er or not there was something in him to establish and proclaim to
the world.

In August, he entered on his law practice in the service of the state
and was soon transferred to the court of Salzburg. Though he may at
that time have been so far from Judaism that only pride and a decent
respect for the feelings of his parents stood between him and baptism,
he could not help perceiving that as a Jew he would find the higher
levels of the civil service hierarchy closed to him. On August 5,
1885, he withdrew from the service, determined to seek fame and
fortune as a writer.

Brimming with hope, he set out on a journey which was to be the
introduction to his literary life. He visited Belgium and Holland and
in Berlin made valuable connections and became a regular contributor
to several important newspapers. Thus the range of his connections and
relationships widened from year to year, and when he travelled again
it was an ever-widening audience that waited for his impressions and
observations.

In a book of reprinted feuilletons of Herzl which appeared in the
first years of his success as a journalist a total of seven or eight
lines is devoted to Jews. His impressions of the Ghetto in Rome. "What
a steaming in the air, what a street! Countless open doors and windows
thronged with innumerable pallid and worn-out faces. The ghetto! With
what base and persistent hatred these unfortunates have been
persecuted for the sole crime of faithfulness to their religion. We've
travelled a long way since those times: nowadays the Jew is despised
only for having a crooked nose, or for being a plutocrat even when he
happens to be a pauper." Pity and bitterness abound in these lines,
but they are written by a detached spectator. He did not know how much
of the Jew there was in him even in this feeling of remoteness from a
world which offered him not living reality but folly.

By 1892, Herzl had achieved great success as a dramatist and as a
journalist; his plays had been performed on the stage of the leading
theatre of Vienna and, to cap the climax, came an appointment to the
staff of the _Neue Freie Presse_, one of the most distinguished papers
on the continent.

Early in October he received a telegram from the _Neue Freie Presse_
asking whether he would accept the post of Paris correspondent. He
replied at once in the affirmative, and proceeded to the French
capital at the end of the same month. He wrote to his parents: "The
position