LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often more read, and therefore more effective, than those which fill treble the space.] JEWS. AND REVOLUTION.

[To THE EDITOR ON TEE " SPECTATOR."] Sus,—In an article in your periodical of the 9th inst., which purports to be a review of a somewhat superficial work on the Russian revolution, the writer seizes the opportunity to indulge in the ancient and, one had hoped, discredited pastime of Jew baiting. It certainly comes as a shook to the. student of men and manners to notice that, in this year of grace, this mediaeval sport should still be in vogue. It is not altogether unreasonable to have hoped that men who claim to be in the vanguard of civilization had realized the lesson which for nearly two thousand years has been taught, at least ones a week, to Europeans; a lesson which had become a common- place to educated Jews many hundred. years- before, namely, the consideration displayed to our neighbours-is the measure.

of our civilization. What place. the writer of the article in question and you, Sir, as editor and publisher of it, deserve to take in twentieth-century civilization I leave to the judgment. of all fair-minded men.

I pointed out to you in a letter of-June last that these attacks

leave the Jew (qua Jew) absolutely indifferent, assured of his high destiny, and conscious that through his sufferings mankind will find salvation, he regards with sorrow, rather than anger, these petty exhibitions of malice, bad taste, and falsehood; nay, in the sense that he would rather be the persecuted than the persecutor, the insulted rather than the insulter, he welcomes them. But inasmuch as he is a British subject he cannot Vet resent that fellow subjects posing as guides to their country- men should disgrace the high ideals of religious and political freedom which it has hitherto been the boast of Englishmen to maintain. As a citizen of a mighty Empire he cannot but deplore the fact that Englishmen should lower its prestige by such a pitiful display of ignorance, prejudice, and vulgarity.

Have you thought of the impression that will be left on every decent-minded person who reads that your reviewer, after enumerating all the alleged vices of the Jews (according to you he has no virtues), sums up the Jew with the phrase : "He is as streaky as the bacon he abhors" 1 Sir, this is worse than silliness; it is the lowest depth of vulgarity. It comes as an unspeakable shock to realize that an English periodical of the standing the Spectator has hitherto enjoyed should have pro- gressed so far on the path to perdition. But great as the shock is to our sense of propriety, it is almost surpassed by the insult offered to our intelligence and knowledge of hittory.

It is suggested that Rousseau acquired the doctrines of the Social Compact and The Equality of Man from Jews, and this suggestion, which your reviewer has not the hardihood to make in direct terms, is bolstered up by citations from Jewish writers who may have explained or approved these doctrines. Until I read this amazing article I was under the impression

that every boy who had been to a Public School knew that Rousseau took these two ideas from Locke's Two Tivatises on Government. That Locke wrote the first of these treatises in answer to Sir Robert Filmer's Patriarchia I should have thought was obvious to anyone who made a pretence to a know- ledge of English literature, seeing-that this information is set out in the sub-title. The Patriarchia, though written nearly forty years before, was not published until MO, and was written to controvert these ideas. The opening words of the pamphlet leave no doubt on the point: "Since the time that school divinity began to flourish there hath been a common opinion maintained, as well by divines as by divers other learned men, which affirms, 'Mankind is naturally endowed and born with freedom from all subjection, and at liberty to choose what form of government it please, and that the power which any oge M(171 bath over others was at first bestowed according to the discretion of the multitude!" The sentence which I have underlined, though not in the exact words, is the gist of the argument maintained by Hooker in the first book of his Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, written in 1599 to defend the Established Church against the extreme Puritans. This is not the place to show the influence of Hobbes on Rousseau, but Hobbes, it must not be forgotten, built a philosophy on these two ideas.

It is not asking too much to expect a reviewer to have some knowledge of the subject he purports to review, and to have some acquaintance with the genesis and growth of ideas, the

fruits of -which he happens to be considering. Had your reviewer not been so intent on Jew baiting, and more interested in elucidating the truth, he would have called to mind the famous charge to the grand jury at the assizes held at York in March, 1848, when the commissioner, Serjeant Thorpe, after- wards Chief Justice, used these contentions of Hooker in justifi- cation of the actions of the Parliamentarians.

Bolshevism appears, so far as we are allowed to know any- thing about it, to be but a variation on these fallacious and well-worn themes. So far as we know Rousseau had no Jewish blood in his 'Veins, and one is tolerably certain that Hooker, Hobbes, Thorpe, and Locke were not of Semitic origin, and if we seek for the intellectual ancestors of the Russian revolution surely we must look for them among the highly respected and eminent Englishmen I have named. But we must not neglect to observe, as Lord Morley so aptly points out, that these Englishmen theorized after the .respective revolutions had been carried oust, whilst the French revolution of the eighteenth century and the Russian revolution of the twentieth century are to a great extent the result of these theories dogmatically expressed and fanatically held.

Were we to push our search a few centuries further back we would find the extraordinary figure of John Ball, who your learned reviewer may 07 may not remember, was executed i a 1381. This clerk in Holy Orders, with a tendency towards Protestantism, certainly adumbrated these same ideas when he took for his text :—

"When Adam dolt and Eve span, Wo was thanne a gentilman? "

It will require, I think, something more than the mere word of a Jew baiter of the twentieth century to convince the English public that this man was a disguised Jewish rabbi. Your reviewer appears to be no more conversant with modern history than lie is with that of the Stuart period or the Middle Ages, but perhaps I wrong him, and the fact is he is too good as Tory even to read the writings of a Whig author, though such author may be of the eminence of Lord Macaulay. Macaulay's speech on "Jewish Disabilities" must be unknown to him, or he would scarcely have had the effrontery to say that depriving Jews of political rights is not persecution.

I must congratulate him on eight words of the profoundest wisdom. Alas that those eight words of sense should be imme- diately followed by eight words of nonsense. He says: "It is our business to understand the Jew." Quick about your busi- ness, friend, and when you have begun to understand the Jew you will not talk about "beating the Jew at his own game," whatever you may mean by the phrase. But, Sir, I greatly fear the task is nigh impossible for your reviewer, not because the Jew is difficult to understand, but because your reviewer is so blinded by prejudice and exalted by an imagined superiority that learning anything would be a difficulty to him. I will, however, give him a hint or two, which I am positive will be of service to him. Let him dismiss from his mind all hate and uncharitableness, let him keep his lips from lying and deceitful speaking, and let him not ascribe to the Jew the feelings he aould have had if his race had been persecuted, insulted, and oppressed for two millenniums. The Jew has learnt in those two thousand years of suffering the futility of anger, and at the same time slowly acquired the art of forgiving, which is the one thing that seems so incredible to the Gentile.—I am, Treborough Lodge, Roadwater, Somerset.

[We return this week to the Jewish question in our second leading article. Though the article was written before we received this letter it serves as a provisional answer to Mr. Salaman.—En, Spectator.]