Western Asia is as ancient as theirs, have been returning to their
native land--not because Ottoman dominion bore less hardly upon them
than upon other gifted races, but because nothing could well be worse
than the conditions they left behind. For these Jewish immigrants came
almost entirely from the Russian Pale, the hearth and hell of modern
Jewry. The movement really began after the assassination of Alexander
II. in 1881, which threw back reform in Russia for thirty-six years. The
Jews were the scapegoats of the reaction. New laws deprived them of
their last civil rights, _pogroms_ of life itself; they came to
Palestine as refugees, and between 1881 and 1914 their numbers there
increased from 25,000 to 120,000 souls.

The most remarkable result of this movement has been the foundation of
flourishing agricultural colonies. Their struggle for existence has been
hard; the pioneers were students or trades-folk of the Ghetto, unused to
outdoor life and ignorant of Near Eastern conditions; Baron Edmund de
Rothschild financed them from 1884 to 1899 at a loss; then they were
taken over by the "Palestine Colonisation Association," which discovered
the secrets of success in self-government and scientific methods.

Each colony is now governed by an elective council of inhabitants, with
committees for education, police, and the arbitration of disputes, and
they have organised co-operative unions which make them independent of
middlemen in the disposal of their produce. Their production has rapidly
risen in quantity and value, through the industry and intelligence of
the average Jewish settler, assisted latterly by an Agricultural
Experiment Station at Atlit, near Haifa, which improves the varieties of
indigenous crops and acclimatises others[44]. There is a "Palestine Land
Development Company" which buys land in big estates and resells it in
small lots to individual settlers, and an "Anglo-Palestine Bank" which