First let me express my delight that your friend and mine, Luzzatti, should have accepted the Presidency of the committee Pro Belgio. The noble Belgian Nation is doubtless to be pitied, but it is still more to be admired. Its tribulations will pass, but its laurels will not fade.

The Belgians went to certain destruction, with a firmness unexampled in history, in honor of a principle, whereas they might easily have secured handsome payment for granting a right of way through their country, and might also have made millions out of the German troops. Without a moment's hesitation, without giving a thought to these profits, they replied with a non possumus of which other nations have not, perhaps, understood the lofty heroism.

Dec. 29.-I was interrupted the other day and have not been able to continue before. I took advantage of the Christmas holidays to go and speak in the neighboring villages and to admire the quiet courage of our countryside. It is as though the words " In your patience possess ye your souls" had been spoken for our people.

As to my feeling about your manifestation in favor of peace, you understand, do you not, that, as a belligerent, and a belligerent the more determined in that I

was before firmly pacific, I look upon it all with an eye very different from yours? A Frenchman cannot now utter the word "peace." To use it would be akin to treason. When a quarrel is for money, or for a strip of territory, one can make peace without moral loss. To make peace when an ideal is at stake is an abdication; even to think of it is to be false to the voice which tells us that man is born for other things than to enjoy the moral and material heritage of his fath

ers.

It is the honor of Belgium, France, and their allies to have seen at once the spiritual nature of this war. No doubt we are fighting for ourselves, but we are fighting, too, for all pecples. The idea of stopping before the goal is reached cannot occur to us and we find some difficulty in understanding how it can occur to lookers-on. We are grateful to them for the excellence of their intentions, but we are somewhat embarrassed by the thought that they are more careful of our physical than of our moral life. Our soldiers are martyrs; they bear witness to a new truth. Their defeat would mean the triumph in Europe of brute force, supported by the two spiritual forces which it has mobilized-science and religion. Before permitting that it is our duty to fight, without even thinking of what may befall. And if our soldiers go down to the last man everybody who had not yet taken up arms will fight to the last cartridge, to the last

stone of our mountains that we can hurl against a Kultur" which is nought save worship of the sword and of the golden calf.

The France of today is fighting religiously. Catholics, Protestants, men of Free Thought, we all feel that our sorrows renew, continue, and fulfill those of the Innocent Victim of Calvary. But they are birth pangs; we may die of them, but we have not the right not to bless the present hour and to take up with rejoicing the task before us.

The peace which St. Francis preached was not peace at any price, peace as an end in itself. Like many others before him, he repeated "Righteousness and Peace have kissed each other "-righteousness first and then peace. There is no true or lasting peace that is not based on justice. He did not beg the people of Perugia no longer to make war on Assisi. He began by fighting them; and later on, at the end of his life, he did not preach peace to these same people, but told them that the wrongs they had committed would be avenged.

Besides, unless I am mistaken, you will soon feel what I am saying. It seems to me that Italy is preparing soon to enter the lists. She will come in at her own time for practical reasons, and also, I am sure, for reasons of ideal. And in the thrill of enthusiasm that will run through you all, from furthest Sicily to the Alpine peaks, you will feel the mysterious workings of spiritual creation, as yet incomplete, but which strives to realize itself in and by us. You will then see how necessary it is for a nation, as for a man, to take the rare chances that are offered him to fulfill his destiny and realize his ideal.

This is what our soldiers-I see it by

their letters-and what our peasants-I hear it in their talk-feel and understand better than I can express it. What France of the Crusades stammered, what France of the Revolution saw dimly, France today desires to accomplish. She believes with all her strength in victory because she has indomitable faith in the ideal of justice and truth that is in her heart. But she does not need to believe in victory in order to fight, for to give up fighting would be to betray her past, her ideal, her vocation. What matter that she die at her task if she has done her work? The other day I read in a Swiss newspaper that one must go to France to see a people whom the war has not perturbed. It seems that in neutral Switzerland there is greater moral distress than in France. This is quite natural. In the ideal work we are now doing we have again found the secret of the life of nations to labor together at a hard task and to be faithful to the Spirit of Life that is embodied in the Creation. This is why I have found no trace of hatred of the enemy or wish for reprisals in the letters of our soldiers, who are enduring what they endure.

My son Jacques is grateful for your thought of him. He is still in the first line in the Argonne. His last letter is dated Dec. 23.

Au revoir, my dear President. In these last days of 1914 I embrace you and wish I could embrace all the people of Assisi, the "black," the "red," and the "white"; for I shall never be able to tell you how fond I am of you all. Long live Italy! and may 1915 bring to the eldest of the Latin nations those victories, material and spiritual, that will reform Europe and place civilization itself on new foundations.

T

THE WANDERING JEW.
HERE is no luck for Israel,"
says the Talmud. Individual
Jews are frequently shrewd

and fortunate, but as a people Israel is, in his own expressive idiom, a Schlemihl, a hapless, ne'er-do-well. Twenty centuries of wandering find him concentrated precisely in the valley of Armageddon. And here in a hundred places he must again grasp the Wanderer's staff. Symbolic is the figure of the Chief Rabbi of Serbia wandering across Europe to beg for his pitiful flock. A workhouse and a hostel at London are congested with Belgian Jews. Forty ravaged towns have poured their Ghettos into Warsaw. Prague, Vienna, Budapest, seethe sullenly with refugees. A census taken of 4,653 Jews, who fled into Alexandria showed subjects of England, France, Russia, Spain, America, Turkey, Persia, Rumania, Italy, Greece and Serbia, while another thousand had already wandered further-to other Egyptian cities, to America, Australia, South Africa, Russia. The only important section of Jewry that has escaped the war is that which has poured itself into the American Melting Pot. And not only are ten of the thirteen millions of Jewry in the European cockpit; nearly three millions are at the fiercest centre of fightingin Poland.

Poland-be it German, Russian or Austrian Poland-is pre-eminently the home of Jewry, and Poland even more than Belgium has been the heart of hell. For two of the Powers that combined to dismember it are now fighting the third across its fragments, and Jewish populations are at their thickest along those 600 miles of border country through which Russia invades East-Prussian

Poland or Galician Poland, Germany hacks her way toward Warsaw, or Austria hurls her counter-attacks.

The accident of a series of peculiarly wise and tolerant monarchs opened Poland to a large volume of Jewish immigration and even gave its Jews a measure of autonomy and dignity. They were the recognized providers of an urban and industrial population to a mainly agricultural people. Thus were they collected for the holocaust of today. For, of course, the partition of Poland left them still pullulating, whether in Prussian Danzig, Russian Warsaw or Austrian Lemberg. And not only have they duplicated the tragedy of the Poles in having to fight what is practically a civil war; not only have they suffered almost equally in the ruin of Poland so poignantly described by Paderewski, in the burnings, bombardings, pillagings, tramplings; not only have they shared in the miseries of towns taken and retaken by the rival armies, but they have been accused hysterically or craftily before both belligerents of espionage or treachery, and even of poisoning the wells, and crucified by both. Hundreds have been shot, knouted, hanged, imprisoned as hostages; women have been outraged, whole populations have fled, some before the enemy, many hounded out by their own military authorities, wandering-but not into the wide world. Into the towns outside the Pale they might not escape-these were not open even to the wounded soldier. In the long history of the martyrpeople there is no ghastlier chapter. Yet it is lost-and necessarily lost-in the fathomless ocean of Christian suffering, in the great world-tragedy. But while Poland and Belgium are crowned

It

by their sorrows and cheered by the hope of rebirth, while the agony of Belgium has become an immortal heroic memory, the agony of Israel is obscure and unknown, unlightened by sympathy, unredeemed by any national prospect, happy if it only escape mockery. is related that when one of these ejected foot-sore populations, wandering at midnight on the wintry roads, with their weeping children, met marching regiments of their own army, the women stretched out their hands in frantic beseechment to the Jews in the ranks. But the Jewish soldiers could only weep like the children-and march on.

TO THEIR TENTS, O ISRAEL. "You are the only people," said Agrippa, trying to hold back the Jews of Palestine from rising against the Roman Empire, "who think it a disgrace to be servants of those to whom all the world hath submitted." Today, servants of all who have harbored them, the Jews are spending themselves passionately in the service of all. At the outbreak of the war an excited Englishwoman, hearing that the Cologne Gazette, said to be run by jews, was abusing England, wrote to me, foaming at the quill, demanding that the Jews should stop the paper. That the Jews do not exist, or that an English Jew could not possibly interfere with the patriotic journalism of a German subject, nay, that the abuse in the Cologne Gazette was actually a proof of Jewish loyalty, did not occur to the worthy lady. Yet the briefest examination of the facts would have shown her that the Jews merely reflect their environment, if with a stronger tinge of color due to their more vivid temperament, their gratitude and attachment to their havens and fatherlands, and their anxiety to prove themselves more patriotic than the patriots. It is but rarely that a Jew makes the faintest criticism of his country in war-fever, and when he does so, he is disavowed by his community and its press. For the Jew his country can do no wrong. Wherever we turn, therefore, we find the Jew prominently patriotic. In England the late Lord Rothschild presided

over the Red Cross Fund, and the Lord Chief Justice is understood to have saved the financial situation not only for England, but for all her allies. In Germany, Herr Ballin, the Jew who refused the baptismal path to preferment, the crea tor of the mercantile marine, and now the organizer of the national food supply, stands as the Kaiser's friend, interpreter and henchman, while Maximilian Harden brazenly voices the gospel of Prussianism, and Ernst Lissauera Jew converted to the religion of Love -sings "The Song of Hate." In France, Dreyfus-a more Christian Jew albeit unbaptized-has charge of a battery to the north of Paris, while General Heymann, Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor, commands an army corps. In Turkey, the racially Jewish Enver Bey is the ruling spirit, having defeated the Jewish Djavid Bey, who was for alliance with France, while Italy, on the contrary, has joined the Allies, through the influence of Baron Sonnino, the son of a Jew. The miltiary hospitals of Turkey are all under the direction of the Austrian Jew, Hecker. In Hungary it is the Jews who, with the Magyars, are the brains of the nation. Belgium has sent several thousand Jews to the colors and at a moment when Belgium's fate hangs upon England, has intrusted her interests at the Court of St. James's to a Jewish Minister, Mr. Hymans. Twenty thousand Jews are fighting for the British Empire, fifty thousand for the German, a hundred and seventy thousand for the Austro-Hungarian, and three hundred and fifty thousand for the Russian. Two thousand five hundred Jews fight for Serbia. Even from Morocco and Tripoli come Jewish troops-they number 20 per cent. of the Zouaves. Nor are the British Colonies behind the French. From Australia, New Zealand, from Canada, South Africa, from every possession and dependency, stream Jewish soldiers or sailors. Even the little contingent from Rhodesia had Jews, and the first British soldier to fall in German Southwest Africa was Ben Rabinson, a famous athlete. In Buluwayo half a company of reserves is composed of Jews.

When Joseph Chamberlain offered the