Well, within a very few years the younger members of that very man's family came out in Parliamentary scandal after scandal, appearing all in sequence one after the other—a sort of procession. They had been let alone right enough! But they had not let us alone. I ask myself, sometimes, How would it sound if some years hence any one of those descendants—having by that time been given his peerage (for they are rich men and all of them in professional politics)—should return to that cry of his ancestor and ask to be "let alone"? There would be no response then in the breasts of the contemporaries who might hear him. Manners will so much have changed in this regard that he would be interrupted. But I do not think that my hypothetical descendant of that rich old Jew is likely to make any such speech. I think that when the time comes for making it, the whole idea of "letting alone" will be quite dead.
I have quoted this old man's speech with no invidious intention but only as an actual example of the way in which the "letting alone" of this great question breaks down. I am as familiar as any Jewish reader of mine with names that have dignified public life in the past, Jewish names, Jewish peers: and I recall in particular the honoured name of Lord Herschell to the friendship between whose nearest and my own I preserve a grateful and sacred memory.
* * * * *
But to return to the failure of the sentimental argument.
The sentimental argument fails because it involves contradictions—that is, incompatibility of fact.