despair of the world, of humanity? In such a
world, what guarantee against the pillage of the Third Temple? And in
such a world were life worth living at all? And, even with Palestine
for ultimate goal, do you counsel delay, a nursing of the Zionist
flame, a gradual education and preparation of the race for a great
conscious historic role in the world's future, a forty years'
wandering in the wilderness to organize or kill off the miscellaneous
rabble--then will you, dreamer, turn a deaf ear to the cry of millions
oppressed to-day? Would you ignore the appeals of these hundreds of
telegrams, of these thousands of petitions with myriads of signatures,
for the sake of some visionary perfection of to-morrow? Nay, nay, the
cartoon of the Congress shall bring itself to pass. Against the
picturesque wailers at the ruins of the Temple wall shall be set the
no less picturesque peasants sowing the seed, whose harvest is at once
waving grain and a regenerated Israel. The stains of sordid traffic
shall be cleansed by the dews and the rains. In the Jewish peasant
behold the ideal plebeian of the future; a son of the soil, yet also a
son of the spirit. And what fair floriage of art and literature may
not the world gain from this great purified nation, carrying in its
bosom the experience of the ages?

Not all his own ideas, these; some perhaps only half-consciously
present to him, so that even in this very Congress the note of
jealousy is heard, the claim of an earlier prophet insisted on
fiercely. For a moment the dignified assembly, becomes a prey to
atavism, reproduces the sordid squabbles of the _Kahal_. As if every
movement was not fed by subterranean fires, heralded by obscure
rumblings, though 'tis only the earthquake or the volcanic jet which
leaps into history!

But the President is finely impersonal. Not he, but the Congress. The
Bulgarians have a tradition that the Messiah will be born on August
29. He shares this belief. To-day the Messiah has been born--the
Congress. "In this Congress we procure for the Jewish people an organ
which till now it did not possess, and of which it was so sadly in
want. Our cause is too great for the ambition and wilfulness of a
single person. It must be lifted up to something impersonal if it is
to succeed. And our Congress shall be lasting, not only until we are
redeemed from the old state, but still more so afterwards ... serious
and lofty, a blessing for the unfortunate, noxious to none