Oldnewland* By DR. THEODOR HERZL Book III THE LAND OF BLOOM CHAPTER III—(continued.)
David continued to address the audience in the Neudorf marquee.
“Let me make clear to you that no one thinks of taking away anything that belongs to you. If anyone desired to do that, I would fight at your side to the last breath. No! There is no question of depriving you of your rights. The fruits of your labor, which will fructify, are yours. The point is different—quite different to that which is being put to you.
“Mendel speaks in good faith, but he is mistaken. He is mistaken if he thinks that everything we can see is the labor of your hands. Your hands made it, but your heads did not think it out. You are, thank God, not so ignorant as the peasants of other days and other countries; but still you do not know the causes that made the happy condition of your state. What is Neudorf? Whoever sees it for the first time and does not know its history is amazed or pleased that this beautiful village has been founded by the old Roman road of Tiberias—in the Wadi Rummani. I traveled here to-day with two strangers, and I was proud to show them the beauty of your fields in which the barley is now in ear. Our meadows, and our orchards, our green gardens, our pretty houses, our cattle, our machines, our irrigation and our cultivated moor. I say ‘ours’ although not a span of the soil and not a single animal belongs to me. Everything is yours, but I feel so at home that I can say ‘ours.’ And when these visitors ask me who conjured this into existence in twenty short years, I answer them as Mendel has answered them, ‘We! We! We!’
“Yes, but how? Did we simply come here and work with our hands as Mendel says? With our weak hands that formerly had been so little accustomed to field labor? How could we achieve results which were not achieved heretofore? At any rate, they were not achieved before the German Protestant peasants came here at the end of the nineteenth century and founded a few colonies. We have even surpassed these, the most capable of the capable. How did that come about?
“It is true you have worked wholly inspired by that passion which we Jews possess for our Holy Land? For others this was an unproductive land, for us it was a good soil, we bedewed it with our love. Our first notable colonies proved it thirty years ago, and yet that settlement was economically worth very little because it was founded on a bad principle. Those, over there, with all their modern machinery, could only make the old type of village, but you have the new village, and that is not the work of your hands only, my friends.
“You will regard it asa joke when I say to you that Neudorf was not built in Palestine but elsewhere ; it was founded in England, in America, in France and