This authority expresses the conviction that, as time goes on, the Jew will develop into a successful agriculturist, provided he is allowed to compete on fair terms with the Christian farmers.[193] An impartial examination of these contradictory opinions seems to lead to the conclusion that the Jew, by nature and the education of two thousand years, is too good a tradesman to make a good husbandman. He is too keen-witted, too enterprising, too ambitious to find adequate satisfaction in the slow and solitary culture of the soil. In this respect the modern Jew is like the modern Greek. The drudgery of field work repels him. The tedium of country life depresses him. “No profit goes where no pleasure is ta’en.” It is in the bustle of the market-place, where man meets man, where wit is pitted against wit, and the intellect is sharpened on the whetstone of competition, that his restless soul finds its highest gratification and most congenial employment. He is a born townsman and a born traveller. He has none of the stolid endurance of the earth-born. Although he can excel in most pursuits, there is apparently one thing beyond the reach of his versatility. He cannot dig. The Russian peasant under normal conditions is the reverse of all this: indolent, intemperate, improvident, unintelligent, and unambitious, he lives entirely in the present, unhaunted by regrets of the past, unharassed by plans for the future, and blissfully unaware of the existence of any world beyond the world which his eye can see--a very type of the earth-born, such as England knew him in the glorious days of Chivalry and Wat Tyler. To such a race even less formidable and foreign a competitor than the unbelieving Jew would appear a monster of iniquity. And yet, there is abundant evidence to prove that it is not the Russian peasant’s instinctive antipathy which is primarily responsible for the sufferings of the Jew. The Russian Jew, owing to his difference from the Russian Christian in race, religion, temperament and mode of living, is by the latter regarded with contempt and prejudice. These feelings, however, are not the only causes of persecution. Formerly, as we have seen, the Jews were reproached with excessive addiction to trade in liquor, whereby, it was alleged, they ruined the peasantry in health, purse and morals. This charge, whatever its value may have once been, can no longer be brought against the Jews; for the Russian Government, since it established a monopoly of spirits, has become the exclusive public-house keeper in the Empire. The charge of usury still remains. But it can easily be proved that in many districts the usurer is the powerful Russian landlord and not the Jew. As a distinguished Russian Liberal has appositely remarked, “the usurer must needs be a wealthy person--a poor devil like the Jewish colonist settled amidst the ‘Little Russian’ peasantry may possibly long for credit; he certainly is not in a position to give it.”[194]