Even the genial Elia was not above entertaining and elaborating the hoary platitude that Jews and Gentiles can never mix. Although he declares that he has, in the abstract, no disrespect for Jews, he admits that he would not care to be in habits of familiar intercourse with any of them. Centuries of injury, contempt and hate, on the one side--of cloaked revenge, dissimulation and hate, on the other, between our and their fathers, he thinks, must and ought to affect the blood of the children. He cannot believe that a few fine words, such as “candour,” “liberality,” “the light of the nineteenth century,” can close up the breaches of so deadly a disunion. In brief, he frankly confesses that he does not relish the approximation of Jew and Christian which was becoming fashionable, affirming that “the spirit of the Synagogue is essentially separative.”[150] Yet, in defiance of Byronic wrath, of Elian humour, and of Coleridgean theology, the demand for justice daily gained ground. In 1830 Mr. Robert Grant, member of Parliament for Inverness, sounded the trumpet-call to battle by proposing that Jews should be admitted to the House of Commons. The Bill was carried on the first reading by 18 votes, but was lost on the second by 63. The initial success of the proposal was evidence of the progress of public opinion; its final rejection showed that there was room for further progress. Indeed, the victory of light over darkness was not to be won without a severe conflict: the prejudices of eighteen centuries had to be assaulted and taken one after the other, ere triumph could be secured. How strong these fortifications were can easily be seen by a glance at the catalogue of any great public library under the proper heading. There the modern Englishman’s wondering eye finds a formidable array of pamphlets extending over many years, and covering the whole field of racial and theological intolerance. But the opposite phalanx, though as yet inferior in numbers, shows a brave front too. In January, 1831, Macaulay fulminated from the pages of the _Edinburgh Review_ in support of the good cause: “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 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.” This premosaic platitude, and other coeval arguments, Macaulay sets himself to demolish; and, whatever may be thought of the intrinsic value of his weapons, the principle for which he battled no longer stands in need of vindication.