Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thoughtWells, H. G. (Herbert George)
History
Anticipations of the reaction of mechanical and scientific progress upon human life and thought
Wells, H. G. (Herbert George)
Civilization; Communication and traffic; Social prediction; Twentieth century -- Forecasts
And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races? How will it deal
with the black? how will it deal with the yellow man? how will it tackle
that alleged termite in the civilized woodwork, the Jew? Certainly not
as races at all. It will aim to establish, and it will at last, though
probably only after a second century has passed, establish a world-state
with a common language and a common rule. All over the world its roads,
its standards, its laws, and its apparatus of control will run. It will,
I have said, make the multiplication of those who fall behind a certain
standard of social efficiency unpleasant and difficult, and it will have
cast aside any coddling laws to save adult men from themselves.[52] It
will tolerate no dark corners where the people of the Abyss may fester,
no vast diffused slums of peasant proprietors, no stagnant
plague-preserves. Whatever men may come into its efficient citizenship
it will let come--white, black, red, or brown; the efficiency will be
the test. And the Jew also it will treat as any other man. It is said
that the Jew is incurably a parasite on the apparatus of credit. If
there are parasites on the apparatus of credit, that is a reason for the
legislative cleaning of the apparatus of credit, but it is no reason for
the special treatment of the Jew. If the Jew has a certain incurable
tendency to social parasitism, and we make social parasitism impossible,
we shall abolish the Jew, and if he has not, there is no need to abolish
the Jew. We are much more likely to find we have abolished the Caucasian
solicitor. I really do not understand the exceptional attitude people
take up against the Jews. There is something very ugly about many Jewish
faces, but there are Gentile faces just as coarse and gross. The Jew
asserts himself in relation to his nationality with a singular
tactlessness, but it is hardly for the English to blame that. Many Jews
are intensely vulgar in dress and bearing, materialistic in thought, and
cunning and base in method, but no more so than many Gentiles. The Jew
is mentally and physically precocious, and he ages and dies sooner than
the average European, but in that and in a certain disingenuousness he
is simply on all fours with the short, dark Welsh. He foregathers with
those of his own nation, and favours them against the stranger, but so
do the Scotch. I see nothing in his curious, dispersed nationality to
dread or dislike. He is a remnant and legacy of mediaevalism, a
sentimentalist, perhaps, but no furtive plotter against the present
progress of things. He was the mediaeval Liberal; his persistent
existence gave the lie to Catholic pretensions all through the days of
their ascendency, and to-day he gives the lie to all our yapping
"nationalisms," and sketches in his dispersed sympathies the coming of
the world-state. He has never been known to burke a school. Much of the
Jew's usury is no more than social scavenging. The Jew will probably
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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