There ought not to be any reason why a classification on broad, liberal, and just grounds should fail to give satisfaction. It is not a matter to wrangle about, and both sides must be prepared to accept equitable decisions given in the spirit of true compromise. Meanwhile there must be a fair field and no favour. 2. The duties of such an Executive Commission as is recommended will not admit of hurry. Perhaps a limitation of two years would not be an extravagant allowance for the work. But there seems no good reason why in the interval things shall be allowed to get worse. To draw a precedent from a much greater, though not more necessary, reform, a measure is wanted for suspending the creation of fresh vested interests. Perhaps a few people may be injured, and more are sure to be disappointed. It always is so, and it always must be so. But in this case, as in others, the end will justify the means. Some old folk may have to close their days in the workhouse instead of succeeding to the doles of some dead neighbour; the assistant to some clerk of a trust must go without the shoes for which he has been so patiently waiting; a prospective churchwarden must be content with a diminished and still diminishing patronage. It is irritating, no doubt, but vested interests in a threatened institution crop up like mushrooms in a night. The sanction of Parliament might reasonably be extended to an enactment decreeing that from a certain date-the day, say, of the introduction of the measure-no new interests should be created in any shape or form. Exception would of course be made in favour of schemes for which application had already been made to the Charity Commissioners, and it would not, I apprehend, be difficult to arrange for temporarily filling up vacancies in the management of any trust. case. 3. Another movement towards order might be similarly proceeding. At present the trusts of the various charities are 1,330 in number. That many of them are models of management it is impossible to deny; it is equally true that the reverse is sometimes the But the issue I would raise is of another kind, and suggests the unadvisability, on economical and economic grounds, of permitting corporations to be possessors of such a large and varied amount of real estate. It is the opinion of Sir Charles Trevelyan, than whom no one has better right to speak on this subject, that the parochial charities of the City, if properly realised and placed in the public funds, would produce treble their present annual value. I cannot do better than quote fully from his evidence : The bequests represent every variety of private property, such as houses, cottages, stables, gardens, workshops, warehouses, wharves, and country farms. Shares in houses was one of the commonest forms of bequests. . . . Property of this description is with difficulty made the most of, even by the thrift and close personal attention of individual proprietors, prompted by the strongest interested motives. What, therefore, is to be expected from the action of the ephemeral churchwardens of phantom parishes, who are neither stimulated nor checked by local public opinion? Waste, deterioration, and total loss constantly come to the surface in the records of these charities. . . . For this broken-down, wasteful, demoralising state of things there is only one remedy: to convert the whole of the City parochial estates into private property by selling them to the highest bidder, and to invest the proceeds in the funds. And again on the economic aspect of the case : The best result of all would be the process of reconstruction and improvement upon which these neglected estates would enter. For attracting the investment of private capital, for encouraging industry, for increasing production, and for maintaining our population in a contented, moral, and hopeful state, there is nothing like the magic of private proprietorship. In a word, then, what is wanted is capitalisation. This might begin at once and proceed as, by the falling in of leases and so on, occasion offered. The process would be gradual, but the question would have been advantageously simplified and cleared. I will allude but briefly to the recommendations of the Royal Commission. That they were ever intended to be carried outat any rate, that they were ever considered likely to be carried out-is hard to think. The Report wants firmness. It reads haltingly. There is an unhealthy straining after one end. It condemns, it is true, decisively enough the existing state of affairs, but there crops up all through a tenderness of compassion which the evidence certainly does not justify. The Commissioners might have spared themselves the assurance that they had been actuated by the desire to perform their work with as little disturbance of existing ideas and interests as is consistent with the effectual discharge of the duty imposed upon them. Nothing, to take an example, could be less likely to commend itself to public confidence than the suggested constitution of the Board which is to administer for the benefit of London generally such eleemosynary funds as may remain over after the wants of the City have been supplied. Fifteen members are to be chosen from the representatives of the City parishes, and two from. the Common Council. The Metropolitan Asylums Board and the Metropolitan Board of Works are each to send two more, and there are to be four co-optative members. The one answer to such an arrangement as this, or to anything in any way approaching it, is that the right of the City to control these charities is not admitted. They belong, by all considerations of justice, to London and to Londoners. A prolonged and anomalous possession enables the City to raise claims which must be fairly met; but, that done, it is almost ludicrous to suggest that the charitable and philanthropic interests of the rest of the metropolis are to be governed in this matter by a packed Board. If the parochial charities of the City are to be rescued from their present pernicious and useless purposes, and applied to the real benefit of the metropolitan poor, the rearrangement must be made on bold and enlightened lines. Charity is becoming a system if not a science. Men are beginning to see that the old methods of helping the poor often effected precisely opposite results, and that the truest kindness which the rich and benevolent can do to them is to help them to help themselves. The other plan has had its trial. For three centuries already the English Poor Law has oppressed the English poor as no other institution has ever weighed down upon any other class. It has, moreover, given the cue to that reckless, indiscriminate, inadequate charity which is only a refined form of cruelty. We are coming, it is to be hoped, upon days when the wealthy, taught by the lessons of the past, will direct their money to the removal of organic and radical defects in the condition of the poor, and when the poor will appreciate the truth that doles and gifts and casual unearned relief constitute little less than a curse and a blight. And so these charities cannot be allowed to become more injurious than now they are by being scheduled, codified, arranged for purposes which a few years hence will be almost universally recognised as disastrous. The Royal Commissioners would have done well to adopt the emphatic memorandum which was offered to them by Mr. Pell, who could speak in this matter from a wide measure of experience gained as a Guardian of the Poor in an East-end Union. He suggested that the fund should be so applied as to encourage any legitimate effort which the poorer classes may be themselves now or hereafter making to meet the wants and attain the objects which the founders of these charities had in view, when these may be in harmony with the conditions of society in modern times. In other words, that provident institutions supported by the poorer classes shall have the first claim on the fund.' These words strike the keynote of the only possible solution. Let Parliament lay down the broad principle here involved, and assign to a strong representative Board, composed of members practically acquainted with the poor quarters of the whole metropolis, full liberty to carry it into action. Let the ecclesiastical funds be similarly accessible to the starving parishes of the diocese. Let these charities come to be recognised as the property of the living and not of the dead, as meant to bless and not to curse. The lot of the poor of London is hard enough; there is here a chance of giving to it wise and permanent relief. R. H. HADDEN. A JEWISH VIEW OF THE ANTI-JEWISH AGITATION. Thou hast spoken of the Jew as the persecution of such as thou art has made him. Heaven in ire has driven him from his country, but industry has opened to him the only road to power and to influence which oppression has left unbarred. Read the ancient history of the people of God, and tell me if those, by whom Jehovah wrought such marvels among the nations, were then a people of misers and usurers!—And know, proud knight, we number names amongst us to which your boasted northern nobility is as the gourd compared with the cedar-names that ascend far back to those high times when the Divine Presence shook the mercy-seat between the cherubim, and which derive their splendour from no earthly prince, but from the awful Voice, which bade their fathers be nearest of the congregation to the Vision. Such were the princes of Judah, now such no more!-Yet there are those among them who shame not such high descent. I envy not thy blood-won honours! I envy not thy barbarous descent from northern heathens! I envy thee not thy faith, which is ever in thy mouth, but never in thy heart nor in thy practice. SIR WALTER SCOTT, Ivanhoe. Sind Christ und Jude eher Christ und Jude THE wave of anti-Jewish agitation which is now sweeping across almost the entire world, and which has reached its fiercest and most significant torrents in Germany, is not so phenomenal as most people think, although it certainly derives an aspect of some importance from the apparently paradoxical circumstances of its appearance. It is probably the last time that we shall witness the surgings and swellings of this hoary visitation in any remarkable prominence; for this is the first occasion upon which its current has been at all impeded, and it has found itself impotently splashing against an adequate breakwater-the breakwater of a highly educated and vigorous liberalism. To my mind, indeed, it is almost a subject of congratulation that this agitation has reappeared so soon after the emancipation of my people, in dimensions sufficient to attract the consideration of the thinking world and to evoke the protests of the most cultured and highly venerated amongst us. What Dean Milman calls the iron age of Judaism' has now endured for more than a thousand years. Consecrated by soi-disant holy records and countenanced by secular traditions, nursed into a monstrous adolescence by legend, and vulgarised by fable, the hatred of the Jew has grown and grown until its indoctrination has ranged from the dicta of popes and emperors to the refrains of nursery lullabies. Can it be wondered at then that this passion has entered deeply into the natures of the dominant races of the world? Its resuscitation at this moment, when it is generally considered that civil and religious liberty is not a mere theory, but an established and indispensable copestone in all well-ordered politics, is a sufficient proof that its complete eradication is a work of very slow development. Hitherto it has luxuriated in congenial surroundings, and its outbursts have been, if not quite unchecked, at least comparatively successful. When the last violent ebullition of anti-Jewish prejudices took place, just sixty years ago, the state of things in Europe was, as far as the moral receptiveness of all classes of society was concerned, very different from that of the present day. The autocracies were then in the ascendant, and the excesses of the French Revolution had discredited those dreams of popular freedom and of religious liberty which have reached a certain degree of realisation in our own times. Under these circumstances the existence of a class burdened with disabilities was no inconsistency, and their occasional persecution no anomaly. Since then the political changes which have been effected are enormous, and in theory at least the equality of all classes has been fully established. Still, however, the hatred of the Jew has continued to lurk illogically amongst the primary passions of non-Jewish nature, and now, but shortly after our emancipation, it has broken out in much of its ancient violence. There can be no doubt, however, that it has this time been effectually checked. In its first reappearance but a vulgar revival of mediæval prejudice, it was sternly met by the simple but irrefutable rebukes of modern philosophy. Since then its changes of front, in the endeavour to assert itself successfully, have been beyond number, and if it has attempted, as it certainly has, to vindicate itself on philosophic principles, it is a sign of its weakness, as it clearly shows the nature and strength of the weapons with which it has had to cope. Can there, then, be any doubt as to the result of this conflict between the unanswerable propositions of modern liberalism and the casuistical justifications of an anachronistic prejudice? It must end in the well-merited disgrace and degradation of the latter, and thus one of the most important works of the age will be largely proceeded with. Its complete success cannot of course be immediate, but, once branded with despicable failure, another generation will be slow to receive its tarnished traditions, and then gradually its paroxysms must weaken and weaken until they die away altogether. It is for this reason that I regard the latest outbreak of anti-Semitism with a species of cœur léger; and I must confess that I do not approach an investigation of its history, its arguments, and its aims, with any |