eir 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 who do not want to be saved.
But they do in many cases do things from which Moslems profit,
but which Moslems by themselves would not propose, let alone perform.
And this has a general signi