Another character which is affiliated to this first leading character of the Jew would seem to be the lucidity of his thought. The Jew's argument is never muddled. That is one of his prime assets not only in all discussion but in all action. It is also, if a cause of strength, a cause of the enmity he arouses: or (to use my milder term) of the "friction."
For an exactly constructed process of reasoning, from which there is no escape, has in it (for those less capable of it) something of the bully. A man may feel the conclusion to be false: perhaps he knows it to be false. He lacks the power to express his reasons. He may not know how to state the principles which his adversary has left out of account, or when to bring them into discussion, and he feels the iron logic offered to him like a pistol presented at the head of his better judgment. But for strength and for weakness also, lucidity is the mark of the Jew's mind. He carries that lucidity into the smallest details of whatever he may perform.
One must add to all this a certain intensity of action which is very noticeable and which again is a cause of friction between himself and those about him. Hear a Jew speaking, especially a Jew speaking upon the revolutionary platform, and note the high voltage at which the current is working. The energy which he uses is not the energy of a large flame but of a well-directed blow-pipe: a stream of heat. He is wholly absorbed, not in his own expression, but in actively penetrating the mind of his hearers. And here again is that difference in quality to which I have alluded. One might say indifferently that the Jew is never eloquent or that he is always eloquent when he speaks upon things that possess his soul. He is not eloquent in our fashion; but he is at any rate astonishingly effective in his own.
The Jew has this other characteristic which has become increasingly noticeable in our own time, but which is probably as old as the race: and