“The movement towards Palestine will be slow, and none of those who have sanctioned the great experiment may hope to live to judge it by the fruits; but it is satisfactory to remember that the British Government’s decision meets with the approbation of many Great Powers. President Wilson views the Zionist programme with the keenest sympathy, and has appointed a Jewish Commission to study in Palestine the question of a Jewish State. The Russian Revolutionary Government has declared its willingness to support the Jewish claim to Palestine, and even permitted a Zionist Conference to be held in Petrograd. Those who should be well informed say that the Pope is not opposing the Zionist ideal, and that the French Government favours it; one and all seem to be agreed that when this war is over the horrors of the Jewish situation as it affects the vast majority of the race must come to an end. The persecution and repression practised in Russia and Roumania down to little more than a year ago cannot go on in a world made fit for all to live in. ... What will be the spiritual effect of this return to Palestine upon the pious Jew, who for two thousand years has said, _If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand forget its cunning_; upon the other class of Jew who will recover his Judaism when it has a centre, a point of focus; and upon the non-Jew to whom the return to Palestine is the fulfilment of prophecy and the foreshadowing of the Millennium?” (_The Graphic._) “We speak of Palestine as a country, but it is not a country.... But it will be a country; it will be the country of the Jews. That is the meaning of the letter which we publish to-day written by Mr. Balfour to Lord Rothschild for communication to the Zionist Federation. It is at once the fulfilment of an aspiration, the signpost of a destiny. Never since the days of the Dispersion has the extraordinary people scattered over the earth in every country of modern European and of the old Arabic civilization surrendered the hope of an ultimate return to the historic seat of its national existence. This has formed part of its ideal life, and is the ever-recurring note of its religious ritual.... For fifty years the Jews have been slowly and painfully returning to their ancestral home, and even under the Ottoman yoke and amid the disorder of that effete and crumbling dominion they have succeeded in establishing the beginnings of a real civilization. Scattered and few, they have still brought with them schools and industry and scientific knowledge, and here and there have in truth made the waste places blossom as the rose.... The British victories in Palestine and in the more distant eastern bounds of the ancient Arab Empire are the presage of the downfall of Turkish power; the declaration of policy by the British Government to-day is the security for a new, perhaps a very wonderful, future for Zionism and for the Jewish race.... In declaring