JESSICA. 391 not laugh when they were massacred in expiation to Christ, as the European Jews had been a few centuries before. But the black Christians of San Domingo were quite in the right. The whites lived idly in full enjoyment of all plea- sures, while the negro who worked for them in the sweat of his black brow got for pay a little rice-meal and very many lashes the blacks were the common folk. "We no longer live in the Middle Ages; the common folk themselves are more enlightened, they no longer kill the Jews dead at sight, nor palliate their hatred with religion; our age is no longer so hot with religious zeal, the traditional grudge veils itself with modern figures of speech, and the lower orders in the pot-houses declaim against the Jews, like their betters in the chamber O ' of deputies, with mercantile, industrial, scientific, or even philosophical arguments. Only utter hypocrites continue to give their hatred a religious hue and persecute Jews on account of Christ; the great multitude confesses that material interests are what are really at stake, and will by all possible means make the realisation of their in- dustrial capacities impossible to Jews. Here in Frankfort, for example, only twenty-four believers in the law of Moses can be married annually, lest their population should increase and thereby too much competition with Christian business people
