the schoolroom, as to hours, costume, and manners,
were often in opposition to Jewish practices. The public school
interrupted the boy's sacred studies in the Hebrew school. Where would
you look for pious Jews, after a few generations of boys brought up by
Christian teachers? Plainly the Czar was after the souls of the Jewish
children. The church door gaped for them at the end of the school
course. And all good Jews rose up against the schools, and by every
means, fair or foul, kept their boys away. The official appointed to
keep the register of boys for school purposes waxed rich on the bribes
paid him by anxious parents who kept their sons in hiding.

After a while the wise Czar changed his mind, or he died,--probably he
did both,--and the schools were closed, and the Jewish boys perused
their Hebrew books in peace, wearing the sacred fringes[1] in plain
sight, and never polluting their mouths with a word of Russian.

And then it was the Jews who changed their minds--some of them. They
wanted to send their children to school, to learn histories and
sciences, because they had discovered that there was good in such
things as well as in the Sacred Law. These people were called
progressive, but they had no chance to progress. All the czars that
came along persisted in the old idea, that for the Jew no door should
be opened,--no door out of the Pale, no door out of their mediaevalism.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] A four-cornered cloth with specially prepared fringes is worn by
pious males under the outer garments, but with, the fringes showing.
The latter play a part in the daily ritual.

CHAPTER II

CHILDREN OF THE LAW

As I look back to-day I see, within the wall raised around my
birthplace by the vigilance of the police, another wall, higher,
thicker, more impenetrable. This is the wall which the Czar with all
his minions could not shake, the priests with their instruments of
torture could not pierce, the mob with their firebrands could not
destroy. This wall within the wall is the religious integrity of the
Jews, a fortress erected by the prisoners of the Pale, in defiance of
their jailers; a stronghold built of the ruins of their pillaged
homes, cemented with the blood of their murdered children.

Harassed on every side, thwarted in every normal effort, pent up
within narrow limits, all but dehumanized, the Russian Jew fell back
upon the only thing that never failed him,--his hereditary faith in
God. In the st