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The Jewish Year Book reckons there are today about 10,000,000 in Europe, 3,000,000 in the United States, and 1,000,000 in the rest of the world.

It reckons 100,000 in France, 106,000 in the Netherlands, 230,000 in Rumania, 257,000 in the United Kingdom, 615,000 in Germany, 1,300,000 in what was formerly Austria-Hungary, and 7,000,000 in Russia. In Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, and Spain there are comparatively few.

The great number in Russia largely trace back to Casimir the Great, a Polish king. His favorite, Esther, a devoted Jewess like her namesake in the Bible, persuaded Casimir to offer the Jews a home in Poland. The Jews had multiplied, especially in that part of Poland which Russia secured in the three partitions and which, with constantly changing boundaries, constituted the Russian Pale. When Casimir died, in 1370, Polish toleration ended. Instead there was often the ferocious shout, "Hep, Hep!" with which the pogrom began. A pogrom is an organized massacre and "Hep" is supposedly derived from the initials of "Hierosolyma est perdita."

The fires through which the Jews have passed only intensified their remarkable domestic and racial devotion. There is no position of honor or confidence where one does not now find a Jew. There is no height or distinction-political, diplomatic, financial, dramatic, artistic, literary-which the sons and daughters of Israel have not attained.

THE GYPSIES

The Gypsies are first found in the Greek islands and continental Greece early in the fourteenth century. No tradition exists as to how they arrived or whence they came. Afterward, they wandered through the Balkan Peninsula, settling nowhere except as the greater number were seized along the way and made serfs or slaves.

In 1417 they appeared in western Europe, showing a peculiar pass or safe-conduct wherein they were called Tsigani. This pass, signed by Sigismund, king of Hungary and German emperor, granted permission to go wherever they pleased in the king's dominions, ordered his subjects to show them kindness and protection, and forbade interference with them of any sort. A little later their roving bands reached Italy, France, and the British Islands.

Believed to have come from Egypt, their English name was Gypsies. The French, however, called them Bohemians, thinking they had originated in Bohemia. They called themselves Rom, supposed to mean man. This term was possibly picked up in passage through southeastern Europe. Among their many other names were Hagarenes, children of Hagar, Saracens, as from Arabia, and Athingani, or "Touch-me-nots," from a heretical sect in Asia

Minor.

Restrictive laws have hampered and sometimes entirely curtailed their former vagrancy.

Most Gypsies now live in houses, though still retaining their restless propensities. Existing

in every country, they have been accurately counted nowhere. There are probably not over 700,000 in Europe, of whom three-fourths are located in Hungary, Rumania, and the Balkan Peninsula, where they enjoy the same civi! rights as the other inhabitants. Without country or traditions or religion of their own, they readily profess whatever is nearest.

The Gypsies are of wiry figure, with black, often silky, hair; large, shining, black eyes; perfect teeth, regular and white, and a glowing rich complexion, which early becomes tawny. Their young women often possess a brilliant but soon fading beauty. In music and dance, the untrammeled freedom of the race finds full expression. Liszt ascribes to the Gypsies "the origin of Hungarian national music." Many of the most popular Rumanian, Serbian, and Bulgarian ballads and tunes are derived from the Gypsies.

Our chief interest in the Gypsy is his language. Toward the end of the eighteenth century three scholars, working apart and unknown to one another, discovered that his "jargon" is a primitive Indo-European language, now spoken nowhere else and contained in no manuscript or book. Corrupted and debased, yet radically the same, it has been preserved through uncounted years and unknown wanderings on the lips of this mysterious people. An eminent Oriental investigator, Dr. Paspati, believed that the Romany was an ancient sister of the Sanscrit and that the Gypsy is the most ancient Indo-European in Europe.

THE GERMANS *

The name German during these last years has been so blackened and befouled by its own children that it can never regain its former place in the respect and esteem of men. But, before militarism destroyed idealism, before the Prussian virus poisoned the German soul, there was no department of research, art, or literature which the Germans did not distinguish. Obscured from the world's thought today by an interposing pall are the thinkers, poets, philosophers, and reformers of Germany's great past.

The main body of Germans has occupied the same territory from a period antedating the Christian era. Though absorbing many Slavic elements, they are as a people less composite than the Italians or the French.

The number of inhabitants of the German Empire at the last census, inclusive of 1,870,000 persons in Alsace-Lorraine and of 1,260,000

* See also, in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, "Peasant Life in the Black Forest," by Karl Frederick Geiser (September, 1908); “A Corner of Old Wurttemberg," by B. H. Buxton (October, 1911); "The German Nation" (September, 1914); "Hildesheim, the Town of Many Gables," by Florence Craig Albrecht (February, 1915).

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A FARMER OF BANFFYIIUNYAD, A VILLAGE OF TRANSYLVANIA

Within the limits of Transylvania ("forest land"), an area of eastern Hungary about half the size of the State of Virginia, reside three "privileged peoples"-the Magyars, the Szeklers, kinsmen of the Magyars, and Saxons, descendants of German immigrants who came into the country in the twelfth century. Numerically, however, the most important element of the population is Rumanian. In addition, there are Jews, Ruthenians, Bulgarians, Slovaks, Serbians, and Greeks. The plurality of Rumanians forms the basis of their country's claim to a large portion of this district, rich in mines, forests, pasture lands, and river-bottom farms.

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The Jewish Year Book reckons the number of Jews in Europe today as 10,000,000; in the United States 3,000,000, and another 1,000,000 scattered throughout the rest of the world. In the famous painting here reproduced the Swiss artist, Burnand, depicts two of the Disciples, Peter and John, hurrying to the Sepulchre. The canvas hangs in the Museum of the Luxembourg, Paris.

foreign residents, was 64,926,000. Subtracting the foreigners, the people of Alsace-Lorraine, and 3,500,000 Slavs, mostly Poles, there remain about 58,000,000 Germans. Adjacent, strongly attached to them, are the 10,000,000 Austrian Germans and the nearly 300,000 in Luxemburg and Liechtenstein, making a total German population in Central Europe of approximately 70,000,000.

The distinction of Low Germans, dwellers in the Lowlands, and High Germans, dwellers further south, on higher ground, early indicated forms of the language and literary expression.

More than any other race in Europe, the Germans in Germany have inter-bred among themselves. In consequence, they have developed traits which in a smaller people would be termed provincial-inordinate self-satisfaction, sense of superiority to other nations, and marked incapacity as colonizers. While making good colonists under other flags than their own, as colonizers under their own flag they have failed utterly.

Despite all inducements offered by their government, they were themselves reluctant to emigrate to German colonies except as State functionaries or soldiers. In 1914, in the more than 1,000,000 square miles of German colonial possessions, there were less than 25,000 white residents, inclusive of foreigners. Moreover, German treatment of the natives is seldom kindly, but in general brutal and inhuman.

Yet German enterprise and discontent with former conditions in the fatherland carried them by hundreds of thousands all over the globe. In the United States there are over 2,500,000 persons who were born in Germany, most of them loyal and efficient American citi* There are over 2,000,000 in Hungary and 1.500,000 in Russia, long resident in those countries. In South America there are more than 500,000.

zens.

In 1914 German or of German origin were

* See in NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC MAGAZINE, "Our Foreign-born Citizens" (February, 1917).

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The reason for the great number of Jews now found in Poland may be traced back to the days of Casimir the Great, a Polish king, whose favorite, Esther, a devoted Jewess, persuaded her royal lover to offer her people a home in his dominions. When Casimir died, in 1370, Polish toleration ended, and during the succeeding centuries the lot of the Jew has been an unhappy one. Marriage vows are taken early by the Jews in Poland; a girl scarcely ceases to play with dolls before she has babies of her own, and a woman twenty-five years old is frequently the mother of six or seven children (see page 499).

the reigning houses of Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Bulgaria, Denmark, the German Empire, and each of its 25 States except the Slavic dynasty of the two Mecklenburgs; Great Britain, Greece, Holland, Liechtenstein, Luxemburg, Norway, Rumania, Russia, and Sweden. In Great Britain the royal house, long thoroughly anglicised, by royal proclamation in 1917, changed its title from "House of SaxeCoburg and Gotha" to "House of Windsor." In Belgium and Rumania the rulers identified themselves with their people. The monarchs of the no longer existing Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian empires are either fugitive or dead.

Until 1871 the term German was an ethnic or geographical expression without national meaning. There had never been a real German nation. Instead had existed an indefinite number of political units-kingdoms, duchies, free cities, loosely connected or not connected at all-in European wars usually taking opposite sides. The number of such units had been

gradually reduced to twenty-five. This was an inheritance from the tribal system, often deplored by German patriots and statesmen. Acting together for the first time in the war of 1870-71, they conquered imperial France.

The proclamation of the Empire on January 18, 1871, at Versailles, in the throne room of Louis XIV, the arch foe of the German race, was most spectacular. German union seemed achieved. On April 16 the sovereigns of the five larger German States granted the Empire a Constitution, in the making of which the people had no share. This Constitution rendered Prussia and her Hohenzollern King supreme in Germany. The Constitution could in no way be changed without the consent of the King of Prussia, who was German Emperor, except by revolution (see map, page 510).

The revolution has now been accomplished But peoples and races remain, though thrones and empires fall. After present troubles are pacified and wrongs righted, in the very center of the continent will exist a compact, homo

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THE PHYSICAL MAP OF EUROPE

A. H. Bumstead, Cartographer

Here are shown the mountain systems and the river valleys which have determined the course of invading hordes and have modified the racial

traits of immigrant peoples (see text, page 448)

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