The English Rothschilds of every generation have found opportunities of performing private not less than public kindnesses. In spite of, or rather perhaps because of this, they have wounded many susceptibilities, for there may be an insolence of neediness not less than of wealth. Fairness, however, requires the admission that the successive representatives of the great Semitic house in respect of the performance of the duties of citizenship as well as in the wise, not less than the beneficent use of wealth, have set an example to the fellow countrymen of their adoption in general, and to their financial rivals in particular. The employment of great wealth in accordance with the principles of magnificence and of taste was esteemed so highly by the cultivated Greeks of old as to receive from Aristotle a concrete illustration in his category of virtuous characters. The same tradition was preserved and exemplified in those republics of mediæval Italy that wore the closest resemblances to the older democracies of Hellas which history records. It was not unknown in England at that period when London was to the Englishman what Florence had been to the Florentine under the Medici, or, at an earlier age, what the City of the Violet Crown had been to the contemporary of Pericles. A similar sense of the public usefulness and patriotic obligations of great wealth animated the citizens of London under our own Edwards, and had previously found many modes of effective expression under Elizabeth. Those were 'the gorgeous days' in which the trader of one of the great chartered companies in the Indies or across the Atlantic, having made some exceptionally successful venture, on returning safely to his native land, and to the township which had been his cradle, was wont to testify his gratitude to Providence by embellishing the place of his birth with buildings or gardens, with galleries or terraces, many of which, as in the case of the gifts of Sir Thomas Gresham, the first of the great loan negotiators, endure to this day, not only in the college which bears his name, but in the Royal Exchange. By no family, not of English birth; by few Englishmen themselves, either under Queen Victoria or her predecessors, have the public and national responsibilities imposed by financial success, or by hereditary millions, on their possessors been recognized so frankly, or been illustrated with so happy and impressive a blend of splendour and propriety, as by the descendents of the bankers of the Princes of Hesse-Cassel who in the first days of this century issuing from their natal judengasse at Frankfort established themselves in England, and at the same time, or shortly thereafter, fixed their emporia in the great Continental capitals as well.