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 negro 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.