When Mr. Gladstone and his friends were fighting what seemed to be a losing battle, the Jews were against them. It was a Jew, Disraeli, who was the arch-plotter against the freeing of Bulgaria, and with a few exceptions his race was with him. The Jews hated Slavism, and the Slavs could not be expected to retort with soft words of brotherly love. In spite of this, I repeat that the peasant riots against the Jews in some provinces deserved blame; but the actions of mobs are never based upon religious principles or religious teaching.
In England, Russia's Jewish problem is not understood. I wrote in 1882, and the same applies now: "It may be wrong to dislike the Jews, but if two and a half million Chinese were monopolising all the best things in Southern England, and were multiplying even more rapidly than the natives of the soil, perhaps the cry 'England for the English' would not be so unpopular as some of our censors seem to think."
The feeling against the Japanese in certain parts of America is, I believe, every whit as bitter as the feeling against the Jews in Russia. I have always been puzzled why the Englishman cannot see this. The Jew is the Cuckoo of Russia; he is forcing the aborigines out of their own nest, and Russians not unnaturally say: "Our own Government helps him to do it, therefore it is time we helped ourselves."
People are prone to hasty judgment.
In The Times, on the occasion to which I have referred above, I wrote:
"The Landlordism of which your Irish farmers complain is but a pale shadow of the cruel servitude enforced on our peasants by the Jews. The disorders both in Ukraine and in Ireland are social and agrarian."
Eight years later the Jewish Question in Russia once more seemed to catch hold of the English imagination, and with increased violence.
A flaming up of Russian violence against the Jews in the south-western provinces of Russia was the cause. In London Christian sympathy was invoked, and the heads of the Church, nobility and members of Parliament besought the Lord Mayor to convene a meeting of protest with the object of preparing a Memorial to be sent to the Tsar "to give public expression of opinion respecting the renewed persecutions to which millions of the Jewish race are subjected in Russia, under the yoke of severe and exceptional edicts and disabilities."
I immediately wrote to The Times pointing out that before Englishmen began to look abroad for things to reform, they might well put their own house in order. I called attention to General Booth's recently published book, In Darkest England, which I had read with something akin to horror. I wonder what would have been said in England if meetings of protest against the Horrors of London had been held in Petrograd!