Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/328

304 of the Jews as mankind has witnessed it, and is now witnessing it in several countries, has been not only especially barbarous in the ferocity of its excesses, but in a singular degree self-debasing and cowardly in the invention of the reasons adduced for its justification.

The Jews are accused of various offensive qualities and dangerous propensities. If we mean to do them anything like justice, are we not in duty bound to inquire how these qualities and propensities, so far as they may really exist, appear in the light of history?

For centuries the Jews were penned up in their ghettos and otherwise forcibly shut off from the rest of humanity, and then they were gravely accused of being clannish.

For centuries they were in most countries arbitrarily restricted in the right to hold land and to follow various civil callings, and then they were gravely accused of not taking to agriculture and of preferring to trade.

For centuries they had to defend themselves against the lawless rapacity of the powerful and against the wanton hostility of the multitude, being robbed and kicked and cuffed and spit upon like outcasts having no rights and no feelings entitled to respect; and then they were accused of having become crafty and unscrupulous in taking advantage of the opportunities left open to them.

For centuries—and even down to our day—whenever a Jew did anything conspicuously offensive, be it in the way of business unscrupulousness or of social ostentation, the cry has been—and is: “Lo, behold the Jew!” While, when a Christian did the same thing, or even ten times worse, nobody would cry: “Lo, behold the Christian!”

And now, to cap the climax, even in this age of light and progress, and in countries boasting of their mental and moral culture, we hear apostles of anti-Semitism, even persons belonging to the so-called upper classes, insist with accents of profound alarm that if the Jews be