Essay and speech on Jewish disabilities — John Shaqi
Essay and speech on Jewish disabilitiesMacaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
Religion
Essay and speech on Jewish disabilities
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
Jews -- Great Britain
The English Jews, we are told, are not Englishmen. They are a separate
people, living locally in this island, but living morally and
politically in communion with their brethren who are scattered over
all the world. An English Jew looks on a Dutch or a Portuguese Jew as
his countryman, and on an English Christian as a stranger. This want
of patriotic feeling, it is said, renders a Jew unfit to exercise
political functions.
The argument has in it something plausible; but a close examination
shows it to be quite unsound. Even if the alleged facts are admitted,
still the Jews are not the only people who have preferred their sect
to their country. The feeling of patriotism, when society is in a
healthful state, springs up by a natural and inevitable association,
in the minds of citizens who know that they owe all their comforts and
pleasures to the bond which unites them in one community. But, under a
partial and oppressive government, these associations cannot acquire
that strength which they have in a better state of things. Men are
compelled to seek from their party that protection which they ought
to receive from their country, and they, by a natural consequence,
transfer to their party that affection which they would otherwise have
felt for their country. The Huguenots of France called in the help of
England against their Catholic kings. The Catholics of France called in
the help of Spain against a Huguenot king. Would it be fair to infer,
that at present the French Protestants would wish to see their religion
made dominant by the help of a Prussian or English army? Surely not.
And why is it that they are not willing, as they formerly were willing,
to sacrifice the interests of their country to the interests of their
religious persuasion? The reason is obvious: they were persecuted then,
and are not persecuted now. The English Puritans, under Charles the
First, prevailed on the Scotch to invade England. Do the Protestant
Dissenters of our time wish to see the Church put down by an invasion
of foreign Calvinists? If not, to what cause are we to attribute
the change? Surely to this, that the Protestant Dissenters are far
better treated now than in the seventeenth century. Some of the most
illustrious public men that England ever produced were inclined to
take refuge from the tyranny of Laud in North America.[9] Was this
because Presbyterians and Independents are incapable of loving their
country? But it is idle to multiply instances. Nothing is so offensive
to a man who knows anything of history or of human nature as to hear
those who exercise the powers of government accuse any sect of foreign
attachments. If there be any proposition universally true in politics
it is this, that foreign attachments are the fruit of domestic misrule.
It has always been the trick of bigots to make their subjects miserable
at home, and then to complain that they look for relief abroad; to
divide society, and to wonder that it is not united; to govern as if a
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