save a few people of an official sort, and these will not long maintain an attitude outworn and already ridiculous.
But the other extreme remains to be studied. It is, in our society, quite a recent phenomenon, though it has gained very great strength in recent years and is increasing alarmingly. It is the extreme of hatred. It is the extreme manifested by those who have but one motive in their action towards the Jewish race, and that motive a mere desire for its elimination. It implies that there is no peace possible between the two races; no reasoned political solution. It relies upon nothing but antagonism. It is already very strong, and its adherents believe themselves to be on the eve of a sort of blundering triumph.
Every one who desires to deal with this grave political matter practically, that is, to establish a permanent policy, will be much more concerned with the extreme here examined than with the other extreme, which ignores the problem altogether. For this new extreme of active hatred is flourishing; that other, older extreme no longer functions.
The near future will have to deal, in practical politics, not only with the problem presented by the Jews as an alien power within the State, but (what will probably prove a more difficult matter) with the hater of the Jew, who is claiming, and rapidly achieving, power on his side. The type is as old as the problem; it is two thousand years old. But it waxes and wanes. Its modern name of "Anti-Semite" is as ridiculous in derivation as it is ludicrous in form. It is partly of German academic origin and partly a newspaper name, vulgar as one would expect it to be from such an origin, and also as falsely pedantic as one would expect, but the exasperated mood of which it is a label is very real.
I say the word "Anti-Semite" is vulgar and pedantic: that I think will be universally admitted. It is also nonsensical. The antagonism to the Jews has nothing to do with any supposed "Semitic" race—which probably