The fiction that a man of obviously different type and culture and race
is the same as ourselves, may be practical for purposes of law and
government, but cannot be maintained in general opinion. A conspiracy or
illusion attempting, for instance, to establish the Esquimaux in
Greenland as indistinguishable from the Danish officials of the
Settlement, would fail through ridicule. Equally ridiculous would be the
pretence that because they were both subjects of the same Crown an
Englishman in the Civil Service of India was exactly the same sort of
person as a Sikh soldier. But with the Jews you have the startling truth
that, while the fundamental difference goes on the whole time and is
perhaps deeper than any other of the differences separating mankind into
groups; while he is, within, and through all his ultimate character,
above all things a Jew; yet in the superficial and most immediately
apparent things he is clothed in the very habit of whatever society he
for the moment inhabits.
I say that this might seem to many the last and strongest argument in
favour of the old-fashioned Liberal policy, but I repeat that it is a
dangerous argument, for it cuts both ways. If a food which disagrees
with you looks exactly like another kind of food which suits you, you
might use the likeness as an argument for eating either sort of food
indifferently. You might say: "It is silly to try to distinguish; one
must admit, on looking at them, that they are the same thing"; but it
would turn out after dinner a very bad practical policy.
There is indeed one last argument which to me, personally, and I suppose
to most of my readers, is stronger than all the rest, for it is the
argument from morals.
If the Liberal attitude of the nineteenth century had proved a stable
one, omitting that element in it which is a falsehood and therefore a
factor of instability, one could retain the rest; _then_ it would
satisfy two appetites common to all men--appetite for justice and the
appetite for charity.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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