Here let me quote the exhilarating verses of a Jewish lady,[*] written at the time of the Boer War (March, 1900): 

  “Long ago and far away, O Mother England,
  We were warriors brave and bold,
  But a hundred nations rose in arms against us,
  And the shades of exile closed o’er those heroic
      Days of old.

  “Thou hast given us home and freedom, Mother England. 
  Thou hast let us live again
  Free and fearless ’midst thy free and fearless children,
  Sparing with them, as one people, grief and gladness,
      Joy and pain.

  “Now we Jews, we English Jews, O Mother England,
  Ask another boon of thee! 
  Let us share with them the danger and the glory;
  Where thy best and bravest lead, there let us follow
      O’er the sea!

  “For the Jew has heart and hand, our Mother England,
  And they both are thine to-day—­
  Thine for life, and thine for death, yea, thine for ever! 
  Wilt thou take them as we give them, freely, gladly? 
      England, say!”

[Footnote *:  Mrs. Henry Lucas (reprinted in her Talmudic Legends, Hymns and Paraphrases.  Chatto and Windus, 1908).]

I am well aware that in what I have written, though I have been careful to reinforce myself with Jewish authority, I may be running counter to that interesting movement which is called “Zionism.”  It is not for a Gentile to take part in the dissensions of the Jewish community; but I may be permitted to express my sympathy with a noble idea, and to do so in words written by a brilliant Israelite, Lord Beaconsfield:  “I do not bow to the necessity of a visible head in a defined locality; but, were I to seek for such, it would not be at Rome.  When Omnipotence deigned to be incarnate, the ineffable Word did not select a Roman frame.  The prophets were not Romans; the Apostles were not Romans; she, who was blessed above all women—­I never heard that she was a Roman maiden.  No; I should look to a land more distant than Italy, to a city more sacred even than Rome."[*]

[Footnote *:  Sybil, Book II., chapter xii.]

III

INDURATION

Though my heading is as old as Chaucer, it has, I must admit, a Johnsonian sound.  Its sense is conveyed in the title of an excellent book on suffering called Lest We Grow Hard, and this is a very real peril against which it behoves everyone

  “Who makes his moral being his prime care”

to be sedulously on his guard.  During the last four years we have been, in a very special way and degree, exposed to it; and we ought to be thankful that, as a nation, we seem to have escaped.  The constant contemplation, even with the mental eye, of bloodshed and torture, has a strong tendency to harden the heart; and a peculiar grace was needed to keep alive in us that sympathy with suffering, that passion of mercy, which is the characteristic virtue of regenerate humanity.  I speak not only of human suffering.  Animals, it has been said, may have no rights, but they have many wrongs, and among those wrongs are the tortures which war inflicts.  The suffering of all sentient nature appeals alike to humanitarian sympathy.