or whatever modern movement you will, have appealed much more to the fighting instincts and political traditions of our race than they have to the Jews. They are marked everywhere by an attitude towards property and patriotism which are the very opposite of the Jews' characteristics. The Revolutions of the past were for the better distribution of property and for the betterment of the State. Often they were openly undertaken because patriotism had been offended by defeat in war and because the Nation was thought to be betrayed. Usually they were jingo and always for distribution of wealth.
It is the unique mark of the Russian revolution and of its attempted extension elsewhere that it repudiates patriotism and the division of property. In that, it differs from all others; and it is markedly, obviously, Jewish. But why had the Jews a chance of action in Russia which they lacked elsewhere?
What were the special characters in the Russian opportunity which made the Jew the creator of the whole movement?
There are, I take it, three main factors present in this case peculiarly suitable to the Jewish effort.
In the first place, this revolution fell upon, and was directed towards, a particular social phenomenon in which that profound instinct in the European, the desire for settled property, had decayed. It fell upon the state of affairs called Industrial Capitalism, the chief mark of which is the destruction in the mass subjected to it (or, at any rate, the atrophying) of that essential part of the European soul—ownership. The Jew is, undoubtedly, unable to sympathize with us in that central core of our civic instincts. He has never understood the European sense of property and I doubt if he ever will.
But in Russia Industrial Capitalism was quite new. The resentment against it was keen. The victims were the sons of peasants, or had