The Maccabaean

healthy pride of race. By virtue of a conscious individuality of outlook which will give their language, their history, and their customs a value in their own eyes and in those of their neighbours, they will gain a new sense of dignity and of self-respect, and will meet their fellow-citizens on equal terms, knowing that in the commerce of ideas they can give as well as receive. So the Jewish communities of the world, each adapting itself to the political and economic conditions of its environment, will yet remain united by a spiritual bond, and will transmit to the world whatever of value the national centre has to give. _

Nor will this renewal of national spirit in the Jew benefit his race alone: it will also benefit all those with whom they live. Keen-sighted statesmen and thinkers in most countries where there is a large Jewish population have favoured the Zionist movement because they have recognised that Zionism, whilst making its disciples better Jews, makes them also better citizens of the State to which they belong. It is no accident that the leader of American Zionism should have stood in the van of the social reform movement in the United States and should have won his way by his untiring devotion to public service to a seat on the Bench of the Supreme Court. It may indeed be hoped that, when the promise of Zionism is fulfilled and its harvest is gathered in, many time-honoured prejudices against the Jew will be at last destroyed. For his fellow-citizens will be no longer tempted to regard him as a homeless man, a man who has lost his national birthright, and therefore in some vague sense inferior to themselves, incapable of service as wholehearted as their own to the State of his adoption, at the worst a parasite in the body politic. Not least among the fruits of the renascence of Jewish nationality will be a fuller sense of civic equality and human brotherhood between Jew and Gentile throughout the world.

A few words may be said, in conclusion, as to one particular effect which the realisation of the Zionist ideal ought naturally to have on the development of political thought and practice. Of all the questions which the present war has brought to the forefront of men's minds there is none more important and more insistently demanding solution than that of the relation of the conceptions of State and Nationality. Throughout the nineteenth century the prevailing idea in Europe was that State and Nationality should be co-terminous; each nation,

however small and however unfitted for self-government, should have the complete machinery and independence of a sovereign State. It was a-period, therefore, of the creation of petty States and—what is worse for the cause of peace—of irredentist movements. And if the conception of the nation-state is to retain its predominance in political thinking, there will assuredly be no end of irredentism and no end of war. The only hope lies in the general acceptance of the opposite conception, according to which the ideal arrangement is that of a number of nations grouped together for the conduct of the affairs which concern them all in common, but maintaining each its own individuality in language and culture, and endowed with a sufficient measure of internal autonomy. The British Commonwealth comes nearer than any political organism of the present or the past to realising this ideal. The new Russia may perhaps in course of time approximate to it. But the day is yet far distant when the world as a whole will be organised on the basis of large groups of nations in free association for State purposes, and any new force which will strengthen the tendency in that direction, theoretically or practically, should be welcomed by those who hope for real progress in international ‘relations. Now in so far as the Jewish people develops along the lines here foreshadowed—and they are lines which it must follow if it remains true to itself—it will be a force making in that direction. For the existence of Jewish communities all over the world, keenly conscious of their national distinctiveness, spiritually attached to their own national home, yet sharing politically and economically the struggles and the fortunes of the peoples among whom they live, will be an object-lesson in the true. distinction and the right relation between State and nationality. It will strengthen the hands of all those who are thinking and working for the great cause of removing the international rivalries and animosities which have now plunged the world in chaos. The Jewish nation, alike at its centre and at its circumference, will help to show mankind that a nation’s life is best lived, not in isolation and conflict, but in community and co-operation; that nationality is essentially a thing of the spirit, not bound up with and fettered by political machinery, but working freely in the hearts and minds of men, and expressing itself in the effort of different human groups to approach the same summit by different roads, each striving upwards along the path marked out for it by its own character and spirit.