And beneath all these surface ruffles was the steady silent drift of the new generation away from the old landmarks.  The synagogue did not attract; it spoke Hebrew to those whose mother-tongue was English; its appeal was made through channels which conveyed nothing to them; it was out of touch with their real lives; its liturgy prayed for the restoration of sacrifices which they did not want and for the welfare of Babylonian colleges that had ceased to exist.  The old generation merely believed its beliefs; if the new as much as professed them, it was only by virtue of the old home associations and the inertia of indifference.  Practically, it was without religion.  The Reform Synagogue, though a centre of culture and prosperity, was cold, crude and devoid of magnetism.  Half a century of stagnant reform and restless dissolution had left Orthodoxy still the Established Doxy.  For, as Orthodoxy evaporated in England, it was replaced by fresh streams from Russia, to be evaporated and replaced in turn, England acting as an automatic distillery.  Thus the Rabbinate still reigned, though it scarcely governed either the East End or the West.  For the East End formed a Federation of the smaller synagogues to oppose the dominance of the United Synagogue, importing a minister of superior orthodoxy from the Continent, and the Flag had powerful leaders on the great struggle between plutocracy and democracy, and the voice of Mr. Henry Goldsmith was heard on behalf of Whitechapel.  And the West, in so far as it had spiritual aspirations, fed them on non-Jewish literature and the higher thought of the age.  The finer spirits, indeed, were groping for a purpose and a destiny, doubtful even, if the racial isolation they perpetuated were not an anachronism.  While the community had been battling for civil and religious liberty, there had been a unifying, almost spiritualizing, influence in the sense of common injustice, and the question cui bono had been postponed.  Drowning men do not ask if life is worth living.  Later, the Russian persecutions came to interfere again with national introspection, sending a powerful wave of racial sympathy round the earth.  In England a backwash of the wave left the Asmonean Society, wherein, for the first time in history, Jews gathered with nothing in common save blood—­artists, lawyers, writers, doctors—­men who in pre-emancipation times might have become Christians like Heine, but who now formed an effective protest against the popular conceptions of the Jew, and a valuable antidote to the disproportionate notoriety achieved by less creditable types.  At the Asmonean Society, brilliant free-lances, each thinking himself a solitary exception to a race of bigots, met one another in mutual astonishment.  Raphael alienated several readers by uncompromising approval of this characteristically modern movement.  Another symptom of the new intensity of national brotherhood was the attempt towards amalgamating the Spanish and German communities, but brotherhood broke down under the disparity of revenue, the rich Spanish sect displaying once again the exclusiveness which has marked its history.