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 “a bondholder’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 avaricious 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 right 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 Arab and Syrian labour.  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 suggest 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