tion and rivalry in low greed. He is an alien of
spirit, whatever he may be in form; he sucks the blood of mankind, he
is not a man, sharing in no loves, sharing in no subjection of the
soul, he mocks it all. Is it not truth I speak, Pash?"

"Not exactly, Mordecai," said Pash, "if you mean that I think the worse
of myself for being a Jew. What I thank our fathers for is that there
are fewer blockheads among us than among other races. But perhaps you
are right in thinking the Christians don't like me so well for it."

"Catholics and Protestants have not liked each other much better," said
the genial Gideon. "We must wait patiently for prejudices to die out.
Many of our people are on a footing with the best, and there's been a
good filtering of our blood into high families. I am for making our
expectations rational."

"And so am I!" said Mordecai, quickly, leaning forward with the
eagerness of one who pleads in some decisive crisis, his long, thin
hands clasped together on his lap. "I, too, claim to be a rational Jew.
But what is it to be rational--what is it to feel the light of the
divine reason growing stronger within and without? It is to see more
and more of the hidden bonds that bind and consecrate change as a
dependent growth--yea, consecrate it with kinship: the past becomes my
parent and the future stretches toward me the appealing arms of
children. Is it rational to drain away the sap of special kindred that
makes the families of men rich in interchanged wealth, and various as
the forests are various with the glory of the cedar and the palm? When
it is rational to say, 'I know not my father or my mother, let my
children be aliens to me, that no prayer of mine may touch them,' then
it will be rational for the Jew to say, 'I will seek to know no
difference between me and the Gentile, I will not cherish the prophetic
consciousness of our nationality--let the Hebrew cease to be, and let
all his memorials be antiquarian trifles, dead as the wall-paintings of
a conjectured race. Yet let his child learn by rote the speech of the
Greek, where he abjures his fellow-citizens by the bravery of those who
fought foremost at Marathon--let him learn to say that was noble in the
Greek, that is the spirit of an immortal nation! But the Jew has no
memories that bind him to action; let him laugh that his nation is
degraded from a nation; let him hold the monuments of his law which
carried within its frame the breath of social ju