'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 enough to recognize that all nations are compact of incongruites, vitalized by warring elements. Nor has he any sympathetic perception of the mystic religious hopes of generations of zealots, of the great swirling spiritual currents of Ghetto life. But in a national movement--which appears at first sight hopeless, because it lacks the great magnetizer, religion--lies a chance denied to one who should boldly proclaim himself the evangel of a modern Judaism, the last of the Prophets. Political Zionism alone can transcend and unite: any religious formula would disturb and dissever. Along this line may all travel to Jerusalem. And, as the locomotive from Jaffa draws all alike to the sacred city, and leaves them there to their several matters, so may the pious concern themselves not at all with the religion of the engineer.