It discovered at its origin, presented as a barrier against it, the Jewish weapon of secrecy. The folly of the Jews in using such a weapon was never better shown, for of all defences it is the easiest to break down. The Anti-Semites countered at once by making every inquiry, by collecting their information, by finding out and exposing the true names hidden under the mask of false ones, by detecting and registering the relationships between men who pretended ignorance one of the other; it ferreted all through the ramifications of anonymous finance and invariably caught the Jew who was behind the great industrial insurance schemes, the Jew who was behind such and such a metal monopoly, the Jew who was behind such and such a news agency, the Jew who financed such and such a politician. That formidable library of exposure spreads daily, and when the opportunity for general publication is given there will be no answer to it.
It is the greatest mistake in the world to regard the Anti-Semite in the vast numerical strength he has now attained all over our civilization as wholly unpractical and therefore negligible, as a man who cannot construct a formidable plan of action simply because he has lost his sense of values. While the movement was growing the method of meeting it was always that of ridicule. It was a false method. The strength of Anti-Semitism was and is based not only on intensity of feeling, but also on industry, an industry very accurate in its methods. The Anti-Semitic pamphlets, newspapers and books, which the great daily press is so careful to boycott, form by now a mass of information upon the whole Jewish problem which is already overwhelming and still mounting up: and all of it hostile to the Jews. You will not find in it, of course, any material for the Defendant's Brief, but as a dossier for the Prosecution it is astonishing in extent and accuracy and correlation.
Now it is to be remembered in this connection that the human mind is influenced by documentation in a special manner. The exact citation of demonstrable things with chapter and verse convinces as can no other method, and the Anti-Semite is ready with such citation on a very large scale indeed, at the first moment when a general publicity, now denied, shall be granted to it.
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Moreover, this reliance of the Jew upon the futility of the Anti-Semitic propaganda omits one very important feature. The Anti-Semitic group is built up of men differing greatly in experience, in judgment and policy. And it is built up of strata differing greatly in the intensity of their hatred. It includes many a man with administrative experience, many a man of great business capacity, of acquired fortune, of talent in affairs. It includes men with a thorough knowledge of European diplomacy; it includes men (in great numbers) with the literary gift of expression for persuading their fellows. Not only is this true, but, as I have said, it includes a large "right wing" which, because they are more restrained in expression than the rest, will exercise a greater weight; men who are not at all blinded by their hatred, though hatred has become their chief motive; men who retain full capacity for organizing a plan of action and for carrying it out. It is true that there is a definite line which divides the Anti-Semite from the rest of those who are attempting to solve the Jewish problem. It is the line dividing those whose motive is peace from those whose motive is antagonism. It is the line dividing those whose object is action, against the Jew, and those whose object is a settlement. But on the Anti-Semitic side of that line—that is, among those whose determination is to suppress and eliminate Jewish influence to the extreme of their power—there are now very many more than the original enthusiasts who created the movement.
The Jews should further remember that to-day every one outside their own community is potentially an Anti-Semite. Not every one, perhaps not even yet a majority, at least in the directing and wealthier classes, is other than friendly or indifferent to the Jews, but there has grown up in every one not a Jew something of reaction against the Jewish power. It requires but an accident to change this from the latent and slight thing it is in most men to an angry passion. I have noticed that among the most violent of Anti-Semites are those who had passed some considerable portion of their early manhood in ignorance of the whole problem. These come across a Jew unexpectedly in some relation hostile to them—they lose money through some Jewish financial operation, or they connect, for the first time, in middle age, several misfortunes of theirs with a common element of Jewish action, or they find Jews mixed up in some attack on their country: thenceforward they become and remain unrepentant Anti-Semites.
The dupe, when he discovers he has been duped, is dangerous, and there is even a considerable category of those who have suffered nothing, even by accident, at the hand of the Jew, yet who, when they discover what the Jewish power is, feel they have been played with, and grow angry at the trickery.
It has been and will be with Anti-Semitism as with all movements. When they begin they are ridiculed. As they grow they come to be feared and boycotted; but of those that are successful it may be justly said that the moment of success begins when they turn the corner and from a fad become a fashion.
It is still (doubtfully) the fashion to separate oneself from the Anti-Semitic movement. You still hear men, when they write or speak upon the Jewish problem, no matter with what hostility to the Jew, excuse themselves as a rule at the beginning of their remarks by saying, "I am no Anti-Semite." For some flavour of the old ridicule still attaches to the name. But fashions change rapidly and the new fashion which comes in to support a growing thing, when it does arrive, arrives in a flood.
We can all of us remember the time when the talk of nationalization, the old State Socialist talk, was the talk of a few faddists who were everywhere ridiculed and despised. To-day it is the fashion; and the practice of State control, State support, the universality of State action, is such that it is those who oppose it who are now the faddists and the cranks.