INTRODUCTION

The first edition of this reprint of Macaulay’s famous essay and speech on the removal of Jewish disabilities was timed for publication on December 28, 1909, the fiftieth anniversary of their author’s death. It was intended to serve a double object. In the first place, it was a tribute to the memory of Macaulay in grateful recognition of his strenuous advocacy of the cause of Jewish emancipation; and in the second place, it was designed to be a further memento of the celebration organised by the Jewish Historical Society of England in 1908, on the occasion of the jubilee of the admission of Jews into Parliament.

Neither the essay nor the speech was Macaulay’s first contribution to the cause of Jewish emancipation. Thomas Babington (afterwards Lord) Macaulay (1800-1859) entered the House of Commons at the General Election of 1830. On April 5, in that same year, Mr. (afterwards Sir) Robert Grant moved to bring in a Bill to remove Jewish political disabilities. The motion was opposed by Sir Robert Inglis. When Inglis resumed his seat, “Sir James Mackintosh and Mr. Macaulay,” as Hansard reports, “rose together, but the latter, being a new Member, was called for by the House.” Thus, Macaulay’s maiden speech was delivered in behalf of the Jewish cause. It made considerable stir. Sir James Mackintosh took part in the debate later, and after complimenting the young orator, said: “I do not rise, therefore, to supply any defects in that address, for indeed there were none that I could find; but it is principally to absolve my own conscience that I offer myself to the attention of the House.”

Writing to Mr. (afterwards Sir) Isaac Lyon Goldsmid on April 13, 1830, Lord Holland suggested “that it might promote your cause to print a correct copy of the late triumphant debate in the Commons in the shape of a pamphlet during holidays. If Mr. Grant, Sir James Mackintosh, Mr. Macaulay, and Dr. Lushington could be prevailed upon to correct their speeches for that publication, it would be a valuable manual for all those who in or out of Parliament are disposed to urge the facts and reasons in your favour” (Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England, iv. 158). This advice does not seem to have been followed, nor did Macaulay himself reprint this particular speech, but it was included in Vizetelly’s two volumes of Macaulay’s Speeches, published in 1853, much to their author’s indignation. The speech occupies the first place in Vol. I. In the second volume of Vizetelly’s edition is another speech by Macaulay, delivered in the House on March 31, 1841, on the Jews’ Declaration Bill. Angered by Vizetelly’s publication, Macaulay himself brought out an edition of his speeches. He included neither of the two speeches which appear in Vizetelly, but inserted the more powerful and effective speech delivered on April 17, 1833.

The production of the essay seems in the first instance to have been due to Macaulay’s own initiative. For on April 29, 1830, a little over three weeks after the 1830 debate, he wrote to Macvey Napier, the editor of the Edinburgh Review: “If, as I rather fear, we should be beaten in Parliament this year about the Jews, a short pungent article on that question might be useful and taking. It ought to come within the compass of a single sheet” (Selection from the Correspondence of the late Macvey Napier, London, 1879, p. 80). In the course of the next few months Macaulay was strengthened in his conviction of the probable efficacy of an essay on the Jewish case by the representations which were made to him in the interval, apparently as an indirect result of Lord Holland’s original suggestion for the reprint in pamphlet form of the debate in the House of Commons on April 5, 1830. Thus in another letter to Macvey Napier, dated October 16, 1830, he stated: “The Jews have been urging me to say something about their claims; and I really think that the question might be discussed, both on general and on particular grounds, in a very attractive manner. What do you think of this plan?” (ibid., pp. 93, 94). On November 27, 1830, he wrote again: “I have only a minute to write. I will send you an article on the Jews next week” (ibid., p. 97). And finally on December 17, 1830, Macaulay sent the article as promised. “I send you an article on the Jews.... I am very busy, or I should have sent you this Jew article before. It is short, and carelessly written, perhaps, as to style, but certainly as to penmanship” (ibid., p. 98). The essay appeared in the Edinburgh Review in the following month, January 1831, and thus stands in date between the maiden speech of 1830 and the speech of 1833. In the latter year the House of Commons passed Mr. Grant’s Bill through all its stages, though it was not till 1860 that the victory was formally won, after a practical triumph in 1858. It is curious to note that, in the debate of 1830, Mr. Grant appealed to the Commons to concede justice to the Jews promptly, and not let the matter hang in the balance for thirty years, as had been done with Catholic Emancipation. The very interval feared by Mr. Grant separated his original motion from its final ratification. Macaulay’s essay played a great part in converting English public opinion. So popular had this essay become, so convincing its plea, that it was regarded as the main statement of the Jewish case. Edition after edition of the volume containing the essay was called for and exhausted. So late as September 1847, when the Tory organ, the Quarterly Review, futilely attempted to set up a reasonable case against the Jewish claim, the whole of the argument was directed towards rebutting Macaulay’s essay.

The present edition is a verbal reprint of Macaulay’s own revision. In the notes attention is drawn to some of the modifications which the author introduced, but a few words may here be said on one or two points in which Macaulay’s revision is particularly interesting. Thus, in the speech as reported in Hansard (3rd Series, Vol. XVII., col. 232), there occurs this passage, deleted in the revision:—

“No charge could be brought against the Jews of evincing any disposition to attack the Christian religion, or to offend its professors. It was true that one imputation of such a nature had lately been thrown out in that House, but it was entirely unfounded. He had seen a great deal of the worship of the Jews, and he had heard a great deal on the subject from others, and from all that he had seen and all that he had heard, he was able to say, without the slightest fear of contradiction, that there was no part of the Jewish worship which was not only not insulting to Christians, but in which Christians might not, without the least difficulty, join.”

The imputation had been made in the House by William Cobbett, on March 1, 1833. The most noteworthy point is, however, the sentences which have been italicised. They give direct evidence that Macaulay must often have visited the synagogue services.

In the revision of the essay, Macaulay, by omitting a couple of sentences, laid himself open to a charge of formal fallacy. Professor F. C. Montague (in his edition of the Essays, Vol. I. p. 289) writes: “When Macaulay asserts the identity of the two propositions—It is right that some person or persons should possess political power, and, Some person or persons must have a right to political power—he commits an obvious fallacy.” But in the Edinburgh Review Macaulay continued: “It will hardly be denied that government is a means for the attainment of an end. If men have a right to the end, they have a right to this—that the means shall be such as will accomplish the end.” There is thus no fallacy in the argument as Macaulay intended it to be understood. It is equally difficult to admit the validity of Professor Montague’s further comment: “Neither is it true in all cases, and without any qualification, that differences of religion are absolutely irrelevant to the bestowal of political power. In some cases the differences of thought and feeling between the adherents of different creeds are so many and so considerable that harmonious co-operation in the same body politic becomes almost inconceivable. Whilst Mohammedanism and Hinduism remain what they are, it is scarcely conceivable that Mohammedans and Hindus could really blend in one constituent body for the choice of a parliament which should govern India.” It remains to be proved by experience whether the results of Lord Morley’s constitutional reforms will not belie this fear, and whether the joint admission of various sects to political responsibility will not, in the end, mitigate sectarian animosities, under the impulse of a common striving for the common good. And Macaulay’s point is missed by Professor Montague. Religion as such must not be made a bar to admission to political rights. Macaulay did not argue that power should be placed in the hands of those unfit to use it for the general good. But assuming the fitness proved, their religion must not be a ground for exclusion. Every one admitted that the fitness had been proved in the case of the Jews. Inglis, who preceded Macaulay, and, of course, on the opposite side, said in the 1833 debate: “He believed that there was no portion of the community that furnished a smaller relative proportion of criminals, or that were better conducted, than the Jews were.” Another opponent of the Bill, Mr. Halcomb, said: “He admitted that the Jews were a body against whose moral character nothing could be adduced; that they were good and loyal citizens of the king.” Mr. William Roche (a Catholic supporter of the Bill) might well comment on all this: “If, Sir, the Jews have proved themselves good subjects in this country, and in all other countries where they have been domesticated and admitted to political freedom, that is all we have a right to look to, leaving to them, as to every other sect, perfect liberty of conscience in their spiritual concerns.” Of course Professor Montague does not dispute the validity of Macaulay’s plea as applied to the Jews. He describes the success of the arguments in the essay as complete, and their justice as generally admitted.

J. Cotter Morison, in his life of Macaulay in the “English Men of Letters” series, advanced the view “that Macaulay’s natural aptitude was rather oratorical than literary.... It is no exaggeration to say that as an orator he moves in a higher intellectual plane than he does as a writer.... In his speeches we find him nearly without exception laying down broad luminous principles, based upon reason, and those boundless stores of historical illustration, from which he argues with equal brevity and force. It is interesting to compare his treatment of the same subject in an essay and a speech. His speech on the Maynooth grant and his essay on Mr. Gladstone’s Church and State deal with practically the same question, and few persons would hesitate to give the preference to the speech” (pp. 131, 132). Jewish disabilities is another subject which occasioned both an essay and a speech from Macaulay. Here, too, the speech, by comparison, must be judged to be more effective than the essay. Certainly there is no passage in the essay which equals in dignity and strength and eloquence the following sentences in the speech:—

“Nobody knows better than my honourable friend the Member for the University of Oxford that there is nothing in their national character which unfits them for the highest duties of citizens. 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. What nation ever contended more manfully against overwhelming odds for its independence and religion? What nation ever, in its last agonies, gave such signal proofs of what may be accomplished by a brave despair? And if, in the course of many centuries, the oppressed descendants of warriors and sages have degenerated from the qualities of their fathers, if, while excluded from the blessings of law, and bowed down under the yoke of slavery, they have contracted some of the vices of outlaws and of slaves, shall we consider this as matter of reproach to them? Shall we not rather consider it as matter of shame and remorse to ourselves? Let us do justice to them. Let us open to them the door of the House of Commons. 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, no heroism among the descendants of the Maccabees” (Infra, pp. 60, 61).

We may at this distance of time prefer the speech to the essay. Nevertheless, we cannot but be profoundly grateful for both, and are bound to recognise and appreciate the deep influence they both exercised in persuading public opinion to grant the Jews of England complete equality before the law with all other denominations. Macaulay was brought up in a home which was the headquarters of the movement for the abolition of slavery. He carried the lessons of his youth into the work of his manhood. He championed the cause of the persecuted and the wronged in various human relations. But nothing that he did has raised a more enduring monument to his name than his enthusiastic and triumphant advocacy of the cause of Jewish freedom.