ict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury.
The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions
by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience.
It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money
methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred
of their religion. We might as well say that people only protect
the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly
condemned fortune-telling. It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain
that Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender;
or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods.
It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a child
as stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers' meeting.
It is to complain of facts and probabilities. There may be good gipsies;
there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies;
many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised a
certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany.
But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect
for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can
be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury. Above all, there is one
other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point.
It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not
become national merely by becoming a political part of any nation.
We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham,
when their caravans stood on Clapham Common.

But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoples
fails in the presence of the greater problem. Here again even the attempt
at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique. The gipsies do
not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes,
and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English
merely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America.
But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal.
His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and name
of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham. The municipal authorities generally
notice the wheels attached to the new cottage, and therefore do not
fall into the error. The gipsy may halt in a particular parish,
but he is not as a rule immediately made a parish councillor.
The cases in which a travelling