There are any number of lines of investigation Mr. Brisbane might enter, and in any one of them his knowledge of his country and of its relation to this particular Question would be greatly enlarged.
Does Mr. Brisbane know who owns Alaska? He may have been under the impression, in common with the rest of us until we learned better, that it was owned by the United States. No, it is owned by the same people who are coming rapidly to own the United States.
Is Mr. Brisbane, from the vantage point afforded by his position in national journalism, even dimly aware that there are elements in our industrial unrest which neither "capital" nor "labor" accurately define? Has he ever caught a glimpse of another power which is neither "labor" nor "capital" in the productive sense, whose purpose and interest it is to keep labor and capital as far apart as possible, now by provoking labor, now by provoking capital? In his study of the industrial situation and its perfectly baffling mystery, Mr. Brisbane must have caught a flash of something behind the backmost scene. It would be good journalistic enterprise to find out what it is.
Has Mr. Brisbane ever printed the name of the men who control the sugar supply of the United States—does he know them—would he like to know them?
Has he ever looked into the woolen situation in this country, from the change of ownership in cotton lands, and the deliberate sabotage of cotton production by banking threats, right on through to the change in the price of cloth and clothing? And has he ever noted the names of the men he found on that piece of investigation? Would he like to know how it is done, and who does it? Mr. Brisbane could find all these things and give them to the public by using his efficient staff of investigators and writers on this Question.
Whether Mr. Brisbane would feel free to do this, he himself best knows. There may be reasons why he would not, private reasons, prudential reasons.
However that may be, there are no reasons why he should not make a complete study of the Question—a real study, not a superficial glance at it with an eye to its "news value"—and arrive at his own considered conclusion. There would be no intolerance about that. As it is now, Mr. Brisbane is not qualified to take a stand on either side of the Question; he simply brushes it aside as troublesome, as the old planters used brush aside the anti-slavery moralists; and for that reason the recent defense of the Jew is not a defense at all. It is more like a bid for favor.
Mr. Brisbane's chief aversion, apparently, is toward what he calls race prejudice and race hatred. Of course, if any man should fear that the study of an economic situation would plunge him into these serious aberrations of mind, he should be advised to avoid that line of study. There is something wrong either with the investigation or with the investigator when prejudice and hatred are the result. It is a mighty poor excuse, however, for an intelligent man to put forward either on his own behalf or on behalf of those whose minds he has had the privilege of molding over a course of years.
Prejudice and hatred are the very conditions which a scientific study of the Jewish Question will forestall and prevent. We prejudge what we do not know, and we hate what we do not understand; the study of the Jewish Question will bring knowledge and insight, and not to the Gentile only, but also to the Jew. The Jew needs this as much, even more than the Gentile. For if the Jew can be made to see, understand, and deal with certain matters, then a large part of the Question vanishes in the solution of ideal common sense. Awaking the Gentile to the facts about the Jew is only part of the work; awaking the Jew to the facts about the Question is an indispensable part. The big initial victory to be achieved is to transform Gentiles from being mere attackers and to transform Jews from being mere defenders, both of them special pleaders for partisan views, and to turn them both into investigators. The investigation will show both Gentile and Jew at fault, and the road will then be clear for wisdom to work out a result, if there should perchance be that much wisdom left in the race.
There is a serious snare in all this plea for tolerance. Tolerance is first a tolerance of the truth. Tolerance is urged today for the sake of suppression. There can be no tolerance until there is first a full understanding of what is tolerated. Ignorance, suppression, silence, collusion—these are not tolerance. The Jew never has been really tolerated in the higher sense because he has never been understood. Mr. Brisbane does not assist the understanding of this people by reading a "simply written" book and flinging a few Jewish names about in a sea of type. He owes it to his own mind to get into the Question, whether he makes newspaper use of his discoveries or not.