were thrown open, and in the name of Fraternity, Liberty and Equality were announced to their inhabitants. When Napoleonic misrule at last exasperated Germany into resistance, the seeds which French influence had sown had already taken firm root in the German soil. On the 11th March, 1812, Frederick William III. issued his famous edict, removing the main disabilities from which the Jews of his dominions had suffered, granting them the rights and imposing upon them the honorable duties of citizenship. They were no longer to be classed as foreigners. The state claimed them as its children, and exacted of them the same sacrifices as all its sons were called upon to bring in the troublous times that soon followed. With what eager alacrity the Jews responded to the king's call the records of the German wars for independence amply testify. On the battle-fields of Leipzig and Waterloo they stood side by side with their Christian brethren. Many sons and fathers of Jewish households yielded their lives in the country's defence. In the blood of the fallen the new covenant of equal justice was sealed for all time to come. However prejudice might still dog their footsteps, however shamefully the government might violate its solemn pledges to the Jewish soldiers on their return from the wars, the Jews of Germany had now gained what they could no more lose. They felt that the land for which they had adventured their all, in whose behalf they had lost so much, was indeed their fatherland. For the first time, after many, many centuries, the fugitives had gained a home, a country. They awoke as from a long sleep. They found the world greatly changed around them; vast problems engaging the attention of thinkers, science and philosophy everywhere shedding new light upon the path of mankind. They were eager to approve themselves worthy and loyal citizens, eager to join in the general work of progress. They dwelt no more with anxious preference on the past. The present and the future demanded their exertions, and the motives that had so long compelled their exclusion from the fellowship of the Gentiles were gradually disappearing. As their religion was mainly retrospective in character and exclusive in tendency, great changes were needed to bring it into harmony with the altered condition of affairs. These changes were accordingly attempted, and their history is the history of Jewish Reform.

FELIX ADLER.

1. AFRICA to-day is the realm of romance. It is the central fascination of the scholar, the explorer, the philanthropist, the man of business. It is the one spot of earth which draws all eyes and hearts to its majestic mysteries. Books of travel, voluminous and costly, are pouring constantly from the presses of Europe and America. When a geographical congress was held in Brussels last autumn, the King of the Belgians expressed a willingness to preside, provided the topic for consideration was Africa. Its explorers are fêted, and receive the costliest medals from kings and learned societies. To get the first name in modern discovery one must devote himself to Africa. From Mungo Park to Cameron, its explorers hold the highest rank. Barth and Lander, Grant and Speke, Schweinfurth, Stanley, and Baker, surpass their rivals in other regions. We care but little for Schuyler and Burnaby in Turkistan, for Burton in Arabia, Arnold in Persia, Wallace in the Archipelago, or travellers in China and Japan, in comparison with the admiration in which we hold the African discoverers. Chief of all travellers, by uncontested suffrage, is Livingstone, who spent a lifetime in threading its jungles, floating down its rivers, circumnavigating its lakes, crossing its paradises, dwelling in its villages; who penetrated more unknown lands and disclosed them to the civilized world than any traveller of any age.

Like a myste

Nor is the romance losing any of its attractions. rious story, it grows more mysterious as the plot proceeds to the dénouement. One would suppose the marvellous discoveries by Speke and Grant of the great Nile lakes, the magnificent march and narrative of Baker, the revelations of Schweinfurth and Barth, and especially the profuse discoveries of Livingstone, might have palled the appetite. But, like Cæsar's ambition, it grows by what it feeds upon. And Cameron's fearful tour and Stanley's bold explorations only find a public growing more and more hungry with every bonne bouche these travellers can toss it.

The reduction of the limits of unexplored territory only makes the secrets yet concealed the more tantalizing. When Cameron spends months in Central Africa trying to get the brutal chief to consent to his visiting a reputed lake, which he thinks is connected with the river Kongo, and is at last compelled to abandon the project, and to "step westward" leaving the mystery unsolved, every reader, stung to like passion for research with himself, is ready to follow him in the renewal of his effort, and never rest till on the bosom of that lake, and drifting thence on the broad river to the western sea. The belt of the absolutely unknown is decreasing annually, but, like all fortresses, the unsubdued part is the strongest and most defiant. We have crept down from Egypt a thousand miles. We have pushed up from the eastern coast a thousand miles. From Khartoum to Victoria Nyanza, from Zanzibar to Tanganyika, the country is well known. No secrets remain there of any especial value, though Colonel Long seeks to manufacture some from a bold raid of his on the track from Gondokoro to Victoria, a region traversed and abundantly described by previous investigators. Even South Africa, below the parallel of Zanzibar and Loando, is quite well known. At Lake Nyassa missionaries are located, who are seeking to connect that lake with Tanganyika, some five hundred miles to the north. A chain of posts will soon unite this lake and Victoria Nyanza, which is already united with the Lower Nile. So that from Alexandria to Cape Town we may consider African exploration done, and African colonization begun.

The region yet unknown lies north of Cameron's line, which was substantially that of Livingstone years ago, to the borders of the Saharan Desert, and west of the lake system from Nyassa to Albert. There rise the rivers that flow into the Atlantic, - the Niger, the Kongo, and other famous streams. Not one of these is fully explored. The Niger has been penetrated the farthest, but much of that still remains a secret, while the mystery of the Lualaba and Kongo is still unsolved. It is not certain that they are the same. This vast tract, covering the real heart of Africa, all its vital organs, and which Schweinfurth never visited, though he calls his book "The Heart of Africa," nor Long, though he boastfully entitles his "Central Africa," nor Cameron, nor Livingstone, is the object of every eye turned in that direction, and the ambition of every explorer who touches that shore. Cameron says some natives who

had visited the lower edge of it report "a country of large mountains wooded to the summits, and valleys filled with such dense forests that they travelled four or five days in succession without seeing the sun." "The equatorial regions of dense forests in Central Africa is still one of the greatest terræ incognita of the globe." * 2. But Africa is not only the land of romance, it is the land of the future. A romance once read is rejected. A secret once solved is spurned. If the unknown is miraculous, so the known is despised. "Ignotum mirabile; res cognita sordet." When the North Pole is discovered all interest in the problem will disappear, for it can never be utilized. But Africa is more than a romance; it is a reality. It has a future as great as our own continent, perhaps greater. It is a land of wonderful abundance, animal, mineral, and vegetable, a land of rivers and mountains and plains and forests, of every variety and of unequalled richness. To it the eyes of commerce, no less than of science, are turned. "You see you are to lose America as a market," says an American to an Englishman at the Philadelphia Exposition; "whither will you go?" "To Africa," was the quick reply. England has already gone there. She controls Egypt and the Cape Colony, the extreme north and south. She holds two thousand miles of the west coast under her sway. She rules from Zanzibar through Abyssinia to Suez. She means to possess Africa, as she now possesses India.

Less active, but not inactive, is Germany, whose ships and factories are on the western coast, whose travellers are among the most resolute of explorers. France, holding Algiers, the Gambia, and the Gaboon, is not without interest in Africa. The Dutch and Portuguese and Spanish have not surrendered the rich spoils which their earliest discoveries gave into their hands.

Africa is looked upon as the greatest of unappropriated treasures on the world's map to-day. America, three and almost four hundred years ago, was the chief object of desire on the part of European nationalities, and Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England fought for the prize, and continued fighting for over three centuries. So Africa to-day is the centre of European attraction, in the interests of commerce no less than in those of science and humanity.

Chief of these nations in her commercial activity is Great Brit

* Encyclopædia Britannica.

ain. No other nation has an approximate control of that continent. Two lines of steamers connect Liverpool with the west coast. One steamer leaving every two weeks gives to that coast a steamer every week, either going out or returning. Almost equally rumerous are her South, and East African steamers, while her connections with the Nile and the Red Sea are closer than with her colonies in America, or even than with her Empire in India. England has girdled Africa preparatory to transferring it as a whole to her own flag.

Nor is this mere political ambition or mere love of aggrandizement. That practical nation in all its enterprises "means business." She has no romance for discovery, no more than has her great rival Russia, or her greater rival America. She is as practical as Mr. Gradgrind himself; cent per cent is her motto. As was that of Spain in her American conquests, as was that of Rome in all her conquests, so is England's to-day. "Will it pay?" is her wise question; "It shall pay," her wiser answer. She extirpates the slave-trade and slavery in order that she may have more purchasers of her wares, more producers of material which shall buy these wares. She sends thither her traders, her sailors, and her soldiers, that she may make profitable returns to her own wealth. If not many captives, she has brought much traffic back to her Rome," whose value doth the general coffers fill." Her fifty vessels a year at the western ports, her like close connections with Cape Colony, her closer ones with Egypt, mean money, and all which that involves. Every steamer goes out loaded to the Plimsoll line, and above it, if the owner dare, with the products of her farms and factories. Two stores are "run" on the ship, the forecastle or Cheap John, and the cabin or Oxford Street. Broadway and Bowery have their representatives on all these lines. You can buy anything from a hawk to a hand-saw, only you buy the hawks in the shape of pigs and chickens on the outward-bound steamers, and in the shape of parrots and monkeys on the homeward-bound, "Do you wish for some potatoes?" said a sweet Scotch brogue to me on the Senegal, as I mounted her ladder and stood on her deck in the harbor of Monrovia. What our party did want, it got, straw hats, umbrellas, shoes, collars, neckties. Had we asked for silks or broadcloth, for chairs or bedsteads, for anything or everything, it could have been supplied, at twice its value forward, at four times its value from the chief steward.