The daylight of a tolerant and liberal administration has chased the ghosts of the past out of Galicia. Even the most orthodox followers of the Synagogue are fast forgetting their ancient wrongs and prejudices. In olden times Jewish boys on their birth were imprisoned by their parents within a pair of stays, laced tighter and tighter every year, that the child’s chest might remain too narrow for military service--a suicidal training, the evil consequences of which are to this day visible in the form of chest diseases and consumption among the Galician Jews. But the practice has long been abandoned. Humaner conditions in the army, and the spread of education among the Austro-Polish Jews, have reconciled them to the service, and now one half of the Galicia contingent of the Austro-Hungarian Army consists of Jewish recruits. The Empire has gained loyal defenders, and the Jews the benefit of a disciplinary and patriotic education. In Italy the Papal States were the last retreat of the Middle Age. The Holy Office had disappeared from Parma, Tuscany, and Sicily in the eighteenth century, but in Rome it continued to flourish; and where the Inquisition held sway there was no peace for Israel. ♦1809♦ The Roman Jews, liberated by Napoleon, were thrust back into slavery after his fall. Then the reign of darkness was restored under the double crown of Dogmatism and Despotism. The temporal power enforced the doctrines of the spiritual, and the spiritual was abused to sanctify the decrees of the temporal. How could the lot of the infidel Jew be other than what it was? The Roman Ghetto continued to be the home of squalor and sorrow far into the nineteenth century. As late as 1847 decrees were issued forbidding the inmates to quit their cage, the Jews were still compelled to hear sermons at church, and everything that bigotry could do was done to bring about their conversion.