Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/188

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172
GREAT RUSSIA

industrial class in every country instead of helping the agricultural population is found to live at their expense, it is not to be wondered at that the Hebrews, wherever they constitute the whole industrial class, should also appear as the exploiters of the people. It is not they who created such a situation. They were schooled too long in the school of the Polish nobility which equally oppressed both the Jews and the Polish serfs. But quite apart from the Polish nobility, is not the selfish oppression of one class over the others the universal rule of social life in the whole of Europe? If our peasants suffered from the oppression of the Jews, who only exist by virtue of the helpless social economic situation of those peasants, that situation was not caused by the Hebrews. The needy peasant goes to the Jew simply because his own people refuse to help him. And if the Jews who assist the peasant exploit him, they do not do so because they are Jews, but because they have obtained the monopoly of national finance which is entirely based on the exploitation of the people. The evil is not due to the Jew, nor to finance, but to the immoral supremacy of finance, and that supremacy was