rom the rest of mankind,'--not an
original statement from amorous dames!

Thus Suess inherited his mother's nature, and together with his unbridled
passion for love came the illimited desire for, and need of, gold.

By the first, he incurred the hatred of those men--husbands, brothers,
fathers of the women he took for his pleasure; by the second, the undying
animosity of the oppressed taxpayers. The end came swiftly. Four years of
debauch and lavish expenditure, and death fell suddenly upon Karl
Alexander of Wirtemberg. He died at nine of the clock one evening, and
the next dawn saw Joseph Suess a hunted fugitive. He was caught between
Ludwigsburg and Stuttgart, and immediately thrown into prison. Here he
languished, a prey to terrible anxiety and remorse; his only visitants
were pastors of the Christian religion who tortured him with argument.
'You are a Jew, but you do not even adhere to the damnable tenets of your
vile cult,' they said.

'I am a man and no coward, and I will not abjure the faith of my
fathers,' he responded. They held out spurious hopes of pardon would he
swear to the pure faith of the Crucified, but Suess remained nobly
obdurate. Then the Church--she to whom Christ bequeathed His sweet
message of pardon, of tenderness, and of leniency--deserted the faithful
Jew, and the law of human cruelty and punishment took hold of him. He was
accorded no trial. His sins were as scarlet indeed; besides, he of the
despised race had dared to rule. The name Jew was a stigma in itself, and
this word the people howled round the tumbril which bore the erstwhile
gorgeous favourite to a death of ignominy. A few women in the crowd
sighed and shed a tear when they saw the godlike beauty of the man,
broken to pathetic ruin by adversity, white-haired, vilified, aged by his
degradation; but chiefly the crowd howled and reviled, and the men spat
in the Jew's face and covered him with a load of horse-dung and foul
ordure. They hung him finally after unspeakable tortures. Then his body
was left to rot in Stuttgart's market-place in the sight of all. A
hideous carrion dangling in a silver cage, which his judges had caused to
be constructed as a terrible warning to those who would profit by the
favour of princes.

Tragic enough in itself, this story of the downfall of a superb ruler and
courtier, the more appalling, when we consider that it was chiefly a
cruel triumph of race hatred. No unbaptized Jew in German history has
ris