Here is a man, a neighbour present in the midst of my society. I put him to inconvenience if I treat him as an alien. I like him; I regard him as a friend. To treat such a man as though he were, although a friend, something separate, not to be admitted to certain functions of my community, offends the heart, as it also offends the sense of justice. Such a man may possess a great talent for, say, administration. Like all men possessed of a great talent, he must exercise it. You maim him if you do not allow him to exercise it. A rule forbidding him to take part in the administration of the society in which he finds himself, or even a feeling hindering him in such activities, creates, not only in him, but in those who are his hosts, a sense of injustice; and if it were possible to adopt a policy wherein the separate character of the Jew should be always in abeyance, so that he could be at the same time an Englishman and yet not an Englishman, or a Frenchman and yet not a Frenchman, then we should have a settlement which all good men ought to accept. Unfortunately that solution is false because, like many appeals to a virtuous instinct, it is sentimental. We call "sentimental" a policy or theory which attempts to reconcile contradictions. The sentimental man will equally abhor crime and its necessary punishment; disorder and an organized police. He likes to think of human life as though it did not come to an end. He likes to read of the passion of love without its concomitant of sexual conflict. He likes to read and think of great fortunes accumulated without avarice, cunning or theft. He likes to imagine an impossible world of mutually exclusive things. It makes him comfortable. Now we commit the fault of the sentimental man (the gravest of practical faults in politics) when we cling at this late date to a continuance of the old policy. You cannot have your cake and eat it too, you cannot at the same time have present in the world this ubiquitous fluid, yet closely organized Jewish community, and _at the same time_ each of the individuals composing it treated as though they were _not_ members of the nation which makes them all they are. You cannot at the same time treat a whole as one thing and its component parts as another. If you do, you are building on contradiction and you will, like everybody who builds on contradiction, run up against disaster. * * * * *