 Chapter 5 The Streets of the City When Jerusalem had been half-buried in snow for two or three days, I remarked to a friend that I was prepared hence-forward to justify all the Christmas cards. The cards that spangle Bethlehem with frost are generally regarded by the learned merely as vulgar lies. At best they are regarded as popular fissions, like that which made the shepherds in the nativity play talk a broad dialect of Somerset. In the deepest sense, of course, this democratic tradition is truer than most history. But even in the cruder and more concrete sense, the tradition about the December snow is not quite so false as is suggested. It is not a mere local illusion for Englishmen to picture the holy child in a snowstorm as it would be for the Londoners to picture him in a London fog. There can be snow in Jerusalem and there might be snow in Bethlehem, and when we penetrate to the idea behind the image, we find it is not only possible but probable. In Palestine at least, in these mountainous parts of Palestine, men have the same general sentiment about the seasons as in the west or the north. Snow is a rarity, but winter is a reality. Here we regarded as the divine purpose of a mystery or the human purpose of a myth. The purpose of putting such a feast in winter would be just the same in Bethlehem as it would be in Balaam. Anyone thinking of the holy child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it, that Christ is not merely a summer son of the prosperous, but a winter fire for the unfortunate. In other words, the semi-tropical nature of the place, like its vulgarity and desecration, can be and are enormously exaggerated. But it is always hard to correct the exaggeration without exaggerating the correction. It would be absurd seriously to deny that Jerusalem is an eastern town, but we may say it was westernized without being modernized. Anyhow it was medievalized before it was modernized, and in the same way it would be absurd to deny that Jerusalem is a southern town in the sense of being normally out of the way of snow storms. But the truth can be suggested by saying that it has always known the quality of snow, but not the quantity. And the quantity of snow that fell on this occasion would have been something striking and even sensational in Sussex or Kent, and yet another way of putting the proportions of the thing would be to say that Jerusalem has been besieged more often and by more different kinds of people than any town upon the globe, that it has been besieged by Jews and Assyrians, Egyptians and Babylonians, Greeks and Romans, Persians and Saracens, Frenchmen and Englishmen. But perhaps never before in all its agony of ages has it ever really been besieged by winter. In this case it was not only snowed on, it was snowed up. For some days the city was really in a state of siege. If the snow had held for a sufficient number of days it might have been in a state of famine. The railway failed between Jerusalem and the nearest station. The roads were impassable between Jerusalem and the nearest village, or even the nearest suburb. In some places the snow drifted deep enough to bury a man, and in some places alas it did actually bury little children, poor little Arabs whose bodies were stiff where they had fallen. Many mules were overwhelmed as if by floods and countless trees struck down as if by lightning. Even when the snow began at last to melt it only threatened to turn the besieged fortress into a sort of island. A river that men could not ford flowed between Jerusalem and the Mount of Olives. Even a man walking about the ordinary streets could easily step up to his knees or up to his waist. Snow stood about like a new system of natural barricades reared in some new type of revolution. I have already remarked that what struck me most about the city was the city wall. Now a new white wall stood all round the city, and one that neither friend nor foe could pass. But a state of siege, whatever its inconveniences, is exceedingly convenient for a critic and observer of the town. It concentrated all that impression of being something compact, and what with less tragic attendant circumstances one might call cozy. It fixed the whole picture in a frame, even more absolute than the city wall, and it turned the eyes of all the spectators inwards. Above all, by its very abnormality, it accentuated the normal divisions and differences of the place, and made it more possible to distinguish and describe them like dramatist persona. The parts they played in the crisis of the snow were very like the parts they played in the general crisis of the state, and the very cut and color of the figures, Turban and Tarbush, Kaki and Bernius and Gabbardine, seemed to stand out more sharply against that blank background of white. The first fact, of course, was a fact of contrast. When I said that the city struck me in its historic aspect as being at least as much a memory of the Crusaders as of the Saracens, I did not, of course, mean to deny the incidental contrasts between this southern civilization and the civilization of Europe, especially northern Europe. The immediate difference was obvious enough when the gold and the gaudy visitation of so comparatively Asiatic city were struck by this strange blast out of the north. It was a queer spectacle to see a great green palm bowed down under a white load of snow, and it was stranger and sadder spectacle to see the people accustomed to live under such palm trees bowed down under such unearthly storms. Yet the very manner in which they bore it is perhaps the first fact to be noted among all the facts that make up the puzzling problem of Jerusalem. Odd as it may sound you can see that the true orientals are not familiar with snow by the very fact they accept it. They accept it as we should accept being swallowed by an earthquake because we do not know the answer to an earthquake. The men from the desert do not know the answer to snow. It seems to them unanswerable. But Christians fight with snow in a double sense. They fight with snow as they fight with snowballs. A Moslem left to himself would no more play with the snowball than make a toy of a thunderbolt. And this is really a type of the true problem that was raised by the very presence of the English soldier in the street, even if he was only shoveling away the snow. It would be far from a bad thing, I fancy, if the rights and wrongs of these Bible countries could occasionally be translated into Bible language. And I suggest this here not in the least because it is a religious language, but merely because it is a simple language. It may be a good thing, and in many ways it certainly is a good thing, that the races native to the Near East, to Egypt or Arabia, should come in contact with Western culture. But it will be unfortunate if this only means coming in contact with Western pedantry, and even Western hypocrisy. As it is, there is only too much danger that the local complaints against the government may be exactly like the official explanation of the government. That is, mere strings of long words with very little meaning involved. In short, if people are to learn to talk English, it will be a refreshing finishing touch to their culture if they learn to talk plain English. Of this it would be hard to find a better working model than what may be called scriptural English. It would be a very good thing for everybody concerned if any really unjust or unpopular official were described only in terms taken from the denunciations of Jezebel and Herod. It would especially be a good thing for the official. If it were true it would be appropriate, and if it were untrue it would be absurd. When people are really oppressed their condition can generally be described in very plain terms connected with very plain things, with bread, with land, with taxes, with children and churches. If imperialists and capitalists do thus oppress them, as they most certainly often do, then the condition of those more powerful persons can also be described in a few and simple words, such as crime and sin and death and hell. But when complaints are made, as they are sometimes in Palestine and still more in Egypt, in the elaborate and long-winded style of a leading article, the sympathetic European is apt to remember how very little confidence he has ever felt in his own leading articles. If an Arab comes to me and says, the stranger from across the sea has taxed me and taken the corn sheaves from the field of my father's, I do really feel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilization with a terrible appeal to eternal things. I feel he is a figure more enduring than a statue, like the figure of Naboth or of Nathan. But when that simple son of the desert opens his mouth and says, the self-determination of the proletarian class-conscious solidarity as it functions for international reconstruction and so on, why then I must confess to the weakness of feeling my sympathies instantly and strangely chilled, I merely feel inclined to tell him that I can talk that sort of pigeon English better than he can. If he modeled himself on the great rebels and revolutionists of the Bible, it would at least be a considerable improvement in his literary style, but as a matter of fact something much more solid is involved than literary style. There is a logic and justice in the distinction, even in the world of ideas, that most people with much more education than the Arab and therefore much less excuse than the Arab entirely ignore the distinction, is merely a result of their ignoring ideas and being satisfied with long words. They like democracy because it is a long word, that is the only thing they do like about it. People are entitled to self-government, that is to such government as is self-made. They are not necessarily entitled to a special and elaborate machinery that somebody else has made. It is their right to make it for themselves, but it is also their duty to think of it for themselves. Self-government of a simple kind has existed in numberless simple societies, and I shall always think it a horrible responsibility to interfere with it. But representative government, or theoretically representative government, of an exceedingly complicated kind, may exist in certain complicated societies without there being bound to transfer to others or even to admire it for themselves. At any rate for good or evil they have invented it themselves, and there is a moral distinction which is perfectly rational and democratic between such inventions and the self-evident rights which no man can claim to have invented. If the Arab says to me, I don't care a curse for Europe, I demand bread, the reproach is to me both true and terrible, but if he says, I don't care a curse for Europe, I demand French cookery, Italian affectionary, English, Autardale, and so on, I think he is rather an unreasonable Arab. After all, we invented these things in auctor auctorietes. And of this problem there is a sort of working model in the presence of the snow in Palestine, especially in the light of the old proverb about the impossibility of snow in Egypt. Palestine is wilder, less wealthy, and modernized, more religious and therefore more realistic. The issue between the things only a European can do and the things no European has a right to do is much sharper and clearer than the confusion of verbosity. On the one hand the things the English can do are more real things like clearing away the snow, for the very reason that the English are not here, so to speak, building on a French pavement, but on the bare rocks of the eastern wilds, the contact with Islam and Israel is more simple and direct. And on the other side the discontents and revolts are more real. So far from intending to suggest that the Egyptians have no complaints, I am very far from meaning that they have no wrongs. But curiously enough the wrongs seem to me more real than the complaints. The real case against our Egyptian adventure was stated long ago by Randolph Churchill when he denounced the Bon Holder's War. It is in the whole business of collecting debts due to cosmopolitan finance. But a stranger in Egypt hears little denunciation of cosmopolitan finance and a great deal of drivel in the way of cosmopolitan idealism. When the Palestinians say that usurers menace their land, they mean the land they dig, an old actuality and not a new abstraction. Their revolt may be right or wrong, but it is real, and what applies to their revolt applies to their religion. There may well be doubts about whether Egypt is a nation, but there is no doubt that Jerusalem is a city, and the nations have come to its light. The problem of the snow proved indeed the text for a tale touching the practical politics of the city. The English soldiers cleared the snow away. The Arabs sat down satisfied or stoical with the snow blocking their own doors or loading their own roofs. But the Jews, as the story went, were at length persuaded to clear away the snow in front of them and then demanded a handsome salary for having recovered the use of their own front doors. The story is not quite fair, and yet it is not so unfair as it seems. Any rational anti-Semite will agree that such tales, even when they are true, do not always signify an ever-richest tradition in Semitism. But sometimes the healthier and more human suggestion of Bolshevism. The Jews do demand high wages, but it is not always because they are in the old sense money-grabbers, but rather in the new sense money-grabbers, as an enemy would put it, men sincerely and bitterly convinced of their rights to the surplus of capitalism. There is the same problem in the Jewish colonies, in the country districts, in the Jewish explanation of the employment of Arabs and Syrian labor. The Jews argue that this occurs not because they wish to remain idle capitalists, but because they insist on being properly paid proletarians. With all this I shall deal, however, when I treat of the Jewish problem itself. The point for the moment is that the episode of the snow, did in a superficial way, suggests the parts played by the three parties, and the tales told about them. To begin with, it is right to say that the English do a great many things as they clear away the snow, simply because nobody else would do them. They did save the Oriental inhabitants from some of the worst consequences of the calamity. Probably they sometimes save the inhabitants from something which the inhabitants do not regard as a calamity. It is the danger of all such foreign efficiency, that it often saves men who do not want to be saved. But they do in many cases do things from which Muslims profit, but which Muslims by themselves would not propose let alone perform. And this has the general significance, even in our first survey, for it suggests a truth easy to abuse. But I think impossible to ignore. I mean that there is something non-political about Muslim morality. Perverse as it may appear, I suspect that most of their political movements result from their non-political morality. They become politicians because they know they are not political, and feel the simple and more or less healthy life is at a disadvantage, in face of the political supremacy of the English and the political subtlety of the Jews. For instance, the tradition of Turkish rule is simply a joke. All the stories about it are jokes, and often very good jokes. My own favorite incident is that which still commemorated in the English Cathedral by an enormous hole in the floor. The Turks dug up the pavement looking for concealed English artillery because they had been told that the bishop had given his blessing to two cannons. The bishop had indeed recently appointed two cannons to the service of the church, but he had not secreted them under the floor of the chancel. There was another agreeable incident when the Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration, sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers and told him to take his choice in a heap of corpses of all creeds and colors. But at once the most curious and the most common touch of comedy is the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizens who have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentleman seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin. If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight from the guillotine or an affable American who had only just vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity about the whole story. If a friend introduced somebody saying, my friend Robinson, his sentence has been commuted to penal servitude, or my uncle William just came from Dartmoor Prison, your mind and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables, what for? Evidently under Turkish rule being hanged was like being knocked down by a cab. You might happen to anybody. This is a parenthesis since I am only dealing here with the superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow. But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk has its tragic as well as its comic side. It was by no means everybody that escaped hanging, and there was a tree growing outside the Jaffa Gate at which men might still shudder as they pass it in the sunlight. It was what a modern revolutionary poet has called bitterly the Tree of Man's Making, and what a medieval revolutionary poet called the Fruit Tree in the Orchard of the King. It was the Jibbit, and lives have dropped from it like leaves from a tree in autumn. Even on the sterner side we can trace the truth about the Muslim fatalism which seems so alien to political actuality. There was a popular legend or proverb that this terrible tree was in some way bound up with the power of the Turk, and perhaps the Muslim over a great part of the earth. There is nothing more strange about that Muslim fatalism than a certain gloomy magnanimity which can invoke omens and oracles against itself. It is astonishing how often the Turks seem to have accepted a legend or prophecy about their own ultimate failure. De Quincey mentions one of them in the blow that half broke the Palladium of Byzantium. It is said that the Muslims themselves predict the entry of a Christian king of Jerusalem through the Golden Gate. Perhaps that is why they have blocked up the fatal gate. But in any case they dealt in that fashion with the fatal tree. They elaborately bound and riveted it with iron, as if accepting the popular prophecy which declared that so long as it stood the Turkish Empire would stand. It was as if the wicked man of Scripture had daily watered a green bay tree to make sure that it should flourish. In the last chapter I have attempted to suggest a background of the battle-minted walls with the low gates and narrow windows which seemed to relieve the liveliest of the colored groups against the neutral tints of the north, and how this was intensified when the neutral tints were touched with the positive hue of snow. In the same merely impressionist spirit I would here attempt to sketch some of the externals of the actors in such a scene, though it is hard to do justice to such a picture even in the superficial matter of the picturesque. Indeed it is hard to be sufficiently superficial, for in the East nearly every external is a symbol. The greater part of it is the gorgeous rag heap of the Arabian humanity, and even about that one could lecture on almost every colored rag. We hear much of the gaudy colors of the East, but the most striking thing about them is that they are delicate colors. It is rare to see a red that is merely like a pillow-box, or a blue that is Wreck-its-blue. The red is sure to have the enrichment of tawny wine or blood oranges, and the blue of peacocks or the sea. In short, these people are artistic in the sense that used to be called aesthetic, and it is a nameless instinct that preserves these nameless tints. Like all such instincts it can be blunted by bullying rationalism. Like all such children these people do not know why they prefer the better, and can therefore be persuaded by sophists that they prefer the worst. But there are other elements emerging from the colored crowd which are more significant, and therefore more stubborn. A stranger entirely ignorant of that world would feel something like a chill to the blood when he first saw the black figures of the veiled Muslim women, sinister figures without faces. It is as if in that world every woman were a widow. When he realized that these were not the masked mutes at a very grisly funeral, but merely ladies literally obeying a convention of wearing veils in public, he would probably have a reaction of laughter. He would be disposed to say flippantly that it must be a dull life, not only for the woman but the man, and that a man might well want five wives if he had to marry them before he could even look at them. But he will be wise not to be satisfied with such flippancy. For the complete veiling of the Muslim women of Jerusalem, though not a finer thing than the freedom of the Christian woman of Bethlehem, is almost certainly a finer thing than the more coquettish compromise of the other Muslim women of Cairo. It simply means that the Muslim religion is here more sincerely observed, and this in turn is part of something that a sympathetic person will soon feel in Jerusalem if he has come from these more commercial cities of the East. A spiritual tone decidedly more delicate and dignified, like the clear air about the mountain city. Whatever the human vice is involved, it is not all together for nothing that this is the holy town of three great religions. When all is said, he will feel that there are some tricks that could not be played, some trades that could not be plied, some shops that could not be opened within a stone's throw of the sepulchre. This indefinable seriousness has its own fantasies of fanaticism or formalism, but if these are vices they are not vulgarities. There is no stronger example of this than the real Jews of Jerusalem, especially those from the ghettos of Eastern Europe. They can be immediately picked out by the peculiar wisps of hair worn on each side of the face, like something between curls and whiskers. Sometimes they look strangely effeminate, like some Rococo burlesque of the ringlets of the early Victorian women. Sometimes they look considerably more like the horns of a devil, and one need not be an anti-Semite to say that the face is often made to match. Though they may be ugly or even horrible, they are not vulgar like the Jews at Brighton. They trail behind them too many primeval traditions and laborious loyalties, along with their grand, though often greasy robes of bronze or purple velvet. They often wear on their heads that odd turban of fur worn by the rabbis in the pictures of Rembrandt. And indeed that great name is not irrelevant, for the whole truth at the back of Zionism is in the difference between the picture of a Jew by Rembrandt and a picture of a Jew by Sargent. For Rembrandt the rabbi was, in a special and double sense a distinguished figure. He was something distinct from the world of the artist, who drew a rabbi as he would a Brahmin. But Sargent had to treat his sitters as cellist citizens of England or America, and consequently his pictures are direct provocations to a pilgrim. But the light that Rembrandt loved falls not irreverently on the strange hairy halos that can still be seen on the shaven heads of the Jews of Jerusalem. And I should be sorry for any pilgrim that brought down any of their gray wisps or whiskers in sorrow to the grave. The whole scene, indeed, seriousness apart might be regarded as a fantasia for barbers, for the different ways of dressing the hair would alone serve as symbols of different races and religions. Thus the Greek priests of the Orthodox Church, bearded and robed in black, with black towers upon their heads, have for some strange reason their hair bound up behind like a woman's. In any case they have in their pomp a touch of the bearded bulls of Assyrian sculpture, and this strange fashion of curling, if not oiling, the Assyrian bull, gives the newcomer an indescribable ideological impression of the unnatural sublimity of archaic art. In the apocalypse somewhere there is an inspiringly unintelligible allusion to men coming on the earth whose hair is like the hair of women and their teeth like the teeth of lions. I have never been bitten by an Orthodox clergyman, and cannot say whether his teeth are at all Leonine, though I have seen seven of them together enjoying their lunch at an hotel with a decorum and dispatch. But the twisting of the hair in the woman's fashion does for us touch that note of the abnormal, which the mystic meant to convey in his poetry, and which others feel rather as a recoil into humor. The best and last touch to this topsy-turvydom was given when a lady observing one of these reverend gentlemen, who for some reason did not carry this curious curfewer, exclaimed in a tone of heart-rending surprise and distress, oh, he's bobbed his hair. Here again, of course, even a superficial glance at the pageant of the street should not be content with his comedy. There is an intellectual interest in the external pomp and air of placid power in these ordinary Orthodox parish priests, especially if we compare them with the comparatively prosaic and jog-trop-good nature of the Roman monks, called in this country the Latins. Mingling in the same crowd with these black rogue pontiffs can be seen shaven men in brown habits who seem in comparison to be both busy and obscure. These are the sons of St. Francis, who came to the east with a grand simplicity and thought to finish the crusades with a smile. The spectator will be wise to accept this first contrast that strikes the eye with an impartial, intellectual interest. It has nothing to do with personal character, of course, and many Greek priests are as simple in their tastes as they are charming in their manners, while any Roman priest can find as much ritual as they may happen to want in other aspects of their own religion. But it is broadly true that the Roman and Greek Catholicism are contrasted in this way in the country, and the contrast is the flat contrary to all our customary associations in the West. In the east it is Roman Catholicism that stands for much that we associate with Protestantism. It is Roman Catholicism that is by comparison plain and practical and scornful of superstition and concerned for social work. It is Greek Catholicism that is stiff with gold and gorgeous with ceremonial, with its hold on ancient history and its inheritance of imperial tradition. In the canto of our own society we may say it is the Roman who rationalizes and the Greek who romanizes. It is the Roman Catholic who is impatient with Russian and Greek childishness and perpetually appealing for common sense. It is the Greek who defends such childishness as childlike faith and would rebuke such common sense as common skepticism. I do not speak of the theological tenets or even the deeper emotions involved, but only, as I have said, of contrast visible even in the street. The whole difference is sufficiently suggested in two phrases I heard within a few days, a distinguished Anglo-Catholic who has himself much sympathy with the Greek Orthodox tradition said to me, after all the Romans were the first Puritans, and I heard that a Franciscan being told that this Englishman and perhaps English generally were disposed to make an alliance with the Greek church had only said by way of comment, and a good thing, too, the Greeks might do something at last. Anyhow the first impression is that the Greek is more gorgeous in black than the Roman in colors. But the Greek, of course, can also appear in colors, especially in those external forms of frozen yet fiery colors which we call jewels. I have seen the Greek patriarch, that magnificent old gentleman walking down the street like an emperor in the Arabian nights, hung all over with historic jewels as thick as beards or buttons, with the gigantic cross of solid emeralds that might have been given him by the green genie of the sea, if any of the genies are Christians. These things are toys, but I am entirely a favor of toys, and rubies and emeralds are almost as intoxicating as that sort of lustrous colored paper they put inside Christmas crackers. This beauty has been best achieved in the North in the glory of colored glass, and I have seen great Catholic windows in which one could really believe that the robes of martyrs were giant rubies or the starry sky a single enormous sapphire. But the colors of the West are transparent, the colors of the East opaque. I have spoken of the Arabian nights, and there is really a touch of them, even in the Christian churches, perhaps increased with the tradition of early Christian secrecy. There are glimpses of gorgeously tiled walls of blue curtains and green doors and golden inner chambers that are just like the entrance to an eastern tale. The Orthodox are at least more oriental in the sense of being more ornamental, more flat and decorative. The Romans are more Western, I might even say more modern, in the sense of having more realism even in their ritualism. The Greek cross is a cross, the Roman cross is a crucifix. But these are deeper matters, I am only trying to suggest a sort of silhouette of the crowd like the similar silhouette of the city. A profile or outline of the heads and hats like the profile of the towers and the spires. The tower that makes this Greek priest look like a walking catafalque is by no means alone among the horns thus fantastically exalted. There is the peaked hood of the Armenian priest, for instance. The stately survival of that strange monophysite heresy, which perpetuated itself in pomp and pride, mainly through the sublime accident of the Crusades. That black cone also rises above the crowd with something of the immemorial majesty of a pyramid. And rightly so, for it is typical of the prehistoric poetry by which these places live, that some say it is a surviving memory of Herorat and the Ark. Again the high and white headgear of the Bethlehem women, or to speak more strictly of the Bethlehem wives, has already been noted in another connection, but it is well to remark it again among the colors of the crowd, because this at least has the significance essential to all criticism of such a crowd. Most travelers from the West regard session Eastern City far too much as a Muslim city, like the lady whom Mr. Murray's bearing met who traveled all over Russia and thought all the churches were mosques. But in truth it is very hard to generalize about Jerusalem, precisely because it contains everything, and its contrasts are real contrasts, and anybody who doubts that its Christianity is Christian, a thing fighting for our own culture and morals on the borders of Asia, need only consider the concrete fact of these women of Bethlehem and their costume. There is no need to sneer in any unsympathetic fashion at all the domestic institutions of Islam. The sexes are never quite so stupid as some feminists represent, and I daresay a woman often has her own way in a harem as well as in a household. But the broad difference does remain, and if there be one thing I think that can safely be said about all Asia and all Oriental tribes, it is this, that if a married woman wears any distinctive mark, it is always meant to prevent her from receiving the admiration or even the notice of strange men. Often it is only made to disguise her. Sometimes it is made to disfigure her. It may be the masking of the face as among the Muslims. It may be the shaving of the head as among the Jews. It may, I believe, be the blackening of the teeth and other queer expedience among the people of the Far East. But it is never meant to make her look magnificent in public. And the Bethlehem wife is made to look magnificent in public. She not only shows all the beauty of her face, and she is often very beautiful. She wears a towering erection which is as unmistakably meant to give her consequence as the triple tiara of the Pope. A woman wearing such a crown and wearing it without a veil does stand and can only conceivably stand for what we call the western view of women, but should rather call the Christian view of women. This is the sort of dignity which must of necessity come from some vague memory of chivalry. The woman may or may not be, as the legend says, a lineal descendant of a crusader. Whether or no she is his daughter, she is certainly his heiress. She may be put last among the local figures I have here described for the special reason that her case has this rather deeper significance. For it is not possible to remain content with the fact that the crowd offers such varied shapes and colors to the eye when it also offers much deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence. The black dress of the Muslim women and the white dress of the Christian woman are in a sober truth as different as black and white. They stand for real principles in a real opposition, and the black and white will not easily disappear in the dull gray of our own compromises. The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty and the other what it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of our paltry political appetites. Nor do I see how we can deny such a right of defense, even in the case we consider less enlightened. It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who consider themselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also consider themselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights. Whatever view we take of the Muslim Arab, we must at least admit that the greater includes the less. It is manifestly absurd to say we have no right to interfere in his country but have a right to interfere in his home. It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus be two universes in the same street. Indeed there are ten rather than two, and it is a proverb that the fight is not only between Christian and Muslim, but between Christian and Christian. At this moment it must be admitted it is almost entirely a fight of Christian and Muslim, a light against you. But of that I shall have to speak later. The point for the moment is that the varied colors of the streets are a true symbol of the varied colors of the soul. It is perhaps the only modern place where the war waged between ideas has such a visible and vivid heraldry. And the fact alone may well leave the spectator with one final reflection, for it is a matter in which the modern world may well have to learn something from the motley rabble of this remote eastern town. It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bonds Street or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions. It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or extravaganza. Every good and innocent mind would be gratified with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome of St. Paul's and surmounted with little ball and cross symbolizing the loyalty of some Anglican to his mother-church. It might even be pleasing to see the street dominate with a more graceful top hat modeled on the Eiffel Tower and signifying the wearer's faith in scientific enterprise or perhaps in its frequent con-commitment of political corruption. These would be fair western parallels to the headdresses of Jerusalem modeled on Mount Ararat or Solomon's Temple, and some may insinuate that we are not ever likely to meet them in the strand. A man wearing whiskers is not even compelled to plead some sort of excuse or authority for wearing whiskers as that you can for wearing ringlets. And though the Anglican clergyman may indeed be very loyal to his mother-church, there might be considerable hesitation if his mother-bade him bind his hair. But lest the more historical view of the London and Jerusalem crowds who show as far from impossible to domesticate such symbols that some day a lady's jewels might mean something like the sacred jewels of the patriarch or a lady's furs mean something like the furred turban of the rabbi, history indeed will show us that we are not so much superior to them as inferior to ourselves. When the Crusader came to Palestine and came riding up that road from Jaffa where the orange plantations glow on either side, they came with motives which may have been mixed and are certainly disputed. There may have been different theories among the Crusaders. There are certainly different theories among the critics of the Crusaders. Many sought God, some gold, some perhaps black magic. But whatever else they were in search of, they were not in search of the picturesque. They were not drawn from a drab civilization by that mere thirst for color that draws so many modern artists to the bazaars of the East. In those days there were colors in the West as well as in the East, and a glow in the sunset as well as in the sunrise. Many of the men who rode up that road were dressed to match the most glorious orange garden and to rival the most magnificent oriental king. King Richard cannot have been considered dowdy even by comparison when he rode on that high red saddle graven with golden lions with his great scarlet hat and his vest of silver crescents. That squire of the comparatively unobtrusive household of Joinville, who was clad in scarlet striped with yellow, must surely have been capable, if I may be allowed the expression, of knocking them in the most magnificent Asiatic bazaar. More were these external symbols less significant, but rather more significant than the corresponding symbols of the Eastern civilization. It is true that heraldry began beautifully as an art and afterwards degenerated into a science. But even in being a science it had to possess the significance, and the Western colors were often allegorical where the Eastern were only accidental. To a certain extent this more philosophical ornament was doubtless imitated, and I have remarked elsewhere on the highly heraldic lions, which even the serocins carved over the gates of St. Stephen. But it is the extraordinary and even exasperating fact that it was not imitated as the most meaningless sort of modern vulgarity is imitated. King Richard's great red hat, embroidered with beasts and birds, has not overshadowed the earth so much as the billy cock, which no one has yet thought of embroidering with any such natural and universal imagery. The cockney tourist is not only more likely to set out with the intention of knocking them, but he has actually knocked them, and orientals are imitating the tweeds of the tourist more than they imitated the stripes of the squire. It is a curious and perhaps melancholy truth that the world is imitating our worst, our weariness and our dingy decline, when it did not imitate our best with the highest moment of our morning. Perhaps it is only when civilization becomes a disease that it becomes an infection. Possibly it is only when it becomes a very virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism. Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afriq's sunny fountains did not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very mountain of the Middle Ages, singing The Canticle of the Sun. When Michelangelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources. Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin marbles with a freeze of reindeer instead of horses, nor did hotentots try to paint mumbo jumbo, as Raphael has painted Madonna's. But many a savage king has worn a top hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased as to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutal factory system, numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess. And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure of the eye in the party-colored crowd before me that brought back to my mind the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine, on which I touched earlier in this chapter. The peril which is largely at the back, both of the just and the unjust objections to Zionism. It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood, will send not its best, but its worst. The artisan way of putting it from the point of view of the Arab is that it will mean not so much the English merchants as the Jewish moneylender. I shall write elsewhere a better type of Jew and the truths they really represent. But the Jewish moneylender is in a curious and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox. He is not only unpopular both in the East and the West, but he is unpopular in the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western. He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy, and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce. I have said apropos of the Arab that the dignity of the Oriental is in his long robe. The mere mercantile Jew is the Oriental who has lost his long robe, which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs. He bustles and hustles too much, and in Palestine some of the unpopularity, even of the better sort of Jew, is simply due to his restlessness. But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the better sort of Jew, or even the better sort of British influence. The same ignominious inversion, which reproduces everywhere the factory chimney without the church tower, which spreads a cockney commerce but not a Christian culture, has given many men a vague feeling that the influence of modern civilization will surround these ragged but colored groups with something as dreary and discolored, as unnatural and desolate as the unfamiliar snow in which they were shivering as I watched them. There seemed a sort of sinister omen in this strange visitation that the North had sent them, in the fact that when the North Wind blew at last it had only scattered on them this silver dust of death. It may be that this more melancholy mood was intensified by that pale landscape and those impassable ways. I do not dislike snow. On the contrary, I delight in it, and if it had drifted as deep as in my own country against my door I should have thought at the triumph of Christmas, and a thing as comic as my own dog and donkey. But the people in the colored rags did dislike it, and the effects of it were not comic but tragic. The news that came in seemed in that little lonely town, like the news of a great war or even of a great defeat. Men fell through regarding it as they have fallen too much to regarding the war, merely as an unmixed misery. And here the misery was really unmixed. As the snow began to melt, corpses were found in it, homes were hopelessly buried, and even the gradual clearing of the roads only brought him stories of the lonely hamlets lost in the hills. It seemed as if a breath of the aimless destruction that wanders in the world had drifted across us. And no task remained for men, but the weary rebuilding of ruins and the numbering of the dead. Only as I went out of the Jaffa Gate a man told me that the tree of the Hundred Deaths that was the type of the eternal caliphate of the Crescent was cast down and lying broken in the snow. CHAPTER VI. THE GROUPS OF THE CITY. Palestine is a striped country. It is the first effect of landscape on the eyes. It runs in great parallel lines, wavering into vast hills and valleys, but preserving the parallel pattern, as if drawn boldly but accurately with giant chalks of green and gray and red and yellow. The natural explanation, or to speak less foolishly, the natural process of this is simple enough. The stripes are the strata of the rock. Only they are striped by the great rains, so that everything has to grow on ledges, repeating yet again that terraced character to be seen in the vineyards and the staircase streets of the town. But though the cause is, in a sense, in the runeous strength of the rain, the hues are not the dreary hues of ruin. What earth there is is commonly a red clay richer than that of Devon, a red clay of which it would be easy to believe that the giant limbs of the first man were made. What grass there is is not only an enamel of emerald, but is literally crowded with those crimson anemones which might well have called forth the great saying touching Solomon in all his glory. And even what rock there is is colored with a thousand secondary interciary tints, as are the walls and streets of the holy city which is built from the quarries of these hills. But the old stones of the old Jerusalem are as precious as the precious stones of the new Jerusalem. And at certain moments of morning or of sunset every pebble might be a pearl. And all these colored strata rise so high and roll so far that they might be skies rather than slopes, as if we looked up at a frozen sunset or a daybreak fixed forever with its fleeting bars of cloud. And indeed the fancy is not without a symbolic suggestiveness. This is the land of eternal things. But we tend too much to forget that recurrent things are eternal things. We tend to forget that subtle tones and delicate hues, whether in the hills or the heavens, were to the primitive poets and sages as visible as they are to us, and the strong and simple words in which they describe them do not prove that they do not realize them. When words speak of the clouds that gather round the setting sun, we assume that he has seen every shadow of color and every curve of form. But when the Hebrew poet says, he hath made the clouds his chariot, we do not always realize that he was full of indescribable emotions aroused by indescribable sights. We vaguely assume that the very sky was plainer in primitive times. We feel as if there has been a fashion in sunsets or as if dawn was always gray in the stone age or brown in the bronze age. But there is another parable written in those long lines of many colored clay and stone. Palestine is in every sense a stratified country. It is not only true in the natural sense as here where the clay has fallen away and left visible the very ribs of the hills. It is true in the quarries where men dig, in the dead cities where they excavate and even in the living cities where they still fight and pray. The sorrow of all Palestine is that its divisions in culture, politics and theology are like its divisions in geology. The dividing line is horizontal instead of vertical. The frontier does not run between states but between stratified layers. The Jew did not appear beside the Canaanite but on top of the Canaanite. The Greek not beside the Jew but on top of the Jew. The Moslem not beside the Christian but on top of the Christian. It is not merely a house divided against itself, but one divided across itself. It is a house in which the first floor is fighting the second floor, in which the basement is oppressed from above and attics are besieged from below. There is a great deal of gunpowder in the cellars and people are by no means comfortable even on the roof. In days of what some call Bolshevism it may be said that most states are houses in which the kitchen has declared war on the drawing-room. But this will give no notion of the toppling pagoda of political and religious and racial differences of which the name is Palestine. To explain that it is necessary to give the travellers first impressions more particularly in their order, and before I return to this view of the society as stratified, I must state the problem more practically as it presents itself while the society still seems fragmentary. We are always told that the Turk kept the peace between the Christian sex. It would be nearer the nerve of vital truth to say that he made the war between the Christian sex. May it would be nearer still to say that the war is something not made by Turks but made up by infidels. The tourist visiting the churches is often incredulous about the tall tales told about them, but he is completely credulous about the tallest of all tales, the tale that is told against them. He believes in a frantic, fratricidal war perpetually waged by Christian against Christian in Jerusalem. It freshens the free sense of adventure to wander through those crooked and cavernous streets expecting every minute to see the Armenian patriarch trying to stick a knife into the Greek patriarch, just as it would add to the romance of London to linger about Lambeth and Westminster in the hope of seeing the Archbishop of Canterbury locked in a deadly grapple with the President of the Wesleyan Conference. And if we return to our homes at evening without having actually seen those things with the eyes of flesh, the vision has nonetheless shone on our path and led us round many corners with alertness and with hope. But in bald fact, religion does not involve perpetual war in the East any more than patriotism involves perpetual war in the West. What it does involve in both cases is a defensive attitude, a vigilance on the frontiers. There is no war, but there is an armed peace. I have already explained the sense in which I say that the Muslims are unhistoric or even anti-historic. Perhaps it would be nearer the truth to say that they are prehistoric. They attach themselves to the tremendous truisms which men might have realized before they had any political experience at all, which might have been scratched with primitive knives of flint upon primitive pots of clay. Being simple and sincere, they do not escape the need for legends. I might almost say that, being honest, they do not escape the need for lies. But their mood is not historic. They do not wish to grapple with the past. They do not love its complexities nor do they understand the enthusiasm for its details and even its doubts. Now in all this, the Muslims of a place like Jerusalem are the very opposite of the Christian of Jerusalem. The Christianity of Jerusalem is highly historic and cannot be understood without historical imagination. And this is not the strong point, perhaps, of those among us who generally record their impressions of the place. As the educated Englishman does not know the history of England it would be unreasonable to expect him to know the history of Moab or of Mesopotamia, he receives the impression, in visiting the shrines of Jerusalem, of a number of small sects squabbling about small things. In short, he has before him a tangle of trivialities which include the Roman Empire in the West and the East, the Catholic Church in its two great divisions, the Jewish race, the memories of Greece and Egypt, and the whole Mohammedan world in Asia and Africa. It may be that he regards these as small things, but I should be glad if he would cast his eye over human history and tell me what are the large things. The truth is that the things that meet today in Jerusalem are by far the greatest things that the world has yet seen. If they are not important, nothing on this earth is important and certainly not the impressions of those who happen to be bored by them. But to understand them, it is necessary to have something which is much commoner in Jerusalem than in Oxford or Boston. That sort of living history which we call tradition. For instance, the critic generally begins by dismissing these conflicts with the statement that they are all about small points of theology. I do not admit that theological points are small points. Religion is only thought applied to religion, and those who prefer a thoughtless religion need not be so very disdainful of others with a more rationalistic taste. The old joke that the Greek sex only differed about a single letter is about the lamest and most illogical joke in the world. An atheist and a theist only differed by a single letter. Yet theologians are so subtle as to distinguish definitely between the two. But though I do not in any case allow that it is idle to be concerned about theology as a matter of actual fact, these quarrels are not chiefly concerned about theology. They are concerned about history. They are concerned with the things about which the only human sort of history is concerned. Great memories of great men, great battles for great ideas, the love of brave people for beautiful places, and the faith by which the dead are alive. It is quite true that with this historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges, fury and sorrow and shame. It is also true that without it men die, and nobody even digs their graves. The truth is that these quarrels are rather about patriotism than about religion in the sense of theology. That is, they are just such heroic passions about the past as we call in the West by the name of nationalism. But they are conditioned by the extraordinarily complicated position of the nations, or what corresponds to the nations. We of the West, if we wish to understand it, must imagine ourselves as left with all our local loves and family memories unchanged, but the places affected by them intermingled and tumbled about by some almost inconceivable convulsion. We must imagine cities and landscapes to have turned on some unseen pivots, or been shifted about by some unseen machinery, so that our nearest was furthest and our remotest enemy, our neighbor. We must imagine monuments on the wrong sites and the antiquities of the one country emptied out on top of the other, and we must imagine through all this the thin but tough threads of tradition everywhere tangled and yet everywhere unbroken. We must picture a new map made out of the broken fragments of the old map, and yet with everyone remembering the old map and ignoring the new. In short we must try to imagine, or rather we must try to hope, that our own memories would be as long and our own loyalties as steady as the memories and loyalties of the little crowd in Jerusalem, and hope or pray that we could only be as rigid, as rabid, and as bigoted as are these benighted people. Then perhaps we might preserve all our distinctions of truths and falsehood in a chaos of time and space. We have to conceive that the tomb of Napoleon is in the middle of Stratford-on-Avon, and that the Nelson Column is erected on the field of Bannock-Bern. That Westminster Abbey has taken wings and flown away to the most romantic situation on the Rhine, and that the wooden victory is stranded like the Ark on Arrat. On the top of the Hail of Terra that the pilgrims to the Shrine of Lords have to look for it in the Island of Runnymede, and that the only existing German statue of Bismarck is to be found in the Pantheon at Paris. This intolerable topsy-turbidum is no exaggeration of the way in which stories cut across each other and sites are imposed upon each other in the historic chaos of the Holy City. Now we in the West are very lucky in having our nations normally distributed into their native lands, so that good patriots can talk about themselves without perpetually annoying their neighbors. Some of the pacifists tell us that national frontiers and divisions are evil because they exasperate us to war. It would be far truer to say that national frontiers and divisions keep us at peace. It would be far truer to say that we can always love each other so long as we do not see each other. But the people of Jerusalem are doomed to have a difference without division. They are driven to set pillar against pillar in the same temple, while we can set city against city across the plains of the world. While for us a church rises from its foundations as naturally as a flower springs from a flower bed, they have to bless the soil and curse the stones that stand on it. While the land we love is solid under our feet to the year's center, they have to see all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day, as incompatible and as inseparable. Their entanglements are tragic, but they are not trumpery or accidental. Everything has a meaning. They are loyal to great names, as men are loyal to great nations. They have differences about which they feel bound to dispute to the death, but in their death they are not divided. Jerusalem is a small town of big things, and the average modern city is a big town full of small things. All the most important and interesting powers in history are here gathered within the area of a quiet village, and if they are not always friends, at least they are necessarily neighbors. This is a point of intellectual interest and even intensity that is far too little realized. It is a matter of modern complaint that in a place like Jerusalem the Christian groups do not always regard each other with Christian feelings. It is said that they fight each other, but at least they meet each other. In a great industrial city like London or Liverpool, how often do they even meet each other? In a large town men live in small cliques, which are much narrower than classes, but in this small town they live at least by large contacts, even if they are conflicts. Nor is it really true, and the daily humors of human life, that they are only conflicts. I have heard an eminent English clergyman from Cambridge bargaining for a brass lamp with a Syrian of the Greek church, and asking the advice of a Franciscan friar who was standing smiling in the same shop. I have met the same representative of the Church of England at a luncheon party with the wildest Zionist Jews, and with the Grand Mufti, the head of the Muslim religion. Suppose the same Englishman had been, as he might well have been, an eloquent and popular vicar in Chelsea or Hampstead. How often would he have met a Franciscan or a Zionist? Not once in a year. How often would he have met a Muslim or a Greek Syrian? Not once in a lifetime. Even if he were a bigot, he would be bound in Jerusalem to become a more interesting kind of bigot. Even if his opinions were narrow, his experiences would be wide. He is not, as a fact, a bigot, nor, as a fact, are the other people bigots. But at the worst they could not be unconscious bigots. They could not live in such uncorrected complacency as is possible to a larger social set in a larger social system. They could not be quite so ignorant as a broad-minded person in a big suburb. Indeed there is something fine and distinguished about the very delicacy and even irony of their diplomatic relations. There is something of chivalry in the courtesy of their armed truce, and it is a great school of manners that includes such differences in morals. This is an aspect of the interest of Jerusalem which can easily be neglected and is not easy to describe. The normal life there is intensely exciting, not because of action's fight, but rather because they do not fight. Of the abnormal crisis when they did fight and the abnormal motives that made them fight, I shall have something to say later on. But it was true, for a great part of the time, that what was picturesque and thrilling was not the war, but the peace. The sensation of being in this little town is rather like that of being at a great international Congress. It is like that moving and glittering social satire in which diplomatists can join in a waltz who may soon be joining in a war. Whether religious and political parties have yet another point in common with separate nations, that even within this narrow space the complicated curve of their frontiers is really more or less fixed and certainly not particularly fluctuating. Conversion is impossible and conversion is not at all common. The very able Anglo-Catholic leader to whom I have already referred uttered to me a paradox that was a very practical truth. He said he felt exasperated with the Christian sex, not for their fanaticism but for their lack of fanaticism. He meant their lack of any fervor and even any hope of converting each other to their respective religions. An Armenian may be quite as proud of the Armenian church as a Frenchman of the French nation. Yet he may no more expect to make a Muslim an Armenian than a Frenchman expects to make an Englishman a Frenchman. If as we are told the quarrels could be condemned as merely theological, this would certainly be the very reverse of logical. But as I say we get much nearer to them by calling them national, and the leaders of the great religions feel much more like the ambassadors of great nations. And as I have also said, that ambassadorial atmosphere can be best expressed on the word irony, sometimes a rather tragic irony. At any tea party or talk in the street between the rival leaders, there is a natural tendency to that sort of wit which consists of an unveiled illusion to a very open secret. Each male feels that there are heavy forces behind a small point, as the weight of the fencer is behind the point of the rapier. And the point can be yet more pointed because the politics of the city, when I was there, included several men with a taste and talent for such polished intercourse, including especially two men whose experience and culture would have been remarkable in any community in the world, the American consul and the military governor of Jerusalem. If in cataloging the strata of the society we take first the top most layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient to take these two men as representing the chief realities about it. Dr. Glaesbrook, the representative of the United States, has the last to do with the internal issues of the country, but here's mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might be put among the first reasons for finding the city interesting. He is an old man now, for he actually began life as a soldier in the southern and secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail not merely the virtues, but the very gestures of the old southern and secessionist aristocrat. He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church and served as a chaplain in the Spanish-American War. Then at an age when most men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine. The brilliant services he performed there in the protection of British and American subjects are here chiefly interesting as throwing a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvy-dom of Turkish rule. There appears in his experiences something in such rule, which we are perhaps to forget, in a vision of stately Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something more tyrannical even than the dull pig-headedness of Prussianism. I mean the most atrocious of all tortures which is called caprice. It is the thing we feel in the Arabian tales when no man knows whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same vizier a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes. I have heard Dr. Glazebook describe a whole day of hideous hesitation in which fugitives for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four times were brought back again to their prison. There is something there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia, and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril of those men who lucked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac. The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentiment for the white hair of the council, and the strange respect that many Muslims feel for the minister of any religion. Once at least the trembling rock of barbaric rule nearly fell on him and killed him. By a sudden movement of lawlessness the Turkish military authority sent to him demanding the English documents left in his custody. He refused to give them up, and he knew what he was doing. In standing firm he was not even standing like Nurse Kavell against organized pressure under the full criticism of organized Europe. He was rather standing in a den of brigands, most of whom had never heard of the international rules they violated. Finally by another freak of friendliness they left him and his papers alone. But the old man had to wait many days in doubt, not knowing what they would do, since they did not know themselves. I do not know what were his thoughts or whether they were far from Palestine and all possibilities that tyranny might return and reign forever. But I have sometimes fancied that, in the ghastly silence, he may have heard again only the guns of Lee and the last battle of the wilderness. If the mention of the American Council refers back to the oppression of the past, the mention of the military governor brings back all the problems of the present. Here I only sketch these groups, as I first found them in the present, and it must be remembered that my present is already past. All this was before the latest change from military to civil government. But the mere name of Colonel Storrs raises the question which is rather misunderstood in relation to that change itself. Many of our journalists, especially at the time of the last and worst of the riots, wrote as if it would be a change from some sort of stiff militarism to a liberal policy akin to parliamentarianism. I think this is a fallacy, and a fallacy not uncommon in journalism, which is professedly very much up to date and actually very much behind the times. As a fact, it is nearly four years behind the times, for it is thinking in terms of the old, small and rigidly professional army. Colonel Storrs is the very last man to be called militaristic in the narrow sense. He is a particularly liberal and enlightened type of the sort of English gentleman who readily served his country in war, but who is rather particularly fitted to serve her in politics or literature. Of course many purely professional soldiers have liberal and artistic tastes, as General Shea, one of the organizers of Palestinian victory, has a fine taste in poetry, or Colonel Popham, then deputy governor of Jerusalem, an admirable taste in painting. But while it is sometimes forgotten that many soldiers are men, it is now still more strange to forget that most men are soldiers. I fancy there are now few things more representative than the British army. Certainly it is much more representative than the British parliament. The men I knew and whom I remember with so much gratitude, working under General Bowles at the seat of government on the Mount of Olives, were certainly not narrowed by any military professionalism, and had, if anything, the mark of quite different professions. One was a very shrewd and humorous lawyer employed on a legal problem about enemy property. Another was a young schoolmaster with keen and clear ideas, or rather ideals, about education for all the races in Palestine. These men did not cease to be themselves because they were all dressed in khaki, and if Colonel Storz recurs first to the memory it is not because he had become a colonel in the trade of soldiering, but because he is the sort of man who could talk equally about all these other trades and twenty more. Incidentally, and by way of example, he can talk about them in ten languages. There is a story, which whether or no it be true is very typical, that one of the Zionist leaders made a patriotic speech in Hebrew and broke off short in his recollection of this partially revived national tongue, whereupon the governor of Jerusalem finished his Hebrew speech for him. Whether it be to exactly the same effect or not, it would be important to inquire. He is a man rather recalling the eighteenth-century aristocrat with his love of wit and classical learning. One of that small group of the governing class that contains his uncle, Harry Crust, and was warmed with the generous culture of George Wyndham. It was a purely mechanical distinction between the military and civil government that would lend to such figures the stiffness of a drumhead court-martial. And even those who differed with him accused him in practice not of militarist lack of sympathy with any of those he ruled, but rather with too imaginative a sympathy with some of them. To know these things, however slightly, and then read the English newspapers afterward, is often amusing enough. But I have only mentioned the matter, because there is a real danger in so crude a differentiation. It would be a bad thing if a system, military in form, but representative in fact, gave place to a system, representative in form, but financial in fact. That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear. And with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum after the official. You must be remembered that I am not at this stage judging these groups, but merely very rapidly sketching them like figures and costumes in the street. The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists, who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy. Among these also I am happy to have friends, and I may venture to call the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote from Zionism. Dr. Edder, the president of the Zionist commission, is a man for whom I conceived the respect long ago when he protested as a professional physician against the subjection of the poor to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence. He criticized with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap anybody else's child whom they chose to suspect of feeble mindedness. They were themselves too feeble minded to define. It was defended very characteristically by a combination of precedent and progress, and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws. That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws to people whom no sane man would call lunatics. It is if they were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from lepers to light-haired persons, and then say blandly that the principle was the same. The humor and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was very welcome to us when we were accused of being anti-Semites, and we afterwards asked Dr. Edder for his own views on the Jewish problem. We found he was then a very strong Zionist, and this was long before he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism. And this accident is important, for it stamps the sincerity of the small group of original Zionists who were in favor of this nationalist ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it. To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires are for it. But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal in men like Dr. Edder and Dr. Weisman, and doubtless many others. The only defect that need to be noted as a mere detail of portraiture is a certain excessive vigilance and jealousy and pertinacity in the wrong place which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular with the English who themselves suffer unpopularity for supporting them. For though I am called an anti-Semite there were really periods of official impatience when I was almost the only pro-Semite in the company. I went about pointing out what was really to be said for Zionism to people who were represented by the Arabs as the mere slaves of the Zionists. This group of Arab anti-Semites may be taken next, but very briefly, for the problem itself belongs to a later page. And the one thing to be said of it here is very simple. I never expected it, and even now I do not fully understand it. But it is the fact that the native Muslims are more anti-Semitic than native Christians. Both are more or less so, and have formed a sort of alliance out of the fact. The banner carried by the mob or the Arabic inscription, Muslims and Christians are brothers. It is as if the little wedge of Zionism had closed up the cracks of the Crusades. Of the Christian crowds in that partnership and the Christian creeds they are proud to inherit, I have already suggested something. It is only as well to note that I have put them out of their strict order in the stratification of history. It is too often forgotten that in these countries the Christian culture is older than the Muslim culture. I for one regret that the old Pax Romana was broken up by the Arabs and hold that in the long run there was more life in that Byzantine decline than in the Semitic revival. And I will add what I cannot hear, develop or defend, that in the long run it is best that the Pax Romana should return, and that the suzerainty of those lands, at least, will have to be Christian, and neither Muslim nor Jewish. The defendant is to defend a philosophy, but I do not hold that there is in that philosophy, for all the talk of its persecutions in the past, a possibility of comprehension and many-sided sympathy, which is not in the narrow intensity either of the Muslim or the Jew. Christianity is really the right angle of that triangle and the other two are very acute angles. But in the meetings that led up to the riots it is the more Muslim part of that mixed crowds that I chiefly remember, which touches the same truth that the Christians are the more potentially tolerant. But many of the Muslim leaders are as dignified and as human as many of the Zionist leaders. The Grand Mufti is a man I cannot imagine as either insulting anybody or being conceivably the object of insult. The Muslim mayor of Jerusalem was another such figure, belonging also I believe to one of the Arab aristocratic houses. The Grand Mufti is a descendant of Muhammad, and I shall not forget his first appearance at the first of the riotous meetings in which I found myself. I will give it as the first of two final impressions, with which I will end this chapter. I fear, on a note of almost anarchic noise, the unearthly beating and braying of the eastern gongs and horns of the two fierce desert faiths against each other. I first saw from the balcony of the hotel the crowd of rioters come rolling up the street. In front of them went two fantastic figures turning like tea totems in an endless dance and twirling two crooked and naked scimitars as the Irish were supposed to twirl chileles. I thought a delightful way of opening a political meeting, and I wish we could do it at home at the general election. I wish that instead of the weary some business of Mr. Bonar Law taking the chair and Mr. Lloyd George addressing the meeting, Mr. Law and Mr. Lloyd George would only hop and caper in front of a procession, spinning round and round till they were dizzy, and waving and crossing a pair of umbrellas in a thousand invisible patterns. But this political announcement or advertisement, though more intelligent than our own head, as I could readily believe another side to it, I was told that it was often apprelude to ordinary festivals such as weddings, and no doubt it remains from some ancient ritual dance of a religious character. But I could imagine that it might sometimes seem to a more irrational taste to have a too religious a character. I could imagine that those dancing men might indeed be dancing dervishes with their heads going round in a more irrational sense than their bodies. I could imagine that at some moments it might suck the soul into what I have called in metaphor the whirlpool of Asia, or the whirlwind of a world whipped like a top with a raging monotony, the cyclone of eternity. That is not the sort of rhythm nor the sort of religion by which I myself should hope to save the soul. But it is intensely interesting to the mind, and even the eye, and I went downstairs and wedged myself into the thick and thronging press. It surged through the gap by the gate where the men climbed lamp posts and roared-out speeches and more especially recited national poems in rich, resounding voices, a really moving effect, at least for one who could not understand a word that was said. Feeling had already gone as far as knocking Jews hats off in other popular sports, but not as yet on any universal and systematic scale. I saw a few of the antiquated Jews with wrinkles and ringlets peering about here and there, some said as spies or representatives of the Zionists, to take away the anti-Semitic color from the meeting. But I think this unlikely, especially as it would have been pretty hard to take it away. It is more likely I think that the archaic Jews were really not unamused and perhaps not unsympathetic spectators, for the Zionist problem is complicated by a real quarrel in the ghetto about Zionism. The old religious Jews do not welcome the new nationalist Jews. It would sometimes be hardly an exaggeration to say that one party stands for the religion without the nation, and the other for the nation without the religion. Just as the old agricultural Arabs hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western business grab and sharp practice, so the old peddling and pedantic but intensely pious Jews hate the Zionists as the instruments of new Western atheism of free thought. Only I fear that when the storm breaks such distinctions are swept away. The storm was certainly rising. Outside the Jaffa gate the road runs up steeply and is split in two by the wedge of a high building, looking as narrow as a tower and projecting like the prow of a ship. There is something almost theatrical about its position and stage properties. It's one high, curtained window and balcony, with a sort of pole or flagstaff where the place is official or rather municipal. It swelled the crowd with its songs and poems and passionate rhetoric in a kind of crescendo, and then suddenly the curtain of the window rose like the curtain of the theater, and we saw on that high balcony the red fez and the tall figure of the Mohammedan mayor of Jerusalem. I did not understand his Arabic observations, but I know when a man is calming a mob, and the mob did become calmer. It was as if a storm swelled in the night and gradually died away in the gray morning. But there are perpetual mutterings of that storm. My point for the moment is that the exasperations come chiefly from the two extremes of the two great Semitic traditions of monotheism, and certainly not primarily from these poor Eastern Christians of whose fanaticism we have been taught to make fun. From time to time there are gleams of the extremities of Eastern fanaticism which are almost ghastly to Western feeling. They seem to crack the polish of the dignified leaders of the Arab aristocracy and design a school of culture and reveal a volcanic substance of which only Oriental creeds have been made. One day a wild Jewish proclamation is passed from hand to hand denouncing disloyal Jews who refused the teaching Hebrew, telling doctors to let them die and hospitals to let them rot, bringing with the old unmistakable and awful accent that badmen dash their children against the stones. Another day the city would be placarded with posters printed in Damascus telling the Jews who looked to Palestine for national home that they should find it in a national cemetery. And when these cries clash it is like the clash of those two crooked Eastern swords that crossed and recrossed and revolved like blazing wheels in the vanguard of the marching mob. I felt the fullest pressure of the problem when I first walked round the hole of the harem enclosure, the courts of the old temple, where the high Muzin towers now stand at every corner and heard the clear voices of the call to prayer. The sky was laden with a storm that became the snowstorm, and it was the time at which the old Jews beat their hands and mourn over what are believed to be the last stones of the temple. There was a movement in my own mind that was attuned to these things and impressed by the straight limits and steep sides of that platform of the mountains, for the sense of crisis is not only in the intensity of the ideals but in the very conditions of the reality, the reality with which this chapter began, and the burden of it is the burden of Palestine, the narrowness of the boundaries, and the stratification of the rock. A voice not of my reason but rather sounding heavily in my heart seemed to be repeating sentences like pessimistic proverbs. There is no place for the temple of Solomon but on the ruins of the mosque of Omar. There is no place for the nation of the Jews but in the country of the Arabs. And these whispers came to me first not as intellectual conclusions upon the conditions of the case, of which I should have much more to say and to hope, but rather as hints of something immediate and menacing and yet mysterious. I felt almost a momentary impulse to flee from the place, like one who has received an omen. For two voices had met in my ears, and within the same narrow space and in the same dark hour, electric and yet eclipsed with cloud, I had heard Islam crying from the Torah and Israel wailing at the wall.