Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/258

252 even her generous temper a shame to her. Had she been too good? as he said — too kind? an accusation which is hurtful, and means something like insult to a woman, though to no other creature. Too kind! No expression of contempt, no insinuated slander can be more stinging than this imputation of having been too kind. Had she been too kind to her sorrowful neighbor? had she led him to believe that her kindness was something more than kindness? She, whose special distinction it was to be kind, whose daily court was established on no other foundation, whose kindness was the breath of her nostrils; was this quality, of which she had come to be modestly conscious, and of which, perhaps, she was a little proud, to be the instrument of her humiliation? She was not a happy wife, nor indeed a wife at all, except in distant and not very pleasant recollection, and in the fact that she had a watchful husband, at the end of the world, keeping guard over her. Was it possible that she had given occasion for his interference, laid herself open to his scorn? It seemed to the poor woman as if heaven and earth had leagued against her. Too kind; suspected by the jealous man who watched her, despised by the ungrateful man by whom her tender generosity had been misinterpreted. She sent down a message to Cara that she was not going out. She sent word to her visitors that she had a headache. She saw nobody all day long. Too kind! The accusation stung in the tenderest point, and was more than she could bear.

 

 From The Saturday Review.

gathering of the leading Jews of Europe was held a few days ago at Paris, under the presidency of M. Crémieux. The race was represented by delegates from most European states, the attendance of Austrian and German Jews being exceptionally large. Jewish intelligence and Jewish wealth came in all their force to do battle for some of the most wretched of the many wretched members of the Jewish community. The meeting had been called together to draw the attention of Europe to the wrongs which Jews habitually undergo in the tributary states of European Turkey. In Turkey itself the Jews have no special cause of complaint. They are not on an equality with the Mahomedans, but they are treated like all the subject populations of the Porte. They are tolerated, and in religious matters left to themselves; and if they are misgoverned, and are often the victims of officials and policemen, they do but share the fortunes of all Christians and many Mahomedans; and as they do not meddle with politics, and find the Turks very considerate as rulers in comparison with many Christian governments, they have no antipathy to the Turks, and are regarded by the Turks without aversion and with a kind of contemptuous friendliness. But they have very good reason for thinking that, if the Christians got the upper hand in any part of European Turkey, they would be cruelly persecuted. Semi-barbarian Christians are far more tyrannical in their fanaticism than the Turks are, and how they govern and how they persecute the Jews know by painful experience in Servia and Roumania. These wretched little states are dependent enough to need that Europe shall continually nurse them and protect them from the consequences of their own rashness, but independent enough to contend that persecution is one of their own internal affairs, and that they must be allowed to carry it on in their own way. And, as it is their fancy to persecute, they certainly indulge their fancy in a most comfortable and thorough way. They hate the Jews, and take every means to show their hatred. The Paris meeting drew up a memorial on the subject of the persecutions of the Jews in Roumania and Servia to be presented to all the great powers; and the memorial was formally presented to Lord Derby, by Baron de Worms and Mr. Serjeant Simon. Lord Derby, and through him the English public, was invited to take notice of what the treatment of Jews in those provinces has been and is. We are told of synagogues burnt, of Jews thrust into the water by Roumanian soldiers using their bayonets and the butt-ends of their muskets, of murders, ravishment, expulsion of whole families in the midst of the winter, exclusion from trade, and general reduction to beggary. "Every crime," as Serjeant Simon stated, "committed by Bashi-Bazouks in Bulgaria has been practised by Christians upon Israelites in Roumania; the barbarity has only been on a smaller scale." The scale, no doubt, makes a great deal of difference. If only ten Bulgarians had been massacred at Batak, as there were only ten Jews drowned by the soldiers at Galatz, Europe would have heard and thought nothing of the Bulgarian atrocities. But as an indication of the spirit in which government 