Yet, in spite of all disabilities, and as though in quiet mockery of them, the Russian Jews contrive not only to exist, but, in some degree, to prosper. Their skill, their sobriety, their industry, their indomitable patience, their reciprocity, and their cunning--all fostered by the persecution of centuries--enable them to hold their own in the struggle, and to evade many of the regulations which are intended to bring about their extinction. They often obtain a tacit permission to live in various trading places beyond the “pale,” and in many villages in which they have no legal right of residence. Vocations forbidden by law are pursued by the connivance of corrupt officials, and the despised outcasts frequently succeed in amassing large fortunes as merchants or contractors, by the practice of medicine, or at the Bar, or in earning a respectable livelihood as professors and authors, and even as Government servants! Even culture is not allowed to die out. National enthusiasm, fomented by persecution, and denied political self-expression, finds an outlet in literature. In spite of the State, the Church, and the Synagogue, the darkness of the Russian ghetto is illumined by gifted writers in prose and verse, like Perez, Abramovitch, Spektor, Goldfaden, and others, who have invested the debased Yiddish jargon of the Russian Jew with the dignity of their own genius, and have produced a literature popular in form as well as in sentiment--a literature which reflects with wonderful vividness and fidelity the humour and the sadness of Russian life, and under a different guise carries on Mendelssohn’s educational mission. In addition to these original works, there is a vast activity in every department of foreign literature and science, including translations from many European languages, and a vigorous periodical press which disseminates the products of Western thought among the masses of the ghetto. So that the Russian Jew has access, through his own Yiddish, not only to works of native creation, but also to the most popular of foreign books, great and otherwise: from Goethe’s _Faust_ and Shakespeare’s _Hamlet_ to Sir A. Conan Doyle’s _Adventures of Sherlock Holmes_. Side by side with these efforts to foster the Yiddish element proceeds a movement on behalf of the Hebrew element, while the upper classes of Polish Jews are actively promoting Polish culture among their poorer Yiddish-speaking brethren. All these movements, whether conducted on parallel or on mutually antagonistic lines, supply sure evidence of one thing--the vitality of the Russian Jewry.