but in the producing and perfecting of every article, then known, which could contribute to the pleasure of their luxurious lords. For these unhappy laborers, whose tasks each year became more arduous, and whose aspirations for liberty, cherished during many generations, were now destroyed, the prospect of relief from their unsupportable burdens seemed absolutely hopeless. Inferior in numbers to these two classes of agricultural serfs, and the individuals condemned by the accident of birth, or the process of law, to perpetual bondage, but vastly superior to them in intelligence, in shrewdness, and in all the arts of deceit, were the Jews. A sweeping decree of the Seventeenth Council of Toledo had confiscated their possessions and sentenced them to servitude. A hundred thousand of these sectaries, in whose breasts rankled a spirit of fierce and sullen hatred, born of hostility handed down for ages, and aggravated by a system of repression scarcely justifiable even by the sternest demands of political necessity, constituted an element of a far more dangerous character than all of the others whose machinations and discontent had undermined the fabric of the Visigothic empire. The national sentiment of superiority--born of theocratic government, of the claims of an arrogant priesthood, of the alleged favor of the Almighty, and of the traditions of three thousand years--was then, as now, all-powerful in the minds of the Jewish people. The defective annals of that age have failed to furnish us with data by which we can determine with what degree of strictness the laws against the Hebrews were enforced. It is probable, however, that in the cities, where a higher condition of intelligence existed and more correct ideas of justice obtained, observance of these inhuman edicts was frequently evaded. In the villages and hamlets the fanaticism and jealousy of the peasantry undoubtedly inflicted every hardship and indignity upon the Jews. In vain might the favored steward or counsellor of the noble, who still retained his residence in the palace, and continued to supply by his own talents and experience the deficiencies produced by his employer’s sloth and incapacity, attempt to alleviate the wretchedness of his countrymen. With the ignorant rabble, the possession of wealth and the exertion of political power by heretics were always unpardonable crimes. The clergy, on all occasions, for ends of their own, fomented the popular discontent, lauded this cruel policy as acceptable to God, and by every device sought to perpetuate the ancient antagonism of the Aryan and Semitic races, in which is to be sought one cause of the irrational and widely-diffused prejudice against the Jew. This feeling was also intensified by the current tradition that, during the reign of Leovigild, the Hebrews had, with unconcealed alacrity, aided the heterodox clergy in persecuting members of the Roman Catholic communion. Under these circumstances, too much importance cannot