go?

The war is raging, in a hundred battlefields uncounted brave men shed
their blood for the future of their nation, Jewish soldiers fight and
fall side by side with their non-Jewish countrymen and comrades, but
their heroic sacrifices are utterly useless for their own people. In
every country, even in Russia, the military excellence, the
patriotism, the contempt of danger and death of the Jewish soldiers,
will be rewarded more or less lavishly and liberally with distinctions
and preferment, but experience teaches us that their glorious conduct
is forgotten very soon after the war by everybody but themselves and
their brethren, and that it certainly does not change in the least the
status of the Jewish people among the nations. At any rate the
consideration of the merits and military virtues of the Jewish
soldiers will not by itself stimulate to action the diplomatists at
the peace congress, unless they are insistently recalled to their
memory. All this requires preparation and arrangements, of which as
yet there is scarcely any trace to be seen.

_Who Could Accept Palestine for the Jews?_

THERE is another point to which attention must be drawn. Let us admit
the most favorable case: the congress will really open up Palestine to
the Jewish people for colonization with self-government and autonomous
local institutions. To whom will it be in a position to make such a
concession? To whom will it deliver Palestine? The Jewish people is a
concept, but it is not a political and administrative individuality,
it is not a body with a head and vital organs. There is actually not
one man who could present himself to the governments assembled in
congress, receive Palestine from their hands, and offer them the
guarantee that he will lead into the land of their ancestors those
Jews that yearn for a new home and national life on an historic soil,
and that he will undertake the implanting of modern culture, the
maintaining of order, and the economic development of the country. An
offer of the congress would fall flat, nobody having the moral right
and the material capacity to accept it in the name and in behalf of
the Jewish people.

_Let Dreaming Give Way to Organizing! The Task for American Jewry_

ALL this points to the necessity of an adequate preparation for coming
events. The Messianic dream does not suffice. Mere wishes and hopes
are vain. We must work. We must organize ourselves without further
loss of time. We must