Page:The International Jew - Volume 1.djvu/179

 XVI.

he real estate speculations of the Jews are familiar to all, but unfortunately do not constitute their entire land program. Many American cities have changed their characters entirely during the past 15 years by reason of Jewish speculation in residence property, and it is a fact established in the larger eastern cities that the recent exorbitant and extortionate rise in rents was largely a matter of the Jewish landlord. The governor of one of the most important of our commonwealths was loath to sign a bill regulating rents. His hesitancy was encouraged by very heavy pressure brought to bear upon him by the weightiest Jewish financial interests in his own and neighboring states. He finally decided that he would sign the bill and give the law effect, and the fact that decided him was his personal investigation and the investigation of his personal agents into hundreds of cases of abuse where he discovered that it was a common practice among Jewish landlords to transfer the same piece of property round and round to every member of the family in turn, each “transfer” being the excuse for a new increase in the rent. Men have their eyes opened to the Jewish Question in various ways: this was the way a governor had his eyes opened.

That, however, is not the peculiarity of Jewish landlords alone; Gentile landlords have played the same trick. But landlordism is peculiarly a Jewish ambition and distinction; the Jew is the Landlord of America. Any group of tenants almost anywhere in America, except the West, could testify to this.

Nor is landlordism itself reprehensible, things being what they are, unless it is anti-social and anti-American. And just here is where it gets point. Some of the oldest and most sacred shrines of Americanism in the East have entirely lost their character as such by the invasion—not of “foreigners”—but of Jews.