Die Welt

Appears every Friday.

Editorial Office and Administration: VIENNA IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Telephone 14199. Communications are to be addressed not to individual persons, but to the Editorial Office or the Administration: Vienna, IX., Türkenstrasse No. 9. Unstamped letters are not accepted, and manuscripts are not returned. Editorial hours: Monday, Wednesday and Friday, 3–4 o'clock. Advertising rates: the four-column petit line, 20 Heller. The advertisement section closes Tuesday evening. Single numbers 30 Heller.

Subscription rates: Austria-Hungary: yearly 12 Kronen, half-yearly 6 Kronen. For abroad: Germany yearly 13 Mk. 70 Pf., half-yearly 6 Mk. 85 Pf.; England yearly 14 Shg., half-yearly 7 Shg.; Russia yearly 7 R., half-yearly 3 R. 50 Kop.; Switzerland, France, Italy, Turkey, Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Greece, Egypt yearly 17 Frcs., half-yearly 8 Frcs. 50 Cts.; America yearly 3 Doll. 40 Ct.

Zionism in the English Parliament.

By Berthold Feiwel.

The "English Zionist Federation" has addressed to all the parliamentary candidates of Great Britain and Ireland a circular, in which those candidates who are ready to stand up for Zionism in the English Parliament are assured that they may count not only upon the votes, but also upon the most vigorous support, of all friends of Zion. Close upon a hundred candidates have answered this circular. Almost all of them — among them many Jewish candidates — expressed in uncommonly cordial words their sympathies for Zionism, and promised that, should they be elected, they would bring their influence to bear in favour of Zionism in Parliament and with the Government.

The Zionists of all the world must be grateful to the Federation. For what the Federation has undertaken and achieved is an advance of Zionism which cannot be rated too highly.

The English parliamentary elections and Zionism. What can the separate wishes of a comparatively insignificant number of Zionist-minded electors signify in the furious strife of Conservatives, Liberals and Nationalists, of Ministerialists and Oppositionists? And the parliamentary candidate? He, who must be glad if he can find his way through the uncanny tangle of the national, social and economic questions of the day far enough to satisfy the claims of his English electors even half-way, — what's Hekuba to him? What can Zionism be to him? A movement of which he knows, if he knows it at all, that it is meant chiefly to benefit the poorest Jews, a mass of people who in their overwhelming majority are at home in Russia, Roumania, America. What more than platonic interest should bind an English parliamentary candidate to this mass?

This and the like the Federation would have had to hear, had it, instead of undertaking its action swiftly and energetically, as it did, first submitted to general discussion the question whether such an action was advisable at all. Above all, those would have protested with all the strength of their bodies who do not wish to be Jews even in their own homes, let alone before the publicity of electoral meetings. But men of our own persuasion, too, would have raised objections — from other points of view, to be sure — objections that would have been well worth examining and discussing in detail, if — if success had not scattered them at a single stroke.

Success is the best teacher. What the Federation, and that it has achieved something so extraordinary, that may be a lesson for all the future to those of our English fellow-partisans who advised against the action, and for the Zionists of other countries.

One learns from it that no minority is so small that it has not the right and the duty to demand what is its due. Perhaps sundry carpers will say: The enthusiasm of the English parliamentary candidates for Zionism is a piece of business like any other. Let them be right! The do, ut des is an everyday thing in politics; why should it be otherwise in England? And yet there is something new in it. An almost vanishing minority here comes forward with the very same decision that otherwise belongs only to the strong majority, and with claims of a highly personal kind. And it is, moreover, a Jewish minority. And the candidate submits himself to this minority with the utmost readiness. He understands perfectly that it, minority though it be, has the right to demand of its representative that he enter into its needs, its wishes and its hopes. On the one side a strong-willed Jewry which begs no favours, but simply demands its right; on the other side parliamentarians with the fullest understanding of this Jewish self-consciousness and with the most modern conception of the duties of a representative of the people, — that is the new phenomenon. And inasmuch as the example of the Federation works fruitfully upon the Zionists of other countries, inasmuch as it teaches them, when and where they have an influence, a right, a voice, to make full use of their smaller or greater power, there is brought about an advance of Zionism the significance of which cannot be foreseen at all.