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It is this movement which has been the occasion of the very valuable work of M. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu on 'Israel among the Nations. The author, who is universally recognised as one of the greatest of living political writers, has special qualifications for his task.

Material conditions born of phenomenal material progress have deadened the sense as to what constitutes real progress; and the working-woman of to-day contends not only with visible but invisible obstacles, the nature of which we are but just beginning to discern. Twenty years ago M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu wrote of women wage-earners:

What Leroy-Beaulieu says of Maimon, "that type of the most cultured Jew to be found before the French Revolution," might more justly be applied to many a less prominent Maskil after him: "Despite his learning and philosophy he sank deeper than the most degraded of his fellow-men, because in repudiating his ancestral faith he had lost the staff which, through all their humiliations, served as a prop even to the most debased of ancient Jews."

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.

Leroy-Beaulieu, in discussing their methods of obtaining converts says: "they prefer boys and youths, whom they strive to convince of the necessity of 'killing the flesh. They sometimes succeed so well, that cases are known of boys of fifteen or so resorting to self-mutilation, to save themselves from the temptations of early manhood.

They mixed in a few generations with the old Christian population, and Spain and Portugal, M. Leroy-Beaulieu truly says, are now among the countries in which the Jewish blood is most evidently and most widely diffused. Another consideration, which M. Leroy-Beaulieu has omitted to mention, but which appears to me to have much weight, is the condemnation of lending money at interest by the Church.

At the time of the discovery of America the Spaniards, as M. Leroy-Beaulieu has remarked, were perhaps less fitted than any other nation of western Europe for the task of American colonization.

But whether this general superiority a superiority not inconsistent with grave failings and drawbacks is due to the rigorous selection of a tragic history, or whether it is, as Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu maintains, the heritage of a civilization older by thousands of years than that of Europe; whether the Torah made the greatness of the people, or the people precisely because of its greatness made the Torah; whether we have a case of natural election or artificial election to study, it is not in any self-sufficient superiority or aim thereat that the essence of Judaism lies, but in an apostolic altruism.

Faucher's dinner was dull, but Passy and Leroy-Beaulieu were there, and there was some good music after dinner. I called yesterday on Feuillet de Conches and Mme. Mohl, each looking a thousand and older than the hills; and I spent some time in the galleries of the Louvre with my old favourites in their eternal youth.

The most valuable portion of this work is, I think, that examining the part which the Jewish race is now playing in the world, and tracing the action of historical causes on the formation of their character. On the old problem of the continued existence of the race through so many ages M. Leroy-Beaulieu has much to say.