[Illustration: _Louis D. Brandeis (born in Louisville, Ky., in 1856), lawyer and publicist, is a distinguished leader in the voluntary profession of "public servant." His extraordinary record of unselfish, genuine achievement in behalf of the public interest--for shorter hours of labor, savings bank insurance, protection against monopoly, against increase in railroad rates, etc.,--gives peculiar aptness to the appeal for community service made in this article, which Mr. Brandeis has prepared from a recent Menorah address. From the beginning Mr. Brandeis has taken a keen interest in the Menorah movement as a promotive force for the ideals he has at heart._] WHILE I was in Cleveland a few weeks ago, a young man who has won distinction on the bench told me this incident from his early life. He was born in a little village of Western Russia where the opportunities for schooling were meagre. When he was thirteen his parents sent him to the nearest city in search of an education. There--in Bialystok--were good secondary schools and good high schools; but the Russian law, which limits the percentage of Jewish pupils in any school, barred his admission. The boy's parents lacked the means to pay for private tuition. He had neither relative nor friend in the city. But soon three men were found who volunteered to give him instruction. None of them was a teacher by profession. One was a newspaper man; another was a chemist; the third, I believe, was a tradesman; all were educated men. And throughout five long years these three men took from their leisure the time necessary to give a stranger an education. The three men of Bialystok realized that education was not a thing of one's own to do with as one pleases--not a personal privilege to be merely enjoyed by the possessor--but a precious treasure transmitted upon a sacred trust to be held, used and enjoyed, and if possible strengthened--then passed on to others upon the same trust. Yet the treasure which these three men held and the boy received in trust was much more than an education. It included that combination of qualities which enabled and impelled these three men to give and the boy to seek and to acquire an education. These qualities embrace: first, _intellectual capacity_; second, _an appreciation of the value of education_; third, _indomitable will_; fourth, _capacity for hard work_. It was these qualities which enabled the lad not only to acquire but to so utilize an education that, coming to America, ignorant of our language and of our institutions, he attained in comparatively few years the important office he has so honorably filled.