and in all matters of buying, selling, and bartering they
are unrivalled among the nations of the earth, but they have been too
long accustomed to town life to be good tillers of the soil. These
Jewish colonies were founded as an experiment to see whether the
Israelite could be weaned from his traditionary pursuits and transferred
to what some economists call the productive section of society. The
experiment has failed, and the cause of the failure is not difficult to
find. One has merely to look at these men of gaunt visage and shambling
gait, with their loop-holed slippers, and black, threadbare coats
reaching down to their ankles, to understand that they are not in their
proper sphere. Their houses are in a most dilapidated condition, and
their villages remind one of the abomination of desolation spoken of by
Daniel the Prophet. A great part of their land is left uncultivated or
let to colonists of a different race. What little revenue they have is
derived chiefly from trade of a more or less clandestine nature.*

* Mr. Arnold White, who subsequently visited some of these
Jewish Colonies in connection with Baron Hirsch's
colonisation scheme, assured me that he found them in a much
more prosperous condition.

As Scandinavia was formerly called officina gentium--a workshop in which
new nations were made--so we may regard Southern Russia as a workshop
in which fragments of old nations are being melted down to form a new,
composite whole. It must be confessed, however, that the melting process
has as yet scarcely begun.

National peculiarities are not obliterated so rapidly in Russia as in
America or in British colonies. Among the German colonists in Russia the
process of assimilation is hardly perceptible. Though their fathers and
grandfathers may have been born in the new country, they would consider
it an insult to be called Russians. They look down upon the Russian
peasantry as poor, ignorant, lazy, and dishonest, fear the officials
on account of their tyranny and extortion, preserve jealously their
own language and customs, rarely speak Russian well--sometimes not at
all--and never intermarry with those from whom they are separated by
nationality and religion. The Russian influence acts, however,
more rapidly on the Slavonic colonists--Servians, Bulgarians,
Montenegrins--who profess the Greek Orthodox faith, learn more easily
the Russian language, which is closely allied to their own, have no