tion. To turn those starving multitudes loose on
the labor market of the metropolis would make trouble of the gravest
kind. The alternative of putting them back on the land, and so of
making producers of them, suggested itself to the Emigrant Aid
Society. Land was offered cheap in south Jersey, and the experiment
was made with some hundreds of families.

[Footnote 4: This was written in 1900.]

It was well meant; but the projectors experienced the not unfamiliar
fact that cheap land is sometimes very dear land. They learned, too,
that you cannot make farmers in a day out of men who have been denied
access to the soil for generations. That was the set purpose of
Russia, and the legacy of feudalism in western Europe, which of
necessity made the Jew a trader, a town dweller. With such a history,
a man is not logically a pioneer. The soil of south Jersey is sandy,
has to be coaxed into bearing paying crops. The colonists had not the
patient skill needed for the task. Neither had they the means. Above
all, they lacked the market where to dispose of their crops when once
raised. Discouragements beset them. Debts threatened to engulf them.
The trustees of the Baron de Hirsch Fund, entering the field eleven
years later, in 1891, found of three hundred families only two-thirds
remaining on their farms. In 1897, when they went to their relief,
there were seventy-six families left. The rest had gone back to the
city and to the Ghetto. So far, the experiment had failed.

The Hirsch Fund people had been watching it attentively. They were not
discouraged. In the midst of the outcry that the Jew could not be made
a farmer, they settled a tract of unbroken land in the northwest part
of Cape May County, within easy reach of the older colonies. They
called their settlement Woodbine. Taught by the experience of the
older colonists, they brought their market with them. They persuaded
several manufacturing firms to remove their plants from the city to
Woodbine, agreeing to furnish their employees with homes. Thus an
industrial community was created to absorb the farmer's surplus
products. The means they had in abundance in the large revenues of
Baron de Hirsch's princely charity, which for all purposes amounts to
over $6,000,000. There was still lacking necessary skill at husbandry,
and this they set about supplying without long delay. In the second
year of the colony, a barn built for horses was turned into a
lecture-