Chapter XXIII: Anti-Semitism (3)

We now seem to be entering on a new chapter in our history. It looks as though the Liberal current which has carried the nation thus far has spent its force, and the counter-current is asserting itself. The House of Commons still is an assembly of popular representatives, but it has lost much of its power for good or evil, and much of the respect which was once paid to it. _Laissez-faire_ is only mentioned to be derided, the principle of free competition is openly assailed, internationalism is branded as cosmopolitanism and appeals to humanity as proofs of morbid sentimentality; while protection is confidently advocated in commerce and industry. How has this change of sentiment come about? One of its causes may be found in the growth of the Imperial idea. The history of all nations shows that national expansion, though often achieved by individual enterprise, can only be maintained by organised effort, by concentration of power in a few hands, and by a proportionate diminution of individual freedom. Democracy and Empire have never flourished together. That the one may prosper, the other must perish. For this reason we find the true democrat necessarily what is now called amongst us a Little Englander; the true Imperialist as necessarily a dictator. The anti-democratic reaction in England was inevitable, owing partly to the expansion of Greater Britain itself, and partly to the development of other countries on Imperialist and despotic lines. For it is now less possible than ever for England to develop uninfluenced by the example of her neighbours. And the example set by those neighbours, as has been shown, is narrow and militant nationalism in their relations with foreigners, and with regard to domestic matters despotism and centralisation. But the growth of this inevitable reaction has in England been accelerated by other and more specific causes.

For a generation after the establishment of Free Trade England enjoyed an unparalleled prosperity--an unchallenged commercial and industrial supremacy. The British flag commanded the seas over which British fleets carried the products of British labour to the four corners of the earth, and the British traveller abroad made himself unpopular and ridiculous by patronising Mont Blanc and by looking superciliously down upon all who had not the good fortune to be born British. Those were the proud days in which Lord Palmerston described Prussia as a country of “d----d professors,” and Matthew Arnold wrote his parable of the young Englishman and the upset perambulator.

But this undisputed sovereignty could not last for ever. Europe recovered from the devastating cataclysm which had left England alone unscathed. The heaps of ruins with which the Napoleonic wars had strewn the Continent were replaced by new edifices. Young states arose out of the ashes of the old ones, and a new life chased away the shadows of death. All these renovated countries, having once set their houses in comparative order, began to look abroad for expansion. Germany proved with marvellous quickness that she could produce other things than “d----d professors”; France likewise; not to mention the smaller countries of Belgium, Holland, Denmark, and Switzerland. On the other side of the Atlantic also the American Republic emerged from the ordeal of her Civil War with renewed vigour, which soon displayed itself in commercial and industrial activity. The upshot of this perfectly natural revolution was that England found herself degraded from an autocratic mistress of the world’s trade to the position of one among many competitors. We saw with surprise and dismay that we were no longer the models and the despair of others. Then our Olympian complacency gave place to nervous anxiety, and our arrogant self-sufficiency was succeeded by serious scepticism concerning the titles on which our former estimate of ourselves rested. We ceased to brag of our own “unparalleled progress,” and began to watch more and more carefully the progress achieved by others. We acquired the habit of asking ourselves how is it that the monopoly which we had foolishly regarded as our inalienable birthright was slipping from our hands; whence sprang this rapid development of countries which until the last half-century were in their commercial and industrial infancy; how came it to pass that nations which until yesterday were content to copy us slavishly or to admire us passively are to-day rivalling us so successfully? This inquiry led to the discovery that the foreigner’s progress arose from superior intelligence, better education, greater adaptability, and other advantages of a similar nature. We came to the conclusion that, unless we rouse ourselves to strenuous exertion, we shall be left behind in the race. This conviction has already found a most laudable expression in the earnest efforts made in every part of England to revise and to improve our commercial and industrial methods and by special education to qualify ourselves for the struggle under the new conditions. So far our loss of the monopoly has proved a blessing in disguise, for it has aroused that spirit of manly emulation to which undisputed supremacy is fatal. But, unfortunately, the same consciousness of our altered position relatively to the rest of the world has also aroused a spirit of an entirely different kind. Many among us--too intelligent to ignore the changed state of things, not intelligent enough to diagnose the real cause of the change--have come to the conclusion that our competitors owe their success to those very fiscal and administrative fetters which we had discarded as obsolete, and that if we wish to save ourselves from ultimate defeat we must adopt their antiquated systems. Freedom, they say, means anarchy, and victory is only possible by discipline, organisation, centralisation. Individualism is hostile to efficiency. The democratic ideal is out of date. At the same time, the cult of humanitarianism has been driven out by the cult of nationalism.

As might have been foreseen by anyone who has watched the march of events with some comprehension of their meaning, the cry for protection was accompanied by the demand for the exclusion of alien immigrants. The sequence was logical and unavoidable. If it is to our profit to exclude the products of foreign labour by prohibitive duties, it is in the same way to our profit to exclude the foreign labourer. The two things, whether viewed from the economic point of view, the political, or the psychological, are indissolubly connected. They both are one expression of the twofold tendencies towards despotism and nationalism--control over the individual and hostility to the foreigner--reaction against free competition on the one hand and against internationalism on the other. Lukewarm or unintelligent pleaders for the one policy may oppose the other. But that the two demands are only two manifestations of one and the same principle is proved by the fact that, in their most uncompromising form, they are defended by the same advocates. At a meeting of the members of an East-end club which the late Home Secretary addressed on Dec. 7, 1903, a resolution, approving of the new trade policy was moved by Mr. D. J. Morgan, M.P., and was seconded by Major Evans Gordon, M.P., both prominent champions of the anti-alien cause. A protectionist writer on the subject of foreign immigration into England concludes his study of the problem with the following illuminating remarks: “Strong rivals, devoid of sentimentality and of the capacity for being fascinated by magic words--such as the word ‘free’--are striving to thrust us from our position. It is full time for us to abandon our long-played _rôle_ of philanthropist among nations, and so to order our affairs, social and economic, that we reap as much advantage as possible and foreign nations as little. And one of these things to be altered is the free entry of foreigners into England.”[268]

As the numbers of foreign immigrants and the numbers of native unemployed went on steadily increasing, the outcry against the former went on steadily gaining in volume and vigour, and at last cohered into a definite campaign which, as might have been expected from the nature of the case, included in its ranks not only the friends of their own country, but the enemies of every other; not only aggressive Protectionists, but also philosophical Revisionists; not only the advocates of the British labourer, but also the adversaries of the Jew.

The first authoritative alarm of the Alien Peril was sounded in January, 1902, when Mr. Balfour, in the course of the debate on the Speech from the Throne, pointed out that, owing to America’s adoption of severer measures against alien immigration, England would be receiving even more immigrants than before. Not long afterwards a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the matter, and, after forty-nine public sittings, in which the evidence of one hundred and seventy-five witnesses was received, came to the conclusion that, although “it has not been proved that there is any serious direct displacement of skilled English labour,” “the continuous stream of fresh arrivals produces a glut in the unskilled labour market.”[269] Five out of the seven members recommended the exclusion of certain classes of immigrants, who were pronounced “undesirable” either on account of their character or owing to the economic position of the districts in which they settled in great numbers, and expressed the hope that the legislature would act on their recommendation.

Both objections--moral and economic--had been anticipated outside the Commission. On one occasion a London magistrate, in sentencing a foreign thief to six months’ hard labour, availed himself of the opportunity for stating that “the case fully illustrated how desirable and necessary it was to check the unwelcome invasion of alien criminals. At present,” he said, “the dregs of foreign countries flowed incessantly into hospitable England, and within a few days were engaged in committing all sorts of offences. The sooner Parliament framed laws to prohibit the landing of these undesirables the better.”[270] Such cases, and cases far less serious, accompanied by similar comments from the bench, became matters of daily occurrence. So unpopular did foreigners become that their exclusion would be urged because some of them at times obstructed thoroughfares with their wheel barrows, thus wasting the valuable time of the Police Courts and disturbing the equanimity of the Metropolitan constables. One day, for example, a Russian lad was brought up at the City Summons Court for causing obstruction with a barrow of fruit. Sir Henry Knight, the Magistrate, imposed on the offender a fine of two shillings, and, with admirable sense of proportion, improved the occasion as follows: “We must have these people stopped from being dumped down upon us. It is abominable!”[271]

On February 16, 1903, was formed an Immigration Reform Association, with the object of enlightening the public in general and legislators in particular on the alien question by means of pamphlets widely distributed among Members of Parliament and other speakers, as well as among working-class organisations. The information thus liberally supplied emphasised the connection of foreign immigrants with crime and vice, described the economic evils which result from the inflow of resourceless aliens and from their competition with the native labourers, and dwelt with especial minuteness on the overcrowding of certain districts of East London and the consequent dispossession of the native working population by the invaders. Towards the end of the same year (Dec. 7, 1903), Mr. Akers-Douglas, the Home Secretary, addressing the members of an East-end London Club, discoursed, amid great applause, on “the dumping of undesirable aliens,” quoting statistics to show how rapidly their numbers grew, and how the grievances of overcrowding, of crime and of competition grew with them, and concluding with the assurance that the Government was seriously contemplating stringent measures for checking the evil in time. A few months later (March 29, 1904) the Home Secretary redeemed his promise by bringing in a Bill “to make provision with respect to the Immigration of Aliens, and other matters incidental thereto.”[272]

In introducing this Bill Mr. Akers-Douglas took pains to persuade the House that the proposed measures were not directed against aliens as aliens, but against aliens as undesirables, and then proceeded to describe the evils, already mentioned, which the Bill was intended to remedy. Sir Charles Dilke protested against the measure on the ground that the majority of the aliens who came to this country, and who would be struck by the Bill, were the helpless victims of political and religious persecution. He affirmed that the native tradespeople had no grievance against foreign labourers, because they were able to absorb the comparatively small number of the latter by making them into good trade unionists. He disputed the figures quoted by the Home Secretary, asserting, on the strength of the Census and of the Royal Commission’s own Report, that the number of foreigners in this country all told was a mere drop in the ocean, and infinitely smaller than the number of foreigners resident in almost every other civilised country--in fact, that many more destitute Britons emigrated from the United Kingdom than destitute aliens came into it. The speaker next pointed out that the Bill would be used to exclude from England people whom afterwards we should be ashamed to have excluded. This measure, he said, had it been enforced at the time of the Paris Commune, would certainly have excluded many of the most distinguished exiles who arrived here in a state of starvation and whose return was afterwards welcomed by France with every expression of gratitude to this country for having maintained them--men like Dalou, one of the greatest sculptors of modern times, like the brothers Reclus, and many of the greatest scientists to whom we had been proud to give hospitality, or men like Prince Peter Kropotkin, who arrived in England stripped of every particle of his property by the Russian Government and was welcomed by the people of this country. The Russian Jews, against whom the heaviest allegations were made, inhabited Stepney and some portions of the East-end, and there were some in Manchester and Leeds. Of these some 20,000 were engaged in the tailoring industry, some 3500 in cabinet-making, and some 3000 in the boot and shoe trade. These were the whole of the people against whom this agitation was directed. The speaker had seen the broken-down prisoners from the “pale” sent for political reasons across Siberia. Those men were not the dangerous persons they were represented to be, miserable as might be their condition when they came here. They were not of a stock inferior to our own; and their stock, when it mixed with our own in the course of years, he believed, went rather to improve than to deteriorate the British race.

Leave was then given to bring in the Bill, which was read a first time. A month later (April 25, 1904) the Bill stood for second reading in the House of Commons and gave rise to a long and lively debate which lasted through the afternoon and evening sittings. In the course of the debate, the measure was discussed in all its aspects, was strenuously attacked by one party and defended as strenuously by the other. Sir Charles Dilke was again foremost in the fray. He moved an amendment “that this House, holding that the evils of low-priced alien labour can best be met by legislation to prevent sweating, desires to assure itself, before assenting to the Aliens Bill, that sufficient regard is had in the proposed measure to the retention of the principle of asylum for the victims of persecution.” This amendment the mover supported by an eloquent speech in which, having once more traversed the Home Secretary’s statistics, and once more reminded the House that these immigrants against whom the measure was directed were the victims of persecution for their religion--people whose friends had been burnt alive and hunted from their homes to death--finally expressed his conviction that behind this measure, not in the House, of course, but in the country, there was kindled an anti-Jewish feeling, warning those members of the Conservative party who participated in this agitation that they had raised a devil which they would find it very difficult to lay.

This statement, naturally enough, provoked many contradictions; but the speaker, in reply, justly asserted that the fact was patent to all readers of the newspapers which supported the Bill.

Other Liberal orators followed, some of whom described the Bill as an example of panic legislation, and others as partly prompted by an agitation directed against the Jews. Among the latter was Mr. Trevelyan, who remarked that the measure aimed almost as much at those who managed to prosper as at those who were poverty-stricken, and that all the evidence went to prove that the great mass of these aliens were sober and industrious people who in the long run became good citizens. He maintained that among many people outside the House there was a frankly anti-Semitic movement which he dreaded and deplored, and that this petty and evil step was in exactly the same direction as that in which the Governments of Russia and Roumania had been going.

The long debate ended with a division, in which the amendment was negatived by a Government majority of 124, and the Bill was read a second time. But its triumph was far from being assured by this victory. Outside the House there was as much divergence of opinion on the merits of the measure, its scope, and its probable effects as there was inside, and the rival parties spared no pains to present the motives of their adversaries in the least flattering colours. Thus, while the advocates of the Bill denounced the opposition to it as “a net constructed with the primary purpose of catching votes,”[273] its opponents derided it as “an attempt on the part of the Government to gratify a small but noisy section of their supporters, and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.”[274]

The English Jews were not left unmoved by the fresh calamity which threatened their suffering brethren. As early as May, 1903, while the Royal Commission was still carrying on its investigations, Mr. Israel Zangwill, at a mass meeting of Zionists, foretold the recommendations of the Commission, and expressed the fear that the exclusion of undesirable aliens might prove only the beginning of worse things. “The Jews came over to England with the Conqueror,” he said, “but all their services to him and his successors did not prevent their expulsion two and a quarter centuries later. He did not wish to be an alarmist, but nobody who had been caught in a crowd of mafficking hooligans could doubt the possibility of anti-Jewish riots even in London.”[275] And when, a year later, the speaker’s prediction as to the result of the Commission’s work was fulfilled, he again, at another Zionist meeting, said that England “was catching the epidemic which rages everywhere against the Jew.”[276] This statement was reported to Mr. Balfour, who replied that “he believed it to be quite untrue,” declaring that “the Aliens Bill is designed to protect the country, not against the Jew, but against the undesirable alien, quite irrespective of his nationality or his creed. I should regard the rise and growth of any anti-Semitic feeling in this country as a most serious national misfortune.”[277] In a letter to _The Times_ Mr. Zangwill reiterated his assertion, and, while absolving Mr. Balfour himself from anti-Semitism, he insisted that the Aliens Bill was inspired by anti-Semites--a statement which he once more repeated emphatically in the course of an interview with a newspaper representative.[278]

Nor was the indignation confined to Jews only. Speaking at the annual meeting of the British Jews’ Society in Exeter Hall the Rev. Peter Thomson declared that the Jew had been rather a blessing to the East-end than otherwise, and, as the best testimony of this, he quoted the Chairman of the City of London Brewery Company, who had lamented that the dividends had gone down because of the immigration of the Jews into the district where their public houses were situated, concluding that he himself had no blessing for the Aliens Bill.[279]

A few days later (May 19) a deputation of the Jewish community sought an interview with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Home Affairs and through Lord Rothschild, who introduced it, drew attention to the clauses of the Bill which would press harshly and unjustly on the numerous Jewish immigrants into this country, pointing out that the investigations of the Royal Commission had proved that the advent of the aliens was not a source of disadvantage, but of benefit to England, that the increase of the alien population was insignificant when compared with that of America, and that the Bill provided no machinery for the exclusion of the really undesirable, such as existed in America, but proposed to establish in this country a loathsome system of Police interference and espionage. The deputation further offered on behalf of the Jewish community to enter into a bond that the Jewish immigrants admitted should not become a public charge during the first two years of their residence, and to assist the authorities in excluding criminals who might be of the Jewish persuasion.

The Under-Secretary thanked the deputation for the very moderate tone in which they had set forth their case, disavowed any intention on the part of the Government to encourage anti-Semitic feeling in England, said that all, from the Prime Minister downwards, recognised the debt which England owed to the Jews, admitted that those members of the race who came here were both healthy and law-abiding, but, he maintained, the Bill sought to exclude the diseased, bad characters, and the destitute.

These assurances, however, failed to reassure the Jews. Many of them continued to apprehend danger; a few even began to regard expulsion as not improbable in the future. This fear has found a voice in literature. In a novel[280] published while the fate of the Aliens hung in the balance, the Jews are banished from England by a wicked Home Secretary, and then are brought back again, because “England can _not_ get along without Jewish money and Jewish brains.” The expulsion is, of course, hardly more convincing than the reason given for the restoration. The authoress, herself, in the preface, describes her book as “a story of the impossible,” but she considers that “a warning--even in the form of fiction--may not be out of place.” The danger may be imaginary and the warning rather premature; none the less, the book bears witness to a genuine feeling of alarm. Such a book could not have been written a generation ago.

Mr. Balfour was, no doubt, quite sincere in repudiating any anti-Semitic bias on his own part and on the part of his immediate followers. The idea of a cultured English gentleman of the present day actuated by religious or racial rancour is too grotesque to be seriously entertained for a moment, and it is further disproved, if disproof were needed, by the attempt which, as will be narrated in the sequel, the Conservative Government, in true Imperial spirit, made to provide a home in a British possession for those Jews whose presence it deemed undesirable in the United Kingdom. Another proof that Jew-hatred is not yet sufficiently powerful in this country to imperil the peace of the Jews was furnished, about the same time, by one of our most distinguished prelates, Bishop Welldon, who in a sermon preached at Westminster Abbey on Good Friday, 1904, exhorted his hearers to an imitation of Christ’s example, and to a practical demonstration of their faith by contributing to the East London Jews’ Fund: “That was,” he said, “the best return they could make for the crucifixion of their Lord and Master. The Jews gave him strife, and encompassed his death; we gave them sanctuary and kindness, and without one word of reproach. They gratefully acknowledged the noble citizenship of Jews in all parts of the world. In return they offered them on this anniversary day of our Lord’s Passion what was to Christians the holiest, dearest examples of the life and character of the Crucified Redeemer.”[281] In the following year the Bishop of Stepney issued an appeal in connexion with Holy Week and Good Friday on behalf of the East London Fund for the Jews. The thoughts of the season, he said, would be incomplete unless they gave a place to those “whose rejection of their own Messiah has been one of the great tragedies of history.” There are more than 100,000 Jews in East London parishes, and in some parishes they form the majority of the population. Following the method suggested some time ago by the Upper House of Convocation, the diocese of London treats the East-end Jews as neighbours and parishioners, and by the tact and patience of the fund’s workers “the barrier of prejudice, built up by long years of persecution at the hands of Christians, is being rapidly removed.”[282] While such sentiments prevail in England, the Jews need not fear for their liberties.

Yet, that the apprehensions of the Jews and of all friends of freedom are not wholly unjustified, that Sir Charles Dilke and those who agree with him in suspecting that anti-Semitic prejudice is not so uncommon in the Kingdom at large as it is among the upper ranks, are not the victims of a hypochondriacal dread of phantoms, was demonstrated with deplorable opportuneness by an event which even a temperate pessimist cannot but regard as a rude and practical version of the creed which is elsewhere preached in a more refined form. While Mr. Akers-Douglas at Westminster was giving the finishing touches to his prescription for the Alien complaint, the people of Limerick were actually trying remedies of a more drastic and homely nature.

The Jews had hitherto been conspicuous in Ireland chiefly by their absence. With the exception of Dublin and Belfast, the island knew the Jew from hearsay only, and his name was to the ordinary Irishman what it was to the Englishman in the days of Gower and Chaucer--a symbol for a vile abstraction. In 1871 there were only six Jews in Cork, two in Limerick and one in Waterford. But of late years persecution on the Continent has forced some of its victims to seek an asylum in Ireland as in England, though to a much smaller degree. The increase in the Jews’ numbers, slight though it was, proved sufficient to arouse a feeling of alarm and suspicion among the ignorant masses both in the towns and in the open country. Craftsmen, tradesmen, ploughmen, and clergymen, all began to look with jealousy upon the clever, thrifty, and infidel new-comers from beyond the sea. This was especially the case at Limerick, where lately had sprung up a diminutive colony of thirty-five Jewish families, which was by the Chief Secretary for Ireland described as a “well-conducted section of the community, engaged for the most part in small trades, and dependent for their livelihood on the goodwill of their customers.”[283]

Yet, small as this colony was, it soon attracted attention. The Catholic inhabitants of that great centre of picturesque and somnolent decay were not pleased at the comparative success of their wide-awake neighbours. The animosity spread from the town to the adjacent villages. The Irish peasant, proverbially improvident and free from any comprehension of the nature of a bargain, was ready to buy from the Jewish peddler his goods, and strongly disinclined to pay for them. The goods were usually sold on the instalment system, and this, in an imaginative mind, created a pleasant illusion which, however, was rudely shattered when the day of reckoning came. Then the peasant realised that the goods were not a free gift, and bitterly resented the hardship of being made to discharge his debt. It has been stated by the Irish peasant’s advocate that over three-quarters of the civil bill processes at quarter sessions in the island were those of Jews against such unsophisticated debtors for arrears of payments for goods purchased.[284] The statement has been shown to be a romantic exaggeration on an unusually ambitious scale. In plain prose, among 1387 civil bills entered for the county and city of Limerick during the year 1903 only 31 were issued by Jews, while in the Easter sessions of 1904, out of a total number of 320 civil bills, eight only belonged to Jews.[285] None the less, it is quite conceivable that often the peddler’s anxiety to obtain his money, brought into collision with the peasant’s unwillingness to part with his, led to strained relations between the two parties. In the circumstances it was perfectly natural that the Jew should be denounced for “usury and extortion.” Irish patriots saw in this new oppressor of their innocent fellow-countrymen a kind of camp-follower of the foreign conquerors. Poor Ireland was described as a carcase whose bones were picked by the Russian and Polish jackals of what had been left on them by the Norman lion and the Anglo-Saxon wolf, and Byron was quoted with considerable effect:

So, when the lion quits his fell repast,
Next prowls the wolf, the filthy jackal last,[286]

The hatred for the creditor was soon extended to his creed. Milesian patriots, indeed, vigorously repudiated the charge of religious intolerance, protesting, as the Russians did before them, that the animosity against the Jew was “merely financial and not religious,”[287] and there seems no reason to doubt that economic distress in Ireland, as in Russia and elsewhere, had contributed its usual share to a hostility which springs from many sources. But the assertion that the prejudice was due “merely” to financial causes is amply disproved by facts. These show that the Catholic clergy was sorely scandalised at the humble prosperity of the unbelievers, and thus there was laid up a quantity of combustible material which only awaited a spark for explosion. This spark was supplied at the beginning of 1904 by Father Creagh, a holy monk of the Redemptorist Order, inspired by a religious fervour and a credulity rare in these days and gifted with great eloquence of the kind which once incited the mobs of Europe to outrages. Like many another mediaeval saint, this priest was impelled by the purest of motives--piety and patriotism--to preach a crusade against those whom his untutored conscience taught him to regard as the enemies of his people and of his God: “It would be madness for a man to nourish in his own breast a viper that might at any moment slay its benefactor with a poisonous bite. So it is madness for a people to allow an evil to grow in their midst that will eventually cause them ruin.” Thus began the preacher, and then proceeded to anathematise the Jews as usurers who enslaved the people, as sinners who rejected Jesus, as the secular persecutors of Christianity, as the monsters who “slew St. Stephen, the first martyr, and St. James the Apostle, and ever since, as often as opportunity offered, did not hesitate to shed Christian blood, and that even in the meanest and most cruel manner, as in the case of the holy martyr, St. Simon, who, though a mere child, they took and crucified out of hatred and derision towards our Lord Jesus Christ. Nowadays they dare not kidnap and slay Christian children, but they will not hesitate to expose them to a longer and even more cruel martyrdom by taking the clothes off their back and the bite out of their mouth.”[288]

Having endowed the Jew with the most diabolical character imaginable and traced to him the woes of the Catholic Church in France, the preacher concluded by exhorting his congregation to have no dealings with the people whom God had cursed. As a result of this atrocious sermon, no Jew or Jewess could stir abroad without being insulted or assaulted, and, when the priest’s exhortations reached the open country, there also, as in the city of Limerick, the Jews fell a prey to a series of brutal attacks, until the preacher, alarmed at his own success, urged his flock to desist from stoning the unbelievers but try to starve them. The good people readily obeyed. They not only ceased to deal with the Jewish peddlers, but, improving on their pastor’s precepts, refused even to pay what they owed to them for goods purchased in the past. And while Catholic customers shunned the Jewish tradesmen, Catholic tradesmen in some cases refused to sell to the Jews the necessaries of life. With the exception of two or three families, the small Jewish colony of Limerick was reduced to utter penury. People hitherto in comfortable circumstances were forced to sell the very furniture of their houses in order to buy food, while the majority of them were saved from starvation only by the charity of some Protestant gentlemen, who, however, were obliged to observe the utmost secrecy in rendering assistance for fear of drawing down upon themselves the pious wrath of the Redemptorist monks and of the six thousand brethren of the Confraternity of the Holy Family, whose fanaticism the prophet continued to inflame with his historic fictions. This state of things did not end until, public opinion being roused in England, the Government was induced to take adequate measures for the protection of the Jews against violence, and philanthropists hastened to their relief. Such was the position of the Jews in a part of Ireland in the year of grace 1904.

Meanwhile the unblessed Bill, after having been safely piloted through the stormy debate on the second reading, suffered shipwreck in the relatively calm harbour of Grand Committee. Every one of its clauses was subjected to severe criticism, until nothing was left of the essay in legislation so carefully elaborated by the Home Secretary. This catastrophe was by the advocates of the measure attributed to “the obstructive tactics to which its opponents resorted.”[289] A more philosophical explanation of the failure of the Bill, and one probably as remote from the truth, would be that the Government, yielding to the importunity of some of its followers, promised a measure which it had no power to pass and no great desire to see passed. Be that as it may, few perhaps regretted the failure of an attempt to shut out from this country all strangers indiscriminately, for no better reason than that they are poor and persecuted, thus conspiring with the very Governments whose conduct we condemn and gratuitously forswearing those traditions of freedom, tolerance, and hospitality which will probably in the estimation of future ages stand much higher than a great many things which we now value as our chief titles to the world’s respect.

These sentiments will naturally be received with derision by persons who, fortified by copious draughts of statistics, boast a healthy immunity from “sentimentality,” profess a truly primitive contempt for abstract ideas, and glory in their emancipation from “the capacity for being fascinated by magic words--such as the word ‘free.’”[290] Strong-minded persons of this type confess that “they cannot see what benefit accrues to the community by the advent of such immigrants that can possibly compensate the injury to our own people of a hard-working class.”[291] Robust thinkers of this school consider obstruction with a barrow of fruit by a poor lad an offence sufficiently serious to justify exclusion, and this, too, while they denounce the Roumanian Government’s policy as “directed to the suppression, expulsion, and political extermination of the Jews.”[292] The statistical mind has its own way of looking at things, and it is able to discern a difference in principle between “expulsion” and “exclusion” which is too subtle for the mere layman’s eye. It is, therefore, not surprising that statisticians should have continued their self-appointed mission of enlightening the world on the enormities of the foreign immigrant. The Immigration Reform Association, immediately on the defeat of the Bill, announced its determination “to continue, and, if possible, to extend its work,” and made an appeal to the public for funds.[293] The magazines continued to be filled with articles on the same melancholy topic, and a daily newspaper carefully chronicled under the standing heading “Our Foreigners Day by Day” all cases, however frivolous, which tended to bring into strong relief the foreigner’s criminality. Members of Parliament felt it to be their duty to denounce to their constituencies the Radical Party, which, by its “most persistent obstruction,” had obliged the Government to withdraw the Bill, and to ask them to demand its reintroduction.[294] In brief, no efforts were spared to influence that powerful assemblage of thoughtless dogmatists known as the reading public, and to guide that monstrous machine which, propelled by prejudice and fed by newspaper paragraphs, constitutes what we cynically call public opinion.

The Government also benevolently promised, both through its members and in the Speech from the Throne, that the Opposition would be given an early opportunity of reforming their manners with regard to the question. Naturally. For, according to the Board of Trade alien immigration returns, the number of foreigners who arrived in the United Kingdom during the twelve months which ended on December 31st, 1904, showed few signs of decline. It was, therefore, plain that the Aliens Bill was not dead; but that the same measure, or a measure conceived in the same spirit, would, unless some power hitherto undiscovered removed the grievance, be again submitted to Parliament at some future date. And this is what actually happened. On April 18, 1905, the Home Secretary brought in a new Bill which differed from its predecessor chiefly in being better adapted to the purpose for which it was intended. And yet, though the arguments by which it was supported and the object at which it aimed remained the same, it met with an entirely different reception. The public had, in the meantime, been so successfully “educated,” and the feeling in favour of legislation for the restriction of the entrance of aliens had grown so strong, that the Opposition, mindful of its party interests, refrained from opposing the measure with the vigour which it had displayed in the previous year, and the Bill, a few months afterwards, became law. ♦1905 Aug. 11♦ That being the case, it is well to form a clear idea as to the merits and the meaning of the measure.

The Aliens Act is avowedly levelled only at the criminal, the pauper, the diseased, and the prostitute. So far it is a measure unobjectionable in theory, however impracticable it may prove in application. Those charged with the execution of its provisions may, if they can, prevent the arrival of these truly undesirable immigrants. No one desires them. But this only touches the fringe of the matter. The exclusion of such immigrants affords no remedy for the congestion and competition which form the principal grounds of complaint against the alien immigrants. The bulk of these are Russian and Polish Jews and, as a class, are, by the late Government’s own admission, neither criminal, nor destitute, nor diseased, nor immoral. They are not a burden on the British tax-payer. They crowd neither the British workhouses nor the British hospitals. The evils complained of can, therefore, be remedied not by the exclusion of the few bad characters, but only by refusing an asylum on British soil to the industrious and temperate victim of Russian or Roumanian tyranny, who, when allowed the opportunity, is, in the vast majority of cases, transformed, within a few years, into a valuable British citizen. And the Act, accordingly, while professing to be directed against undesirable characters, makes no distinction whatever between the undesirable and the merely unhappy. It provides nominal protection for political refugees, it is true, but the subordinate officials, to whose discretion the matter is practically left, are empowered to prohibit from landing men and women whose sole crime is that, accustomed to a frugal life, they are willing to accept a wage which the English working man and woman refuse. Is this a cause sufficient to justify exclusion? That is the real question at issue, honestly put. The talk about criminals, paupers and prostitutes is only a disingenuous effort to clothe a selfish economic matter with a semblance of morality. It is not their vices but their virtues that render Jewish immigrants really undesirable. Is that right? The answer to this question would have been easy enough a few years ago. But now, when the whole principle of free competition is under reconsideration, the answer which the majority of Englishmen will be disposed to make to it must ultimately depend on their decision concerning that principle.

How far can the Act be fairly regarded as a symptom of anti-Semitic feeling? There can be no doubt that its authors and many of its supporters, entirely free from religious or racial prejudice themselves, intended it simply as a remedy for an economic complaint. But whatever the late Government’s intentions may have been, and whether in this matter it acted as a leader or a follower, it has in effect provided anti-aliens and anti-Semites, avowed or secret, with the very weapon which they wanted, as they showed by their eager participation in the movement which, if it did not dictate the measure, certainly assisted in its production. Again, it would be unfair and untrue to charge all, or even the bulk, of the anti-alien agitators with anti-Semitism. The great majority of them were and are animated by no special prejudice against the Jews as such, and, if they teach the masses any lesson, it is to hate and to despise all foreigners impartially. But as by far most of these foreigners who come to England happen to be Jews, it is impossible to dissociate the anti-alien from the anti-Jewish campaign. On the Continent the haters of the Jew on racial or religious grounds are few in comparison with those who persecute him from enlightened motives, economic and social. Yet we brand them all as anti-Semites, justly in the main, if somewhat loosely; for differences in motive are of little practical importance when they lead to agreement in action. In England also the few enemies of the Jew have recognised in the enemies of the undesirable alien natural allies, and the two forces, however widely they may differ in their origin, coalesce into practical anti-Semitism--a coalition which has found, as we have seen, a common vehicle of expression in the provincial patriot’s pamphlet. Other signs of anti-Semitism, in the strict sense of the term, are not wanting; the most sinister of them hitherto being the Limerick affair. It is, of course, easy to overrate the significance of these cases. It is not so easy to overlook them.

Even more ominous than these specific cases is the slow formation in the British Isles of an atmosphere favourable to the dissemination of any illiberal epidemic whose germs may chance to grow at home or to be imported from abroad. Narrow nationalism is daily becoming more aggressive, more unscrupulous, and more unashamed of itself. Public opinion is daily showing a more ready acquiescence in the sacrifice of the claims of man to the claims of the Englishman--this is called patriotism--and of the claims of right to the claims of policy--this is called Imperialism. Patriotism is a noble sentiment, and the imperial is a noble ideal. But nobler than either patriotism or Imperialism are justice and freedom. With these the love of country and the love of Empire are things for which one may well be content to live and happy to die. Without them they are merely fair masks for things whose real names are worship of self, worship of pelf, the deification of brute force, low lust of conquest abroad, which sooner or later leads to slavery at home; substitution of the little and the local for the great and the eternal. It is a gradual approximation towards that standard of conduct which has turned Germany from a high school of humanistic culture into a barrack, and which threatens to turn England from a school of political liberty into a shop. A ledger is a respectable book enough, but an indifferent substitute for a moral code. And we seem to take pride in quoting the ledger and in ridiculing the moral code.

The whole controversy in Parliament and in the press on the Alien question is an illustration of this attitude. In vain you will seek amid the conflicting arguments for any clear apprehension of the principle involved. The same politicians and publicists who denounced the late Government for endeavouring to exclude the undesired alien from England, denounced it also for not excluding the undesired alien from South Africa. The same calumnies from which they defended the Jew they themselves would level at the Chinaman, and while they appealed to the ideal of freedom in order to stigmatise the Government’s attempts to protect the native of England against competition, they anathematised that Government for not protecting the native of South Africa against similar competition; objecting not so much to the conditions under which the yellow man was imported as to the colour of his skin. Even the most liberal of our public men are apt to use the terms “white man” or “alien” in a manner which shows that they are far from being proof against the prejudices which they condemn in others. At no other time, perhaps, has more painfully been demonstrated the ominous absence of consistent principle from British statesmanship. The two political parties, devoid of any sincere faith in the maxims which they profess, are ready to deny one day what they may defend the next, and to exchange creeds at a moment’s notice for a moment’s gain. In such a state of the national temper and of political morality anti-Semitism would find only too congenial a soil. The present writer, after a careful study of the whole history of the modern movement against the Jews, cannot but concur with those who maintain that the seeds of anti-Semitism are already amongst us. These seeds may still lie too deep for germination, but there are sufficient reasons to fear that in England, as on the Continent, any accident may, sooner or later, bring them near the surface and aërate them into life. The day on which this may happen will be a black day not for the Jews only.

The meaning of anti-Semitism, as it prevails abroad, can be read by the light of its results. By their actions thou shalt know them. But the actions of the anti-Semites, deplorable as they are, are less deplorable than the social conditions which they illustrate. Anti-Semitism is a movement retrogressive in a twofold sense. Retrogressive inasmuch as it shows that the current of European humanism is flowing backwards, and retrogressive inasmuch as it has actually checked the gradual and voluntary assimilation of the Jew. It is a resurrection of the mediaeval monster of intolerance with a fresh face, and its effects are those which attended mediaeval persecution.

Among the worst Jews it has brought back to life the class of vulgar apostates which had vanished with the emancipation of the race--lineal descendants of those renegades who in the Dark Ages poisoned the shafts of persecution, who slandered their own race, befouled the nest in which they had been nursed, reviled their own God, and treated their own brethren with a contempt which none deserved more richly than themselves. Such a specimen of reversion to a type which one had fondly imagined to be extinct is the editor of a well-known French journal, than whom no one distinguished himself more unenviably in the anti-Dreyfus campaign. He was only one of many Jews who, ashamed of their despised race, strive to conceal the guilt of their origin by joining the ranks of its most rabid foes, and who, by their excessive zeal, betray what they would fain disguise. Readers of M. Anatole France’s _Histoire Contemporaine_ will remember the exquisite portraits of Hebrew anti-Semites, such as Madame de Bonmont--“une dame catholique, mais d’origine juive”--her brother Wallstein, M. Worms-Clavelin, the prefect, and, above all, the prefect’s wife, who educated her daughter in a Catholic convent, and who “a garni avec les chapes magnifiques et vénérables de Saint-Porchaire ces sortes de meubles appelés vulgairement poufs.”

Among the best Jews it has brought about a reaction against the ideals established by Mendelssohn’s teaching. It has originated a call back to orthodoxy, to narrowness, to exclusiveness. Israel at the present day is essentially a religious brotherhood; anti-Semitism forces it to become once more a nation. Even those Jews who in time of prosperity might feel inclined to quit the Synagogue, are in the day of adversity driven back to it from a sense of chivalry. Persecution strengthens the feeling of fraternity, and the liberal instincts of the individual are sacrificed for the sake of the community, as in the days of old. But, if separatism is fatal to the Jews themselves, it is hardly a blessing to humanity at large. From the other point of view, the Gentile, anti-Semitism is not less an evil. Disraeli once said that “Providence would deal good or ill fortune to nations according as they dealt well or ill by the Jews.”[295] The saying, when stripped of its quasi-apocalyptic garb, will be found to conceal a great truth in it. Hatred towards the Jew has always abounded whenever and wherever barbarism has abounded. The amount of anti-Semitism in a country has generally been proportionate to the amount of bigotry, mental depravity, and moral callousness it contained. That so many now are willing to advocate anti-Semitism marks the precarious and superficial character of our civilisation.

I have already said that I consider anti-Semitism as a proof and an illustration of a tendency to turn back the hand on the dial. It is a coincidence, not perhaps wholly devoid of significance, that the age which has witnessed the revival of Jew-hatred is also the age of revived mediaevalism under other aspects--art, literature, and religion. The step from Romanticism to Romanism is a very short one. Indeed, the two things may be regarded as only two different manifestations of one mental disposition: the disposition to a mediaeval interpretation of life and its problems. More significant still are the attempts made in these days to whitewash the great tyrants of the past whose principles reason and experience have taught us to abhor. Most significant circumstance of all, the apologists of the Inquisition, whom the sarcasms of the eighteenth century had shamed into silence, and Napoleon’s cannon cowed into feigned toleration, have, within the last thirty years, taken heart again, and ventured to abuse that liberty of speech which they owe to the triumph of Rationalism by preaching the cause of Obscurantism. Learned Jesuits and Benedictines in many parts of Europe have, since 1875, not only publicly acknowledged and defended the abominations of the Holy Office, but actually expressed an undisguised longing for its restoration to the power of roasting every one who dares to think for himself.[296] That they may succeed is a fear which even the most fantastic of pessimists would feel unable to cherish. But their mere existence forms in itself a considerable check on too sanguine optimism.