e in America, down to the least little
village. Read the signs on the marts of commerce and on the shops;
Goldstein (gold stone), Edelstein (precious stone), Blumenthal
(flower-vale), Rosenthal (rose-vale), Veilchenduft (violent odour),
Singvogel (song-bird), Rosenzweig (rose branch), and all the amazing
list of beautiful and enviable names which Prussia and Austria glorified
you with so long ago. It is another instance of Europe's coarse and
cruel persecution of your race; not that it was coarse and cruel to
outfit it with pretty and poetical names like those, but it was coarse
and cruel to make it pay for them or else take such hideous and often
indecent names that to-day their owners never use them; or, if they do,
only on official papers. And it was the many, not the few, who got the
odious names, they being too poor to bribe the officials to grant them
better ones.

Now why was the race renamed? I have been told that in Prussia it was
given to using fictitious names, and often changing them, so as to beat
the tax-gatherer, escape military service, and so on; and that finally
the idea was hit upon of furnishing all the inmates of a house with one
and the same surname, and then holding the house responsible right along
for those inmates, and accountable for any disappearances that might
occur; it made the Jews keep track of each other, for self-interest's
sake, and saved the Government the trouble(4).

If that explanation of how the Jews of Prussia came to be renamed is
correct, if it is true that they fictitiously registered themselves to
gain certain advantages, it may possible be true that in America they
refrain from registered themselves as Jews to fend off the damaging
prejudices of the Christian customer. I have no way of knowing whether
this notion is well founded or not. There may be other and better ways
of explaining why only that poor little 250,000 of our Jews got into the
'Encyclopaedia'. I may, of course, be mistaken, but I am strongly of the
opinion that we have an immense Jewish population in America.

Point No. 3--'Can Jews do anything to improve the situation?'

I think so. If I may make a suggestion without seeming to be trying to
teach my grandmother to suck eggs, I will offer it. In our days we have
learned the value of combination. We apply it everywhere--in railway
systems, in trusts, in trade unions, in Salvation Armies, in minor
politics, in major politics, in European Concerts. Whateve