merchants,the physicians, the students of the laws of life, of exchange, and of those productions that distinguish one country and are needed in another. These two departments combine in producing a social tendency towards an enlargement of social and industrial ideas, and a more strict adaptation of means to ends such as distinguishes the highest intelligence.
“On the other hand, I am pained to observe not only a tendency but a fixed system of placing restraint on the cultivation of the mind.
In many localities even the elementary schools are’ closed; and men are left to pursue, as best they may, an unenlightened search even for the most common means of sustaining life and its duties. Since Duke Conrad, fifty-four years ago, totally destroyed all the schools in the Hessian territory established by an earnest brotherhood, and the entire village of Weilandsdorf; since forty-one schools in the district of Passau were annihilated at the same period, to the present hour, omitting a multitude of similar instances in every country in Europe, and conspicuously and overwhelmingly in Spain and France, the antagonistic current of repression of educational effort has encountered the opposite tendency I have described. In the midst of this chaos of public instruction, in this confusion of thought on mercantile relations, in this grievous ignorance of facts and principles, the Jew cultivates his calculations, and details of comparison and of opportunity; he estimates values; he studies contracts and the intricacies of legal
