hese that all my love
belongs, and I am just as set on increasing their number as you are
set on diminishing it. It is in them that I perceive the latent power
of the Jewish people. In brief, my kind."

In this letter of June 3, 1895, Herzl for the first time imparted his
new Jewish policy to a stranger. The writing down of his views, as
well as his conversation on the subject, had had a stronger effect on
himself than on Hirsch. He had obtained a clear vision of the new and
revolutionary character of his proposals. On the same day or shortly
thereafter he began a diary under the title of _The Jewish Question_.

"For some time now, I have been engaged upon a work of indescribable
greatness. I do not know yet whether I shall carry it through. It has
assumed the aspect of some mighty dream. But days and weeks have
passed since it has filled me utterly, it has overflown into my
unconscious self, it accompanies me wherever I go, it broods above all
my commonplace conversation, it peeps over my shoulder at the comical
little journalistic work which I must carry out. It disturbs and
intoxicates me."

Then suddenly the storm breaks upon him. The clouds open, the thunder
rolls and the lightning flashes about him. A thousand impressions beat
upon him simultaneously, a gigantic vision. He cannot think, he cannot
act, he can only write; breathless, unreflecting, unable to control
himself, unable to exercise the critical faculty lest he dam the
eruption, he dashes down his thoughts on scraps of paper--"Walking,
standing, lying down, in the street, at table, in the night," as if
under unceasing command.

And then doubts rise up from the depths. He dines with well-to-do,
educated, oppressed people who confront the question of anti-Semitism
in a state of complete helplessness: "They do not suspect it, but they
are ghetto-natures, quiet, decent, timid. That is what most of us are.
Will they understand the call to freedom and to manhood? When I left
them my spirits were very low. Again, my plan appeared to me to be
crazy." Then at once he comes to "Today I am again as firm as steel."
He notes the next morning. "The flabbiness of the people I met
yesterday gives me all the more grounds for action."

Clearer and clearer becomes the picture which he has of himself and of
his task in the history of his people. "I picked up once again the
torn thread of the tradition of our people. I lead it into the
Promised Land."

"The Promised La