Up to this point Jewish leaders of all shades of opinion travelled the same road. It was only at this stage that commonplace charity and political foresight had to part company. To the former it seemed easy to surmount all difficulties and all objections instantly by a few plausible generalities, which to such minds were invested with the force of axiomatic truth, and to question which they would regard as useless. Persecution, it was said, is a temporary phenomenon, and consequently the defence should be temporary. But is the persecution of the Jews really only temporary? Are not all these outrages and accusations links in one chain? Are they not, to a certain extent, the consequences of the precarious and untenable position of a people without a land? Short-sighted philanthropists, harassed by no doubts of this kind, asserted as facts what they knew in reality to be only probabilities. There is no doubt as to their perfect good faith, nor should any wilful misrepresentation be attributed to them. They had seized on one part of the truth, namely, that justice should be applied to the Jews. With regard to questions of nationality and territory they had no experience. They knew little of the conditions of the countries where the Jewish masses lived; the psychology of the non-Jewish masses in those countries was unknown to them. But history was against their superficial optimism, and in the minds of really thinking people grave doubts arose whether the future of the Jewish people could be secured by haphazard defence and immediate relief. It would be idle for the optimists to treat anxieties of this kind as if they were heresies. They were not reactionary aspirations; nor were they the pretensions of ignorant spirits to be wise beyond the limits of man’s wisdom. They were in reality the logical consequences of experience and observation. They reveal a true conception of the Jewish problem, which is belittled and watered down by commonplace optimism. The Damascus affair, like similar events before and after it, stimulated Zionist aspirations, not because Zionism is merely a reflex of persecution, but because persecution reveals to the Jew his real situation, which, during the short intervals of peace, he does not clearly understand or is inclined to overlook.