This is a bold assertion, and will appear bolder yet to any one who has read his chapter in _The Richard Wagner Cult_. Wagner’s dislike of the Jews, which Nordau calls anti-semitism, and his views on social questions, which our alienist calls Anarchism, are pointed out as unfailing stigmata of degeneration. One of the methods of our alienist is to notice and make much of certain extreme opinions in people who are actually made, or who have made themselves, intensely objectionable, and then to point out that similar opinions and ideas are present in the mind of some celebrity, and then to draw the conclusion that this celebrity must be on the road to madness. Either he does not see himself, or he trusts his readers will not see, that by such methods every man in the world might be proved to some extent deranged. He forgets that exaggerated virtues become vices, and that some of the most prominent men in the world have had idiosyncrasies to which they have even given considerable play without at all coming within the range of degeneration. The anti-semitism in Germany, which Nordau ascribes to degeneration—probably with the approval of the majority of Jews—in that country, as well as in Russia, France, and the United States, springs from causes so patent, that no man who aspires to be considered an acute observer of his time should ignore them. Let us instance Russia first—a country where the latest wave of anti-semitism first took a violent form. Can any one who is acquainted with the typical financial history of the Russian villages wonder that the Jews in Russia should be looked upon as a scourge? What has happened in thousands of such villages is this. An energetic, clever Jew settles amongst the Russian _moujiks_, who combine thriftlessness and love of an easy life with many of the good qualities and innocence of primitive races. The Jew is bent on making money, and caring little about the opinion the community may form of him, and too brave to fear their enmity, he has no hesitation in taking up any kind of business, however unpopular it may render him. He willingly becomes a publican, a pawnbroker, a land-grabber, and, in combination with other Jews, a speculator and cornerer. His attention to business, his self-denial, his hardheartedness to his customers, his knowledge of the tricks of trades and finance, the ready support he gets from his co-religionists in other districts in carrying out his purposes, however derogatory they may be to the community—all this soon renders him the master of the situation. The stranger, who at first in such a friendly spirit invited his customer to drink his _vodka_ and borrow his money, is soon transformed into a harsh tyrant who, by hook or by crook, came into possession of all the belongings of the villagers, and calmly makes use of their destitution to extort from them their future earnings. The Jews, as a rule, on the one hand, and the Russians on the other,