The Jews devote themselves almost exclusively to the industries, and for this they suffer much. Commerce is not safe. The feudal lords descend from their fortresses to pillage the merchant's goods. The highways are besieged by licensed robbers, who confiscate the merchandise, murder the owners, or sell them as slaves, or exact enormous ransoms. Might makes right, and the most powerful are the most distinguished for their unscrupulous robberies. Their castles, erected on almost inaccessible heights among the pathless woods, become the secure receptacles of predatory bands, who spread terror over the country and make traffic and enterprise insecure and next to impossible. And as it is on land so it is at sea, where a vessel is never secure from an attack of the pirates, and where neither restitution nor punishment of the criminals is obtained from governments, which sometimes fear the plunderer and sometimes connive at the offense. The political state of Europe we find still worse. The word _liberty_ has not yet found its way into the dictionaries of the people. By far the greater part of society is everywhere bereaved of its personal liberty. Everyone that is not Noble is a slave. Warfare is the rule of the day. The Church tramples upon kings and nobles; these, in their turn, such is the prestige of the feudal system, tyrannize over the next lower order, the next lower order apes the example of its superior upon its inferior, and so on from lower to lower caste, till the lowest, the peasants, who have sunk into a qualified slavery called serfdom. The fight for supremacy between Church and State, the dreadful oppression of the several orders of feudalism, convulses society with their perennial feuds, the pride of the countries are either cruelly butchered or employed more frequently in laying waste the fields of their rivals, or putting the destructive firebrand, or the ruthless sword upon the prosperity of their foe, than improving their own. Let this report, meager as it is, suffice. The ignorance and misery and suffering and cruelties that abound everywhere are too revolting to tempt a longer stay. Like Ajax, we pray for light. Away from the jaws of darkness. Ye sailors, ho! furl your sails, raise the anchor, clear the harbor. And thou goodly vessel, staunch and strong, hie thee straight across the foaming deep. And thou, O Aeolus, blow cheerily and lustily thy southern winds upon us. And thou, O Neptune, speed thou our course, haste us back again to fair Andalusia, to beauteous Cordova, for there is no spot on earth like Cordova, "the city of the seven gates," "the tent of Islam," "the abode of the learned," "the meeting place of the eminent," the city of parks and palaces, aqueducts and public baths, the city of chivalrous knights and enchanting ladies.