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no more civil right to punish law-breakers than any other strangers.

In my turn, however, I may remark that there is a "point" which appears to have escaped Mr. Gladstone's notice. And that is somewhat unfortunate, because his whole argument turns upon it. Mr. Gladstone assumes, as a matter of course, that pig keeping was an offense against the "law of Moses"; and, therefore, that Jews who kept pigs were as much liable to legal pains and penalties as Englishmen who smuggle brandy (Impregnable Rock, p. 274).

There can be no doubt that, according to the law, as it is defined in the Pentateuch, the pig was an "unclean" animal, and that pork was a forbidden article of diet. Moreover, since pigs are hardly likely to be kept for the mere love of those unsavory animals, pig-owning, or swineherding, must have been, and evidently was, regarded as a suspicious and degrading occupation by strict Jews, in the first century a. d. But I should like to know on what provision of the Mosaic law, as it is laid down in the Pentateuch, Mr. Gladstone bases the assumption, which is essential to his case, that the possession of pigs and the calling of a swineherd were actually illegal? The inquiry was put to me the other day; and, as I could not answer it, I turned up the article "Schwein" in Riehm's standard Handwörterbuch, for help out of my difficulty; but unfortunately without success. After speaking of the martyrdom which the Jews, under Antiochus Epiphanes, preferred to eating pork, the writer proceeds:

It may be, nevertheless, that the practice of keeping pigs may have found its way into Palestine in the Græco-Roman time, in consequence of the great increase of the non-Jewish population; yet there is no evidence of it in the New Testament; the great herd of swine, two thousand in number, mentioned in the narratived of the possessed, was feeding in the territory of Gadara, which belonged to the Decapolis; and the prodigal son became a swineherd with the native of a far country into which he had wandered; in neither of these cases is there reason for thinking that the possessors of these herds were Jews.^[1]

Having failed in my search, so far, I took up the next work of reference at hand, Kitto's Cyclopædia (vol. iii, 1876). There, under "Swine," the writer, Colonel Hamilton Smith, seemed at first to give me what I wanted, as he says that swine "appear to have been repeatedly introduced and reared by the Hebrew

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1. I may call attention, in passing, to the fact that this; authority, at any rate, has no sort of doubt of the fact that Jewish law did not rule in Gadara (indeed, under the head of "Gadara," in the same work, it is expressly stated that the population of the place consisted "predominantly of heathens"), and that he scouts the notion that the Gadarene swineherds were Jews.