The Maccabaean

For the first time in its history, the Jewish National Fund in the year 1913, collected the sum of a million francs. It is necessary that the various activities and methods of this, the most promising Jewish national institution, be better known to the Jewish people.

The four principle activities of the Jewish National Fund are as follows.

(1). The purchase of land;(2). The planting of trees on Na-

A National Tax.

The year book on German agricultural reform contains a statement by Adolf Damaschke that the German colonizing commission has brought its work to the stage where. on an average, one new village is founded each week in the eastern provinces of Germany. Such results can be attained only by the German colonizing commission, because, first, millions of marks raised by forced taxation of the rich German nation are placed at its disposal by the Government, and, second, its colonizing material consists of farmers and farm-laborers with generations of agricultural experience.

Even if we, with the support of the Jewish national treasury, were able to establish fifty new villages in Palestine in the course of each year, we should hardly keep pace with the increasing population of East European Jewry. This should be sufficient to indicate how overwhelming a task confronts the National Fund. The National Fund will become equal to this task only when our "donations" take on the character of a voluntary, but inclusive national tax, in the widest sense of the term.

tional Fund estates, utilizing the means of the Tree Planting Fund.

(3). Erection of workingmen's dwellings;

(4) The establishment and fostering of co-operative settlement societies and of laborers' "societies of occupation."

The following article is an official statement of the accomplishment and methods of the last-mentioned phase of the work.

Limitations of Private Initiative.

It might be urged that the purchase and settlement of the land are incumbent not only upon the National Fund, but that full and free play remains for the exercise of private initiative. It is even declared that private enterprise must assume the most important role in the matter of land-purchase. We do not underestimate the importance of private enterprise, which can bring large sums of money into the country within a brief period. The National Fund has itself done much to arouse and encourage private enterprise in rural and urban development. It has granted building loans for Tel Aviv, etc., long-term loans to the Palestine Land Development Company and to individual planters in the colonies, amounting to the not insignificant sum of almost a million francs, or about one-fourth of its total investments in Palestine. What is usually lost sight of in appraising private initiative is, however, the fact that the interests of the individual are not always in consonance with national and national-economic interests. It is true that Jewish landed possessions in Palestine and by philanthropy. But,