Take, again, another aspect of the nineteenth century liberal idea: the recognition of citizenship. You have had that over and over again in the attempted solutions of the past. It was the very essence of the Roman method. For though the Government of the Roman Empire was much too concerned with realities and with enduring work to accept any fiction in the matter, or to pretend in practice that the Jew was not a Jew; though, on the contrary, the Romans recognized at once the gulf between the Jews and themselves, and recognized it not only by their cruelty to the Jew but also by the privileges they granted him; yet it was always their policy to admit _citizenship_ as the primary distinction. The Jew who could claim that he was a full Roman citizen was, in the eyes of a Roman Tribunal, much more important in that capacity than in his social capacity as Jew. His "point," as we should say in our modern slang, was his citizenship, not his Judaism. So, I say, this solution has for a further argument the fact that in one part or another it is in touch with the various attempts our race has made in the past to solve the problem. There is yet another argument strongly in favour of the Liberal fiction which was attempted in the immediate past, and thought to have been successfully established. It is the consonance of that fiction with the whole body of modern custom and law, with the whole mass of modern economic and social habit. We travel so much, we mix so much, our economic activities are at once so complicated, so interlocked, and (unhappily) for the most part so secret, that any other way of meeting the Jews would have seemed--at any rate if it had appeared in the shape of a positive law--a monstrous anachronism. A man must meet his friends' friends and treat them as a normal part of the general society in which he moves. As the Jew permeated the society of the West everywhere (small though his numbers were in the West), as he everywhere intermarried with Europeans of the wealthier class, to insist in his presence upon his separate nationality would have been odious; it would have been like making a guest feel out of place in one's home. What is more, to by far the greater part of the wealthier and governing classes of the Western States the difference of race was so far masked that it had almost come to be forgotten. Sometimes a shock would revive it. An English squire would find, for instance, that a relation of his by marriage, whose Jewish name and descent he had never bothered about, was cousin to, and in close connection with, a person of a totally different name--an Oriental name--mixed up in some conspiracy, say, against the Russian State. Or he would learn with surprise that a learned University man with whom he had recently dined was the uncle of a socialist agitator in Vienna. But the shock would be a passing one, and the old mood of security would return.