Cast away all prejudices, all conventionalities, all subterfuges, look the thing boldly in the face, and will any one tell me either that it is reall… - Edward Augustus Freeman

I know that to run down Lord Macaulay is the fashion of the day. I have heard some speak against him who have a right to speak; I have heard many more who have none. I at least feel that I have none; I do not see how any man can have the right who has not gone through the same work through which Macaulay went, or at least through some no less thorough work of a kindred sort. I can see Macaulay's great and obvious faults as well as any man; I know as well as any man the cautions with which his brilliant pictures must be studied; but I cannot feel that I have any right to speak lightly of one to whom I owe so much in the matter of actual knowledge, and to whom I owe more than to any man as the master of historical narrative. Read a page of Macaulay; scan well his minute accuracy in every name and phrase and title; contrast his English undefiled with the slipshod jargon which from our newspapers has run over into our books; dwell on the style which finds a fitting phrase in our own tongue to set forth every thought, the style which never uses a single word out of its true and honest meaning; turn the pages of the book in which no man ever read a sentence a second time because he failed to catch its meaning the first time, but in which all of us must have read many sentences a second or a twentieth time for the sheer pleasure of dwelling on the clearness, the combined fulness and terseness, on the just relation of every word to every other, on the happily chosen epithet, or the sharply pointed sarcasm .

I am fuming at all this jew humbug. It is simply got up to call off our thoughts from Armenia and Crete. If I were to say that every nation has a right to wallop its own jews I might be misunderstood, for I don't want to wallop anybody, even jews. The best thing is to kick them out altogether, like King Edward Longshanks of famous memory. But I do say that if any nation chooses to wallop its own jews 'tis no business of any other nation. Whereas if the Turk wallops Cretans and Armenians it is our business, because we have promised to make them do otherwise. And, besides, if you simply want to abuse Russia there is Bulgaria bullied and Finland threatened. What can jews matter beside either of these?

That Mahometanism is essentially an obstructive, intolerant system, supplying just sufficient good to stand in the way of greater good. It has consecrated despotism; it has consecrated polygamy; it has consecrated slavery. It has declared war against every other creed; it has claimed to be at least dominant in every land. And in one sense it has rightly so claimed. So long as a Mahometan nation is dominant and conquering, so long is it great and glorious after its own standard. When it ceases to have an enemy to contend against, it sinks into sluggish stupidity and into a barbarism far viler than that of the conquerors who raised it to greatness. It must have an enemy; if cut off, like Persia, from conflict with the infidel, it finds its substitute in sectarian hatred of brother Moslems. Islam has founded mighty empires, it has reared splendid palaces, it has accumulated libraries of countless volumes. But it has done nothing for man in his highest earthly capacity, as the citizen of a free state; it has done nothing for the higher even of his purely speculative faculties. By slightly reforming, it has perpetuated and sanctified all the evils of the eastern world. It has, by its aggressive tenets, brought them into more direct antagonism with the creed and civilization of the west. A system, originally the greatest of reforms in its own age and country, has proved the curse and scourge of the world for twelve hundred years.