frequency. We can, I think, advance by many degrees from the lack of charity we now show, even if we despair of living in real intimacy with a people so different in their deepest qualities from ourselves.
Personally, I am not sure that such closer intimacy might not be established; I have never found any difficulty in reaching and retaining intimate acquaintance with the Jews of my own circle—but I may have been fortunate. I know that with most of my fellows it is not so, and perhaps the Jew will always remain to the mass of those about him something strange and unapproachable, and I fear, repulsive. But there is no reason, why we should mix with that hesitation in our relations an element of indifference, still less of contempt, still less, again, of cruelty.
I repeat the formula for a solution: it is recognition and respect.
Recognition is here no more than the telling of the truth: there is a Jewish nation. Jews are citizens of that nation; and recognition means not only the telling of this truth on special occasions but the use of it as a regular habit in our relations on both sides.
This statement is, upon any just analysis of the Jewish question, so obvious and so simple, that it needs neither insistence upon it nor development. Its plain statement is sufficient. But there attaches to a solution so determined a much more active and complicated question, upon the uncertainty of which not only this reform but many another has made shipwreck. The question must be answered rightly, because, if we answer it wrongly, the whole scheme fails.
The question is this: Should the social habit, the general method in writing and speaking and in all relations, precede in this case the institutional action, legal changes, constitutional definitions? Or should the legal changes, the new institutions, the constitutional definitions come first?