300 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



earliest and crudest conception of tribal ethics, prevailed at least 

 as late as the reign of Edward III i. e., till about the middle of 

 the fourteenth century ; and long after this period it was exceed- 

 ingly difficult to enact and almost impossible to enforce laws for 

 the protection of foreigners, so deeply rooted and intense was the 

 prejudice against them. Even far down into the eighteenth cen- 

 tury they continued to be regarded with extreme suspicion, and 

 were often subjected to gross indignities, independently of any 

 personal qualities or any peculiar conduct on their part. The 

 mere fact of their alienage sufficed to kindle against them the 

 anger of the populace and turn the masses into an unruly mob. 

 This is still the mental attitude of the cockney, and cockneyism is 

 only a local form of philistinism by no means confined to the pre- 

 cincts of Bow Bells. 



The laws of Venice, as expounded by Portia in the case of Shy- 

 lock vs. Antonio, discriminated against aliens as opposed to citi- 

 zens in a manner extremely fatal to the plaintiff and exceedingly 

 characteristic of mediaeval legislation. 



Under the influence of the political panic caused by the ex- 

 cesses of the French Revolution, Lord Grenville succeeded, in 

 1793, in persuading the British Parliament to pass an alien bill, 

 in which the spirit of feudalism reasserted itself ; and since the 

 abolition of this retrogressive law, which was effected chiefly 

 through the enlightened energy of George Canning, the leaders 

 of the Tory party have repeatedly endeavored to re-enact it. In 

 every age and every country landed aristocracies have always 

 shown a marked tendency to narrowness, provincialism, and dis- 

 trust in their international relations. Indeed, from time imme- 

 morial, agricultural communities have been excessively conserva- 

 tive in this respect and hostile to progress ; whereas commercial 

 states and cities, whose prosperity is in proportion to their cos- 

 mopolitanism and dependent upon it, are naturally philallogeneal 

 (to coin a word from the Greek of the Alexandrian patriarch 

 Cyril, who unfortunately seldom exemplified in his conduct the 

 virtue expressed by the epithet), or friendly to foreigners and 

 easily accessible to influences from without. 



Even in America, where all portions of the population are 

 more mobile and undergo more rapid and radical changes than 

 in other lands, the farmers are notoriously tenacious of old ideas 

 and suspicious of reformatory movements of all kinds, following 

 their traditions and clinging to their prejudices long after arti- 

 sans and other handworkers of the manufacturing centers and 

 large cities have cast aside these notions as obsolete and injurious. 



All European governments appear to be periodically or epi- 

 demically affected with spasms of antipathy to aliens. France 

 suffered from a particularly severe attack of this sort just before 



