A land without a people for a people without a land throw upon the Jews the actual manual labor of regeneration and prevent them from exploiting the "fellahin", whose numbers and lower wages are moreover a considerable obstacle to the proposed immigration from Poland and other suffering centers". In 1914 Chaim Weizmann, later president of the World Zionist Congress and the first president of the state of Israel said: "In its initial stage Zionism was conceived by its pioneers as a movement wholly depending on mechanical factors: there is a country which happens to be called Palestine, a country without a people, and, on the other hand, there exists the Jewish
Chaim Weizmann non-interventionist position. Weizmann consulted several times with Samuel on the homeland policy during 1915, but H. H. Asquith, then Prime Minister, would be dead set against upsetting the balance of power on the Middle East. Attitudes were changing to "dithyrambic" opposition; but in the Cabinet, to the Samuel Memorandum, it remained implacably opposed with the exception of Lloyd George, an outspoken radical. Edwin Montagu, for example, Samuel's cousin was strenuously opposed. Weizmann did not attend the meeting of Jewry's ruling Conjoint Committee when it met the Zionist leadership on 14 April 1915. Yehiel Tschlenow had travelled from Berlin to speak