This self-reliance is of the essence of Zionism. Zionism is a Jewish programme. It is a Jewish programme because it requires of Jews courage, initiative, resourcefulness, tenacity, will-power and sacrifice. For Jewish emancipation the most important condition is that others should be humane. For Zionism the most important condition is that Jews should be Jews, adhering with tenacious consistency to this truly national idea of their own. In the first case the real work has to be done by others; Jews can do very little, their rôle being chiefly passive. They may be persecuted or not; they may get rights or not. Essentially it depends on many factors outside their influence and their control. But Zionism is essentially an active Jewish programme. Zionism is real Jewish self-help. Zionism tends to make the Jews creators, not creatures of conditions and situations. Zionists, like all Jews, are fundamentally optimists; but theirs is no mere “wait and see” optimism. Confidence in the Future has been the curse of the Jew. Confidence in “Progress” as an idol has been blindness. Away with idols! Jews have to take their cause into their own hands, for God helps those who help themselves. First of all, they have to look on the general situation of the world and on that of their own people as it is. They have also to read the signs of the time. Time does not stand still. We are no longer at the end of the eighteenth century. The fundamental character of the present age is clear. This is a Nationalist age. Zionism looks at the 2000 years of the Jewish tragedy in the perspective of national justice. The Jewish problem is essentially (and independently of the necessity of human rights for the Jews everywhere) a question of national homelessness. * * * * * The world has been passing through a period which sometimes seems like a nightmare of blood and ruin, and sometimes like one of the greatest eras in which man can be called upon to live. All over Europe, almost all over the world, the storm of the greatest and most terrible war in history has burst with the fury of a thousand volcanic eruptions and a thousand hells. Flourishing countries have been reduced to heaps of smoking ruins. Vast fields have been saturated with the blood of millions of men. Large masses of population, almost whole peoples, have been ruined or driven out of their countries.