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Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen:

In order to come here I had to break a solemn vow I had made to myself to stop public speaking and to devote my time entirely to my quiet literary occupations. But my highly valued friend, Mr. Isidor Straus, described to me so impressively the important work done by the Educational Alliance in a cause which has always been very near to my heart, that I could not resist his request that I should say at this your annual meeting at least a few words of appreciation and sympathy. I can do this only in the way of an entirely offhand familiar talk for which I have asked Mr. Straus in the carriage, as we came here, to give me the points desirable to be touched. The importance of the task undertaken by your association cannot be over-estimated. There is in this City of Greater New York the greatest aggregation in the whole world of people of the Jewish race and faith—some 600,000 to 700,000 of them. They are mostly new-comers, fugitives from injustice, tyranny and oppression, poor, and in every sense strangers in this land which is to be their future home. You have undertaken, as far as your influence reaches, to do your best to lead them on the path of civic virtue and of private and public usefulness. Truly a noble, a necessary and a vast enterprise beset with incalculable difficulties and responsibilities.

During one of our municipal election campaigns I once heard a public speaker—if I remember rightly it was Mr. Jerome—make the remark that if we wished to come into contact with true and ardent American patriotism, we must go not to Fifth Avenue, but to the Jewish quarter on the East side, because the people living there, who were fugitives from the most cruel persecution, felt and appreciated the blessings of American liberty more keenly than native Americans, who had enjoyed those blessings from the cradle up, possibly could appreciate them. I believe this is in a great measure true. Nothing could be more natural than that those who in their native lands have been kicked and cuffed by a despotic power should most keenly enjoy the freedom of action and movement, the security of their rights, and the large opportunities for bettering their condition which they enjoy here—more