grounds for this statement concerning the nations
that act as "hosts"? Where it is not based on limited physiocratic
views it is founded on the childish error that commodities pass from
hand to hand in continuous rotation. We need not wake from long
slumber, like Rip van Winkle, to realize that the world is
considerably altered by the production of new commodities. The
technical progress made during this wonderful era enables even a man
of most limited intelligence to note with his short-sighted eyes the
appearance of new commodities all around him. The spirit of enterprise
has created them.

Labor without enterprise is the stationary labor of ancient days; and
typical of it is the work of the husbandman, who stands now just where
his progenitors stood a thousand years ago. All our material welfare
has been brought about by men of enterprise. I feel almost ashamed of
writing down so trite a remark. Even if we were a nation of
entrepreneurs--such as absurdly exaggerated accounts make us out to
be--we should not require another nation to live on. We do not depend
on the circulation of old commodities, because we produce new ones.

The world possesses slaves of extraordinary capacity for work, whose
appearance has been fatal to the production of handmade goods: these
slaves are the machines. It is true that workmen are required to set
machinery in motion; but for this we have men in plenty, in
super-abundance. Only those who are ignorant of the conditions of Jews
in many countries of Eastern Europe would venture to assert that Jews
are either unfit or unwilling to perform manual labor.

But I do not wish to take up the cudgels for the Jews in this
pamphlet. It would be useless. Everything rational and everything
sentimental that can possibly be said in their defence has been said
already. If one's hearers are incapable of comprehending them, one is
a preacher in a desert. And if one's hearers are broad and high-minded
enough to have grasped them already, then the sermon is superfluous. I
believe in the ascent of man to higher and yet higher grades of
civilization; but I consider this ascent to be desperately slow. Were
we to wait till average humanity had become as charitably inclined as
was Lessing when he wrote "Nathan the Wise," we should wait beyond our
day, beyond the days of our children, of our grandchildren, and of our
great-grandchildren. But the world's spirit comes to our aid in
another way.

This century h