ery
path to distinction. At one time the voice of this party urged that
differences of creed were made dangerous only by the denial of
citizenship--that you must make a man a citizen before he could feel
like one. At present, apparently, this confidence has been succeeded by
a sense of mistake: there is a regret that no limiting clauses were
insisted on, such as would have hindered the Jews from coming too far
and in too large proportion along those opened pathways; and the
Roumanians are thought to have shown an enviable wisdom in giving them
as little chance as possible. But then, the reflection occurring that
some of the most objectionable Jews are baptised Christians, it is
obvious that such clauses would have been insufficient, and the doctrine
that you can turn a Jew into a good Christian is emphatically retracted.
But clearly, these liberal gentlemen, too late enlightened by
disagreeable events, must yield the palm of wise foresight to those who
argued against them long ago; and it is a striking spectacle to witness
minds so panting for advancement in some directions that they are ready
to force it on an unwilling society, in this instance despairingly
recurring to mediaeval types of thinking--insisting that the Jews are
made viciously cosmopolitan by holding the world's money-bag, that for
them all national interests are resolved into the algebra of loans, that
they have suffered an inward degradation stamping them as morally
inferior, and--"serve them right," since they rejected Christianity. All
which is mirrored in an analogy, namely, that of the Irish, also a
servile race, who have rejected Protestantism though it has been
repeatedly urged on them by fire and sword and penal laws, and whose
place in the moral scale may be judged by our advertisements, where the
clause, "No Irish need apply," parallels the sentence which for many
polite persons sums up the question of Judaism--"I never _did_ like the
Jews."
It is certainly worth considering whether an expatriated, denationalised
race, used for ages to live among antipathetic populations, must not
inevitably lack some conditions of nobleness. If they drop that
separateness which is made their reproach, they may be in danger of
lapsing into a cosmopolitan indifference equivalent to cynicism, and of
missing that inward identification with the nationality immediately
around them which might make some amends for their inherited privation.
No dispassionate observ
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