Volume 2, Slice 2 Part 22 (1/2)

The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was founded in 1780, and has the management of a large national antiquarian museum in Edinburgh. In Ireland a society was founded in 1849 called the Kilkenny Archaeological Society, holding its meetings at Kilkenny. In 1869 its name was changed to the Royal Historical and Archaeological a.s.sociation of Ireland, and in 1890 to the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, its office being transferred to Dublin. In France _La Societe Nationale des Antiquaires de France_ was formed in 1814 by the reconstruction of the _Academie Celtique_, which had existed since 1805. The American Antiquarian Society was founded in 1812, with its headquarters at Worcester, Ma.s.s.

It has a library of upwards of 100,000 volumes and its transactions have been published bi-annually since 1849. In Germany the _Gesamtverein der Deutschen Geschichtsund Altertumsvereine_ was founded in 1852. _La Societe Royale des Antiquaires du Nord_ at Copenhagen is among the best known of European antiquarian societies.

ANTIQUE (Lat. _antiquus_, old), a term conventionally restricted to the remains of ancient art, such as sculptures, gems, medals, seals, &c. In a limited sense it applies only to Greek and Roman art, and includes neither the artistic remains of other ancient nations nor any product of cla.s.sical art of a later date than the fall of the western empire.

ANTI-SEMITISM. In the political struggles of the concluding quarter of the 19th century an important part was played by a religious, political and social agitation against the Jews, known as ”Anti-Semitism.” The origins of this remarkable movement already threaten to become obscured by legend. The Jews contend that anti-Semitism is a mere atavistic revival of the Jew-hatred of the middle ages. The extreme section of the anti-Semites, who have given the movement its quasi-scientific name, declare that it is a racial struggle--an incident of the eternal conflict between Europe and Asia--and that the anti-Semites are engaged in an effort to prevent what is called the Aryan race from being subjugated by a Semitic immigration, and to save Aryan ideals from being modified by an alien and demoralizing oriental _Anschauung_. There is no essential foundation for either of these contentions. Religious prejudices reaching back to the dawn of history have been reawakened by the anti-Semitic agitation, but they did not originate it, and they have not entirely controlled it. The alleged racial divergence is, too, only a linguistic hypothesis on the physical evidence of which anthropologists are not agreed (Topinard, _Anthropologie_, p. 444; Taylor, _Origins of Aryans_, cap. i.), and, even if it were proved, it has existed in Europe for so many centuries, and so many ethnic modifications have occurred on both sides, that it cannot be accepted as a practical issue. It is true that the ethnographical histories of the Jews and the nations of Europe have proceeded on widely diverging lines, but these lines have more than once crossed each other and become interlaced. Thus Aryan elements are at the beginning of both; European morals have been ineradicably semitized by Christianity, and the Jews have been Europeans for over a thousand years, during which their character has been modified and in some respects transformed by the ecclesiastical and civil polities of the nations among whom they have made their permanent home. Anti-Semitism is then exclusively a question of European politics, and its origin is to be found, not in the long struggle between Europe and Asia, or between the Church and the Synagogue, which filled so much of ancient and medieval history, but in the social conditions resulting from the emanc.i.p.ation of the Jews in the middle of the 19th century.

If the emanc.i.p.ated Jews were Europeans in virtue of the antiquity of their western settlements, and of the character impressed upon them by the circ.u.mstances of their European history, they none the less presented the appearance of a strange people to their Gentile fellow-countrymen. They had been secluded in their ghettos for centuries, and had consequently acquired a physical and moral physiognomy differentiating them in a measure from their former oppressors. This peculiar physiognomy was, on its moral side, not essentially Jewish or even Semitic. It was an advanced development of the main attributes of civilized life, to which Christendom in its transition from feudalism had as yet only imperfectly adapted itself.

The ghetto, which had been designed as a sort of quarantine to safeguard Christendom against the Jewish heresy, had in fact proved a storage chamber for a portion of the political and social forces which were destined to sweep away the last traces of feudalism from central Europe.

In the ghetto, the pastoral Semite, who had been made a wanderer by the destruction of his nationality, was steadily trained, through centuries, to become an urban European, with all the parasitic activities of urban economics, and all the democratic tendencies of occidental industrialism. Excluded from the army, the land, the trade corporations and the artisan gilds, this quondam oriental peasant was gradually transformed into a commercial middleman and a practised dealer in money.

Oppressed by the Church, and persecuted by the State, his theocratic and monarchical traditions lost their hold on his daily life, and he became saturated with a pa.s.sionate devotion to the ideals of democratic politics. Finally, this former bucolic victim of Phoenician exploitation had his wits preternaturally sharpened, partly by the stress of his struggle for life, and partly by his being compelled in his urban seclusion to seek for recreation in literary exercises, chiefly the subtle dialectics of the Talmudists (Loeb, _Juif de l'histoire_; Jellinek, _Der Judische Stamm_). Thus, the Jew who emerged from the ghetto was no longer a Palestinian Semite, but an essentially modern European, who differed from his Christian fellow-countrymen only in the circ.u.mstances that his religion was of the older Semitic form, and that his physical type had become sharply defined through a slightly more rigid exclusiveness in the matter of marriages than that practised by Protestants and Roman Catholics (Andree, _Volkskunde der Juden_, p. 58).

Unfortunately, these distinctive elements, though not very serious in themselves, became strongly accentuated by concentration. Had it been possible to distribute the emanc.i.p.ated Jews uniformly throughout Christian society, as was the case with other emanc.i.p.ated religious denominations, there would have been no revival of the Jewish question.

The Jews, however, through no fault of their own, belonged to only one cla.s.s in European society--the industrial _bourgeoisie_. Into that cla.s.s all their strength was thrown, and owing to their ghetto preparation, they rapidly took a leading place in it, politically and socially. When the mid-century revolutions made the _bourgeoisie_ the ruling power in Europe, the semblance of a Hebrew domination presented itself. It was the exaggeration of this apparent domination, not by the _bourgeoisie_ itself, but by its enemies among the vanquished reactionaries on the one hand, and by the extreme Radicals on the other, which created modern anti-Semitism as a political force.

Germany.

The movement took its rise in Germany and Austria. Here the concentration of the Jews in one cla.s.s of the population was aggravated by their excessive numbers. While in France the proportion to the total population was, in the early'seventies, 0.14%, and in Italy, 0.12%, it was 1.22% in Germany, and 3.85% in Austria-Hungary; Berlin had 4.36% of Jews, and Vienna 6.62% (Andree, _Volkskunde_, pp. 287, 291, 294, 295).

The activity of the Jews consequently manifested itself in a far more intense form in these countries than elsewhere. This was apparent even before the emanc.i.p.ations of 1848. Towards the middle of the 18th century, a limited number of wealthy Jews had been tolerated as _Schutz-Juden_ outside the ghettos, and their sons, educated as Germans under the influence of Moses Mendelssohn and his school (see JEWS), supplied a majority of the leading spirits of the revolutionary agitation. To this period belong the formidable names of Ludwig Borne (1786-1837), Heinrich Heine (1799-1854), Edward Ganz (1798-1839), Gabriel Riesser (1806-1863), Ferdinand La.s.salle (1825-1864), Karl Marx (1818-1883), Moses Hess (1812-1875), Ignatz Kuranda (1811-1884), and Johann Jacobi (1805-1877). When the revolution was completed, and the Jews entered in a body the national life of Germany and Austria, they sustained this high average in all the intellectual branches of middle-cla.s.s activity. Here again, owing to the accidents of their history, a further concentration became apparent. Their activity was almost exclusively intellectual. The bulk of them flocked to the financial and the distributive (as distinct from the productive) fields of industry to which they had been confined in the ghettos. The sharpened faculties of the younger generation at the same time carried everything before them in the schools, with the result that they soon crowded the professions, especially medicine, law and journalism (Nossig, _Statistik des Jud. Stammes_, pp. 33-37; Jacobs, _Jew.

Statistics_, pp. 41-69). Thus the ”Semitic domination,” as it was afterwards called, became every day more strongly accentuated. If it was a long time in exciting resentment and jealousy, the reason was that it was in no sense alien to the new conditions of the national life. The compet.i.tion was a fair one. The Jews might be more successful than their Christian fellow-citizens, but it was in virtue of qualities which complied with the national standards of conduct. They were as law-abiding and patriotic as they were intelligent. Crime among them was far below the average (Nossig, p. 31). Their complete a.s.similation of the national spirit was brilliantly ill.u.s.trated by the achievements in German literature, art and science of such men as Heinrich Heine and Berthold Auerbach (1812-1882), Felix Mendelssohn (-Bartholdy) (1809-1847), and Jacob Meyerbeer (1794-1864), Karl Gustav Jacobi the mathematician (1804-1851), Gabriel Gustav Valentin the physiologist (1810-1883), and Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903) and Heymann Steinthal (1823-1899) the national psychologists. In politics, too, Edward Lasker (1829-1884) and Ludwig Bamberger (1823-1899) had shown how Jews could put their country before party, when, at the turning-point of German imperial history in 1866, they led the secession from the _Fortschritts-Partei_ and founded the National Liberal party, which enabled Prince Bismarck to accomplish German unity. Even their financiers were not behind their Christian fellow-citizens in patriotism. Prince Bismarck himself confessed that the money for carrying on the 1866 campaign was obtained from the Jewish banker Bleichroeder, in face of the refusal of the money-market to support the war. Hence the voice of the old Jew-hatred--for in a weak way it was still occasionally heard in obscurantist corners--was shamed into silence, and it was only in the European twilight--in Russia and Rumania--and in lands where medievalism still lingered, such as northern Africa and Persia, that oppression and persecution continued to dog the steps of the Jews.

The signal for the change came in 1873, and was given unconsciously by one of the most distinguished Jews of his time, Edward Lasker, the gifted lieutenant of Bennigsen in the leaders.h.i.+p of the National Liberal party. The unification of Germany in 1870, and the rapid payment of the enormous French war indemnity, had given an unprecedented impulse to industrial and financial activity throughout the empire. Money became cheap and speculation universal. A company mania set in which was favoured by the government, who granted railway and other concessions with a prodigal hand. The inevitable result of this state of things was first indicated by Jewish politicians and economists. On the 14th of January 1873, Edward Lasker called the attention of the Prussian diet to the dangers of the situation, while his colleague, Ludwig Bamberger, in an able article in the _Preussischen Jahrbucher_, condemned the policy which had permitted the milliards to glut the country instead of being paid on a plan which would have facilitated their gradual digestion by the economic machinery of the nation. Deeply impressed by the gravity of the impending crisis, Lasker inst.i.tuted a searching inquiry, with the result that he discovered a series of grave company scandals in which financial promoters and aristocratic directors were chiefly involved.

Undeterred 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 cla.s.s, and especially in the financial section of that cla.s.s, 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 ent.i.tled _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 sponsors.h.i.+p 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 pa.s.sions 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 clericals, smarting under the _Kutlturkampj_, which was supported by the whole body of Jewish liberalism, joined eagerly in the new cry. In 1876 another sensational pamphlet was published, Otto Glogau's _Die Borsen und Grundergeschwindel in Berlin_ (”The Bourses and the Company Swindles in Berlin”), dealing in detail with the Jewish partic.i.p.ation in the scandals first revealed by Lasker. The agitation gradually swelled, its growth being helped by the sensitiveness and _cacoethes scribendi_ of the Jews themselves, who contributed two pamphlets and a much larger proportion of newspaper articles for every one supplied by their opponents (Jacobs. _Bibliog. Jew. Question_, p.

xi.). Up to 1879, however, it was more of a literary than a political agitation, and was generally regarded only as an ephemeral craze or a pa.s.sing spasm of popular pa.s.sion.

Towards the end of 1879 it spread with sudden fury over the whole of Germany. This outburst, at a moment when no new financial scandals or other ill.u.s.trations of Semitic demoralization and domination were before the public, has never been fully explained. It is impossible to doubt, however, that the secret springs of the new agitation were more or less directly supplied by Prince Bismarck himself. Since 1877 the relations between the chancellor and the National Liberals had gradually become strained. The deficit in the budget had compelled the government to think of new taxes, and in order to carry them through the Reichstag the support of the National Liberals had been solicited. Until then the National Liberals had faithfully supported the chancellor in nursing the consolidation of the new empire, but the great dream of its leaders, especially of Lasker and Bamberger, who had learnt their politics in England, was to obtain a const.i.tutional and economic _regime_ similar to that of the British Isles. The organization of German unity was now completed, and they regarded the new overtures of Prince Bismarck as an opportunity for pressing their const.i.tutional demands. These were refused, the Reichstag was dissolved and Prince Bismarck boldly came forward with a new fiscal policy, a combination of protection and state socialism. Lasker and Bamberger thereupon led a powerful secession of National Liberals into opposition, and the chancellor was compelled to seek a new majority among the ultra-Conservatives and the Roman Catholic Centre. This was the beginning of the famous ”journey to Canossa.”

Bismarck did not hide his mortification. He began to recognize in anti-Semitism a means of ”dis.h.i.+ng” the Judaized liberals, and to his creatures who a.s.sisted him in his press campaigns he dropped significant hints in this sense (Busch, _Bismarck_, ii. 453-454, iii. 16). He even spoke of a new _Kulturkampf_ against the Jews (_ibid_. ii. p. 484). How these hints were acted upon has not been revealed, but it is sufficiently instructive to notice that the final breach with the National Liberals took place in July 1879, and that it was immediately followed by a violent revival of the anti-Semitic agitation. Marr's pamphlet was reprinted, and within a few months ran through nine further editions. The historian Treitschke gave the sanction of his great name to the movement. The Conservative and Ultramontane press rang with the sins of the Jews. In October an anti-Semitic league was founded in Berlin and Dresden (for statutes of the league see _Nineteenth Century_, February 1881, p. 344).

The leaders.h.i.+p of the agitation was now definitely a.s.sumed by a man who combined with social influence, oratorical power and inexhaustible energy, a definite scheme of social regeneration and an organization for carrying it out. This man was Adolf Stocker (b. 1835), one of the court preachers. He had embraced the doctrines of Christian socialism which the Roman Catholics, under the guidance of Archbishop Ketteler, had adopted from the teachings of the Jew La.s.salle (Nitti, _Catholic Socialism_, pp. 94-96, 122, 127), and he had formed a society called ”The Christian Social Working-man's Union.” He was also a conspicuous member of the Prussian diet, where he sat and voted with the Conservatives. He found himself in strong sympathy with Prince Bismarck's new economic policy, which, although also of La.s.sallian origin (Kohut, _Ferdinand La.s.salle_, pp. 144 et seq.), was claimed by its author as being essentially Christian (Busch, p. 483). Under his auspices the years 1880-1881 became a period of bitter and scandalous conflict with the Jews. The Conservatives supported him, partly to satisfy their old grudges against the Liberal _bourgeoisie_ and partly because Christian Socialism, with its anti-Semitic appeal to ignorant prejudice, was likely to weaken the hold of the Social Democrats on the lower cla.s.ses. The Lutheran clergy followed suit, in order to prevent the Roman Catholics from obtaining a monopoly of Christian Socialism, while the Ultramontanes readily adopted anti-Semitism, partly to maintain their monopoly, and partly to avenge themselves on the Jewish and Liberal supporters of the _Kulturkampf_. In this way a formidable body of public opinion was recruited for the anti-Semites. Violent debates took place in the Prussian diet. A pet.i.tion to exclude the Jews from the national schools and universities and to disable them from holding public appointments was presented to Prince Bismarck. Jews were boycotted and insulted. Duels between Jews and anti-Semites, many of them fatal, became of daily occurrence. Even unruly demonstrations and street riots were reported. Pamphlets attacking every phase and aspect of Jewish life streamed by the hundred from the printing-press. On their side the Jews did not want for friends, and it was owing to the strong att.i.tude adopted by the Liberals that the agitation failed to secure legislative fruition. The crown prince (afterwards Emperor Frederick) and crown princess boldly set themselves at the head of the party of protest. The crown prince publicly declared that the agitation was ”a shame and a disgrace to Germany.” A manifesto denouncing the movement as a blot on German culture, a danger to German unity and a flagrant injustice to the Jews themselves, was signed by a long list of ill.u.s.trious men, including Herr von Forckenbeck, Professors Mommsen, Gneist, Droysen, Virchow, and Dr Werner Siemens (_Times_, November 18, 1880). During the Reichstag elections of 1881 the agitation played an active part, but without much effect, although Stocker was elected. This was due to the fact that the great Conservative parties, so far as their political organizations were concerned, still remained chary of publicly identifying themselves with a movement which, in its essence, was of socialistic tendency. Hence the electoral returns of that year supplied no sure guide to the strength of anti-Semitic opinion among the German people.

The first severe blow suffered by the German anti-Semites was in 1881, when, to the indignation of the whole civilized world, the barbarous riots against the Jews in Russia and the revival of the medieval Blood Accusation in Hungary (see _infra_) ill.u.s.trated the liability of unreasoning mobs to carry into violent practice the incendiary doctrines of the new Jew-haters. From this blow anti-Semitism might have recovered had it not been for the divisions and scandals in its own ranks, and the artificial forms it subsequently a.s.sumed through fact.i.tious alliances with political parties bent less on persecuting the Jews than on profiting by the anti-Jewish agitation. The divisions showed themselves at the first attempt to form a political party on an anti-Semitic basis.

Imperceptibly the agitators had grouped themselves into two cla.s.ses, economic and ethnological anti-Semites. The impracticable racial views of Marr and Treitschke had not found favour with Stocker and the Christian Socialists. They were disposed to leave the Jews in peace so long as they behaved themselves properly, and although they carried on their agitation against Jewish malpractices in a comprehensive form which seemed superficially to identify them with the root-and-branch anti-Semites, they were in reality not inclined to accept the racial theory with its scheme of revived Jewish disabilities (Huret, _La Question Sociale_--interview with Stocker). This feeling was strengthened by a tendency on the part of an extreme wing of the racial anti-Semites to extend their campaign against Judaism to its offspring, Christianity. In 1879 Professor Sepp, arguing that Jesus was of no human race, had proposed that Christianity should reject the Hebrew Scriptures and seek a fresh historical basis in the cuneiform inscriptions. Later Dr Eugen Dubring, in several brochures, notably _Die Judenfrage als Frage des Ra.s.sencharakters_ (1881, 5th ed. Berlin, 1901), had attacked Christianity as a manifestation of the Semitic spirit which was not compatible with the theological and ethical conceptions of the Scandinavian peoples. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had also adopted the same view, without noticing that it was a _reductio ad absurdum_ of the whole agitation, in his _Menschliches, Allzumenschliches_ (1878), _Jenseits von Gut und Bose_ (1886), _Genealogie der Moral_ (1887). With these tendencies the Christian Socialists could have no sympathy, and the consequence was that when in March 1881 a political organization of anti-Semitism was attempted, two rival bodies were created, the ”Deutsche Volksverein,” under the Conservative auspices of Herr Liebermann von Sonnenberg (b. 1848) and Herr Forster, and the ”Sociale Reichsverein,” led by the racial and Radical anti-Semites, Ernst Henrici (b. 1854) and Otto Bockel (b. 1859).

In 1886, at an anti-Semitic congress held at Ca.s.sel a reunion was effected under the name of the ”Deutsche antisemitische Verein,” but this only lasted three years. In June 1889 the anti-Semitic Christian Socialists under Stocker again seceded.

Meanwhile racial anti-Semitism with its wholesale radical proposals had been making considerable progress among the ignorant lower cla.s.ses. It adapted itself better to popular pa.s.sions and inherited prejudice than the more academic conceptions of the Christian Socialists. The latter, too, were largely Conservatives, and their points of contact with the proletariat were at best artificial. Among the Hessian peasantry the inflammatory appeals of Bockel secured many adherents. This paved the way for a new anti-Semitic leader, Herrmann Ahlwardt (b. 1846), who, towards the end of the 'eighties, eclipsed all the other anti-Semites by the sensationalism and violence with which he prosecuted the campaign.

Ahlwardt was a person of evil notoriety. He was loaded with debt. In the Manche decoration scandals it was proved that he had acted first as a corrupt intermediary and afterwards as the betrayer of his confederates.

His anti-Semitism was adopted originally as a means of _chantage_, and it was only when it failed to yield profit in this form that he came out boldly as an agitator. The wildness, unscrupulousness, and full-bloodedness of his propaganda enchanted the mob, and he bid fair to become a powerful democratic leader. His pamphlets, full of scandalous revelations of alleged malpractices of eminent Jews, were read with avidity. No fewer than ten of them were written and published during 1892. Over and over again he was prosecuted for libel and convicted, but this seemed only to strengthen his influence with his followers. The Roman Catholic clergy and newspapers helped to inflame the popular pa.s.sions. The result was that anti-Jewish riots broke out. At Neustettin the Jewish synagogue was burnt, and at Xanten the Blood Accusation was revived, and a Jewish butcher was tried on the ancient charge of murdering a Christian child for ritual purposes. The man was, of course, acquitted, but the symptoms it revealed of reviving medievalism strongly stirred the liberal and cultured mind of Germany. All protest, however, seemed powerless, and the barbarian movement appeared destined to carry everything before it.

German politics at this moment were in a very intricate state. Prince Bismarck had retired, and Count Caprivi, with a programme of general conciliation based on Liberal principles, was in power. Alarmed by the non-renewal of the anti-Socialist law, and by the conclusion of commercial treaties which made great concessions to German industry, the landed gentry and the Conservative party became alienated from the new chancellor. In January 1892 the split was completed by the withdrawal by the government of the Primary Education bill, which had been designed to place primary instruction on a religious basis. The Conservatives saw their opportunity of posing as the party of Christianity against the Liberals and Socialists, who had wrecked the bill, and they began to look towards Ahlwardt as a possible ally. He had the advantages over Stocker that he was not a Socialist, and that he was prepared to lead his apparently large following to a.s.sist the agrarian movement and weaken the Social Democrats. The intrigue gradually came to light.

Towards the end of the year Herr Liebknecht, the Social Democratic leader, denounced the Conservatives to the Reichstag as being concerned ”in using the anti-Semitic movement as a b.a.s.t.a.r.d edition of Socialism for the use of stupid people.” (1st December). Two days later the charge was confirmed. At a meeting of the party held on the 3rd of December the following plank was added to the Conservative programme: ”We combat the oppressive and disintegrating Jewish influence on our national life; we demand for our Christian people a Christian magistracy and Christian teachers for Christian pupils; we repudiate the excesses of anti-Semitism.” In pursuance of the resolution Ahlwardt was returned to the Reichstag at a by-election by the Conservative district of Arnswalde-Friedeberg. The coalition was, however, not yet completed. The intransigeant Conservatives, led by Baron von Hammerstein, the editor of the _Kreuz-Zeitung_, justly felt that the concluding sentence of the resolution of the 3rd of December repudiating ”the excesses of anti-Semitism” was calculated to hinder a full and loyal co-operation between the two parties. Accordingly on the 9th of December another meeting of the party was summoned. Twelve hundred members met at the Tivoli Hall in Berlin, and with only seven dissentients solemnly expunged the offending sentence from the resolution. The history of political parties may be searched in vain for a parallel to this discreditable transaction.

The capture of the Conservative party proved the high-water mark of German anti-Semitism. From that moment the tide began to recede. All that was best in German national life was scandalized by the cynical tactics of the Conservatives. The emperor, strong Christian though he was, was shocked at the idea of serving Christianity by a compact with unscrupulous demagogues and ignorant fanatics. Prince Bismarck growled out a stinging sarcasm from his retreat at Friedrichsruh. Even Stocker raised his voice in protest against the ”Ahlwardtismus” and ”Bockelianismus,” and called upon his Conservative colleagues to distinguish between ”respectable and disreputable anti-Semitism.” As for the Liberals and Socialists, they filled the air with bitter laughter, and declared from the housetops that the stupid party had at last been overwhelmed by its own stupidity. The Conservatives began to suspect that they had made a false step, and they were confirmed in this belief by the conduct of their new ally in the Reichstag. His debut in parliament was the signal for a succession of disgraceful scenes. His whole campaign of calumny was transferred to the floor of the house, and for some weeks the Reichstag discussed little else than his so-called revelations. The Conservatives listened to his wild charges in uncomfortable silence, and refused to support him. Stocker opposed him in a violent speech. The Radicals and Socialists, taking an accurate measure of the shallow vanity of the man, adopted the policy of giving him ”enough rope.” Shortly after his election he was condemned to five months' imprisonment for libel, and he would have been arrested but for the interposition of the Socialist party, including five Jews, who claimed for him the immunities of a member of parliament. When he moved for a commission to inquire into his revelations, it was again the Socialist party which supported him, with the result that all his charges, without exception, were found to be absolutely baseless.

Ahlwardt was covered with ridicule, and when in May the Reichstag was dissolved, he was marched off to prison to undergo the sentence for libel from which his parliamentary privilege had up to that moment protected him.