ths of its heroes who died to
preserve its national existence; when it is reminded of its small
beginnings and gradual growth through past labors and struggles, such
as are still demanded of it in order that the freedom and well-being
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.

This was one of the favorite ideas of George Eliot, which she has again and
again expressed. She was impressed with the conviction that such a national
life is necessary to the world's growth and welfare, that the era of a
common brotherhood, dissociated from national traditions and hopes, has not
yet come. Hence her belief that Judaism ought to speak the voice of a
united race, occupying the old home of this people, and sending forth its
ideas as a national inheritance and inspiration. This belief inspires the
concluding words of her essay, as well as the last chapters of the novel.

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 a