Part 17

In this country, Parliament, in the shape of its three estates, rules every thing. In making any man a member of Parliament, we, in a certain degree, make him our master--we give him the power of sharing, at least, in the making of those laws which are our masters; and although the individual may be but little, yet he _may_, if he have talent, or the industry or skill to form a party, or the skill to direct one, do infinite evil to any interest which he determines to destroy. Opening the doors of Parliament to the Jew, is actually opening the doors of power, and of a power which, if he have a conscientious adherence to his own belief, he _must_ use against ours. The question, then, is not of mere municipal regulation, but of the very life of our religion. Religion is the highest concern of human existence, and the source not only of our immortal hopes, but of freedom and Protestantism in their purest form; and to possess it in its freedom, to preserve, it with its rights, and to transmit it unmutilated to posterity, has been the great struggle of ages, and has been well worth the struggle. It is unnecessary to detail here the especial doctrines of Christianity; but the Jew rejects them all, charges them all with falsehood, and affirms, that it would be our duty to both God and man, to cast them all under our feet. Therefore, we cannot expect any _assistance_ from the Jew in defending our religion, or our religious rights, or the national support of that religion.

But in the legislature there is already a powerful party openly hostile to Protestantism, with many individuals who may be willing to aid that party, though not of their belief. On which side would the Parliamentary Jew vote? There can be no doubt that, if at all conscientious, he would vote for the extinction of Protestantism. Can we then be justified to ourselves, or our country, in giving the additional strength of a new, opulent, and influential party to the antagonists of Protestantism?

It is true, that any _direct_ attempt to destroy our religion in England is not likely to occur, at least for a considerable time; but are there not a multitude of minor ways, of insidious approaches, of dangerous artifices, and malignant tamperings, which, without open violence, would have all the effect of active hostility? And in these, would the Jew be for or against us?

But there is a still more solemn consideration. God punishes those who abuse his gifts, or neglect his trusts. Protestantism is both a gift and a trust, and of the most invaluable order. Must there not be a public and personal crime in disregarding the interests of both; and disregarding them for a thing so worldly, contingent, and paltry, as political convenience? The Jew outside the legislature, however he may hate our religion, is powerless to injure it; but once inside the legislature, he may conspire to its ruin. If we put a weapon into the hand of an enemy, whom but ourselves can we blame for the consequences. If we do an act which cannot be undone, what sympathy shall our wailings deserve, when we feel that we have actually recruited for a hostile faction.

But having disposed of the cant of Liberalism, let, us now turn to the more dangerous cant of Security. "What reason is there to apprehend public evil from a single Jew, or from half a dozen at most in Parliament?" We remember that exactly the same language was used for the admission of the Papists. "What harm can be done by letting in one or two Papists? they can never amount to above half-a-dozen, let them do what they will at the hustings." Yet their votes and partisans now amount to at least fifty; they carry every object which they determine to carry; and they have crumbled down cabinets like the discharge from a battery.

In the instance of the Jew, the answer is clear. They have the means among them of coming to the hustings with irresistible force. On this topic we say no more; but every body knows the nature of a popular election under the Reform Bill.

But then we are to "trust to character;" the individual in question is unambitious, or immersed in his own affairs, or afraid of the sound of his own voice, or is a parliament phantom. He may be all this, or quite the contrary, for any contrary knowledge of ours; but once in Parliament, with his whole sharp and craving community at his heels, he _must_ make an effort--or he will be soon driven back to his counting-house. Or if he were at once as fixed and silent as a rock, who shall answer for his successors? In no instance of party violence is the first man the true representative. He comes full dressed into the levee, bows as he enters the presence, and offers his petition with the air pleasing to the souls of lords in waiting. His successor comes; the _sans culotte_ roars at the head of his rabble in the streets, and storms the palace, stairs. The Jew in parliament will be no longer the emblem of sly submissiveness that traverses Houndsditch. History tells us well the fierceness of his day of authority; the daring zealotry, the bitterness of his national anger, and the mortal venom of his personal vindictiveness. If those outbursts have seldom occurred in our days, the loss of political position may be justly taken for the cause; with every thing to risk and nothing to gain, we can easily account for quietude. But, give him that position, make him the leader, the treasurer, or the recruiting officer of a party,--give him the hope of seizing place,--make his voice the key-note of doubtful debate,--make his party the prop of a tottering ministry, or the champions of an aspiring opposition,--give him the power of carrying fifty votes, or half the number, across the House, the utterers of the words of life or death to a cabinet standing in the Dock,--and what measure of revenge or spoliation, of insolent triumph or irremediable evil, might they not demand, and might they, not obtain?

We solemnly declare, that much as we deprecate Papist influence, we think that all its hostility is not to be dreaded the hundredth part so much as political power in Jewish hands. _There_ would be no lazy braggadocio, no loose riot of success, none of the vulgar intoxication that goes to sleep after the victory,--we should have the steady, sullen, cool antagonism, whose subtlety never slumbers.

But there are other and important considerations. The British empire extends over a variety of creeds. If the Christian legislature admits one sect known as the open antagonist of Christianity, why not admit the neutrals? Why not the Mahometan? Why not the Hindoo? Are they half as much opposed to Christianity as the Jew? We have conquered a Chinese island,--why not have a parliamentary believer in the god Foh, and in his prophet Confutzee? Ceylon is ours,--why reject the votary of Boodh? We have the Cape, and we shall soon have the land of the Caffre,--why not admit the worshipper of the Serpent, or the man who trembles before the mystery of the Fetish? The Dyak of Borneo, and the Malay of Singapore are already basking under the beams of the British crown; neither will trouble us with controversies,--why not compile them all into one imperial representation? They are fully as honest as the Jew, not much more ignorant, and much less likely to quarrel with us.

In the largeness of this subject we are forced to pass by a multitude of pressing considerations; but there is one, to which we cannot avoid making some slight reference--the actual state of the Jewish religion. Many, who have not attended to this subject, evidently feel all interest in the Jew, as the "descendant of the original receivers of the law, a mistaken and stiff-necked generation, perhaps, but still clinging to the law of Sinai." On this subject we speak with perfect reverence, but also with perfect truth, when we say, that it is scarcely possible to discover the religion of Sinai in the Jewish ritual of the present day; their religion is Rabbinism, precisely the same, (except for its additional excesses and inventions) that it was when the most sacred of all authorities pronounced to the Sadducee, and the Pharisee, and the nation, that they had made the law of Moses of "none effect by their traditions." The "oral law," wholly traditionary, is now the law of all the Jews, (the Karaites, a small sect, excepted.) Their liturgy is wholly formed from the oral law, and some of its comments, among an abundance of trivialities, are dangerous. The "deniers of the law are _cut off_ for ever, and perish through their wickedness, and have no part in the world to come." Among those thus condemned for ever are the Christians and Mahometans. But some of the passages in the Talmud show the personal peril into which the oral law may condemn the recusants of any kind.

"It is lawful," says the Rabbi Eleazar, "to split open the nostrils of an unlearned man on the day of atonement, which falls on the Sabbath. And his disciples said, Rabbi, say rather that it is lawful to slaughter him. The Rabbi replied, _That_ would require a benediction, but now no benediction is needful."

But we must leave the subject to be treated by others who have more time; assuring the reader that Rabbinism is a compilation very much in the following style:--

"Rabbi Judah said, Every thing that God created in the world he created male and female. And thus he did with Leviathan the piercing serpent, and Leviathan the crooked serpent, he created them male and female. But if they had been united, they would have desolated the entire world. What then did the Holy One? He took away the strength of the male Leviathan, and slew the female, and _salted her_ for the righteous for the time to come."

And of this kind is the Scriptural(!) knowledge of the modern Jew. We really do not speak of these things in levity, but in deference for the truth, and to show how distinct the follower of Rabbinism is from the follower of Moses.

We now close the subject, disavowing all hostility to the Jew, but distinctly expressing our conviction, that his admission into a Christian parliament is wholly inconsistent with common right, common duty, or common sense. How can we offer the homage of either heart or lip to our Lord Christ, when we give the highest boon within our power to a sect who pronounce him all impostor? How can we respect his religion, when we regard it as a matter of total indifference whether we support its friends or encourage its enemies? or how can we deserve to retain the inestimable privileges, alike spiritual and temporal, which we have received from Christianity, when we negligently, or for some personal object, lay them at the mercy of the unbeliever?

What ought England to do at this moment? It ought to teem with petitions. Its clergy ought to meet, and give their most solemn pledge to resist this most fatal innovation. Its bishops ought each to take the lead in those meetings, and, instead of waiting to make a useless speech in the House of Lords, come forth and do their duty like men.

PÆANS OF THE ATHENIAN NAVY.--NO. I.

PHORMIO'S VICTORY IN THE CORINTHIAN GULF--WITH SOME INTRODUCTORY REMARKS ON THE ATHENIAN SEA-SERVICE.

The maritime glory of ancient Athens has scarcely been regarded by Englishmen with the attention and sympathy which our own national interest and pride in the rule of the waves might be expected to create.

Our boast of trusting to our wooden walls is a literal translation of the Athenian statesman's maxim, which inspired his country's successful resistance to her Persian invader. Athens, like England, made herself, by her fleets, felt and feared in every region of the then known world. Like England, she won herself, beyond sea, an empire far disproportioned to the scanty extent of her domestic territory; and she held that empire, and defied all the assaults of combined enemies by land, so long as, and no longer than, she maintained her ascendency on the ocean.

In the palmy days of Athens every Athenian was a seaman. A state, indeed, whose members, of an age fit for service, at no time exceeded thirty thousand, and whose territorial extent did not equal half Sussex, could only have acquired such a naval dominion as Athens once held, by devoting, and zealously training, all its sons to service in its fleets.[8] The resident aliens, and some of the slaves, were also compelled to row in the Athenian galleys; foreign mariners were sometimes hired; but the staple of the crews consisted of free citizens of Athens, members of the sovereign republic, which they served with hearts and hands in the cause of her aggrandisement; zealously executing the decrees Which they themselves had voted, and each of them (as Herodotus remarked) feeling that what he wrought he wrought for himself, and striving to do the work thoroughly.[9]

[8] See _Thucyd._ i. 143, and _Xenoph. de Repub. Ath._ i. 19.

[9] See the remarkable passage in Herodotus (_Terpsichore_, 78) where he describes the change in the spirit of the Athenians after they had got rid of the yoke of the Pisistratidæ, and felt the full vigour of the free institutions which Cleisthenes had perfected for them.

We look back with just national pride on the energy which our country displayed, and the resources which she called into action during the fearful struggles of the last war. We dwell with honest complacency on the narrative that tells us how, when, after the rupture of the peace of Amiens, our Great Enemy menaced invasion, England, besides her preparations by land, put forth her might "on the element she calls her own. She covered the ocean with five hundred and seventy ships of war of various descriptions. Divisions of her fleet blocked up every French port in the Channel; and the army destined to invade our shores might see the British flag flying in every direction on the horizon, waiting for their issuing from the harbour, as birds of prey may be seen hovering in the air above the animal which they design to pounce upon:"[10] while, at the same time, along Indian seas, and by the shores of continents of whose existence the Ancients dreamed not, our squadrons commanded every coast that could supply an enemy's ship to chase, or an enemy's colony to capture. Yet, if we take into consideration the comparative populations and territories of the two states, we shall find instances in Greek history of Athens making exertions to secure her independence, and naval supremacy, which surpass even those which are the just boast of Britain. We may pass over the day of Salamis, when all Athens was on ship-board; nor need we, for this purpose, do more than glance at her armaments at the fatal siege of Syracuse, and in the other death-struggles of the Peloponnesian war. There is an original inscription still preserved in the Louvre, which attests the energies of Athens at another crisis of her career, not, indeed, more intense or exciting than those which we have alluded to, but more interesting to Englishmen, from the variety of the, scenes of operation, on which Athens then, like England in modern wars, at once sought conquests abroad, and repelled enemies at home. At the period we now advert to (B. C. 457) an Athenian armament of two hundred galleys was engaged in a bold though unsuccessful expedition against Egypt. The Athenian crews had landed, had won a battle; they had then re-embarked and sailed up the Nile, and were busily besieging the Persian garrison in Memphis. As the complement of a trireme galley was at least two hundred men, we cannot estimate the forces then employed by Athens against Egypt at less than forty thousand men. At the same time she kept squadrons on the coasts of Phœnicia and Cyprus, and yet maintained a home-fleet that enabled her to defeat her Peloponesian enemies at Cecryphalea and Ægina, capturing in the last engagement seventy galleys. This last fact may give us some idea of the strength of the Athenian home-fleet that gained the victory: and by adopting the same ratio of multiplying whatever number of galleys we suppose to have been employed, by two hundred, so as to gain the aggregate number of the crews, we may form some estimate of the forces which this little Greek state then kept on foot. Between sixty and seventy thousand men must have served in her fleets during that year. Her tenacity of purpose was equal to her boldness of enterprise. Sooner than yield or withdraw from any of their expeditions, the Athenians at this very time, when Corinth sent an army to attack their garrison at Megara, did not recall a single crew or a single soldier from Ægina or from abroad; but the lads and old men, who had been left to guard the city, fought and won a battle against these new assailants. The inscription which we have referred to, is graven on a votive tablet to the memory of the dead, erected in that year by the Erechthean tribe, one of the ten into which the Athenians were divided. It shows, as Thirlwall has remarked,[11] "that the Athenians were conscious of the greatness of their own efforts;" and in it this little civic community of the ancient world still "records to us with emphatic simplicity, that its slain fell in Cyprus, in Egypt, in Phœnicia, at Haliæ, in Ægina, and in Megara, _in the same year_."

[10] Scott's _Life of Napoleon_.

[11] _History of Greece_, vol. iii. p. 26, n.

Of course, in order to man and keep afoot such armaments as these, Athens employed large numbers of her subject-allies, of hired mariners, and also of slaves. But, as has been marked before, her own citizens formed the staple of her forces. In the periods, indeed, of her deepest distress, towards the close of the Peloponnesian war, when her dreadful defeats in Sicily must have diminished the serviceable part of her free population, and swept off the flower of her youth, "as if the spring-time were taken out of the year," she was compelled to fill her fleets with a far larger proportion of slaves and hired foreigners. And then her enemies, by the offer of higher pay, could half unman the Athenian ships, and improve their own complements on the very eve of decisive operations.[12]

[12] Plutarch in _Vitâ Lysandri_.

Themistocles was the great founder of the Athenian navy. He first taught Athens to disregard the land, and to look on the sea as her national element of empire. His enemies said of him that he took the spear out of his countrymen's grasp, and replaced it with the oar.[13] But the contemporary historian explicitly attests[14] that the salvation of Greece from Persia arose from the Athenians having become a sea-faring people: and it was Themistocles who made them so.

[13] Plutarch in _Vitâ_.

[14] Herodotus _Polyhymnia_, 144.

He persuaded his fellow-countrymen to devote the produce of their silver mines to building a fleet, instead of dividing it among themselves. This fleet, well exercised in contests with Ægina, was the nucleus of the navy of Athens, that taught the Greeks how to fight and conquer at Artemisium and Salamis. These victories, and the equally successful sea-fights in which Cimon afterwards led the Greeks against the remnants of the Persian navy on the Asiatic coasts, raised the zeal of the Athenians for their sea service to the highest pitch. And when they had acquired the supremacy over the Greek islanders and cities of the coasts of the Ægean, they gained and sedulously employed fresh resources for augmenting the number of their galleys, and improving their own skill as mariners. For no nation was ever more thoroughly aware than the Athenians of the importance of assiduous training and perfect discipline in naval warfare. Their great orator, Pericles, mainly encouraged them to resist the combined powers of Lacedæmon and her allies, by reminding them of their long practice in seamanship compared with that of their enemies, who were more numerous, and might be equally brave, but never could equal their skill. He truly told them that seamanship is an art not to be acquired off-hand by landsmen, or to be picked up as a mere minor accomplishment, but that it requires long practice, uninterrupted by other occupations. "Athens had devoted herself to this since the invasion of the Medes; she had not, indeed, perfected herself; but the reward of her superior training was the rule of the sea--a mighty dominion, for it gave her the rule of much fair land beyond its waves, safe from the idle ravages with which the Lacedæmonians might harass Attica, but never could subdue Athens."[15]

[15] See the speech of Pericles at the end of the first book of Thucydides, and also the great speech in the second book.

An ancient Athenian trireme would make a poor figure beside a modern line-of-battle ship, the most majestic product of human skill and daring. Still, as we have seen, the number of men employed on board a naval armament in the old times far exceeded the united complements of a modern fleet. The slaughter in action was far greater, and, from the nature of the conflict, more depended upon discipline and seamanship, comparatively with mere animal courage, than is the case even in the sea-fights of the present time. The ancients contended in long light galleys, the prows of which were armed with sharp strong beaks, for the purpose of staying in an adversary's timbers, and more effectually running her down. Inexperienced crews sought only to grapple with an enemy, and to decide the affair by boarding. But the more highly-disciplined mariners avoided this unscientific mode of closing, in which numbers and brute force were sure to prevail, and sought by skill and speed, by manœuvring round their antagonists, by wheeling, halting, backing, and charging exactly at the right moment, to avoid the shocks intended for themselves, and to run an opponent down by taking her amidships or on the quarter, or to dash away and shatter part of her oars.

If we can picture to ourselves two hostile squadrons of modern steam-boats, without artillery, seeking to destroy each other principally by running down, we shall gain an idea in many respects analogous to the idea of a sea-fight of antiquity. But we must remember that the motive power of the old war-galleys, when contending, came entirely from oars, sails not being used in action: so that the efficiency of the manœuvres depended on the skill and nerve of the whole crew, and not merely on the excellence of machinery and the dexterity of one or two officers. Of the two hundred men who made the usual complement of a Greek trireme, at least four-fifths pulled at the oar; the proportion of mariners being continually diminished in the best navies, as they trusted more and more to swiftness and tactics, and less to hand-to-hand fighting. They pulled in three tiers, ranged one above another, the lowest having, of course, the shortest oars and lightest work; better men being required for the middle tier, and the most powerful and skilled rowers being alone fit to work the long oars of the upper rank.

The probable mode of arranging the tiers of oars, so that the higher should sufficiently overstretch the lower, so as not to interfere in stroke with them, is excellently explained by Mitford in an appendix to the eighth chapter of his second volume. Adopting the views of General Melville, and illustrating them by a description of war-galleys actually in use among the islanders of the Pacific, Mitford says:--"Along the waist of the galley, from a little above the water's edge, a gallery projected at an angle of about forty-five degrees. In this the upper rowers were disposed, checkered with the lower. Space for them being thus gained, partly by elevation, partly by lateral projection, those of the highest tier were not too much above the water to work their oars with effect."