VLADIVOSTOK-A VIEW INCLUDING PART OF THE HARBOR

be limited to the repatriation of the Czechoslovaks. America, however, found herself in the position of being the principal obstacle in the way of the Japanese efforts to capitalize the Allied intervention in a business way.

The Japanese high command, with the military party in Tokyo dominating Japan's diplomacy, speedily showed its hand. Although all the Powers agreed that none should send more than 7,200 men, Japan swamped the joint intervention with 77,000; and, with military policy on the basis of seniority invested in the Japanese commander-in-chief, the Japanese forces overwhelmingly dominated eastern Siberia. While they dealt with this part of the Russian East from Lake Baikal to the Pacific as though Japan had won it by right of conquest, American soldiers convoyed our publicity agents attempting to reassure the Siberians as to Allied intentions and undertook to rehabilitate the railways in the face of Japanese obstruction of a deliberately provocative character.

THE SIBERIAN STAKES

and, at the price of evacuation, tried to buy their way into an economic mastery of the Pacific coast.

But reactionary and invader inevitably found their position more and more precarious as the provinces of the old Russian Empire from Transbaikalia, through the Amur, Priamur, and the maritime regions, even to Vladivostok rose against this spoliation. From the movement backed by the Bolsheviks, now supreme in the rest of Siberia, there grew the buffer state of the "Far Eastern Republic," including in these provinces, with an area of over 1,000,000 square miles, a population of 2,000,000, and vast resources of coal, iron, and other strategic minerals. With the Japanese diplomacy employing every means to intrench itself in this veritable treasure-house of the Far East, there came the Washington Conference.

THE FAILURE OF "MILITARY UNDERWRITING"

The Arms Conference insured the failure of the Japanese efforts to dominate the commercial future of Siberia for generations by this attempt at the "military There was no secret about Japan's underwriting" of Japan's business needs. intentions. The vital need of the Mikado's land was not political expansion for her population so much as assuring herself of the economic resources at hand in East Asia for industrialization. Siberia's natural wealth beckoned irresistibly, and the Japanese high command seemed in a position to deliver the commercial opportunity Japanese business needed.

So long as the Great War lasted the Western Powers could do nothing to upset Japan's military screen, behind which Japanese business established itself. Finally, with the Czechoslovaks evacuated and the anti-Bolsheviks collapsing, the Allies and America withdrew their forces from Siberia; but the Japanese stayed, in spite of ambiguous promises to leave the Russian East. Japan, after the temporary reduction of her troops forced by the United States earlier, promptly increased them again to 100,000, converted strategic cities of the Amur and the Maritime Provinces into virtual Japanese fortresses, backed the sanguinary troop of anti-Red "patriots" plundering under the guise of a counter-revolution,

The jingoistic basis of a Japanese forward policy in the East-to insure Japan against the menace of encroaching "white-manism"-was dissipated into thin air by the magic of the Hughes armaments programme and the FourPower Pacific Treaty. The man SO largely responsible for Japan's adhesion to the Washington proposals, Admiral Baron Kato, returned to Tokyo to head

the Government of the Mikado's land in June of 1922; and as Premier of Japan he immediately launched a struggle to carry out the spirit of the negotiations in the New World. His coming into office meant governmental economy, sadly needed by Japanese business under the strain of world-wide deflation, the reduction of the Japanese army, and the fulfillment of Japanese promises at Washington to withdraw from Siberia. It was a decisive defeat for the military party; and it put an end to the scheme of using the Japanese high command to underwrite the economic ambitions of the Mikado's land for the monopolistic exploitation of Siberia.

NEW WORLD POLITICS FOR OLD

The Kato Ministry has taught Japan a first lesson in international relations: force defeats its own ends if economic advantage is the objective in this new world of business realities. It has cost the Mikado's land half a billion yen gold (perhaps as high as $370,000,000 gold) to find out in Siberia that a military machine cannot make business for a nation to-day.

So, five years after the Allied intervention began the occupation of Siberia as an emergency measure born of the Great War, Japan has completed her evacuation of the last stronghold held by her on the Russian mainland of Asia. When one pauses to weigh this littleunderstood episode of the Great War, the diplomatic marvel of the situation comes home. Overnight a great scheme of empire has collapsed. It was not because of any dramatic challenge of Japan's course of action from the Western Powers. It was upset by a turn of world events about the Mikado's land bringing home to the Japanese people the high costs of military adventure. Japan sounded taps on embattled business in Siberia because it failed as a dollarsand-cents proposition. There is nothing in it that Japan cannot get much more easily by friendly business statesmanship which builds up, instead of tearing down, international relations.

A

MOTHER came to me the other

day with a story that set me thinking about the subject-matter of this article. I have lived practically my entire life in an American environment-only a few memory glimpses of Nevski Prospect and the brilliant St. Petersburg of the old régime are out of the New World picture and I have taken both my Judaism and my Americanism for granted. One doesn't argue about the virtues of his parents, especially if he is indebted to them head over heels for whatever has made life

worth living.

The mother-let us call her Mrs. Rosengarten-was in a state of extreme agitation.

"My son Myron has not been admitted to She named a well-known medical college in an Eastern State.

"Better luck next time," I comforted. "Perhaps he will pass his examinations successfully if he works a bit harder. Myron is a very young man. He can afford another year of general training. In fact, it will do him good."

"I am afraid," she sighed, "that there's no hope for my boy. They didn't tell me so, but I know he was kept out for only one reason: he is a Jew."

"Mrs. Rosengarten," I urged, as patiently as I knew how, "aren't you falling into an old fallacy? Why should you rush to embrace martyrdom? There are surely other reasons than the one you named. Did you inquire about the results of the test?"

She explained that Myron had been subjected to the new psychological tests. She had ascertained that his rating was very high. It was so high, in fact, that the boy had entertained no doubts about his admission. He had taken it for granted that prospective students would be accepted in the order of their standing, and his was among the ranking five. When the notice of rejection came, it carried with it no palliative in the form of a reason. Nothing was stated except the bare fact that Myron Rosengarten was not to be admitted at the medical school in question. Both the boy and the mother drew the inference I found it hard to accept.

"Mother," the boy had queried in his despair, "am I an American or am I not?"

The youth had always taken for granted one of the implications of Americanism-a square deal. The exclusion had made him feel declassé. He had been born in this country, and had assumed until the shock of his last experience that no American could possibly be humiliated as he had been. A normal lad, studious, mischievous, a dreamer of adolescent dreams, a devotee of athletics, he had set his heart on becoming a physician. He would have

BY ELIAS LIEBERMAN

taken gamely rejection for any fault that it lay in his power to remedy. What had struck him, he felt, was a blow in the dark. His patriotism, his most sacred beliefs in American democracy and fair play, were outraged. In his anguish came the first great doubt of his life, expressed in "Am I an American or am I not?"

IT

A SHELL-SHOCKED PEOPLE

́T occurred to me, after I had heard this mother's story, that I belonged to a shell-shocked people. Everything which seems queer to other people about Jewish reactions may be explained by this hypothesis. Sometimes the shocked condition is inherited; sometimes it comes as it did to this boy. The feeling is akin to the sting of a lash meant for slaves on the back of a free man, the harsh word intended for a gutter-snipe addressed to a gentleman of refinement, the realization that the world is standing on its head topsy-turvy, that virtues are vices, that white is black. The remnants of Russian nobility earning a precarious livelihood as waiters and waitresses in the café chantants of Harbin, China, know exactly what I mean.

Because of this condition of mind and soul a Jew frequently sees anti-Semitism where none is intended. He starts violently at the rustling of a piece of paper carried along by the wind. Over-conscious of his Jewishness and super-sensitive to what others, non-Jews, do and say, he ascribes devious motives to their simplest actions. It is so easy and convenient to explain away all the failures of life by reference to this one cause that the weakling falls readily into the temptation. He can always cite plenty of examples, and is never at a loss for seeming justification of his abnormality.

While I cannot sympathize with constant whining and complaining, feeling that such yielding to petty irritation is a far cry from our Maccabean inheritance, I can understand its genesis and its possible cure. Hilaire Belloc in his latest book on the Jews expresses surprise at the abnormal reactions of Jews socially. The very word, "Jew," he says, "is regarded by some of my coreligionists as a term of reproach." Some of his friends were offended when he referred to them as Jews. It is true, obversely, that some simple-minded Jews are more or less flattered when they are not recognized as such. All this is a phase of shell-shock. There is always in most Jews the sub-conscious fear, "Where will the next brick come from?"

Take a normal people with a passion for initiative and leadership, expose them for thousands of years to persecution, to active and passive hatreds, to cruelties as fiendish as any devised by the ingenious brain of man to rack his

fellow human beings, and you are bound to get some queer reactions. Native strength, blue blood, call it what you will, is bound to assert itself again and again in spite of any obstacles that may be put up. But also there is bound to appear on many a face the furtive look of those who dwell in everlasting fear and in many a form the cringing stoop of the man who imminently expects to be kicked. Most often the furtive expression and the cringing stoop are not seen. They are in the soul.

Conditions and environment have been responsible for great changes among Jews. With a natural adaptiveness, they look and act like the people among whom they find themselves. The best example of this principle is the Italian Jew, who in every respect is an Italian like the others. There are no discrepancies, no differences whatsoever, between the Roman or the Venetian Jew and his fellow-citizen except such as are inherent in different religious practices. From a civic, social, intellectual, commercial, and political standpoint they are indistinguishable.

A striking test can be made by any one interested. Take a picture of a typical Galician Jew with his ear-locks and his long capote or cloak, and place it beside that of an American Jew of the same social status. And the psychic differences will seem even greater than the physical. Thank God, the American Jew still walks upright! As some one once said, "A country gets the kind of Jews it deserves."

The condition of shell-shock is not the result merely of what happened in the remote past. In fact, it has been truly noted that the way to eliminate the Jew is to make him happy and prosperous. In his exalted state of freedom from care and worry he irons out all distinctions between himself and his fellows, intermarries freely, changes his religion be-cause it keeps him from ready intercourse with his neighbors, and becomes completely assimilated. But where there is constant prodding, where a man's Judaism makes a difference in his social or civic rights, the Jew often develops stubborn resistance. It is the old fable of the wind and the sun.

myth of Jewish world domination will remain a myth as long as the Jewish temperament reacts substantially as it now does. In the main, the impulse for initiative and leadership is so strong that there are always too many officers and too few followers. One need only observe the irrevocable schisms in Jewish religion, in Jewish life, letters, and political opinion-Zionistic feuds are a good example-to realize how fantastic, how wildly improbable, is the yarn about world conquest.

Every Jew is a potential philanthropist. The reason for this is very clear. From the first moment of Jewish consciousness he is made to realize his responsibility for every other Jew on the face of the earth. Strangely enough, this lesson is impressed upon him by non-Jews. If a Jew misbehaves in a public place, if his voice is too loud, his manner too aggressive, his clothing too flashy, he overhears some such remark as: "The Jews! They never know how to behave." The flip generalization in one fell swoop covers every one of the Jewish faith in hovel and palace, in homes of refinement and culture as well as in slum tenements located in the foreign quarters of overgrown cities. If a Jew commits larceny, it is not a thief who took the money but again that strange criminal the Jew, who never Icould be trusted. On the other hand, if he attains eminence the classification no longer holds. Thus Bergson is the great French philosopher, Mendelssohn the great German composer, and Einstein the great German scientist.

Because of this the Jew develops a "jumpy" state of nerves. He is so often swept into the wrong category that he accepts it as a regular thing, although his resentment at the injustice never wanes. Seldom must any other group, classified in any way whatsoever, listen to so much unintelligent, often malicious, opinion about itself.

He pitied Jews who had to live anywhere else. His only rival in happiness was perhaps the English Jew. English people have stolidly upheld the privileges accorded to British Jews by AngloSaxon tradition. Both in the United States and in England hostile propaganda against the Jews as a group was unknown. There may have been isolated cases of dislike or prejudice, but no organized attack of the kind that developed in both countries after the war.

In England anti-Semitism has proved more or less futile. It has resulted in no special hardship for British Jews, although the sensation of being berated is in itself not pleasant. In the United States, unfortunately, the effects seem to have been more damaging. Mob thinking is responsible. It is so easy to get on the band wagon and shout against some one. Rationalizing dislike is an old sport of tyrants.

The hue and. cry against the immigrant has left its impress upon the Jew, in spite of the fact that the latter is hardly a newcomer on American soil. There were Jews in the New Amsterdam of Peter Stuyvesant and patriotic Jewish communities in Revolutionary days. Haym Salomon, who gave his fortune to the cause of freedom, is a well-known instance, but there were many others just as devoted, if less affluent. In spite of a few loud-mouthed agitators who make themselves easily heard, Americars of the Jewish faith, like their fellow-citizens, have stood ever ready, as the statistics of the World War attest, to give, not only their wealth, but their lives, at their country's call. The immigrant Jews who settled here came to stay. Their descendants are to be found in every walk of commerce, industry, art, science, and professional life to-day. Any person so inclined can draw up with the aid of "Who's Who" his own list of eminent men and women who profess the Jewish faith. This is mentioned merely to explain the resentment of the Jew in being regarded either directly or by implication as an outsider.

To understand, therefore, how difficult it is to be a Jew one must hypothesize an honest, earnest effort to make good, thwarted on every hand by ignorance and malice. That this ignorance and malice are often found in unexpected places makes the situation all the more complex.

Assume, friend reader, that you are an American Jew whose parents and grandparents were born here-in short, that you have no connections that matter with any other country. In the days before the war you found your faith no bar to success or happiness. Every place worth getting, every acquaintance or friend worth having, was yours if you had the gifts of personality to acquire them. It is true that some college fraternities discriminated against Jewish young men and women, no matter how eligible otherwise, but this was no handicap. In every college there were non-sectarian groups that recognized your merit if you had it.

To-day you would find the air charged with suspicion. Your desire to live normally, with your Judaism in your subconsciousness, where it belongs, would be constantly baffled. If you become, as a result of the frigid attitude of others, somewhat shy and retiring, you are accused of clannishness. Should you put on a bold front and determine to batter your way to recognition, you hear murmurs that you are ill-bred and aggressive. Such conduct is expected of you. The familiar generalization is flaunted, the generalization you have been expecting and dreading all the while: "The Jews are " Supply the missing adjectives.

Suppose you are readily accepted, as often happens, into the society of your equals; your lot even then is somewhat precarious unless your friends are of the

sort that judge you by your quality and not by your label. You become that well-known phenomenon, the "Jewish friend" who is used to prove the toler ance of your neighbor every time he proves particularly disagreeable to one of your co-religionists. "I have many Jewish friends," is an expression a Jew dreads to hear. He immediately translates it to mean what it does: "I am always conscious of the fact that you and I are different." Another abhorred locution comes in the form of an insulting compliment: "You do not look like a Jew." This, freely paraphrased, implies: "Jews are awful freaks. I am happy to note that you, old scout, look human."

The art of being a Jew is thus seen to be difficult socially, though not impossible. One needs a good, thick skin and occasionally convenient mental obtuseAn attitude of detachment from other Jews helps also. Happy is the absolutely independent mortal who has no concern for others of his kind. He does not suffer vicariously.

ness.

I will not here go into the familiar annoyances of a social nature, such as exclusion from certain neighborhoods, houses, summer hotels. Refined American Jews are very cautious about choosing their residences as well as their summer resorts. They do not wish to invite insult. A diverting jest about "consumptives, dogs, and Jews not admitted" was sometimes included in the prospectus, to make the punishment fit the crime.

Again, although these problems can and have been satisfactorily solved-the refined Jew never goes where he is not wanted-nevertheless the very fact of their existence is irritating psychically. It leaves a scar somewhere on the soul and contributes to the shell-shocked condition to which I have already referred. To get the full force of this assume that you are the son or daughter of a blueblooded, ancient race, that your ancestors were among the first to give the world a code of practical ethics, that they were responsible for the accepted religion of most of the civilized population of the globe, that they were of undisputed aristocratic lineage, that their family tree included sages, heroes, and kings. Then have a moron bar you from his summer hotel in some such merry fashion as I have indicated, and you will not be in the mood to repeat with Browning, "All's well with the world!"

Commercially and industrially you are again the prey of the prejudiced and the unthinking. If only an absolute standard were held before you which you must attain before being admitted into the ranks of desirable workers, you would have no right to complain. But some of the very best positions are closed to you by reason of your faith. Newspaper advertisements, more or less frankly, make this clear to you. The usual euphemism is, "Christian firm has an opening for," etc. You are defeated