THE NEW EXODUS. B ARON HIRSCH, it has at last become
certain, is to be the Moses of the new Jewish Exodus, and a very modern Moses it is that Providence has chosen. He is described to us as a typical German Jew, with capital and energy, who knew how to obtain great contracts in Eastern Europe at high prices, but who has always done the work he had contracted to do ; and who accumulated out of vast transactions a fortune on the American scale. No charge has ever been advanced against him, except the old one of being too successful; but he is not loved in Eastern Europe, and in Germany the prejudice is so strong that Princes are condemned for the court which they never- theless continue to pay to the successful seeker for millions. Baron Hirsch is said to value this court, to be eager for social, and even titular distinction ; and as that is the foible of every Hebrew outside the class which cares only for philosophy or religious thought, the charge is not in itself improbable. To gain the front, however, by great acts of philanthropy is not altogether an ignoble ambition. It is now clear that some rumours as to his intentions are true, and that Baron Hirsch really means to play the part of a second Moses, and lead his country- men out of a captivity as cruel as that of Egypt, into many new Lands of Promise. We heartily hope that he may succeed, and that we may have to describe him ten years hence as a benefactor to the human race, and are inclined to believe that be may succeed better than a more ideal leader for a flying people. In the first place, whether he is a man of innate benevolence or not, he has a feeling for his people which is at once deep and genuine ; he is capable of giving on the grandest scale—a most unusual peculiarity with the new billionaires, even the Duke de Galliera making his marvellous benefactions chiefly after death—he is accustomed to vast under- takings ; and he has the solid sense which, in our experience, the majority even of the successful philan- thropists—such, for instance, as the Abolitionists and the reformers of factory labour—have been apt to lack. His address to his suffering countrymen in Russia, published on Wednesday, is full of it, and full, too, of a certain dignity of pathos, shown in that appeal to their historic patience, which we should have hardly expected to find. His plan, moreover, as sketched out in that address, and in the articles of the Association which he has formed in order to admit the leading Hebrews of the world as partners in his task, though not in his expenditure, is plainly the only one con- sistent at once with his purpose and with the subborn facts which impede its realisation. He cannot resist the Russian Government, nor can his people, and he there- fore accepts its policy, which might drive any Jew frantic with rage, as the cardinal fact of the situation, and asks to be allowed to aid in carrying it out so as to diminish as far as possible the vast sum of human misery which it must involve. The request, it seems clear, has been granted, though not to the fall, the Russian authorities still dis- playing a savage callousness and spite; but the effort to regulate the Exodus, to reduce it within grooves, and to spread it over a generation, has been sanctioned, and will be protected. The huddled rush of a tortured people will by-and-by be reduced to a steady flow of emigrants, like that which has partially depopulated Ireland, which must be of great proportions, but which need not involve the deaths and sufferings and degradations of a mad stampede. Those Jews who require aid—that is, in practice, those in most pressing danger—will receive it from local committees acting under Baron Hirsch, and will be forwarded gradually to the colonies he is forming, not at one point but at many, beyond sea. The flying nation is not to be forced on one unwilling country, but to stream out gradually to many, each colony, as it forms itself and acquires means of living, becoming a re- servoir in which larger and larger masses may be collected, thence to be distributed into the regular industries through every open channel. The emigrants, wherever they are located, will be expected to labour, and as the only field of labour always ready is un- cultivated soil, the majority of them will at first become cultivators. Baron Hirsch has faced that problem boldly ; he evidently believes that Jews, like other people, will dig rather than starve, though they are much too intelligent to think digging the best occupation ; and his first colony, in New Jersey, is just what an English colony of the kind would be. The colonists fell and build, plough and sow, as they once must have done in judEea. City colonies also are contemplated by the Association, and, in fact, Russian Jews will be sent anywhere where there is a possibility of an opening for industrious persons who will do any work which the prejudices of previous occupiers will permit them to attempt. The Baron and his friends think, like all other men concerned in emigration, first of the Americas ; but they would, we believe, try any accessible land in Asia—they have taken power to do so in their deed—and they are unaffected by one difficulty which hampers the emigration of Anglo-Saxons. Jews are exempt from the English dread of unfavourable climates. Whether they are protected, as they would say, by their rigid puritanism about diet, or, as we should rather say, by having shed in their long pilgrimage of seventeen hundred years all the families liable to be poisoned by miasma, it is certain that Jews can flourish anywhere— there are families in Bengal which have not quitted that superheated steam-bath for two hundred years, and are ruddier now than most German Jews,—that, in fact, they surpass even Negroes in their indifference to climate, for Negroes would die in Russia as they die in Maine, of forms of lung-disease. The whole world is open to them, if only it offers food.
Can the scheme succeed ? We do not quite see why not. Baron Hirsch cannot, of course, whatever his wealth may be, move five millions of people from continent to continent ; nor could even his fellow-shareholders if they devoted their whole property to the task ; but the burden of transporting and settling a nation, if the Russian Govern- ment does not relent, will not fall exclusively on them. Thou- sands, tens of thousands, of Russian Jews need nothing but guidance and shelter till they have learned a lan- guage; and tens of thousands more need nothing but free passes, which cost, when you are dealing with weekly ship- loads, exceedingly small sums. Thousands will be helped just for the journey by other Jews ; the numbers and the cost will be greatly reduced by the deaths of children ; and within five years a new force will come into operation of which we in England can well estimate the extent. The colonists will summon other colonists, as the Irish summon Irishmen, and a numerous though scattered people, probably prosperous, certainly saving, will be assisting Baron Hirsch. The drain on the Jewish population of Russia will increase in magnitude as the years pass on, until at last it will reach a volume which will not only absorb the natural increase, but perceptibly diminish the number even of a nation. Of course, if the Russian Government alters its policy, as all humane men hope, and a great many believe it will, the emigra- tion will decline ; but the chances are not in favour of that solution. Wherever the prejudice against Jews has taken firm hold, it has lasted centuries ; and it has taken firm hold in Russia. Let it once be seen that they can be made to go, and they will be made to go continuously, and without pity or fear. Neither of those passions stopped persecution in the Middle Ages, and on such subjects the world only advances, when it advances at all, in patches. The English and the French have no prejudice against Jews, but Germany, after a century of experience, remains as prejudiced as ever. It is quite possible, probable even, that Russia for fifty years will be no safe habitation for Jews ; and if it is so, Baron Hirsch's plan will succeed, and the ancient race, hived for so many centuries in Eastern Europe, will have passed through another, and let us hope a final, Dispersion.
The new Exodus thus commenced, and going on, the German newspapers say, on one railway alone at the rate of six hundred a day, is, to our thinking, one of the most in- structive events of modern history. It shows that the day of vast calamities produced solely by the action of man is not entirely over, that national hatred has lost none of its intensity, that prejudice can still conceal from men that they are committing colossal crimes. The Rus- sians are white men, believe very strongly in Christianity, and axe, in most of the relations of life, rather more sympathetic than most of the peasantry of Europe. Yet they are behaving like the Spaniards of the fifteenth century, no worse, but also no better. We all believe that religious liberty is becoming a dogma of mankind ; yet a civilised country casts out the professors of an ancient and non-proselytising creed to die by the wayside without a thought of repentance. We all assert that the "law of love" is overcoming all other laws, those of justice more especially included ; but what is the law of love doing for the Russian Jews ? They are sentenced, effectually sentenced, to transportation by popular hate alone. And the event may teach us, too, that in spite of the general clamour, one man is not like another. It is perfectly possible that the leadership of Baron Hirsch may save his nation ; that the sense and liberality of one man may do for five millions what no crowd of them could possibly have done for them- selves. That we are all equal, is the creed of the hour; but at how many men, when they crossed the Red Sea, did. the Jews reckon Moses ? And how many men will Baron Hirsch be worth to his nation if it escapes in safety from the sentence passed on it by the Russian people and their Czar ?
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