How far the discipline of the Law actually produced the Chosen People postulated in its conferment is a subtle question for pragmatists. Mr. Lucien Wolf once urged that "the yoke of the Torah" had fashioned a racial aristocracy possessing marked biological advantages over average humanity, as well as sociological superiorities of temperance and family life. And indeed the statistics of Jewish vitality and brain-power, and even of artistic faculty, are amazing enough to invite investigation from all eugenists, biologists, and statesmen. But whether this general superiority--a superiority not inconsistent with grave failings and drawbacks--is due to the rigorous selection of a tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu maintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the people, or the people--precisely because of its greatness--made the Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial election to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic altruism. The old Hebrew writers indeed--when one considers the impress the Bible was destined to make on the faith, art, and imagination of the world--might well be credited with the intuition of genius in attributing to their people a quality of election. And the Jews of to-day in attributing to themselves that quality would have the ground not only of intuition but of history. Nevertheless that election is, even by Jewish orthodoxy, conceived as designed solely for world-service, for that spiritual mission for which Israel when fashioned was exiled and scattered like wind-borne seeds, and of the consummation of which his ultimate repatriation and glory will be but the symbol. It is with _Alenu_ that every service ends--the prayer for the coming of the Kingdom of God, "when Thou wilt remove the abominations from the earth, and the idols will be utterly cut off, when the world will be perfected under the Kingdom of the Almighty and all the children of flesh will call upon Thy name, when Thou wilt turn unto Thyself all the wicked of the earth.... In that day the Lord shall be One and His name One." Israel disappears altogether in this diurnal aspiration.