The Hebrew language is read and written by all the men and half of the
women, but is not spoken except by a few especially orthodox Jews on
Saturday. Hebrew is the language of business and correspondence, Yiddish
the language of conversation, just as Latin in the Middle Ages was the
official and international language, while the various peoples spoke
each its own vernacular. The Yiddish spoken by the Russian Jews in
America is scarcely a language--it is a jargon without syntax,
conjugation, or declension. Its basis is sixty per cent German of the
sixteenth century, showing the main origin of the people, and forty per
cent the language of the countries whence they come.

That which most of all has made the Jew a cause of alarm to the peasants
of Eastern Europe is the highest mark of his virtue, namely, his rapid
increase in numbers. A high birth-rate, a low death-rate, a long life,
place the Jew as far above the average as the negro is below the
average. These two races are the two extremes of American race vitality.
Says Ripley:[53]--

"Suppose two groups of one hundred infants each, one Jewish, one of
average American parentage (Massachusetts), to be born on the same day.
In spite of the disparity of social conditions in favor of the latter,
the chances, determined by statistical means, are that one-half of the
Americans will die within forty-seven years; while the first half of the
Jews will not succumb to disease or accident before the expiration of
seventy-one years. The death-rate is really but little over half that of
the average American population."

While the negro exceeds all races in the constitutional diseases of
consumption and pneumonia, the Jew excels all in immunity from these
diseases. His vitality is ascribed to his sanitary meat inspection, his
sobriety, temperance, and self-control. Of the Jew it might be said more
truly than of any other European people that the growth of population
has led to overcrowding and has induced emigration. Yet of no people is
this less true, for, were it not for the discrimination and persecution
directed against them, the Jews would be the most prosperous and least
overcrowded of the races of Europe.

=The Finns.=--Until the year 1901 Finland was the freest and best governed
part of the Russian Empire. Wrested from Sweden in 1809, it became a
grand duchy of the Czar, guaranteed self-government, and confirmed by
coronation oath of each successor. It was the only se