ing called "The Jewish Problem as a Problem of Race,
Morals and Culture." One of his closest friends had gone to Brazil for
a Jewish committee to investigate the possibility of settling Jews in
that part of South America. In 1892 he wrote an article on French
anti-Semitism in which he considered the solution of a return to Zion
and seemed to reject it. He wrote "The New Ghetto" two years before
"The Jewish State" appeared. He was present at the trial of Alfred
Dreyfus in December, 1894. He witnessed the degradation of Dreyfus and
heard the cries of "Down with the Jews" in the streets of Paris. He
read Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic journal "La France Juive" and
said, "I have to thank Drumont for much of the freedom of my present
conception of the Jewish problem." While he was in Paris he was
stirred as never before by the feeling that the plight of the Jews was
a problem which would have to have the cooperation of enlightened
statesmanship. What excited him in the strangest way was the
unaccountable indifference of Jews themselves to what seemed to him
the menace of the existing situation. He saw the Jews in every land
encircled by enemies, hostility to them growing with the increase of
their numbers. In his excitement he thought first of Jewish
philanthropists. He sought an interview with Baron Maurice de Hirsch
in May, 1895. He planned an address to the Rothschilds. He talked of
his ideas to friends in literary circles. His mind was obsessed by a
gigantic problem which gave him no rest. He was struggling to pierce
the veils of revelation. He saw a world in which the Jewish people
lacked a fulcrum for national action and therefore had to seek to
create it through beneficence. He had a remarkably resourceful and
agile imagination. He weighed ideas, balanced them, discarded them,
reflected, reconsidered, tried to reconcile contradictions, and
finally came to what seemed to him at the moment the synthesis of the
issue which seemed acceptable to reason and sentiment.

* * * * *

Obviously, "The Jewish State" was not a dogmatic finality. Most of the
plans for settlement and migration are improvisations. The pamphlet
was not a rigid plan or a blueprint. It was not a description of a
Utopia, although some parts of it give that impression. It had an
indicated destiny but was not bound by a rigid line. It was the
illumination of a dynamic thought and followed the light with the hope
that it migh