The substance of the following three essays was originally contributed, in the form of independent articles to the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, and the Daily Telegraph respectively. They have been carefully revised, much amplified, and largely rewritten in order to make a connected argument and avoid repetition. Footnotes of authorities have been added. My grateful acknowledgments are due to the Editors of the Manchester Guardian, the Spectator, and the Daily Telegraph for their kindness in permitting this republication.
I confess to a feeling of shame at having to write this pamphlet at all. That reputable newspapers in this country should be seeking to transplant here the seeds of Prussian anti-Semitism, and that they should employ for this purpose devices so questionable and a literature so melodramatically silly, cannot but cause a sense of humiliation to any self-respecting Englishman. It is for this reason that I have strictly limited myself to an examination of the specific charges formulated by these publications. I cannot bring myself to believe that it is necessary to deal with them on a larger scale.
L.W.
Gray's Inn, London, W.C.
November, 1920.
THE MYTH OF THE JEWISH MENACE
I
THE DEMONOLOGY OF THE "MORNING POST"
The prodigious essay on "The Cause of World Unrest" which the Morning Post has lately published in seventeen articles and some sixty columns of printed matter[1] is a document on which the student of political thought in England will dwell sadly. Over a century ago, in world circumstances of startling similarity and almost from the same party standpoint, Burke gave us, in his "Causes of the Present Discontents," his "Reflections," and his "Regicide Peace" a large and stately piece of political philosophy. To-day the leading organ of Conservative opinion in this country can only expound a sort of political demonology, borrowed partly from the obscurantists of Bourbon Clericalism and partly from the fanatics of Hohenzollern Anti-Semitism. It would be merciful to pass by this strange effort in silence, but unfortunately there is reason to believe that, with all its grotesqueness, it is calculated to work a good deal of mischief. Credulous and vicious people are still abundant, and they are not confined to the crowd. Mr. Winston Churchill has darkly hinted that he reads the signs of the times much in the same way as the Morning Post, and a curious story is current that the translation of the Russian forgery on which the theory of that journal mainly rests was actually made in the Intelligence Department of the War Office. Then there are Mr. Chesterton and Mr. Belloc and quite a conventicle of smaller fry who have been vainly preaching the same apocalypse for years. The Morning Post may bring them recruits, and that assuredly is not desirable.