er, at Ekaterinburg,
three years ago, a young soldier in Russian uniform walked slowly into
the room, and took his place with a most wondering expression on his
face. He was, I found, a young Jew, and had received baptism some time
before in England. The manoeuvres had brought him to that part of
Siberia, and to his great amazement he had heard just before, that in
that unlikely place, there was to be on the following Sunday a service
of the Church into which he had been baptized. In my conversation with
him afterwards, however, it seemed to me that I was speaking not to a
Jew but to a Russian. Somewhere, no doubt, he is fighting now, and as
patriotically, I feel sure, as his comrades in the ranks. Is it good
policy to waste such good material as this, to restrict the national
assets in this way, and keep back its powers of expansion and
development? To ask such questions in these days is to answer them.

"I have been discussing," says Mr. Costa in his most
instructive article, "with Jewish folk in London, Russian men
and women of culture and refinement, the prospect of this dream
becoming a reality. They incline to the belief that if Russia
is really in earnest over the matter, and is not propounding it
as a strategical move; if, in our time, she will hurl to the
dust the grim, hope-excluding walls of the congested Pale, she
cannot but open up an era of unexampled greatness and
prosperity. With that wonderful intellectual force, now held in
check, applied to the advancement of Russian culture and
progress, the Empire of the Tsar might awaken and expand beyond
the most ambitious dreams of its dead-and-gone autocrats."

Just as we are led to believe that a people gets the government it
deserves, so we may well be brought to think that possibly, with respect
to this virile and persistent race, the nation gets the Jews it
deserves. As a policy which is meant to degrade must have a degraded
class as its result, so to give every part of the nation's life and
equipment full equality of opportunity is to get the best the nation as
a whole has to give in return. We are further told by Mr. Costa that
while the Russian conscript fights because he must, the English Jew
fights because he loves to serve the country which has been all in all
to him and his. And thus "Peer's son and first-born of the _ghetto_
grocer rub shoulders in the task of upholding the nation's honour.