ready for the reception of emigrants. When the proper time comes, I shall appoint committees at Hamburg and other towns to receive, inquire into, and accept applications from destitute Jews, after which a free passage to their new homes will be provided for the successful applicants. I do not intend to make the mistake of crowding the colonists together at once in one place. I shall divide the land into plots, sections, and villages, and have everything ready for the emigrants before they are sent out. In each village I shall place a number of earlier Jewish colonists, whose prosperity and experience will encourage, aid, and stimulate the new-comers."

I may speak, however, with regard to the question of the present condition of one portion of the European Jews, namely, those who live under special laws, and whose fate, especially since it has taken such a hard line in Russia, excites the pity not only of the co-religionists of these unfortunates, but also of all friends of humanity. To do justice to this subject and to go to the bottom of it, one must strive to avoid the error of putting all classes of the Jewish population into one category, for under such treatment the enormous majority would suffer; namely, the poor.

Let us give these for once the first place, which in real life they never have. These great masses of poor Jews are the eternal prototype of martyrdom, of suffering, of persecution. Without law or protection they have been wandering on their thorny path like Pariahs of human society for centuries, bent under the double weight of their heavy burden and of universal contempt. People cast at them the reproach that they are not productive forces of society, but devote themselves only to trade, which brings quick profits. Granted that it is so; could it be otherwise when they have for centuries been denied every occupation of a good citizen-especially the tilling of the soil; shut out of honorable employment and so forced, if they did not wish to starve, always to seek some way to earn bread for themselves and their families? If in this way this power and this fertility of resource have been evolved in them at the cost of other qualities, I believe that no one has the right to reproach them for it.

It is easy, however, to give a refutation of this charge. Where the Jews are free from these shackling fetters, there their best powers have turned to scientific investigation, to art, and to poetry. The names of Disraeli, Mendelssohn, Halévy, Meyerbeer, Heine, to which can be added a long list of others, suffi

ciently illustrate this assertion. It is also a universally known and acknowledged fact that the medical profession has received its best recruits from the Jews, and that the most eminent physicians of Europe belong to this race. Where they hold professors' chairs in universities, it is chiefly the abstract branches of knowledge that they impart; and the scientific spirit of research belongs, above all, to them.

Among the great masses who must toil for their daily bread, certainly many have not yet devoted themselves to tilling the soil, and on this account their enemies have devised the charge that Jews are of no use in agriculture, that they are averse to all hard work. Here also experience gives a refutation. In the lands where Jews have been permitted to acquire landed prop. erty, where they have found opportunity to devote themselves to agriculture, they have proved themselves excellent farmers.

For example, in Hungary they form a very large part of the tillers of the soil, and this fact is acknowledged to such an extent that the high Catholic clergy in Hungary almost exclusively have Jews as tenants on mortmain properties, and almost all large landholders give preference to the Jews on account of their industry, their rectitude, and their dexterity. These are facts that cannot be hid, and that have force, so that the anti-Semitic movement, which for a long time flourished in Hungary, must expire. It will expire because every one sees that so important a factor in the productive activity of the country—especially in agriculture cannot be spared. My own personal experience, too, has led me to recognize that the Jews have very good ability in agriculture. I have seen this personally in the Jewish agricultural colonies of Turkey, and the reports from the expedition that I have sent to the Argentine Republic plainly show the same fact.

These convictions led me to my activity to better the unhappy lot of the poor down-trodden Jews, and my efforts shall show that the Jews have not lost the agricultural qualities that their forefathers possessed. I shall try to make for them a new home in different lands, where as free farmers, on their own soil, they can make themselves useful to the country. If this should not come to pass among the present generation, the next will

surely fulfil this expectation. But to return to the point-all the facts cited lead plainly to the conclusion that the Jews possess the necessary qualifications not only for science and art but also for agriculture, and that the charges made against them are in great part founded on an error.

I do not know how the state of feeling is in this respect among you in America-that is, what the deportment of the wealthy Jewish population is toward the Christians and vice versa; whether there also the Jews who are rising in the world meet with a certain friction and exclusiveness in social intercourse. I know nothing of the situation, yet it seems to me that in free America, where the whole social organization is of recent date, where only modern views can take root, anti-Semitic feeling would be a veritable anachronism.

But the European situation I know from my own observation. Here also, I think, anti-Semitic feeling, directed especially toward the rich, must disappear in some years, and indeed, "faute de combattants," as the French say.

This question is of such great importance that it should not be without interest to go into it more closely, and I must enter a little into detail about it that I may make myself understood. Let us, for this purpose, divide the Jewish people into three groups-the poor, the middle class, and the rich. The poor are usually only mocked at, and can therefore not become objects of envy; the middle classes have not risen so high that they attract the attention of those above them or excite jealousy; the third group, then, alone remains, namely, the rich, who in the last half of this century have amassed not millions, but billions, and have excited special envy because at the same time with their rise in material prosperity others, once the only social leaders of the feudal classes, instead of going forward have gone backward and -without thinking of their own deficiencies-have treated the wealthy Jews as the cause of their fall. Besides, the luxury that comes with wealth, as if of necessity, and the expenditure consequent upon it, excite universal notice and envy. Even the riches of this class are cast in their teeth, without consideration that through their spirit of enterprise, through their admirable knowledge of business, they have enriched the

lands in which they live, and increased the national welfare. It is they who are especially to be thanked for the construction of railways, the setting on foot of great industries and the like, that have aided the states concerned to attain greater prosperity. Wealth has its obligations as well as its privileges. No class has ever been more ready to recognize and discharge those obligations than the Jews, who, in all countries where they have amassed sufficient property to free themselves from absolute want, have been foremost in works of philanthropy, irrespective of creed or race. If that enterprise, energy, and ability, which they possess in a large degree, be a cause of prejudice, then the fault lies at the door of our civilization, rather than at that of the Jewish race. The careful student of our civilization will recognize that the material development which characterizes the nineteenth century has redounded largely to the benefit of the lower classes, and has placed them, in all enlightened countries, in the possession of many comforts of life which in past ages were the monopoly of the favored few.

43

M. DE HIRSCH.

IMMIGRATION AND DEGRADATION.

To me, as a student of the American census, the statistics of the foreign elements of our population have had a peculiar interest. To note the first appearance, in the web of our national life, of these many-colored threads; to watch the patterns which they formed as they grew in numbers during the successive stages of our development, was always a fascinating study. But, curious and even instructive as are inquiries into the varying aptitudes, as to residence and occupation, manifested by the several foreign nationalities represented among us, or into their varying liabilities to different forms of disease, of physical infirmity, or of criminal impulse, I shall confine myself in this paper to speaking of the influence exerted by our foreign arrivals upon the native population in the past, and to considerations arising upon the contemplation of the overwhelming immigration of the present time.

False and absurd as are many of the views prevalent in the old world regarding things American, there is no other particular in which European opinion has been so grotesquely in the wrong, as in respect to the indebtedness of the population of the United States to continuous immigration from abroad. Conclusions have been announced and unhesitatingly accepted in Europe, and, indeed, copied and repeated long without contradiction here, which are of the most astonishing character, in the highest degree derogatory to the vitality of our native American stock, and to the sanitary influences of our climate. Thus, Mr. Clibborne, in a paper entitled "The Tendency of the European Races to Become Extinct in the United States," read before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, in 1856, stated the following stupendous result of his investigation:

"From the general unfitness of the climate to the European constitution, coupled with occasional pestilential visitations which occur in the healthier localities, on the whole in an average of three or four generations,