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, to the honor of all Jews, and worthy of a past, the glory of which is far off, but everlasting." And, as he steps from the tribune, amid the roar of "Hochs," and the thunder of hands and feet and sticks, and the flutter of handkerchiefs, with men precipitating themselves to kiss his hand, and others weeping and embracing, be sure that no private ambition possesses him, be sure that his heart swells only with the presentiment of great events and with uplifting thoughts of the millions who will thrill to the distant echo of this sublime moment. What European parliament could glow with such a galaxy of intellect? Is not each man a born orator, master of arts or sciences? Has not the very caftan-Jew from the Carpathians published his poetry and his philosophy, gallantly championing "The Master of the Name" against a Darwinian world? Heine had figured the Jew as a dog, that at the advent of the Princess Sabbath is changed back to a man. More potent than the Princess, the Congress has shown the Jew's manhood to the world. That old painter, whose famous Dance of Death drew for centuries the curious to Bâle, could not picture the Jew save as the gaberdined miser, only dropping his money-bag at Death's touch. Well, here is another sight for him--could Death, that took him too, bring him back for a moment--these scholars, thinkers, poets, from all the lands of the Exile, who stand up in honor of the dead pioneers of Zionism, and, raising their right hands to heaven, cry, "If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning!" Yes, the dream still stirs at the heart of the mummied race, the fire quenched two thousand years ago sleeps yet in the ashes. And if our President forgets that the vast bulk of his brethren are unrepresented in his Congress, that they are content with the civic rights so painfully won, and have quite other conceptions of their creed's future, who will grudge him this moment of fine rapture? Or, when at night, in the students' _Kommers_, with joyful weeping and with brotherly kisses, sages and gray-beards join in the _gaudeamus igitur_, who shall deny him grounds for his faith that _juvenes sumus_ yet, that the carking centuries have had no power over our immortal nation. "Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety."