of how much this would transform the political scene; of the dapper figure of Sir Herbert Samuel swathed as a Bedouin, or Sir Alfred Mond gaining a yet greater grandeur from the gorgeous and trailing robes of the East.  If my image is quaint my intention is quite serious; and the point of it is not personal to any particular Jew.  The point applies to any Jew, and to our own recovery of healthier relations with him.  The point is that we should know where we are; and he would know where he is, which is in a foreign land.

This is but a parenthesis and a parable, but it brings us to the concrete controversial matter which is the Jewish problem.  Only a few years ago it was regarded as a mark of a blood-thirsty disposition to admit that the Jewish problem was a problem, or even that the Jew was a Jew.  Through much misunderstanding certain friends of mine and myself have persisted in disregarding the silence thus imposed; but facts have fought for us more effectively than words.  By this time nobody is more conscious of the Jewish problem than the most intelligent and idealistic of the Jews.  The folly of the fashion by which Jews often concealed their Jewish names, must surely be manifest by this time even to those who concealed them.  To mention but one example of the way in which this fiction falsified the relations of everybody and everything, it is enough to note that it involved the Jews themselves in a quite new and quite needless unpopularity in the first years of the war.  A poor little Jewish tailor, who called himself by a German name merely because he lived for a short time in a German town, was instantly mobbed in Whitechapel for his share in the invasion of Belgium.  He was cross-examined about why he had damaged the tower of Rheims; and talked to as if he had killed Nurse Cavell with his own pair of shears.  It was very unjust; quite as unjust as it would be to ask Bethmann-Hollweg why he had stabbed Eglon or hewn Agag in pieces.  But it was partly at least the fault of the Jew himself, and of the whole of that futile and unworthy policy which had led him to call himself Bernstein when his name was Benjamin.

In such cases the Jews are accused of all sorts of faults they have not got; but there are faults that they have got.  Some of the charges against them, as in the cases I have quoted concerning religious ritual and artistic taste, are due merely to the false light in which they are regarded.  Other faults may also be due to the false position in which they are placed.  But the faults exist; and nothing was ever more dangerous to everybody concerned than the recent fashion of denying or ignoring them.  It was done simply by the snobbish habit of suppressing the experience and evidence of the majority of people, and especially of the majority of poor people.  It was done by confining the controversy to a small world of wealth and refinement, remote from all the real facts involved.  For the rich are the most ignorant people on earth, and the best that can be said for them, in cases like these, is that their ignorance often reaches the point of innocence.