at the same time
there was a sort of satisfaction that this embezzlement combined with
treachery and even bordering on sacrilege, had been committed by a Jew.
In order to understand this feeling it is necessary to be acquainted
with the state of public opinion regarding the Jews both great and
small. As we have had occasion to say in this history, the universally
detested and all powerful financial caste was composed of Christians and
of Jews. The Jews who formed part of it and on whom the people poured
all their hatred were the upper-class Jews. They possessed immense
riches and, it was said, held more than a fifth part of the total
property of Penguinia. Outside this formidable caste there was a
multitude of Jews of a mediocre condition, who were not more loved than
the others and who were feared much less. In every ordered State, wealth
is a sacred thing: in democracies it is the only sacred thing. Now
the Penguin State was democratic. Three or four financial companies
exercised a more extensive, and above all, more effective and continuous
power, than that of the Ministers of the Republic. The latter were
puppets whom the companies ruled in secret, whom they compelled by
intimidation or corruption to favour themselves at the expense of the
State, and whom they ruined by calumnies in the press if they remained
honest. In spite of the secrecy of the Exchequer, enough appeared to
make the country indignant, but the middle-class Penguins had, from the
greatest to the least of them, been brought up to hold money in great
reverence, and as they all had property, either much or little, they
were strongly impressed with the solidarity of capital and understood
that a small fortune is not safe unless a big one is protected. For
these reasons they conceived a religious respect for the Jews' millions,
and self-interest being stronger with them than aversion, they were as
much afraid as they were of death to touch a single hair of one of the
rich Jews whom they detested. Towards the poorer Jews they felt less
ceremonious and when they saw any of them down they trampled on them.
That is why the entire nation learnt with thorough satisfaction that the
traitor was a Jew. They could take vengeance on all Israel in his person
without any fear of compromising the public credit.

That Pyrot had stolen the eighty thousand trusses of hay nobody
hesitated for a moment to believe. No one doubted because the general
ignorance in which ever