But after a while the mother thinks of the wickedness of the Jews:—
Yet to read the shameful story
How the Jews abused their King,
How they served the Lord of Glory,
Makes me angry while I sing.
In these days, the Anti-Semites are not so likely to be angry while they sing, as while they cast up their accounts.
******
The natural sciences discriminate between classes rather than between individuals. Sociology deals with groups, and not with persons. Anthropology acquaints us with the aboriginal and unmoralized man. It emphasizes the solidarity of the clan and the persistence of the cult. Experimental psychology is at present interested in the sub-conscious and instinctive life. For its purpose it treats a man as a series of nervous reactions. Human history is being rewritten as a branch of Natural History. Eliminating the part played by personal will, it exhibits an age-long warfare between nations and races.
This is all very well so long as we remember what it is that we are studying. Races, cults, and social groups exist and have their history. There is no harm in defining the salient characteristics of a race, and saying that, on the whole, one race is inferior to another. The difficulty comes when this rough average is made the dead line beyond which an individual is not allowed to pass.
In our Comedy of Errors, which is always slipping into tragedy, there are two Dromios on the stage,—the Race and the Individual. The Race is an abstraction which can bear any amount of punishment without flinching. You may say anything you please about it and not go far wrong. It is like criticising a composite photograph. There is nothing personal about it. Who is offended at the caricatures of Brother Jonathan or of John Bull? We recognize certain persistent national traits, but we also recognize the element of good-humored exaggeration. The Jew, the Slav, the Celt, the Anglo-Saxon have existed for ages. Each has admired himself, and been correspondingly disliked by others. Even the Negro as a racial abstraction is not sensitive. You may, if you will, take up the text, so much quoted a generation ago, “Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be.... God shall enlarge Japheth, and he shall dwell in the tents of Shem; and Canaan shall be his servant.” Dromio Africanus listens unmoved to the exegesis of Petroleum V. Nasby and his compeers at the Crossroads: “God cust Canaan, and sed he shood be a servant forever. Did he mean us to pay him wages? Not eny: for ef he hed he wood hev ordered our tastes and habits so es we shood hev hed the wherewithal to do it.”