ent of the Emigration
Regulation Department of the Jewish Territorial Organisation, which,
founded shortly after the great massacres of Jews in Russia, will soon
have fostered the settlement of ten thousand Russian Jews in the West of
the United States.

"Romantic claptrap," wrote Mr. A. B. Walkley in the _Times_ of "this
rhapsodising over music and crucibles and statues of Liberty." As if
these things were not the homeliest of realities, and rhapsodising the
natural response to them of the Russo-Jewish psychology, incurably
optimist. The statue of Liberty is a large visible object at the mouth
of New York harbour; the crucible, if visible only to the eye of
imagination like the inner reality of the sunrise to the eye of Blake,
is none the less a roaring and flaming actuality. These things are as
substantial, if not as important, as Adeline Genee and Anna Pavlova, the
objects of Mr. Walkley's own rhapsodising. Mr. Walkley, never having
lacked Liberty, nor cowered for days in a cellar in terror of a howling
mob, can see only theatrical exaggeration in the enthusiasm for a land
of freedom, just as, never having known or never having had eyes to see
the grotesque and tragic creatures existing all around us, he has
doubted the reality of some of Balzac's creations. It is to be feared
that for such a play as _The Melting Pot_ Mr. Walkley is far from being
the [Greek: charieis] of Aristotle. The ideal spectator must have known and felt
more of life than Mr. Walkley, who resembles too much the library-fed
man of letters whose denunciation by Walter Bagehot he himself quotes
without suspecting _de te fabula narratur_. Even the critic, who has to
deal with a refracted world, cannot dispense with primary experience of
his own. For "the adventures of a soul among masterpieces" it is not
only necessary there should be masterpieces, there must also be a soul.
Mr. Walkley, one of the wittiest of contemporary writers and within his
urban range one of the wisest, can scarcely be accused of lacking a
soul, though Mr. Bernard Shaw's long-enduring misconception of him as a
brother in the spirit is one of the comedies of literature. But such
spiritual vitality as Oxford failed to sterilise in him has been largely
torpified by his profession of play-taster, with its divorcement from
reality in the raw. His cry of "romantic claptrap" is merely the
reaction of the club armchair to the "drums and tramplings" of the
street. It is in fact (he wi