from the vulgar charge that they are cheaters; that each and all will always try, right or wrong, to secure the best of any bargain into which a poor Gentile may enter with them. Those whom the commercial standing of the Jews, here and elsewhere, has not yet cured of this slanderous prejudice will not be converted by my pleading. Envy is an incurable disease; jealousy makes blind, and the common saying is surely true, that none are so blind as those who will not see. But neither have I the least desire to hide or gloss over our real failings and shortcomings. Those who cannot rest on their own real merits and accept the blame for their undeniable demerits must not dare to challenge the judgment of the world. The Jew does dare it, and all he asks of his critics is fairness, impartiality, justice. What I have said to his praise and for his defense was intended solely to assist the fairminded reader in forming a just opinion of an agitation which in Europe embitters, cripples, and darkens thousands of lives, which, under better treatment, would be spent in contentment and general usefulness. It is for this purpose only that I will briefly add two more traits of the Jews, equally valuable and undeniable. One is their charity; they care for their poor, their sick, their aged, if destitute, as the numerous institutions prove, found in every place where they dwell in sufficient number to maintain them. Ungrudgingly they assume the heavy burdens which this "exclusiveness" imposes upon them. Blame them for it who may; the right-minded will not, especially when assured that this feeling of pity is not the privilege of the well-to-do among them only. The working classes have always something to spare from their scanty earnings for "Z'dakah," the religious term in common use for charity, which, significantly enough, in biblical Hebrew means "justice." The idea that charity is an essential part of worship has been bred into them by long tradition, and continues to be regarded as such, wherever rabbinical Judaism survives in full force. From childhood every Jew knows the saying of Simon the Just, one of the last men of the Great Synagogue:-- "The whole world rests on these three pillars; Law, Worship, and Charity." The other trait is their zeal in the education of their children.