They speak their own language, Yiddish, and many conduct their affairs, keep their ledgers, write contracts, wills, and many other documents in this dialect; the registration of births, marriages, and deaths is done by their rabbis, and the divorces granted by them are recognized by the state as valid; in the smaller towns they prefer to settle their differences before their own judiciary (Beth din), and not in the state courts; they collect the greater part of their own taxes for the Government in the name of the Jewish community; not only is each individual Jew required to do military duty, but the Jewish community as a whole is held responsible for delivering annually a certain number of recruits. This separateness goes as far as the calendar with many Jews, who date their letters and documents according to the Hebrew and not the Russian calendar. Up to about fifty years ago it was a disgrace for a Jew to be able to read Russian or German, or even to have in his possession a book in one of these vulgar languages; it was a sin next to apostasy. But during the last two generations a profound change has taken place. At the time I was in Prague the ancient Ghetto was in process of demolition, and it illustrates the change which has come in recent years that most of the people living in the narrow streets and battered ancient buildings of the former Ghetto were not Jews but Christians. After Prague, the city which has the oldest and most interesting Ghetto in Europe is Cracow, and the most interesting thing about it is the fact that it is still inhabited by Jews. They live there to-day very much, I suppose, as they did a hundred years ago, a race separate and apart, more removed, apparently, from the manners, customs, and comprehension of the rest of the world than any people this side of China. I have known Jews nearly all my life. I have done business with them and have more than once talked to them in their synagogues, and have always found sympathy and support among them for the work I have had to do for my own people. I have frequently visited and studied, to some extent, the poorer classes in the Jewish quarter on the East Side in New York. In spite of this, however, when certain strange figures in long black coats, soft felt hats, with pale faces, lighted by dark glittering eyes and framed by glossy curls which hung down on either side in front of their ears, were pointed out to me in Vienna, I had not the slightest notion to what race or nationality of people they belonged. Later on, when I reached Cracow, these same slender figures and pale, delicate faces became very familiar to me, and I learned to recognize in them the higher type of Polish Jew.