partly for industrial ends, and feeding the unskilled labour-market in
certain manufactures of our great cities.

§ 8. The Jew as an Industrial Competitor.--Looking at these foreigners
as individuals, there is much to be said in their favour. They do not
introduce a lower morality into the quarters where they settle, as the
Chinese are said to do; nor are they quarrelsome and law-breaking, like
the low-class Italians who swarm into America. Their habits, so far as
cleanliness is concerned, are perhaps not desirable, but the standard of
the native population of Whitechapel is not sensitively high. For the
most part, and this is true especially of the Jews, they are steady,
industrious, quiet, sober, thrifty, quick to learn, and tolerably
honest. From the point of view of the old Political Economy, they are
the very people to be encouraged, for they turn out the largest quantity
of wealth at the lowest cost of production. If it is the chief end for a
nation to accumulate the largest possible stock of material wealth, it
is evident that these are the very people we require to enable us to
achieve our object.

But if we consider it is sound national policy to pay regard to the
welfare of all classes engaged in producing this wealth, we may regard
this foreign immigration in quite another light. The very virtues just
enumerated are the chief faults we have to find with the foreign Jew.
Just because he is willing and able to work so hard for so little pay,
willing to undertake any kind of work out of which he can make a living,
because he can surpass in skill, industry, and adaptability the native
Londoner, the foreign Jew is such a terrible competitor. He is the
nearest approach to the ideal "economic" man, the "fittest" person to
survive in trade competition. Admirable in domestic morality, and an
orderly citizen, he is almost void of social morality. No compunction or