rather than producers because they have no land of their own from which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic.  They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building the Pyramids of Egypt.  They can no more feel the full stream of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping by the waters of Babylon.  For exile is the worst kind of bondage.  In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues.  It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in.  The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.

It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered.  The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment.  The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only a specially dangerous development of the general charge of uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise; the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour.  It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible, commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple communities like those of Palestine.  A very honest Moslem Arab said to me, with a singular blend of simplicity and humour, “A Jew does not work; but he grows rich.  You never see a Jew working; and yet they grow rich.  What I want to know is, why do we not all do the same?  Why do we not also do this and become rich?” This is, I need hardly say, an over-simplification.  Jews often work hard at some things, especially intellectual things.  But the same experience which tells us that we have known many industrious Jewish scholars, Jewish lawyers, Jewish doctors, Jewish pianists, chess-players and so on, is an experience which cuts both ways.  The same experience, if carefully consulted, will probably tell us that we have not known personally many patient Jewish ploughmen, many laborious Jewish blacksmiths, many active Jewish hedgers and ditchers, or even many energetic Jewish hunters and fishermen.  In short, the popular impression is tolerably true to life, as popular impressions very often are; though it is not fashionable to say so in these days of democracy and self-determination.  Jews do not generally work on the land, or in any of the handicrafts that are akin to the land; but the Zionists reply that this is because it can never really be their own land.  That is Zionism, and that has really a practical place in the past and future of Zion.