timents.
Such, Sir, 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 civilisation, 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 their
poets. What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming
odds for its independence and religion? What nation ever, in its last
agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a
brave despair? 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 bowed
down under the yoke of slavery, they have contracted some of the vices
of outlaws and of slaves, shall we consider this as matter of reproach
to them? Shall we not rather consider it as matter of shame and remorse
to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of
the House of Commons. Let us open to them every career in which ability
and e