That large and greatly increasing body of men who so fear Jewish domination, and are vigorously reacting against the Jews under the influence of that fear, are much more likely to end with injustice to the Jew than with subservience to him. It is from this atmosphere that the great misfortunes of the past have arisen. It is of the essence of any solution that this mood should be exorcised upon the one side as upon the other. There is another theory which I have read of in more than one learned Jewish treatise and which has been repeated (after Jewish authors themselves had launched it) by many non-Jewish societies and historians, to the effect that the very survival of the Jews, their very existence as a separate community, was due to conditions common in the past, now disappeared, and that therefore the present difficulties can safely be left to time. This is, of course, to make the general assertion that the Jewish race can be absorbed, and that absorption is the solution. That conclusion I summarily rejected in the earlier pages of this book on the historical ground that it has had the most favourable circumstances for success and yet has always failed. But in the particular case stated it has an argument of its own and one needing very special examination: it is this:-- Those who defend this theory tell us that however favourable the opportunities for absorption were in the past they are nothing to the opportunities of the present and the future, and that therefore the argument from history fails. In the past (they tell us) the Jews were exclusive and even made of their exclusiveness a religion. They on their side mixed as little as possible with the world around them and we on our side maintained that exclusion by an equal insistence upon the difference between ourselves and them. We had in those days, it is maintained, a religion based upon the Incarnation and therefore abhorrent to the Jew; that religion is dead or dying, and with it the tendency to exclusion from outside has disappeared; while on the Jewish side there is also a great weakening of the old religious bond, less of the old Messianic dogma, and on both sides the enormous melting-pot[3] that makes for absorption with an intensity and rapidity quite unknown in the past. It was one thing to absorb the Jew when it took a month to go as an ordinary traveller from London to Rome, it is another thing when it takes three days. It was one thing to absorb the Jew when in the greater part of cases there was a bar to the mixing of the races, based upon the nerves of religion, it is quite another thing to absorb the Jew when those most powerful of emotional forces have disappeared--and so forth. Now the reasons which bring me to reject this theory are two-fold.