The Maccabaean

DANIEL WEBSTER, in the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts held in the early days of the nineteenth century, supported the proposition that no one except landowners be granted the right of suffrage. Such a principle was repugnant to the spirit of democracy which characterized American development and was rejected as rank toryism. Yet the proposition cannot be laughed to scorn as the last resort of conservatives —particularly if it could be reconciled with the aims and methods of democratic institutions. No one loves his country so much as he who claims part of the soil of his fatherland as his individual possession, and who can peacefully lie under the shadow of the tree which his ancestors planted and inhabit an unmortgaged house without the haunting fear of being dispossessed. Happy, indeed, is the land that can convert all of its citizens into landowners, for the latter are the most attached to their country —it is to them not only a fatherland, but also a motherland, which nourishes them in their infancy, fosters them to maturity and is the staff of life in their old age. To the tenant, America spells “opportunity,” “democracy” and the “the square deal,” but with the landlord and the free farmer these spiritual forces are supplemented by the material considerations of “home” and “hearth.” The intangible patriotism is strengthened by the love for the land that he plows or the fireside that is so full of reminiscences.

But so much has been said and written about the benefits, to a nation, of a free farming class, that it will be sufficient to call to mind only one example as illustrating the proposition. It was the free farmers—the yeomanry—of England that conquered the French at Crecy, Poitiers and Agincourt. The descendents of these independent landowners (who had not yet been contaminated by the “factory system”) went to face the “Invincible Armada” of Philip II. It was the same type of manhood that left England and built a

New England in the New World rather than submit to a compromise with their conscience, while the “Ironsides” under Cromwell vanquished their king at Marston Moor and Naseby, and established the Commonwealth. Even so, the French peasants are the bulwark of France to-day, while England, in spite of her industrial supremacy at home, is beginning to look towards her free sons in Canada, Australia and South Africa as the foundation-stone of the British Empire.

In the history of Zionism, we have now reached a stage where we can fully appreciate the value of a virile agricultural class for the development of a Hebrew Commonwealth in Palestine. There are over seventy thousand Jews in the Holy Land, and only about seven thousand (or less than one-tenth) are the members of the various Jewish agricultural colonies, yet all Zionists recognize that the future of the Jewish nation rests with these seven thousand pioneers and not with the forty thousand Chalukah Jews in Jerusalem or even with our poverty stricken brethren in the smaller towns of Palestine. We feel, instinctively, that the Jews must build on a true foundation—on mother-earth—and cease to be a nation of “Luftmenschen.”

1. Theories of Franz Oppenheimer.

It is this fact that has attracted the attention of all thinking Zionists to the efforts put forth by Franz Oppenheimer for the establishment of co-operative farming colonies in Palestine. The interest in the agricultural development of the Land of Israel was already strong when our clear-thinking Jewish economist advanced the theories of co-operative colonies. If we begin with the premise that a farming class is desirable and necessary as the proper foundation for a virile community and an effective society, we must, naturally, examine with interest any and all propositions aiming at the development of a Hebrew yeomanry.