of those dire forebodings which have characterised so many other disquisitions on the subject which I have had the advantage of perusing.

If this latest revival of Judeophobia is not infelicitous in its appearance amongst a people through long ages addicted to a display of passion in this direction, it is certainly deserving of attention on account of its not being confined to one country. The effervescence of a certain feeling against the Jews is apparent in almost all the large states of the world, with the single exception perhaps of France. Eastern Christianity, which Mr. Gladstone has ventured to characterise as carrying the torch of civilisation in the Orient, has signalised itself, for some time past, in outrages upon the Jews, before which the excesses of Batak may be relegated to a category of comparative humanity. The fiery cross' has been adopted by the smaller Mohammedan States, and has left a smoking trail over the whole of the southern littoral of the Mediterranean; even in Italy, where so many Israelites occupy positions of prominence and responsibility, ugly rumours, quasi-justified by a certain deafness to the sufferings of the Roumanian Jews, have been heard of high personages cherishing a prejudice against the Jews; in America the 'Boycotting' of Jews is a common occurrence, and in this country we have been recently told that the agitation which was commenced by Professor Goldwin Smith, and continued by some of the lights of the Liberal party, is only slumbering until other more pressing affairs shall have been disposed of.

And yet, strange to say, there is nothing even in the latest phases of this agitation to commend it to that high standard of intelligence which is accepted as the spirit of the age. The involved and often contradictory arguments in its favour which are now so numerously put forward did not generate the present agitation, but were really generated by it under the pressure of being forced to adopt a programme capable of whitewashing it into the required degree of respectability. It broke out in precisely the same way as it has always broken out before. The hatred of the Jew by the Christian has become, as I have already pointed out, one of those acquired habits which proverbial philosophy teaches us are as secondary instincts. In normal passions there is a community of feeling which embraces all ages, from the darkest to the present day, and amongst these passions Judeophobia has long been ranked. In our present development of intellectual strength, these passions do little more than balance the relatively enlightened sentiments which we evolve from a calm and educated appreciation of equitable law; but let this equilibrium be once disturbed, and they immediately rise into the ascendant. Thus when the holy aspirations of the Crusades degenerated into vulgar fanaticism, the Jews were persecuted; when the balance of mind and passion was disturbed by the appearance of the Black Death, the primary prejudices of Christians associated the Jews with their visitation, and their wholesale massacre became inevitable; in 1820, Germany found itself groaning under fearful burdens, and when in their despair their fretful eyes by chance alighted upon a few Jews who had managed to amass wealth, the Germans gave vent to all their grievances in one mighty outburst of their most congenial prejudice. See too how, in this country, when party feeling reached the highest pitch it has ever reached in English history, the Hebrew extraction of the then Prime Minister was sufficient to induce a host of writers and speakers to vent all their party spleen on the Jewish race. Similar circumstances have generated the present agitation. Germany has, during the last ten years, fallen from the position of one of the richest and happiest, to one of the poorest and most disturbed of states. Bowed down beneath the intolerable burden of an immense standing army, and distracted by failing trade and intense political conflict, the country has presented a melancholy appearance, and consequently the Jews have become the scapegoats of all the popular discontent. The vague and illogical murmurs of the people have been taken up by all extremes of political opinion; and Socialists and Conservatives, Protestants and Catholics, have alike found in Judeophobia an identity with their own interests. This fact alone is sufficient to show the blindly instinctive-as distinct from the intelligently deliberate-nature of the agitation, and it is therefore hardly likely that it will survive in its integrity the inevitable return to calm, honourable, and imınortal principles.

Before, however, I examine the most noteworthy amongst the arguments of the anti-Semites, it may be desirable that I should briefly sketch the history of the recent outbreak, in illustration of my theory of the inherent nature of the prejudice which has brought it about.

During the late Russo-Turkish war the Jews all over the world were loud in their condemnation of what they, in common with a large number of their countrymen, regarded as the hypocritical designs of Russia. Carried away by the heat of party conflict, which then ran phenomenally high, many of them even ventured to appear at public meetings and to express the tendency of their opinions with the courage and outspokenness of citizens and patriots. Political differences rapidly fermented until they reached the highest point of violence, and then, boiling over, they degenerated into vindictive personalities and low abuse. This was the opportunity for signalising themselves required by the more narrow-minded of the opponents of the national programmes in England and Hungary. In this country Sir Tollemache Sinclair, and in the Cisleithan kingdom an individual named Istoczy, seized with avidity upon the theme, and, having discovered that Lord Beaconsfield was of Hebrew parentage, and that Jews generally supported the Russophobic policy, they abandoned the more complex problems of the Eastern question--to the solution of which they had not been able to contribute anything -for the more simple outcry that the Jews were at the bottom of all the mischiefs of which they complained. At that moment the German people were, by a combination of the elements of depression, particularly susceptible to an attack of Judeophobia; the contagion was not slow to reach them, and it soon became apparent that the vague murmurs of the multitude, which were speedily heard, only required some directing and organising agency to give them more than ordinary point and effect.

Singularly appropriate was the anti-Semites' first choice of a leader. This was made in the person of one Wilhelm Marr, an obscure German journalist, who appeared to hold sufficiently gloomy views on the Jewish question to recommend him to the public, and these he very soon embodied in a pamphlet which he entitled Der Sieg des Judenthums über das Germanenthum.

In this work the author mournfully and lugubriously exclaimed that Germany was becoming thoroughly Judaised. He explained that the Jews were gradually ousting native Germans from every post of value and importance in the country, and that, by their remarkable discipline as a class, their rapid multiplication, and their demoralising avocations, they were in a fair way, if not to exterminate the Teuton race altogether, at least to subjugate it. To such a pitch of despair did Herr Marr work himself in this unique literary production that he concluded with this very distressing peroration :A voice in the desert has been raised, and has stated facts-undeniable facts. Let us accommodate ourselves to the inevitable, if we cannot remedy it. Væ victis, finis Germaniæ!' There was, however, some method in Herr Marr's melancholia. Notwithstanding the cheerless view of the prospects of his fatherland which he took in the body of his pamphlet, in a short prefatory address to his readers he suddenly brightened up, and called upon his countrymen to join with him in preventing the consummation of the Hebrew conspiracy which he had discovered, by founding a social and political weekly newspaper, to be edited by himself.

Unfortunately, everything was so ripe for an outbreak of Judeophobia that the German public did not trouble itself to inquire into Herr Marr's motives. It read his brochure with avidity, and within a few days six editions were exhausted. The Ultramontane and Conservative organs eagerly seized upon the theory promulgated by Marr; the former accepting it as a novel form of an old and cherished polemical whetstone, the latter recognising in it a plausible basis on which to avenge all the wrongs which an impoverished and intolerant Junkerthum attributed to the Jews. Diatribe after diatribe was launched from the columns of such representative prints as the Germania, the Vaterland, the Reichsbote, and the

Kreuz-Zeitung, and gradually Herr Marr's theory became exagge rated, until, under the name of International Semitism,' it was proclaimed that the danger extended to the whole of the civilised world.

Marr then published a second pamphlet, called Der Weg zum Siege des Germanenthums über das Judenthum, in which, whilst advocating a great national anti-Jewish movement, he also endeavoured to prove that the commercial avocations of the Jews were and always had been a standing menace and danger to the people amongst whom they dwelt. Real work, he told his readers, the Jews would not undertake, preferring always those dark byways of Schachern und Wuchern, which were the sole reasons that they had always been hated from the beginning of history.' A number of other pamphleteers followed in the same strain, the most notable being Die Judenfrage, by Waldegg, Neupalästina, Wo steckt der Mauschel? by Reymond, Vorurtheil oder berechtiger Hass? by von Wedell, and Minister Maybach und der Giftbaum, by Naudh. The patriotism of the Jews was also attacked by Rubens, Rohling, and Todt, with casuistical analyses of Rabbinical Judaism, and then suddenly the so-called economical aspects of the agitation attracted the attention of the Rev. Herz Stöcker, one of the court chaplains, and a pillar of communistic socialism.

This impulsive ecclesiastic, having founded an association called the Christian Social Working-man's Party, intended to work wonders in the way of ameliorating the condition of the German workingman, commenced to lecture on the Jewish question before his rough disciples with a ferocious energy,' to quote the words of the Berlin correspondent of the Times, which would have endeared him to th soul of Martin Luther and of John Knox.' He revived all the charges which had fruitlessly been brought against the Jews five years before by the Kreuz-Zeitung, preaching that they were the authors of a new caste and of a new source of social oppression, and that they were endeavouring to create amongst themselves not only an aristocracy of finance, but also a dangerous antocracy of capital. The prevailing depression in commerce and agriculture recommended these views to the most sensitive sympathies of the German working classes. The belief rapidly spread that all the miseries from which Germans were suffering were really due to the unholy accumulations of the Jews, and, as a consequence, the popular excitement ran so high that on the occasion of a Jewish festival one or two personal attacks upon Hebrews were chronicled by the papers. The excitement increased; vague advertisements appeared in the Berlin and Dresden newspapers calling upon the opponents of Judaisation to send their names to certain addresses, and at last, about eighteen months ago, a number of anti-Semite leagues were announced, with head-quarters in the two great centres of German Protestantism and

Catholicism. The following is a translation of the first statutes of these leagues adopted by the members :

1. The object of the Anti-Semite League, founded by non-Jews, is to unite all non-Jewish Germans of all persuasions, all parties, all stations, into one common league, which, setting aside all separate interests, all political differences, shall strive, with all earnestness and diligence, for the one end, viz., to save our German fatherland from becoming completely Judaised, and render residence in it supportable to the posterity of its aborigines.

2. This object is to be striven after in a strictly legal way, by resisting with all lawful means the further supplanting of Germanism by Judaism, by making it its task to thrust the Semites back into a station corresponding to their numerical strength; by delivering the Germans from the oppression of Jewish influence weighing down upon them in the social, political, and ecclesiastical spheres, and securing to the children of Germans their full right to offices and dignities in the German fatherland.

3. To attain this object the League avails itself of the following means: (a) Granting aid toits members and to other societies having the same tendency in the shape of money, lectures, communications, itinerant teachers, libraries, by the press, etc., and by favouring non-Jewish competitors in all spheres and stations of life. (b) Public and private agitation for the removal of Jewish preponderance in the administration of the community and the State, in the legislature, and society, by instruction, by aiding aspiring young talent, by education and scholarships, by rescuing unfortunate victims from the hands of the usurers, etc. (c) Opposing the Jewish press by aiding and starting non-Jewish journals; and finally (d), by forming exclusive circles, clubs, and the like. to which Jews are not admitted.

4. The symbol of the League, combining religious faith with the fatherland (sic) [meaning, of course, the love of the fatherland or patriotism], is the cross resting on an oak-leaf. This circumstance alone proves that the League is by no means aggressive. All violence, all baiting (Hetze) is foreign to it.1 Politics are excluded from all the meetings of the League.

5. The members are divided into 'called' and 'chosen' ones.

6. Every respectable non-Jewish man of twenty-four years of age, able to read and write, and offering guarantees that he joins the League for the sake of its objects, not from niere curiosity or impure motives, can become a 'called' member. Exceptionally, men under twenty-four may be admitted too.

7. The candidate has to apply in writing to the office of the League, to send in his photograph, furnished with his name in his own hand, and must be able to refer to two 'called' ones, or one 'chosen' member. On his being admitted, his photograph, furnished with the stamp of the League, will be returned, and the symbol of the League handed to him. The two will serve him at meetings or in conferences with an individual member as his legitimation.

8. Each member has to pay an admission fee of three marks, one mark for the symbol, and fifty pfennings for the bye-laws. Also a monthly contribution of one mark has to be paid to the office of the League. Larger contributions are permitted.

9. Every member is fully entitled to aid on the part of the League, so far as its objects are concerned, and is, on the other hand, in duty bound to promote them to the best of his abilities. On matters of the League the members have to observe the strictest secrecy towards non-members.

In more than one detail the agitation of the Anti-Semite League bears a resemblance to that of the Irish Land League. Both ostentatiously parade their disapproval of personal violence, and yet all the outrages which have taken place within the area of their influence are directly traceable to their encouragement.