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.