most marked character in the city of New York. To know why these Jews have come is to look into racial, political, and economic conditions throughout the great empire of the Czar.
To study the main routes of communication in a region like our Middle States is to gain an insight into the relations of physical conditions to historical development that will be of no little use in the study of other origins and remoter periods. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance, for instance, of the part that the Hudson River has played in the history of the Western Hemisphere since its discovery and settlement by the Europeans. The route by way of the Hudson, Lake George and Lake Champlain afforded in the early times the one interior passage to the St. Lawrence from the settlements on our seaboard.
Much of the land adjacent to the river was granted in large tracts under the Dutch system to patroons, so called, who were virtually feudal lords. Upon some of these tracts there still survive various peculiarities of the feudal system of land tenure. To know something of what feudalism meant as respects the control
