“Then he began his classifications again: all bankers were Jews, likewise brokers, most of the great financiers,--and that was to be expected; the majority of barons, also baronets; they had got possession of the press, they were getting into politics; they had forced their entrance into the army and navy; they had made their way into the cabinets of Europe and become prime ministers; they had slipped into diplomacy and become ambassadors. But a short time ago they were packed into the Ghetto: now they inhabited palaces, the most aristocratic quarters, and were members of the most exclusive clubs. A few years ago they could not own land; they were acquiring it by purchase and mortgage in every part of Europe, and buying so many old estates in England that they owned the larger part of several counties. “Mr. Lowell said more, much more, to illustrate the ubiquity, the universal ability of the Hebrew, and gave examples and statistics for every statement, however astonishing, drawn from his inexhaustible information. He was conscious of the sort of infatuation which possessed him, and his dissertation alternated between earnestness and drollery; but whenever a burst of laughter greeted some new development of his theme, although he joined in it, he immediately returned to the charge with abundant proof of his paradoxes. Finally he came to a stop, but not to a conclusion, and as no one else spoke, I said, ‘And when the Jews have got absolute control of finance, the army and navy, the press, diplomacy, society, titles, the government, and the earth’s surface, what do you suppose they will do with them and with us?’ ‘That,’ he answered, turning towards me, and in a whisper audible to the whole table, ‘that is the question which will eventually drive me mad.’” On the return of the Lowells from Paris to London they moved into a larger and more commodious house still in Lowndes Square, but No. 31. “We have been having a mild winter,” Lowell writes to Mr. Field, 19 January, 1884, “with only a couple of days or so of frost thus far. Everything is looking as green as summer (by everything I mean the grass in the Parks) and the thrushes are using up all their best songs before the curtain of spring rises. The Season hasn’t begun yet, but I am dining out more or less as usual. Fanny goes too sometimes, but can’t stand much of it. You will have seen that I have resigned my rectorship, but I was at once chosen president of the Birmingham and Midland Institute so that I might have another chair to sit down in.”