Coningsby; Or, The New GenerationDisraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield
General
Coningsby; Or, The New Generation
Disraeli, Benjamin, Earl of Beaconsfield
Great Britain -- Fiction; Political fiction; Politicians -- Fiction
‘Oh! as for illiberality, I have no objection to it if it be an element
of power. Eschew political sentimentalism. What I contend is, that if
you permit men to accumulate property, and they use that permission to a
great extent, power is inseparable from that property, and it is in the
last degree impolitic to make it the interest of any powerful class to
oppose the institutions under which they live. The Jews, for example,
independently of the capital qualities for citizenship which they
possess in their industry, temperance, and energy and vivacity of mind,
are a race essentially monarchical, deeply religious, and shrinking
themselves from converts as from a calamity, are ever anxious to see
the religious systems of the countries in which they live flourish;
yet, since your society has become agitated in England, and powerful
combinations menace your institutions, you find the once loyal
Hebrew invariably arrayed in the same ranks as the leveller, and the
latitudinarian, and prepared to support the policy which may even
endanger his life and property, rather than tamely continue under a
system which seeks to degrade him. The Tories lose an important election
at a critical moment; ‘tis the Jews come forward to vote against them.
The Church is alarmed at the scheme of a latitudinarian university, and
learns with relief that funds are not forthcoming for its establishment;
a Jew immediately advances and endows it. Yet the Jews, Coningsby,
are essentially Tories. Toryism, indeed, is but copied from the mighty
prototype which has fashioned Europe. And every generation they must
become more powerful and more dangerous to the society which is hostile
to them. Do you think that the quiet humdrum persecution of a decorous
representative of an English university can crush those who have
successively baffled the Pharaohs, Nebuchadnezzar, Rome, and the Feudal
ages? The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian
organisation. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature, which
has baffled Egyptian and Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, and Christian
Inquisitors. No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a
superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it.
The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains.
And at this moment, in spite of centuries, of tens of centuries, of
degradation, the Jewish mind exercises a vast influence on the affairs
of Europe. I speak not of their laws, which you still obey; of their
literature, with which your minds are saturated; but of the living
Hebrew intellect.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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