balanced by the gain of some 30,000 Algerian ones; for in 1870 the Jews of Algiers became, in a body, naturalised Frenchmen, and are proving themselves excellent and enlightened subjects of France. =5. In Italy.=――In Italy, the Popes personally were, as a rule, mild in their treatment of the Jewish race. At the coronation of each new Pope the Jews of Rome had to offer the Holy Father a scroll of the Law, which the Pontiff would take in his hand, and sadly remarking, ‘Your Law is good, but you understand it not,’ would return to them, turning his back on the deputation as he did so. This old custom, somewhat humiliating in its form, and which can be traced back so far as the twelfth century, remained in force until our own times, as if to remind Jews that they were accounted heretics; but with this exception, and with only a very occasional baptism effected by force or by stratagem, there was little done to bring home the fact to them. In the Middle Ages, as we have seen, the Popes had small need for robbing Jews in the name of religion. They had all Christendom to draw on for revenue, and when the period of paying for indulgences and dispensations had passed away, the period of licensed plundering and proselytising was passing too. And many of the later Popes were learned and enlightened men, who were humane by nature as well as by habit. The downfall of Napoleon caused, for a time, a cloud to spread over that dawn of wider liberty which had broken with the Revolution. Once more, and until the year 1848, the Jews in the Papal dominions were shut up in their ghetto, and in Rome, they were not altogether emancipated, till 1870. From 1848, however, their position throughout Italy steadily, if somewhat slowly, improved. Since 1859, the Jews in Tuscany and Lombardy have been emancipated; since 1861, in Naples and Sicily; since 1866, in Venice; and since 1870, in the capital. At the present time, in all the Italian dominions, Jews are in possession of civil and religious rights. =6. In Spain and Portugal.=――In 1821, Portugal opened her gates again to her long-expelled Jews. At the consecration service of the first reopened synagogue in Lisbon there was a curious sight. Members of what had always been accounted Catholic families hurried up from the interior of the country to take part in the ceremony. What could these Catholics want in a Jewish place of worship? thought the authorities. The mystery was soon explained. The strangers proved to be Marannos, who, from generation to generation for 300 years, had worn a disguise, and were now anxious to cast it off, and to take upon themselves once again the ‘inheritance of Jacob.’ Spain held longer than Portugal to the old bad policy, but in 1868 she, too, annulled the decree which kept Jews from her shores.