not familiar with snow by the very fact that 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 the 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 a 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 shovelling 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 explanations 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 and 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 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 fathers,” I do really feel that he towers over me and my perishing industrial civilisation with a terrible appeal to eternal things.  I feel he is a figure more enduring than a statue,