No group of people of all the heterogeneous mass that constitutes the Russian nation were half so prominent as the Jews in that abortive attempt at freedom. Witness the police records of the revolutionary period, which show that sixty-five out of every hundred political offenders were Jews, in districts where the population was fifteen parts Jewish and eighty-five parts Gentile. When I visited my native town in the Pale, several years after the revolution, it was hard to find, among the young men and women I talked with, one in a dozen who had not shared in the dangers of 1905. If we really want to know how heartily the Jews played their part in the revolution, we need only ask the Russian Government why the anti-Semitic laws have been so vengefully enforced since a certain crimson year within the present decade. And the whole significance of these things, in the present study, lies in the fact that precisely that spirit which prompts to rebellion in despotic Russia rallies in free America to the support of existing institutions. If it was a merit in 1620 to flee from religious persecution, and in 1776 to fight against political oppression, then many of the Russian refugees of to-day are a little ahead of the Mayflower troop, because they have in their own lifetime sustained the double ordeal of fight and flight, with all their attendant risks and shocks. To obtain a nice balance between the relative merits of these two groups of rebels, we remind ourselves that, for sheer adventurousness, migration to America to-day is not to be mentioned on the same page with the magnificent exploit of 1620, and we reflect that the moral glory of the revolution of 1776 is infinitely greater than that of any subsequent revolt; because that, too, was a path-finding adventure, with no compass but faith, no chart but philosophical invention. On the other hand, it is plain that the Russian revolutionists moved against greater odds than the American colonists had to face. The Russians had to plot in secret, assemble in the dark, and strike with bare fists; all this under the very nose of the Czar, with the benighted condition of the Russian masses hanging like a cloud over their enterprise. The colonists were able to lay the train of revolution in the most public manner, they had the local government in their hands, a considerable militia obedient to their own captains, and the advantage of distance from the enemy's resources, with a populace advanced in civic experience promising support to the leaders.