is only when it becomes a very
virulent disease that it becomes an epidemic. Possibly again
that is the meaning both of cosmopolitanism and imperialism.
Anyhow the tribes sitting by Afric's sunny fountains did
not take up the song when Francis of Assisi stood on the very
mountain of the Middle Ages, singing the Canticle of the Sun.
When Michael Angelo carved a statue in snow, Eskimos did not
copy him, despite their large natural quarries or resources.
Laplanders never made a model of the Elgin Marbles, with a frieze
of reindeers instead of horses; nor did Hottentots try to paint
Mumbo Jumbo as Raphael had painted Madonnas. But many a savage king
has worn a top-hat, and the barbarian has sometimes been so debased
as to add to it a pair of trousers. Explosive bullets and the brutal
factory system numbers of advanced natives are anxious to possess.
And it was this reflection, arising out of the mere pleasure
of the eye in the parti-coloured crowd before me, that brought back
my mind to the chief problem and peril of our position in Palestine,
on which I touched earlier in this chapter; the peril which is largely
at the back both of the just and of the unjust objections to Zionism.
It is the fear that the West, in its modern mercantile mood,
will send not its best but its worst. The artisan way of putting it,
from the point of view of the Arab, is that it will mean not
so much the English merchant as the Jewish money-lender. I shall
write elsewhere of better types of Jew and the truths they
really represent; but the Jewish money-lender is in a curious
and complex sense the representative of this unfortunate paradox.
He is not only unpopular both in the East and West, but he is unpopular
in the West for being Eastern and in the East for being Western.
He is accused in Europe of Asiatic crookedness and secrecy,
and in Asia of European vulgarity and bounce. I have said _a propos_
of the Arab that the dignity of the oriental is in his long robe;
the merely mercantile Jew is the oriental who has lost his long robe,
which leads to a dangerous liveliness in the legs. He bustles
and hustles too much; and in Palestine some of the unpopularity
even of the better sort of Jew is simply due to his restlessness.
But there remains a fear that it will not be a question of the
better sort of Jew, or of the better sort of British influence.
The same ignominious inversion which reproduces everywhere the factory
chimney without the chu