Fortunately for France, for civilization and for the Jews, anti-Semitism was utterly defeated in the open political combat for the first time in modern history. The barrier erected by Liberty proved sufficiently strong to stem the tide of raging injustice; the very excitement caused by the wrong was the best warning against the danger which the revival of medieval bigotry brings to an enlightened country. Persecution and discrimination were again forced back and confined to the more shady corners of the earth, to the countries where the masses of the people are still oppressed by tyranny and handicapped by ignorance. It was in these countries that the Dreyfus agitation was seized upon by the enemies of the Jews and exploited to the ♦utmost extent, and it was there that many Jews began to despair. If France could become anti-Semitic at the end of the nineteenth century, what hope was there for the Jew in the backward countries, in political progress and cultural development? The full force of the victory over the French reactionaries was known and felt only in the free countries; elsewhere the impression remained that the Jews of France remained in a lamentable position, and that the future looked as gloomy to them as is usually the case in Russia after a new outbreak of anti-Jewish riots. The result of this new hopeless view of the Jewish situation was the sudden spread of the new Zionist movement, which was inaugurated about that time on the Continent by Dr. Theodore Herzl (1860–1904). He and his first supporters were Austrians, they obtained their largest following in Russia and Galicia, and in the large cities in other countries where there were numbers of Jewish Immigrants from slavic countries. When the movement began to show signs of life in the English speaking countries, native or assimilated Jews joined it and became its leaders. And so it came to pass that although the American press, with few and unimportant exceptions, was as strongly pro-Dreyfus as the Jewish press itself, and the victory of Justice and liberalism was as much emphasized here as in Paris, a limited field was prepared here for the Zionist movement, as well as in Russia, Austria and Roumania. The old “Chowewe Zion,” or believers in the colonization of Palestine, joined the new political movement here, as they did abroad, and the “Maskilim,” or Germanized Hebrew scholars, who were forced to the background by the advent of the popular radical leaders of the new period of immigration, were also attracted by the new movement which helped to restore the equilibrium among the intellectual Jewish classes. The first Zionist societies of New York consisted almost entirely of immigrants. But when the “Federation of Zionist Societies of Greater New York and Vicinity” (organized 1897) expanded by absorbing societies outside of New York, and became, at a convention held in New York in July, 1898, the “Federation of American Zionists,” American Jews were