55,000 in 1897 to over 100,000 in 1911, the total population increasing in the same period only from 650,000 to 700,000.
The greater number of the Palestinian Jews live in towns, but there are 41 agricultural colonies, and each year sees one or more added. Travelers remark the salutary effect of the Jewish settlement on Palestine, and are particularly struck by the Hebraic character which the life of the whole country is acquiring. The institutions which have grown up (wherever feasible under Ottoman protection) since 1897 designate it specifically. There is the National Jewish Library, the property of the Jewish National Fund; there is Bezalel, the national school of arts and crafts; there are the schools and gymnasia, the gymnastic unions, the workingmen's clubs, the co-operative agricultural colonies, the literary and learned societies, and the last Congress projected a university in Jerusalem, for the establishment of which more than half the necessary cost has already been subscribed. The language of all these groups and institutions, of the daily life, of instruction, of entertainment and of research, is Hebrew. An attempt to substitute, in some of the schools and in a projected technological institute, another language, was met by a storm of resistance. Teachers and pupils went on strike, there were protest meetings everywhere, the whole of Pal-
estinian Jewry defied the projectors of the change, although the teachers risked in this way the loss of their livelihood and the parents the education of their children. Nothing could have shown more clearly how deep-lying is the force that animates the Zionists, how unanimous on fundamentals they are and how real and specific is the promise of a new and living Hebraism, which under modern conditions and in forms appropriate to the nature of the Jews and of contemporary civilization shall maintain the continuity of the tradition of the prophets, enriched by the chastening experiences of the diaspora, and expressive of the autonomy of a characteristic Jewish group-life.
There exist many other phases and results of Zionist activity all showing a similar development. I confine myself to the foregoing indication of the most definitive. They may constitute to the reviewer’s highly practical soul, failure ‘to make any substantial headway.’ They may, to his unsentimental intelligence, be based on barren “sentiment alone” whereon “no movement of a large character has ever thrived.” But let him, in fairness, show what else it is that animates and advances the pursuit of any ideal; and let him show in any other movement of a similar nature, however else animated, a more “substantial headway,’” in the same period of time, under similar circumstances and against similar obstacles.
HORACE M. KALLEN.
PALESTINE AND THE WAR
The Political Situation.
An event like the war in Europe cannot take place without having disastrous effects on every country, community and individual in the world. We Jews living in Palestine feel the effects of the war in many respects—as Palestinians, as Jews and as individuals who are bound by many ties to the countries from which we have come.
For many years the European powers have been watching with jealousy each other's endeavors to court Palestine; the Arabs have been desirous of
freeing themselves from Turkish rule, and Turkey herself has always been threatening to rid herself from foreign interference. The outbreak of the war in Europe has increased fervor among the people to the utmost.
From the first fateful days of August the Turkish Army has been mobilizing. In all parts of the country one meets Arabs who have been pressed to military service and who either are trained for this service now or are on their way to the Egyptian or the Russian frontier, where the contingent of Turkish troops is stationed. The object of