could not become a tradesman, because a tradesman ought to be a member of a Guild; as a general rule, no one could join a Guild, who was not a burgess; and the law forbade the Jews to become burgesses. But, even if the law allowed it, the Jews could not, without violating their religion, participate in the feasts and ceremonies of the Guilds. Nor were the handicrafts more accessible to the Jews; for most of them were in the hands of close corporations into which the despised Jew could not easily gain admittance. Moreover, an apprenticeship of many years was required, and apprenticeship necessitated residence in the master’s house. Now the Church forbade the Christians, on pain of excommunication, to receive Jews in their houses, and, therefore, a Jewish boy, even if his own parents’ prejudices and the scruples of the Synagogue were overcome, could not become a Christian’s apprentice. Agriculture was likewise out of the question, because, even if the landlords would have them, the Jews, being forbidden by their religion to take the oath of fealty, could not become villeins. The popular hatred of the Jew rendered the profession of peddler or carrier equally perilous. His Semitic face and conspicuous yellow badge, which he was compelled to wear from the age of seven, would have made him a target for insult and assault on every road and at every fair in the country. Thus the Jew, after two hundred years’ residence in England, found himself labouring under all the disabilities of an alien, the only occupation left open to him being that which foreign merchants were allowed to pursue--namely, the export trade in wool and corn; but for this occupation, limited at the best, a great capital was needed, and, therefore, after the recent sufferings of the race, few could find profit in it. For all these reasons, Edward’s alternative remained a dead letter, and, as the Jews could not suffer themselves to starve, usury continued rampant, and the second error proved worse than the first. The distemper was far too complex to be cured by Edward’s simple remedy. It might have been encouraged by impunity; it certainly was accentuated by severity. The money-lenders, no longer under official supervision, exceeded all bounds of extortion: the peril of detection had to be paid for. The demand for loans increased as the supply diminished, the rate of interest rose, and, as the transactions had to be kept secret, all sorts of subterfuges were resorted to: a bond was given for a multiple of the sum actually received, and the interest often figured under the euphemism of “gift” or “compensation for delay,” or, if the money-lender combined traffic in goods with traffic in money, the interest was paid in kind. It was contrary to common sense and human experience to expect that a royal statute should have prevailed over what really was an inevitable necessity, and the abuses that followed were only such as might have been anticipated in