“And so it would,” smiled the General, “if now we were only Federalists like Adams, and remembered the Church of England as a guide. This, however, is a Presbyterian administration; wherefore, we shall abide none of your Lents, but drink and dance and dine as far into spring flowers as we will.”
“Being the earliest instance,” added I, “when to drink and to dance and to dine were called an evidence of Calvinism.”
Noah was pen-employed over certain wisdom which should find subsequent exposition in his paper.
“There are large money influences,” remarked Noah, thoughtfully, when we had talked a moment, “which have grown alluringly friendly about my associate, Watson Webb. They are offering a loan to our paper of fifty thousand dollars. You know”—this with his satirical air—“how papers are ever in want of a loan. These money folk bank on that to win us; perhaps, too, they find hope in my being a Jew.”
“And what would your associate do?” I asked.
“To be frank,” returned Noah, “he grants admiring ear to this song of siren money. I think we shall part company—Webb and I.”
“And yet,” said I, with a bent for banter, “you are ever in one kind or another laying emphasis on your Jewish readiness for gold. Now you see it is the Jew who can not be moved, while our Gentile, with an eye to the yellow chance, would not be found so sentimental.”
“For all that,” remarked Noah, “the Jew is a profound money hunter. It is but natural he should be. That cupidity, or, if you prefer, that gold-greed, has been through centuries developed as his one hope for safety. In the oppressions which have borne upon him, and which in all countries save this still bear him down, your Jew has found in money his last cave of retreat. He might bulwark himself with riches. With others, gold would mean luxury; with the Jew, it stood for life itself, and to go wanting it was to be tooth and nail about the digging of his own grave.”
“And it is your theory, then,” said I, “that the great need for gold which for ages was to stare the Jew in the face, became the seed of that genius, to gather which now the race is heir to?”
“Without question,” said Noah. “More; since the Jew has been safe of his goods and his blood in this land of ours, and the rowels of that great need no longer lance the flanks of effort and set it to the leap, we rear a kind of Jew who owns no mighty care for money. I will find you Jews in our midst who can still be hawks to swoop, but who have no hold to keep. They will spend you their riches or give them away like water. We shall yet rear an American Jew who has no skill to get money. Still, going back to that first thought—for it is worrying my soul like a dog—of those money influences busy with the enlistment of Webb, I am free to say that even in his worst hour your Jew would never take a bribe. He would sell neither his friend nor his principle; those were never Jewish ways of money-finding.”