EARLY AMERICAN FINANCIERS 403 



nearly a hundred years older than the bank of England, 

 which Law saw appear. 



Bills of exchange dated from a previous bank of Barce- 

 lona, when the Jews were in disfavor and required to have 

 their money in some liquid state. The Dutch gave the penin- 

 sular Jews an asylum, and hence fiscal science paused long 

 at Amsterdam. 



The Jewish race proved an exception to all the other 

 migrations of Germans, Tartars, Phoenicians, etc., in that 

 they carried financiers in their camp. The golden calf is 

 still their passover mark. Their survival is not a miracle, 

 but a scientific, a constitutional method, an insurance and 

 commissariat. "Render unto Caesar the things which are 

 Caesar's, " was also spoken by a Jew. 



At this day, when Rothschild and Belmont extend to us 

 the certitude of our money and enable the times to revive, 

 the traditions of some old transactions about Jerusalem are 

 commonplace. From the Arab and Semitic sentimentality 

 we get a foolish hostility to riches, and the church had to take 

 among its saints the rich man who, by not giving his all to 

 the poor, preserved the moralist a tomb. 



A Dutchman, King William, reared among the semi- 

 Jewish bankers of Holland, planted the bank of England at 

 the suggestion of a merchant who offered through it to raise 

 the king's war loans. The politicians in parliament attacked 

 it. It charged the government 8 per cent, and £4,000 besides 

 annually, but the people took the stock ten years after Penn 

 founded Philadelphia. 



The bank set Europe free from the French king and his 

 persecutions and gave English liberty its career, of which we 

 are a part, and the public debt of England is the private 

 affair of the bank, not the business of impecunious political 

 demagogues. 



Why did America, with such a capable financier as Hamil- 

 ton, grow up to dislike banks and bankers? The constant 

 indebtedness of slaveholders and the debts of the free settlers 

 to establish themselves on new land caused the two classes 

 to unite against paying debts and taxes. The four presidents 

 elected after Hamilton's retirement and death traduced his 



