It may sound paradoxical, but it is true, that if the Statesmen of Europe, and the hereditary families of the European nations who still take so much part in the conduct of those nations, had thought less of the Jewish money power and more of the Jews as a whole they would have benefited both parties in a very different fashion. We have seen the artificial protection of the Jews of Eastern Europe because individual Statesmen have been subservient to the commands of very rich individual Jewish bankers. But the thing has been done blunderingly. It has served only to anger the independent nationalities of the East, notably the Poles, the Roumanians and the Hungarians who have experience of the difficulties inseparable from an alien minority. Our politicians have treated the whole affair externally and mechanically, merely obeying orders without trying to understand.
The ultimate result of such interference by our Western politicians is unhappily certain. The last state of the Jews in Eastern Europe will be worse than the first. Their sufferings will be greater than in the past, and that because, instead of acting from attempted comprehension and sympathetic comprehension of the Jewish difficulties the politicians, who have acted as the servants of a few wealthy Jews, have merely obeyed the orders of these rich men and have done so with the secret reluctance that always accompanies self-surrender to a wage.
Is it not apparent, as we look through history, that the permanent power of the Jew or, at any rate, the celebrity of his nation is utterly distinct from those chance accumulations of wealth which a few individuals owe to the national passion for speculation and a cosmopolitan position?
One after another the striking Jewish names of history are the names of Jews who have ardently pursued some moral or intellectual thesis; most of them--I had nearly said _all_ of them--were poor men, and for the most part men deliberately poor because they preferred, as it is in the Jewish nature to prefer, the immediate work in hand to any other consideration.
It is these names that remain and are permanent and are the glory of the Jewish race.
There is one aspect of this Jewish wealth which I hesitate whether to put among the general or among the particular causes of the friction between that nation and its hosts.