A more practical comparison would be one between the Jews and gipsies; for the latter at least cover several countries, and can be tested by the impressions of very different districts.  And in some preliminary respects the comparison is really useful.  Both races are in different ways landless, and therefore in different ways lawless.  For the fundamental laws are land laws.  In both cases a reasonable man will see reasons for unpopularity, without wishing to indulge any task for persecution.  In both cases he will probably recognise the reality of a racial fault, while admitting that it may be largely a racial misfortune.  That is to say, the drifting and detached condition may be largely the cause of Jewish usury or gipsy pilfering; but it is not common sense to contradict the general experience of gipsy pilfering or Jewish usury.  The comparison helps us to clear away some of the cloudy evasions by which modern men have tried to escape from that experience.  It is absurd to say that people are only prejudiced against the money methods of the Jews because the medieval church has left behind a hatred of their religion.  We might as well say that people only protect the chickens from the gipsies because the medieval church undoubtedly condemned fortune-telling.  It is unreasonable for a Jew to complain that Shakespeare makes Shylock and not Antonio the ruthless money-lender; or that Dickens makes Fagin and not Sikes the receiver of stolen goods.  It is as if a gipsy were to complain when a novelist describes a child as stolen by the gipsies, and not by the curate or the mothers’ meeting.  It is to complain of facts and probabilities.  There may be good gipsies; there may be good qualities which specially belong to them as gipsies; many students of the strange race have, for instance, praised a certain dignity and self-respect among the women of the Romany.  But no student ever praised them for an exaggerated respect for private property, and the whole argument about gipsy theft can be roughly repeated about Hebrew usury.  Above all, there is one other respect in which the comparison is even more to the point.  It is the essential fact of the whole business, that the Jews do not become national merely by becoming a political part of any nation.  We might as well say that the gipsies had villas in Clapham, when their caravans stood on Clapham Common.

But, of course, even this comparison between the two wandering peoples fails in the presence of the greater problem.  Here again even the attempt at a parallel leaves the primary thing more unique.  The gipsies do not become municipal merely by passing through a number of parishes, and it would seem equally obvious that a Jew need not become English merely by passing through England on his way from Germany to America.  But the gipsy not only is not municipal, but he is not called municipal.  His caravan is not immediately painted outside with the number and name of 123 Laburnam Road, Clapham.  The municipal authorities generally