Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 40.djvu/188

176 Every dog trained as a hunter or herder is a specialist, and is prized for one fine capacity attained in some degree at the expense of mental proportion and symmetry; in miscellaneous matters outside of his province he may be easily surpassed by any underbred and mongrel but many-sided village cur. Modern scholarship shows a like tendency to psychical alogotrophy or one-sided intellectual growth. As science deepens its researches, each department of investigation becomes more distinct, and the toiler in the mines of knowledge is forced to confine his labors to a single lode if he would exhaust the treasures it contains. He sees clearly so far as his lantern casts its rays; but all outside of this small luminous circle is dense darkness.

If a race of superior beings had taken charge of man's education for thousands of years and conducted it on the same principle as that which has guided us in domesticating and utilizing the lower animals, what maimed specimens of humanity would have been the result! Slavery has always tended to produce this effect; but the slave, however degraded his condition, speaks the same language as his master, thereby profiting from his intercourse with those who are placed over him, and sharing in the general progress of society more fully than any dumb animal could do. So, too, the position which Christian intolerance assigned to the Jews for many centuries, closing to them all branches of industry except usury, developed in them a peculiar talent for finance, together with many hard and offensive traits of character naturally growing out of money brokerage, and finally becoming almost innate. In the middle ages they were made to serve as sponges to suck up the people's substance in order that it might be squeezed out of them at the convenience of the rulers. King John II, surnamed the Good, issued in 1360 a decree permitting the Jews in his realm to take, as compensation for loaning money, "quatre deniers par livre par semaine," equivalent to ninety per cent per annum, not from any feeling of favoritism for the Israelites, but, as he expressly stated, because "the greater the privileges enjoyed by the Jews, the better they will be able to pay the taxes levied on them by the king." This "good" monarch was wont to confiscate periodically a large portion of the pillage thus obtained in order to replenish his exhausted exchequer, and was actually praised by his subjects for punishing Jewish rapacity. It was a system of indirect taxation worthy of modern tariff legislators.

In the early part of the thirteenth century, Frederic II, the Hohenstaufen, ordained that the Jews should be permitted to dwell in Nuremberg and to lend money on interest, stating that, "inasmuch as this sinful business is essential to trade and to the commercial prosperity of the city, it would be a lesser evil to let the