Page:Sarolea - Great Russia.djvu/175

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PROBLEM OF RUSSIAN JEW
159

up of a score of different races. Nor does a nation even imply community of language, for the German-speaking Alsatians were, and still are, passionately French in sentiment, even as the French-Canadians have become loyal British citizens. No; a nation is a collective political aggregate, it is a moral personality. It is bound together by common religious ideals, by common institutions, by common traditions, by common loves and hatreds, and, most of all perhaps, by the memories of common glories and common sufferings. The bonds which hold a nation together are sentimental and spiritual, and no nation has ever been welded together by stronger moral and spiritual bonds than the Jewish nation—bonds so strong, indeed, that the Jews have remained a State within a State, and that the members of the ghettos all over the world have remained denizens of the same ideal commonwealth.


V

The Jews are a prolific race, and they have always obeyed the Biblical command, "increase and multiply." Of late years the Jewish birth-rate has fallen considerably, but that decrease is more than compensated by the decrease in