The Jews, in individual cases, may be sharper in business than their non-Jewish fellow business men of the same station in life. Belonging to an Oriental, passionate race, they have a more vivid imagination and can see things in brighter colors than the non-Jews. This is, however, true only of individual cases. The ordinary Jewish business man is as clever or as stupid as the Gentile business man. A mediocrity, whether a Jew or a Gentile, is a mediocrity, and the Jewish mediocrity is no more productive or creative than the non-Jewish mediocrity. It is interesting that in the Levant, where Greeks, Armenians and other Oriental people are active in business, the Jew cuts a relatively poor figure as a business man. There are in Salonica great Jewish merchants but the vast majority of Salonica Jews are artisans and laborers. The Jews of the East when settled in the West, be it in Western Europe or America, have seldom achieved a great success as merchants or business men. The fact is that the Jew is no more shrewd as a business man than the Englishman, Frenchman, or American. It is true, however, that in exceptional cases the Jews produce commercial geniuses as they also produce literary and artistic and scientific geniuses. We are an old and relatively pure race and our experience is far-reaching. We have more productive powers than many other peoples, and we produce proportionately more great men than other peoples. Some of these great men are great in business, but that does not mean that the Jews are a business people and a clever business people. OUR NATIONAL BUDGET AND BRIBERY All peoples who live under normal conditions live economically, that is, on a systematized budget in which expenditure is adjusted to income. The Jewish people, not living under such conditions, do not live economically. Their budget is not systematized nor are its expenditures proportionate to the income. The lack of a systematized budget, however, does not mean that we have no fixed annual expenditures, although it is true that we have no fixed annual income. The truth is that we, as a people, spend as much as any other people of equal numbers who live a normal life. The only difference is seen in this: while other peoples spend money for national organization and on national institutions, we have to spend our money either in bribery or to help pogrom victims. On the eve of the Jewish New Year it is proper that we draw up and take account of our annual budget. The biggest sum in this budget is the item marked "bribery." Few realize how many millions are spent annually by Russian and Roumanian Jews who seek to mollify their oppressors with bribe or gift offerings. Few realize that the many millions spent by wealthy Assimilationists in non-Jewish philanthropies are also bribe offerings. The Jew has learned that if he means to be a Jew he must pay bribery and that if he does not want to be a Jew, he must also pay bribery.