'And if there was
one still without a lord and master, it would probably be a very ugly
and sickly virgin. And, anyhow, it will be a long wooing. So in the
meantime let me teach you to fire a pistol.'

'With all my heart--but merely to shoot wild beasts.'

'That is all I am asking for,' said David grimly.

Encouraged by this semi-success, David boldly called upon a
tea-merchant quite unknown to him, and asked for a subscription to buy
revolvers.

The tea-merchant, who was a small stout man, with a black cap of
dubious cut, protested vehemently against such materialistic
measures. Let them put their trust in _Cultur_! To talk
Hebrew--therein lay Israel's real salvation. Let little children once
again lisp in the language of Isaiah and Hosea--that was true Zionism.

'Then don't you want the Holy Land?' asked the astonished David.

'Merely as a centre of _Cultur_. Merely as a University where Herbert
Spencer may be studied in the tongue of the Psalmist. All the rest is
bourgeois Zionism. Political Zionism? Economic Zionism? Pah! Mere
tawdry imitations of heathen politics!'

'Then you agree with the Chovevi Zionists!'

'Not at all. Zion is less a place than a state of mind. We want
Culture--not Agriculture; we want the evolutionary efflorescence of
Israel's inner personality----'

David fled, only to stumble upon a Nationalist who declared that
Zionism was a caricature of true Nationalism, and Territorialism a
cheap philanthropic substitute for it.

'Then why not join in the Self-Defence of our nation?' David asked.

'I will--when we are on our own soil. Your corps is a mere mockery of
the military concept.'

David found no more comfort in his interview with the member of the
L.A.E.R., who was convinced that only in the League for the
Advancement of Equal Rights lay the Jew's true security. It was the
one party whose success was sure, the only one based upon an
unconditional historic necessity.

David's morning was not, however, to pass without the discovery of a
man of no Party. And, strangely enough, he owed his find to the
headache these innumerable Parties caused him. For, going into a
chemist's shop for a powder, he was served by a red-bearded Jew whose
genial face emboldened him to solicit a stock of bandages and
antiseptics--in view of a possible _pogrom_.

'But the _pogroms_ are over,' cried the chemist. 'They were but the
expiring agonies of the old order. The reign of love is at hand, the
broth