She may be put last among the local figures I have here described, for the special reason that her case has this rather deeper significance.  For it is not possible to remain content with the fact that the crowd offers such varied shapes and colours to the eye, when it also offers much deeper divisions and even dilemmas to the intelligence.  The black dress of the Moslem woman and the white dress of the Christian woman are in sober truth as different as black and white.  They stand for real principles in a real opposition; and the black and white will not easily disappear in the dull grey of our own compromises.  The one tradition will defend what it regards as modesty, and the other what it regards as dignity, with passions far deeper than most of our paltry political appetites.  Nor do I see how we can deny such a right of defence, even in the case we consider the less enlightened.  It is made all the more difficult by the fact that those who consider themselves the pioneers of enlightenment generally also consider themselves the protectors of native races and aboriginal rights.  Whatever view we take of the Moslem Arab, we must at least admit that the greater includes the less.  It is manifestly absurd to say we have no right to interfere in his country, but have a right to interfere in his home.

It is the intense interest of Jerusalem that there can thus be two universes in the same street.  Indeed there are ten rather than two; and it is a proverb that the fight is not only between Christian and Moslem, but between Christian and Christian.  At this moment, it must be admitted, it is almost entirely a fight of Christian and Moslem allied against Jew.  But of that I shall have to speak later; the point for the moment is that the varied colours of the streets are a true symbol of the varied colours of the souls.  It is perhaps the only modern place where the war waged between ideas has such a visible and vivid heraldry.

And that fact alone may well leave the spectator with one final reflection; for it is a matter in which the modern world may well have to learn something from the motley rabble of this remote Eastern town.

It may be an odd thing to suggest that a crowd in Bond Street or Piccadilly should model itself on this masquerade of religions.  It would be facile and fascinating to turn it into a satire or an extravaganza.  Every good and innocent mind would be gratified with the image of a bowler hat in the precise proportions of the Dome of St. Paul’s, and surmounted with a little ball and cross, symbolising the loyalty of some Anglican to his mother church.  It might even be pleasing to see the street dominated with a more graceful top-hat modelled on the Eiffel Tower, and signifying the wearer’s faith in scientific enterprise, or perhaps in its frequent concomitant of political corruption.  These would be fair Western parallels to the head-dresses of Jerusalem; modelled on Mount Ararat or Solomon’s Temple,