ongress meets,
and, where Swiss sweethearts use to dance, are debated the tragic
issues of an outcast nation. An oblong hall, of drab yellow, with cane
chairs neatly parted in the middle, and green-baized tables for
reporters, and a green-baized rostrum, and a green-baized platform,
over which rise the heads and festal shirt-fronts of the leaders.

A strangely assorted set of leaders, but all with that ink-mark on the
brow which is as much on the Continent the badge of action, as it is
in England the symbol of sterility; all believing more or less naively
that the pen is mightier than the millionaire's gold.

Only one of them hitherto has really stirred the world with his
pen-point--a prophet of the modern, preaching "Woe, woe" by
psycho-physiology; in himself a breezy, burly undegenerate, with a
great gray head marvellously crammed with facts and languages; now to
prove himself golden-hearted and golden-mouthed, an orator touching
equally to tears or laughter. In striking contrast with this
quasi-Teutonic figure shows the leonine head, with its tossing black
mane and shoulders, of the Russian leader, Apollo turned Berserker,
beautiful, overpowering, from whose resplendent mouth roll in mountain
thunder the barbarous Russian syllables.

And even as no two of the leaders are alike, so do the rank and file
fail to resemble one another. Writers and journalists, poets and
novelists and merchants, professors and men of professions--types that
once sought to slough their Jewish skins, and mimic, on Darwinian
principles, the colors of the environment, but that now, with some
tardy sense of futility or stir of pride, proclaim their brotherhood
in Zion--they are come from many places; from far lands and from near,
from uncouth, unknown villages of Bukowina and the Caucasus, and from
the great European capitals; thickliest from the pales of persecution,
in rare units from the free realms of England and America--a strange
phantasmagoria of faces. A small, sallow Pole, with high cheek-bones;
a blond Hungarian, with a flaxen moustache; a brown, hatchet-faced
Roumanian; a fresh-colored Frenchman, with eye-glasses; a dark,
Marrano-descended Dutchman; a chubby German; a fiery-eyed Russian,
tugging at his own hair with excitement, perhaps in prescience of the
prison awaiting his return; a dusky Egyptian, with the close-cropped,
curly black hair, and all but the nose of a negro; a yellow-bearded
Swede; a courtly Viennese lawyer; a Ger