The solution which I propose, which I believe could be made stable, and which I further believe is the only stable one, demands a greater, a more necessary effort upon our side than upon that of our guests.
It is the average man who must do his duty in the matter, and it is upon him that the responsibility will fall, if we take up once again that wretched sequence of ill-ease, persecution, reaction, which has marked so many centuries.
We are the vast majority, we are the organism within which this small minority moves. We are, or could be if we chose, the makers of our own laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own political moods.
I know it is the custom to throw all the responsibility upon the other side, to be perpetually devising instruments for their guidance which soon become instruments for their oppression, and in general to imagine a problem wherein the part of the European is purely negative and all the work has to be done by the Jewish stranger.
That attitude is not only false but grossly undignified. When men accuse some one weaker than themselves of interference with, and even of acquiring power over, them they condemn themselves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium has so rarely been reached in all these sixty generations of debate. For however alien, however irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving the strain which it causes.
Here let me recall at the risk of repetition (for repetition is necessary to lucidity in such arguments) the logical process with which I opened this essay. I say that the vast majority, the fixed race through which in fluid