One after another the striking Jewish names of history are the names of Jews who have ardently pursued some moral or intellectual thesis; most of them—I had nearly said all of them—were poor men, and for the most part men deliberately poor because they preferred, as it is in the Jewish nature to prefer, the immediate work in hand to any other consideration.
It is these names that remain and are permanent and are the glory of the Jewish race.
* * * * *
There is one aspect of this Jewish wealth which I hesitate whether to put among the general or among the particular causes of the friction between that nation and its hosts.
It falls certainly among the general causes in the sense that it is connected with the Jewish character as a whole and not with any special method in that character's action. It is connected, I mean, with their very nature, and they cannot change that nature. On the other hand, it might be put among the particular causes on account of its quite modern and probably ephemeral character: it is, as it were, a particular cause of the friction proceeding from the general causes of character just enumerated, and this cause of friction is the presence of Jewish Monopoly.
It is an exceedingly dangerous point in the present situation. I do not think that the Jews have a sufficient appreciation of the risk they are running by its development. There is already something like a Jewish monopoly in high finance. There is a growing tendency to Jewish monopoly over the stage for instance, the fruit trade in London, and to a great extent the tobacco trade. There is the same element of Jewish monopoly in the silver trade, and in the control of various other metals, notably lead, nickel, quicksilver. What is most disquieting of all, this tendency to monopoly is spreading like a disease. One province after another falls under it and it acts as a most powerful irritant. It will perhaps prove the immediate cause of that explosion against the Jews which we all dread and which the best of us, I hope, are trying to avert.
It applies, of course, to a tiny fraction of the Jewish race as a whole. One could put the Jews who control lead, nickel, mercury and the rest into one small room: nor would that room contain very pleasant specimens of their race. You could get the great Jewish bankers who control international finance round one large dinner table, and I know dinner tables which have seen nearly all of them at one time or another. These monopolists, in strategic positions of universal control are an insignificant handful of men out of the millions of Israel, just as the great fortunes we have been discussing attach to an insignificant proportion of that race. Nevertheless, this claim to an exercise of monopoly brings hatred upon the Jews as a whole.
The thing is deservedly hated because it is exceedingly unnatural and exceedingly tyrannical. It would be tyrannical even for one of our own people to hold us up in the supply of things essential to us. It is intolerable in a people alien to us. When we come to discuss, in the next chapter, the unfortunate use of secrecy by the Jews (the most potent, perhaps, of the particular causes which have lead them into their present peril) we shall better understand another odious feature in this modern monopoly of control, which is the way in which it spreads underground and out of sight leaving the world in general ignorant that this, that and the other individual Jew is its master in the matter of some essential thing which he controls.
To put it plainly, these monopolies must be put an end to.