we have

that Athens and Sparta and Carthage have never excelled, endured fifteen hundred years of supernatural slavery; during which every device that can degrade or destroy man has been the destiny that we have sustained and baffled.

The Hebrew child has entered adolescence only to learn that he was the Pariah of that ungrateful Europe that owes to him the best part of its laws, a fine portion of its literature, all its religion. Great poets require a public; we have been content with the immortal melodies that we sung more than two thousand years ago by the waters of Babylon and wept. They record our triumphs; they solace our affliction. Great orators are the creatures of popular assemblies; we were permitted only by stealth to meet even in our temples. And as for great writers, the catalogue is not blank. What are all the schoolmen, Aquinas himself, to Maimonides?* and as for modern philosophy, all springs from Spinoza! + But the passionate and creative genius that is the nearest link to divinity, and which no human tyranny can destroy, though it can divert it; that should have stirred the hearts of nations by its inspired sympathy, or governed senates by its burning eloquence, has found a medium for its expression, to which, in spite of your prejudices and your evil passions, you have been obliged to bow.

The ear, the voice, the fancy teeming with combinations, — the imagination fervent with picture and emotion, that came from Caucasus, and which we have preserved unpolluted, — have endowed us with almost the exclusive privilege of music; that science of harmonious sounds which the ancients recognized as most divine, and deified in the person of their most beautiful creation. I speak not of the past; though were I to enter into the history of the lords of melody, you would find it the annals of Hebrew genius. But at this moment, even, musical Europe is ours. There is not a company of singers, not an orchestra in a single capital, that are not crowded with our children, under the feigned names which they adopt to conciliate the dark aversion which your posterity will some day disclaim with shame and

* MAIMONIDES. A Jewish Rabbi and philosopher of great celebrity, born in Spain about 1135. He acquired a great reputation for sagacity and learning.

+ SPINOZA. A celebrated pantheistical philosopher born of Jewish parents in Holland, in 1632. At an early age he announced opinions which were considered heretical and for which he was excommunicated by the Jews. He passed his life as a solitary recluse, his character being, according to an eminent writer, "one of the most devout on record, for his life was, in a manner, one unbroken hymn." See Froude's Short Studies on Great Subjects.

disgust. Almost every great composer, skilled musician, almost every voice that ravishes you with its transporting strains, spring from our tribes. The catalogue is too vast to enumerate; too illustrious to dwell for a moment on secondary names, however eminent. Enough for us that the three great creative minds to whose exquisite inventions all nations at this moment yield — Rossini, Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn,

are of Hebrew race; and little do your men of fashion, your "Muscadins” of Paris and your dandies of London, as they thrill into raptures at the notes of a Pasta or a Grisi, — little do they suspect that they are offering homage to the sweet singers of Israel.

ON THE DEATH OF THE DUKE OF WELLINGTON.*

THE House of Commons is called upon to-night to fulfil a sorrowful, but a noble, duty. It has to recognize, in the face of the country, and of the civilized world, the loss of the most illustrious of our citizens, and to offer to the ashes of the great departed the solemn anguish of a bereaved nation. The princely personage who has left us was born in an age more fertile of great events than any period of recorded time. Of those vast incidents the most conspicuous were his own deeds, and these were performed with the smallest means, and in defiance of the greatest obstacles. He was, therefore, not only a great man, but the greatest man of a great age. Amid the chaos and conflagration which attended the end of the last century there rose one of those beings who seem born to master mankind. It is not too much to say that Napoleon combined the imperial ardor of Alexander with the strategy of Hannibal. The kings of the earth fell before his fiery and subtile genius, and at the head of all the powers of Europe he denounced destruction to the only land which dared to be free. The Providential superintendence of this world seems seldom more manifest than in the dispensation which ordained that the French Emperor and Wellesley should be born in the same year; that in the same year they should have embraced the same profession; and that, natives of distant islands, they should both have sought their military education in that illustrious land which each in his turn was destined

* The extract is from a speech on the death of the Duke of Wellington delivered by Mr. Disraeli in the House of Commons while Chancellor of the Exchequer. Wellington was the greatest general England ever produced. His most famous victory was gained over Napoleon at the historic battle of Waterloo. He was born in Ireland in 1769 and died in 1852.

to subjugate. During the long struggle for our freedom, our glory, I may say our existence, Wellesley fought and won fifteen pitched battles, all of the highest class, - concluding with one of those crowning victories which give a color and aspect to history. During this period that can be said of him which can be said of no other captain, that he captured three thousand cannon from the enemy, and never lost a single gun. The greatness of his exploits was only equaled by the difficulties he overcame. He had to encounter at the same time a feeble government, a factious opposition, and a distrustful people, scandalous allies, and the most powerful enemy in the world. He gained victories with starving troops, and carried on sieges without tools; and, as if to complete the fatality which in this sense always awaited him, when he had succeeded in creating an army worthy of Roman legions, and of himself, this invincible host was broken up on the eve of the greatest conjuncture of his life, and he entered the field of Waterloo with raw levies, and discomfited allies.

But the star of Wellesley never paled. He has been called fortunate, for fortune is a divinity that ever favors those who are alike sagacious and intrepid, inventive and patient. It was his character that created his career. This alike achieved his exploits and guarded him from vicissitudes. It was his sublime self-control that regulated his lofty fate. It has been the fashion of late years to disparage the military character. Forty years of peace have hardly qualified us to be aware how considerable and how complex are the qualities which are necessary for the formation of a great general. It is not enough to say that he must be an engineer, a geographer, learned in human nature, adroit in managing mankind; that he must be able to perform the highest duties of a minister of state, and sink to the humblest offices of a commissary and a clerk; but he has to display all this knowledge, and he must do all these things at the same time, and under extraordinary circumstances. At the same moment he must think of the eve and the morrow, of his flanks and of his reserves ; he must carry with him ammunition, provisions, hospitals; he must calculate at the same time the state of the weather and the moral qualities of man; and all these elements, which are perpetually changing, he must combine amid overwhelming cold or overpowering heat ; sometimes amid famine, often amid the thunder of artillery. Behind all this, too, is the ever-present image of his country, and the dreadful alternative whether that country is to receive him with cypress

or laurel. But all these conflicting ideas must be driven from the mind of the military leader, for he must think and not only think he must think with the rapidity of lightning, for on a moment, more or less, depends the fate of the finest combination, and on a moment, more or less, depends glory or shame. Doubtless, all this may be done in an ordinary manner, by an ordinary man; as we see every day of our lives ordinary men making successful ministers of state, successful speakers, successful authors. But to do all this with genius is sublime. Doubtless, to think deeply and clearly in the recess of a cabinet is a fine intellectual demonstration, but to think with equal depth and equal clearness amid bullets is the most complete exercise of the human faculties. Although the military career of the Duke of Wellington fills so large a space in history, it was only a comparatively small section of his prolonged and illustrious life. Only eight years elapsed from Vimiera to Waterloo, and from the date of his first commission to the last cannon-shot on the field

of battle scarcely twenty years can be counted. After all his triumphs he was destined for another career, and if not in the prime, certainly in the perfection of manhood, he commenced a civil career scarcely less eminent than those military achievements which will live forever in history. Thrice was he the ambassador of his sovereign to those great historic congresses that settled the affairs of Europe; twice was he Secretary of State; twice was he Commander-in-Chief; and once he was Prime Minister of England. His labors for his country lasted to the end; and he died the active chieftain of that famous army to which he has left the tradition of his glory.

The Duke of Wellington left to his countrymen a great legacy, greater even than his glory. He left them the contemplation of his character. I will not say his conduct revived the sense of duty in England. I would not say that of our country. But that his conduct inspired public life with a purer and more masculine tone I cannot doubt. His career rebukes restless vanity, and reprimands the irregular ebullitions of a morbid egotism. I doubt not that, among all orders of Englishmen, from those with the highest responsibilities of our society to those who perform the humblest duties, I dare say there is not a man who in his toil and his perplexity has not sometimes thought of the duke and found in his example support and solace.

Though he lived so much in the hearts and minds of his country

men, — though he occupied such eminent posts and fulfilled such august duties, it was not till he died that we felt what a space he filled in the feelings and thoughts of the people of England. Never was the influence of real greatness more completely asserted than on his decease. In an age whose boast of intellectual equality flatters all our self-complacencies, the world suddenly acknowledged that it had lost the greatest of men; in an age of utility the most industrious and common-sense people in the world could find no vent for their woe and no representative for their sorrow but the solemnity of a pageant; and we — we who have met here for such different purposes to investigate the sources of the wealth of nations, to enter into statistical research, and to encounter each other in fiscal controversy we present to the world the most sublime and touching spectacle that human circumstances can well produce, -the spectacle of a Senate mourning a Hero!

THERE have been some, and those, too, among the wisest and the wittiest of the northern and western races, who, touched by a presumptuous jealousy of the long predominance of that Oriental intellect to which they owed their civilization, would have persuaded themselves and the world that the traditions of Sinai and Calvary were fables. Half a century ago Europe made a violent and apparently successful effort to disembarrass itself of its Asian faith. The most powerful and the most civilized of its kingdoms,* about to conquer the rest, shut up its churches, desecrated its altars, massacred and persecuted their sacred servants, and announced that the Hebrew creeds which Simon Peter brought from Palestine, and which his successors revealed to Clovis, were a mockery and a fiction. What has been the result? In every city, town, village, and hamlet of that great kingdom, the divine image of the most illustrious of Hebrews has been again raised amid the homage of kneeling millions; while, in the heart of its bright and witty capital, the nation has erected the most gorgeous of modern temples,† and consecrated its marble and golden walls to the name, and memory, and celestial efficacy of a Hebrew woman.

* FRANCE. When the celebrated French Revolution was at its height, the rulers and their followers, for the time being, repudiated the Christian religion, and set up Paganism in its stead. The Communists, while they held possession of Paris, during the recent Franco-German War, did much the same thing, but it was shorter lived.

+ The Church of the Madeleine in Paris.