the national culture, religion and traditions of the Jews, which are endangered by assimilation. The question of bread, important as it is, is not the whole of the Jewish problem. The old Roman “panem et circenses” could never become a Jewish principle. The Jewish principle is expressed in the words:―― “... man doth not live by bread only, but by everything that proceedeth out of the mouth of the Lord doth man live” (Deuteronomy viii. 3). Now members of other nations can find a home in America while their nation remains and develops its own life in the mother-country. But where is the mother-country of the Jews, of Judaism? Various schemes of Jewish colonisation were planned and partly carried out in America at the time of which we speak. Some of them met with some success, others proved utter failures. On the other hand, great masses of Jews were inspired by the conviction that good results could be expected only in Palestine from an effort to turn the exiled Jews into agriculturists. That view was strongly opposed by others who, living themselves in affluence, thought that they would always be secure against persecution in the countries in which they dwelt. They consequently thought that the Jewish problem could be solved only by a real union between the Jews and their non-Jewish neighbours, by a process in which the Jews would cast off all that separated them from non-Jews. They were blind to the fact, established by the whole of Jewish history, that the more the Jew denies his distinctiveness the more he is attacked and accused of it; and that whilst small groups of Jews may sometimes succeed in getting rid of their dissimilarity, the Jewish masses neither can nor will. They thought that Palestine should be the last place for the Jew of to-day to think of, being under the mistaken impression that the Holy Land was unsuitable for colonisation and agriculture on a large scale. They argued from a technical standpoint which had a bad foundation. They had no knowledge of the facts, and Palestine was for them really a _terra incognita_. But the masses turned with a unanimous impulse to Palestine. Everywhere societies of “Lovers of _Zion_” were founded for the realization of the cherished hope of making Jews once more owners of land in Palestine. Sometimes the idea was taken up with more enthusiasm than practical sense, and many hurried to Palestine in the belief that, once in the country, they would find it easy to make a living. Not unnaturally there was much disillusionment, and many a bitter lesson was learnt by sad experience. So it became incumbent upon the existing societies to keep the enthusiasm of their adherents within the bounds of sanity and practicability. The societies had to grope their way carefully. They had to find out suitable localities for establishing colonies, to direct the energies of those most fit to undertake colonising work into the proper channels, and to check the efforts of