We, the Destroyers
acter which crosses your intentions and thwarts your personality.
The Jew, whose lack of contact with your world had made him ineffective, becomes effective. The vial is uncorked, the genius is out. His enmity to your way of life was tacit before. To-day it is manifest and active. He cannot help himself: he cannot be different from himself: no more can you. It is futile to tell him: "Hands off!" He is not his own master, but the servant of his life-will.
For when he brings into your world his passionately earnest, sinisterly earnest righteousness, absolute righteousness, and, speaking in your languages and through your institutions, scatters distrust of yourselves through the most sensitive of you, he is working against your spirit. You gentiles do not seek or need or understand social justice as an ultimate ideal. This is not your nature. Your world must so be fashioned as to give you the maximum of play, adventure, laughter, animal-lyricism. Your institutions frame
145
