The number of those who received direct assistance was only a small fraction of the arrivals from Russia at that time. According to the opinion of the author of the article _United States_ in the “Jewish Encyclopedia,” “The various committees and societies assisted about five per cent. of the total Jewish immigrants.” One of the most active and self-sacrificing of the workers for the refugees, Michael Heilprin, who was himself brought up under the influence of the _Haskalah_ movement, was, like all Maskilim of the old school, a strong believer in the theory that the Jewish problem was to be solved by inducing or helping the Jews to become agriculturists. Many of the immigrants who belonged to the class described as _Intellectuals_ or _Intelligents_, whose dreams of political liberty and assimilation in Russia were shattered by the pogroms, also entertained fantastic notions about the virtue of agriculture. They fell in with all colonization plans, for which they had more enthusiasm than natural aptitude, and this gave rise to a series of experiments in the colonizing of Russian immigrants, none of which were immediately successful, though it contributed to the inception of a small class of Jewish farmers which is slowly growing in the United States, and in which many see considerable promise for the future. Illustration: Herman Rosenthal. Photo by Schill, Newark, N. J. The first Jewish agricultural colony of that period was founded on Sicily Island, Catahoula Parish, Louisiana. The settlers, including thirty-five families from Kiev and twenty-five from Yelisavetgrad, had been partly organized in Russia. Its leading spirit was Herman Rosenthal (b. in Friedrichstadt, Courland, 1843; a. 1881), who is now chief of the Slavonic department of the New York Public Library. Before the colony was fairly started it was literally swept away by an overflow of the Mississippi in the spring of 1882, and the colonists scattered; a few of them, however, settling as independent farmers in Kansas and ♦Missouri. In July, 1882, Rosenthal headed another group of twenty families which formed the colony Cremieux, in Davison county, in the present State of South Dakota. It led a precarious existence for about three years and was finally abandoned. Another attempt, which was made by the Alliance Israelite Universelle, with the formation of a colony surnamed “Betlehem Yehudah,” in the same region, was no more successful. Colonies founded in the same year in Colorado and Oregon met with no better fate. The colonies founded in North Dakota (one), in Kansas (five), in Michigan (one), and in Virginia (two) remain but memories. Those founded later in Connecticut were more successful, and some of them are still in existence and even growing. The most successful were those established in New Jersey, where four of the nine which were founded there since 1882 are still in existence and, considering the drawbacks of such enterprises, are in a flourishing