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No. 1 | Vienna, 5th January 1900. | Fourth Year

On the Way.

H. If I am not mistaken, our work is a remarkable one. Were the professors of the university not such dreadfully absent-minded people, for ever leaving their umbrellas standing somewhere in antiquity, they really ought to be watching us, to see whether we build wisely or foolishly. Even our errors might yield many a lesson. But the gentlemen professors, who never understand that which is coming into being, arrive only later; afterwards, to be sure, they know everything better than we do, and they explain to us that which has come to be.

Of such movements as ours, the Zionist, no exact conception is therefore prepared for the later generations. Those who might be cool and "scientific" enough to observe calmly do not for the longest time notice at all that something important is going forward. Those who act, again, stand too much in the midst of it to be able, with all the striving after truth that may fill them, to furnish trustworthy accounts.

One day we shall be at the goal — we hope it with all the strength of our soul — and then perhaps all the stations, the incidents of the journey, all the expectations and anxieties that for years filled our lives, will at a stroke be forgotten. Amid the new and enormous tasks which will only there arise for us, and which will demand much strength and courage, there will perhaps no longer be any leisure to be found for looking back upon the events that went before.

Now, however, we are still on the way, and although we hasten onward without rest, there are yet moments of reflection upon the past and the future, and above all upon the regions that pass before our eyes. It is comparable to the mood one has in a railway train. To be sure, we do not travel upon prepared rails; our road is not made. For correctness' sake, then, we had better make use of the older, but still serviceable, simile of the ship.

Yes, it is with us as though we found ourselves upon a ship and were steering out towards the old-new land. There are times on a sea voyage when one sees round about nothing but water and sky. He who does not know the seaman's signs may then believe that one is making no headway at all. But the sailor need only cast a glance at the log-glass, and he knows not only that the ship is moving, but also how many knots her speed amounts to. And if the man at the helm does not sleep, and if he knows his quarter of the heavens, then the coast must one day rise out of the waves.

As I write this, there rises the memory of real, not allegorical, sea voyages that I have made. Among them were some upon the Mediterranean, the most beautiful sea I know. It has lovely and wonderful shores. Every harbour is a splendour, everything gleams picturesquely in the sunshine, and even the poorest do not look unhappy, because the nature that surrounds them is so rich. I think of Italy, whose southernmost and most glorious coasts the strand of Palestine indeed resembles.

Past Italy the West European travels when he journeys to the Orient. At least it still happens so at present, since the Bagdad Railway is only in the making. In a few years Mesopotamia — the beautiful, fruitful hinterland of Palestine, the actual ancestral home of the Jews, the land between Tigris and Euphrates in which Abraham was at home — in a few years, then, Mesopotamia will be opened by the Bagdad Railway to modern world traffic. Until this land route is finished, the West Europeans can travel to the Orient only by sea. He who would go, for example, from England to Egypt or Palestine, to India or China, takes ship at Southampton and sails round France, Spain and Portugal until he comes through the Straits of Gibraltar into the Mediterranean. Now there are people, however, who do not take the ship for the Orient already at Southampton, but go on board only at some other port. There may be various reasons for it. The one sort cannot bear a long sea voyage; they are afraid of the rolling and pitching of a ship on the open sea; they are of the opinion that water has no beams; they are easily made seasick. The second sort would be seaworthy enough, but the ship or its master does not appear to them quite