brought into the camp of the Eastern _Chovevé Zion_—when I see men who till recently seemed to know what they wanted and how to get it, now suddenly deserting the flag which but yesterday they held sacred, and bowing the knee to an idea which has no roots in their being, simply because it comes from the West: when I see all this, and remember how many paroxysms of sudden and evanescent enthusiasm we have already experienced, then I really feel the heavy hand of despair beginning to lay hold on me. It was under the stress of that feeling that I wrote my Note on the Congress, a few days after its conclusion. The impression was all very fresh in my mind, and my grief was acute; and I let slip some hard expressions, which I now regret, because it is not my habit to use such expressions. But as regards the actual question at issue I have nothing to withdraw. What has happened since then has not convinced me that I was wrong: on the contrary, it has strengthened my conviction that though I wrote in anger, I did not write in error. Footnote 20: [One of a series of three essays on “Political Zionism.”] Footnote 21: [_Die Welt_, the German organ founded by Herzl.] Footnote 22: [The first Secretary of the _Chovevé Zion_, and an opponent of the “spiritual” ideas of Achad Ha-Am.] Footnote 23: See my essay _Imitation and Assimilation_. [Selected essays by Achad Ha-Am, pp. 107-124.] Footnote 24: [_Galuth_—“exile”—is the word commonly used by Jews to denote the condition of the Jewish people so long as it is not in its own land, Palestine.] Footnote 25: The “political” Zionists generally think and say that they were the first to lay it down as a principle that the colonisation of Palestine by secret and surreptitious means, without organisation and in defiance of the ruling Power, is of no value and ought to be abandoned. They do not know that this truth was discovered by others first, and that years ago the _Chibbath Zion_ of Judaism demanded that everything should be done openly, with proper organisation and with the consent of the Turkish Government. Footnote 26: [After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., Titus asked Rabbi Jochanan, one of the leading Jews of the time, what he wanted. The reply was, “Give me Jabneh and its scholars.” The Rabbi understood—though the Roman conqueror did not—that in the conditions then existing a centre of Jewish learning would do more to preserve Israel than political institutions.] Footnote 27: In _Imitation and Assimilation_. Footnote 28: [The reference here is to the schools of the _Alliance Israélite Universelle_, which were French in spirit. Many years after this essay was written, in 1913, the Germanising tendencies of the schools maintained by the _Hilfsverein der deutschen Juden_ in Palestine led to an acute conflict between that body and the Zionists.] Footnote 29: