sectarian animosities, under the impulse of a common striving for the common good. And Macaulay’s point is missed by Professor Montague. Religion _as such_ must not be made a bar to admission to political rights. Macaulay did not argue that power should be placed in the hands of those unfit to use it for the general good. But assuming the fitness proved, their religion must not be a ground for exclusion. Every one admitted that the fitness had been proved in the case of the Jews. Inglis, who preceded Macaulay, and, of course, on the opposite side, said in the 1833 debate: “He believed that there was no portion of the community that furnished a smaller relative proportion of criminals, or that were better conducted, than the Jews were.” Another opponent of the Bill, Mr. Halcomb, said: “He admitted that the Jews were a body against whose moral character nothing could be adduced; that they were good and loyal citizens of the king.” Mr. William Roche (a Catholic supporter of the Bill) might well comment on all this: “If, Sir, the Jews have proved themselves good subjects in this country, and in all other countries where they have been domesticated and admitted to political freedom, that is all we have a right to look to, leaving to them, as to every other sect, perfect liberty of conscience in their spiritual concerns.” Of course Professor Montague does not dispute the validity of Macaulay’s plea as applied to _the Jews_. He describes the success of the arguments in the essay as complete, and their justice as generally admitted. J. Cotter Morison, in his life of Macaulay in the “English Men of Letters” series, advanced the view “that Macaulay’s natural aptitude was rather oratorical than literary.... It is no exaggeration to say that as an orator he moves in a higher intellectual plane than he does as a writer.... In his speeches we find him nearly without exception laying down broad luminous principles, based upon reason, and those boundless stores of historical illustration, from which he argues with equal brevity and force. It is interesting to compare his treatment of the same subject in an essay and a speech. His speech on the Maynooth grant and his essay on Mr. Gladstone’s _Church and State_ deal with practically the same question, and few persons would hesitate to give the preference to the speech” (pp. 131, 132). Jewish disabilities is another subject which occasioned both an essay and a speech from Macaulay. Here, too, the speech, by comparison, must be judged to be more effective than the essay. Certainly there is no passage in the essay which equals in dignity and strength and eloquence the following sentences in the speech:—