“... he was sorry to say that the magnificent truth respecting the Chosen People has been set aside by certain Jews themselves. There were some who were unconscious of the miracle of the preservation of the Jewish race, in spite of the efforts of the whole world to assimilate them――of the miracle of their distinct existence unassimilated with the other nations of the earth. Where was there a literature produced by any nation that had had that moral civilising and enfranchising power over the hearts and minds and lives of men that the literature of _Israel_ had exercised?...” “... It was necessary to incite the national idea and national ambition in the heart of _Israel_ throughout the world. Why should an intelligent and powerful race be content to be vagrants on the face of the earth? Why should they be content to be a homeless race now that circumstances were pointing to facilities for giving them a home?...” “... The national movement was a reality and a fact. It is not a spasmodic movement, but one that was being carried on with great practical business-like skill and determination....” “... Let the world give the Jews their home. Palestine was the cradle of their race, its ancient and proper home, the centre of its great and glorious history, and it was the outpourings of sorrow for it that has rendered the literature of the Jews the most precious and beautiful one extant. The Jews had a right to Palestine, it was God’s gift to them, and that was a greater right than an Englishman’s right to England....” “Stir yourselves up, agitate, work, labour for your cause. I know such a man as Mr. Gladstone is a friend of this movement....”¹ ¹ No. 18 ... Palestina, The _Chovevi Zion_ Quarterly.... ――December, 1896. _pp._ 14‒16. In confirmation of this evidence as to Gladstone’s attitude towards Jewish national distinctiveness, we find in his writings an eloquent recognition of the “Hebrew genius.” 81. “But indeed there is no need, in order to a due appreciation of our debt to the ancient Greeks, that we should either forget or disparage the function, which was assigned by the Almighty Father to this most favoured people. Much profit, says St. Paul, had the Jew in every way. He had the oracles of God: he had the custody of the promises: he was the steward of the great and fundamental conception of the unity of God, the sole and absolute condition under which the Divine idea could be upheld among men at its just elevation. No poetry, no philosophy, no art of Greece ever embraced, in its most soaring and widest conceptions, that simple law of love towards God and towards our neighbour, on which ‘two commandments hang all the law and the prophets,’ and which supplied the moral basis of the new dispensation.”