It might have continued to flourish for yet another generation, at any
rate among the leading classes of this commercial community, but for two
new developments which broke it down, each development the result of so
large a toleration. The first was the growth of numbers, the second of
influence. What made that old falsehood glaring and that old grotesque
apparent was the enormous increase throughout all the West of the Jewish
poor, accompanied by the enormous increase of the power exercised by the
Jewish rich in public affairs. Men grew angry at finding themselves
pledged to a pretence that Jews were not, when their presence was
everywhere unavoidable, in the streets, and in the offices of
government. The fiction was possible when a very few financiers, mixed
with and lost in the polite world, were alone concerned. It became
impossible in the face of the vast new ghettoes of London, Manchester,
Bradford, Glasgow, and the formidable and growing list of Jewish and
half-Jewish Ministers, Viceroys, ambassadors, dictators of policy.
This contempt for and irritation with what I have called the nineteenth
century attitude, the Liberal attitude, was already apparent before the
end of that century. It was muttering during the South African war in
England and the Dreyfus case in France; it became vocal in the first
years of this century, especially in connection with parliamentary
scandals; with the Bolshevist rising in 1917 it became clamorous. It
will certainly grow. We already have a formidable minority prepared to
act against the interest of the Jew. It will in all probability become,
and that shortly, a majority. It may appear at any moment, on some
critical occasion, on some new provocation, as an overwhelming flood of
exasperated opinion.
All the more does it behove us to treat the old-fashioned neutrality and
fiction fairly; to examine it even with a bias in its favour; to set
down all that can be said in its defence before we reject it, as I think
we must now all reluctantly reject it. I say "reluctantly"; for after
all it was the fixed mood of our fathers, who did great things: we feel
their reproach when we abandon it, and there are still present with us
very many of our elders to whom our new anxiety is abhorrent.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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