“‘Such, sir,’ said he, ‘has in every age been the reasoning of bigots. They never fail to plead, in justification of persecution, the vices which persecution has engendered. England has been to the Jews less than half a country, and we revile them because they do not feel for England more than a half patriotism. We treat them as slaves, and wonder that they do not regard us as brethren. We drive them to mean occupations, and then reproach them for not embracing honourable professions. We long forbade them to possess land, and we complain that they chiefly occupy themselves in trade. We shut them out from all the paths of ambition, and then we despise them for taking refuge in avarice. During many ages we have in all our dealings with them abused our immense superiority of force, and then we are disgusted because they have recourse to that cunning which is the natural and universal defence of the weak against the violence of the strong. But were they always a mere money-changing, money-getting, money-hoarding race? 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 civilization, 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 poets. What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and religion? 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 bound down under the yoke of slavery they have contracted some of the vices of outlaws and slaves, shall we consider this a matter of reproach to them? Shall we not rather consider it a matter of shame and remorse to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. 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 amongst the descendants of the Maccabees.’” We have “done this,” and the results have stultified all this nicely balanced rhetoric. And the following pages may suggest that our European ancestors had other reasons for expelling the Jews than the mere “bigotry” and “brutality” so unphilosophically ascribed to them by Lord Macaulay. FOOTNOTES: [5] [Dr. J. C. Nott, the well-known ethnologist.]