After two generations of this, with the opening of the twentieth century those of the great territorial English families in which there was no Jewish blood were the exception. In nearly all of them was the strain more or less marked, in some of them so strong that though the name was still an English name and the traditions those of a purely English lineage of the long past, the physique and character had become wholly Jewish and the members of the family were taken for Jews whenever they travelled in countries where the gentry had not yet suffered or enjoyed this admixture. Specially Jewish institutions, such as Freemasonry (which the Jews had inaugurated as a sort of bridge between themselves and their hosts in the seventeenth century), were particularly strong in Britain, and there arose a political tradition, active, and ultimately to prove of great importance, whereby the British State was tacitly accepted by foreign governments as the official protector of the Jews in other countries. It was Britain which was expected to interfere, within the measure of her power, whenever a persecution of the Jews took place in the East of Christendom: to support the Jewish financial energies throughout the world, and to receive in return the benefit of that connection. We shall have a most imperfect picture of the causes which gradually made the Jews regard this country as their centre of action if we omit one essential point. England was secure. During the whole period which saw the rise of the Jews to eminence in this island and their ultimate alliance with its political and commercial system, English society enjoyed a profound peace. Save for the petty incidents of the '15 and '45 (the first of no effect south of the border, the second ephemeral and confined to the North), no hostilities took place upon English soil between the rebellion of Monmouth under James II and the bombarding of London by the Germans from the air during the late war. There has been (save for some quite insignificant local riots) complete security for property and especially for large property. There have been since the middle of the eighteenth century no confiscations, and of commercial fortunes none since the middle of the seventeenth: no invasion, no civil war, and therefore no loot: no personal danger from violence. Such conditions formed an environment ideal for the permanent establishment and rooting of Jewish power, and for the organization of a Jewish base.