But though I may be on the extreme Right of present-day economic theory, I meet with no one, whatever his school of thought, who is not haunted by the uneasy suspicion that the United States is heading into a severe economic stringency; perhaps not one so overwhelming as I expect, but bad enough. I can understand this uneasiness. Billions which do not run to two figures are now no more than carfare to the Federal Government. It is estimated that by the end of another year our Federal debt will touch 56 billion dollars, and that if all our governmental enterprises (Federal, state and municipal) are carried out as projected, they will cost about 212 billion dollars per year. I observe with interest that even those of my friends who range themselves on the moderate economic Left apparently have to do a bit of whistling to keep up their courage in the face of the prospect thus held out; and no wonder.

Very well. Now let us assume that when all our chickens have come home to roost the strain on our economic coop is ten per cent of what I believe it will be; nay, as little as ten per cent of what my friends on the Left have an instinctive presentiment that it may be. Let us also assume that by that time the strength of anti-Jewish sentiment in our society is ten per cent of what it appears to be at the moment. With these allowances duly made, let us ask ourselves what prospect awaits the American Jew under those circumstances. An appeal to history, I am afraid, elicits only one answer. Without the least divergence, those circumstances conform to a historical pattern reaching back to Sumer and Akkad; my knowledge of this is what has moved me to take up my position on the economic Right. There is every reason to fear that the prospect awaiting the American Jew will also follow the historic pattern which has persisted with unfailing regularity in those circumstances for more than ten centuries. The sudden flaring-up of anti-Jewish sentiment in this country, to which I have alluded, was coincident with the onset of the depression in 1929, and it was damped down only by the sheer accident of encountering a great wave of sympathy for the mistreated Jews of Europe. It was not extinguished, however; its spread was checked and it was left smouldering, as my own researches show. But for this one accidental happening in Europe, there is no telling how great a destructive force it might have stored up for release.

Much as any well-disposed citizen must dislike to say so, there can be no doubt that if even only the destructive force now latent were released by the circumstances we are postulating, the consequences would be as appalling in their extent and magnitude as anything seen since the Middle Ages. The American mob's grim reputation for sheer anthropoid savagery is equaled only by that of the revolutionary mobs of Paris. At the outset of the German Government's movement against the Jews, an American visitor asked Herr Hitler why he was making it so ruthless. The Reichskanzler replied that he had got the idea from us. Americans, he said, are the great rope and lamppost artists of the world, known of all men as such. He was using the same methods against the Jews that we used against the loyalists of '76, the Indians, the Chinese on our Western Coast, the Negroes, the Mexicans, the Filipinos—every helpless people, in fact, whom we had ever chanced to find underfoot. This may be a rank exaggeration, but the barb in it sticks. I recall another incident which anyone who knows our history will recognize at once as symptomatic. To get the force of it one must bear in mind that its hero was utterly humorless, utterly incapable of expressing himself in a deliberately humorous exaggeration. He was speaking the language of dull, serious, workaday matter-of-fact. Passing through a Missouri village two or three years ago, one of my friends stopped for a chat with a citizen, evidently a man of local mark, who was in a state of mind over the commercial practices of certain Jews who had settled there. 'I tell you, we are going after those people some day,' he said, 'and when we do, we ain't going to be gentlemanly about it, like Hitler.'