=4. What became of the Country and the People.=――Palestine was parcelled out into lots; parts of the land were given as loot to the Roman soldiers, and parts were sold to the highest bidders. Many of the people were slaughtered outright; many were reserved to be killed more artistically in gladiatorial shows, or in combat with wild beasts. Some of them were carried off into slavery, and some remained as slaves on the soil. The slave markets of the world were glutted, and Jewish captives became a drug in the marts. As citizens of a separate state the Jews ceased to exist. They had no longer a national centre. Long before the destruction of Jerusalem the dispersion of the nation had begun, but now it was complete, and, so to speak, official. There had been Jews in Alexandria from the time of the Ptolemies, and in Rome from the days of Pompey; they were to be found at this date in every place important enough to be remembered, throughout the wide Roman dominions. There were numbers of Jews in Antioch, in Greece, in Italy, on the north coasts of Africa, and in the sunny islands of the Mediterranean. But each and all of these dispersed and separated Jews had hitherto turned in loyal thought to Jerusalem, and a self-imposed tax from ‘him that was near and from him that was far off’ had been regularly forwarded to Jerusalem every year towards the support of the Temple. This very tax was now used as a means to crush the nationality out of the people. Titus decreed that a like sum should henceforward be contributed by every adult Jew in his dominions towards the support of the temple of Jupiter. =5. Salvage.=――To put up tamely with preventable evils is only less weak than to fret unceasingly over unpreventable ones. The Jews, at this crisis in their history, fell into neither error. They realised the wreck, and looked bravely round to see what could be rescued. Their country was gone, their nationality was threatened, their religion was in danger. Their ‘Law’ remained to them. They made a raft of that, and saved Judaism.