e war. But he is not known in England at all in connection with a much
more important campaign, which he has conducted much more recently and
with much more success; a campaign against the Jews like one of the
Anti-Semitic campaigns of the Continent. Now any one who knows anything
of America knows exactly what the Peace Ship would be like. It was a
national combination of imagination and ignorance, which has at least
some of the beauty of innocence. Men living in those huge, hedgeless
inland plains know nothing about frontiers or the tragedy of a fight for
freedom; they know nothing of alarum and armaments or the peril of a
high civilisation poised like a precious statue within reach of a mailed
fist. They are accustomed to a cosmopolitan citizenship, in which men of
all bloods mingle and in which men of all creeds are counted equal.
Their highest moral boast is humanitarianism; their highest mental boast
is enlightenment. In a word, they are the very last men in the world who
would seem likely to pride themselves on a prejudice against the Jews.
They have no religion in particular, except a sincere sentiment which
they would call 'true Christianity,' and which specially forbids an
attack on the Jews. They have a patriotism which prides itself on
assimilating all types, including the Jews. Mr. Ford is a pure product
of this pacific world, as was sufficiently proved by his pacifism. If a
man of that sort has discovered that there is a Jewish problem, it is
because there is a Jewish problem. It is certainly not because there is
an Anti-Jewish prejudice. For if there had been any amount of such
racial and religious prejudice, he would have been about the very last
sort of man to have it. His particular part of the world would have been
the very last place to produce it. We may well laugh at the Peace Ship,
and its wild course and inevitable shipwreck; but remember that its very
wildness was an attempt to sail as far as possible from the castle of
Front-de-Boeuf. Everything that made him Anti-War should have
prevented him from being Anti-Semite. We may mock him for being mad on
peace; but we cannot say that he was so mad on peace that he made war on
Israel.

It happened that, when I was in America, I had just published some
studies on Palestine; and I was besieged by Rabbis lamenting my
'prejudice.' I pointed out that they would have got hold of the wrong
word, even if they had not got hold of the wrong man. As a point of
p