Impressions of Theophrastus Such

The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!

To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require

so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general

sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent

resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer

discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage

of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the

prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the

most ordinary prompting of comparison--the bringing things together

because of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same

practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced,

according to their association with superficial differences, historical

or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects

often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that

of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her

maid.

To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a

form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in

conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect

of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the

various points of view--the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and

the abysmally ignorant.

That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of

national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving

nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has

been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that

even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English

regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,--these are the

glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and

universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They

have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances.

That there is a free modern Greece is due--through all infiltration of

other than Greek blood--to the presence of ancient Greece in the

consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point

safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by

ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that

the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows

that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that

many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are

disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with

Italy: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of

Mazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship

of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past that

wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was

Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless

wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic

convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the

Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in

European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as

chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for

painters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of halfpence;

and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful,

in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello.

Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments

with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate

existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and

innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.

Again, one of our living historians finds just sympathy in his vigorous

insistance on our true ancestry, on our being the strongly marked

heritors in language and genius of those old English seamen who,

beholding a rich country with a most convenient seaboard, came,

doubtless with a sense of divine warrant, and settled themselves on this

or the other side of fertilising streams, gradually conquering more and

more of the pleasant land from the natives who knew nothing of Odin,

and finally making unusually clean work in ridding themselves of those

prior occupants. "Let us," he virtually says, "let us know who were our

forefathers, who it was that won the soil for us, and brought the good

seed of those institutions through which we should not arrogantly but

gratefully feel ourselves distinguished among the nations as possessors

of long-inherited freedom; let us not keep up an ignorant kind of naming

which disguises our true affinities of blood and language, but let us

see thoroughly what sort of notions and traditions our forefathers had,

and what sort of song inspired them. Let the poetic fragments which

breathe forth their fierce bravery in battle and their trust in fierce

gods who helped them, be treasured with affectionate reverence. These

seafaring, invading, self-asserting men were the English of old time,

and were our fathers who did rough work by which we are profiting. They

had virtues which incorporated themselves in wholesome usages to which

we trace our own political blessings. Let us know and acknowledge our

common relationship to them, and be thankful that over and above the

affections and duties which spring from our manhood, we have the closer

and more constantly guiding duties which belong to us as Englishmen."

To this view of our nationality most persons who have feeling and

understanding enough to be conscious of the connection between the

patriotic affection and every other affection which lifts us above

emigrating rats and free-loving baboons, will be disposed to say Amen.

True, we are not indebted to those ancestors for our religion: we are

rather proud of having got that illumination from elsewhere. The men who

planted our nation were not Christians, though they began their work

centuries after Christ; and they had a decided objection to Christianity

when it was first proposed to them: they were not monotheists, and their

religion was the reverse of spiritual. But since we have been fortunate

enough to keep the island-home they won for us, and have been on the

whole a prosperous people, rather continuing the plan of invading and

spoiling other lands than being forced to beg for shelter in them,

nobody has reproached us because our fathers thirteen hundred years ago

worshipped Odin, massacred Britons, and were with difficulty persuaded

to accept Christianity, knowing nothing of Hebrew history and the

reasons why Christ should be received as the Saviour of mankind. The Red

Indians, not liking us when we settled among them, might have been

willing to fling such facts in our faces, but they were too ignorant,

and besides, their opinions did not signify, because we were able, if we

liked, to exterminate them. The Hindoos also have doubtless had their

rancours against us and still entertain enough ill-will to make

unfavourable remarks on our character, especially as to our historic

rapacity and arrogant notions of our own superiority; they perhaps do

not admire the usual English profile, and they are not converted to our

way of feeding: but though we are a small number of an alien race

profiting by the territory and produce of these prejudiced people, they

are unable to turn us out; at least, when they tried we showed them

their mistake. We do not call ourselves a dispersed and a punished

people: we are a colonising people, and it is we who have punished

others.

Still the historian guides us rightly in urging us to dwell on the

virtues of our ancestors with emulation, and to cherish our sense of a

common descent as a bond of obligation. The eminence, the nobleness of a

people depends on its capability of being stirred by memories, and of

striving for what we call spiritual ends--ends which consist not in

immediate material possession, but in the satisfaction of a great

feeling that animates the collective body as with one soul. A people

having the seed of worthiness in it must feel an answering thrill when

it is adjured by the deaths of its heroes who died to preserve its

national existence; when it is reminded of its small beginnings and

gradual growth through past labours and struggles, such as are still

demanded of it in order that the freedom and wellbeing thus inherited

may be transmitted unimpaired to children and children's children; when

an appeal against the permission of injustice is made to great

precedents in its history and to the better genius breathing in its

institutions. It is this living force of sentiment in common which makes

a national consciousness. Nations so moved will resist conquest with

the very breasts of their women, will pay their millions and their blood

to abolish slavery, will share privation in famine and all calamity,

will produce poets to sing "some great story of a man," and thinkers

whose theories will bear the test of action. An individual man, to be

harmoniously great, must belong to a nation of this order, if not in

actual existence yet existing in the past, in memory, as a departed,

invisible, beloved ideal, once a reality, and perhaps to be restored. A

common humanity is not yet enough to feed the rich blood of various

activity which makes a complete man. The time is not come for

cosmopolitanism to be highly virtuous, any more than for communism to

suffice for social energy. I am not bound to feel for a c******n as I

feel for my fellow-countryman: I am bound not to demoralise him with

opium, not to compel him to my will by destroying or plundering the

fruits of his labour on the alleged ground that he is not cosmopolitan

enough, and not to insult him for his want of my tailoring and religion

when he appears as a peaceable visitor on the London pavement. It is

admirable in a Briton with a good purpose to learn Chinese, but it

would not be a proof of fine intellect in him to taste Chinese poetry in

the original more than he tastes the poetry of his own tongue.

Affection, intelligence, duty, radiate from a centre, and nature has

decided that for us English folk that centre can be neither China nor

Peru. Most of us feel this unreflectingly; for the affectation of

undervaluing everything native, and being too fine for one's own

country, belongs only to a few minds of no dangerous leverage. What is

wanting is, that we should recognise a corresponding attachment to

nationality as legitimate in every other people, and understand that its

absence is a privation of the greatest good.

For, to repeat, not only the nobleness of a nation depends on the

presence of this national consciousness, but also the nobleness of each

individual citizen. Our dignity and rectitude are proportioned to our

sense of relationship with something great, admirable, pregnant with

high possibilities, worthy of sacrifice, a continual inspiration to

self-repression and discipline by the presentation of aims larger and

more attractive to our generous part than the securing of personal ease

or prosperity. And a people possessing this good should surely feel not

only a ready sympathy with the effort of those who, having lost the

good, strive to regain it, but a profound pity for any degradation

resulting from its loss; nay, something more than pity when happier

nationalities have made victims of the unfortunate whose memories

nevertheless are the very fountain to which the persecutors trace their

most vaunted blessings.

These notions are familiar: few will deny them in the abstract, and many

are found loudly asserting them in relation to this or the other

particular case. But here as elsewhere, in the ardent application of

ideas, there is a notable lack of simple comparison or sensibility to

resemblance. The European world has long been used to consider the Jews

as altogether exceptional, and it has followed naturally enough that

they have been excepted from the rules of justice and mercy, which are

based on human likeness. But to consider a people whose ideas have

determined the religion of half the world, and that the more cultivated

half, and who made the most eminent struggle against the power of Rome,

as a purely exceptional race, is a demoralising offence against rational

knowledge, a stultifying inconsistency in historical interpretation.

Every nation of forcible character--i.e., of strongly marked

characteristics, is so far exceptional. The distinctive note of each

bird-species is in this sense exceptional, but the necessary ground of

such distinction is a deeper likeness. The superlative peculiarity in

the Jews admitted, our affinity with them is only the more apparent when

the elements of their peculiarity are discerned.

From whatever point of view the writings of the Old Testament may be

regarded, the picture they present of a national development is of high

interest and speciality, nor can their historic momentousness be much

affected by any varieties of theory as to the relation they bear to the

New Testament or to the rise and constitution of Christianity. Whether

we accept the canonical Hebrew books as a revelation or simply as part

of an ancient literature, makes no difference to the fact that we find

there the strongly characterised portraiture of a people educated from

an earlier or later period to a sense of separateness unique in its

intensity, a people taught by many concurrent influences to identify

faithfulness to its national traditions with the highest social and

religious blessings. Our too scanty sources of Jewish history, from the

return under Ezra to the beginning of the desperate resistance against

Rome, show us the heroic and triumphant struggle of the Maccabees, which

rescued the religion and independence of the nation from the corrupting

sway of the Syrian Greeks, adding to the glorious sum of its memorials,

and stimulating continuous efforts of a more peaceful sort to maintain

and develop that national life which the heroes had fought and died for,

by internal measures of legal administration and public teaching.

Thenceforth the virtuous elements of the Jewish life were engaged, as

they had been with varying aspects during the long and changeful

prophetic period and the restoration under Ezra, on the side of

preserving the specific national character against a demoralising fusion

with that of foreigners whose religion and ritual were idolatrous and

often obscene. There was always a Foreign party reviling the National

party as narrow, and sometimes manifesting their own breadth in

extensive views of advancement or profit to themselves by flattery of a

foreign power. Such internal conflict naturally tightened the bands of

conservatism, which needed to be strong if it were to rescue the sacred

ark, the vital spirit of a small nation--"the smallest of the

nations"--whose territory lay on the highway between three continents;

and when the dread and hatred of foreign sway had condensed itself into

dread and hatred of the Romans, many Conservatives became Zealots, whose

chief mark was that they advocated resistance to the death against the

submergence of their nationality. Much might be said on this point

towards distinguishing the desperate struggle against a conquest which

is regarded as degradation and corruption, from rash, hopeless

insurrection against an established native government; and for my part

(if that were of any consequence) I share the spirit of the Zealots. I

take the spectacle of the Jewish people defying the Roman edict, and

preferring death by starvation or the sword to the introduction of

Caligula's deified statue into the temple, as a sublime type of

steadfastness. But all that need be noticed here is the continuity of

that national education (by outward and inward circumstance) which

created in the Jews a feeling of race, a sense of corporate existence,

unique in its intensity.

But not, before the dispersion, unique in essential qualities. There is

more likeness than contrast between the way we English got our island

and the way the Israelites got Canaan. We have not been noted for

forming a low estimate of ourselves in comparison with foreigners, or

for admitting that our institutions are equalled by those of any other

people under the sun. Many of us have thought that our sea-wall is a

specially divine arrangement to make and keep us a nation of sea-kings

after the manner of our forefathers, secure against invasion and able to

invade other lands when we need them, though they may lie on the other

side of the ocean. Again, it has been held that we have a peculiar

destiny as a Protestant people, not only able to bruise the head of an

idolatrous Christianity in the midst of us, but fitted as possessors of

the most truth and the most tonnage to carry our purer religion over the

world and convert mankind to our way of thinking. The Puritans,

asserting their liberty to restrain tyrants, found the Hebrew history

closely symbolical of their feelings and purpose; and it can hardly be

correct to cast the blame of their less laudable doings on the writings

they invoked, since their opponents made use of the same writings for

different ends, finding there a strong warrant for the divine right of

kings and the denunciation of those who, like Korah, Dathan, and Abiram,

took on themselves the office of the priesthood which belonged of right

solely to Aaron and his sons, or, in other words, to men ordained by the

English bishops. We must rather refer the passionate use of the Hebrew

writings to affinities of disposition between our own race and the

Jewish. Is it true that the arrogance of a Jew was so immeasurably

beyond that of a Calvinist? And the just sympathy and admiration which

we give to the ancestors who resisted the oppressive acts of our native

kings, and by resisting rescued or won for us the best part of our civil

and religious liberties--is it justly to be withheld from those brave

and steadfast men of Jewish race who fought and died, or strove by wise

administration to resist, the oppression and corrupting influences of

foreign tyrants, and by resisting rescued the nationality which was the

very hearth of our own religion? At any rate, seeing that the Jews were

more specifically than any other nation educated into a sense of their

supreme moral value, the chief matter of surprise is that any other

nation is found to rival them in this form of self-confidence.

More exceptional--less like the course of our own history--has been

their dispersion and their subsistence as a separate people through ages

in which for the most part they were regarded and treated very much as

beasts hunted for the sake of their skins, or of a valuable secretion

peculiar to their species. The Jews showed a talent for accumulating

what was an object of more immediate desire to Christians than animal

oils or well-furred skins, and their cupidity and avarice were found at

once particularly hateful and particularly useful: hateful when seen as

a reason for punishing them by mulcting or robbery, useful when this

retributive process could be successfully carried forward. Kings and

emperors naturally were more alive to the usefulness of subjects who

could gather and yield money; but edicts issued to protect "the King's

Jews" equally with the King's game from being harassed and hunted by the

commonalty were only slight mitigations to the deplorable lot of a race

held to be under the divine curse, and had little force after the

Crusades began. As the slave-holders in the United States counted the

curse on Ham a justification of n***o slavery, so the curse on the Jews

was counted a justification for hindering them from pursuing agriculture

and handicrafts; for marking them out as execrable figures by a peculiar

dress; for torturing them to make them part with their gains, or for

more gratuitously spitting at them and pelting them; for taking it as

certain that they killed and ate babies, poisoned the wells, and took

pains to spread the plague; for putting it to them whether they would be

baptised or burned, and not failing to burn and m******e them when they

were obstinate; but also for suspecting them of disliking the baptism

when they had got it, and then burning them in punishment of their

insincerity; finally, for hounding them by tens on tens of thousands

from the homes where they had found shelter for centuries, and

inflicting on them the horrors of a new exile and a new dispersion. All

this to avenge the Saviour of mankind, or else to compel these

stiff-necked people to acknowledge a Master whose servants showed such

beneficent effects of His teaching.

With a people so treated one of two issues was possible: either from

being of feebler nature than their persecutors, and caring more for ease

than for the sentiments and ideas which constituted their distinctive

character, they would everywhere give way to pressure and get rapidly

merged in the populations around them; or, being endowed with uncommon

tenacity, physical and mental, feeling peculiarly the ties of

inheritance both in blood and faith, remembering national glories,

trusting in their recovery, abhorring apostasy, able to bear all things

and hope all things with the consciousness of being steadfast to

spiritual obligations, the kernel of their number would harden into an

inflexibility more and more insured by motive and habit. They would

cherish all differences that marked them off from their hated

oppressors, all memories that consoled them with a sense of virtual

though unrecognised superiority; and the separateness which was made

their badge of ignominy would be their inward pride, their source of

fortifying defiance. Doubtless such a people would get confirmed in

vices. An oppressive government and a persecuting religion, while

breeding vices in those who hold power, are well known to breed

answering vices in those who are powerless and suffering. What more

direct plan than the course presented by European history could have

been pursued in order to give the Jews a spirit of bitter isolation, of

scorn for the wolfish hypocrisy that made victims of them, of triumph in

prospering at the expense of the blunderers who stoned them away from

the open paths of industry?--or, on the other hand, to encourage in the

less defiant a lying conformity, a pretence of conversion for the sake

of the social advantages attached to baptism, an outward renunciation of

their hereditary ties with the lack of real love towards the society

and creed which exacted this galling tribute?--or again, in the most

unhappy specimens of the race, to rear transcendent examples of odious

vice, reckless instruments of rich men with bad propensities,

unscrupulous grinders of the alien people who wanted to grind _them_?

No wonder the Jews have their vices: no wonder if it were proved (which

it has not hitherto appeared to be) that some of them have a bad

pre-eminence in evil, an unrivalled superfluity of naughtiness. It would

be more plausible to make a wonder of the virtues which have prospered

among them under the shadow of oppression. But instead of dwelling on

these, or treating as admitted what any hardy or ignorant person may

deny, let us found simply on the loud assertions of the hostile. The

Jews, it is said, resisted the expansion of their own religion into

Christianity; they were in the habit of spitting on the cross; they have

held the name of Christ to be _Anathema_. Who taught them that? The men

who made Christianity a curse to them: the men who made the name of

Christ a symbol for the spirit of vengeance, and, what was worse, made

the execution of the vengeance a pretext for satisfying their own

savageness, greed, and envy: the men who sanctioned with the name of

Christ a barbaric and blundering copy of pagan fatalism in taking the

words "His blood be upon us and on our children" as a divinely appointed

verbal warrant for wreaking cruelty from generation to generation on the

people from whose sacred writings Christ drew His teaching. Strange

retrogression in the professors of an expanded religion, boasting an

illumination beyond the spiritual doctrine of Hebrew prophets! For

Hebrew prophets proclaimed a God who demanded mercy rather than

sacrifices. The Christians also believed that God delighted not in the

blood of rams and of bulls, but they apparently conceived Him as

requiring for His satisfaction the sighs and groans, the blood and

roasted flesh of men whose forefathers had misunderstood the

metaphorical character of prophecies which spoke of spiritual

pre-eminence under the figure of a material kingdom. Was this the method

by which Christ desired His title to the Messiahship to be commended to

the hearts and understandings of the nation in which He was born? Many

of His sayings bear the stamp of that patriotism which places

fellow-countrymen in the inner circle of affection and duty. And did the

words "Father, forgive them, they know not what they do," refer only to

the centurion and his band, a tacit exception being made of every Hebrew

there present from the mercy of the Father and the compassion of the

Son?--nay, more, of every Hebrew yet to come who remained unconverted

after hearing of His claim to the Messiahship, not from His own lips or

those of His native apostles, but from the lips of alien men whom cross,

creed, and baptism had left cruel, rapacious, and debauched? It is more

reverent to Christ to believe that He must have approved the Jewish

martyrs who deliberately chose to be burned or massacred rather than be

guilty of a blaspheming lie, more than He approved the rabble of

crusaders who robbed and murdered them in His name. But these

remonstrances seem to have no direct application to personages who take

up the attitude of philosophic thinkers and discriminating critics,

professedly accepting Christianity from a rational point of view as a

vehicle of the highest religious and moral truth, and condemning the

Jews on the ground that they are obstinate adherents of an outworn

creed, maintain themselves in moral alienation from the peoples with

whom they share citizenship, and are destitute of real interest in the

welfare of the community and state with which they are thus identified.

These anti-Judaic advocates usually belong to a party which has felt

itself glorified in winning for Jews, as well as Dissenters and

Catholics, the full privileges of citizenship, laying open to them every

path to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged that

differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of

citizenship--that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel

like one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been succeeded by

a sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limiting clauses were

insisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too far

and in too large proportion along those opened pathways; and the

Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them

as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring that

some of the most objectionable Jews are baptised Christians, it is

obvious that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine

that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically retracted.

But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by

disagreeable events, must yield the palm of wise foresight to those who

argued against them long ago; and it is a striking spectacle to witness

minds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are ready

to force it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairingly

recurring to mediaeval types of thinking--insisting that the Jews are

made viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's money-bag, that for

them all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, that

they have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morally

inferior, and--"serve them right," since they rejected Christianity. All

which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a

servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been

repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose

place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the

clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many

polite persons sums up the question of Judaism--"I never _did_ like the

Jews."

It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, denationalised

race, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must not

inevitably lack some conditions of nobleness. If they drop that

separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of

lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of

missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately

around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation.

No dispassionate observer can deny this danger. Why, our own countrymen

who take to living abroad without purpose or function to keep up their

sense of fellowship in the affairs of their own land are rarely good

specimens of moral healthiness; still, the consciousness of having a

native country, the birthplace of common memories and habits of mind,

existing like a parental hearth quitted but beloved; the dignity of

being included in a people which has a part in the comity of nations

and the growing federation of the world; that sense of special belonging

which is the root of human virtues, both public and private,--all these

spiritual links may preserve migratory Englishmen from the worst

consequences of their voluntary dispersion. Unquestionably the Jews,

having been more than any other race exposed to the adverse moral

influences of alienism, must, both in individuals and in groups, have

suffered some corresponding moral degradation; but in fact they have

escaped with less of abjectness and less of hard hostility towards the

nations whose hand has been against them, than could have happened in

the case of a people who had neither their adhesion to a separate

religion founded on historic memories, nor their characteristic family

affectionateness. Tortured, flogged, spit upon, the _corpus vile_ on

which rage or wantonness vented themselves with impunity, their name

flung at them as an opprobrium by superstition, hatred, and contempt,

they have remained proud of their origin. Does any one call this an evil

pride? Perhaps he belongs to that order of man who, while he has a

democratic dislike to dukes and earls, wants to make believe that his

father was an idle gentleman, when in fact he was an honourable artisan,

or who would feel flattered to be taken for other than an Englishman. It

is possible to be too arrogant about our blood or our calling, but that

arrogance is virtue compared with such mean pretence. The pride which

identifies us with a great historic body is a humanising, elevating

habit of mind, inspiring sacrifices of individual comfort, gain, or

other selfish ambition, for the sake of that ideal whole; and no man

swayed by such a sentiment can become completely abject. That a Jew of

Smyrna, where a whip is carried by passengers ready to flog off the too

officious specimens of his race, can still be proud to say, "I am a

Jew," is surely a fact to awaken admiration in a mind capable of

understanding what we may call the ideal forces in human history. And

again, a varied, impartial observation of the Jews in different

countries tends to the impression that they have a predominant

kindliness which must have been deeply ingrained in the constitution of

their race to have outlasted the ages of persecution and oppression.

The concentration of their joys in domestic life has kept up in them the

capacity of tenderness: the pity for the fatherless and the widow, the

care for the women and the little ones, blent intimately with their

religion, is a well of mercy that cannot long or widely be pent up by

exclusiveness. And the kindliness of the Jew overflows the line of

division between him and the Gentile. On the whole, one of the most

remarkable phenomena in the history of this scattered people, made for

ages "a scorn and a hissing" is, that after being subjected to this

process, which might have been expected to be in every sense

deteriorating and vitiating, they have come out of it (in any estimate

which allows for numerical proportion) rivalling the nations of all

European countries in healthiness and beauty of _physique_, in practical

ability, in scientific and artistic aptitude, and in some forms of

ethical value. A significant indication of their natural rank is seen in

the fact that at this moment, the leader of the Liberal party in Germany

is a Jew, the leader of the Republican party in France is a Jew, and the

head of the Conservative ministry in England is a Jew. And here it is

that we find the ground for the obvious jealousy which is now

stimulating the revived expression of old antipathies. "The Jews," it is

felt, "have a dangerous tendency to get the uppermost places not only in

commerce but in political life. Their monetary hold on governments is

tending to perpetuate in leading Jews a spirit of universal alienism

(euphemistically called cosmopolitanism), even where the West has given

them a full share in civil and political rights. A people with oriental

sunlight in their blood, yet capable of being everywhere acclimatised,

they have a force and toughness which enables them to carry off the best

prizes; and their wealth is likely to put half the seats in Parliament

at their disposal."

There is truth in these views of Jewish social and political relations.

But it is rather too late for liberal pleaders to urge them in a merely

vituperative sense. Do they propose as a remedy for the impending danger

of our healthier national influences getting overridden by Jewish

predominance, that we should repeal our emancipatory laws? Not all the

Germanic immigrants who have been settling among us for generations,

and are still pouring in to settle, are Jews, but thoroughly Teutonic

and more or less Christian craftsmen, mechanicians, or skilled and

erudite functionaries; and the Semitic Christians who swarm among us are

dangerously like their unconverted brethren in complexion, persistence,

and wealth. Then there are the Greeks who, by the help of Phoenician

blood or otherwise, are objectionably strong in the city. Some judges

think that the Scotch are more numerous and prosperous here in the South

than is quite for the good of us Southerners; and the early

inconvenience felt under the Stuarts of being quartered upon by a

hungry, hard-working people with a distinctive accent and form of

religion, and higher cheek-bones than English taste requires, has not

yet been quite neutralised. As for the Irish, it is felt in high

quarters that we have always been too lenient towards them;--at least,

if they had been harried a little more there might not have been so many

of them on the English press, of which they divide the power with the

Scotch, thus driving many Englishmen to honest and ineloquent labour.

So far shall we be carried if we go in search of devices to hinder

people of other blood than our own from getting the advantage of

dwelling among us.

Let it be admitted that it is a calamity to the English, as to any other

great historic people, to undergo a premature fusion with immigrants of

alien blood; that its distinctive national characteristics should be in

danger of obliteration by the predominating quality of foreign settlers.

I not only admit this, I am ready to unite in groaning over the

threatened danger. To one who loves his native language, who would

delight to keep our rich and harmonious English undefiled by foreign

accent, foreign intonation, and those foreign tinctures of verbal

meaning which tend to confuse all writing and discourse, it is an

affliction as harassing as the climate, that on our stage, in our

studios, at our public and private gatherings, in our offices,

warehouses, and workshops, we must expect to hear our beloved English

with its words clipped, its vowels stretched and twisted, its phrases of

acquiescence and politeness, of cordiality, dissidence or argument,

delivered always in the wrong tones, like ill-rendered melodies, marred

beyond recognition; that there should be a general ambition to speak

every language except our mother English, which persons "of style" are

not ashamed of corrupting with slang, false foreign equivalents, and a

pronunciation that crushes out all colour from the vowels and jams them

between jostling consonants. An ancient Greek might not like to be

resuscitated for the sake of hearing Homer read in our universities,

still he would at least find more instructive marvels in other

developments to be witnessed at those institutions; but a modern

Englishman is invited from his after-dinner repose to hear Shakspere

delivered under circumstances which offer no other novelty than some

novelty of false intonation, some new distribution of strong emphasis on

prepositions, some new misconception of a familiar idiom. Well! it is

our inertness that is in fault, our carelessness of excellence, our

willing ignorance of the treasures that lie in our national heritage,

while we are agape after what is foreign, though it may be only a vile

imitation of what is native.

This marring of our speech, however, is a minor evil compared with what

must follow from the predominance of wealth--acquiring immigrants, whose

appreciation of our political and social life must often be as

approximative or fatally erroneous as their delivery of our language.

But take the worst issues--what can we do to hinder them? Are we to

adopt the exclusiveness for which we have punished the Chinese? Are we

to tear the glorious flag of hospitality which has made our freedom the

world-wide blessing of the oppressed? It is not agreeable to find

foreign accents and stumbling locutions passing from the piquant

exception to the general rule of discourse. But to urge on that account

that we should spike away the peaceful foreigner, would be a view of

international relations not in the long-run favourable to the interests

of our fellow-countrymen; for we are at least equal to the races we call

obtrusive in the disposition to settle wherever money is to be made and

cheaply idle living to be found. In meeting the national evils which are

brought upon us by the onward course of the world, there is often no

more immediate hope or resource than that of striving after fuller

national excellence, which must consist in the moulding of more

excellent individual natives. The tendency of things is towards the

quicker or slower fusion of races. It is impossible to arrest this

tendency: all we can do is to moderate its course so as to hinder it

from degrading the moral status of societies by a too rapid effacement

of those national traditions and customs which are the language of the

national genius--the deep suckers of healthy sentiment. Such moderating

and guidance of inevitable movement is worthy of all effort. And it is

in this sense that the modern insistance on the idea of Nationalities

has value. That any people at once distinct and coherent enough to form

a state should be held in subjection by an alien antipathetic government

has been becoming more and more a ground of sympathetic indignation; and

in virtue of this, at least one great State has been added to European

councils. Nobody now complains of the result in this case, though

far-sighted persons see the need to limit analogy by discrimination. We

have to consider who are the stifled people and who the stiflers before

we can be sure of our ground.

The only point in this connection on which Englishmen are agreed is,

that England itself shall not be subject to foreign rule. The fiery

resolve to resist invasion, though with an improvised array of

pitchforks, is felt to be virtuous, and to be worthy of a historic

people. Why? Because there is a national life in our veins. Because

there is something specifically English which we feel to be supremely

worth striving for, worth dying for, rather than living to renounce it.

Because we too have our share--perhaps a principal share--in that spirit

of separateness which has not yet done its work in the education of

mankind, which has created the varying genius of nations, and, like the

Muses, is the offspring of memory.

Here, as everywhere else, the human task seems to be the discerning and

adjustment of opposite claims. But the end can hardly be achieved by

urging contradictory reproaches, and instead of labouring after

discernment as a preliminary to intervention, letting our zeal burst

forth according to a capricious selection, first determined accidentally

and afterwards justified by personal predilection. Not only John Gilpin

and his wife, or Edwin and Angelina, seem to be of opinion that their

preference or dislike of Russians, Servians, or Greeks, consequent,

perhaps, on hotel adventures, has something to do with the merits of the

Eastern Question; even in a higher range of intellect and enthusiasm we

find a distribution of sympathy or pity for sufferers of different blood

or votaries of differing religions, strangely unaccountable on any other

ground than a fortuitous direction of study or trivial circumstances of

travel. With some even admirable persons, one is never quite sure of any

particular being included under a general term. A provincial physician,

it is said, once ordering a lady patient not to eat salad, was asked

pleadingly by the affectionate husband whether she might eat lettuce, or

cresses, or radishes. The physician had too rashly believed in the

comprehensiveness of the word "salad," just as we, if not enlightened by

experience, might believe in the all-embracing breadth of "sympathy with

the injured and oppressed." What mind can exhaust the grounds of

exception which lie in each particular case? There is understood to be a

peculiar odour from the n***o body, and we know that some persons, too

rationalistic to feel bound by the curse on Ham, used to hint very

strongly that this odour determined the question on the side of negro

slavery.

And this is the usual level of thinking in polite society concerning the

Jews. Apart from theological purposes, it seems to be held surprising

that anybody should take an interest in the history of a people whose

literature has furnished all our devotional language; and if any

reference is made to their past or future destinies some hearer is sure

to state as a relevant fact which may assist our judgment, that she, for

her part, is not fond of them, having known a Mr Jacobson who was very

unpleasant, or that he, for his part, thinks meanly of them as a race,

though on inquiry you find that he is so little acquainted with their

characteristics that he is astonished to learn how many persons whom he

has blindly admired and applauded are Jews to the backbone. Again, men

who consider themselves in the very van of modern advancement, knowing

history and the latest philosophies of history, indicate their

contemptuous surprise that any one should entertain the destiny of the

Jews as a worthy subject, by referring to Moloch and their own

agreement with the theory that the religion of Jehovah was merely a

transformed Moloch-worship, while in the same breath they are glorifying

"civilisation" as a transformed tribal existence of which some

lineaments are traceable in grim marriage customs of the native

Australians. Are these erudite persons prepared to insist that the name

"Father" should no longer have any sanctity for us, because in their

view of likelihood our Aryan ancestors were mere improvers on a state of

things in which nobody knew his own father?

For less theoretic men, ambitious, to be regarded as practical

politicians, the value of the Hebrew race has been measured by their

unfavourable opinion of a prime minister who is a Jew by lineage. But it

is possible to form a very ugly opinion as to the scrupulousness of

Walpole or of Chatham; and in any case I think Englishmen would refuse

to accept the character and doings of those eighteenth century statesmen

as the standard of value for the English people and the part they have

to play in the fortunes of mankind.

If we are to consider the future of the Jews at all, it seems

reasonable to take as a preliminary question: Are they destined to

complete fusion with the peoples among whom they are dispersed, losing

every remnant of a distinctive consciousness as Jews; or, are there in

the breadth and intensity with which the feeling of separateness, or

what we may call the organised memory of a national consciousness,

actually exists in the world-wide Jewish communities--the seven millions

scattered from east to west--and again, are there in the political

relations of the world, the conditions present or approaching for the

restoration of a Jewish state planted on the old ground as a centre of

national feeling, a source of dignifying protection, a special channel

for special energies which may contribute some added form of national

genius, and an added voice in the councils of the world?

They are among us everywhere: it is useless to say we are not fond of

them. Perhaps we are not fond of proletaries and their tendency to form

Unions, but the world is not therefore to be rid of them. If we wish to

free ourselves from the inconveniences that we have to complain of,

whether in proletaries or in Jews, our best course is to encourage all

means of improving these neighbours who elbow us in a thickening crowd,

and of sending their incommodious energies into beneficent channels. Why

are we so eager for the dignity of certain populations of whom perhaps

we have never seen a single specimen, and of whose history, legend, or

literature we have been contentedly ignorant for ages, while we sneer at

the notion of a renovated national dignity for the Jews, whose ways of

thinking and whose very verbal forms are on our lips in every prayer

which we end with an Amen? Some of us consider this question dismissed

when they have said that the wealthiest Jews have no desire to forsake

their European palaces, and go to live in Jerusalem. But in a return

from exile, in the restoration of a people, the question is not whether

certain rich men will choose to remain behind, but whether there will be

found worthy men who will choose to lead the return. Plenty of

prosperous Jews remained in Babylon when Ezra marshalled his band of

forty thousand and began a new glorious epoch in the history of his

race, making the preparation for that epoch in the history of the world

which has been held glorious enough to be dated from for evermore. The

hinge of possibility is simply the existence of an adequate community of

feeling as well as widespread need in the Jewish race, and the hope that

among its finer specimens there may arise some men of instruction and

ardent public spirit, some new Ezras, some modern Maccabees, who will

know how to use all favouring outward conditions, how to triumph by

heroic example, over the indifference of their fellows and the scorn of

their foes, and will steadfastly set their faces towards making their

people once more one among the nations.

Formerly, evangelical orthodoxy was prone to dwell on the fulfilment of

prophecy in the "restoration of the Jews," Such interpretation of the

prophets is less in vogue now. The dominant mode is to insist on a

Christianity that disowns its origin, that is not a substantial growth

having a genealogy, but is a vaporous reflex of modern notions. The

Christ of Matthew had the heart of a Jew--"Go ye first to the lost

sheep of the house of Israel." The Apostle of the Gentiles had the heart

of a Jew: "For I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my

brethren, my kinsmen according to the flesh: who are Israelites; to whom

pertaineth the adoption, and the glory, and the covenants, and the

giving of the law, and the service of God, and the promises; whose are

the fathers, and of whom as concerning the flesh Christ came." Modern

apostles, extolling Christianity, are found using a different tone: they

prefer the mediaeval cry translated into modern phrase. But the

mediaeval cry too was in substance very ancient--more ancient than the

days of Augustus. Pagans in successive ages said, "These people are

unlike us, and refuse to be made like us: let us punish them." The Jews

were steadfast in their separateness, and through that separateness

Christianity was born. A modern book on Liberty has maintained that from

the freedom of individual men to persist in idiosyncrasies the world may

be enriched. Why should we not apply this argument to the idiosyncrasy

of a nation, and pause in our haste to hoot it down? There is still a

great function for the steadfastness of the Jew: not that he should

shut out the utmost illumination which knowledge can throw on his

national history, but that he should cherish the store of inheritance

which that history has left him. Every Jew should be conscious that he

is one of a multitude possessing common objects of piety in the immortal

achievements and immortal sorrows of ancestors who have transmitted to

them a physical and mental type strong enough, eminent enough in

faculties, pregnant enough with peculiar promise, to constitute a new

beneficent individuality among the nations, and, by confuting the

traditions of scorn, nobly avenge the wrongs done to their Fathers.

There is a sense in which the worthy child of a nation that has brought

forth illustrious prophets, high and unique among the poets of the

world, is bound by their visions.

Is bound?

Yes, for the effective bond of human action is feeling, and the worthy

child of a people owning the triple name of Hebrew, Israelite, and Jew,

feels his kinship with the glories and the sorrows, the degradation and

the possible renovation of his national family.

Will any one teach the nullification of this feeling and call his

doctrine a philosophy? He will teach a blinding superstition--the

superstition that a theory of human wellbeing can be constructed in

disregard of the influences which have made us human.

THE END.