He--the ordinary Englishman--may be dimly conscious that the Jew is the one great exception to the general curse upon the sons of Adam, and that he alone eats bread, not in the sweat of his own face, but in the sweat of his neighbour’s face--like the German cuckoo, who does not colonize, but establishes himself in the colonies of other natives. He has perhaps been told that all the world over the Jew spurns the honest toil of the peasant and the day labourer; that in the new Jewry of Houndsditch and Petticoat Lane, in the Marais, in the Ghetto, in the Juden Strasse, and in the Hárat el Yahúd (Jewish quarters) of Mussulman cities, his sole business is _quocumque modo rem--sordid gains_--especially by money-lending, and by usury, which may not be practised upon a fellow Jew, but which, with the cleanest of consciences, is applied to the ruin of the Gentile. He has heard that where Saxon and Celt ply pick and pan, the Hebrew broker and pedlar buy up their gains and grow rich where the working-men starve in the midst of gold. He sees that the “Chosen People” will swarm over the world from California to Australia, wherever greed of gain induces them to travel. “To my mind,” says a popular writer, “there are few things so admirable and wonderful in this life as the ‘getting on,’ as it is vulgarly called, of the Hebrew race. For one of us who, by means of infinite wriggling, panting, toiling, struggling, and hanging on by his eyebrows, so to speak, to opportunity, ambitious to emerge from obscurity, and ascend to the topmost round of the ladder, there seems to be at least five hundred Caucasian Arabs who attain the desired altitude; ay, and who manage to avoid turning giddy and toppling over. Most Jews seem to rise, and the instances of a few going ‘to the utter bad,’ as the phrase runs, seem equally as rare. How often your successful Nazarene comes to grief! At the moment you think him Lord of All he is Master of Nothing.... Jews appear to keep what they have gotten; and, what is better, to get more, and keep _that_ too. They are not much given, I fancy, to experience the pangs of remorse; and I cannot well imagine a mad Jew. It must be something awful. On the whole, looking at the vast number of Christians I have known who from splendour have subsided into beggary, and the vast number of Hebrews I have watched advancing, not from mendicity--a Jew never begs, save from one of his own tribe, and then I suppose the transaction is more of the nature of a friendly loan, to be repaid with interest when brighter days arrive--but from extreme indigence to wealth and station, I incline to the opinion that Gentiles have a natural alacrity in sinking--look how heavy I can be--but that the Chosen People have as natural a tendency towards buoyancy. That young man with the banner in Mr. Longfellow’s ballad was, depend upon it, an Israelite of the Israelites; only I think the poet was wrong, as poets generally are, in his climax.