If it is true that immigration is not what it used to be, the fact will appear from a detailed comparison of the "old" and the "new" immigration. But which of the immigrant stocks of the good old times shall be taken as a standard? Woman's wisdom urges me to go right back to the original pattern, just as I would do if I went to the shops to match samples. And the original pattern was brought to this country in the year 1620. Surely comparison with the Mayflower stock is the most searching test of the quality of our immigration that any one could propose. The predominant virtue of the Pilgrims was idealism. The things of the spirit were more to them than the things of the flesh. May we say the like of our present immigrants? Of very many of them, yes; a thousand times yes. Of the 8,213,000 foreigners landed between the years 1899 and 1909, 990,000 were of that race which for nineteen centuries has sacrificed its flesh in the service of the spirit. It takes a hundred times as much steadfastness and endurance for a Russian Jew of to-day to remain a Jew as it took for an English Protestant in the seventeenth century to defy the established Church. Those who think that with the Spanish Inquisition Jewish martyrdom came to an end are asked to remember that the Kishinieff affair is only eight years behind us, and that Bielostock has been heard from since Kishinieff, and Mohileff since Bielostock. And more terrible than the recurrent _pogrom_, which hacks and burns and tortures a few hundreds now and then, is the continuous bloodless martyrdom of the six million Jews in Russia through the operation of the anti-Semitic laws of that country. Thirty minutes spent in looking over a summary of these laws recently compiled by an English historian(1) will convince any reader with a spark of imagination that every Russian Jewish immigrant to-day is a fugitive from religious persecution, even as were the English immigrants of 1620. (1) Lucien Wolf, _Legal Sufferings of the Jews in Russia_. But while nobody questions the idealism of the Jew in religion, the world has been very slow to credit him with any degree of civic devotion. The world did not stop to think that a man has to have a country before he can prove himself a good citizen. But happily in recent times he has been put to the test of civic opportunity, notably in America; with the result that he was found to possess a fair share of the civic virtues, from the generosity displayed in the town meeting, when citizens vote away their substance to support a public cause, to the brute heroism of the battle-field, where mangled flesh gives proof of valiant spirit.(2) And what the Jews of West European stock proved in the American wars for freedom the Jews of Eastern Europe have proved more recently, by their forwardness in the Russian revolution of 1905. (2) See _The Jews in America_, by Rev. Madison C. Peters.