The Maccabaean

ZIONISM has before it a task of tremendous difficulty. It is expected to organize an emigrant movement of such magnitude as the world has never before witnessed. That is the first difficulty. The second is that the territory to which the movement for certain incontestible reasons must be directed, is comparatively small, so small that a considerable density of population has to be reckoned with at the outset. A third difficulty lies in the fact that this territory is very different in climate, in the nature of its soil, its flora, etc., from those countries out of which the emigration is to issue. The 4th and greatest difficulty lies in the character of the human material that is to be directed to the new settlements. The people whom we are to lead out of the most terrible oppression that ever weighed upon human beings, are neither soldiers nor farmers, but almost entirely city-bred artisans. We have, therefore, to deal with a physically weakened and, through hunger, squalid poverty, destitution and social degradation, stunted human material—untrustworthy building stone for a new nationality.

The difficulties are so immense that one can easily understand how optimism itself loses its nerve and drops the hand that might render assistance. And in truth when one takes account only of the material factors of history the problem seems insoluble. Fortunately, however, there are immaterial, imponderable, unmeasurable, spiritual forces of such power as to be able to make the seemingly impossible possible.

With these imponderable, irresistible spiritual forces, our colonists, we dare hope, will make up for what they lack in bodily strength. The longing which two thousand years of goluth has only

made more intense is a tremendous advantage for Zionistic, and only for Zionistic, colonization. The grant of the most splendid agricultural tracts in Canada or Argentine would not be able to arouse the strength of the Wandering Jew as would the settling in one of the poorest steppes through which the Jordan flows and upon which Lebanon looks down.

I regard the following as the main points to be kept in view in Zionistic colonization.

1. It must depend upon self-help. This is compatible with what that great and wise friend of humanity, Victor A. Huber, called "aristocratic help"—that is, the non-material support of industry by the free advice of the educated and the expert. The principle of self-help gets full exercise, moreover, only through the granting of credit which corresponds to the breadth of the newly created credit basis.

Alms, however, are to be strictly forbidden. Alms solve no social problem. They break the backbone of all economic self-reliance. They destroy the best seed. Misfortunes due to the elements, crop failures and conflagrations may be mitigated by general social means, but aside from these the principle, "God helps those who help themselves" must be allowed to work out with adamantine firmness. Under no circumstances should the colonists have the feeling that behind them stand rich capitalists who are ready to pull their wagon out of every mire. Economic history proves that the consciousness of having such assistance always in reserve of itself produces poverty even under otherwise favorable conditions; whereas, on the other hand, the consciousness of having to depend on their own strength will stim-