which had lopped them off from the family of nations. It is a wonder that all future growth was not arrested. As to the charge of tribalism (the writer acknowledging that the vast majority of Jews believe in it), and even according some unknown and undefined power as derivable from tribalism, to make a charge of this is but to repeat the old fable of the wolf and the lamb. All that intelligent Jews are doing to-day is to take advantage of their freedom. They are trying to rid themselves of that incubus which has been weighing them down. That large and increasing number of Reformers and Reform synagogues, springing up in the large cities of Western Europe and the United States; the decadence, the difficulty of maintaining synagogues of pure orthodox Jews; the complaints, the lamentations which are constantly heard from the mouths of orthodox ministers and their organs, over what they call "the neglect of religious observance," show that the time of change has come. Even among some of the orthodox, the gross superstitions accompanying the offerings (auction-sales of God's blessings, knocked down to the highest bidder) have been for the major part abolished. Efforts are continually made to modify the ritual by denationalizing the older-fashioned form of prayer, and giving it more of that spiritual life which Maimonides first developed. Dietary and physical observances, which the Eastern Jew borrowed or adopted from the nations which once surrounded him, are being expunged. What is the true reason for this change, a change which, born in America and in England, is now commencing to exert some slight influence in Germany? The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church. Every act of wrong done to Jews rendered them the more rigid in their belief, causing at the same time differentiation in their surroundings. Whenever, through the operation of better, more humane laws, oppression was removed, Jews became more like the men among whom they lived. Why should M. Renan find fault with the French Jew, and take the Parisian Israelite as the type of some Hebraic Athenian? Under normal conditions men float in the general current, at about equal depths, for the social law of specific gravity remains forever the same. Those sociologists are ignorant of their calling who demand, then, of the Jew an instantaneous reversal of an existence formed by his surroundings, and a forgetting of the great belief which has been burned into his heart by the fires of thousands of years.