“Nobody knows better than my honourable friend the Member for the University of Oxford that there is nothing in their national character which unfits them for the highest duties of citizens. He knows that, in the infancy of civilisation, when our island was as savage as New Guinea, when letters and arts were still unknown to Athens, when scarcely a thatched hut stood on what was afterwards the site of Rome, this contemned people had their fenced cities and cedar palaces, their splendid Temple, their fleets of merchant ships, their schools of sacred learning, their great statesmen and soldiers, their natural philosophers, their historians and their poets. What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair? And if, in the course of many centuries, the oppressed descendants of warriors and sages have degenerated from the qualities of their fathers, if, while excluded from the blessings of law, and bowed down under the yoke of slavery, they have contracted some of the vices of outlaws and of slaves, shall we consider this as matter of reproach to them? Shall we not rather consider it as matter of shame and remorse to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of the House of Commons. Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees” (_Infra_, pp. 60, 61). We may at this distance of time prefer the speech to the essay. Nevertheless, we cannot but be profoundly grateful for both, and are bound to recognise and appreciate the deep influence they both exercised in persuading public opinion to grant the Jews of England complete equality before the law with all other denominations. Macaulay was brought up in a home which was the headquarters of the movement for the abolition of slavery. He carried the lessons of his youth into the work of his manhood. He championed the cause of the persecuted and the wronged in various human relations. But nothing that he did has raised a more enduring monument to his name than his enthusiastic and triumphant advocacy of the cause of Jewish freedom. Civil Disabilities of the Jews FROM “THE EDINBURGH REVIEW,” _Jan. 1831_ _Statement of the Civil Disabilities and Privations affecting Jews in England_ 8vo. London: 1829[1]