How far this can really happen it is very hard for anybody, especially a casual visitor, to discover in the present crisis.  It is admitted that there is much Arab and Syrian labour employed; and this in itself would leave all the danger of the Jew as a mere capitalist.  The Jews explain it, however, by saying that the Arabs will work for a lower wage, and that this is necessarily a great temptation to the struggling colonists.  In this they may be acting naturally as colonists, but it is none the less clear that they are not yet acting literally as labourers.  It may not be their fault that they are not proving themselves to be peasants; but it is none the less clear that this situation in itself does not prove them to be peasants.  So far as that is concerned, it still remains to be decided finally whether a Jew will be an agricultural labourer, if he is a decently paid agricultural labourer.  On the other hand, the leaders of these local experiments, if they have not yet shown the higher materialism of peasants, most certainly do not show the lower materialism of capitalists.  There can be no doubt of the patriotic and even poetic spirit in which many of them hope to make their ancient wilderness blossom like the rose.  They at least would still stand among the great prophets of Israel, and none the less though they prophesied in vain.

I have tried to state fairly the case for Zionism, for the reason already stated; that I think it intellectually unjust that any attempt of the Jews to regularise their position should merely be rejected as one of their irregularities.  But I do not disguise the enormous difficulties of doing it in the particular conditions Of Palestine.  In fact the greatest of the real difficulties of Zionism is that it has to take place in Zion.  There are other difficulties, however, which when they are not specially the fault of Zionists are very much the fault of Jews.  The worst is the general impression of a business pressure from the more brutal and businesslike type of Jew, which arouses very violent and very just indignation.  When I was in Jerusalem it was openly said that Jewish financiers had complained of the low rate of interest at which loans were made by the government to the peasantry, and even that the government had yielded to them.  If this were true it was a heavier reproach to the government even than to the Jews.  But the general truth is that such a state of feeling seems to make the simple and solid patriotism of a Palestinian Jewish nation practically impossible, and forces us to consider some alternative or some compromise.  The most sensible statement of a compromise I heard among the Zionists was suggested to me by Dr. Weizmann, who is a man not only highly intelligent but ardent and sympathetic.  And the phrase he used gives the key to my own rough conception of a possible solution, though he himself would probably, not accept that solution.