the ancient Jews turned their enemies into hewers of wood and drawers of water.  The modern Jews have to turn themselves into hewers of wood and drawers of water.  If they cannot do that, they cannot turn themselves into citizens, but only into a kind of alien bureaucrats, of all kinds the most perilous and the most imperilled.  Hence a Jewish state will not be a success when the Jews in it are successful, or even when the Jews in it are statesmen.  It will be a success when the Jews in it are scavengers, when the Jews in it are sweeps, when they are dockers and ditchers and porters and hodmen.  When the Zionist can point proudly to a Jewish navvy who has not risen in the world, an under-gardener who is not now taking his ease as an upper-gardener, a yokel who is still a yokel, or even a village idiot at least sufficiently idiotic to remain in his village, then indeed the world will come to blow the trumpets and lift up the heads of the everlasting gates; for God will have turned the captivity of Zion.

Zionists of whose sincerity I am personally convinced, and of whose intelligence anybody would be convinced, have told me that there really is, in places like Rishon, something like a beginning of this spirit; the love of the peasant for his land.  One lady, even in expressing her conviction of it, called it “this very un-Jewish characteristic.”  She was perfectly well aware both of the need of it in the Jewish land, and the lack of it in the Jewish race.  In short she was well aware of the truth of that seemingly topsy-turvy test I have suggested; that of whether men are worthy to be drudges.  When a humorous and humane Jew thus accepts the test, and honestly expects the Jewish people to pass it, then I think the claim is very serious indeed, and one not lightly to be set aside.  I do certainly think it a very serious responsibility under the circumstances to set it altogether aside.  It is our whole complaint against the Jew that he does not till the soil or toil with the spade; it is very hard on him to refuse him if he really says, “Give me a soil and I will till it; give me a spade and I will use it.”  It is our whole reason for distrusting him that he cannot really love any of the lands in which he wanders; it seems rather indefensible to be deaf to him if he really says, “Give me a land and I will love it.”  I would certainly give him a land or some instalment of the land, (in what general sense I will try to suggest a little later) so long as his conduct on it was watched and tested according to the principles I have suggested.  If he asks for the spade he must use the spade, and not merely employ the spade, in the sense of hiring half a hundred men to use spades.  If he asks for the soil he must till the soil; that is he must belong to the soil and not merely make the soil belong to him.  He must have the simplicity, and what many would call the stupidity of the peasant.  He must not only call a spade a spade, but regard it as a spade and not as a speculation.  By some true conversion the urban and modern man must be not only on the soil, but of the soil, and free from our urban trick of inventing the word dirt for the dust to which we shall return.  He must be washed in mud, that he may be clean.