n, modern, civilized
France, a hundred years after the Declaration of the Rights of Man.
The French people, or at any rate the greater part of the French
people, does not want to extend the rights of man to Jews. The edict
of the great Revolution had been revoked."

Illumined thus in retrospect, the "curious excitement" which gripped
Herzl on that occasion takes on a special significance. "Until that
time most of us believed that the solution of the Jewish question was
to be patiently waited for as part of the general development of
mankind. But when a people which in every other respect is so
progressive and so highly civilized can take such a turn, what are we
to expect from other peoples, which have not even attained the level
which France attained a hundred years ago?"

In that fateful moment, when he heard the howling of the mob outside
the gates of the _Ecole Militaire_, the realization flashed upon Herzl
that anti-Semitism was deep-rooted in the heart of the people--so
deep, indeed, that it was impossible to hope for its disappearance
within a measurable period of time. Precisely because he was so
sensitive to his honor as a Jew, precisely because he had proclaimed,
in the _New Ghetto_, the ideal of human reconciliation, and had taken
the ultimate decision to stand by his Jewishness, the ghastly
spectacle of that winter morning must have shaken him to the depths of
his being. It was as if the ground had been cut away from under his
feet. In this sense Herzl could say later that the Dreyfus affair had
made him a Zionist.

He saw all about him the ever fiercer light of a blazing
anti-Semitism. In the French Chamber of Deputies the deputy Denis made
an interpellation on the influence of the Jews in the political
administration of the country. In Vienna a Jewish member of the
Reichstag rose to speak and was howled down. On April 2, 1895, were
held the municipal elections of Vienna, and there was an enormous
increase in the number of anti-Semitic aldermen. Changing plans passed
tumultuously through his mind. He wanted to write a book on "The
Condition of the Jews," consisting of reports on all the important
Jewish colonization enterprises in Russia, Galicia, Hungary, Bohemia,
the Orient, and those more recently founded in Palestine, about which
he had heard from a relative. Alphonse Daudet, the famous French
author with whom he had discussed the whole matter, felt that Herzl
ought to write a novel; it would carry