e by
hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was a disaster so crushing that
its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day, more than
three thousand years after the event.

Is it presumably that the eye of Egypt was upon Joseph the foreign Jew
all this time? I think it likely. Was it friendly? We must doubt it. Was
Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long in
Egypt? and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to express
that character--like Shylock's? It is hardly to be doubted. Let us
remember that this was centuries before the Crucifixion?

I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later and refer to a remark
made by one of the Latin historians. I read it in a translation many
years ago, and it comes back to me now with force. It was alluding to
a time when people were still living who could have seen the Saviour in
the flesh. Christianity was so new that the people of Rome had hardly
heard of it, and had but confused notions of what it was. The substance
of the remark was this: Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through
error, they being 'mistaken for Jews.'

The meaning seems plain. These pagans had nothing against Christians,
but they were quite ready to persecute Jews. For some reason or other
they hated a Jew before they even knew what a Christian was. May I not
assume, then, that the persecution of Jews is a thing which antedates
Christianity and was not born of Christianity? I think so. What was the
origin of the feeling?

When I was a boy, in the back settlements of the Mississippi Valley,
where a gracious and beautiful Sunday school simplicity and practicality
prevailed, the 'Yankee' (citizen of the New England States) was hated
with a splendid energy. But religion had nothing to do with it. In
a trade, the Yankee was held to be about five times the match of the
Westerner. His shrewdness, his insight, his judgment, his knowledge, his
enterprise, and his formidable cleverness in applying these forces were
frankly confessed, and most competently cursed.

In the cotton States, after the war, the simple and ignorant Negroes
made the crops for the white planter on shares. The Jew came down in
force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro's wants on
credit, and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro's share
of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one. Before
long, the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtfu