The whole and sole claim of the Jew is, that some of his party are
rich. How they have made their riches, or how they spend them,
is beneath us to inquire. But what are their national evidences,
even of wealth, it might be difficult to discover. They exhibit no
fruits here, nor anywhere. It has been often asked, with genuine
astonishment, what signs of national liberality have ever been
given by Jewish wealth in the world? What contribution does it
make, or has it ever made, to the arts that decorate life, to the
literature that enlightens it, or to those bold and commanding
services by which nations are raised or restored? Where are the
picture galleries, or the great libraries, the great institutions,
erected by the wealth of the Jew? As to the genius which endows
mankind, for generations to come, with noble inventions, or leaves
its name behind in a track of glory to posterity, who ever heard of
it among the Jews? Shopkeepers of London have planted its vicinity
with great establishments, castles of charity, magnificent monuments
of practical religion, to which all the works of Jewish bounty are
molehills. The Jews have an hospital and a few schools,--and there
the efflux of liberality stops, the stream stagnates, the river
becomes a pond, and the pond dries away.
It is remarkable, and may be a punitive consequence, that there
is nothing so fugitive as the wealth of the Jew. There is perhaps
no hereditary example of Jewish wealth in the world. In England
we have seen opulent firms, but they have never had the principle
of permanency. Supposed to be boundlessly wealthy, a blight came,
and every leaf dropt off. One powerful firm now lords it over the
loan-market of Europe. We have no desire to anticipate the future;
but what has become of all its predecessors in this country? or what
memorial have they all left, to make us regret their vanishing, or
remember their existence?
Of the sudden passion with which Ministers have snatched the
Israelite to their bosom, we shall leave the explanation until
their day of penitence. As poverty makes man submit to strange
companionship, political necessity may make a Whig Cabinet stoop to
the embrace of the Jew. The resource is desperate, but the exigency
must be equally so. We hail the omen,--the grasp at straws shows
nothing but the exhaustion of the swimmer.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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