this alleged
overruling coercion _a priori_ of the climate and the desert. Climate
and desert do not necessarily coerce them, if in large and notorious
cases they have failed to do so. So feels Gibbon; and, by an instinct of
timidity, back he flies to the previous evasion--to the natural
controlling power of climate and soil, admitting the Scriptural fact,
but seeking for it an unscriptural ground, as before he had flown in
over-precipitate anxiety to the denial of the Scriptural fact, but in
that denial involving a withdrawal of the unscriptural ground.

The sceptics in that instance show their secret sense of a preference
from the distracted eagerness with which they fly backwards and
forwardwise between two reciprocally hostile evasions.

The answer I reserve, and meantime I remark:

Secondly, that, supposing this answer to have any force, still it meets
only one moiety of the Scriptural fatality; viz., the dispersion of the
Jews--the fact that, let them be gathered in what numbers they might,
let them even be concentrated by millions, therefore in the literal
sense _not_ dispersed, yet in the political sense universally
understood, they would be dispersed, because never, in no instance,
rising to be a people, _sui juris_, a nation, a distinct community,
known to the public law of Europe as having the rights of peace and war,
but always a mere accident and vagrant excess amongst nations, not
having the bare rights of citizenship; so far from being a nation, not
being an acknowledged member of any nation. This exquisite
dispersion--not ethnographic only, but political--is that half of the
Scriptural malediction which the Boulanger answer attempts to meet; but
the other half--that they should be 'a byword, an astonishment,'
etc.--is entirely blinked. Had the work even prospered, it would still
have to recommence. The Armenians are dispersed through all Eastern
lands, so are the Arabs; even the descendants of Ali are found severed
from their natal soil; but they are not therefore dispersed: they have
endured no general indignities.

Thirdly, it does not meet the fact of the Jewish _existence_ in any
shape, whether as a distinct or an amalgamated people. There is no doubt
that many races of men, as of brute animals, have been utterly
extinguished. In cases such as those of the Emim, or Rethinim, a race
distinguished by peculiar size, so as to be monstrous in comparison with
other men, this extinction could more readi