wise and practical counsels the wheels of government could not be kept in motion. This indispensable necessity of maintaining in positions of honor and power a class whose nominal disabilities degraded them below the legal status of cattle was a result of the illiterate and priest-ridden state of the Dark Ages. The cause of the universal prejudice existing against the Jews from time immemorial has been the subject of much speculation, but has never been definitely ascertained. That prejudice long antedates the Christian era. They were banished by the Egyptians, enslaved by the Persians, despised by the Greeks, persecuted by the Romans. So little were they esteemed by the latter, that during the wars with Hadrian four Jews were bartered for a modius of barley. A well-founded tradition, repeated time and again by classic historians, declared that they were expelled from Egypt for fear that the plague might be communicated by the loathsome diseases with which they were afflicted. In that country, as elsewhere subsequently, they were isolated from all other members of the community. Moses is designated by ancient writers as the “Chief of the Lepers.” It is well known that leprosy was first introduced into Italy by the soldiers of Pompey, who contracted it in Palestine. This awful malady was not only indigenous to the latter country, but was generally considered a morbid physiological condition peculiar to the Hebrew people, with whom, in fact, it was chronic and hereditary, and among whom it assumed its most malignant and appalling form.