“The historical power of the prophets of Israel,” says James Darmesteter, “is exhausted neither by Judaism nor by Christianity, and they hold a reserve force for the benefit of the coming century. The twentieth century is better prepared than the nineteen preceding it to understand them.” While Zionism is a pious hope and a vision out of despair in countries where the victims of oppression are still counted by millions, the republicanism of the United States is the nearest approach to the ideals of the prophets of Israel that ever has been incorporated in the form of a state. The founders of our government converted the dreams of philosophers into a political system,--a government by the people, for the people, whereunder the rights of man became the rights of men, secured and guaranteed by a written constitution. Ours is peculiarly a promised land wherein the spirit of the teachings of the ancient prophets inspired the work of the fathers of our country. American liberty demands of no man the abandonment of his conscientious convictions; on the contrary, it had its birth, not in the narrowness of uniformity, but in the breadth of diversity, which patriotism fuses together into a conscious harmony for the highest welfare of all. The Protestant, the Catholic, and the Jew, each and all need the support and the sustaining power of their religion to develop their moral natures and to keep alive the spirit of self-sacrifice which American patriotism demands of every man, whatever may be his creed or race, who is worthy to enjoy the blessings of American citizenship. I do not wish to be misunderstood as claiming any special merit for the Jews as American citizens which is not equally possessed by the Americans of other creeds. They have the good as well as the bad among them, the noble and the ignoble, the worthy and the unworthy. They have the qualities as well as the defects of their fellow-citizens. In a word, they are not any less patriotic Americans because they are Jews, nor any less loyal Jews because they are primarily patriotic Americans. The Jew is neither a newcomer nor an alien in this country or on this continent; his Americanism is as original and ancient as that of any race or people with the exception of the American Indian and other aborigines. He came in the caravels of Columbus, and he knocked at the gates of New Amsterdam only thirty-five years after the Pilgrim Fathers stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock. FELIX ADLER