cannot be held consistently with our professed attachment to the countries in which our lot is cast—­and we have abandoned it.  We have fought and slain one another in the Franco-German war, and in the war of the North and the South.  Your whole difficulty with your pauper immigrants arises from your effort to keep two contradictory ideals going at once.  As Englishmen, you may have a right to shelter the exile; but not as Jews.  Certainly, if the nations cast us out, we could, draw together and form a nation as of yore.  But persecution, expulsion, is never simultaneous; our dispersal has saved Judaism, and it may yet save the world.  For I prefer the dream that we are divinely dispersed to bless it, wind-sown seeds to fertilize its waste places.  To be a nation without a fatherland, yet with a mother-tongue, Hebrew—­there is the spiritual originality, the miracle of history.  Such has been the real kingdom of Israel in the past—­we have been ‘sons of the Law’ as other men have been sons of France, of Italy, of Germany.  Such may our fatherland continue, with ‘the higher life’ substituted for ’the law’—­a kingdom not of space, not measured by the vulgar meteyard of an Alexander, but a great spiritual Republic, as devoid of material form as Israel’s God, and congruous with his conception of the Divine.  And the conquest of this kingdom needs no violent movement—­if Jews only practised what they preach, it would be achieved to-morrow; for all expressions of Judaism, even to the lowest, have common sublimities.  And this kingdom—­as it has no space, so it has no limits; it must grow till all mankind, are its subjects.  The brotherhood of Israel will be the nucleus of the brotherhood of man.”

“It is magnificent,” said Raphael; “but it is not Judaism.  If the Jews have the future you dream of, the future will have no Jews.  America is already decimating them with Sunday-Sabbaths and English Prayer-Books.  Your Judaism is as eviscerated as the Christianity I found in vogue when I was at Oxford, which might be summed up:  There is no God, but Jesus Christ is His Son.  George Eliot was right.  Men are men, not pure spirit.  A fatherland focusses a people.  Without it we are but the gypsies of religion.  All over the world, at every prayer, every Jew turns towards Jerusalem.  We must not give up the dream.  The countries we live in can never be more than ‘step-fatherlands’ to us.  Why, if your visions were realized, the prophecy of Genesis, already practically fulfilled, ’Thou shalt spread abroad to the west and to the east, and to the north and to the south; and in thee and in thy seed shall all the families of the earth be blessed,’ would be so remarkably consummated that we might reasonably hope to come to our own again according to the promises.”

“Well, well,” said Strelitski, good-humoredly, “so long as you admit it is not within the range of practical politics now.”

“It is your own dream that is premature,” retorted Raphael; “at any rate, the cosmic part of it.  You are thinking of throwing open the citizenship of your Republic to the world.  But to-day’s task is to make its citizens by blood worthier of their privilege.”