must proceed on broad and great lines, creating the great Jewish triumph. Herzl might have snatched that for us in a few years, other leaders may need a few decades, but time must not weaken us in the desire for the measure of perfect national healing, and we must not barter a great project with an accomplishment hidden in to-morrow for a tin-trumpet scheme carried out to-day, and ending where it begins.
Not that we preach patience; instead, we preach activity, not the activity of "something to show," but the execution stage by stage, of an enduring purpose. With a certain readiness of resource in attitude, some political agility, a filled treasury and fair leadership, the Jewish State in Palestine is a possibility, sufficient of a possibility in the near future for the Jewish people to be justified in staking their all on the effort to attain it.
Mr. L. J. Greenberg East Africa has not been schooled in
Again. English politics without
result. In the "open letter,"
published elsewhere in this issue, in which he deals at length with the East African project, he sets forth plans which in other countries would be left to a caucus, at the supreme moment of a Congress. We do not feel ourselves in agreement with all that Mr. Greenberg has to say, but his main conclusions seems to us perfectly justified. Whilst we oppose laissez faire, we do not approve of the policy of "do something." Chovevi Zionism and East Africa are in that respect the same as to us. We wish to do —the right thing, not the thing nearest at hand, and therefore we can only regard the East African project from the dual political viewpoint —its affect on Zionist policy, its possible affect, if accepted, on the Jewish people.
That the Jews will gain from the possession of an autonomous state is unquestionable; the exercise of political functions is worth a world of philosophic theories on national culture and political education. Nations are ripened in the schools of experience, not at the writing desk of academicians. East Africa, or an autonomous settlement, can teach us more in ten years by practice than can be learnt in a century by a "correspondence course" in national life. Every Russian Jew in America knows that his environment has in ten years placed him a century in advance of his relatives in his native land. The oldest fashioned Jewess, in the most orthodox back street in New York, can politically "give points" to the young students of politics in Eastern Europe, and she does not know how she came by that knowledge.
So much we have to gain from East Africa, since that is the particular "anywhere" in view. The autonomy there will not "outlander" the non-Jew. We do not expect that, not even in Palestine, but because it is British it will be less of a Jewish state than would a similar political creation in Palestine. Not only that, but the Jewish East African autonomy as a British crown colony, could and would come under the observation and deliberations of the British House of Commons. That body is decidedly liberal, and particularly tolerant, siding as a rule with settlers against the Government. There is, therefore, in the future the possibility of friction in the British Parliament concerning a Jewish settlement. We are not squeamish in such matters; better a debate on a British Jewish State than on an anti-Jewish anti-alien bill; nevertheless, such debate and friction puts certain limitations on the East African scheme. We could not, if we would, regard it as a permanent solution of the Jewish question,