The declaration in favour of Zionism, the solemn pledge of the forces of the British State to an exceptional support of the Jew in a matter wholly to his benefit and not in any way to that of England, coming though it did after the climax of Jewish power had been reached and passed, was the last stage of that long process of alliance between the British commercial policy and its ruling classes on the one hand and the Jews upon the other. Already, as I have said, that alliance was morally shaken. The great influx of poor Jews had shaken it. The mere effect of time, the inevitable revolt of the human conscience against an unnatural pretence and an obvious fiction, was bound to come, and was overdue. But although the alliance was already shaken, the English State remained officially closely interlocked with Jewry, and its last action, the demand for the establishment of a Jewish State in Palestine, was, as has so often happened in the story of human development, at once the term and the turning-point of a process which had reached its conclusion; for it will be remarked throughout history that any force is most expressive, its manifestation of power most crude and most emphatic, in the perilous interval _after_ its real strength has begun to decline and _before_ its first open defeat. But the problems presented by this experiment in Palestine merit a separate examination. To this I will now turn. ZIONISM CHAPTER XI ZIONISM The question of Zionism has been discussed from every possible aspect save one, and that one is the only factor which relates to the thesis of this book. It has been argued, as a purely Jewish matter; there has been debate upon its justice or injustice among the Jews themselves, as to its advantage or disadvantage to their race; debate among the various non-Jewish forces concerned as to the advantage or disadvantage it would be to them; debate upon the rights and wrongs of the native population among which the Jews might find a home; debate as to whether that home should be in Palestine or elsewhere--and so on. All these discussions avoid the ultimate issue. Some of them, of course, are of evident importance within the Jewish community, but so far as the essential problem we are discussing in this book is concerned, they do not apply. The one question which is at issue from the point of view of our thesis is this:-- _Whether the Zionist experiment will tend to increase or to relax the strain created by the presence of the Jew in the midst of a non-Jewish world._ That, and that only, is our concern, and from that point of view we may examine the theory of Zionism which has now emerged into an attempted practice. First let us consider its necessary general implications: the implications which Zionism involves, no matter where or how the experiment were tried.