The signal for the change came in 1873, and was given unconsciously by one of the most distinguished Jews of his time, Edward Lasker, the gifted lieutenant of Bennigsen in the leadership of the National Liberal party. The unification of Germany in 1870, and the rapid payment of the enormous French war indemnity, had given an unprecedented impulse to industrial and financial activity throughout the empire. Money became cheap and speculation universal. A company mania set in which was favoured by the government, who granted railway and other concessions with a prodigal hand. The inevitable result of this state of things was first indicated by Jewish politicians and economists. On the 14th of January 1873, Edward Lasker called the attention of the Prussian diet to the dangers of the situation, while his colleague, Ludwig Bamberger, in an able article in the _Preussischen Jahrbücher_, condemned the policy which had permitted the milliards to glut the country instead of being paid on a plan which would have facilitated their gradual digestion by the economic machinery of the nation. Deeply impressed by the gravity of the impending crisis, Lasker instituted a searching inquiry, with the result that he discovered a series of grave company scandals in which financial promoters and aristocratic directors were chiefly involved. Undeterred by the fact that the leading spirit in these abuses, Bethel Henry Strousberg (1823-1884), was a Jew, Lasker presented the results of his inquiry to the diet on the 7th of February 1873, in a speech of great power and full of sensational disclosures. The dramatic results of this speech need not be dwelt upon here (for details see Blum, _Das deutsche Reich zur Zelt Bismarcks_, pp. 153-181). It must suffice to say that in the following May the great Vienna "Krach" occurred, and the colossal bubble of speculation burst, bringing with it all the ruin foretold by Lasker and Bamberger. From the position occupied by the Jews in the commercial class, and especially in the financial section of that class, it was inevitable that a considerable number of them should figure in the scandals which followed. At this moment an obscure Hamburg journalist, Wilhelm Marr, who as far back as 1862 had printed a still-born tract against the Jews (_Judenspiegel_), published a sensational pamphlet entitled _Der Sieg des Judenthums uber das Germanthum_ ("The Victory of Judaism over Germanism"). The book fell upon fruitful soil. It applied to the nascent controversy a theory of nationality which, under the great sponsorship of Hegel, had seized on the minds of the German youth, and to which the stirring events of 1870 had already given a deep practical significance. The state, according to the Hegelians, should be rational, and the nation should be a unit comprising individuals speaking the same language and of the same racial origin. Heterogeneous elements might be absorbed, but if they could not be reduced to the national type they should be eliminated. This was the pseudo-scientific note of the new anti-Semitism, the theory which differentiated it from the old religious Jew-hatred and sought to give it a rational place in modern thought. Marr's pamphlet, which reviewed the facts of the Jewish social concentration without noticing their essentially transitional character, proved the pioneer of this teaching. It was, however, in the passions of party politics that the new crusade found its chief sources of vitality. The enemies of the _bourgeoisie_ at once saw that the movement was calculated to discredit and weaken the school of Manchester Liberalism, then in the ascendant. Agrarian capitalism, which had been dethroned by industrial capitalism in 1848, and had burnt its fingers in 1873, seized the opportunity of paying off old scores. The clericals, smarting under the _Kutlturkampj_, which was supported by the whole body of Jewish liberalism, joined eagerly in the new cry. In 1876 another sensational pamphlet was published, Otto Glogau's _Die Börsen und Grundergeschwindel in Berlin_ ("The Bourses and the Company Swindles in Berlin"), dealing in detail with the Jewish participation in the scandals first revealed by Lasker. The agitation gradually swelled, its growth being helped by the sensitiveness and _cacoëthes scribendi_ of the Jews themselves, who contributed two pamphlets and a much larger proportion of newspaper articles for every one supplied by their opponents (Jacobs. _Bibliog. Jew. Question_, p. xi.). Up to 1879, however, it was more of a literary than a political agitation, and was generally regarded only as an ephemeral craze or a passing spasm of popular passion.