Another form taken by that open expression of the sense of superiority among the Jews: It lends to all their actions in our State a certain assurance and solidity which vastly strengthens their power of resistance, no doubt, but also provokes their misfortunes. The religious interpreter of history might say that they had been specially endowed with this sense by Providence because Providence intended them to survive as a national unit miraculously, in the face of every disability; to remain themselves for 2,000 years under conditions which would have destroyed any other people in perhaps a century: and yet intended to suffer. The rationalist will say that the expression of a sense of superiority, and the power of resistance that accompanies it are but different names for the same thing; that but for the presence of that expression of superiority the resistance could not have succeeded, but for the resistance there could have been no persecution; that there was no design in the matter, only the chance presence of a particular quality which has produced its necessary and logical effect. But whichever be the true explanation, the historical fact remains, that this sense of superiority produced an open and overweening expression of it whenever the Jews have been free to give vent to their feelings, and that while it has had, as one great consequence, the strengthening of the identity, permanence, survival of the Jewish people, it has also had, for another great consequence, their recurrent oppression following on every period of freedom. There is one last thing to be said, which it is almost impossible to say without the danger of giving pain and therefore of confusing the problem and making the solution more difficult. But it must be said, because, if we shirk it, the problem is confused the more. It is this: While it is undoubtedly true, and will always be true, that a Jew feels himself the superior of his hosts, it is also true that his hosts feel themselves immeasurably superior to the Jew. We can only arrive at a just and peaceable solution of our difficulties by remembering that the Jew, to whom we have given special and alien status in the Commonwealth, is all the while thinking of himself as our superior. But on his side the Jew must recognize, however unpalatable to him the recognition may be, that those among whom he is living and whose inferiority he takes for granted, on _their_ side regard him as something much less than themselves.