government can not interfere with the domestic affairs of
another nation. This argument has little if any application
to the present situation. There is much evidence accumulat-
ing to show that the pogroms and abuses of the Jews con-
tinue in the countries where they have heretofore existed,
and that the chaotic and lawless condition in these countries
has offered an opportunity for the cruel gratification of race
and religious prejudice. On the whole, it is not too much
to say that the people of the Jewish race have suffered more
in this war, as noncombatants, than any other people, unless
it be the Serbians and the Armenians.

In Poland and in Galicia the true story of their agonies
and losses is heartrending. The five nations who are to
draft the treaty at Versailles are setting up governments in
Poland, in the Ukraine and in the Baltic provinces. In all
of these the Jewish population is a substantial percentage of
the whole. In their sad story we find the Jews in the Middle
Ages seeking refuge from the oppression and cruelty of
Western Europe and rushing to the great empire of Poland,
then stretching from the Baltic to the Black Sea, to take
advantage of a charter of religious tolerance and oppor-
tunity granted by one of the liberal Polish kings. The irony
of fate, however, ended the Polish kingdom and a large part
of it was turned over to Russia, which ground the Jews
under its tyrannous heel. This is why half of the thirteen
millions of Jews living in the world were at the beginning
of this war to be found in the Russian pale in which Jews
were permitted to live, to which they were limited, and which
was practically coterminous with the territory which Russia
had taken from old Poland.

One of the great projects of this Congress of Powers at
Versailles is to set up independent governments in these ter-

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