with perfect impunity, in spite of the law and the most severe penalties which can be imposed. So far as the gamekeeper is concerned, he is not only minded, but determined to do so; and his master, although often deploring the slaughter of harmless or rare birds, seems incapable of forbidding and preventing it.

The law as it stands is definite and severe enough; it remains for those who will do so to see that it is enforced.

But to return to the Acts of Parliament. There is next a proviso for the protection of poulterers and dealers. Two other offences

are:

(d) Exposing or offering for sale after the 15th of March any wild bird recently killed or taken.

(e) Having in one's control or possession after the 15th of March any wild bird recently killed or taken. No person can be convicted of these two offences if he proves to the Court that the bird was lawfully killed. For example, a poulterer is charged with selling plovers after the 15th of March. If he proves that they were shot in Lincolnshire during the last week of February, that is a good defence. Secondly, he may prove that the birds in question were killed in some place to which the Act does not extend-e.g. that he imported them from Holland. This will, of course, be a good defence at all seasons, even though the birds were shot, imported, and exposed for sale during the month of May. These provisions are reasonable inasmuch as the Acts only aim at protecting the birds of the United Kingdom.

Considerable powers are entrusted to county councils of deciding what birds within their counties are deserving or in need of special protection. The Home Secretary, the Secretary for Scotland, and the Lord-Lieutenant in Ireland may, upon the application of any county council or grand jury in Ireland, make an order varying or extending the close times for any species of birds on whose behalf the application is made. For special reasons an order may be made absolutely forbidding the killing or taking of particular species during the whole year, or an order prohibiting the taking of all wild birds in particular places during the whole or any part of the year. A county council can also apply for an order adding any species they may think proper specially to protect to the list of scheduled birds; and if the necessary order be made, the higher fine before mentioned will avenge their deaths as if they had always been included in the favoured list, and a man will be liable to the fine if he kills them during the close time on his own fields.

The island of St. Kilda is exempted from the Act; and any county or part of a county may be exempted upon the application of its county council. For instance, in the Exe Fishery District in Devonshire, the cormorant and the shag have been deprived of a close time, and it is lawful to destroy these fish-devouring birds at all times of the year. The majority of county councils have been

zealous in availing themselves of these powers, and a number of orders have been made and published in the Gazette extending the close time for various birds or adding them to the scheduled list.

The zeal of county councils has been sometimes excessive, though in the right direction. It is impossible not to smile when we read that the London County Council have resolved to apply to the Home Secretary for an order forbidding the killing in the county of London of such birds, among others, as the grouse, capercaillie, peregrinefalcon, raven, rock-dove, and black-headed bunting, whose claim to be considered a British bird rests on a solitary specimen said to have been shot near Brighton some thirty years ago. But this is better than apathy.

There is one proviso of the Acts which is of practical importance. Any person who sees, or thinks he sees, an offence against the law being committed may demand the name and address of the offender. If the offender refuse it, there is nothing to be done; but by following him to his home and prosecuting him he may be mulcted in an additional fine for refusing his name and place of abode.

We now come to the question of protecting eggs, which it is difficult to do by law. The love of bird's-nesting is deeply rooted in the heart of boys; it is one of the outlets which a taste for natural history takes; a taste which it is more desirable perhaps to foster than to check. Some years ago the question of protecting eggs by legislation was considered by a committee of the British Association, which arrived at the conclusion that bird's-nesting could not possibly be generally stopped; that public opinion would not sanction an Act of Parliament of the requisite severity, and the filling of our gaols with small boys which would follow.

Yet the danger which many rare species ran of being exterminated by the destruction of their eggs was imminent. It was useless to make a close time during the nesting season, if you allowed the destruction of the eggs and merely forbade the destruction of the parents. The rarest eggs were sought by professional collectors, who robbed every nest for the purpose of sale. The Oological Society of Birmingham got up an expedition to the Hebrides with the intention of collecting eggs wholesale. Whatever objection there might be to stopping boys' bird's-nesting in the country lanes, there could be none in attempting to put an end to this collecting by persons who made it a profitable trade, and whose business it was to visit the known nesting-places of rare birds.

In spite of the attendant difficulties, Parliament has attempted to protect eggs by the Act of 1894. It is almost too soon to judge of the success or failure of this attempt, but there seems no reason why it should not be successful.

Any county council may apply to the Home Secretary in England or the Secretary for Scotland in that country to make an order prohibiting

(1) The taking or destroying of all wild birds' eggs in any place or any places within the county.

(2) The taking or destroying of the eggs of any specified kind of bird within the county or in any part or parts of the county.

When the Home Secretary makes an order it must be advertised in the local newspapers and placarded in conspicuous spots in the district. The maximum fine is 17. for every egg taken or destroyed, and any person who incites another to break the order is equally liable.

It should be observed that no eggs are preserved unless they are named in the order, and that the Act only affects such counties as choose to adopt it. The law does not contemplate unlimited or indiscriminate protection of birds' eggs: its main object is to prevent the extinction or serious diminution of certain kinds of birds by the taking or destruction of their eggs, which object is sought to be obtained by prohibiting the taking of eggs either in certain defined breeding-places or of certain defined species of birds generally throughout the county.

Such is a summary of the laws for protecting our wild birds against their enemies. The three great enemies of the feathered world are the professional collectors, the bird-catchers, and the gamekeepers. They carry on wars equally destructive in their way against different sorts of birds. Rarity attracts the collector, and he shoots the hoopoe, the osprey, or the bittern. Singing powers attract the bird-catcher, and he catches goldfinches or nightingales in nets, without exaggeration, by hundreds and thousands; for one man has been known to catch as many as forty dozen goldfinches in a morning.

The gamekeepers are beyond the reach of the law. It can only be hoped that some day the game preservers, whose servants the keepers are, and whom they might be expected to obey, will take vigorous and effective measures to check the useless and indiscriminate trapping and shooting of feathered vermin, so-called. For it must be remembered that the vast majority of birds which the gamekeeper destroys as vermin are absolutely guiltless of destroying game birds, their young, or their eggs.

The professional collector and the bird-catcher are effectively dealt with by the present law if it is enforced. But according to the Judicial Statistics for England and Wales in the year 1895, only 121 persons were proceeded against under the Wild Birds' Protection Acts. Out of these the magistrates dismissed the charge in thirtythree cases, and only fifty-five persons were fined. It would be interesting and melancholy to know how many thousands of offences against the Acts went unprosecuted and unpunished.

HAROLD RUSSELL.

PHILO-ZIONISTS AND ANTI-SEMITES

ZION has many friends, but the important thing for her at the present time is that she should be saved from most of them. Dr. Herzl, the imaginative author of The Jewish State,' is her friend; but so also is Dr. Emil Reich, the brilliant if caustic writer of 'Jew-Baiting on the Continent;' and the Association of Lovers of Zion' is compelled to take a modest place in the background between these two opponents. While the Viennese litterateur is willing, in the name of Zion,' to found his Hebrew State either in Syria or South America, the Nineteenth Century reviewer would fain see Zionism' localised or carried into effect in Central Europe; and to the Lovers of Zion' alone is left the undivided attachment to the old ideal, of a real and physical Zion-at Zion.

It may be well to contrast these different objectives, and to make it clear who are the real Philo-Zionists.

I

In the interest of fair discussion Dr. Emil Reich's contribution to the subject-ZIONISM'2-deserves first consideration; and it is impossible to withhold from the writer-mistaken as he may appear to us -the homage due as well to his perfect frankness, as to the moderation and critical acumen with which he has dealt, from the outside, with the complicated states of political feeling and religious sentiment, now stirring up all the varied elements of modern Jewry. Our gratitude is all the more lively towards Dr. Reich because in this essay we do not recognise the apologist of the Jew-baiters; and we perceive a distinct advance from the anti-Semitic feeling which has marked some of the Doctor's previous studies of the Jewish question. Or was it perhaps not the same Dr. Emil Reich who compared the Jews, indifferently, either to the fluctuating body of the gipsies, or to the castiron organisation of the Jesuits; who said that the German Jews more than merited their treatment at the hands of the anti-Semites ' for enduring without any serious revolt the shame of being refused 'Nineteenth Century, September 1896. 2 Ibid. August 1897.

the rank of officer in the German army, although by law fully entitled to it; who alleged against them the fanciful, yet dreadful, vice of having got their emancipation without fighting for it;' who, while admitting the untruth of the string of accusations levelled against the Jews as an excuse for persecutions, formulated against them the heavy and unanswerable indictment that they, especially the emancipated Jews, were 'profoundly immodest;' that they were 'the worst of upstarts; that they perpetrated the specific crime of want of social tact; and who concluded his summary of the position by expressing the opinion that if anti-Semitism has done nothing but bring the great question of nationality into still stronger relief, it has well deserved of Europe'?

6

Whether as the Zionist Jekyll or the anti-Semitic Hyde, Dr. Reich is above all things the conscientious historical student, and in his earlier paper he diagnosed 'the disgrace of the nineteenth century' accurately enough when he traced it to the political exigencies of parties in Germany-('exigencies which would keep alive the antiSemitic party even if all the Jews had left Europe');-while he is no less outspoken in his latest contribution to the subject, where he dismisses the idea of its being a racial question as a childish delusion,' and seeks to explain the difference between Jew and Christian on quite other grounds.

6

It may be as well to dispose of these alleged grounds of difference, before proceeding to the other and more serious part of Dr. Emil Reich's article; because from these mistaken grounds the Doctor seeks to trace the causes of the Zionist movement, and he does so, therefore, on a broad basis of error. Dr. Reich writes:

....

The Old Testament does not preach a belief in a future world, or, still more correctly, it does not dwell on the individual immortality of the believer's soul. . . . To the Jew therefore the belief in the restoration of the ancient Jewish State has much of the religious nature of the Christian belief in a future world. . . . The Jew claimed God's special blessing by virtue of his Jewish Citizenship . . . . between him and God stood as mediator and saviour, the people of Israel . . . . Forgiveness and pardon, atonement and salvation, could come to the individual only through the forgiveness and salvation bestowed by God upon the people as a whole. This is the fundamental belief, the one ineradicable creed that made, and makes, the distinctive feature of Judaism. He who believes in that mediatorship of the Jewish nation is a Jew; he who does not believe in it is no Jew, and (sic) if all his ancestors were Semites.

Let it be said at once: there is no such belief, no such creed. We do not recognise it, and it does not stir the impulses of a single Jewish Nationalist. The anti-Semites would deprive us only of the good things of this world, but Dr. Reich, in his characteristic desire to discover a new philosophy of history, a new Weltausschauung for the Jew, has taken away from us also the hope of a future existence. Was it our Psalmist who proclaimed: