They were denied all healthy and ordinary ambitions, and thus money-making became to them an interesting and sometimes an absorbing pursuit, even when it was not; which it mostly was, a painful and sordid necessity. Jews ceased to be producers; the Land and the Book seemed alike to be closed against them. They developed into the chief traders and financiers of the Middle Ages, ranging from pedlars and hawkers to contractors of State loans. =5. The Slave Trade.=――The incessant warfare, and the imperfect civilisation, of these early centuries made of men and women and children a recognised article of commerce. Selling people into slavery has a dreadful sound, but in those days it was not quite so dreadful a thing, nor even so avoidable a one, as it would be in these. Great tracts of cultivated land were constantly being laid waste; what was to be done with the vanquished dwellers thereon? In that rough and ready system of waging war, it was centuries too soon for trying any of our modern methods of treaties of peace or diplomatic settlement. The hostile inhabitants of a conquered state had to be exterminated or to be rendered harmless. It really resolved itself with the victors into a question of slaughter or of slavery. And of that hard choice, slavery was possibly the less uncomfortable fate to the conquered, whilst to the conquerors it was decidedly the more economical arrangement, and on the whole, perhaps, the more humane; for, transformed from enemies into property, the slaves were pretty sure of fair treatment from buyer and from seller both, and their chief hardship would be the chance of being sold in separate lots, and of being divided from their families as well as from their country.