'You forget,' said Raphael, 'that, wherever the old Judaism has not been overlaid by the veneer of Philistine civilisation, we are already sociological object-lessons in good fellowship, unpretentious charity, domestic poetry, respect for learning, disrespect for respectability. Our social system is a bequest from the ancient world by which the modern may yet benefit. The demerits you censure in English Judaism are all departures from the old way of living. Why should we not revive or strengthen that, rather than waste ourselves on impracticable novelties? And in your prognostications of the future of the Jews have you not forgotten the all-important factor of Palestine?' 'No; I simply leave it out of count. You know how I have persuaded the Holy Land League to co-operate with the movements for directing the streams of the persecuted towards America. I have alleged with truth that Palestine is impracticable for the movement. I have not said what I have gradually come to think--that the salvation of Judaism is not in the national idea at all. That is the dream of visionaries--and young men,' he added, with a melancholy smile. 'May we not dream nobler dreams than political independence? For, after all, political independence is only a means to an end, not an end in itself, as it might easily become, and as it appears to other nations. To be merely one among the nations--that is not, despite George Eliot, so satisfactory an ideal. The restoration to Palestine, or the acquisition of a national centre, may be a political solution, but it is not a spiritual idea. We must abandon it--it cannot be held consistently with our professed attachment to the countries in which our lot is cast--and we have abandoned it. We have fought and slain one another in the Franco-German War, and in the war of the North and the South. Your whole difficulty with your pauper immigrants arises from your effort to keep two contradictory ideals going at once. As Englishmen, you may have a right to shelter the exile; but not as Jews. Certainly, if the nations cast us out, we could draw together and form a nation as of yore. But persecution, expulsion, is never simultaneous; our dispersal has saved Judaism, and it may yet save the world. For I prefer the dream that we are divinely dispersed to bless it, wind-sown seeds to fertilise its waste places. To be a nation without a fatherland, yet with a mother-tongue, Hebrew--there is the spiritual originality, the miracle of history. Such has been the real kingdom of Israel in the past--we have been "sons of the Law" as other men have been sons of France, of Italy, of Germany. Such may our fatherland continue, with "the higher life" substituted for "the Law"--a kingdom not of space, not measured by the vulgar meteyard of an Alexander, but a great spiritual Republic, as devoid of material form as Israel's God, and congruous with his conception of the Divine. And the conquest of this kingdom needs no violent movement--if Jews