THE MONEY-KINGS.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXIV, Issue 16326, 23 August 1913, Page 10

THE MONEY-KINGS.

If tho history of capitalism contains one pa go of romanco that page deals with the rise of tho world's moneykings, the Jews, and their share in turning the rude process of primeval barter into tho elaborate modern financial system. This line of thought forms tho basis of Professor Sompart’s somowhat striking book, “ Tho Jews and Modern Capitalism,” recently translated into English and now issued by Fishor Unwin. Professor Sompart takes up tho argument precisely where the more impassioned historian of tho ancient Ghetto, lit by tho blaze of every mediteval pillager’s torch, laid it down. Tho vocational fate of tho dispersed race was fixed long before the Norman Conquest, and dark as tho Jewish horizon may have been at that time, it was a fate already tempered with triumph. “ As soon as international trade and organised warfare required tho large and mobile use of money the Jews became recognised as a national utility, almost a necessity ” Ruling councils, dukes and kings found themselves in reality, if not in name, fighting the ignorant bigotry of tho multitudo to keep these infidel sources of supply within their realms as a stand-by against the depletion of tlioir treasuries by war, invasion or famine. “ Jew-farming ” was an underhand industry every politic monarch had an eye to, and it is little credit to the Christianity of those days that it was frequently the worst kings, such as the unspeakable William Rufus, who, for their own material profit," were most merciful in their dealings with God’s ancient poople. The crassly stupid and barbarously cruel orthodoxy of the Middlo Ages stood to lose in prosperity and in initiative by the enforcement of its own penal laws against the forlorn financiers, and when at last bigotry secured their expulsion from Spain, Portugal and the greater part of Italy the economio decline of the Latin race commenced and the weight of commercial solidity followed tho fugitives to Central Europe and diffused itself among the Teutons of Britain, Norman France, Holland and North. Germany. With the rise in Britain of the stable and progressive constitutional idea the money-kings began to come into the more peaceable fruits of their earlier dubious supremacy. The credit system is their great modern achievement, whether for good or for evil, while they perfected old finanoial ideas of Lombards, Flemings and Florentines, and led up to their last century triumph in the organisation of company promotion. Wherover the mightiest machines of capitalism, are found a Jewish hand guides them, and a Jewish fiat controls every motion of international finance. There would seem to be powers and proclivities in the Hebrew people which marked them out for such economio lordship even while they were yet in Palestine. Profossor Sompart maintains that the distinguishing features of the Jewish character are intellectuality, teleology, energy and mobility, all brought into play ‘by the higher finance, which, of course, is a very different thing from “ big finance.” As a nation of herdsmen the Jews carried from, tho cradleland of their race that gambling, profit instinct which is never so strong in the tamer agriculturist, who is satisfied with the normal returns of manual labour. This primeval instinct, mirrored in tho tale of Laban and Jacob, was fostered by tho later events which forced the whole homeless race into a nameless yet powerful merchant guild that made possiblo tho riso of such houses as that of tho Rothschilds. Tho very religion of tho Jew, the bond that kept the dispersed people together, tended towards the development of the same intellectual quality. The religion was intensely practical, tho antipodes of tho unworldly mysticism: of tho Farther East. Its most sacred terms wore strangely, businesslike —contracts, covenants, rewards and promises all pointed towards a kind of divine book-keoping, which, so far as the Jew himself was concerned, worked out into the moral and eugenio

success of tho unexampled Law of Moses. In this lies tho key to the well-known analogy drawn between Puritanism and tho mechanical capitalism of modem times. But Puritanism, as Professor Sompart remarks, is applied Judaism. It may bo contended that a power so deeply implanted ard so strangely fostered as tho economic supremacy of the Jew has a higher and nobler destiny before it than has yet boen realised. In kindlier days tho sharp, hard lines which have marked out tlio history of the Rothschilds and othors of their kind will soften into tho benignant attributes of such beneficont lords of finance as the Into Sir Moses Montefiore. These people “with Oriental sunlight in their blood,” as George Eliot once Baid, have yet to show a soul of economics which will bring healing and prosperity where once it brought strife and disaster.