ble ambitions they haunted the obscurer byways
of industry; they were to be found in many occupations which sharpen
the intellect but blunt the moral sense, and they threw themselves
passionately into the acquisition of wealth and of secret power.
Exposed for generations, even in lands where they were not more
seriously persecuted, to constant insult and contempt, they often lost
their self-respect and learned to acquiesce tamely in what another
race would resent. Slavish conditions produced, as they always do,
slavish characteristics, and, as is always the case, those
characteristics did not at once disappear when the conditions that
produced them had altered.

M. Leroy-Beaulieu has dwelt with much force on this subject, and he
ascribes considerable weight to the fact that the Jews have been
wholly outside the system of feudalism and chivalry in which the
modern conception of honour was chiefly formed. Perhaps the Jew might
retort with some justice, that he has had at least the compensating
moral advantage of having derived no part of his notions of right and
wrong from a Church in which such an institution as the Spanish
Inquisition was deemed a holy thing.

Defects of another kind have contributed largely to his unpopularity.
Great as is the power of assimilation which the Jewish race possesses,
the charm and grace of manner seem to have been among the qualities
they most slowly and most imperfectly acquire. It is natural that men
who have been excluded from honours but not from wealth should value
money and the ostentatious display of riches more than their
neighbours. In the professions in which the Jews chiefly excel, men
rise most rapidly from low origin and culture to conspicuous wealth.
Direct money-making has some tendency to materialise and lower the
character, and Jews have been for generations prominent in occupations
which do much to impair those delicacies of feeling on which the charm
of manner largely depends. Besides this, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly
remarks, though the oldest of the cultured races they are a race of
_parvenus_ in the good society of Europe. In nearly all countries they
have till very recently been excluded from the kind of society and
from the kind of education in which the best manners are formed. The
exaggerations of bad taste; the love of the loud, the gaudy, the
ostentatious, and the meretricious; the awkwardness of men who are ill
at ease in an unaccustomed sphere, who have not