ZIONISM AND IRISH HOME RULE
TO the thoughtful observer of current events, the idea of two races whose characteristics and economic conditions are as diametrically opposed as the poles, striving for the same ideal, is, to say the least, a most unusual one, yet this fact is examplified in the analogy that may be drawn between Zionism and the Irish Home Rule movement.
The lively social, communicative, impulsive and warm hearted Irishman, lacking not in depth of character, steadiness and perseverance, and the serious, earnest industrious and intellectual Jew, the one intermingling freely and assimilating easily, and the other holding himself aloof and scorning assimilation or any action which would tend to weaken his identity—these two are, each in his way, striving for the same ideal—national life.
The great increase in race feeling within the past one hundred years is one: of the most marked of the changes which force themselves upon our view. The tendency of the present day is to magnify the characteristics of the different people, to take pride in them, and to make them the basis of national existence.
Within the last half a century, the Italians have become a nation and are still dissatisfied because Italy does not include all the members of their race; the Germans have united in a great Empire, and engaged in unending quarrels with the French and Poles within their borders; the Hungarians have been doing their utmost to stamp the German character out of the Saxons of Transylvania, and to make Magyars of the Slavs whom they rule.
The existence of this tendency is so marked that it has aroused the Irishman
after thirteen hundred years of struggling—against the greatest odds, to one supreme effort, to assert his National existence; it has after nineteen hundred years of the most cruel persecutions and greatest sufferings, aroused the Jew to look upon national life as the only remedy against disintegrating forces that are slowly, but surely sapping out its vitality and to institute the movement which aims at the national rejuvenation.
The Irish people, when authentic history opens, about the year 500 C. E., were Celts, kinsmen of the primitive races of Gaul, yet even at this primal stage of their existence they do not appear to have possessed any decided racial characteristics, but were open to the passing influence of every race with whom they came in contact. The mode of life was semi-barbarous, their religion a form of Druidism.
For 500 years a ceaseless war, a war unlike any war waged by one. civilized nation against another, went on between England and Ireland. This ruthless struggle, in which England was eventually victorious, bore decided results for Ireland. A large part of the population assimilated, so that one part is of English descent, another of Scottish descent. This resulted in the inevitable change of racial traits, maners and customs. TheEnglish language has largely displaced the Irish; the Catholic religion, which was the dominant one in England at the time of the Conquest, became the religion of the whole of Ireland.
And the Jews? While the Celts, Teutons and Saxons were grazing their flocks upon the verdant pastures of Western Eu-