“Parliament is played out,” said this gathering counter. revolution. “Democracy is played out.”
Mr Copper of Caxton felt the need of some resistance to these unending concessions to labour demands. “What this country needs,” said Mr Copper, “is leadership, firmer leadership. We want a middle-class party led by a Man.” Mr Stannish of Tintern was inclined to agree with Mr Copper, but Mr Droop of London Pride, who was suspected of religious unsoundness, was disposed to be critical not of the idea but of the leader towards whom their thoughts were turning. He exhibited newspaper pictures and invited his neighbours to look at them.
“He’s herring-jawed, and I like teeth that meet,” said Mr Droop. “Why does he dress up in this sort of tights he wears? His shape ain’t English. It isn’t even decent, He seems to attach too much importance to his behind. Look at that one. It’s a sort of hind bosom he’s got. And why does he imitate them Dagos? Can’t he think anything out for himself? Anything fresh? Fine outlook for us to have a leader without an original idea in his head! Ask him what we are to do, and he’ll go round asking, What would Musso do? If we want a strong Englishman, let’s have a strong English Englishman with a mind of his own, and not that sort of flibberty-gibbet. Flibberty-gibbet, I call him. Something that sways about and dangles. For good old England? No, thank you.”
“Well, anyhow, we’ve got to be quit of this Parliament nonsense,” said Mr Copper, “and all this criticising of everybody and doing nothing, while the Bolshies and Jews run away with everything we’ve got.”
“Jews?” said Edward Albert, questioning himself.
It is interesting to note that our specimen Englishman for the first thirty years of his life was practically unaware of contemporary Jews. He thought they were a disagreeable lot of people in the Bible whom even God had had to give up at last, and that had been the end of them. We lived in the New Dispensation. He went to school with Jews and half-Jews and quarter-Jews and never perceived any distinctive difference between them and his other school-fellows. He thought Circumcision was something religious, and enquired no further into the matter. Was Buffin Burleybank a Jew? Was Jim Whittaker? Was Evangeline Birkenhead, on either side, Jewish? It never occurred to Edward Albert to ask, and there is no need to introduce irrelevant information into this story. If Jews are so different you ought to be able to tell.
But as the vague uneasiness of the Georgian decadence spread and sought forms of expression, it was necessary to protect oneself from any sense of responsibility in the matter by finding scapegoats, and almost any outstanding group of people was exposed to the honour of vicarious atonement. A certain section of the mixture of peoples called the Jews, especially those hailing from Eastern Europe, is ghetto-conscious and suffers from an. Adlerian assertiveness, and it has always been a temptation to bright young men of the Armenoid type to set up as “champions” for their “people”, to revive the sense of being downtrodden if it threatens to wane and insist upon a preferential association. Jew must help Jew. Such economic bad manners reveal a universal human tendency; Scotchmen hang together, Welshmen control the milk and drapery trades in London, and so on; only the drastic contempt of more broadly civilised individuals can do anything to correct this exclusiveness.
Unhappily at the conclusion of the 1914-18 phase of the world war, the professional Jewish “champions” set themselves with particular energy to inflame this racial segregation in every possible way and to ignore as blatantly as possible the common need for a world settlement. They did not want to go on to a new world; they headed their “people” for Zion, They became Maccabean, they became heroic; boys in West Kensington dreamt of being Davids and their sisters Esthers, No public man, no writer, no journalist could go anywhere without having the Jewish Problem thrust into his face as though it was the one supreme interest of mankind. He was threatened implicitly or explicitly with boycotts and mischief if he refused his appointed role as a Gideonite, hewer of wood and a drawer of water for the Great Race. The mildest, most broadminded of humanitarians found themselves provoked into saying, “Oh, damn those Jews!”
Admittedly the Jews are tactless and vain and clannish but that after all is the worst that can be said about the worst of them. The most they did was to irritate. The great Jewish conspiracy is and always has been a fantasy.
But it was disastrous of these champions and leaders of Jewry, considering how widely dispersed and how vulnerable their “people” were, to make them so conspicuous in a world in urgent need of scapegoats. Homo Tewler Teutonicus, licking his sore vanity after defeat, found himself all too ready to be persuaded that he had been betrayed to defeat by the Jews. Morningside Prospect throughout the western world, looking for some scapegoat to explain the increased rocking of the financial boat, found it plausible to attribute it to “international finance” and easy to believe that international finance was essentially Jewish, It is not. It is less so than ever it was.
And come to think of it, said the Christian Churches, why, in spite of all our educational efforts, are congregations shrinking and our people losing their religious ardour? Some one, something, not ourselves, must be to blame. Why are our flocks restricting their birth-rate, while Jews, as we all know, invariably have enormous families? Why is there this increasing incredulity in the beautiful incomprehensible dogmas of our religion? How can people disbelieve what they cannot possibly understand unless they are stirred up by mischief-makers? And what is there at the back of this upset in Godless Russia, which was once so devoted to the Little Father on earth and his and Our Father in Heaven? ,You can read all about the ramifications of these satanic plottings in Mrs Nesta Webster’s Secret Societies and Subversive Movements. Or you can study how the new pogromism was revived in that curious and impudent forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. There you see how craziness festers into mania.
That, in terms of general contemporary history, is the why and wherefore of the world epidemic of pogrom fever in the second Georgian period, and that is why Edward Albert, our microcosm, leaning over his garden gate and talking to Mr Copper, remarked, “These here Jews seem to be doing a lot of mischief in the world, one way and another.”
And why Mr Copper, already thoroughly infected, replied,
“And we let ’em get away with it—every time.”
You see here in Morningside Prospect in our Edward Albert just the same threefold mental stir that was to be found in the whole Morningside Prospect side of civilisation; the sick dread of some profound rearrangement of economic and social relationships impending, a dread expressing itself defensively in an irrational fear of “Bolshevism”; the same unpleasant realisation of a common nerveless conduct of affairs leading to the craving for a saviour and leader, and the same disposition to discover a scapegoat, for which role the Jewish Champions were already preparing their “people.” The world now and henceforth is doomed to live in an increasing community of interpretations, and these three factors were to be found among the threatened governing classes, all round the globe from pole to pole. The Bolshie, the Jew and the inspired Leader, all essentially imaginary beings, were becoming the three cardinal figures in a new mythology of escape from thought, starkness and courage.