their wide dispersion; despite their triumphs and defeats in wars, in state building, and church formation; despite the wide diversity between them in their literature, their philosophy, their art, their trades and industries. Are the Semites still characterized by the same gifts and tendencies of mind and heart, ruled by the same passions, subject to the same limitations, as were their ancestors in all their generations? Among them there is a fraction, and that fraction again scattered over vast areas, in various states of civilization, and under diversified kinds of governments, enjoying liberty and rights of citizenship in the one, and groaning under relentless oppression in the other,--are they still none other than Semites? Are they so permeated with Semitic features that they can never amalgamate with their surroundings and become full-weighted citizens of the state where they pitch their tents,--offer them what inducements you may,--but must be kept at arms length and treated as suspects? Has nature lost all her power in this instance and become faithless to herself? Will the Hebrew child not love the land of its birth and feel the kinship with the people whose language and mode of life become its own? But why heap up improbabilities and impossibilities? The designation fastened upon us as a stigma was a fraud from the beginning, a conscious fraud and a malicious invention. It was "conceived in mischief and brought forth in iniquity." What was meant was not anti-Semitism, but _anti-Judaism_; but that name had to be avoided because it implies hostility to a religion and a creed; and that, again, might be construed as springing from an awakened zeal for the instigator's own Church; a suspicion they could not permit to rest upon them. No, it is not the Jew's religion that makes him obnoxious and a danger to the state, but it is his descent from the eldest son of Noah. True, the Jews have at no time adopted it as a national name. "Semitic" is of comparatively recent date, an abstract word intended merely for scientific classification, never meant for discrimination of any portion of the Semitic races, or to become a hissing and a byword or a mask for robbers of human rights and destroyers of human happiness. The victims of this crusade are not a nameless horde for whom a designation had to be coined; they are known to history for three thousand years as Hebrews, Israelites, Jews, and they have no mind to exchange these names for any other. But a new "Hep Hep" was wanted, and so "Semites" was hauled from the world of books, disfigured, and fastened upon the Jewish gabardine in noble emulation of the barbarism of the Middle Ages. The more senseless, the more welcome it was as a bugbear to frighten the populace and to stir into flames the sparks of fanaticism which are always smouldering in the hearts of the vulgar, whether of low degree or high degree, worldly or ghostly.