The idea that the Jew should think himself our superior is something so incomprehensible to us that we forget the existence of the feeling. If it be constantly reiterated, for the purpose of dealing with this great political difficulty, it is perhaps reluctantly admitted, but still held as sort of abnormal, bewildering truth. I contend that the forgetfulness of that truth, the attempt to solve the problem without that truth remaining constant and fixed in the mind of the statesman, is in a very large measure the cause of our failure in the past; and that the way the Jew openly acts upon it in gesture, tone, manner, social assertion, is a very important factor in the quarrel between his race and ours. Consider the attitude of statesmanship in the past towards this vital conflict. In every such attitude I think the Jewish conviction of superiority has been omitted. For the attitudes taken up by European statesmen in the past towards the alien Jewish element in their midst have always been one of three sorts:-- (1) Either they have acted as though there were no Jewish nation, as though the Jew were merely a private citizen like any other who happened to have peculiar opinions and customs of his own but who was not substantially different from the men around him. (2) Or they have attempted to suppress, or to expel, or to destroy the Jew with ignominy and violence. (3) Or, while recognizing the existence of the Jewish nation as something separate from their own fellow-nationals whom they have to administrate, the statesmen have tried to arrive at equilibrium by a sort of pact in which Jewish separateness was recognized, _but under conditions of disability_. Now in all these three methods there is absent all recognition of the Jewish feeling of superiority. In the first it is obviously lacking because the whole idea of a Jewish nation is absent. It is equally obviously lacking from the second method, that of persecution: the persecutor instinctively acts as though the Jew felt himself to be an inferior. In the third method it is also absent, not in theory but in practice. For the statesmen who have acted thus in the past have not attempted to give the Jews a _separate_ status only, they have in point of fact nearly always given them an _inferior_ status. By so doing they have exasperated the Jewish national sentiment. For instance, certain nations have treated Jews as a separate people, as aliens, by forbidding them untrammelled residence, and enforcing registration. But when it came to taxation or freedom from military service, _then_ there was no special recognition of the Jew.