prison him, or to fine him; for every man who conducts himself
peaceably has a right to his life and his limbs, to his personal liberty
and his property. But it is not persecution, says my honourable friend,
to exclude any individual or any class from office; for nobody has a
right to office: in every country official appointments must be subject
to such regulations as the supreme authority may choose to make; nor can
any such regulations be reasonably complained of by any member of the
society as unjust. He who obtains an office obtains it, not as matter of
right, but as matter of favour. He who does not obtain an office is
not wronged; he is only in that situation in which the vast majority
of every community must necessarily be. There are in the United Kingdom
five and twenty million Christians without places; and, if they do not
complain, why should five and twenty thousand Jews complain of being in
the same case? In this way my honourable friend has convinced himself
that, as it would be most absurd in him and me to say that we are
wronged because we are not Secretaries of State, so it is most absurd
in the Jews to say that they are wronged, because they are, as a people,
excluded from public employment.

Now, surely my honourable friend cannot have considered to what
conclusions his reasoning leads. Those conclusions are so monstrous that
he would, I am certain, shrink from them. Does he really mean that it
would not be wrong in the legislature to enact that no man should be
a judge unless he weighed twelve stone, or that no man should sit in
parliament unless he were six feet high? We are about to bring in a bill
for the government of India. Suppose that we were to insert in that bill
a clause providing that no graduate of the University of Oxford
should be Governor General or Governor of any Presidency, would not my
honourable friend cry out against such a clause as most unjust to
the learned body which he represents? And would he think himself
sufficiently answered by being told, in his own words, that the
appointment to office is a mere matter of favour, and that to exclude
an individual or a class from office is no injury? Surely, on
consideration, he must admit that official appointments ought not to
be subject to regulations purely arbitrary, to regulations for which no
reason can be given but mere caprice, and that those who would exclude
any class from public employment are bound to show some special reaso