‘Of all mortal woes,’ so declared the weeping Persian to Thersander at the banquet, ‘the greatest is this: with many thoughts and wise, to have no power.’ Under the crushing burden of that mortal woe the Jewish race had rested restlessly for over sixteen weary centuries. Power had passed from the dispossessed people with the fall of their garrisoned Temple, and under dispersion and persecution their ‘many thoughts and wise’ had grown dumb, or shrill, or cruelly inarticulate. The kingdom of priests and the kinsmen of the Maccabees had dwindled to a community of pedants and pedlars. Into the schools of the prophets had crept the casuistries and subtleties of the Kabbalists; and descendants of those who had been skilful in all manner of workmanship now haggled over wares which they lacked skill or energy to produce. East and west the doom of Herodotus was drearily apparent, and to an onlooker it must have seemed incredible that these poor pariahs, content to be contemned, were of the same race which had sung the Lord’s songs and had fought the Lord’s battles. In the seventeenth century the fires of the Inquisition were still smouldering, and Jewish victims of the Holy Office, naked and charred, or swathed and unrecognisable, were fleeing hither and thither from its flames, across the inhospitable continent of Europe. Nearer to the old scenes was no nearer to happiness; the farthest removed indeed from any present realisation of ancient prosperity seemed those wanderers who had turned their tired, sad faces to the East. The land on which Moses had looked from Pisgah; for which, remembering Zion, the exiles in Babylon had wept; for which a later generation, as unaided as undaunted, had fought and died--this land, their heritage, had passed utterly from the possession of the Jews. ‘Thou waterest its ridges: Thou settlest the furrows thereof.’ Seemingly out of that ownership too the land had passed, for His ridges had run red with blood, and in His furrows the Romans had sown salt. From the very first century after Christ, Jews had been grudged a foothold in Judæa, and from the date of the Crusades any dwelling-place in their own land was definitely denied to the outcast race. A new meaning had been read into that ancient phrase, ‘the joy of the whole earth.’ The Holy City had come, in cruel, narrow limitation, to mean to its conquerors the Holy Sepulchre, all other of its memories ‘but a dream and a forgetting.’ And now, although the fervour of the Crusades had died away, and the stone stood at the mouth of the Sepulchre as undisturbed and almost as unheeded of the outside world as when the two Marys kept their lonely vigil, yet enough still of all that terribly wasted wealth of enthusiasm survived to make the Holy Land difficult even of approach to its former rulers. Through all those centuries, for over sixteen hundred slow, sad, stormy years, this powerless people had borne their weary burden, ‘the greatest of all