[8] This we gather from the reports of the General Board of Health on the epidemic cholera. In 1832 only 4 deaths were recorded out of the 3,000 Portuguese Jews, and in 1849 amongst the 20,000 then inhabiting London there were no more than 13, although the loss from cholera amounted to 12,837. This gives a proportion of 0·6 per 1,000, whilst the superintendent registrar assigns 1: 1,000 to Hampstead, 6: 1,000 to Whitechapel, 7: 1,000 to the City of London, 19: 1,000 to Shoreditch, and 29: 1,000 to Rotherhithe. [These figures are for the special cholera year 1832. Since then the visitations have been much less severe.] [9] [The work referred to is _Lebensdauer und Todesursachen 22 verschiedener Stände_. Frankfort, 1855.] [10] [These figures are for average years, and hence hold good now as then.] [11] [Author of the large history of the Jews in 5 vols. Rotterdam, 1707.] [12] There is another parasitic race, also of pure blood, but Indo-European, not Semitic, whose preservation appears almost as “providential” as that of the Jews, and whose union is even more exceptional because it is not bound either by revelation or indeed by any form of faith--the Gypsy. [13] Not to mention Wolff and Palgrave the travellers, and Monseigneur Bauer, Père Hermann, and Père Marie de Ratisbonne, the converts. CHAPTER II OPINION OF THE JEW IN ENGLAND Of all Europeans, the Englishman, who boasts of being a staunch friend to the people “scattered and peeled,” and whose confident ignorance and indiscriminate philanthropy are bestowed upon them equally with the African negro, knows least of the customs and habits of his _protégés_, and especially of those of Jews in foreign countries. The neglect of things near to us must be the reason why we know so little of the inner life of Jewry: there are, however, other concomitant causes. In our native land the Hebrew lives protected, and honoured, in fact, as one of ourselves. We visit him, we dine with him, and we see him at all times and places, except perhaps at the Sunday service. We should enjoy his society but for a certain coarseness of manner, and especially an offensive familiarity, which seems almost peculiar to him. We marvel at his talents, and we are struck by the adaptability and by the universality of his genius. We admire his patience, his steadfastness, and his courage, his military prowess, and his successful career in every post and profession--Statesman and Senior Wrangler, Poet and Literato, Jurist, Surgeon, and Physician, Capitalist, Financier, and Merchant, Philosopher and Engineer, in fact in everything that man can be. When we compare the Semitic Premier with his Anglo-Saxon rival, it is much to the advantage of the former: while jesting about the “Asian mystery,” we cannot but feel that there is something in the Asiatic which we do not expect, which eludes our ken, which goes beyond us.