UNREASONING HATRED.

Waikato Argus, Volume IV, Issue 294, 28 May 1898, Page 1 (Supplement)

UNREASONING HATRED.

Stiuotly speaking, every kind of hatred might be said to be unreasoning, but if there is one manifestation on it more than another to which the term may be applied it is the recent European demonstrations of hatred of the Jews.

The Jew is used to persecution. In Russia he is compelled to live within prescribed districts. In Austria and Romania he is the victim of mob violence or of street ruffians, who sometimes even assault and rob him with impunity. In Germany an active political party makes his expulsion the chief article of its faith, In most European couutries, if he is not subject to legal disabilities, he is discriminated against to such an extent the as amounts to the same thing. Just at present it is in France, whose republican institution should be a guarantee of utmost tolerance, that the most shocking manifestations of hatred of the Jews are being made. What is there in the ques ! ion of the guilt or innocence of Captain Dreyfus which should stir up mobs in the s'reets of Paiis and other French cities to shout ' Down with the Jews !" and to attack Jewish houses and shops? Simp'y this: that Dreyfus is a Jew, and the fact so warps the judgment ot thousands of Frenchmen that they are almost ready to mob anyone who suggests, that he ought to have a new and open trial. A Jew stal)3 a Span ; ard in Algiers—very likely in self-defence. Immediately a mob gathers, crying ' Down with the Jews !' and begins b-caking up Jewish shops and maltreating all Jews whom it finds on the streets. If an Italian had stabbed the Spaniard there would have been no mob shouting ' Down with the Italians !' What impels the mob is not honor at the man's crime, but blind, unreasoning hatred of Jews as Jews. Such demonstrations are a revival of tho savagery of the Middle Ages. They are out of place in the nineteenth century and they Jisgraco the communities which tolerate them. Thero is nothing iu the Jewish character which affords any justification of such troatment. In whatever country the Jew is ho is a good citizen. His respect for the law is ono of his strongest traits. He is patient, industrious, and thrifty. Ho does not furnish a largo quota to the prisons, and to a larger extent than most people he takes care of his own poor, and keeps them from becoming a public burden, To hate a man, and to wish to inflict pain upon him or to do him a wrong, not because of anything he has done, but because he happens to have been born of a. certain rac», is one of the basest feelings which can prompt hnman conduct.

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