all degrees, which naturally employs it to maintain its own dignity and privileged position. Towards one class of the population, and that a highly important and exceptional one, the Emperor's attitude of unprejudiced goodwill has never varied. Israelites form only a small proportion--about 1 per cent.--of the whole people, and are to be found in very large numbers only in Berlin and Frankfurt; but to their financial and commercial ability Germany owes a debt one may almost describe as incalculable. There is a strong national prejudice against them in all parts of the Empire, as there probably is in all countries, and it must be admitted that the manners and customs of the lower-class Jew, his unpleasant and insistent curiosity, his intrusiveness where he is not desired, his want of cleanliness, his sharpness at a bargain, his oily bearing to those he wishes to propitiate and his ruthless sweating of the worker in all fields when in his power, are all disagreeable personal qualities. There is also, as a concomitant of the nation's growth in wealth of every sort, and mostly perhaps to be found in the capital a class of Jewish parvenu, remarkable for snobbishness, ostentation, and affectation. But one must distinguish; and of a large percentage of the educated class of Jew in Germany it would be difficult to speak too highly. Germans may be the "salt of the earth," as the Emperor once told them they were, but Jewish talent can with quite as much, perhaps more, justice be called the salt of German prosperity. And not alone in the region of finance and commerce. Some of the best intellect, most of the leading enterprise in Germany, in all important directions, is Jewish. Many of her ablest newspaper proprietors and editors are Jews. Many of her finest actors and actresses are Jews and Jewesses. Many of her cleverest lawyers, doctors, and artists are Jews. The career of Herr Albert Ballin, the Jewish director of the Hamburg-Amerika line, the Emperor's friend, to whom Germany owes a great deal of her mercantile marine expansion, is a long romance illustrative of Jewish organizing power and success.