f the Jew to earn even the scanty means of existence that
suffice for a frugal race has been constricted by degrees, until nearly
every opportunity to win a livelihood is denied; and until the helpless
poverty of the Jew has constrained an exodus of such proportions as to
cause general concern.

The political disabilities of the Jews in Roumania, their exclusion from
the public service and the learned professions, the limitations of their
civil rights, and the imposition upon them of exceptional taxes,
involving as they do wrongs repugnant to the moral sense of liberal
modern peoples, are not so directly in point for my present purpose as
the public acts which attack the inherent right of man as a bread winner
in the ways of agriculture and trade. The Jews are prohibited from
owning land, or even from cultivating it as common laborers. They are
debarred from residing in the rural districts. Many branches of petty
trade and manual production are closed to them in the over-crowded
cities where they are forced to dwell and engage against fearful odds,
in the desperate struggle for existence. Even as ordinary artisans or
hired laborers they may only find employment in the proportion of one
"unprotected alien" to two "Roumanians" under any one employer. In
short, by the cumulative effect of successive restrictions, the Jews of
Roumania have become reduced to a state of wretched misery. Shut out
from nearly every avenue of self-support which is open to the poor of
other lands, and ground down by poverty as the natural result of their
discriminatory treatment, they are rendered incapable of lifting
themselves from the enforced degradation they endure. Even were the
fields of education open to them, of civil employment and of commerce,
as to "Roumanian citizens," their penury would prevent rising by
individual effort. Human beings, so circumstanced, have virtually no
alternatives but submissive suffering, or flight to some land less
unfavourable to them. Removal under such conditions is not and cannot be
the healthy intelligent emigration of a free and self-reliant being. It
must be, in most cases, the mere transplantation of an artificially
produced diseased growth to a new place.

Granting that, in better and more healthful surroundings, the morbid
conditions will eventually change for good, such emigration is
necessarily for a time a burden to the community upon which the
fugitives may be cast. Self-reliance, and the knowle