Caricature by Joseph Ferdinand Keppler published in the December 25, 1878, edition of Puck. The associated article reads : "It is to be regretted that Mr. Hilton is as unsuccessful as a dry-goods man and a hotel keeper as he notoriously was as a jurist. But the fact remains. He took it upon himself to insult a portion of our people, whose noses had more of the curvilinear from of beauty than his own pug, and he rode his high hobby-horse of purse-proud self-sufficiency until he woke up one day to find that the dry-goods business was waning—growing small by degrees and beautifully less. Then Mr. Hilton arouses himself. He turns his great mind from thoughts of the wandering bones of Stewart; he brings the power of his gigantic brain to bear upon the great question. ‘How shall I revive trade?’ He remembers that he had insulted the Jews. Aha! we’ll conciliate them. So out of the coffers that A. T. Stewart filled he gropes among the millions, and orders the trustees of a few Hebrew charities to bend the pregnant hinges of their knees at his door, and receive a few hundred dollars. But in this country the Jew is not ostracized. He stands equal before the law and before society with all his fellow-citizens, of whatever creed or nationality. And the Jew has stood up like a Man and refused to condone the gross and uncalled-for insults of this hap-hazard millionaire, merely because he flings the offer of a thousand dollars in their faces. All honor to the Jews for their manly stand in this instance. Trampled upon, scourged, banished as they have been for centuries under the ban of religious persecution, at last they find a land in which they have rights equal with all their fellow-countrymen. They have in this instance asserted their rights, and have dared to maintain their self-respect. It is the verdict of all thinking men that in everything he has done, from the Grand Union Hotel, and the Women’s Home, down to Stewart’s grave, Hilton has been a magnificent failure—and the Jews have won a grand success."
Caricature of Jews selling old clothes on Chatham Street in New York. From Pictures of New York life & character, published New York: G.W. Averell & Co.
