uld crawl in. Our necks and wrists
especially seemed circled with rings of fire. Anything like the
number and voracity of the fleas of that 'happy village' I have
never, during a long and varied intimacy with the insect,
experienced."[67]

These experiences were made near the troglodyte village es-Sal; and as
Mr. Oliphant peeped into the subterranean dwellings and dark caves, with
a view to his colonization company, he exclaimed,

"Indeed, there is probably no country in the world where an
immigrant population would find such excellent shelter all ready
prepared for them, or where they could step into the identical
abodes which had been vacated by their occupants at least 1,500
years ago, and use the same doors and windows."[68]

It is just possible, however, that emigrants might not care to have
their necks and wrists circled with rings of fire, and their bodies
covered with swarms of loathsome insects, for the romantic delights of
living in underground dens that had not been occupied for 1,500 years.

Mr. Oliphant's scheme only contemplates Jewish emigrants, to whom such
conditions would not be altogether novel.

"I should not," he says, "expect men to come from England or
France, but from European and Asiatic Turkey itself, as well as
from Russia, Galicia, Roumania, Servia, and the Slav countries."

He has, however, his eye on the whole Jewish race throughout the world
when he says:--

"As the area of land which I should propose, in the first instance,
for colonization would not exceed a million, or, at most, a million
and a half acres, it would be hard if, out of nearly 7,000,000 of
people attached to it by the tradition of former possession, enough
could not be found to subscribe a capital of L1,000,000, or even
more, for its purchase and settlement, and if, out of that number,
a selection of emigrants could not be made, possessing sufficient
capital of their own to make them desirable colonists."[69]

This article is not a review of Mr. Oliphant's interesting book, and
therefore I shall not follow him into the details of his colonization
scheme, where he narrows it, first, to Oriental Jews exclusively, and
second to the elevation of such Jews into petty landlords.

"It has been objected," he says, "that the Jews are not
agriculturists, and that any attempts to develop the agricultural
resour