exact terms. He is never romantic about it. But he is almost invariably generous in the use of it. Our race, when it yields to the vice of avarice, is close, secretive, uncharitable. He is pitiless and sly in accumulation. He is vociferous in his insistence upon the exact terms of an agreed compact. He is also tenacious in the pursuit of anything which he has set out on, the accumulation of money among the rest. He is almost fanatical in his appetite for success in whatever he has undertaken, the accumulation of money among the rest. But to say that the money, once accumulated, is not generously used, is nonsense. There is not one of us who could not cite at once a dozen examples of Jewish generosity upon a scale which makes us ashamed.
Nor is it true to say that this generosity has ostentation for its root, or, as it is called, "Ransome," either. Though a love of magnificence is certainly a great passion in the Jewish character, it does not account for the most of his generosity. It is a generosity which extends to all manner of private relations, and if you will take the testimony of those who have been in the service of the Jews and are not Jews themselves, that testimony is almost universally in favour of their employers, if those employers be men of large means.
They will tell you that they felt humiliated in serving a Jew; that the relations were never easy; that there was always distance. But not often that they were treated meanly. Just the other way. There has usually been present a spontaneous generosity. The same argument applies to the cry of "Ransome." It is true that some of the more scandalous Jewish fortunes have thrown up defences against public anger by the return of a small proportion in the shape of public endowments: it is an action and a motive not peculiar to them. But that does not explain the mass of private and unheard benefaction to which we can all testify and which is as common with the middle-class Jew as with the wealthy. It is here as in the matter of courage a question of kind. Those of our people who happen to be generous (they are rare) do not calculate. They often forget or