(1) The taking or destroying of all wild birds' eggs in any place or any places within the county. (2) The taking or destroying of the eggs of any specified kind of bird within the county or in any part or parts of the county. When the Home Secretary makes an order it must be advertised in the local newspapers and placarded in conspicuous spots in the district. The maximum fine is 11. for every egg taken or destroyed, and any person who incites another to break the order is equally liable. It should be observed that no eggs are preserved unless they are named in the order, and that the Act only affects such counties as choose to adopt it. The law does not contemplate unlimited or indiscriminate protection of birds' eggs : its main object is to prevent the extinction or serious diminution of certain kinds of birds by the taking or destruction of their eggs, which object is sought to be obtained by prohibiting the taking of eggs either in certain defined breeding-places or of certain defined species of birds generally throughout the county. Such is a summary of the laws for protecting our wild birds against their enemies. The three great enemies of the feathered world are the professional collectors, the bird-catchers, and the gamekeepers. They carry on wars equally destructive in their way against different sorts of birds. Rarity attracts the collector, and he shoots the hoopoe, the osprey, or the bittern. Singing powers attract the bird-catcher, and he catches goldfinches or nightingales in nets, without exaggeration, by hundreds and thousands; for one man has been known to catch as many as forty dozen goldfinches in a morning. The gamekeepers are beyond the reach of the law. It can only be hoped that some day the game preservers, whose servants the keepers are, and whom they might be expected to obey, will take vigorous and effective measures to check the useless and indiscriminate trapping and shooting of feathered vermin, so-called. For it must be remembered that the vast majority of birds which the gamekeeper destroys as vermin are absolutely guiltless of destroying game birds, their young, or their eggs. The professional collector and the bird-catcher are effectively dealt with by the present law if it is enforced. But according to the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales in the year 1895, only 121 persons were proceeded against under the Wild Birds' Protection Acts. Out of these the magistrates dismissed the charge in thirtythree cases, and only fifty-five persons were fined. It would be interesting and melancholy to know how many thousands of offences against the Acts went unprosecuted and unpunished. HAROLD RUSSELL. PHILO-ZIONISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES 1 ZION has many friends, but the important thing for her at the present time is that she should be saved from most of them. Dr. Herzl, the imaginative author of 'The Jewish State,' is her friend; but so also is Dr. Emil Reich, the brilliant if caustic writer of Jew-Baiting on the Continent;' and the Association of Lovers of Zion' is compelled to take a modest place in the background between these two opponents. While the Viennese litterateur is willing, in the name of Zion,' to found his Hebrew State either in Syria or South America, the Nineteenth Century reviewer would fain see Zionism' localised or carried into effect in Central Europe; and to the Lovers of Zion' alone is left the undivided attachment to the old ideal, of a real and physical Zion-at Zion. It may be well to contrast these different objectives, and to make it clear who are the real Philo-Zionists. I In the interest of fair discussion Dr. Emil Reich's contribution to the subject-ZIONISM'2-deserves first consideration; and it is impossible to withhold from the writer-mistaken as he may appear to us -the homage due as well to his perfect frankness, as to the moderation and critical acumen with which he has dealt, from the outside, with the complicated states of political feeling and religious sentiment, now stirring up all the varied elements of modern Jewry. Our gratitude is all the more lively towards Dr. Reich because in this essay we do not recognise the apologist of the Jew-baiters; and we perceive a distinct advance from the anti-Semitic feeling which has marked some of the Doctor's previous studies of the Jewish question. Or was it perhaps not the same Dr. Emil Reich who compared the Jews, indifferently, either to the fluctuating body of the gipsies, or to the castiron organisation of the Jesuits; who said that the German Jews more than merited their treatment at the hands of the anti-Semites 'for enduring without any serious revolt the shame of being refused Nineteenth Century, September 1896. 2 Ibid. August 1897. the rank of officer in the German army, although by law fully entitled to it; who alleged against them the fanciful, yet dreadful, vice of having' got their emancipation without fighting for it;' who, while admitting the untruth of the string of accusations levelled against the Jews as an excuse for persecutions, formulated against them the heavy and unanswerable indictment that they, especially the emancipated Jews, were profoundly immodest;' that they were the worst of upstarts;' that they 'perpetrated the specific crime of want of social tact;' and who concluded his summary of the position by expressing the opinion that if anti-Semitism has done nothing but bring the great question of nationality into still stronger relief, it has well deserved of Europe'? Whether as the Zionist Jekyll or the anti-Semitic Hyde, Dr. Reich is above all things the conscientious historical student, and in his earlier paper he diagnosed 'the disgrace of the nineteenth century' accurately enough when he traced it to the political exigencies of parties in Germany-('exigencies which would keep alive the antiSemitic party even if all the Jews had left Europe');-while he is no less outspoken in his latest contribution to the subject, where he dismisses the idea of its being a racial question as a childish delusion,' and seeks to explain the difference between Jew and Christian on quite other grounds. It may be as well to dispose of these alleged grounds of difference, before proceeding to the other and more serious part of Dr. Emil Reich's article; because from these mistaken grounds the Doctor seeks to trace the causes of the Zionist movement, and he does so, therefore, on a broad basis of error. Dr. Reich writes: .... The Old Testament does not preach a belief in a future world, or, still more correctly, it does not dwell on the individual immortality of the believer's soul. . . . To the Jew therefore the belief in the restoration of the ancient Jewish State has much of the religious nature of the Christian belief in a future world. The Jew claimed God's special blessing by virtue of his Jewish Citizenship . . . . between him and God stood as mediator and saviour, the people of Israel Forgiveness and pardon, atonement and salvation, could come to the individual only through the forgiveness and salvation bestowed by God upon the people as a whole. This is the fundamental belief, the one ineradicable creed that made, and makes, the distinctive feature of Judaism. He who believes in that mediatorship of the Jewish nation is a Jew; he who does not believe in it is no Jew, and (sic) if all his ancestors were Semites. • ... Let it be said at once: there is no such belief, no such creed. We do not recognise it, and it does not stir the impulses of a single Jewish Nationalist. The anti-Semites would deprive us only of the good things of this world, but Dr. Reich, in his characteristic desire to discover a new philosophy of history, a new Weltausschauung for the Jew, has taken away from us also the hope of a future existence. Was it our Psalmist who proclaimed: Yea! though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thy rod and thy staff they comfort me ? 3 Was it our Prophet who held out the promise them from death. O death, where are thy plagues? is thy destruction ? '4 95 I will redeem O grave, where Were they our Fathers who said: "This world is compared to the vestibule to the future world; prepare thyself in the vestibule, that thou mayest enter the palace; or, again," Not thine the labour to complete, and yet art thou not free to cease therefrom; for know the reward of the righteous is in the future state'? 6 Was it our Rabbi who taught Life's earthly pleasures who pursues The joys of heaven he shall lose, Was it our Talmud which proclaimed him a heretic who exclaimed "Woe unto you, ye sinners! who say the dead will live again; the living die, how then shall the dead live again;' and which extolled the wisdom of the sage, who responded, 'Woe unto you, ye sinners! those who did not previously exist are made alive; how much more then those who have already once been amongst the living !' 8 No! The differences which separate us from Christians are not in the character of our mediators. The individual Jew knows no mediator between himself and God. All his life, all his history is a passionate resistance to the idea of mediation; and it is for this he has suffered throughout the ages. Dr. Reich insists on just that dogmatic code of Christianity which is perishing; he exhibits in this little of the Epicikeia, the sweet reasonableness of temper, which, according to Matthew Arnold, was the great virtue of the Christian; and he does not recognise with that sound thinker and good man, that the differences between us are as nought compared with the great truth Righteousness is salvation, which, first committed to Israel, has been spread by Christianity—wherever its vital teachings are truly understood-to all corners of the earth. How ineffectively and incompletely this has been done was recognised by Arnold when he said, 'Poor Israel! poor ancient people! What punishment can have been to thee like the punishment of watching the performances of the Aryan genius upon the foundations which thou hadst given to it? Like the torture for a poet to hear people laying down the law about poetry who have not the sense of what poetry is—a sense with which he was born! Like Psalm xxiii. 4. Ethics of the Fathers, iv. 21. 'Isidore Myers, Gems from the Talmud. 4 Hosea xiii. 14. • Ibid. ii. 21. 8 Talmud Treatise Synhedrin. the affliction to a man of science to hear people talk of things as proved, who do not even know what constitutes a fact !'9 The love of nation in the Jews has, therefore, nothing to do with the mystic causes discussed by Dr. Emil Reich. It has, apart from the special calls which are associated with it, very much the same basis as the sentiment which animates other peoples, who, feeling a communion of descent, a common heritage of traditions, desire an open field for the development of their special qualities, an unfettered opportunity to fulfil the aspirations of their fathers, a free activity in the attainment of their own ideals. As Mazzini said of the Italians— when the Italy' they craved was contemptuously described by the leading statesman in Europe as 'merely a geographical expression' -the Jews 'desire to live, to live with all the faculties of their being. . . to advance under the eye of God, their only Master, towards the accomplishment of their mission.' 10 Anti-Semitism, if it has done nothing else good, has evoked, though it has not created, a consciousness of this national identity, this unity of destiny in Jewry; much in the same way as the Napoleonic scourge did this for the varied peoples of the European States. The mind, as well as the heart of Judah, has been stirred! Under the stagnancy of the Ghetto there has always lain painfully imprisoned some tendency which could become heroic;' and the flood of nationalistic feeling which was set moving by the world throb of the Revolution and of which anti-Semitism is, according to Dr. Reich, the latest wave, has not left the Jew untouched in its progress. Not that this was any new sentiment to him, for, as your reviewer truly says, 'When other people barely stammered the first spellingbook of nationality, the Jews were already reading its elaborate textbooks.' Dr. Reich thinks, however, that the existence of this feeling, and of these aspirations, is evidence of a want of patriotism in the Jews in the countries where they are now mere denizens and sojourners.' This contention has frequently been raised and as frequently disproved; and in England, at least, it was finally set at rest years ago in this Review by the series of articles, Can the Jew be a patriot?' in which Dr. H. Adler, now Chief Rabbi, took a prominent part. But the best answer to the question, 'Can the Jew be a patriot?' is-He is a patriot; and that, too, not only in the victories of peace, where Jews have always taken a prominent and honoured part in all the lands of their dispersion-witness the host of literary giants, political leaders, and artistic workers which this people has produced even in the present generation; but in the struggles of war, even in the countries where he is now worst treated-witness the heroic records of the Franco-German and Russo-Turkish contests, and the • Literature and Dogma, chap. xi. 10 Professor Marriott in The Makers of Modern Italy, Lecture 1. |