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 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 pidgin English better than he can.  If he modelled 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 that 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 their being bound to transfer it 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 confectionery, English audit ale,” and so on, I think he is rather an unreasonable Arab.  After all, we invented these things; in auctore auctoritas.

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 modernised, more religious and therefore more realistic.  The issue between the things only a European can do, and the things no European has the right to do, is much sharper and clearer than the confusions 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