d by the fact that the leading spirit in these abuses, Bethel
Henry Strousberg (1823-1884), was a Jew, Lasker presented the results of
his inquiry to the diet on the 7th of February 1873, in a speech of
great power and full of sensational disclosures. The dramatic results of
this speech need not be dwelt upon here (for details see Blum, _Das
deutsche Reich zur Zelt Bismarcks_, pp. 153-181). It must suffice to say
that in the following May the great Vienna "Krach" occurred, and the
colossal bubble of speculation burst, bringing with it all the ruin
foretold by Lasker and Bamberger. From the position occupied by the Jews
in the commercial class, and especially in the financial section of that
class, it was inevitable that a considerable number of them should
figure in the scandals which followed. At this moment an obscure Hamburg
journalist, Wilhelm Marr, who as far back as 1862 had printed a
still-born tract against the Jews (_Judenspiegel_), published a
sensational pamphlet entitled _Der Sieg des Judenthums uber das
Germanthum_ ("The Victory of Judaism over Germanism"). The book fell
upon fruitful soil. It applied to the nascent controversy a theory of
nationality which, under the great sponsorship of Hegel, had seized on
the minds of the German youth, and to which the stirring events of 1870
had already given a deep practical significance. The state, according to
the Hegelians, should be rational, and the nation should be a unit
comprising individuals speaking the same language and of the same racial
origin. Heterogeneous elements might be absorbed, but if they could not
be reduced to the national type they should be eliminated. This was the
pseudo-scientific note of the new anti-Semitism, the theory which
differentiated it from the old religious Jew-hatred and sought to give
it a rational place in modern thought. Marr's pamphlet, which reviewed
the facts of the Jewish social concentration without noticing their
essentially transitional character, proved the pioneer of this teaching.
It was, however, in the passions of party politics that the new crusade
found its chief sources of vitality. The enemies of the _bourgeoisie_ at
once saw that the movement was calculated to discredit and weaken the
school of Manchester Liberalism, then in the ascendant. Agrarian
capitalism, which had been dethroned by industrial capitalism in 1848,
and had burnt its fingers in 1873, seized the opportunity of paying off
old scores. The cleric