The most extreme form of this opinion was to be found in people who spoke of the Jew as nothing other than a citizen with a particular religion. A state would be dominantly Catholic or Protestant, but it would contain smaller religious bodies, eager minorities, for which a place had to be found, side by side with the more or less indifferent majority. Catholic France had a five per cent and wealthy Huguenot minority. Protestant England had a seven per cent and poor Catholic minority. Protestant Holland had a large minority--more than a third--of Catholics, and so forth. It had become odious to nineteenth century thought that religious differences (which it regarded as nothing more than shades of doubtfully-held private opinion) should be the concern of the State. A large number of people thought of the Jews, not as a race, but only as a religion; and regarding all religion thus, they concluded that it could involve no diminution of citizenship. At the other end of the scale you had public men who fully appreciated the ultimate difficulties which would certainly arise from this inconclusive settlement of the matter. These regarded the Jews as a quite distinct nationality, and even as a nationality likely to clash with the national needs of its hosts; they would even (in private) express their hostility towards that nationality. None the less, they thought it must be treated in public life as though it did not exist. These men were most emphatic in their private letters and conversation--that the Jewish problem was _not_ a religious but a national one. Nevertheless (they said) it was necessary _to-day_ to mask that problem by a fiction and to _pretend_ that the Jew was just like everybody else save for his religion. All other solutions (they said) demanded a knowledge of history and of Europe not to be expected of the public at large; again, the Jews were so powerful that if _they_ desired the fiction to be supported they must be humoured. At any rate, recourse must be had, in our time at least, to this make-believe. To the new and already antagonistic attitude towards the Jews now rising so strongly everywhere throughout Western Europe (which is in part a reaction from the nineteenth century position), this old-fashioned way of denying the Jewish race or ignoring its existence by a fiction appears morally odious, and we wonder to-day why it commanded universal support. It involved a falsehood, of course, often a conscious falsehood; and it was also undignified; for there appears to our generation something as grotesque in denying the existence of the Jewish nation as in denying our own. But that the fiction was maintained sincerely, and that the grotesque and undignified side of it went unperceived, we can assure ourselves in a few moments' converse with any one of that older generation which maintained it and still represents it among us.