Do you object that the poor will be the only ones to immigrate to Palestine? Why, it is just those that we want. Prithee, how else shall we make our roads and plant our trees? No mention now of the Eurasian exemplar, the synthetic "over-man." Perhaps he is only to evolve. Do you suggest that an inner ennobling of scattered Israel might be the finer goal, the truer antidote to anti-Semitism? Simple heart, do you not see it is just for our good--not our bad--qualities that we are persecuted? A jugglery--specious enough for the moment--with the word "good"; forceful "struggle-for-life" qualities substituted for spiritual, for ethical. And yet to doubt that the world would--and does--respond sympathetically to the finer elements so abundantly in Israel, is it not to 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 rôle 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!