and our present opportunities, self-respect demands that
we live not only honorably but worthily; and worthily implies nobly.
The educated descendants of a people which in its infancy cast aside
the Golden Calf and put its faith in the invisible God cannot worthily
in its maturity worship worldly distinction and things material. "Two
men he honors and no third," says Carlyle--"the toil-worn craftsman
who conquers the earth and him who is seen toiling for the spiritually
indispensable."

And yet, though the Jew make his individual life the loftiest, that
alone will not fulfill the obligations of his trust. We are bound not
only to use worthily our great inheritance, but to preserve and, if
possible, augment it; and then transmit it to coming generations. The
fruit of three thousand years of civilization and a hundred
generations of suffering may not be sacrificed by us. It will be
sacrificed if dissipated. Assimilation is national suicide. And
assimilation can be prevented only by preserving national
characteristics and life as other peoples, large and small, are
preserving and developing their national life. Shall we with our
inheritance do less than the Irish, the Servians, or the Bulgars? And
must we not, like them, have a land where the Jewish life may be
naturally led, the Jewish language spoken, and the Jewish spirit
prevail? Surely we must, and that land is our fathers' land: it is
Palestine.

_A Land Where the Jewish Spirit May Prevail_

THE undying longing for Zion is a fact of deepest significance--a
manifestation in the struggle for existence. Zionism is, of course,
not a movement to remove all the Jews of the world compulsorily to
Palestine. In the first place, there are in the world about 14,000,000
Jews, and Palestine would not accommodate more than one-fifth of that
number. In the second place, this is not a movement to compel anyone
to go to Palestine. It is essentially a movement to give to the Jew
more, not less, freedom--a movement to enable the Jews to exercise the
same right now exercised by practically every other people in the
world--to live at their option either in the land of their fathers or
in some other country; a right which members of small nations as well
as of large--which Irish, Greek, Bulgarian, Servian or Belgian, as
well as German or English--may now exercise.

Furthermore, Zionism is not a movement to wrest from the Turk the
sovereignty of Palestine. Zionism seeks merely to e