any of you should be alarmed by reason of your experience at the hands of the enemy who has retired, I hereby inform you that it is my desire that every person should pursue his lawful business without fear of interruption.
'Furthermore, since your City is regarded with affection by the adherents of three of the great religions of mankind, and its soil has been consecrated by the prayers and pilgrimages of multitudes of devout people of these three religions for many centuries, therefore do I make known to you that every sacred building, monument, holy spot, shrine, traditional site, endowment, pious bequest, or customary place of prayer, of whatsoever form of the three religions, will be maintained and protected according to the existing customs and beliefs of those to whose faiths they are sacred.'
The Balfour Declaration.—Zionism is the movement for the establishment in Palestine of a National Home for the Jewish People. As a movement of return it may be said to date from the destruction of the national existence of the Jews in Palestine by the Romans in the second century A.D. Since that time the ideal has been tenaciously preserved by Jews throughout the world.
During the nineteenth century various English statesmen gave such political support as was then possible to the ideal. In modern times, too, England has been pre-eminent amongst the Powers in encouraging and furthering its realization.
Jewish colonization in Palestine, as it is now understood, began in 1880. It was at that period that the persecution of the Jews in Russia and Eastern Europe stimulated the return to Palestine, and Jewish settlements sprang up in different parts of the country. It was not, however, until Theodor Herzl, an Austrian Jewish publicist and dramatist, conceived, in 1897, the project of summoning a Congress of Jews, that Zionism became a political movement. That Congress defined the meaning of Zionism as the effort to win 'a legally-secured, publicly-recognized Home for the Jewish People in Palestine.'
