virtues of all the saint. People willed to make them contemptible by treating them scornfully for twenty centuries, by refusing to them the approach to all dignities and honourable positions, and by pushing them all the deeper down into the mean trades—and, indeed, they have not become cleaner under this process. But contemptible? They have never ceased believing themselves qualified for the highest functions; neither have the virtues of all suffering people ever failed to adorn them. Their manner of honouring parents and children, the reasonableness of their marriages and marriage customs make them conspicuous among Europeans. Besides, they know how to derive a sense of power and lasting revenge from the very trades which were left to them (or to which they were abandoned); we cannot help saying, in palliation even of their usury, that, without this occasional pleasant and useful torture inflicted on their scorners, they would hardly have persevered so long in their selfrespect. For our self-respect depends on our being able to make reprisals in good and evil things. Moreover, their vengeance never carries them too far, for they all have that liberality even of the soul in which the frequent change of place, climate, customs, neighbours, and oppressors schools man; they live by far the greatest experience in any human intercourse, and even in their passions they still exercise the caution of this experience. They are so sure of their intellectual suppleness and shrewdness, that they never, not even in the bitterest
