something which they have to defend and which in their hearts they admit is evil; or to the evil of which they are indifferent so long as it gives them a disproportionate share of material enjoyment.
We must add to these the sincere man who will admit the domination of Industrial Capitalism because he honestly believes that, bad as it is, it isnowbecome inevitable and that to tamper with it would bring the whole State into anarchy. "Such as it is," he would say, "the structure of our society now depends upon it. We may palliate its evils, we may try very gradually to transform its worst features. But in its essence it must remain as it is, or our last state will be worse than our first."
Of this kind are those who argue that any social experiment antagonistic to Industrial Capitalism, if pushed sufficiently far, would result in famine and chaos and even physical evils far worse than the physical evils which the mass of men have tosuffer in the great towns which capitalism has produced.
Apart from these categories, the masses of men, I say, to-day are convinced that Industrial Capitalism is an evil, an evil of the grossest sort; an evil of a sort unknown to the greater part of human history and unknown to-day in the greater part of the human race; an evil which those peasant societies, or societies of well-divided property throughout Europe, are happy to have escaped; and an evil from which we, who are caught in it, are trying to escape as best we may.
In that modifying phrase "as best we may" lies the crux, for the great mass of Europeans feel that any attack on Industrial Capitalism which denies the nation its supreme place, or which impedes the superior task of keeping the nation strong and wealthy, is barred; they also feel instinctively that any attack which denies the general right of private property and the value of that institution to the healthy conduct of our affairs is also barred. The great mass of our race, when faced by the problem of Industrial Capitalism, feel that it has to be solved in some way that will neither destroy property nor the nation through which the individual alone can function.
But this, which is true of the great mass of our race, is not true of the Jews. Therefore they were able, in the case of the Russian Revolution, to go straight for their object, and that object was (apart from the obvious object of revenge, of love of power, and the rest) the destruction of an economic inequality.
These Jews who have destroyed what we knew as Russia were undoubtedly possessed of a politicalideal: the ideal of Communism. No doubt many individuals among them (all ultimately) would prefer the good of Israel to the good of any Russian. No doubt the wreaking of vengeance upon former oppressors was strong, as also the appetite for destroying a general and a national sentiment alien to them and even repulsive to them; but there remains, as a positive motive behind the whole affair, the ideal of Communism. The Jews alone of the forces present were capable of heartily entertaining that ideal, and were free of all obstacles against the achievement of it—the obstacle of patriotism, the obstacle of religion, the obstacle of the sense of property.
These considerations, I take it, are what explains the Jewish character of the upheaval in the East, with its destruction of the Russian nation, its enormous experiments in social economy, its inevitable impoverishment of the State as a whole, its enthusiastic support by the minority which accepts its doctrine.
Those very few men and women who have been witnesses of the Jewish experiment in Russia (excluding those engaged in propaganda upon one side or the other) give us a picture which is much what we should have expected of the situation.
It seems that the great mass of the nation has affirmed the instinct of private property with the greatest vigour, and that some nine-tenths of the Russians have settled down upon the land to which they always claimed ownership and in which their sense of ownership is more fierce than ever. In the towns the unnatural system—unnatural because it opposes all our instincts as Europeans—works more and more slackly as the original system ofterror weakens. For it is clear that Communism needs a despot, and the active rule of a despot is necessarily short: it is a system incapable of transition and therefore of duration.
The perfectly explicable but deplorable exercise of vengeance by the Jews has been directed against what we euphemistically term the governing directing classes, who have been massacred wholesale and whose remnants are subjected to perpetual persecution.
The productivity of the industrial masses has naturally sunk to a very low level, because under Communism it can only work through something like military discipline, and work done under those conditions is on a much lower productive level than free work.
But the real interest in the Jewish revolution in Russia, to which is now permanently affixed the name of Bolshevist (which is nothing more than the Russian for "whole-hogger"), lies in these two points: first, the continued propaganda of Communism throughout the world (which propaganda in organization and direction is in the hands of Jewish agents); secondly, and much more important, the effect of the Jewish revolution in producing hostility to the Jews throughout the world.
I say this second fact is much more important because it is the more real and the more enduring. You will never make a Communist of the highly-civilized, tenacious, intelligent and humorous Occidental European. You will no more make a Communist of him than you will make him walk on all fours or permanently abjure the use of good liquor. You may get middle-class faddists to accept Communism as a mere creed, and of course you can easilyget exasperated men, ground down by capitalism, to acceptanytheory,anysystem, which promises them relief. But you will not get Communism working in men who boast the old European blood, in the descendants of those who created our past and its monuments. They will certainly preserve their traditions and their character. Though the peril must be combated, and is being successfully combated everywhere, it is not a peril of great magnitude to the West.
The other effect of the Jewish revolution in Russia—the peril into which it has put the Jews themselves—ispermanent andisof the first magnitude. I know no way to meet it except to explain why that revolution was almost necessarily a Jewish revolution, to emphasize the sincerity of the Jews who have led it, to exculpate them as far as possible, and, at any rate, to shield their unfortunate compatriots abroad from the consequences of what was certainly a very bad piece of tactics so far as the future of this people was concerned.
We ought, I think, not to nourish a new and special hostility against the Jew on account of what he has done in Russia, but, on the contrary, to excuse him, especially because he is a Jew. We ought, as it seems to me, to say: "He had reasons for action and excuse for action which men of our race would not have had, and though we must prevent that action from spreading, we must not allow what seemed quite natural under the circumstances to the Jew to warp our attempted solution of the Jewish problem. We ought to work for its solution as impartially and as soberly as though the provocation of Bolshevism had never been given."
That sounds an extreme thing to say, and I fear it will be ridiculed by most of those who (as they tell us) have had their eyes opened by the Bolshevist explosion and who are now confirmed enemies of the Jewish people. But though it sound fantastic, I am convinced that it is a right attitude. To lose one's judgment on a permanent problem through panic or heat, to forget the elements of such a problem merely because it has been presented to us suddenly in an acute form, is the negation of reason. As well might a man who is dealing with the problem of fermented liquor, and trying to get people to use it rationally, let his judgment be overcome by a case of delirium tremens and rush thereupon into some scheme of prohibition. The very test which distinguishes good statesmanship from bad is the power to keep one's head under provocations like these; to maintain a middle course and to aim at whatever solution our reason tells us to be just undernormalcircumstances. We who saw the gravity of the Jewish problem long before the recognition of it was general, and who studied it under calmer conditions for many years, have a right to be heard now: now that the tide is making against these people and that the fear of anarchy threatens to turn men's heads.
We were long blamed for attacking the Jews, we are already blamed for defending them. It is a proof that our attitude is well grounded and unaffected by fashion.
The Bolshevist revolution will not last. Its Jewish character was inevitable. It had a side to it of Jewish enthusiasm for a sort of incorporeal justice, and, in any case, it ought not to be allowed to deflect us from a conclusion which the muchlarger lines of history and all general considerations of reason impose.
Our conclusion, as I have said, is a recognition and protection of the Jewish nation as something quite different from ourselves and yet necessarily inhabiting our society. Such a full recognition leaves us fore-armed against the tendency in the Jew (which we cannot avoid) to forget our national feelings and to misconceive our sense of ownership. It would render impossible the conspiracies and the vengeance which have destroyed Russia, and I believe that had the former Russian Government treated the Jews as I say they should be treated, it would be in power to-day.
THE POSITION IN THE WORLD AS A WHOLE
The danger of the Jewish nation in the world to-day may be summed up in this phrase:—
"The Jews are obtaining control and we will not be controlled by them."
That is the simplest formula, and the one which would be immediately subscribed to by the whole mass of those outside the Jewish community who are alive to the question at all. Being the simplest form of the truth, it needs, when applied to a highly complex situation, detailed modification.
This modification proceeds from three sources:—
First, the extent of the Jewish control and the extent of the resentment against that control vary very largely from one community to another.
Secondly, the civic tradition of each community in its treatment of the Jewish question also differs from that of every other, though these various traditions fall into certain fairly well-defined groups.
Thirdly, the position is modified according to the presence, in varying degrees of strength in different communities, of certain international forces even more powerful than the Jews themselves. The four principal of the international forces are:—
(1) The Catholic Church;
(2) Islam;
(3) The forces of international Capitalism; and
(4) The international reaction against it of the industrial proletariat.
We must in the first line of this inquiry make an important premise. The fact from which we proceed, namely, the uneasy feeling that the Jews are getting control and the determination not to tolerate that control, will be denied by the Jews themselves. It is denied sincerely—I have entered upon too many discussions with them and heard too many of their protestations to doubt that; and if the denial were valid, not only the particular survey I propose in this chapter, but the whole of the argument of this book, would fail. For if there is a Jewish question to-day, and if it is present in the acute form in which we all know it to be present, it is not due merely to the contrast and friction between the Jews and their hosts, but especially to this feeling of domination.
But the Jewish belief in this matter is not valid, sincerely as it is held. To the great majority of Jews it will, of course, seem common-sense. What has the unfortunate poor Jew in the slums of our great cities to do with controlling the modern world? How in his eyes can the phrase have any meaning at all? If you pass from him to the comparatively small Jewish middle class, you would hear a denial almost equally vigorous. The Jewish scientist will tell you that he is concerned with his researches and laughs at the idea of interfering with his neighbours; the Jewish historian that he is concerned with his documents, that nothing is further from his thoughts than interfering withpeople outside his trade; the little Jewish shopkeeper will tell you that he is in active competition with his non-Jewish neighbours and by no means always successful in that competition; the Jewish lawyer will tell you that he is concerned with the system of law in which he happens to be immersed—the Napoleonic Code, the English Common Law or what not—and that any idea of his personally wanting to control the vast non-Jewish majority among whom he lives is moonshine: and so it is.
The great Jewish banker, though he is fully aware of his power, would tell you that in his daily business he comes up against forces to which he is subject, and has competitors who are at the best neutral, and more commonly hostile, to Israel; and even the man who is to-day more powerful—if that be possible—than the Jewish banker, I mean the Jewish monopolist, and especially the Jewish monopolist in metal, though he would be extremely annoyed to have the extent of his control exposed, will feel that it is due to his superior abilities and in no way designed for mastery.
All these individual replies are true; but if you make of them a composite and general reply, if you put it as a reply of all Israel to all the world outside, crying, "I have no desire for supremacy; I never act in such a fashion that my domination can be felt or shall increase; the motive is not present, even subconsciously, among my people"—then that general reply would be false.
In point of fact the Jew hascollectivelya power to-day, in the white world, altogether excessive. It is not only an excessive power, it is inevitably acorporatepower and, therefore, a semi-organized power. It is not only excessive and in the mainorganized, it was, until the recent reaction began, a rapidly increasing power—and most people believe it to be still increasing. To that the whole world outside the Jewish community will testify.
The criterion by which we may judge whether any form of power is irritant to those whom it affects is not the testimony of those who exercise the power, but the testimony of those over whom it is exercised. There never was a tyranny in the world, not even one of those personal tyrannies (which have been so much more highly organized and so much more direct than this power of the Jews), there never has been a despotism in history, which would not tell you that it was accidental, or necessary, or, in any case, innocent of any motive of oppression. And history universally replies: "To judgethat, you must ask those who felt the pressure; not those who exercised it."
Now those who feel the pressure in the matter we are now examining are unanimous. They differ in the degree of their resentment from those to whom the thing is so intolerable that they are already in active revolt against it, to those who feel it merely as a distant though an approaching discomfort. But everybody feels it in some degree. It is a universal sensation running throughout the nerves of the modern world and it is growing too fast in degree and extent to be ignored.
I have already quoted the effect upon those hundreds of educated men taken into the temporary Civil service during the late war, when they found, holding the locked gate of one monopoly after another, the international Jew. His control of finance needs no discussion. If the individual banker or financier is not aware of it, the most ofthose who are affected are acutely aware of it. Men exaggerate in giving it a sort of conscious personality, but they certainly do not exaggerate when they point to its effects. The Jew must remember, what it may be difficult for him to accept and what is certainly true, that not only is his domination very bitterly resented but that his presence in any position of control whatsoever is odious to the race among which he moves. Everybody feels that about any form of alien control, much more do they feel it about that form which they instinctively know to be most alien of all. Every one has noticed this control exercised in the form of keeping silence upon what it was to the disadvantage of Israel to have known; in the form of the advertising of what it was to the advantage of Israel to have advertised; in the form of the giving and withholding of credit; in the form of attack in the Press against nations with whom Israel had a quarrel and the defence in the Press of those (they have now almost disappeared) upon whom Israel, in the immediate past, relied for defence. And everybody has discovered—what is not unjust, indeed, what is inevitable, but what is none the less a source of exasperation—the solidarity of the Jewish race where the interests of any member of it were concerned.[1]
But if the thing were felt everywhere as acutely and as consciously as it is felt in special groups to-day—as it is felt, for instance, in one particular section of English opinion already represented in thePress, is felt in a wider section of French opinion, and in a still wider section of Polish opinion—then the matter would be simple. We could then say that an issue of the clearest kind had arisen, and forbid a small alien minority to decide the destinies of those among whom it lives and of whom it is not. The answer would be obvious, and the only difficulty would be how the Jewish control might be lessened without grievous injustice to innocent individuals.
But the thing is not so felt. It is modified, as I have said, by the varying degrees of intensity in which it is recognized and by the other international forces which come into play.
If we consider the varying political traditions and the varying international forces, if we examine the world's national groups, we shall find something like this: In the vast body of Russia a position most paradoxical. For years the Jew was everywhere openly attacked and hated in those parts of the Russian Empire where he was allowed to live in large numbers. These were nowhere within Russia proper but upon the western outskirts of that empire, within what was once the old Polish kingdom and largely within what is now the restored Republic of Poland. But the Russian traditional antagonism to the Jew changed in a few weeks of chaos to something not opposite but novel and different. The Russian allowed a prodigious revolution to be made by the Jews, he accepted the loot of that revolution which the Jew secured to him; he has submitted wholly in the towns, partly in the country, to a tyranny exercised by Jews ever since that complete reversal of his national history, now four years old.
The external political power of what was once the Russian Empire has disappeared. The Jews have killed it. But the great mass of Russian humanity remains strongly affected by this curious change. Where popular instinct works untrammelled the old and violent passionate antagonism between the Russian and the Jew survives. You see it in the hotch potch of the Ukraine, the inhabitants of which, in spite of all theories, are of Russian race and tradition, and the central town of which is the sacred region of Russia as a member of Christendom. There, for all the Jewish Committees with large towns under their complete control, there have been repeated revolts. But in the greater part of European Russia at least, and in much of what was once the Asiatic Empire, the Jews hold what is left of the Executive government.
So far as we can judge from the very imperfect accounts which reach us (for nowhere is the weapon of secrecy more ruthlessly used), the mass of the Russians, that is, the peasantry, are in two minds. To the action of the Jewish despotism in the town they are indifferent, but to his early attempts against themselves they were bitterly opposed. They have suffered at his hands and they thought him a tyrant. But the Jew seems to have dropped this interference and the Russian soil to have settled down as a peasant proprietary. On the other hand, it was a revolution guided by those same Jewish Committees which secured the peasant in the possession of his land. The Russian peasant has always regarded the land as his own. He had, I understand, regarded that odd, pedantic measure, "The Liberation of the Serfs," as onlyanother name for the robbing him of his land; and when the organization of Russian society dissolved in the strain of war, he poured over the great estates and took back what he thought was his own.
For the strange Jewish conception of Communism, a million miles removed from our European racial instincts and our high civilized traditions, the Russian peasant could have nothing but a bewildered contempt. None the less he was conscious that the Jewish revolution had permitted him, if not to take the land (he did that himself), at least to hold it; and the revolution is indistinguishable from the Jewish control of the towns.
Within the towns, again (our information is most imperfect and I can only piece together what eye-witnesses have told me), although the Jew is, of course, individually hated, yet his control does stand for certain things which the mass of the people still support. He organized the resentment of the poor against the rich. He erected before their eyes the pleasing spectacle of a social revenge. He carried out, fairly consistently, his Communist programme, one aspect at least of which is practical enough; for the man that works with his hands finds that he is as well, or better, fed out of the meagre common stock, than those who were once his masters.
In general I think it true to say that the Jewish control over Christians, if, in a way, stronger in what was once the Russian Empire than anywhere else, is also there least resented. I do not say it would not be resented if it were to excite action again against the peasants, but we cannot forget that the peasants were eager to fight for the newRussian regime because they identified it with their new property in land. The situation is absurd enough. Men in hundreds of thousands willing to fight for Communist masters because by so doing they believe they can secure themselves in an absolute form of property! But that is what the "red" army was.
In that belt of nations, vague in boundary, which used to constitute the Marches of the East and which now stand between what was once the Russian Empire and the Germanies, the position would seem to be this.
There are in these countries everywhere a very large proportion of Jews. The largest by far are in Lithuania and Galicia, where, of whole towns, from a third to a half and sometimes up to two-thirds, of the population are Jewish. Very large also is the proportion within the admitted frontiers of modern Poland; very large in Roumania, and considerable in Hungary.
In all these countries the Jewish problem is something quite different from what it is farther West. The Jews are in these countries admittedly a separate nation. Even as I write I hear the complaint, sounding strange in our Western ears, proffered by the Polish Jews who have been appealing to the West against what they claim to be the oppressive practice of writing them down as Poles! In Roumania for two generations it has been the fixed principle of the State, now latent, now overt, but always acted upon in social practice, that the Jew is not a Roumanian at all and cannot be one. Of course he cannot be one really, any more than he can be an Englishman, or a Frenchman, or an Irishman. (Fancy a Jew an Irishman!) But Imean, not even one by fiction or by convention. In Poland the greater part of these people have a different language and all of them have a different social custom and a different life from the world around them. In Hungary, where the numerical pressure of the Jew is less, there is, of course, a most lively memory of the attempted revolution under Cohen in 1918, the massacres of Hungarians, the setting up of an ephemeral Bolshevism and the necessity of its suppression. In Bohemia the pressure is far less and in the Balkan States south of the Danube and the Drave. It is only present as a pressure of numbers in the group of States which lie between the Baltic and the Black Sea South and North and between the Russian people and the German people East and West.
When we come to Occidental Europe, in which must be included, though it is hardly a true part of it, Germany beyond the Elbe; when we come to the Scandinavian countries, to France, Britain, Italy, Spain, Switzerland and the Low Countries, the problem changes. The numerical proportion of Jews sinks enormously. Fairly large in one or two Dutch towns, it is almost insignificant in Scandinavia, and though we have had into the great English towns and to some extent into the northern French towns (particularly Paris) a considerable recent influx of Jews, yet the total number of these people in the West remains far, far smaller than the great masses of the East of Europe. The same is still more true of Italy, and, in spite of the absorption of a great deal of Jewish blood in the past, of Spain.
But while the numerical proportion of Jews in these western countries is much smaller, and whiletherefore the peril of Jewish domination is very different informfrom what it is farther East, it is clearly marked. It is exercised primarily through finance; next through the sceptical Universities, the anonymous Press and the corrupt Parliaments, and, lastly, in a more general form, by the presence of institutions which greatly favour the rise of the Jew in competition with his hosts; each favours international knowledge; each favours anonymity; each still favours the old Liberal nonsense which called itself "toleration" and was really an indifference to that most fundamental of all social motives—religion—save, of course, where an exception is made to permit attack upon the Catholic Church.
Under influence of this sort, both sincere and hypocritical, both generous and mean, the Jew acquired in all the larger communities, and especially in France, Italy, Germany and England, a power out of all proportion to his numbers, and I may add, without, I hope, offending any Jewish reader, out of proportion to his abilities; certainly out of proportion to any right of his to interfere in our affairs. It was a Jew who produced the divorce laws in France, the Jew who nourished anti-clericalism everywhere in that country and also in Italy; the Jew who called in the forces of Occidental nations to protect his compatriots in the East, and the Jew whose spirit has so largely permeated the Universities and the Press.
Ireland is an exception. In Ireland the Jew (outside the little industrial corner in the north-east) is nobody. And here it must be remarked that the migrations of the Jew which give him numbers here for a time and afterwards numbers elsewhere,in places where previously he had not been known; which give him influence here for a time, and sees it followed by the decline of that influence, do not seem to obey any law which we can trace, and are certainly not the product of any conscious action. It is one of the strangest phenomena in history, this odd, spasmodic flood movement of the Jewish race. Is it concerned with commerce? That is one element undoubtedly; that is what explains the exploitation of England by Jews after the Conquest, of Spain in the later Middle Ages, of the Valley of the Rhine; but then, why not other commercial centres as an attraction? Venice was not one, though the Jew was well tolerated there; nor was Paris after the early Middle Ages, and while some of the Dutch towns formed such centres of attraction the Belgian towns did not.
Was it asylum? That would account, of course, for the great influx of Jews into mediaeval Poland, but then why not into eighteenth century England? Why not until very late in the nineteenth century? England, which gave the Jews a more complete civic position than he could find anywhere else in the world, was not invaded by them. Why these very recent influxes into the United States, which has for now a century and a half been perfectly open by its Constitution, and was by all its civic tradition an ideal asylum for the Jews? Until quite recent times the Jew was hardly known there, and to this day he is not known outside a few great cities.
No. There would seem to be no law, or at least no discoverable law, for this mysterious movement, the ebb and flow of Israel—but that is a digression. To return to the national situations.
If we leave the Old World and turn to the United States, we find a novel condition of affairs still in process of development and very puzzling to the foreign observer. I do not pretend to analyse it completely in a few lines, nor even accurately, for I am dependent upon the observation of others, and the United States are so utterly different from us that we have difficulty in following their contemporary history; but something of this sort would seem to be passing there.
* * * * *
In the United States the Jews were present, till the last few years, in numbers even smaller in proportion to the population than their numbers in France, England and Italy, far smaller than their numbers in what was formerly the German Empire. In the agricultural part of America, which is still, I believe, one half of the population, the Jew was almost unknown. You find him here and there, as a lawyer or a storekeeper, but that world was not familiar with him any more than our English country-sides are familiar with him to-day. With the growth of the great industrial towns, of course, the Jew came, but he was still no "feature in the landscape." There was a certain social prejudice against him among the wealthier classes in the East, and—this is very important—the truth was always told about him. There was in America no convention—the Jew was always recognized as a Jew and there was never any of the nonsense we had over here of pretending that he was something else.
Of that phenomenon of which the history of Europe is full, which is so marked in the easterncounties to-day and which is beginning to rise in the West, there is nothing traceable in the early and middle nineteenth century, nor even till the close of it, in the United States.
Then came the change. It is a change which has taken place in the lifetime of men much younger than myself. It is a change, I am told, most marked since I last visited the United States more than twenty years ago. A regular and organized Jewish emigration began to pour in, especially from the Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms probably a third of the population; it created Ghettoes in most of the large Northern industrial towns, and all the phenomena we associate in Europe with these movements began to show themselves. There was the growth of the financial monopoly and of monopolies in particular trades. There was the clamour for toleration in the form of "neutralizing" religious teaching in schools; there was the appearance of the Jewish revolutionary and of the Jewish critic in every tradition of Christian life. The Jews went also—as they usually do—to the heart of things, and the Executive was attacked. The last and apparently the most unpopular of the presidents, Mr. Wilson, seems to have been wholly in their hands. Anonymity in the Press came, of course. A very marked example of it is a journal calledThe New Republic, which, though it has but a small proportion of Jewish writers upon it, and though its capital is (I believe) not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes the organ of the Jewish intellectuals, always joins in the boycott of any news unfavourable to European Jews, always joins in the clamour for anything favourable to them, and in general adheres to theJewish side, like theHumanitéin Paris, or, let us say,The New Statesmanin England.
But the novel presence in the United States of this phenomenon with which in the west of Europe we have now been familiar for a long time, provides a more direct and a very different kind of reaction from what it has among us. This reaction against Jewish powers was not (to use a Stock Exchange metaphor) "sticky." There was no hesitation; there were no uneasy patches of silence. The Jewish question was discussed from the moment it was first felt and to-day it is discussed beyond all others. Of political topics I have found it the first in the conversation of the Americans who have visited Europe since the War and with whom I have discussed the affairs of their country. It ranges, as that reaction always does, from the wildest Anti-Semitism to strong and open defence of the Jewish position, not only by Jews but by the very small minority of their admirers outside the Jewish community, especially among the wealthy. The characteristic of the whole thing in the United States is that it is only just beginning. It is capable of becoming one of those sudden growths of which the past history of the Republic has made us familiar, and indeed it is too early yet to judge, even on the largest lines, what forms it may not take. It is enough to say that there is behind the reaction against the Jew in that country a growing intensity of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe, for all the advance we have made in the matter, are unfamiliar. If a test be required, contrast the silence about the Jews in '96, during Bryan's great attack upon the gold standard, with the work of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day!
The rest of the world is either of Islam or heathen. In the heathen world, so far, the Jew has little place. He has a strong grip on India, of course, but only through the British Raj, not through the native population; and in China, except as a quasi-European merchant, he has no power at all; neither has he over the strong and organized nationality of Japan.
Such are the degrees, very roughly, of the problem; such the differences of its quality in the various national groups to-day. Of these the two most interesting states of the problem by far, because they are changing with the greatest rapidity, are found in France, in England and in the United States.
I have said that the second modifying condition was the difference of civic traditions of the various nations. Here again you have a differentiation from East to West. But within it a differentiation, ultimately due to religion, from North to South. In Russia there was never any tradition of keeping silence upon the Jew, or of respecting the Jew at all. He was, until the recent revolution, the national enemy, and there was the end of it. Similarly in Poland, Roumania and the vaguer populations of their borders, and even in the old Hungary, the Jew was talked of openly as belonging to a separate nationality and, on the whole, a hostile one.
But as one got west another spirit emerged, another tradition. It was "the thing" to treat the Jew as a citizen. This fashion was weaker in the Germanies than in the Low Countries, France, or England; it was everywhere present west of the Elbe.
It was a tradition flowing from two sources: the commercial and protestant England of the seventeenth century, the sceptical France of the eighteenth. The Jew (according to this spirit) merited special protection and special respect. He must be protected and respected even in his passion for secrecy; so that at last the mere mention of his existence in the cultivated and directing classes of the west became something of an oddity.
From this spirit proceeded the Liberal fiction or convention which I dealt with in the second chapter of this book. It was clinched, it was given permanent form, by the enthusiasm and severe doctrine of the French Republicans, which arose at a moment when Israel was regarded as a religion and its national quality was forgotten. Since all religion was thought to be dying, since, further, an enthusiasm had arisen against almost any religion which exercised civic power (notably the Catholic Church), this Jewish religion, formerly regarded as inimical to the State, or at any rate separate from it, was naturally accorded a special privilege. That strange system arose, the death of which we are now watching after its brief life of somewhat more than a century, whereby the Jew was permitted to wear the mask of nationalities other than his own, and to function everywhere as though he were a citizen, not of Israel, but of the nation in which he chanced to find himself.
Against this attitude arose at last the powerful plea of nationalism. In England, as we shall see in the next chapter, this plea was less strong than elsewhere, because the interests of international Jewish finance and of British commerce were for so long nearly identical. In Italy, where the Jewwas naturally closely connected with the nationalist movement on account of its antagonism to the Papacy, national feeling clashed little with the anomaly of the Jew. But in France, especially after the defeat of 1870, the contrast became stronger and stronger, just as it is strengthening to-day in Germany after the defeat of 1918.
It was that clash between the "city" of Israel and the other "cities" in which we Europeans function, to which allusion has been made on a former page. It would be very convenient, no doubt, to the "City" of Israel if all other "cities" disappeared and left an open field for Jewish operations. But they do not propose to disappear; and though our devotion to them may seem inexplicable to the Jew, he must accept it as a permanent force; for the patriotism of the European will not weaken.
In the United States this Liberal tradition or convention, this conception that the Jew must be treated as a full citizen, was far stronger even than it was in the West of Europe. It was in the very soul of the Constitution, and, what is more important, in the very soul of the people. For such a spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of immigrants from many different countries, all of whom were absorbed in and merged by the American spirit. If ever there was a field in which the false conception that a Jew could be a Jew and at the same time the full citizen of another nation, that field was the United States of America. Yet it is there that the problem is now reaching its most acute form; and the reason is that side by side with this strong civic tradition there goes acomplete freedom of speech and a very active public opinion. The reality became too much for theory and the Jew was recognized as something apart. He will never fall into the background again.
There remain to be considered the international forces which modify this general truth that the quarrel with the Jew is a quarrel with his increasing control over our affairs.
Those international forces are Religion—Islam and the Catholic Church—the force of Modern Capitalism, and the Reaction against that force of the Industrial Proletariat, the Reaction summed up in the term Socialism. All four are international.
The position of the Jew in Islam can be simply defined. In Islam he is treated with less method and therefore with less continued oppression than in Christendom, but always and permanently as something base and inferior, save in a few rare moments when he has the favour of particular rulers or is necessary to some special society, or is admired in a moment of intellectual brilliance.
Normally the Jew in Islam is an outcast. I know very well that the game is played of pretending that Islam is in some way kinder to him than we are. It is but a game: the playing of one party against another—of Islam against Christendom—by Israel, which is of neither. In Islam his superior position in Christendom is equally famed. History is too strong for such pretences. All the history of Islam, all the social spirit of Islam, to which there are countless witnesses to-day, give the same verdict about the general treatment of the Jew in that society.
So it was in independent Islam. But Islam,politically controlled to-day by the Western Christian powers, is another matter. Under that unstable state of affairs (no one can say how long it will last; the conflict between Islam and Christendom seems eternal and the rise and fall of that tide is indefinitely successive) the problem takes on quite another shape. France and England appear in Islam as the artificial supporters of the Jew.
Until quite lately it was the French who bore the worst odium of this in the eyes of the Mohammedans. Under the French the Jews in North Africa were often given a special, a superior position, which was an insult to every Mohammedan and which is still an insult to him. It is the weakest point of the French regime. In Algeria the Ghetto Jew may vote. The Arab may not. Even in Morocco, where things have been done more wisely than in Algiers, the difficulty is felt. How are you to treat a Jew differently in Morocco from the way in which he is treated in France? He is common to the two countries. If you treat him as if he were French, and therefore a member of the governing power, what of the pride of those lords of the Atlas and of Fez?
In the vastly larger field of Mohammedan control exercised by Britain, which, directly and indirectly, is ten times that of France, there was until lately less of this friction; but the tables have been turned, and to-day it is Britain which stands to the Mohammedan as the thruster-in of the Jew. It began with the support of Jewish finance in Egypt; it went on with the extended control over Indian commerce by Jews; it continued in the control of Indian currency by Jews. It has ended in the grotesque appointment to the Indian Viceroyaltyand the extraordinary experiment of Palestine.
To-day, at the moment in which I write, there is no doubt on the matter whatsoever: From Rabat on the Atlantic to the Bay of Bengal, the Western Powers are regarded as the agents of a Jewish intrusion which is intolerable to Islam. And whereas the chief blame lay, until quite a few years ago, upon the French, to-day it lies upon the British Government.
* * * * *
The rôle of the Catholic Church in the debate between the Jews and Christendom is the most discussed, the worst understood, of any point connected with the general problem. But it is capable of simple definition. Wherever the Catholic Church is powerful, and in proportion as it is powerful, the traditional principles of the civilization of which it is the soul and guardian will always be upheld. One of these principles is the sharp distinction between the Jew and ourselves. The Rationalist would say that this distinction was racial, and that it only found religious expression on account of its racial reality. His opponent would say that the origin of the quarrel was mainly religious; that it was a difference in religious tradition which formed the contrast between the Jew and Christendom. The former can cite as evidence the violent original contrast between the Roman Empire and the Jew, the latter the truth that religion, philosophy, is the formative force in every human society.
But whichever theory you adopt, the fact is there. The Catholic Church is the conservator of an age-long European tradition, and that tradition will never compromise with the fiction that a Jew canbe other than a Jew. Wherever the Catholic Church has power, and in proportion to its power, the Jewish problem will be recognized to the full.
On the other hand, there never has been and never will be, or can be, admission by Catholic morals of warfare against the Jew. Those morals are plain. That doctrine has been defined over and over again and acted upon throughout history. If indirect hostilities are opened against the majority by a minority in its midst, they may be repressed and punished. Still more important, insincere and pretended conversion, used as a cloak, may be repressed and punished. But though a community has the right to determine its own life, and (if it think it possible) even to eliminate (with justice, not with cruelty, violence or injustice in any form) an alien, a hostile minority; yet that minority has its own right to live, if not there, then elsewhere. It has its right—once it is rooted and traditional—to its own convictions, to its own tradition. If you allow it to live among you, you must allow it to live its own life save where that life threatens yours. The Catholic Church will always maintain reality, including the reality of that sharp distinction between the Jew and his hosts.
The opponent of the Catholic Church will tend, other things being equal, to support the Jew, because, under that distinction, the Jew may find himself ill at ease. The whole Protestant tradition of the North was for more than 300 years favourable to the Jew, partly indeed on account of its reliance upon the Jewish Scriptures, its absorption in the inspired Jewish folk-lore, but more because the alliance with the Jew was an alliance against the Catholic Church. Strong traces of that spirit stillremain. What has warred against it has been the sheer necessity in every country, Catholic or Protestant, Liberal or anti-Liberal, to preserve society against what each began to feel as a disruptive and an alien domination.
There remain the two novel forces—Modern Capitalism, and, protesting against it, its victim, the Modern Industrial Proletariat.
A few years ago anyone would have said that the opposition to the Jew was an opposition to capitalism alone; the Jew was the representative of capitalism, and Jewish finance was the particular aspect of Jewish power in which that power was universally hated. But we have seen all that change. To-day the strongest force against the Jew is on the other side. It is mainly aroused, not by the fear of capitalist forces, but by the fear of revolutionary forces.
I make bold to say that when the feeling against the Jew comes to the point of action, the Jew will necessarily, and in self-defence, fall back upon the leadership of the proletariat against industrial capitalism. He will—he must, from mere instinct, quite apart from calculation—use the line of cleavage which divides a society hostile to him. He will rely on the line of cleavage driven by the vast modern quarrel between the few possessors in the modern industrial world and their victims, the exploited millions.
So put, the opportunity of the Jew, if he be driven to extremities to raise an army in his defence, seems a great opportunity enough. It would seem easy for him to deflect all animosity against himself into animosity against the rich—safeguarding, of course (as he has done in Russia),the Jewish rich. But we must remember three formidable conditions which weaken that opportunity.
The first condition is this: The industrial millions are still quite a small minority and will probably in the future be an even smaller minority of the civilized white world. The war dealt them a heavy blow. The fact that the industrial proletariat is a town population, and therefore less and less productive, is another cause of weakness; their decline in health another. The fact that industrial capitalism depends upon the machine being kept going, and that its serfs are less and less willing to keep the machine going, is another.
Secondly, the area (and that is important) occupied by industrial capitalism is but a very small area of the surface of the civilized world.
Thirdly, the revolt of the Industrial Proletariat, if the Jews provoke it, will be short-lived. Either it will be defeated, or after destroying its masters it will, under Jewish leadership, destroy its own powers of production, as in Russia.
When the fury is exhausted, in a very short time the Jewish problem will reappear.
The proletarian battle may rage intensely, but it will be far from universal, and will not be sufficient, I think, to distract mankind from that other cross-problem of Jew and non-Jew, to which his attention is being more and more steadily directed.