by any other person in our modern society. I cannot recollect one single case in all the hundreds of Jews I have come across—not one in the score whom I can count as intimates—who showed any sign of this malignant hatred. I have heard many outbursts of exasperation which, when we think of the past, are natural enough; but of some persistent and evil desire to hurt those among whom they live, some instinctive desire unconnected with past suffering, and acting as a sort of instinct, I have seen no trace. If such were to be discovered in some exceptional Jew out of a large acquaintance I should conclude that it might be true of a small minority, but common sense and common experience are sufficient to show that it does not affect the mass.
Of the causes of friction, even of acute friction, which I have enumerated in former pages, there is the habit of secrecy, there is the mutual contempt, arising in each from a sense of superiority over the other; there is the quarrel between what is national and what is international, between what is of us and what is alien. There are, in a word, plenty of elements suggesting accidental antagonism, but of intrinsic antagonism there is no evidence—there is no evidence, I mean, that the Jews would still desire to destroy a society in which they found themselves at their ease.
And, if we examine ourselves, we shall be equally convinced that there is no corresponding desire upon our side to do a wrong to the Jew. We also are exasperated by the memory of insult in moments of quarrel, of international action opposing our national interests and of friction between what is native and what is alien; but that is a very different thing from permanent and necessary antagonism. I know very well what is called "modern thought" gives to the unconscious part of man a large place and reduces, as much as it can, the field of reason. I cannot agree with it. It seems to me that man is essentially rational; and his political relations can be arranged consonantly with his conscious morals and his conscious logic.