The implied fallacies current in the modern industrial revolutionary formulæ, in such phrases as "What does it matter to the working man whether he is exploited by a German or an English master?" or, again, "Why should the individual Tom Smith be sacrificed for an abstraction called England?" or again, "Nationalism is the great obstacle to the full development of humanity"--all that sort of thing, which we feel by instinct and can, if it is necessary, prove by reason to be nonsense in our case, sounds, in Jewish ears, as very good sense indeed. For in his case these things involve no fallacies at all; they apply to _him_ vividly and exactly. Why should the Jew be sacrificed for England? In what way is England, or France, or Ireland, or any other nation necessary to _him_? Again, is it not obvious in his eyes that these terms, "France, Ireland, England, Russia," are but abstractions? The _real_ thing in his eyes when he thinks of us, is the individual and his certain needs, especially his physical and material needs; because upon these there can be no doubt; upon these all are agreed; these are visible and tangible. "England," "France," "Poland" are whimsies. It is true that if you were to put his special case to the Jew with similar force and say, "No Jew should run any risk for Israel," "no Jew should suffer any inconvenience by trying to help a fellow Jew in distress," "the idea of Israel is a vague abstraction--all that counts is the individual Jew and especially his physical requirements"; if you said that sort of thing you would be offending the most profound instincts of Jewish patriotism and you would, in fact, clash with the overt and covert action of the Jews throughout the world. But the Jew would answer that, as his was an international polity, the argument applying to our national polity did not apply to him; that his feelings, though analogous to ours, were of a different kind, and that, at any rate, he cannot sacrifice a fine idea of his like Communism for our provincial and local habit, called by us Europeans "the love of our country." There is more than this in the business. Even those truths which we know to be truths have little effect upon us, unless they enter into the practice of our lives. There are, no doubt, a number of Jews who would admit at once the truth of any nationalist statement made by a European. When a Frenchman, or an Englishman, or a Russian says to him, "My first duty is to my people; I must keep them strong as well as in being and I must sacrifice my interests to theirs when it is necessary," there are many Jews who would answer: "You are quite right. The theory is sound. Man can only function as a part of a particular society," and so forth; but it is one thing to recognize a truth and another thing to experience it in one's bones, as it were, and these truths, even where he is admitting them, are truths indifferent to the Jew.