Of that phenomenon of which the history of Europe is full, which is so marked in the eastern counties to-day and which is beginning to rise in the West, there is nothing traceable in the early and middle nineteenth century, nor even till the close of it, in the United States.
Then came the change. It is a change which has taken place in the lifetime of men much younger than myself. It is a change, I am told, most marked since I last visited the United States more than twenty years ago. A regular and organized Jewish emigration began to pour in, especially from the Baltic. It flooded New York, where it now forms probably a third of the population; it created Ghettoes in most of the large Northern industrial towns, and all the phenomena we associate in Europe with these movements began to show themselves. There was the growth of the financial monopoly and of monopolies in particular trades. There was the clamour for toleration in the form of "neutralizing" religious teaching in schools; there was the appearance of the Jewish revolutionary and of the Jewish critic in every tradition of Christian life. The Jews went also--as they usually do--to the heart of things, and the Executive was attacked. The last and apparently the most unpopular of the presidents, Mr. Wilson, seems to have been wholly in their hands. Anonymity in the Press came, of course. A very marked example of it is a journal called _The New Republic_, which, though it has but a small proportion of Jewish writers upon it, and though its capital is (I believe) not Jewish, is yet to all intents and purposes the organ of the Jewish intellectuals, always joins in the boycott of any news unfavourable to European Jews, always joins in the clamour for anything favourable to them, and in general adheres to the Jewish side, like the _Humanité_ in Paris, or, let us say, _The New Statesman_ in England.
But the novel presence in the United States of this phenomenon with which in the west of Europe we have now been familiar for a long time, provides a more direct and a very different kind of reaction from what it has among us. This reaction against Jewish powers was not (to use a Stock Exchange metaphor) "sticky." There was no hesitation; there were no uneasy patches of silence. The Jewish question was discussed from the moment it was first felt and to-day it is discussed beyond all others. Of political topics I have found it the first in the conversation of the Americans who have visited Europe since the War and with whom I have discussed the affairs of their country. It ranges, as that reaction always does, from the wildest Anti-Semitism to strong and open defence of the Jewish position, not only by Jews but by the very small minority of their admirers outside the Jewish community, especially among the wealthy. The characteristic of the whole thing in the United States is that it is only just beginning. It is capable of becoming one of those sudden growths of which the past history of the Republic has made us familiar, and indeed it is too early yet to judge, even on the largest lines, what forms it may not take. It is enough to say that there is behind the reaction against the Jew in that country a growing intensity of feeling with which we, as yet, in Western Europe, for all the advance we have made in the matter, are unfamiliar. If a test be required, contrast the silence about the Jews in '96, during Bryan's great attack upon the gold standard, with the work of Mr. Ford and all that he stands for to-day!