radition
and custom, together with the most unbounded ambition and very superior
mental gifts, never produced a single family of powerful men able to
maintain their position more than a century or two, when the nations of
Europe have produced at least half a dozen that have lasted a thousand
years? If there be any answer to such a question, it is that the pursuit
and care of money have a tendency to destroy the balance and produce
degeneration by over-stimulating the mind in one direction, and that not
a noble one, at the expense of the other talents; whereas the struggle
for political power sharpens most of the faculties, and the acquisition
and preservation of landed property during many generations bring men
necessarily into a closer contact with nature, and therefore induce a
healthier life, tending to increase the vitality of a race rather than
to diminish it. Whether this be true or not, it is safe to say that no
great family has ever maintained its power long by the possession of
money, without great lands; and by 'long' we understand at least three
hundred years.

With regard to the Jews in Rome it is a singular fact that they have
generally been better treated by the religious than by the civil
authorities. They were required to do homage to the latter every year
in the Capitol, and on this occasion the Senator of Rome placed his foot
upon the heads of the prostrate delegates, by way of accentuating their
humiliation and disgrace, but the service they were required to do on
the accession of a new Pope was of a different and less degrading
nature. The Israelite School awaited the Pope's passage, on his return
from taking possession of the Lateran, standing up in a richly hung
temporary balcony, before which he passed on his way. They then
presented him with a copy of the Pentateuch, which he blessed on the
spot, and took away with him. That was all, and it amounted to a
sanction, or permission, accorded to the Jewish religion.

As for the sumptuary laws, the first one was decreed in 1215, after the
fall of the Pierleoni, and it imposed upon all Jews, and other heretics
whomsoever, the wearing of a large circle of yellow cloth sewn upon the
breast. In the following century, according to Baracconi, this mark was
abolished by the statutes of the city and the Jews were made to wear a
scarlet mantle in public; but all licensed Jewish physicians, being
regarded as public benefactors, were exempted from the rule. For