heir neighbors sought distraction in the
blazing public-houses, and their tipsy bellowings resounded through the
streets and mingled with the Hebrew hymns. Here and there the voice of a
beaten woman rose on the air. But no Son of the Covenant was among the
revellers or the wife-beaters; the Jews remained a chosen race, a
peculiar people, faulty enough, but redeemed at least from the grosser
vices, a little human islet won from the waters of animalism by the
genius of ancient engineers. For while the genius of the Greek or the
Roman, the Egyptian or the Phoenician, survives but in word and stone,
the Hebrew word alone was made flesh.

CHAPTER XIX.

WITH THE STRIKERS.

"Ignorant donkey-heads!" cried Pinchas next Friday morning. "Him they
make a Rabbi and give him the right of answering questions, and he know
no more of Judaism," the patriotic poet paused to take a bite out of his
ham-sandwich, "than a cow of Sunday. I lof his daughter and I tell him
so and he tells me she lof another. But I haf held him up on the point
of my pen to the contempt of posterity. I haf written an acrostic on
him; it is terrible. Her vill I shoot."

"Ah, they are a bad lot, these Rabbis," said Simon Wolf, sipping his
sherry. The conversation took place in English and the two men were
seated in a small private room in a public-house, awaiting the advent of
the Strike Committee.

"Dey are like de rest of de Community. I vash my hands of dem," said the
poet, waving his cigar in a fiery crescent.

"I have long since washed my hands of them," said Simon Wolf, though the
fact was not obvious. "We can trust neither our Rabbis nor our
philanthropists. The Rabbis engrossed in the hypocritical endeavor to
galvanize the corpse of Judaism into a vitality that shall last at least
their own lifetime, have neither time nor thought for the great labor
question. Our philanthropists do but scratch the surface. They give the
working-man with their right hand what they have stolen from him with
the left."

Simon Wolf was the great Jewish labor leader. Most of his cronies were
rampant atheists, disgusted with the commercialism of the believers.
They were clever young artisans from Russia and Poland with a smattering
of education, a feverish receptiveness for all the iconoclastic ideas
that were in the London air, a hatred of capitalism and strong social
sympathies. They wrote vigorous jargon for the _Friend of Labor_ and
compassed the extreme prove