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.