his dream
but discounts the future, his prophecy is merely fore-speaking, his
vision prevision. He talks agriculture, viticulture, subvention of the
Ottoman Empire, both by direct tribute and indirect enrichment; stocks
and shares, railroads, internal and to India; natural development
under expansion--all the jargon of our iron age. Let not his movement
be confounded with those petty projects for helping Jewish
agriculturists into Palestine. What! Improve the Sultan's land without
any political equivalent guaranteed in advance! Difficulty about the
holy places of Christianity and Islam? Pooh! extra-territorial.

A practised publicist, a trained lawyer, a not unsuccessful comedy
writer, converted to racial self-consciousness by the "Hep, Hep" of
Vienna, and hurried into unforeseen action by his own paper-scheme of
a Jewish State, he has, perhaps, at last--and not unreluctantly--found
himself as a leader of men.

In a Congress of impassioned rhetoricians he remains serene, moderate;
his voice is for the more part subdued; in its most emotional
abandonments there is a dry undertone, almost harsh. He quells
disorder with a look, with a word, with a sharp touch of the bell. The
cloven hoof of the Socialist peeps out from a little group. At once
"The Congress shall be captured by no party!" And the Congress is in
roars of satisfaction.

'Tis the happy faculty of all idealists to overlook the visible--the
price they pay for seeing the unseen. Even our open-eyed Jewish
idealist has been blest with ignorance of the actual. But, in his very
ignorance of the people he would lead and the country he would lead
them to, lies his strength, just as in his admission that his Zionist
fervor is only that second-rate species produced by local
anti-Semitism, lies a powerful answer to the dangerous libel of local
unpatriotism. Of the real political and agricultural conditions of
Palestine he knows only by hearsay. Of Jews he knows still less. Not
for him the paralyzing sense of the humors of his race, the petty feud
of Dutchman and Pole, the mutual superiorities of Sephardi and
Ashkenazi, the grotesque incompatibility of Western and Eastern Jew,
the cynicism and snobbery of the prosperous, the materialism of the
uneducated adventurers in unexploited regions. He stands so high and
aloof that all specific colorings and markings are blurred for him
into the common brotherhood, and, if he is cynic enough to suspect
them, he is philosopher e