n several instances to death. I think its
meagreness proves the negative, viz., that the poor victims had
nothing really to confess; and this in addition to the positive
evidence of those who died under the torture, sealing their testimony
with their blood.

But might not the accused have brought forward positive evidence in
their favour? One person did come forward to prove that he had seen
the Friar in another part of the town subsequently to the date of the
supposed murder. He was bastinadoed to death--a consummation not
likely to encourage other witnesses to come forward; and indeed the
Jews assert that Moslems of the first rank in Damascus, if they dared
speak, could have established an _alibi_ for them in many cases.

To have anything like an adequate idea of what these unfortunate
people suffered, after the heads of their families had been thrown
into prison, you must be on the spot to hear, as one of themselves
expressed it, "their hearts speaking." Insults of all kinds heaped
upon them by the refuse of mankind, their houses broken into and
plundered with impunity, jewels torn from the persons of their female
relatives, young children imprisoned and tortured with starvation, the
son bastinadoed before the mother's eyes to make her betray her
husband's place of concealment, the most exorbitant bribes demanded to
permit the common necessaries of life to pass the gates of the prison
for its bruised and wretched inhabitants. These, sir, were some of
their sufferings, and of these I had undoubted evidence.

Surely the correspondent of the _Times_, to whom you allude, if he had
not confined himself while in Damascus to Frank society, and that,
too, of a particular caste, would have seen and heard enough to make
him hesitate before he declared his belief in the guilt of the Jews,
the mildness of their sufferings, and the mercy of their persecutors!
Had he gone to the house of David Arari, he would have learned that
_women_ had been tortured, and in vain. He might have seen with his
own eyes the heroic conduct of the poor negro girl, a Moslem and a
slave, whom the torture could not force to bear false witness against
the Jew, her master. He might there also have learned that if Madame
Arari had consented to sacrifice her daughter's virtue, she might have
preserved her husband's person from violence, his property from
plunder, and her people from slander. He might have ascertained the
amount of sympathy and mercy whic