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electoral votes of any southern State anyhow, and
the "reunited country" talk is, perhaps, " a good
enough Morgan until after election." A regiment
composed almost entirely of Irishmen may not cast
many Republican votes, and it is just as well not to
allow General Lee, Colonel Bryan and others of the
Democratic stripe to get too much popularity!
But 1000 is a long time off, Mr. President, and you
can't fool alt the people all the time. — Hebrew Stand
ard.
Jews as Hmertcans,
By Alfred Henry Lewis.
gakO-DAY 1 received a letter from a mean man.
■ Without giving aught of reason for the poison
and spleen within him, lie inveighed against
the Jews in the most unbridled way, sympathized
with the Russians in their efforts to drive them forth
from that realm, and hoped to see the day —this man
did—when the Jews would all be driven out of Amer
ica. Then, after paying graceful tribute to my ge
nius as a hammer-thrower, he urged me to turn my
belligerent attention to hammering the Hebrew race.
Not that it had been guilty of any private or public
wrongdoing so far as I could learn ; but merly for
luck, as it were —merely because it was Hebrew.
It is with much pleasure 1 furnish herewith to my
correspondent my views on Jews. And I do it the
more readily because I, myself, am Danish Saxon,
thoroughbred, and racially came in the front-door
and down the middle aisle. Norse, without a cross,
would be my breed ; and a backward run of ten cen
turies along my ancestral trail would land one in
Norway. Yes, indeed ; I've no doubt that no (urther
astern than 1,000 years one would find my honored
forbear with a forehead showing as flat a slant as a
shed roof, without enough clothes upon him to flag
a hand car; one would find my lineal ancestor, I say,
going about clad in a sheepskin and club eating his
meat raw and saving his fire to pray to. With such an
ancestral race, I take it, I may speak fairly and fa
vorably of the Jews without being charged as one
having an undue interest.
This to my Jew-hating correspondent: Bar In
dians, I know of nobody with any better original
right to remain in this country than the Jew. He
was here as soon as any. He got no one's consent
to come, he needs no one's permission to stay. From
the first he has been a patriot —a true American; not
in words alone, but in deeds.
Speaking first in some narrow spirit of sordid
money-making, I'm free to say I like to see .a Jew
about. He is a good commercial sign. The Jew does
not make prosperity any more than the swallow
makes the summer. But his presence is a proof that
it exists. I'd no more settle in a Jewless community
than I'd buy a farm and turn to agriculture in a
stone-fence country. The absence of the Jew an( l the
presence of the stone fence indicate regions of hard
work and little profit.
But to put the Jew in a better light and show his
proper title to the name "American," let me post my
correspondent on a detail or two of his country's
history.
Over in Washington is a claim pending; it has
been before the congresses of this country for over a
century. It has never been paid, never will be paid;
as this country, in the business of its debts, is utterly
and with open eyes dishonest, and never gives up a
dollar it can by any crook or hook cheat its creditor
out of. The original claim was, 1 believe, full four
millions of dollars, and a century and a quarter of
interest would, when added, make the whole amount
a robust, broad-shouldered sum.
What was the origin of this four-million-dollar
claim ? It was for money loaned the struggling col
onies in the dark hour of 1776 and the seven years
that followed, wherewith to pay the bills of the rev
olution. It was all, every dollar, loaned by one Jew,
one Solomon Hyams, of Philadelphia. Other Jews —
for the race was rich then, as it is rich now —loaned
other money, and it is not too much to say that our
war of the revolution, to the full extent of one half
at least, was fought on Jew money and Jew-credit,
and that if it hadn't been for the patriotism and
money sacrifices of the Jews Washington couldn't
have kept the armies in the field.
My correspondent needn't take my word. Dock
ery or Savers, or Cockrell, or any other old time
member cf the appropriations committe can tell him
all about the four million dollar claim due the heirs
of old Solomon Hyams. He can read the letters of
Washington, of Franklin, of Morris, attesting it.
The Jews furnished there volutionary sinews of war to
the tune of millions upon millions ; did it without secur
ity : did it for liberty; did it without expecting to
get the money back. And they never did get it back.
Old Solomon Hyams died a pauper. On his death
bed somebody reminded him of the quartet of mil
lions he had sunk for public weal in the revolution.
"Yes," said old Hyams, "I die a pauper, but I die
happy. I have lived to see civil and religious liberty
accomplished in this country."
Let me tell you about another Jew. Mind you,
these are only specimen bricks; there were thousands
of others like them. This particular Jew I have in
mind was named Moredcai Noah. He was a great
editor, the Horace Greeley of the first quarter of this
century; the partner at one time of James Watson
Webb; you may read of him in the encyclopaedia.
This Mordecai Noah was a soldier, an author, an
editor; a Democrat, and a great friend of Andrew
Jackson. You may find his grave in the little Jew
burying ground down town; it was the last grave
dug in that ancient little cemetery.
Mordecai Noah was our first minister to the Bar
bary States. The government told him to buy off
the forty Americans held in slavery in Algiers, and
