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 novel[280] 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.