the Christians that notion, too, stays. And it was said, that they outraged and defiled the sacred wafer, by sprinkling it with blood and beating it in a mortar. No charge against them was too frivolous or too foolish to be believed.

It is wonderful that, through so many persecutions, the race should have continued to grow and thrive, to lay up goods and money, illustrating always the proverb, "as rich as a Jew," making itself essential to the prosperity and progress and good order of the states and cities that dealt with it so harshly and ungratefully. Stobbe is not unwilling to admit, that some of the Popes were more humane than their Christian subjects in the treatment of the unfortunate Hebrews, and that some of the kings guaranteed rights to a people who had no rights that Christians were bound to respect. They came back to the cities from which they were driven out; and, excepting the city of Nuremberg, there was hardly any important city from which they were finally banished. In an appendix to Stobbe's work, is a curious chapter on the "Privileges" of the Jews, a gleam of light in the prevailing darkness. In the thirteenth century, the Dukes of Austria and the Emperors of Germany were disposed almost to favor Israel at the expense of their Christian vassals. There are thirty-one items in the list of favors which Duke Frederic of Austria grants to the Jews in his dominion. A Jew then had all the rights of a Christian, and even more. He could have his own tribunals, in which a Christian had no right to meddle or to testify. He could have his own schools, and enjoy his own worship unmolested. If a Christian struck a Jew, his hand should be cut off for the offence. No Jewish child should be baptized without the full and free consent of parents. A debt to a Jew was as valid as any debt, and could not be evaded on the plea of usury. These privileges, however, belong chiefly to the thirteenth century. After that, the times of bitterness came again, and the good-will of the former emperors was forgotten. It is a little singular, that the time of greatest toleration to the Jews coincided with the time of greatest prosperity to the Church.

C. H. B.

POLITICS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE.

THE Eastern Question is the bête-noir of European politics; and it will continue to be so as long as the policy of external aggrandizement prevails over that of internal moral development. It is a question which statesmen avoid: for all possible solutions of it threaten the

*

equilibrium of the existing political system, and the disturbance of that means to them confusion and anarchy and civil death; and it is a question which journalists discuss with more than their usual reckless flippancy and audacious ignorance. The creation, therefore, in Europe of a right public sentiment, which is but another term for the enlightenment of the general conscience, is difficult, almost hopeless. In this country, however, where no direct personal interest, so to speak, is involved in the consideration of the subject, we may reasonably expect a clearer, juster, and more philosophical conception of the whole question, in all its manifold relations and all its endless issues. The two pamphlets undernoted, by Mr. Rangabé, the present scholarly and able Greek Minister at Washington, point the way to that solution of it which is likely to engage more and more the public attention as the only permanent one. Turkey is necessary to the European equilibrium, argue a large party in England and France and elsewhere. The Turks are civilizable, like other races: to develop the Turkish element in all its energy is, therefore, the proper policy, the safest and most humane. So thought Lord Palmerston; and so think the short-sighted men who control the conservative party of Europe to-day. They forget that Turkey is no longer the Turkey of the Coran; that its soldiers are no longer the soldiers of Solyman the Magnificent. The condition of its existence was conquest; and, conquest having ceased to be possible, there remains nothing but tyranny without force. To such a degree, indeed, has its vigor degenerated in the last fifty years, that a handful of Greeks kept its whole power in check for seven years, and finally established an independent state; while Samos, Egypt, Algeria, Tunis, the Danubian Provinces, Servia, Montenegro, and the Lebanon, have successively, either in whole or in part, thrown off their chains. For a barbarous power will always degenerate, unless it is belligerent. The Byzantine Greeks were corrupt indeed; but they preserved, in their traditions and their religion, the germ of a higher civilization. Their religion was better than their morals; and so they have been saved. The religion of the Turks, on the contrary, was inferior to their virtue when first dominant on the Bosphorus; and so they have

* La Solution de la Question d'Orient. Par R***. Paris: E. Dentu, Libraire-Editeur, 1867.

La Turquie, ou La Grèce: pour faire suite à la Brochure intitulée “La Solution de la Question d'Orient." Par R***. Paris: E. Dentu, Libraire-Editeur, 1867.

become stagnant and rotten, making foul the air of Europe: for they had no ideal of saint or martyr to draw them on; no vision of a spiritual life opening to them in those flashes of holier thought which, at times, illumine the soul of man by virtue of its divine essence. With no thought here but of indulgence, and no promise hereafter of other reward than the rapture of sense, they have become what, after centuries of inaction, they could not but have become, — bankrupt, body and soul.

But if Turkey cannot be reformed within the pale of Mohammedanism, can it be saved from its doom by assimilating the European civilization, by the toleration of all sects, and the equalizing of all races? Mahmoud saw that Turkey would perish unless radical reforms were undertaken, and so he slew in cold blood forty thousand Janissaries, and untied the hands of the Sultan; but every Turk in Europe is a Janissary still: for honesty is a thing unknown to the Turkish official mind. If ten honest men were needed to save that vast Sodom, they could not be found.

But more than that: the ineradicable hostility of the Turk to the Christian baffles all attempts to secure justice to the one, or prosperity to the other. The Hatti-Scherifs and the Hatti-Houmayouns, as the decrees are called in which civil equality has been proclaimed, are but waste paper. For there is but one code in Turkey: the Coran is the law temporal as well as spiritual; and those who administer it are thus priests as well as judges. The Ulemas are more than the Sultan; and the Ulemas hate the unbeliever as only the pious of Islam can hate. An imperial decree suppressed the kharatsch, or head-tax; and all the subjects of the Sultan were declared equal before the law. The measure was hailed with enthusiasm in Europe, as a token of the regeneration of the empire: but it is notorious, that the testimony of a Christian before a Turkish tribunal still goes for nothing, and woe to the Christian who bears witness against a Turk; while, though they no longer pay a head-tax in name, the Christians are compelled to pay an enormous sum in commutation of military service, which they are not allowed to render. It is a waste of time, however, to expose the futility of all efforts to redeem the institutions of Turkey from the decay that has overtaken them. The abolition of the Turkish empire must be conceded as necessary. It needs but a squadron of English, French, Austrian, and Russian ships of war to drop anchor in the Golden Horn, with a united note from the governments they represent, directing the Sultan to withdraw into

Asia, to make the Turkish empire disappear from the soil of Europe. But it would be a deplorable measure to allow every petty nationality thus left free to establish itself as an independent state. The world is weary of small states, with all their jealousies and bickerings: modern society tends to great empires, in which voluntary union supplies the place of a central force. "For a great result," says Mr. Rangabé, a great measure must be adopted." The creation of a great Christian empire is the only solution worthy of Europe and the age; and of that empire Constantinople must be the seat, and the Greeks the body-guard.

66

*

H. J. W.

WE are indebted to Mr. Stallard for a study of marked value on the subject of pauperism and its relief. A Christian himself, and keenly sensible to the reproach of the contrast he describes, he has traced it faithfully and unsparingly,-first in the cruel, clumsy, and ineffectual working of the English Poor Law, with the utter and hopeless misery which it often makes not even an effort to relieve; and, second, in the effective, business-like, and vigilant charity which delivers the Jewish population from these extremes of misery, and especially never suffers it to become hereditary. The Jews have the great advantage, in dealing with the destitution of their own people, that they make a class by themselves, with well-defined boundaries; so that the general question of pauperism, in the nation or the city at large, has not to be met: at the same time that that population is large enough (being, if we remember rightly, considerably more than fifty thousand) to make a fair experiment, with results of real value. To add to the value of the experiment, it has to be considered, that, fifty years ago, the Jews made the most degraded and wretched class of the London poor, so that the efforts made for their relief sprang from an imperative sense of need; that they are obliged to receive a constant and large stream of immigration of the most wretched class of foreign Jews, who hope to find some benefit from the more equal laws of England; and that they are excluded, by their peculiar customs, especially by their sabbath observance, from most of the better sorts of employment, particularly mechanical out-door employment, which employ laborers in large numbers. In-door trades,

London Pauperism among Jews and Christians: an Inquiry into the Prin ciples and Practice of Out-door Relief in the Metropolis, and the Result upon the Moral and Physical Condition of the Pauper Class. By J. H. STALLARD. London: Saunders, Otley, & Co. pp. 337.

VOL. LXXXIII. — NEW SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. II.

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especially tailor-work and petty shopkeeping, are the main resource for these many thousands, and are likely to be excessively overstocked. Yet, against these signal disadvantages, the Jewish administration of charity has made such headway, that the last degradation of English poverty is quite unknown; and it is an established principle among the Jews, that pauperism, in the second generation, is a thing not to be expected or allowed. They assume, in the first place, that every person would rather work than beg: whereas the English law assumes beggary and imposture as the normal state of things among the poor, to be guarded against with jealous vigilance.* And they spare no pains, through their energetic and skilful committees of charity, to educate every child in some honest trade which will generally insure a steady and respectable maintenance; while the English way too often is, to give grudgingly the immediate relief that is absolutely needed, taking no heed at all whether the children may not be dismissed to the life of beggars, prostitutes, and thieves. "It is by feeding, educating, and apprenticing the children, that pauperism is destroyed" (p. 192).

16.4.

MRS. DALL's book† has the unusual quality, in a work of this character, of being eminently readable. The second and third divisions have been previously published as distinct volumes, under the titles of "Woman's Right to Labor," and "Woman's Rights under the Law." In this form, they were well received, and had considerable circulation. The first part-on Education - is now first published; and a very instructive Appendix - showing the progress of events during the last ten years, in the matter of education, the employment and legal rights of women-gives unity, completeness, and value to the work.

The theory of the book is, that women should be fitted by education, permitted by public opinion, and empowered by legislation, to take their place side by side with men, so far as they may be able or disposed, in any or all the affairs of life, including legislation and the so-called learned professions. In the market, the workshop, the forum, the pulpit, they should be at liberty to compete, on equal terms, with men,

*This cruel assumption is met by the fact, that 35 per cent of those who apply for relief are widows and orphans.

†The College, the Market, and the Court; or, Woman's Relation to Education, Labor, and Law. By CAROLINE H. DALL. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1867. pp. xxxv., 499.