courses, as has been done in New York, is it not idle to raise a protest every Christmas season against the singing of carols, and holiday decorations? One rabbi has advanced the plan of having certain hours set aside for the teaching of religious groups and taught by ministers of their own faith. Once admit that any religion may be taught in the public schools, and you cannot resist the demand that all of religion should be taught there.
This conflict, which is bound to become more earnest from year to year, is inevitable. It is simply one of the slight irritations and discomforts the Jews must undergo while in the lands of their exile. As Goluth children, their offspring must listen patiently to the singing of hymns in praise of the Christian Saviour, and they must, without complaint, become inoculated with the virus of non-Jewish doctrine. If you wish to end this abnormal condition, the remedy is in their own hands. An appeal to American first principles is now too late.
THE BANKRUPTCY OF CHARITY.
We do not rejoice to hear that the Jewish charities of this country and England are in difficulties. Charity is the only conceivable expedient for the relief of a large number of chronic ailments of the Jewish people. It does relieve immediate want, it does alleviate the condition of the few individuals it reaches.
The fact is, however, that Jewish charity is the affair of a few persons who have, by constant refusal to treat the Jewish question in a natural way, estranged the organization of charity from the Jewish people. We do not allude to the charity which has no official machinery, but to the charity that has created the organizations of scientific philanthropy. By refusing to treat the Jewish question in a normal way, by hiding the facts from their constituencies, by a constant desire to claim for charity more than it is entitled to, and by the refusal to admit the Jewish people to its councils, they have succeeded in erecting a massive edifice without a foundation.
They have not sought to understand that the Jewish problem is one and indivisible. In-
stead they have broken it up into fragments, thinking to attract the Jewish people to this or that benefaction. The Jewish people refuse to move on behalf of individual petty difficulties. Unless they are made to see that all the physical ills of the Jews are due to one great evil, they will pass by the contribution box with the remark: "How does this concern me?"
In other words, the leaders of the bankrupt charıty have frittered away their inheritance, have lost the ideal, the largest aspect of the questions with which they are dealing, and have become mere grubbers in the field of charitable relief. Having erected a theory of Jewish silence as to actual conditions, having decided to act on a theory into which the Jewish question was to be compressed, having eliminated the right of the people to a voice in the large affairs of Jewish interest, they now find, after twenty years of experience in Jewish affairs that the people do not support them. As a result, in New York ‘there are not more than five thousand families who support the chain of institutions known as Jewish charity. The American Jewish committee which could have appealed to all conscious Jews is now an affair of a coterie of well-meaning gentlemen who are wondering why they are unable to obtain the confidence of the Jewish people. The Baron de Hirsch fund, which was the legacy of a large-minded Jewish philanthropist to the Jewish people, has become the weapon of irresponsible managers, who act as if they were suffering from mental paralysis. The fund, which was projected as a relief to Jews in time of suffering, has become the agency for the suppression of candor, the defense of malfeasants in oflice, and the general distrust of the Jewish people.
It is small wonder that such methods lead to bankruptcy. Even if their coffers were filled, they would nevertheless be bankrupt. No matter how much money the Hirsch trustees may possess, the use of it to corrupt journalism, to foster inefficiency, to crush Jewish life into the mold of prejudiced theories, would suffice to brand it as bankrupt; it is unable and unwilling to pay its debts to the Jewish people.