Their opulence and their magnificence surpassed imagination, and aroused against them fanatical adversaries. We know the history of that famous Bernardin de Feltre, who carried his enthusiasm so far as to preach a crusade against them, and who on every occasion showed himself their most implacable enemy. He pursued them everywhere as usurers thirsting for the blood of the people, and, to ruin their establishments, he conceived the idea of opposing them by the formation of those houses of loaning on pledges, which are called _monts-de-piete._ At the beginning, everything was free in them, and the sums lent were without interest. Moreover, their success was prodigious, and most of the cities of Italy had their _monts-de-piete_, which were one day to surpass in usurious exactions the boldest operations of the Jews.... However these _monts-de-piete_ could not fill the place of the establishments of the Jews, and this circumstance proves with what shrewdness the latter had truly divined the wants of the money circulation. Although _monts-de-piete_ loaned money almost without interest, the formalities which it was necessary to undergo in order to have a right to their help, the inevitable delays in their administration, the necessity of proving the legitimate possession of the articles pledged, and above all, the obligation on the part of depositors to make known their names, soon kept away borrowers, who could obtain funds at any time, in secret and without formalities, from the Jewish bankers. Rich and poor, lords and villeins, hastened to them, and their credit was so great at Leghorn, in the times of the Medicis, that the saying became proverbial: "_It is better to beat the Grand-duke than a Jew_." Pope Sixtus Fifth had opened again to them all the sources of wealth which his predecessors had closed; their goods were even exempt from every toll, the _sacra monte della pieta_ ceased to compete with them, when the Christians in charge had surpassed the abuses of their rivals. After ten years of its existence, the _monts-de-piete_ had become what they are to-day, open pits under the steps of misfortune rather than asylums to escape it.... Everything then seems to warrant the belief that the Jews exercise a notable influence on the course of political economy in Europe, by keeping in charge, in the midst of feudal anarchy, the commercial traditions destined to become perfected and refined in the atmosphere of the fifteenth century. It is to the persecutions of which they were victims that we are indebted for the first attempts at credit and the system of circulation. They alone, perhaps, by concentrating on trade in gold and silver