Letters to the Editor

To the Editor of the

Jewish Daily Bulletin:

With regard to the recent review of “Triopoly—or Class War?” in your columns, it would appear that your reviewer did not fully assimilate the contents or message of the book.

My own impression from reading the book is that if ever there was a prophet able to see clearly and to analyze social and industrial trends objectively and whole, that prophet is Robert Segal.

His book furnishes us not only with an economic, but what the author calls “psychonomic”, interpretation of history in which he shows that although man began with nothing he has worked himself up to a position of extreme poverty.

Mr. Segal has charted the road on which industry is slowly and subconsciously proceeding and his analysis, involving a new philosophy with an original nomenclature of human values in cultural and industrial relations, is, to say the least, provocative.

Mr. Segal indicates, by tracing man’s development from the primitive, through the feudal ages, down to the present, that our economic issues and fetishes are complicated by spiritual factors the classical economist has overlooked, but which is part of the basis of economic aspirations and now finding expression in the National Revovery Act, representing the first phase of an American commonwealth becoming Triopoly-minded.

The last chapter of the book is of intense Jewish interest. In fact, one suspects that the entire volume was meant to lead up to this chapter. Here Mr. Segal defines the world position of the Jews since the Dispersion and traces Jewish influence on world history. Although he does not say so in so many words, one receives the impression that Triopoly, like the League of Nations, is the Jewish contribution to mankind. Zionists will be interested in Mr. Segal’s characterization of the birth of the Jewish State as part of the polity of the Powers. He declares: “The new spirit was evinced most significantly, because most disinterestedly, in the mandate to restore the Jewish State. Doubtless, this disinterestedness has since plagued the Mandatory, the British Empire, as spelling lack of incentive to carry on. Notwithstanding a certain hesitation and intervals of backing and filling, the original impulse toward Jewish Restoration and the founding of the League of Nations—linked together as they are and belonging to the same genre—represents the most remarkable outcropping of the World War; a strangely-hued flower of fulfillment appearing in the fullness of travail that now and again marks a new nigh tide in human sensitiveness and inspiration.

“Was it felt that, after all, perhaps the Jews were the true protagonists of the elements of salvation in Christianity and should be permitted to re-form their lines with a view to staying the forces of destruction that had well-nigh undone the world?

“Or was it that the nations sickened of the destructiveness of the War and chose, as a symbol of an altered vision of national relations of the future, to make whole the most shattered of peoples and, in the doing, of this and like tasks, be done with both victorism and fear and the international anarchy growing out of them?”

Simon Marks.