but the immense international clamour with which it was surrounded. This local affair was made an affair of the whole world, and men took as passionate an interest in it in the remotest corners of civilization as though they had been the principals actually engaged.
Such a phenomenon could not but astonish the mass of onlookers who had hitherto not given the Jewish question a thought, and when there was added to it the great ordeal of the South African War, openly and undeniably provoked and promoted by Jewish interests in South Africa, when that war was so unexpectedly prolonged and proved so unexpectedly costly in blood and treasure, a second element was added to the growing feeling, not yet, indeed, of antagonism to Jewish power (half cultured France was Dreyfusard, and much more than half England favoured the Boer War at its origin), but of interest in the Jewish question, of curiosity, on the part of the average citizen, who had not hitherto heard of it.
The original minority which had begun to oppose Jewish power, with their extreme left wing of Anti-Semites, and their core of men whose quarrel was rather with the financial control of the modern world than with any racial problem, tended to grow. As always happens with a growing movement, events appeared to suit themselves to that growth and to promote it.
The Panama scandals in the French Parliament had already fed the movement in France. The later Parliamentary scandals in England, Marconi and the rest, afforded so astonishing a parallel to Panama that the similarity was of universal comment. They might have passed as isolated things a generation before. They were now connected, often unjustly, with the uneasy sense of a general financial conspiracy. They were, at any rate, connected with an atmosphere essentially Jewish in character.