That is why the first expressions of hostility in our time were so exaggerated and ill-proportioned. That is why so many of them were plainly mad. This very character of exaggeration, this very wildness in proportion, rendered those against whom the attack was delivered more contemptuous of it than they should have been. The forerunners of the present movement--I mean, of the movement hostile to Israel--were not calculated to excite the respect of their opponent or even to carry with them the men on their own side. They lacked that "common" sense which is the first quality of leadership. For the power of leadership implies a soul in common with those who are led. The enthusiast can lead permanently, but the extravagant man never for long. I say that these first attacks were on that account despised: they were unduly despised by those whom they menaced. There lay in reserve behind all the exaggeration and wildness a great bulk of very different opinion; the opinion of men normal in their appreciation of values and of proportion, not given to "seeing things," fully in touch with reality; men who know that they have hitherto only been silent through the action of fear, who despise themselves on that account and who are the more ready to act. For the sense of fear not only degrades but angers: at least in our race. The European who admits to himself that he has restrained an instinct not from religion, nor from a general sense of right, but from cowardice, is always angry with himself and awaits the moment when he can take his own revenge upon his own past and clear himself of reproach in his own eyes. Herein lies the peril to Israel of such a state of affairs. But with that I am not here concerned. I am only concerned with its effect upon ourselves. So long as we degrade ourselves, so long as we humiliate ourselves by our own cowardice, so long as we shirk all reasonable discussion, let alone all expression of hostility because we dread the consequences at the hands of our opponents, so long there are present in rising intensity two evil things: first, the postponement of the right solution; secondly, the turning of a reasoned policy into mere hatred with all the consequences that flow from such evil emotion. The longer we maintain whatever remains of that barrier to free speech (happily it is already crumbling) the longer do we produce the two fatal results of postponing justice and of creating enmity. The destruction of that barrier, the ridding of ourselves of fear in the matter, is, as is always the case in the exercising of this unmanly thing, a matter for individual effort. As the proverb goes, "Some one must bell the cat," which is another way of saying that if each man waits upon his neighbour, things will only grow worse and worse.