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, 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