profit. The result has not been a decrease in cost to the public, but an increase. It is characteristic of Jewish business methods that economies are for the sake of the business, not for the sake of the public. The commodities in which there have been the most inexcusable and exorbitant increases in prices to the public, and the lines of business which have been most quickly frightened into lower prices without any explanatory change in the general situation, have been those fines in which Jews exercise the widest control.
Business to the Jewish mind is money; what the successful Jew may do with his money after he gets it is another matter, but in the getting of it he never permits “idealistic slush” to interfere with the dollar. His dollar of profit is never “clipped” by any of the voluntary reforms by which a few men are trying to ameliorate the condition of the workers.
This is not by any means due to the hardness of the Jewish heart, but to the hardness of the Jewish view of business. Business is to it a matter of goods and money, not of people. If you are in distress and suffering, the Jewish heart would have sympathy for you; but if your house were involved in the matter, you and your house would be two separate entities; the Jew would naturally find it difficult, in his theory of business, to humanize the house; he would deal with it after a manner which other people would call “hard,” but he would not feel the charge to be just; he would say that it was only “business.”
It is probably this way that the Jewish “sweatshops” of New York may be explained. When the susceptible people of the nation commiserated the poor Jews of the New York sweatshops, they for the most part did not know that the inventors and operators of the “sweatshop” method were themselves Jews. Indeed, while it is the boast of our country that no race or color or creed is persecuted here, but liberty is insured to all, still it is a fact which every special investigator has noted that the only heartless treatment ever accorded the Jew in the United States came from his own people, his overseers and masters. And yet there is no evidence that either the “sweater” or the “sweated” ever thought of it as inhumanity or as “heartless.” It was “business.” The “sweated”
