The Jews of the United States were also in open sympathy with the liberal movements in Central Europe, especially in Germany, which culminated in the revolutions of the year 1848. While there was no active co-operation or direct assistance in those times of slow communication, those who wrote from America described the conditions prevailing here as well-nigh ideal from the liberal point of view. A poem by Sigmund Herzl, entitled “Auf! Nach Amerika!” which appeared in the “Central Organ,” published in Vienna in 1848 by Isidor Bush (b. in Prague, Bohemia, 1822; a. in New York, 1849; d. in St. Louis, Mo., 1898), in which America is described as a place where true brotherly love reigns supreme, where ignorance and base prejudice are entirely unknown, may be taken as an example of the expression of that sentiment. When the great Jewish champion of the liberal movement in Germany, Gabriel Riesser (b. in Hamburg, Germany, 1806; d. there 1863), visited America in 1856, he was greeted by many former German revolutionary soldiers――both Jewish and Christian――and in New York they gave a public dinner in his honor. German Jews in Philadelphia formed a Riesser Club, which existed for a number of years. (See Albert M. Friedenberg in “Publications,” XVII, pp. 204–5.) * * * * * The first diplomatic difficulties which the Government of the United States experienced on account of discrimination against its Jewish citizens occurred about this time, and――strangely enough――it was not with Russia, but with the Swiss Confederation. A general convention between the two republics was drawn and signed at Berne, November 25, 1850, by Mr. A. Dudley Mann, American Minister to Switzerland, on the part of the United States, and by Messrs. Druey and Frey-Hérosée on the part of the Swiss Confederation. This treaty and a copy of the instructions under which Mr. Mann acted, together with his dispatch of November 30, 1850, explanatory of the Articles of Convention, were transmitted to the United States Senate on February 13, 1851, by President Millard Fillmore (1800–74). Neither the treaty nor the papers accompanying it were ever made public, the ban of secrecy imposed by the Senate having never been removed. But President Fillmore himself, in the message transmitting the treaty, objected to it in the form in which it was presented. He said: “There is a decisive objection arising from the last clause in the First Article. That clause is in these words: _On account of the tenor of the Federal Constitution of Switzerland, Christians alone are entitled to the enjoyment of the privileges guaranteed by the present Article in the Swiss Cantons. But said cantons are not prohibited from extending the same privileges to citizens of the United States of other religious persuasions._