thought that you are about
to be deprived of your rights and stripped of your possessions. You
will be insulted when you walk in the street. If you are poor, you
suffer doubly. If you are rich, you must conceal the fact. You are not
admitted to any honorable calling, and if you deal in money you are
made the special focus of contempt.... The situation will not change
for the better, but rather for the worse.... There is only way out:
into the Promised Land.'"

Where the Promised Land was to be located, how it was to be acquired,
is not yet mentioned. Herzl does not seem to have thought this
question of decisive significance; it was a scientific matter. It was
the organization of the migration which held his attention, the
political preparations among the Powers, the preliminary changes to be
brought about among the masses by training, by "tremendous propaganda,
the popularization of the idea through newspapers, books, pamphlets,
lectures, pictures, songs."

On the day of his conversation with Baron de Hirsch, Herzl wrote him a
long letter in which he sought to supplement the information and
impressions which had been the result of the meeting. "Please believe
me, the political life of an entire people--particularly when that
people is scattered throughout the entire world--can be set in motion
only with imponderables floating high in the air. Do you know what the
German Reich sprang from? From dreams, songs, fantasies, and
gold-black bands worn by students. And that in a brief period of time.
What? You do not understand imponderables? And what is religion?
Bethink yourself what the Jews have endured for two thousand years for
the sake of this fantasy....

"The exodus to the Promised Land presents itself as a tremendous
enterprise in transportation, unparalleled in the modern world. What
transportation? It is a complex of all human enterprises which we
shall fit Into each other like cog-wheels. And in the very first
stages of the enterprise we shall find employment for the ambitious
younger masses of our people: all the engineers, architects,
technologists, chemists, doctors, and lawyers, those who have emerged
in the last thirty years from the ghetto and who have been moved by
the faith that they can win their bread and a little honor outside the
framework of our Jewish business futilities. Today they must be filled
with despair, they constitute the foundation of a frightful
over-educated proletariat. But it is to t