force in 1664 was
followed the next year by the Great Plague and the year after by the
Great Fire of London would not appear to indicate that the Jews
necessarily bring good fortune to the land that protects them. The truth
is, of course, that kindness to any portion of the human race brings its
own reward in the form of moral improvement in the individual or nation
that performs it, but no more benefit attaches to philanthropy when
exercised towards the Jew than towards the Chinaman.

I would urge, then, that the Jewish problem should be approached neither
in the spirit of superstitious pro-Semitism nor in the bitter spirit of
"anti-Semitism," but with a sanity worthy of an enlightened age. To
quote again the words of Bernard Lazare, let us enquire what part "the
Jew, considering his spirit, his character, the nature of his philosophy
and his religion," may now be taking "in revolutionary processes and
movements." Is there, then, any evidence that there exists amongst Jewry
to-day an organized conspiracy having for its objects world-domination
and the destruction of Christianity such as the famous _Protocols of the
Elders of Zion_ suggest?[836]

The theory of a Jewish world-conspiracy does not, of course, rest on the
evidence of Protocols. To judge by the paeans of joy that rang through
the press after the publication of the _Times_ articles, one would
imagine that with the so-called "refutation" of this one document the
whole case against the Jews had collapsed and that the "anti-Semites"
must be for ever silenced. But the arguments of the Jews and their
friends go further than this; not only do they claim that there is no
Jewish conspiracy, but no world-plot of any kind. This contention they
had indeed maintained from the beginning, and Mr. Lucien Wolf, in his
earliest "refutation" of the Protocols, derided the exponents of the
secret-society danger as vehemently as he derided the perfidious author
of the Jewish Peril. It will in fact always be noticed that references
to the Illuminati meet with almost as much resentment from the Jewish
press as allusions of a directly "anti-Semitic" character. Barruel, who
refused to incriminate the Jews, and de Malet, who never referred to
them at all, are denounced by Mr. Lucien Wolf no less as scaremongers
than Gougenot des Mousseaux or Chabauty. To suggest that any Hidden Hand
has ever been at work in the world is to raise immediately a storm of
Jewish protest.

Yet intellig