Let them smile—until they grow old enough to understand life as it is, and not as it appears through the glasses of a ready-made doctrine. Then they will understand that what they contemptuously call “romanticism” is the crown of life and the source of man’s superiority over the brute. They will understand, too, that this very anti-romantic doctrine has its attraction principally because of its romantic element—because it offers scope for devoted service in the cause of a distant ideal. But if ever there comes a day when that ideal is realised, and romanticism disappears entirely, then there will arise a new generation, which will curse that day for the hunger it has brought—a hunger not for bread, but for romanticism, for some ideal striving which can once more give scope for exaltation, for sacrifice, and so fill the emptiness of a life of peace and plenty. Footnote 57: [A letter to the editors of _Ha-Omer_, a Hebrew miscellany which began to appear in 1907—the first of its kind in Palestine.] Footnote 58: [From the preliminary announcement of _Ha-Omer_.] Footnote 59: This Essay was written at the end of the period of the movement for freedom in Russia, which attracted almost all the educated Russian Jews, with the result that our national work and Hebrew literature were greatly impoverished. [Footnote added in 1913.] Footnote 60: [_i.e._, in 1889.] Footnote 61: [An allusion to an old Jewish legend.] Footnote 62: [1905. It was at this Congress that the split on the question of East Africa (often loosely referred to as Uganda) took place. Some of the minority seceded and formed the Jewish Territorial Organisation.] Footnote 63: [Russia.] Footnote 64: Sombart, _Socialismus und sociale Bewegung_ (1905), p. 61. Footnote 65: [S.D. = Social Democrats; S.S. = Zionist Socialists.] Footnote 66: [_i.e._, the _Chovevé Zion_ Hebrew School.] “WHEN MESSIAH COMES” (1907) “_When Messiah comes, impudence will be rife._” This ancient saying has been used so often as a weapon of controversy, that familiarity has robbed it of its sting. For this reason let me say at the outset that I quote it here for no controversial purpose, but wish, on the contrary, to point out that it really draws attention to a natural and permanent connection between two phenomena of human life, whereof the one is an inevitable consequence of the other. And like every objective truth, it neither censures nor reproves, but simply states a fact.