and nomadic form Israel goes moving from century to century, is not free to discharge its responsibility by any one of those attempted solutions which I have condemned. No man, I trust, will have the cynicism to say that mere persecution, let alone its horrible extreme, is or should be a solution. No man can predict the same of exile either. No man can discharge our responsibility by pretending that any solution arrived at must be for our good alone and may disregard that of those who live among us.
It is a statement one hears frequently enough that the masters of house have alone to decide what shall be done under their roof: that the interloper, the alien element, has no standing and no right to complain of whatever measures may be taken for the protection of the household. The thing so put sounds plausible. It is essentially false. It is comparable to the argument applied to private property—that because private property is a right, and that because a man "may do what he likes with his own," therefore he may use it to the manifest hurt of others. Moreover, the analogy is false; for when a man is talking of "the master of the house" having the right in his household to decide its own way of living and of treating its guests, he is considering a very small unit in a great community; his household in the whole nation: a little body which, if it discharge or in any other way deal with something alien to itself, will inflict no great injury upon that foreign body, since there is all the world for it to turn to outside. But in the relations between the Jew and Christendom, or the Jew and Islam, the parallel fails. It is precisely because there is no "outside" to which the exile can turn that a duty is imposed on us.
It is true indeed that when a small and alien minority assumes to dictate the policy of the rest, to regard its own advantages alone and subordinate to those advantages the life of all, the claim is grotesque and must be disallowed. But we should remember upon the other side that it is only by exaggerating its claim that a minority can live at all. It is only by fierce