In the United States this Liberal tradition or convention, this conception that the Jew must be treated as a full citizen, was far stronger even than it was in the West of Europe. It was in the very soul of the Constitution, and, what is more important, in the very soul of the people. For such a spirit was nourished not only in doctrine but in practice by the appearance, in vast quantities, of immigrants from many different countries, all of whom were absorbed in and merged by the American spirit. If ever there was a field in which the false conception that a Jew could be a Jew and at the same time the full citizen of another nation, that field was the United States of America. Yet it is there that the problem is now reaching its most acute form; and the reason is that side by side with this strong civic tradition there goes a complete freedom of speech and a very active public opinion. The reality became too much for theory and the Jew was recognized as something apart. He will never fall into the background again. There remain to be considered the international forces which modify this general truth that the quarrel with the Jew is a quarrel with his increasing control over our affairs. Those international forces are Religion--Islam and the Catholic Church--the force of Modern Capitalism, and the Reaction against that force of the Industrial Proletariat, the Reaction summed up in the term Socialism. All four are international. The position of the Jew in Islam can be simply defined. In Islam he is treated with less method and therefore with less continued oppression than in Christendom, but always and permanently as something base and inferior, save in a few rare moments when he has the favour of particular rulers or is necessary to some special society, or is admired in a moment of intellectual brilliance. Normally the Jew in Islam is an outcast. I know very well that the game is played of pretending that Islam is in some way kinder to him than we are. It is but a game: the playing of one party against another--of Islam against Christendom--by Israel, which is of neither. In Islam his superior position in Christendom is equally famed. History is too strong for such pretences. All the history of Islam, all the social spirit of Islam, to which there are countless witnesses to-day, give the same verdict about the general treatment of the Jew in that society. So it was in independent Islam. But Islam, politically controlled to-day by the Western Christian powers, is another matter. Under that unstable state of affairs (no one can say how long it will last; the conflict between Islam and Christendom seems eternal and the rise and fall of that tide is indefinitely successive) the problem takes on quite another shape. France and England appear in Islam as the artificial supporters of the Jew.