The second main cause of friction upon our side is the unintelligence of our dealing with the Jews. That unintelligence is allied, of course, to the disingenuousness of which I have spoken; but it is a separate thing none the less, and we can learn from the Jews its opposite, for _their_ dealings with _us_ are always intelligent. They know what they are driving at in those relations, though they often misunderstand the material with which they deal. But we, over and over again, would seem not even to know what we are driving at. What could be more unintelligent, for instance, than the special forms of courtesy with which the Jew is treated? I am not talking of the elaborate, false friendship which I have just dealt with under the head of disingenuousness, but of the genuine attempts at courtesy towards this alien people--the courtesy expressed by those who have no intimate relations with them, and do not desire to have intimate relations with them. It is almost invariably, in those who commonly avoid the Jews, a courtesy which expresses patronage on the surface of it. It may be compared with the courtesy that rich men show to poor men--as offensive a thing as there is in the world. And how unintelligent is our dealing with any particular Jewish problem; for instance, the problem of Jewish immigration! We mask it under false names, calling it "the alien question," "Russian immigration," "the influx of undesirables from Eastern and Central Europe," and any number of other timorous equivalents. The process is one of cowardly falsehood, but the falsehood is not more remarkable than the stupidity, for no one is taken in and least of all the Jews themselves. This unintelligence extends to many another field. How unintelligent are the efforts of the writers who would, as it were, make amends to the Jews for former persecution by putting imaginary Jew heroes into their books. In this particular we offend less than did our fathers of the Victorian period. Dickens' offence was grave. He disliked Jews instinctively; when he wrote of a Jew according to his inclination he made him out a criminal. Hearing that he must make amends for this action, he introduced a Jew who is like nothing on earth--a sort of compound of an Arab Sheik and a Family Bible picture from the Old Testament, and the whole embroidered on an utterly non-Jewish--a purely English character.