of interest to Jewish capitalists. Under these circumstances the canonical writers finally decided that, being in any case lost, it was immaterial whether the Jews committed a few more or a few less sins; the borrowing Christians, however, were excused by their necessities.
The interest demanded by the Jews was, it is true, exceedingly high, and often beyond the power of the debtor to pay, but this was a result of the value of money at the time, of the scarcity of coin, and above all, of the oppressive amounts which the Jews were obliged to pay to princes and town authorities. The Caorsines and the great Italian bankers put their demands just as high as the Jews, and where they got the trade in money into their own hands the desire arose, as for example in Paris at the beginning of the fourteenth century, to have the Jews back again, since their activity as money-lenders was, on the whole, in many ways beneficial, and at that time irreplaceable. They did for the northern countries and for Spain what was done for Italy by the bankers' associations of the so-called Lombards, and by the money-brokers of Asti, Sienna, Florence, and other cities, who were partly patronized and partly silently tolerated (and in either case frequently called into requisition) by the Popes and bishops. In France and England there was even at times competition between Lombard and Jew. The Emperor Louis's son, Louis the Brandenburger, issued in the year 1352 a public invitation to the Jews to settle free of taxation in his land, because "since the time when the Jews were destroyed (referring to the great massacre of 1348), there has been every-where, both among rich and poor, a deficiency in ready money."
| CHEMISTRY IN HIGH-SCHOOLS. |
By ELISA A. BOWEN.
HAVE, for some years, been trying to improve the teaching of chemistry in girls' schools. It is, of course, work of the most elementary character. I wished earnestly to make it, so far as it went, inductive study in other words, to train the observing powers to select for themselves the significant facts; and to train the reasoning powers to draw for themselves, with some degree of independence, the more important of the general principles which we call the theory of chemistry.
When I began to teach this subject, about six years ago, the progressive teachers had become dissatisfied with the old plan of book-study or lecture, with experiments by the teacher. The best thing offered as improvement was the performance of experiments by the pupils themselves. This was certainly an important advance; and manipulation is, first or last, essential to any complete knowledge of
