Part 17

We will seek to bestow the moral salvation of work on men of every age and of every class; and thus our people will find their strength again in the land of the seven-hour day.

PLANS OF THE TOWNS

The local groups will delegate their authorized representatives to select sites for towns. In the distribution of land every precaution will be taken to effect a careful transfer with due consideration for acquired rights.

The local groups will have plans of the towns, so that our people may know beforehand where they are to go, in which towns and in which houses they are to live. Comprehensive drafts of the building plans previously referred to will be distributed among the local groups.

The principle of our administration will be strict centralization of our local groups' autonomy. In this way the transfer will be accomplished with the minimum of pain.

I do not imagine all this to be easier than it actually is; on the other hand, people must not imagine it to be more difficult than it is in reality.

THE DEPARTURE OF THE MIDDLE CLASSES

The middle classes will involuntarily be drawn into the outgoing current, for their sons will be officials of the Society or employees of the Company "over there." Lawyers, doctors, technicians of every description, young business people--in fact, all Jews who are in search of opportunities, who now escape from oppression in their native country to earn a living in foreign lands--will assemble on a soil so full of fair promise. The daughters of the middle classes will marry these ambitious men. One of them will send for his wife or fiancee to come out to him, another for his parents, brothers and sisters. Members of a new civilization marry young. This will promote general morality and ensure sturdiness in the new generation; and thus we shall have no delicate offspring of late marriages, children of fathers who spent their strength in the struggle for life.

Every middle-class emigrant will draw more of his kind after him.

The bravest will naturally get the best out of the new world.

But there we seem undoubtedly to have touched on the crucial difficulty of my plan.

Even if we succeeded in opening a world discussion on the Jewish Question in a serious manner--

Even if this debate led us to a positive conclusion that the Jewish State were necessary to the world--

Even if the Powers assisted us in acquiring the sovereignty over a strip of territory--

How are we to transport masses of Jews without undue compulsion from their present homes to this new country?

Their emigration is surely intended to be voluntary.

THE PHENOMENON OF MULTITUDES

Great exertions will hardly be necessary to spur on the movement. Anti-Semites provide the requisite impetus. They need only do what they did before, and then they will create a desire to emigrate where it did not previously exist, and strengthen it where it existed before. Jews who now remain in Anti-Semitic countries do so chiefly because even those among them who are most ignorant of history know that numerous changes of residence in bygone centuries never brought them any permanent good. Any land which welcomed the Jews today, and offered them even fewer advantages than that which the Jewish State would guarantee them, would immediately attract a great influx of our people. The poorest, who have nothing to lose would drag themselves there. But I maintain, and every man may ask himself whether I am not right, that the pressure weighing on us arouses a desire to emigrate even among prosperous strata of society. Now our poorest strata alone would suffice to found a State; these form the strongest human material for acquiring a land, because a little despair is indispensable to the formation of a great undertaking.

But when our "desperados" increase the value of the land by their presence and by the labor they expend on it, they make it at the same time increasingly attractive as a place of settlement to people who are better off.

Higher and yet higher strata will feel tempted to go over. The expedition of the first and poorest settlers will be conducted by Company and Society conjointly, and will probably be additionally supported by existing emigration and Zionist societies.

How may a number of people be directed to a particular spot without being given express orders to go there? There are certain Jewish benefactors on a large scale who try to alleviate the sufferings of the Jews by Zionist experiments. To them this problem also presented itself, and they thought to solve it by giving the emigrants money or means of employment. Thus the philanthropists said: "We pay these people to go there."

Such a procedure is utterly wrong, and all the money in the world will not achieve its purpose.

On the other hand, the Company will say: "We shall not pay them, we shall let them pay us. We shall merely offer them some inducements to go."

A fanciful illustration will make my meaning more explicit: One of those philanthropists (whom we will call "The Baron") and myself both wish to get a crowd of people on to the plain of Longchamps near Paris, on a hot Sunday afternoon. The Baron, by promising them 10 francs each, will, for 200,000 francs, bring out 20,000 perspiring and miserable people, who will curse him for having given them so much annoyance. Whereas I will offer these 200,000 francs as a prize for the swiftest racehorse--and then I shall have to put up barriers to keep the people off Longchamps. They will pay to go in: 1 franc, 5 francs, 20 francs.

The consequence will be that I shall get the half-a-million of people out there; the President of the Republic will drive up "a la Daumont"; and the crowds will enjoy and amuse themselves. Most of them will think it an agreeable walk in the open air in spite of heat and dust; and I shall have made by my 200,000 francs about a million in entrance money and taxes on gaming. I shall get the same people out there whenever I like but the Baron will not--not on any account.

I will give a more serious illustration of the phenomenon of multitudes where they are earning a livelihood. Let any man attempt to cry through the streets of a town: "Whoever is willing to stand all day long through a winter's terrible cold, through a summer's tormenting heat, in an iron hall exposed on all sides, there to address every passer-by, and to offer him fancy wares, or fish, or fruit, will receive two florins, or four francs or something similar."

How many people would go to the hall? How many days would they hold out when hunger drove them there? And if they held out, what energy would they display in trying to persuade passers-by to buy fish, fruit and fancy wares?

We shall set about it in a different way. In places where trade is active, and these places we shall the more easily discover, since we ourselves direct trade withersoever we wish, in these places we shall build large halls, and call them markets. These halls might be worse built and more unwholesome than those above mentioned, and yet people would stream towards them. But we shall use our best efforts, and we shall build them better, and make them more beautiful than the first. And the people, to whom we had promised nothing, because we cannot promise anything without deceiving them, these excellent, keen business men will gaily create most active commercial intercourse. They will harangue the buyers unweariedly; they will stand on their feet, and scarcely think of fatigue. They will hurry off at dawn, so as to be first on the spot; they will form unions, cartels, anything to continue bread-winning undisturbed. And if they find at the end of the day that all their hard work has produced only 1 florin, 50 kreutzer, or 3 francs, or something similar, they will yet look forward hopefully to the next day, which may, perhaps, bring them better luck.