A number of causes united in making the socialistic propaganda strongest among the Russian Jews. They had come from a country where all the elements of opposition naturally gathered around the political parties that stood in secret conflict with the Government and also the social order of things. In America, they came at once in contact with the sweat-shop and similar industrial oppressions, which only sharpened their dislike of the social structure. Intellectually they stood higher than those of their brethren who persevered with the conservatives, for they had at least come to think about their condition and the affairs of the world, while the others clung to old superstitions and did nothing to drag themselves out from the slough of ignorance into which they had fallen in Russia. At the same time the many intelligent men who had been driven to the United States nearly all had belonged to the opposition parties at home, and it was from them alone that the masses could be saved from the clutches of the sensational novelists. This struggle between Schaikewitsch and his tribe on the one side and the intelligent writers on the other began towards the end of the last decade, and the older men are being as surely driven to the wall here as they have been in Russia by Rabinowitsch and the newer school of writers. These younger men have, with but one exception, been driven to Judeo-German letters as their last resort. Some of them had never before published anything in any language, and none of them had ever practised writing in their vernacular. They all belonged to that class of Jewish young men who had received their instruction in Russian schools, or who had in any way identified themselves completely with their Gentile comrades. They had all reached their school age in the seventies, when everybody was as eager to become Russianized as two decades before their parents had been to oppose the new culture. Either as belonging to the Jewish race, or because of their sympathies with the Nihilists, they had to flee from the country. These form to a great extent the basis for the Russian intelligence in the United States.