His own race he cleared from prejudice, and proudly displayed as a potent, if sometimes hidden, force throughout the world. His praise and illustration of its endowments, its strength by virtue of its purity of strain, its tenacity and power of organisation, its veiled ramifications among the mainsprings that move Governments and alter systems, no longer raise a smile; and if they did, they would certainly cease to do so when placed on the lips of Macaulay, who thus treated them—

“He knows,” said Macaulay, speaking in 1833 of the member for the University of Oxford—“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.... Let us open to them every career in which ability and energy can be displayed. Till we have done this, let us not presume to say that there is no genius among the countrymen of Isaiah, or heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees.”