And, above all, this one additional fact must, in like manner, be grasped in any useful discussion of the problem of the Russian Jew.
The enormous development of the industrial resources and energies of Russia is too frequently ignored in an unfriendly foreign press, which finds space and speculation only for the external policy and generally exaggerated plans of the Tsar’s Government. What Russia is accused of coveting in Manchuria, or of devising in Persia, and not what she is strenuously and rapidly achieving in the sphere of her vast domestic activities, exercises the critical attention of West-European and American journalism. And yet, the wide and sure and extraordinary progress that is being made in the economic development of a great empire, as self-contained in its measureless natural resources as the United States, and with an assured domestic market for most of her manufactured products in a population of fully 140,000,000—growing at a rate of upwards of 2,000,000 annually out of a natural increase—ought to be a subject of infinitely greater concern to the public thought of commercial rivals like Great Britain and the United States—as it undoubtedly is to the keener sense of German competition—than what Russian policy may or may not mean in its diplomatic trend in the Far East.
Russia is at the beginning of an enormous manufacturing career. Her surplus urban population will be drawn upon for the needs of her mills and factories. An artisan class, in a comparatively new sphere of industrial energy, is rapidly growing, made up of young men who must inevitably gather new ideas of social life among the influences of associated labour; a class to be recruited from an uneducated peasantry, susceptible to new impressions of capital and labour, of wages and economic rights, of citizenship and political teachings, and of the contending human rivalries of class interests for wealth and influence and power in the rule of the state.
In a word, the government of a country in which freedom of the press is limited, and the right of public meeting denied; where no Parliament, or Congress, exists for the ventilation of theories, the discussion of reforms, or the chances of legislative redress, finds itself confronted with the problem of a huge working class, soon to number millions, and to be emancipated from peasant ignorance; a class, too, which must contribute its quota of strength to Russia’s enormous army. And this autocratic guardian of an Empire’s destinies says: “The enemy of my household is the Jew. I have treated him badly, and he naturally resents it. He retaliates by preaching Socialism in my industrial centres. He is in alliance with the avowed enemies of the Empire in Western Europe. For all these reasons, out he must go! Let him be off to any country whose Constitution may admit him to equal citizenship with people who are ruled by other systems and laws than ours. In Russia the Jew is both a domestic and an Imperial danger, and it is our duty to rid ourselves of its cause.”
CHAPTER VI
THE ZIONIST SOLUTION
NO truer general statement of the case of the Russian Jew, or nobler appeal to enlightened humanity in his behalf, has been made in our time than by Cardinal Manning, in a letter addressed to a London meeting in December, 1890. Every word of this superbly Christian epistle is as true and as applicable to-day as it was thirteen years ago, and I quote the concluding sentences of it here as being both a powerful argument in behalf of an oppressed people, and as a testimony to the liberty-loving spirit of a Cardinal of the Catholic Church:
“Six millions of men in Russia are so hemmed in and hedged about by penal laws as to residence, and food, and education, and property, and trade, and military service, and domiciliary visits, and police inspection as to justify the words, that ‘no Jew can earn a livelihood,’ and that ‘they are watched as criminals.’ The narratives before us may be highly coloured, they may be overcharged; but, all deductions made, they show both a violent and a refined injustice, which is perpetually as ‘iron entering the soul.’
“And, further, when the cry of such a multitude of suffering is wafted through the commonwealth of Europe, it is surely a part of the comity of nations that we should, with all due respect, make known what we have heard, in the confidence that, if things be so, the first to seek out and to treat such evils would be the supreme authority of the Realm from whence those wailing voices came.
“We show no disrespect in believing that what reaches our ears may not have reached the ears of those who are most highly exalted. Knowledge travels more readily on lower levels, and often does not ascend to the highest regions; the highest are, as a rule, the last to know the excesses and malpractices of their local authorities. We, therefore, with all due reverence, petition the Imperial Ruler of all the Russias to take account of all the Governors of the Jewish Pale; and even this we should not venture to do, if the sufferings alleged were not of such a kind and of such an extent as to violate the great and primary laws of human society. On this broad and solid base of natural law the jurisprudence of European civilisation rests. The public moral sense of all nations is created and sustained by participation in this universal common law; when this is anywhere broken, or wounded, it is not only sympathy but civilisation that has the privilege of respectful remonstrance.
“I am well aware of the counter allegations, not only of the anti-Semitic press, but of guarded and responsible adversaries; nevertheless, it is certain that races are as they are treated. How can citizens who are denied the rights of naturalisation be patriotic? How can men, who are only allowed to breathe the air, but not to own the soil under their feet, to eat only a food that is doubly taxed, to be slain in war, but never to command—how shall such a homeless, an exiled race live the life of the people among whom they are despised, or love the land which disowns them?