274 MARRIAGE AND DISEASE. 



modern peoples, and that, too, notwithstanding 

 frequent and cruel oppression. To my mind this 

 strange immunity from degeneration, after centuries 

 of consanguineous unions, is only to be accounted for 

 by the absence of " social consanguinity " among 

 this people. The Jew has been for centuries a 

 wanderer upon the face of the earth ; a veritable 

 rolling-stone, though differing from the proverbial 

 rolling-stone in its one grand characteristic. He is 

 without a country, therefore without patriotism, and 

 consequently never a soldier ; but, except on_ih 

 battlefield, there is no spot on the earth's surface 

 where wealth and honour are to be won that the Jew 

 is not to be found not as a settler, merely as a 

 temporary sojourner. He has few ties, and he has 

 no love for one country more than another. So he 

 moves from town to town from country to country, 

 from continent to continent in pursuit of wealth, 

 his wandering bringing about such change of en- 

 vironment that anything approaching the " social 

 consanguinity " constantly met with among European 

 aristocracies is impossible. 



The same might, to a certain extent, be said of that 

 other race of wanderers upon whom repeated con- 

 sanguineous marriages seem to bring no blight 

 the Gipsies. In the case of the Gipsies, however, 

 much of their immunity from degenerative disease 

 doubtless depends upon their more natural mode of 

 life, and consequent large store of physical health, 

 as is undoubtedly the case among savage tribes 



