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you have to suffer is that any wrong done by any of your people is charged not merely against the guilty individual but against your race.
In this respect it is of the highest importance that the new-comers should be brought under the guidance of the strongest and loftiest ethical influences—of an instruction which teaches not only the ordinary branches of useful knowledge, but which teaches what true honesty is, as distinguished from mere legal or technical honesty—and what true success is, that kind of success which you will remember with satisfaction on your deathbed, and the memory of which you will be really proud to leave to your children—as distinguished from the success which consists in merely accumulating heaps of money or in crushing any number of competitors in business by unscrupulous devices. The inculcation in people's minds of sound notions as to what true honesty in all the various relations of life, and genuine success, success to be morally proud of, really consist in, will do more to steady the character of a population, and prepare it to gain the confidence and esteem of others, than any other kind of instruction. And it is this kind of moral enlightenment which the Educational Alliance is preeminently fitted and destined to impart.
No less important will the influence of this Alliance be in a political sense. I do not mean that it should exert that influence in behalf of any particular political doctrine, or for the benefit of any political party. Quite the contrary. Let me explain myself. If there are 700,000 Hebrews living in this city of Greater New York, they constitute will nigh one-fifth of its population. They can exercise a great political power, a power that in the decision of great public questions may be decisive in this city, and through this city in this State, and through this State in the whole republic. It is not unnatural that the recently immigrated part of this population, that is, the great mass of it, living and moving in surroundings rather new and strange to them, should be easily accessible to the voice of the demagogue, and that the demagogue should endeavor to make them believe that, as Jews, they have separate interests different from those of the rest of their American fellow citizens, and that in order to defend and maintain those separate and different interests they must politically stand together and make their power tall as one solid mass. I say this is not unnatural, for there is such a tendency among other nationalities
