Exactly the same political issue of religious fanaticism applies to the question of Christian sensibilities. Any one who has seen, as in 1914 I saw at Easter-tide, the tens of thousands of devout Roman Catholics from Poland, Italy, and Spain, and the other tens of thousands of devout Greek Catholics from Russia and the East, who yearly frequent the shrines of Christianity in Palestine, and who thus consummate a lifetime of devotion by a pilgrimage undertaken at, to them, staggering expense and physical privation; and who has observed, as I have observed, the suppressed hatred of them all for both the Jew and the Mussulman; and who has noted, further, the bitter jealousies between even Protestant and Catholic, between Greek Catholic and Roman--such an observer, I say, can entertain no illusions that the placing of these sacred shrines of Christian tradition in the hands of the Jews would be tolerated. The most enlightened Christians might endure it, but the great mass of Christian worshippers of Europe would not. They regard the Jew not merely as a member of a rival faith, but the man whose ancestors rejected their fellow Jew, the Christ, and crucified Him. Their fanaticism is a political fact of gigantic proportions. A Jewish State in Palestine would inevitably arouse their passion. Instead of such a State adding new dignity and consideration to the position of the Jew the world over (as the Zionists claim it would do), I am convinced that it would concentrate, multiply, and give new venom to the hatred which he already endures in Poland and Russia, the very lands in which most of the Jews now dwell, and where their oppressions are the worst. The political pretensions of Zionism are fantastic. I think the foregoing paragraphs have demonstrated this. Is Zionism a spiritual will-o’-the-wisp? I assert with all the vigour of my most profound convictions that it is. Its professed spiritual aim is the reassertion of the dignity and worth of the Jew. It is a mechanism designed to restore to him his self-respect, and to secure for him the respect of others. The means by which it proposes to accomplish this have been described above. How pitifully inadequate these means are has been demonstrated.