Page:A Jewish State 1917.djvu/57

 on the development of our technical contrivances. Steam-power concentrated men in factories about machinery, where they were over-crowded, and where they made one another miserable by over-crowding. Our present enormous, injudicious and unsystematic rate of production is the cause of continual severe crises which ruin both managers and employés. Steam crowded men together; electricity will probably scatter them again, and may perhaps bring about a more prosperous condition of the labor market. In any case, our scientific discoverers, who are the true benefactors of humanity, will continue their labors after the commencement of the emigration of the Jews, and they will discover things as marvellous as those we have already seen, or indeed more wonderful even than these.

The word "impossible" has ceased to exist for our men of science. Were a man who lived in the last century to return to the earth, he would find the life of today full of incomprehensible magic. Wherever we moderns appear with our inventions, we transform the desert into a garden. To build a city takes in our time as many years as it formerly required centuries; America offers endless examples of this. Distance has ceased to be an obstacle. The spirit of our age has gathered fabulous treasures into its storehouse. Every day this wealth increases. A hundred thousand heads are occupied with speculations and research at every point of the globe, and the discovery of one becomes, ere long, the property of the whole world. We ourselves will use and carry on every new attempt in our Jewish State; we shall introduce the seven-hours day as an experiment for the good of humanity; and we shall proceed in everything else in the same humane spirit, making of the new land a land of experiments and a model State.

The undertakings made by the Jews will remain, after their managers' departure, where they originally were founded. And the Jewish spirit of enterprise will not even fail there where people welcome it. For Jewish capitalists will be glad to invest their funds where they are familiar with surrounding conditions. And whereas Jewish money is now sent out of countries on account of existing persecutions, and is sunk in most distant foreign undertakings, it will flow back again in consequence of this peaceable solution, and will help further to raise the status of the countries which the Jews have left.