Zionists a plateau in East Africa the half-dozen local Britons held a massmeeting" of protest. Yet today, though the offer was rejected by the Zionists, fifty Jewish volunteers-among them Captain Blumenthal of the Artillery and Lieutenant Eckstein of the Mounted Rifles-are serving in the Defense Force enlisted at Nairobi. Letters from British Jews published in a single number of the Jewish World, taken at random, reIveal the writers as with the Australian fighting force in Egypt, with the Japanese at the taking of Tsing-Tao, with the Grand Fleet in the North Sea, while the killed and wounded in the same issue range over almost every British regiment, from the historic Black Watch, Grenadier Guards, or King's Own Scotch Borderers down to the latest Middlesex and Manchester creations. The Old World and the New are indeed at clash when a Jewish sailor on Passover eve, in lieu of sitting pillowed at the immemorial ritual meal, is at his big gun, my eye fixed to the telescopic lights and an ear in very close proximity to an adjacent navyphone, and the remainder of the time with my head on a projectile for a pillow." Anglo-Jewry, once the home of timorous mothers and Philistine fathers, has become a Maccabean stronghold.

One distinguished family alonethe Spielmanns-boasts thirty-five members with the forces. A letter of thanks from the King has published the fact that an obscure Jew in a London suburb has five sons at the front.

And in all these armies the old Maccabean valor which had not feared to challenge the Roman Empire at its mightiest, and to subdue which a favorite General had to be detached from the less formidable Britain, has been proved afresh. "The Jewish bravery astonished us all," said the Vice Governor of Kovno, and, indeed, the heroism of the Russian Jew has become a household word. More than 300 privates-they cannot be officers have been accorded the Order of St. George. One Jew, who brought down a German aeroplane, was awarded all four degrees of the order at once. In England Lieutenant de Pass won the Victoria Cross for carrying a wounded man

out of heavy fire, and perished a few hours later in trying to capture a German sap. In Austria up to the end of the year the Jews had won 651 medals, crosses, &c. "I give my life for the victory of France and the peace of the world," wrote a young immigrant Jew who died on the battlefield. A collection of letters from German soldiers, published by the Jewish Book-shop of Berlin, reveals equal devotion to Germany. And to the question, "What shall it profit the Jew to fight for the whole world? " a Yiddish journalist, Morris Myer, has found a noble answer. There is a unity behind all this seeming self-contradiction, he points out. "All these Jews are dying for the same thing -for the honor of the Jewish name."

THE RIDDLE OF RUSSO-JEWRY.

The devotion of the Jew to the British flag needs no explanation. Both socially and by legislation England has given the world a lesson in civilization. And if France only just escaped the pollution of the Dreyfus affair, if Germany and Austria are anti-Semitic in temper, all these countries have yet given the Jew his constitutional rights, and the Kaiser in particular has had the sense and the spirit to turn his ablest Jews into friends and henchmen. The appointment of several hundred officers during the war has probably removed the last tangible grievance of German Jewry. As for Turkey, she has been since 1492 a refuge of Jewry from Christian persecution, while Italy, which has had a Jewish Prime Minister as well as a Jewish War Minister (General Ottolenghi), stands equal with England in justice to the Jew. But that the Russian Jews, yet reeking from the blood of a hundred pogroms, should have thrown themselves into Russia's struggle with almost frenzied fervor, this is, indeed, a phenomenon that invites investigation, and invites it all the more because the Jews in America, remote from the new realities, continue their barren curses against Russia, and include in their malisons those who, like myself, proclaim the cause of the Allies the cause of civilization.

It would be easy to dismiss the enthusiasm of the Russian Jews as more politic than patriotic, or to say that they have made a virtue of necessity. But it bears all the marks of a sincere upwelling, a spiritual outreaching to their fellow-Russians. Such scenes as marked the proclamation of war have never been known in Russian Jewry. The Jewish Deputy in the Duma and the Jewish press were at one in proffering heart and soul to the country. From the Great Synagogue of Petrograd five thousand Jews, headed by the Crown Rabbi, marched to the Czar's Palace and, kneeling before it, sang Hebrew hymns and the Russian anthem. Their flags bore the motto, "There are no Jews or Gentiles now." At Kieff ten thousand Jews, carrying Russian banners and the Scrolls of the Law, paraded the town, and similar demonstrations occurred wherever Jews dwelt. A Warsaw writer records that the Jews wept with emotion in the synagogues as the prayed for Russia's victory. Thousands of youths who had escaped conscription offered themselves as volunteers; in Rostoff even a girl smuggled herself among them and went through several battles before she was detected. The older generation poured out its money in donatives. The Dowager Empress accepted and named a Red Cross Hospital. One wealthy Jew in the province of Kherson undertook to look after all the families of reservists in six villages, or 1,380 souls.

Something must, perhaps, be discounted for the hysteria and hypnosis of war time. And other factors than patriotism proper may have entered into the enthusiasm. The young generation had reached the breaking point. Baffled of every avenue of distinction, the most brilliant blocked from the schools and universities by the diabolical device of admitting even the small percentage by ballot and not by merit, grown hopeless of either Palestine without or the social revolution within, the young Jews hovered gloomily between suicide and baptism, between depravity and drink. Some with a last glimmer of conscience and faith had thought to

avoid the stigma of Christianity by becoming merely Mohammedans; others to dodge at least the Greek Church had exploited an Episcopalian missionary. But even for these Russia refused to open up a career. To this desperate generation the war came as an outlet from a blind alley, a glad adventure. Hence the reckless bravery on the battlefield. But there was reason, too, in the ecstasy. England, ever the Jew's star of hope, was at last to fight side by side with Russia. For the Russian the alliance was a pride, for the Jew an augury of liberty. The great democracies of the West would surely drag Russia in their train. And for the elders the fear of Germany was the beginning of wisdom. The very first day of the war she had taken possession of the undefended town of Kalicz on the Russian border, and in this town, more than a third Jewish, had initiated her policy of "frightfulness." And mingling with this sinister first impression came the stories of wealthy Jews returning from Karlsbad, Wiesbaden, and other Summer resorts from which they had been ejected as "alien enemies." Te Jew began to cling to the devil he knew, to realize that, after all, Russia was his home.

But when every allowance is made for lower factors, there remains a larger and deeper truth underlying the enthusiasm, the truth which it takes a poet to feel and which found its best expression in the words of the RussoYiddish writer, Shalom Asch, whose dramas have been played in Berlin and whose books were published in English. Germany's aeroplanes had rained down on the Pale not bombs, but leaflets, announcing herself as the deliverer of the oppressed peoples under the Russian yoke and promising to grant the Jews equal rights. To these seductive attempts to exploit the Jewish resentment against Russia, Shalom Asch answered sternly: "The oppressed peoples under the Russian yoke' have risen as one man against the German bird of prey. The Jews are marching in the Russian ranks for the defense of their fatherland. Nor is it the youth alone

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that has done its duty. In every town of Russia Jews have established committees; our sisters are joining the Red Cross, our fathers are collecting funds. * * Thousands of Russo-Jewish volunteers have enlisted in France * even from America, where Germany has tried to exploit our sufferings, they are beginning to come. For this is not a war to defend the Russian bureaucracy which is responsible for the pogroms, but to defend the integrity of our fatherland. ** * * Nor do we do our duty in order to earn' equal rights * but because, deeply hidden in our hearts, there is a burning feeling for Russia. * Look at America, where hundreds of societies and streets bear the names of our Russian towns. No Pale, no restrictions, no

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pogroms, can eradicate from our hearts this natural feeling of love for our country, and God be thanked for it! Nobody gives a fatherland and nobody can take it away. We have been in Russia as long as the Slav peoples. The history of the Jews in Poland begins with the very first page of Polish history. Equal rights must be ours, because for a thousand years and more we have absorbed into our blood the sap of the Slav soil, the Slav landscape is reflected in our thought and imagination. We shall fight against the system of government which refuses to recognize our equality, as we fought against it in 1905. But the Russian soil is sacred, it belongs to the peoples of Russia, and whoever dares to touch it will find in the Jew his first foe!"

LTHOUGH the machinery creaks

AL

a bit, and for the time being friction is more apparent than the actual benefits, there has never been a more perfect organization of a free people than is evidenced in warring Germany of today. One of the most singular chapters of economic history is being written for the benefit of posterity. The socialization of the German State has been so rapid and complete that it will take science years to record what has been achieved. We can state also that Germany has never been economically so strong and so firmly knit together as now, after nearly a year of

war.

Similar advancement is apparent in the technical field. Germany, like the sleeping beauty, has been aroused out of her century-long sleep by the electric spark which touches the blackness of anthracite to bring forth the magic colors of aniline dyes. War stimulated progress. Saltpetre was literally extracted from the air.

The great revolution in means of transportation since the days of Napoleon has benefited Germany more than any other nation, as Frederich List predicted. The Prussian railway system is not only the largest single enterprise in the world, but it is the most efficient mechanism ever created, typifying German unity and striking power. The railway has welded together nations which otherwise could hardly come into touch, such, for example, as Germany and Turkey.

With the help of her Allies and of such neutrals as are contiguous by land, and with her control of the Baltic Sea, and, through Turkey, of the Black Sea, Germany commands an economic terri

tory which could support itself for years in case of necessity. And these changes have been effected during a period when the British industrial has been losing its mobility!

In a moral and intellectual sense, also, England has been living the life of a retired capitalist, the richest capitalist of the world. England's tremendous heritage still towers over her head as a globe encompassing dome, but the foundation arches of this heaven-storming structure are cracking. The religious life of the Anglo-Saxon has aged into formalism, and, having lost the power of adapting itself to scientific progress, is degenerating into little more than hypocrisy.

"No Englishman," said Carlyle, "any longer dares to pursue Truth. For 200 years he has been swathed in lies of every sort." And even that phenomenon of disintegration called "Enlightenment," which England never succeeded in outgrowing, offers no substitute for the truths that slipped from her as her religion withered into formalism; no mechanical formula will solve the riddle of the universe; no utilitarian calculation of happiness will satisfy the anxious longings of the heart.

Herein lies England's internal danger; here gapes the abyss which Carlyle and Emerson sought to bridge with building stones of German philosophy.

And, in fact, it was upon German soil that the basic lines of that universal temple were thought out which was to furnish a new home for the searching human spirit. German idealism outstripped the British mind since it fused puritanism and enlighenment to a higher unity. The rigid greatness of puritan

ism lived on in old Prussia, to which it had always been bound by threads of spiritual history. But Kant placed this same old Prussia upon the judgment seat of reason when he vanquished the greatest skeptic of all times, David Hume, the final product of British thought.

Amid the doubts of the intellect and the perplexities of the soul the "mandate of duty" becomes the granite block upon which man can rise to "freedom" and bring "order" into his affairs-"order" into conflict between knowledge and desire of the man who understands and acts. Looking up from that rock man inevitably attains to faith in God and to confidence in an all-embracing plan of salvation, even when in places the continuity of the ordained purpose remains veiled in darkness.

But the synthesis achieved by German thought was even richer than this. When old Prussia allied itself with Western Germany, with its warmer blood and its quicker perceptions of art, duty and individual liberty were merged in the "idea of the whole "-from Kant to Hegel!

The discipline of the individual as a part of the social whole is, for the German, no servitude, as the Briton is wont to imagine, but a higher step toward freedom. For the individual in that way confers the place of transcendent value upon society.

"Law seems to bind with rigid fetters Only the mind of the slave who spurns it." The collective force of Germany, which interlocks the free individual with the social whole, is stronger than the forceful individuals whom old England produced. This tendency is observable in the German Army, in German state enterprises, and in the kartel organization of German capital. At his best the Briton succeeded in subjecting the world to British dominion through strong personalities for the glory of a worldstrange God.

The German, on the other hand, does his best in creating a highly organized community for the purpose of furthering in society the historic development of eternal values. Thus the idea of the Kingdom of God (Civitas Dei) and its

visible manifestation in the Christian Church, continue to produce beneficent results. Corresponding to this difference in philosophic outlook between the two races, there is a difference in political aims. The formal freedom of the Briton the German regards only as the first step beyond which he must go by bringing about a rational organization of the State for material justice, and in this respect the Prussian State Socialist and the Social Democrat are at one.

The German strives for rational order, where the British ideal of competition places the blind forces of finance upon an arbitrary throne. No one knew this better than an Englishman himself -Carlyle-who thought that Germany when she took the lead in Europe had secured several hundred years more for the attempt to build out of the germs then in existence a new social order.

Beyond these national aims the German does not strive for world dominion, but for a rational organization of the world on the basis of voluntary co-operation. Kant's "Eternal Peace" is to him an ideal always to be striven for, even though unattainable. But between this indefinite remote aim-" One flock and one shepherd!"-and the today, full of national antagonisms, the German believes that he can realize certain intermediate steps through a welding for a federal union of nations akin in interests and civilization.

That such a political organization can be expected Germany has proved by its kartels, wherein stronger and weaker units exist with advantage to all. Switzerland, essentially German in character, constitutes such a federation, comprising three of the principal European nationalities. Similarly, Austria-Hungary should be such a federation, assuring equal rights to Germans, Magyars, Rumanians, west and southern Slavs.

A commercial and political union of the two Central European powers lay in the direction of Bismarck's thoughts, and is today more than ever felt as a need consequent upon the present brotherhood in arms. By leaning upon such a Central European nucleus the Germanic States of the north and Slavic States of the south