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.