At this time I was invited to meet Mr. Coleridge with a zealous Unitarian minister. It was natural to conclude that such uncongenial, and, at the same time, such inflammable materials. would soon ignite. The subject of Unitarianism having been introduced soon after dinner, the minister avowed his sentiments, in language that was construed into a challenge, when Mr. Coleridge advanced to the charge by saying, "Sir, you give up so much that the little you retain of Christianity is not worth keeping." We looked in vain for a reply. After a manifest internal conflict, the Unitarian minister prudently allowed the gauntlet to remain undisturbed. Wine, he thought more pleasant than controversy.

Such conduct on the part of Coleridge would be considered by many as a breach of good manners. Later, he behaved in a similar way to Emerson. When the great American essayist visited him in 1833, Coleridge at once burst into a declaration on the folly and ignorance of Unitarianism and its high unreasonableness, nor was he the least perturbed when Emerson felt bound to tell him that he was born and bred a Unitarian, a fact that was, of course, known to Coleridge. De Quincey tells us that Coleridge said it had cost. him a painful effort, but not a moment's hesitation, to abjure his Unitarianism, from the circumstance that he had among the Unitarians many friends, to some of whom he was greatly indebted for great kindness. In particular, he mentioned Dr. Prior Estlin of Bristol. The cleavage in his relationships with Doctor Estlin did not take place until seven years after Coleridge had publicly abjured Unitarianism.

It must be related, to the credit of Coleridge, that he made many attempts, though with varying and always temporary success, to escape from the thraldom of drug-taking. On 3rd December, 1808, he wrote to Doctor Estlin detailing the attempts he had made to break off the habit and stating that he had reduced the dose to onesixth part of what formerly he took. Then he continued:

I have no immediate motive to detail to you the tenets in which we differ. Indeed, the difference is not so great as you have been led to suppose and is rather philosophical than theological. I believe the Father of all to be the only object of adoration or prayer. The Calvinistic tenet of a vicarious satisfaction I reject not without some horror and though I believe that the redemption by Christ implies more than what the Unitarians understand by the phrase, yet I use it rather as a X, Y, Z, an unknown quantity, than as words to which I pretend to annex clear notions. I believe that in the salvation of man a spiritual process sui generis is required, a spiritual aid and agency, the

nature of which I am wholly ignorant of, as a cause, and only perfectly apprehend it from its necessity and its facts.

This letter read in conjunction with his communication to Cottle and his intercourse with the unnamed Unitarian minister causes one to wonder whether, after all, the assertion of some of his biographers that Coleridge was "all things to all men," was not correct.

In 1810, Coleridge again succumbed to the domination of opium. He joined his wife and children at Keswick, remaining there for about five months, with a resultant restoration, said his wife, of good health, spirits, and humor. Relapse followed relapse, however, until 1813, by which time he had fallen into a deplorable mental, physical, and financial condition, which lasted until 1816, when he placed himself voluntarily under the care of Doctor Gillman at Highgate.

The break with Doctor Estlin came in 1813 and was directly the outcome of a lecture Coleridge delivered at Bristol at a time when his health was utterly broken and his nerves shattered. A numerous audience attended the lecture, in the course of which, Coleridge, in a reference to Paradise Regained, said that Milton had clearly represented Satan as a "sceptical Socinian." The offence was aggravated in a letter to Cottle when he said that Satan's faith somewhat exceeded that of the Socinians.

Remorse and despondency followed, as happen invariably after severe indulgence in opium, and, in December, 1813, Coleridge wrote to Joseph Wade of Bristol, asking him to request the prayers of Mr. Roberts, a Nonconformist minister of the same city, "for my infirm and wicked heart; that Christ may mediate to the Father to lead me to Christ, and give me a living instead of a reasoning faith." His last letter, written in an apologetic strain, to Doctor Estlin, is dated 9th April, 1814. Whether answered or not is unknown, but there does not appear to have been any resumption of friendship or communication, and three years later Doctor Estlin passed away. In the same year (1814, 26th June), Coleridge wrote to Joseph Wade:

In the one crime of OPIUM, what crime have I not made myself guilty of!-Ingratitude to my Maker! and to my benefactors injustice! and unnatural cruelty to my poor children!— self-contempt for my repeated promises-breach, nay, too often actual falsehood.

Coleridge maintained his bitter invective against Unitarianism to the end. Writing in March, 1832, two years before the final scene in his life, to Miss Lawrence, he described God, as imagined by the

Unitarians, to be a sort of law-giving God of gravitation, to whom prayer would be as idle as to the law of gravity. Yet in a letter to Doctor Estlin on 7th December, 1802, he rejoiced in the numerous congregations of Deists, whom he had heard, existed in America, for, he said, "surely religious Deism is infinitely nearer the religion of our Savior than the gross idolatory of Popery, or the more decorous, but not less genuine idolatry of a vast number of Protestants."

There is much to be said in extenuation of Coleridge's addiction to opium, from which he was never wholly emancipated. Neither idleness nor sensual indulgence, but disease, drove him to the habit. The post-mortem examination of his remains revealed the fact that he suffered from a complaint which, as was afterwards demonstrated in an article in the Lancet, explained both his indolence and opium habit, and his enfeeblement of will may be attributed to this physical defect.

CRIMINALITY AMONG THE JEWISH YOUTH

T

BY HAROLD BERMAN

WENTY-FIVE or thirty years ago, certain, if not most all, sections of the city of New York, were infested by gangs. The lower East Side, at about the time when the Russo-Polish immigrants came to settle in it in considerable numbers, as well as some other sections of the city-mostly of the water-front outposts or their vicinage-bristled with gangs of roughs, aggregations of youths of varying degrees of criminality and evil behavior, their misdeeds varying from the mere petty acts of hoodlumism and rowdiness, the disturbance of the peace-especially around the time of political campaigns and election days-to acts of robbery and occasional, if more or less rare, murder. Each section of the big city at the time spoken of boasted its own gangs; gangs that were characteristically its own, each one boasting a more-or-less locally or city-wide renowned leader, known for some distinctive characteristic or for certain acts of violence committed by him at some time or other in his career, either previous or subsequent to his assumption of the crown of leadership.

These gangs were exclusively Irish in their composition, both as to leadership as well as to their rank and file. To any one who is at all conversant with the city of New York, as it was constituted in those not so distant days, or to the one who will take the trouble of looking up the records of the police and the higher courts of the period with their rosters of arraignments and convictions, or who will glance through the files of New York City's newspapers of the same period, this contention will become a self-evident fact.

The very thought of looking for Jewish names in the ranks of the professional rowdy and the criminal of that day was as ludicrous as the thought of Antediluvian monsters stalking the sidewalks of Twentieth Century Broadway. For one thing, the Jew, whether of

the older or the younger generation, was but a recent arrival to these shores. He had just come, in his greatest numbers that is, from the teeming Ghettoes of the great Empire of the Czars, and was thoroughly docile and tractable, law-abiding and glad enough to be left alone. He still carried deeply craven in his inner being, and seared into his very soul, the memories of the persecutions that he and his had been subject to in his old home and hence was glad enough to be left alone. Indeed, he greatly feared these gangs and gangsters whether they operated individually or collectively, and the terror that their proximity struck into his heart was not the least one of the trials that he was called upon to endure during the early days of his sojourn in a strange land, adding not a little to the terrors of his already sorely tried existence.

Of late days, however, we are witnessing a phenomenon that is not only new and surprising as far as it appertains to the Jew's comparatively recent sojourn in this land, but marks a new departure in the race's entire millenial history. The reference here is to the outbreak of gangsterism in New York's Ghetto, as has been so sadly and repeatedly exemplified within very recent years. This is indeed a phenomenon that is not to be accounted for on the ordinary and hackneyed grounds upon which we usually base our theories and draw our deductions as to youthful delinquency and moral lapses.

A deeper probing into the soul of the people affected by this new evil, a painstaking study into its innate psychology, as well as the tragedy, or rather, the series of tragedies, through which it passed within recent years; the flames that have seared its flesh and tested its stamina-all these are the indispensable pre-requisites of him. who would sit in judgment upon a people at a most critical period in its history.

For, to understand the full and tragic significance of this new evil—and that it is new no one can gainsay—it is but necessary to recall the fact that but a brief while ago, as history is reckoned, the premeditated murder of a human being was an act utterly inconceivable to the Jewish mind. The Ghettoes of the world, real and metaphorical, were singularly free from deeds of violence. As a matter of course, we are treating here of deeds of violence that have their origin and are prompted by individual and subjective motives, and not of those that are the product of organized, commercialized and impersonal traffic such as we behold so recurrently and shockingly in our city of New York at the present day with its organized murder-gangs that murder for hire or a fee stipulated in advance. This