Page:The International Jew - Volume 1.djvu/25

 Rh the principal banking houses of every country as there is between the various branches of the United States Post Office—and for the same reason, namely, they are all operated from the same source and for the same purpose.

Just before the war Germany bought very heavily in American cotton and had huge quantities of it tied up here for export. When war came, the ownership of that mountainous mass of cotton wealth changed in one night from Jewish names in Hamburg to Jewish names in London. At this writing cotton is selling in England for less than it is selling in the United States, and the effect of that is to lower the American price. When the price lowers sufficiently, the market is cleared of cotton by buyers previously prepared, and then the price soars to high figures again. In the meantime, the same powers that have engineered the apparently causeless strengthening and weakening of the cotton market, have seized upon stricken Germany to be the sweatshop of the world. Certain groups control the cotton, lend it to Germany to be manufactured, leave a pittance of it there in payment for the labor that was used, and then profiteer the length and breadth of the world on the lie that “cotton is scarce.” And when, tracing all these antisocial and colossally unfair methods to their source, it is found that the responsible parties all have a common characteristic, is it any wonder that the warning which comes across the sea—“Wait until America becomes awake to the Jew!”—has a new meaning?

Certainly, economic reasons no longer explain the condition in which the world finds itself today. Neither does the ordinary explanation of “the heartlessness of capital.” Capital has endeavored as never before to meet the demands of labor, and labor has gone to extremes in leading capital to new concessions—but what has it advantaged either of them? Labor has heretofore thought that capital was the sky over it, and it made the sky yield, but behold, there was yet an higher sky which neither capital nor labor had seen in their struggles one with another. That sky is so far unyielding.

That which we call capital here in America is usually money used in production, and we mistakenly refer