Page:A Jewish State 1917.djvu/45

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LOCAL GROUPS
29

going current, for their sons will be the Company's officials and employés "over there." Lawyers, doctors, scientists of every description, young traders—in fact, all Jews who are in search of opportunities, who now escape from oppression in their native country to earn a living in foreign lands—will assemble on a soil so full of fair promise. The daughters of the middle classes will have married these ambitious men. One of them will send for his wife to come out to him, another for his parents, brothers and sisters. Members of a new civilization marry young. This can but promote general morality and ensure sturdiness in the scions of our race; and thus we shall have no delicate offspring of late marriages, children of fathers who spent their strength in the struggle for life.

Every middle-class emigrant will draw more of his kind after him.

The bravest will naturally get the best out of the new world.

But here we seem undoubtedly to have touched on the crucial difficulty of my plan.

Even if we succeeded in opening a serious general discussion on the Jewish Question—

Even if this debate led us to a positive conclusion that the Jewish State were necessary to the world—

Even if the Powers assisted us in acquiring the sovereignty over a strip of territory—

How are we to transport masses of Jews without undue compulsion from their present homes to this new country?

Their emigration is surely voluntary?

THE PHENOMENON OF MULTITUDES.

Great exertions will not be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a love of emigration where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before. Jews who now remain in Anti-Semitic countries do so chiefly because, even those among them who are most ignorant of history, know that numerous changes of residence in bygone centuries never brought them any permanent good. Any land which welcomed the Jews today and offered them even fewer advantages than the future Jewish State would guarantee them, would immediately attract a great influx of our people. The poorest, who have nothing to lose, would drag themselves there. But I maintain, and every man may ask himself whether I am not right, that the pressure weighing on us rouses a desire to emigrate even among prosperous strata of society. Now our poorest strata alone would suffice to found a State; for these make the most vigorous conquerors, because a little despair is indispensable to the formation of a great undertaking.

But when our desperadoes increase the value of the land by their presence and by the labor they expend on it, they make it at the same time increasingly attractive as a place of settlement to people who are better off.

Higher and yet higher strata will feel tempted to go over. The expedition of the first and poorest settlers will be conducted by conjoint Company and Society, and will probably be additionally supported by existing emigration and Zionist societies.

How may a number of people be concentrated on a particular spot without being given express orders to go there? There are certain Jews, benefactors on a large scale, who try to alleviate the sufferings of their co-religionists by Zionist experiments. To them this problem also presented itself, and they thought to solve