should be cleared up beyond the possibility of mistake. to
treat the accusation of cruelty in their way of It is not always easy to get an amending Bill passed, and killing animals for food as a new mode of persecution. It is in the absence of such a Bill it is quite possible that the extremely improbable that the people of Switzerland cared Act might prove to have a meaning which its authors two straws how the Jews prepared calves for eating, or never intended it to bear. Highly competent lawyers believed that pole-axing was so much more merciful a way of are of opinion that the Bill, as it stands, does touch killing, than bleeding animals to death. Mercy to the brute- creation is not yet universal on the Continent, nor has opening ' the veins yet ceased to be one of the accredited methods of ' committing suicide. Yet the Swiss people went the whole • length of submitting a law against the Jewish method of eventually agree. They might be of opinion that the slaying animals to a Referendum, and carried it, too, by words of the Act were too clear to give any room for a heavy popular vote. The obvious inference is the Jewish ' consideration of the intention of its authors, and the one,—that the Swiss people desired to expel the Jews, and Church might find herself poorer by her schools and her took this method of intimating that their presence in Swiss parish rooms, and with no prospect of recovering them, cities had become disagreeable. Nor are we quite sure except by the slow and doubtful expedient of subsequent that the recent prosecutions in Aberdeen were entirely die- legislation. At the Church Congress it was suggested that tated by motives of humanity. The Scotch do not love the a deputation should wait upon Mr. Fowler, and obtain from Jews, being much too like them, and can hardly have con- him an authoritative declaration of what he means the sidered them inhuman when they themselves kill pigs is Bill to do, and a promise to insert whatever explanatory almost exactly the same way, and fowls, unless they have words may be found necessary to place that meaning some practice different from the English, in a way far more beyond the reach of doubt. That is a very good way of cruel. It is quite true that we are none of us, Jews or Chris- meeting the difficulty, and we hope that it will be shortly tians, half solicitous enough to avoid needless suffering to the adopted. animals we must put to death ; but it is a little invidious to There remains that more vague dislike of the Bill, fix upon the Jews as the first objects of what ought to be the which finds expression in such phrases as " parochial subject of a general law. It is extremely doubtful if their disestablishment." There are some incumbents who do system is the most cruel. Professor Virchow, who is the first not like the supersession of the Vestry by the Parish of living physiologists, says it is not; while it is not doubtful Council, or their own deprivation of all purely civil that the motive for their practice is entirely untainted functions in the parish, except so far as they can win the with cruelty or even recklessness about animal suffering. confidence of their parishioners, and induce them to elect They believe they are obeying a direct divine command, in them as one of their representatives. They feel that they have not deserved to be ousted from the chairmanship at presence of which, if it could be proved, the accusation of parish meetings, and from the official honours they have cruelty would be futile ; while they are undoubtedly follow- hitherto enjoyed. They have, on the whole, done their ing a tradition of three thousand years, which makes them work well, and they have done it when there was really no think that method of inflicting death not only reasonable one else to do it, and when, but for them, it would have and right, but the only right and reasonable method to pur- gone undone. Of these official honours there is one to sue. As a people, the Jews are far from inhuman, either to" which some of them cling with special tenacity. There are beasts or to each other, though they share, naturally enough, a, number of charities of which the incumbent and church- the feelings of each land in which they dwell, and are not wardens are charged with the distribution. These charities, in Italy or Spain, or perhaps Switzerland, so kindly as the they contend, ought to be treated as ecclesiastical charities, would be in England or in China. whereas, as the Bill stands, they are not intended to be A good many people will ask why the Jews should care so treated. They call this " parochial disestablishment and about the matter, and why they cannot put up with the aboli- ' disendowment," and as such they resent it. We fail, we tion of their separate customs in eating, as they have put up, confess, to follow their reasoning in this particular. An ecclesiastical charity is to our thinking a charity de- since the third Temple was destroyed, with the abolition of the daily sacrifice. They could wait for the restoration of the voted to ecclesiastical objects, not a charity administered by ecclesiastical persons. The incumbent and church- one custom, as they wait for the other; and the habit of so wardens of a parish have no natural right to superb- waiting and eating " Kosher" meat, for example, on one day only in the year, as they eat Passover-bread, would greatly tend the distribution of a dole. They may be the best increase the convenience and freedom of their lives. The persons to undertake it,—they may also be the worst ; but in either case they will be so in right of their personal, observance must to a majority of them be a horrid nuisance. not of their official qualifications. The contention that It binds those whom they themselves call " the observant," to the ever founders of these charities intended for to asso- live permanently in great cities; it fetters them constantly ciate them with the Church seems to us quite untenable. in travelling abroad ; and we should think, though we are When a man in the last century made the incumbent andthey diminish the not quite sure, that wherever are few in number, it who naturally came into his head. They were the official variety of their ordinary food. Why, then, cannot they chiefs of the parish, and so they naturally occurred to him surrender a custom no more sacred than a dozen other* as the channel through which his bounty should be distri. which they have been compelled by circumstances, or per- buted. They possessed a double character ; and all the suaded by convenience, to surrender,—such, for instance, probabilities point to the fact that it was the secular half throughout Europe, as polygamy, and in Germany, France, of this double character that he had in view. Had it been and England their ancient costume P The question is the more reasonable because the argument which they are accustomed to put forward is not a very convincing one. They say, or their papers do for them, that their dietary rules are exceedingly healthy, and that " Kosher " meat in particular is muoh more digestible than meat killed in the usual Christian fashion ; but it may be suspected that the statement is put forward as a more convenient plea than the actual truth. The Jews are rather specially healthy as regards malarions disease, because the life of fifteen hundred years passed under crowded conditions has killed-out the families liable to infection, and they therefore escape sometimes, not always, when an epidemic is raging among their neighbours. As regards other diseases, they are not specially exempt,—are not, for example, healthier than the general average of the people in Marylebone. They die, like the rest of mankind ; and though individuals among theni occasionally reach a great age—a peculiarity true also of the Negroes in the West Indies, who have every- thing against them—it may be doubted if their average longevity is any higher than that of Englishmen or Germans, equally well supplied with necessaries, and equally exempt from the temptation to intemperance. The true answer to those who advise them to give up their dietary rules is that they wish to preserve their separateness, and that they think the observance of a strict and rather painful law helps not only to preserve that separateness, but to keep up the reverence for their general law,--call it racial, or call it as they would do, strictly religious. They are probably, as might be expected from their vast experience, entirely in the right. The whole experience of mankind seems to show that, while that class of religious laws which may be generically termed the reminding laws are to the spiritually-minded fetters rather injurious than valuable, to the mass of quasi-believers they are helps,—sometimes neces- sary helps. There is no particular good in fasting—though we should all perhaps benefit by abstinence from flesh and alcohol on one day in the week,—but the Catholic who does not fast loses a reminder which entire nations have found beneficial to the development of religious attention. The Hindoo who eats meat soon ceases to attend to more serious commands ; the Mahommedan who avoids the five prayers is never a pious Mahommedan, and some years ago the Scotchman who disregarded Sunday was usually found to have lost a good deal of his faith. The whole tone of thought of the West is now opposed to what a Jew would call "observance," and as regards the highest minds the new liberty is probably a new source of strength ; but in the case of the great majority there are also definite drawbacks. They forget—we mean in the first and simplest sense of for- getting—religion too much. Religion, having no compul- sory part in their daily lives, is apt also to have no part in their daily thoughts. The doing of something burden- some or tedious, or the abstaining from something pleasant, helps to subjugate the will, and render the mind more ready for the process of reflection, which, though it is not religion, is one of its best preparatives. The Quakers could not help giving up their " plain " dress and mode of speech, for they had become almost ridiculous to their own younger generation; but they gave up with it a great deal which was of some value, and especially the separateness which enabled -them to keep up a continuous protest against the revived modern tendency to frivolousness of life. The Evangelicals of to-day have given up most of the restrictions, those against dancing, for example, and the theatre, which in the forties they threatened to push to absurd extremes ; but it may be doubted whether in doing so they have not diminished the great merit of their rather narrow mode of thought,—its insistence that for orthodox Christians life must always be a serious affair. No creed has lasted which absolutely put away all rites and ceremonies ; and we suspect the next man who founds a sect—and there will be plenty more, for all the modern " tendencies "—will do well from his own point of view to insist on his followers doing something exceedingly disagreeable and constantly recurrent. Ho will secure, perhaps, fewer disciples, but they will be more zealous, He will run the risk, of course, if he multiplies such reminders, of doing as the Hindoos and Sews have done, that is, ci lashing religion under the observances of religion; but he will give his sect a singular cohesion and a core of devotees. No one can read that remarkable book, " The Children of the Ghetto," the anatomy of a people in the disguise of a novel, without a feeling of surprised contempt for the burden of " Law " which the lower Jews of London bear uncomplainingly ; but no one either can read it without seeing that it is this very burden which has solidified the race and given it its power of resistance to all external influence, The Asiatic method of enforcing recurrent restrictions through rules of diet has not approved itself to Europeans, and is in itself no doubt a little silly, the world producing too little rather than too much variety of food ; but the Asiatic idea has strength in it, and we may yet see it revive under another form, with results on those who revive it of considerable importance. The last attempt to make an " observance "—a week's self-denial for the sake of the Salvation Army—has probably raised more money in a hurry, more, we mean, in proportion to the givers' means, than any known device, and that is a rather poor and intermittent rule, much inferior to Mabomet's order, obeyed for at least a century, to surrender a tithe, of all income to the Church.
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