The warfare continued with vigour on both sides. The Jews, encouraged by Mr. Grant’s partial success, went on petitioning the House of Commons for political equality, and their petitions found a constant champion in Lord John Russell, who year after year brought in a Bill on the subject. But the forces of the enemy held out gallantly. That a Jew should represent a Christian constituency, and, who knows? even control the destinies of the British Empire, was still a proposition that shocked a great many good souls; while others ridiculed it as preposterous. A. W. Kinglake voices the latter class of opponents in his _Eothen_. A Greek in the Levant had expressed to the author his wonder that a man of Rothschild’s position should be denied political recognition. The English traveller scowls at the idea, and quotes it simply as an illustration of the Greek’s monstrous materialism. “Rothschild (the late money-monger) had never been the Prime Minister of England! I gravely tried to throw some light upon the mysterious causes that had kept the worthy Israelite out of the Cabinet.” Had Kinglake been endowed with the gift of foreseeing coming, as he was with the gift of describing current events, he would probably never have written the eloquent page on which the above passage occurs. But in his own day there was nothing absurd in his attitude. Till 1828 no more than twelve Jewish brokers were permitted to carry on business in the City of London, and vacancies were filled at an enormous cost. Even baptized Jews were excluded from the freedom of the City, and therefore no Jew could keep a shop, or exercise any retail trade, till 1832. The struggle for the enfranchisement of the Jews was only one operation in a campaign wherein the whole English world was concerned, and on the result of which depended far larger issues than the fate of the small community of English Jews. It was a campaign between the powers of the past and the powers of the future. Among those engaged in this struggle was a man in whom the two ages met. He had inherited the traditions of old England, and he was destined to promote the development of the new. His life witnessed the death of one world and the birth of another. His career is an epitome of English history in the nineteenth century.