In one corner of the square I noticed a dull gray-coloured building from which troops of little Jewish children were issuing. It was one of those schools by means of which Jewish teachers, through all the persecutions and dispersions of nineteen centuries, have kept alive the memory of the Jewish history and the Jewish law and so kept the race together. I do not think I know of anything which so illustrates and emphasizes the power of education as the influences which these schools have had upon the Jewish people. I was interested in all that I saw of the life of the Jew in Cracow, because it gave me some idea of the poverty, degradation, and squalor in which more than half of the Jewish race is living to-day in different parts of Europe. Of the twelve million Jews in the world, about nine millions live in Europe. Of this number more than six million live in Russia and nearly two million and a half in Austria, Roumania, and the other parts of southeastern Europe. I have given some idea of the poverty of the Jews in Galicia, where they are politically free. From all that I can learn the Jews in Russia and Roumania are very much worse off than they are in the Austrian province of Galicia. Most of us, who are acquainted with Jews only in America or in western Europe, have been led to believe, in spite of the evident poverty of many of the Jews who live on the East Side in New York and in the Whitechapel district of London, that, as a race, the Jews are extremely wealthy. I was surprised, therefore, to read recently the statement, made by Jews who have investigated the condition of their own people, to the effect that, while they are undeniably wealthier than their Christian neighbours in the countries in which, during the past hundred years, they have been granted their freedom, taking the Jews as a whole they are poorer than any other civilized nation in the world. In short, one writer has said: "If we were to capitalize their wealth and distribute it among the twelve millions of Jews they would dispute with any poor nation for the lowest place in the scale of wealth."[4] The direction in which the Jews seem to be superior to all of the rest of the world is apparently not in wealth but in education. Even in Russia, where they do not have the same educational advantages that are given to the rest of the population, it is found that, while 79 per cent. of the total population can neither read nor write, the percentage of illiteracy among the Jews is 61 per cent. which is 18 per cent. less than that of the rest of the population.