For centuries the Jews had a respected and comfortable home in Spain, but then came the fearful Inquisition, and the ninth day of Ab 1492 saw 300,000 of them exiled out of the country they had helped grow to culture and wealth. There was the Declaration of the Rights of Man during the French Revolution, but then came the Dreyfus affair a century later. There was science and enlightenment in United Germany, but never was anti-Semitism more pronounced, more scientific than there between 1875 and '80. In 1881 the May Laws were passed in Russia. In 1882 there was a ritual murder trial in Hungary. Our statutes and sciences, after all, are but ways and means, improved ways and means, to what?--often to unimproved ends, it seems. Our learning and knowledge are what?--but channels to educate, to lead out (e-duco) the noble qualities in man? yes; perhaps also his jealousies and hatreds. And thus there comes a time of doubt. The courtesies and learning of this university life, reflects the Jewish student, perhaps but cover up these jealousies and hatreds, make them more polite, and all the more painful therefore. However much he will not, he sees cliques and denominational clubs all about him: Catholic clubs, Lutheran clubs, Jewish clubs; in the lecture room the gentiles form their groups and the Jews form theirs; in the election of class officers the Jews have been slighted; at the class dinner a Jew was insulted; one fellow was refused accommodations at a student rooming-house because he was a Jew; and the sensitive young man begins to feel as though there were but two divisions of people at the University after all: Jews and everybody else. _The Perennial Burden of the Jew_ BUT it is unfair and ungrateful to speak thus of the American University. All superstition and prejudice may not have disappeared here; enough it is that they tend to disappear so rapidly. But what of the large country outside the university? What of the growing Jewries in our cities? What of the Jew in the little hamlet carrying his pack of tinware from door to door; he is so eager to earn an honest dollar for a wife, a daughter, perhaps for a son at college; so eager to find him a home like that of the earlier non-Jewish immigrants who buy his wares; yet why must he overstrain his virtues before them, break through the ice, as the saying goes, and clear himself--why? for being a Jew. Evidently, others are taken as good until they prove themselves bad; the Jew is bad until he proves himself good. Should some other Jewish trader come to the same locality and commit some wrong, overcharge a shilling on the price of a kettle, for example, the first Jew must be made to feel ashamed of it, for it was not the other man who did the wrong, but the "Jew in him." Evidently, again, the Jewish problem is not of the individual, but of the race. Must the Wandering Jew bear a perennial burden?