The first report of the Chicago Relief and Aid Society contains a tabulation of the 18,478 families according to nationalities who up to November 18 had received aid. The word "Nationality" is not to be understood in the passport sense of the word, but as belonging to a certain stock. Englishmen, as such are separated from Scotch, Irish, Wallisians and Canadians. Poles are not counted as Russians, Prussians or Austrians, even though there exists no Polish State. Spaniards are not separated from Spanish Creoles, and Swedes, Danes and Norwegians are summed up as Scandinavians. Native Americans of black skin are called Africans, while Bohemians are enumerated as such, not as Civleithanic Austrians. Against these classifications nobody has raised any protest. But fate so willed it, that forty-three families are designated as "Jewish", and immediately a Mr. Philipp Stein creates havoc in the Chicago Tribune. He says:

"The Jews once were a nation, but everybody knows they long since ceased to be one. A nation is a totality of a people bound together by a common language and common customs. The Jews in the last two centuries have 2uniformly adopted the language and the customs of the peoples among whom they live. In England they are Englishmen: in Germany, Germans; in America, Americans. The differentiating quality is their religion. It is not the first time in the history of our city that the error to which I take exception has been committed."

Nay, and it is not the first time either that we have to take exception to the error on which the intended correction is based. Mr. Stein desires that the Jews should have ceased to be a special nationality (Stammesgenossenschaft) but he errs if he thinks that what he wishes is already a fact. It is even in France, Germany, England and America only very partly true. And is the Jew in Bucharest a Rumanian, in Constantinople a Turk, in Belgrade a Serb, and in Valparaiso a Creole? He does not dream of it. The forty-three families in the tabulation who are classified as Jews called themselves Jewish. Does Mr. Stein expect the young secretary, who records the statements of the aid seeker in the lists, to correct these statements from ethnological, national, religious, viewpoints?

The English word "nation" and the German word "nation" are far from being completely synonymous. In English "nation" means a political unit that may comprise very divergent ethnological types. In this sense France is a "nation". Even Turkey in spite of its inextricable jumble of peoples is a "nation". In the German language, however, the concept of "oration" conveys the idea of identical descent. Mr. Stein's protest has been written in English, but thought cut in German.

The Jews have ceased to be a "nation", but a separate nationality; i. e. a special "Stammesart"; they still are, and will remain so until the differentiating physiological characteristics.