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No. 33. — Vienna, 15 August 1902. — 6th Year.

"The Helots of Park Lane".

By Leo Rafaels.

We all know who the Helots were, even if it is less certain how they came to their degradation and to their name. The Helots were the rabble, the lowest dregs of the population in the Spartan commonwealth — indeed, even less than that: they had nothing whatever in common with the people of Sparta. They were treated like other beasts of burden. They had to live, the Helots, else they could not have done the dirty work of the Spartans; but how they lived, how they dwelt, how they felt and thought, was a matter of greater indifference to their Spartan masters than the moods of their horses, to which they certainly ascribed more soul than to the utterly dull-witted and slavish Helots. The Spartans, as is well known, held all the manly virtues in high esteem — love of truth, courage, abstinence, chastity; in the Helots any such virtue would have outraged them. The Helots were permitted to give themselves up to every vice — the worse, the better. Noble Spartans showed their boys drunken Helots, in order to instil in them a horror of intemperance.

All this we know from our school-days.

Park Lane, too, is a well-known notion: it is the most aristocratic street in the world. If ever you are in London, do not fail to climb to the top of an omnibus at the corner of Piccadilly and Hyde Park, and on the slow drive to study carefully the palaces to right and left. Here dwell the rulers of the earth. Hold your breath: here the dream of antiquity and of the dark centuries has become reality; here is the earthly paradise. Here life flows on free of care; here is the boundary where the ancient curse upon mankind loses its force; here there is no toil and no sweat; here the fortunate enjoy existence as once the gods did upon Olympus.

That is Park Lane.

But what in all the world has Park Lane, the seat of the dukes and earls of England, to do with Helots?

That is precisely the curious thing about the matter: there are Helots in Park Lane! A very aristocratic English monthly, perhaps the most aristocratic of all, namely the "Monthly Review", which since its foundation has served the interests of the high nobility and supports the present Conservative Government with unreserved party zeal, has discovered them. In the July number of this periodical England is warned of the dangers that threaten the Empire if the Government does not in good time wrest a part of their influence from the great capitalist holders of the South African gold shares, the "Helots of Park Lane". Now South Africa does not concern us in the least; English policy after the peace gives us no anxiety; not even the doubtful fate of the gold mines robs us of our sleep. The warning of the English monthly would therefore have left us quite cold. But the "Helots of Park Lane"! Who are the Helots of Park Lane??

Let us look more closely at the passages.

"One of the greatest dangers," says the "Monthly Review", "is the enormous power which international capital possesses in South Africa, for this capital is neither British nor, properly speaking, European." — "It cannot be repeated too often that the enormous influence which capital exercises in South Africa belongs in very great part to people who are not British by birth and usually do not belong politically to the British Empire either." — "Now we do not mean exactly to say that the Helots of Park Lane possess a double portion of inherited human wickedness; but . . ."

An analysis of these enigmatic expressions yields no satisfactory result either. International capital — that is correct. The goldfields of the Transvaal belong to all nations, English, Dutch, Germans, French, Americans. Not European — that may be correct too: America, after all, is substantially interested. But why Helots of Park Lane? Neither the German, nor the French, nor the American gold millionaires have palaces in Park Lane: they all enjoy their wealth at home. And if perhaps a German or an American did live in Park Lane — since when is a subject of the Emperor William or a citizen of the Star-Spangled Banner a Helot?!

Could it perhaps be — ?

We reject the thought most decidedly as absurd, impossible. The Jewish gold millionaires, of whom, moreover, there are very, very few in proportion to the non-Jewish ones, have from the very beginning, setting aside all particular interests, so much extreme English