We have all thoughtfully—­or unthoughtfully—­read the pathetic story of the years of plenty and the years of famine in Egypt, and how Joseph, with that opportunity, made a corner in broken hearts, and the crusts of the poor, and human liberty—­a corner whereby he took a nation’s money all away, to the last penny; took a nation’s live stock all away, to the last hoof; took a nation’s land away, to the last acre; then took the nation itself, buying it for bread, man by man, woman by woman, child by child, till all were slaves; a corner which took everything, left nothing; a corner so stupendous that, by comparison with it, the most gigantic corners in subsequent history are but baby things, for it dealt in hundreds of millions of bushels, and its profits were reckonable by hundreds of millions of dollars, and it was a disaster so crushing that its effects have not wholly disappeared from Egypt to-day, more than three thousand years after the event.

Is it presumably that the eye of Egypt was upon Joseph the foreign Jew all this time?  I think it likely.  Was it friendly?  We must doubt it.  Was Joseph establishing a character for his race which would survive long in Egypt? and in time would his name come to be familiarly used to express that character—­like Shylock’s?  It is hardly to be doubted.  Let us remember that this was centuries before the Crucifixion?

I wish to come down eighteen hundred years later and refer to a remark made by one of the Latin historians.  I read it in a translation many years ago, and it comes back to me now with force.  It was alluding to a time when people were still living who could have seen the Saviour in the flesh.  Christianity was so new that the people of Rome had hardly heard of it, and had but confused notions of what it was.  The substance of the remark was this:  Some Christians were persecuted in Rome through error, they being ‘mistaken for Jews.’

The meaning seems plain.  These pagans had nothing against Christians, but they were quite ready to persecute Jews.  For some reason or other they hated a Jew before they even knew what a Christian was.  May I not assume, then, that the persecution of Jews is a thing which antedates Christianity and was not born of Christianity?  I think so.  What was the origin of the feeling?

When I was a boy, in the back settlements of the Mississippi Valley, where a gracious and beautiful Sunday school simplicity and practicality prevailed, the ‘Yankee’ (citizen of the New England States) was hated with a splendid energy.  But religion had nothing to do with it.  In a trade, the Yankee was held to be about five times the match of the Westerner.  His shrewdness, his insight, his judgment, his knowledge, his enterprise, and his formidable cleverness in applying these forces were frankly confessed, and most competently cursed.

In the cotton States, after the war, the simple and ignorant Negroes made the crops for the white planter on shares.  The Jew came down in force, set up shop on the plantation, supplied all the negro’s wants on credit, and at the end of the season was proprietor of the negro’s share of the present crop and of part of his share of the next one.  Before long, the whites detested the Jew, and it is doubtful if the negro loved him.