It is a recognized fact that you can fool the heedless masses with certain catchwords as much as you please. It is the children’s game, _Schneider, leih’ mir die Scher_ (“Puss in the Corner”), arranged for the use of grown-up people: the one who tries to find a place knows perfectly well that the place to which the other directs him is not empty, but he runs toward it obediently, and meanwhile the wily fox swaps his place for a better and snaps his finger laughingly at the one dispossessed. This is the game played by those men who sin at the phrase “social question”: “The Jew has an empty place”—and the dupe makes for the Jew. Since he knows incidentally that his “friends” are not well disposed toward the Jew, he means at least to get this much advantage from the game, that he will vent his temper on the man; he can do this without any expenditure of great courage and without peril, for he has behind him a superior power which springs to his aid—if the aid costs nothing more than a few fisticuffs. As far as this dragging in of the social question is concerned, these florid speakers only commit the trifling error of adopting for their science absolutely faulty premises, so that their whole edifice is shaky at its foundation. No social reformer, no economist of the present time will look for the evil in accumulated capital as such. The man who should keep his millions locked up in his strong box in the form of packages of bank notes—for so the common throng imagines it—would ultimately perish of starvation, for it is a law of nature that what is not renewed is at last used up. Accumulated capital, then, is not in itself the cause but only the result. The evil has its roots elsewhere; and if once these roots are radically extirpated, then capital will of necessity circulate in such a way as to pass through all hands. A few representatives of the people have already indicated the solution of the social enigma—if I am not mistaken, Dr. Menger recently. It is not our affair, however, to go into this in detail here, for our aim is simply to bring out the fact that the Anti-Semitic movement on the basis of social science stands on feet of clay, and that the men who to bolster their cause trespass on this ground have only an utterly superficial acquaintance with the question, most of them none at all. But the average man allows himself to be persuaded easily, for he has learned a deal at school—but not logical thinking. Now if he sees that another is (or rather seems to be) doing this business for him, then so much the better; then he gladly lets the other take the trouble and believes that he has done his part when he joins in the hue and cry.