a
knocking, and unless the household, like the Thane of Cawdor and his
wife, have been doing some deed without a name, they need not shudder.
It turns out at worst to be a poor relation who wishes to come in out of
the cold. The porter always grumbles and is slow to open. "Who's there,
in the name of Beelzebub?" he mutters. Not a change for the better in
our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have
not opposed it,--have not prophesied with the alderman that the world
would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence of it. The world, on
the contrary, wakes up, rubs its eyes, yawns, stretches itself, and goes
about its business as if nothing had happened. Suppression of the slave
trade, abolition of slavery, trade unions,--at all of these excellent
people shook their heads despondingly, and murmured "Ichabod." But the
trade unions are now debating instead of conspiring, and we all read
their discussions with comfort and hope, sure that they are learning the
business of citizenship and the difficulties of practical legislation.

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against
the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world
was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most
tenacious, race that had ever lived in it--the race to whom we owed our
religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in
all literature--a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary
as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the
bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable
impulsion. We drove them into a corner, but they had their revenge, as
the wronged are always sure to have it sooner or later. They made their
corner the counter and banking-house of the world, and thence they rule
it and us with the ignobler sceptre of finance. Your grandfathers mobbed
Priestley only that you might set up his statue and make Birmingham the
headquarters of English Unitarianism. We hear it said sometimes that
this is an age of transition, as if that made matters clearer; but can
any one point us to an age that was not? If he could, he would show us
an age of stagnation. The question for us, as it has been for all before
us, is to make the transition gradual and easy, to see that our points
are right so that the train may not come to grief. For we should
remember that nothing is m