This cruel prejudice--for all lump condemnations are cruel--is no importation, no hang-over from the past. It appears to spring out of contemporary experience and is invading circle after circle of broad-minded. People who give their lives to befriending immigrants shake their heads over the Galician Hebrews. It is astonishing how much of the sympathy that twenty years ago went out to the fugitives from Russian massacres has turned sour. Through fear of retaliation little criticism gets into print; in the open the Philo-semites have it all their way. The situation is: Honey above, gall beneath. If the Czar, by keeping up the pressure which has already rid him of two million undesired subjects, should succeed in driving the bulk of his six million Jews to the United States, we shall see the rise of a Jewish question here, perhaps riots and anti-Jewish legislation. No doubt thirty or forty thousand Hebrews from eastern Europe might be absorbed by this country each year without any marked growth of race prejudice; but when they come in two or three or even four times as fast, the lump outgrows the leaven, and there will be trouble. America is probably the strongest solvent Jewish separatism has ever encountered. It is not only that here the Jew finds himself a free man and a citizen. That has occurred before, without causing the Jew to merge into the general population. It is that here more than anywhere else in the world _the future is expected to be in all respects better than the past_. No civilized people ever so belittled the past in the face of the future as we do. This is why tradition withers and dies in our air; and the dogma that the Jews are a "peculiar people" and must shun intermarriage with the Gentiles is only a tradition. The Jewish dietary laws are rapidly going. In New York only one-fourth of the two hundred thousand Jewish workmen keep their Sabbath and only one-fifth of the Jews belong to the synagogue. The neglect of the synagogue is as marked as the falling away of non-Jews from the church. Mixed marriages, although by no means numerous in the centers, are on the increase, and in 1909 the Central Conference of Jewish Rabbis resolved that such marriages "are contrary to the tradition of the Jewish religion and should therefore be discouraged by the American Rabbinate." Certainly every mixed marriage is, as one rabbi puts it, "a nail in the coffin of Judaism," and free mixing would in time end the Jews as a distinct ethnic strain.