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No 12. Vienna, 25 March 1898. Second Year.

As a considerable number of subscriptions expire at the end of this month, those concerned are reminded to effect their renewal in good time, so that no interruption may occur in the delivery of the paper.

The Administration.

March Days.

By O. Erter.

The Liberal papers of Germany have kept the fiftieth anniversary of the 18th of March 1848 with festival articles in which, as though by agreement, one refrain recurred: without 1848 no 1870, without the 18th of March 1848 no 18th of January 1871, without the Revolution no unification of the German people and no founding of the German Empire. As though by agreement, we say, this refrain repeated itself. It is always thus with historical traditions, that they gradually assume the form of articles of faith, familiar to all and, when the occasion offers, acknowledged by all. In the main, indeed, no historian will dispute that the first cradle-song was sung to the German Empire on the 18th of March 1848 — a shrill, storming song whose melody was tinged withal with a little blood: "black is death, red is blood, golden flickers the flame." Yet what was sown in the year 1848 and came up in the year 1870 has proved lasting chiefly upon the national side alone; for liberty and equality of rights there sprang from it a fruit with a very bitter after-taste. To-day one may affirm this, without distorting historical truth, of the 24th of February no less than of the 13th and of the 18th of March. Idealism has evaporated, the cosmopolitan idea has lost its credit; of citizenship in the sentimental-enthusiastic sense of the men of Forty-eight one speaks now only with a shrug of the shoulders, as of a petrifact.

It is of course far from our purpose to refer this indisputable transformation to the condition of the Jews alone, though it would certainly be of great interest to recall the Jewish "martyrs" of that year of storm. That in Vienna the first victim of March was a Jewish engineer, that among the fugitives who saved themselves from the reaction by exile there was a great number of Jews — to name only Fischhof and Goldmark, the two Simons and Moriz Hartmann — we mention truly not out of vainglory, for such as opinions are constituted to-day, it is very sonorously denied that it is any glory to have been of the company then. Something else, rather, is passing through our mind. We think of one who, but six years after the March days of 1848 — although he had himself, in the eminent position of editor-in-chief of the leading democratic "Rheinische Zeitung," fought bravely for the ideals of the year Forty-eight — divined the later development and became the apostle of Zionism. We think of Moses Heß, who in the year 1854 published his flaming tract "Rom und Jerusalem," a writing in German as good as few others, and thought so deeply Jewish that every Protest Rabbi of to-day might take from it a profitable example. Moses Heß, like the Frenchman Laharanne almost at the same moment in his tract "Le juif errant," pointed with uplifted hand to Jerusalem as the true refuge of the Jews, at the very time when the intoxication of assimilation was celebrating its first orgies. And this apostle of Zionism was a revolutionary too, but a revolutionary without the Calabrian hat and without barricades, even as Zionism is itself a revolution, yet a revolution which needs to overthrow nothing in order to found what it purposes.

Strange, how the very conception of revolution has altered. In its earlier meaning it is scarcely familiar any longer to the present generation. Out of revolution has come evolution; out of subversion, which only the reactionaries still turn to account now and again as a bogey, has come development. We stand upon the threshold of a new century, and all that we behold is revolution — revolution, however, with the statute-book in its hand. Social policy is pursued in order peacefully to forestall a violent steering upon the State of the Future; the school is estranged from classicism in order to concede to the influence of the natural sciences the mastery over modern education; the range of subject-matter in art and literature is widened, even at the risk that the aesthetic ideal of thousands of years may lose its venerable physiognomy. The great Northern poet Henrik Ibsen, whose seventieth birthday was lately kept like a holiday of the world, is a revolutionary — "north-westward, Saten, lies thy realm of air, but south-eastward we sail this time," so it runs in Goethe — and at bottom every biologist is a revolutionary who deems what exists to be no longer sufficient and would lead over into a new develop-