THE LAW OF HEREDITY 79 



of Eastern Europe. But religion and race sentiment 

 will always make the Jew a different man from his 

 Christian neighbour. Moreover, the migrating Jew 

 brings with him to a free country like England the 

 habits of mind appropriate to the less civilised com- 

 munity he may have left, and such moral peculiarities 

 cannot be corrected in a single generation. Breeders 

 of domestic animals know that it takes six or eight 

 generations to fix or unfix a given quality by heredity, 

 and men are hardly to be judged by a less exacting 

 standard than horses or dogs. For these various 

 reasons Macaulay's tirade in favour of the admission 

 of Jews to all the privileges of English citizenship, 

 not upon the ground of political expediency, but 

 because of their inherent identity with Englishmen 

 in civil instinct, may be set down as a piece of 

 empty though brilliant rhetoric.^ Macaulay argued 

 that it would be as reasonable to place all red-haired 

 men under a political ban as Jews. If it could be 

 shown that all the red-haired men of Europe were of 

 one race, that they had had no fatherland for two 

 thousand years, and that during most of that time 

 they had been shamefully oppressed by their fair- or 

 black-haired neighbours, the argument would hold 

 1 Macaulay's Essay, " On the Civil Disabilities of the Jews," 



