e would have been remarkable in any community in the world;
the American Consul and the Military Governor of Jerusalem.

If in cataloguing the strata of the society we take first the topmost
layer of Western officialism, we might indeed find it not inconvenient
to take these two men as representing the chief realities about it.
Dr. Glazebrook, the representative of the United States,
has the less to do with the internal issues of the country; but his
mere presence and history is so strangely picturesque that he might
be put among the first reasons for finding the city interesting.
He is an old man now, for he actually began life as a soldier in the
Southern and Secessionist army, and still keeps alive in every detail,
not merely the virtues but the very gestures of the old Southern
and Secessionist aristocrat.

He afterward became a clergyman of the Episcopalian Church, and served
as a chaplain in the Spanish-American war, then, at an age when most
men have long retired from the most peaceful occupations, he was sent
out by President Wilson to the permanent battlefield of Palestine.
The brilliant services he performed there, in the protection of British
and American subjects, are here chiefly interesting as throwing
a backward light on the unearthly topsy-turvydom of Turkish rule.
There appears in his experiences something in such rule
which we are perhaps apt to forget in a vision of stately
Eastern princes and gallant Eastern warriors, something more
tyrannical even than the dull pigheadedness of Prussianism.
I mean the most atrocious of all tortures, which is called caprice.
It is the thing we feel in the Arabian tales, when no man knows
whether the Sultan is good or bad, and he gives the same Vizier
a thousand pounds or a thousand lashes. I have heard Dr. Glazebrook
describe a whole day of hideous hesitation, in which fugitives
for whom he pleaded were allowed four times to embark and four
times were brought back again to their prison. There is something
there dizzy as well as dark, a whirlpool in the very heart of Asia;
and something wilder than our own worst oppressions in the peril
of those men who looked up and saw above all the power of Asiatic arms,
their hopes hanging on a rocking mind like that of a maniac.
The tyrant let them go at last, avowedly out of a simple sentiment
for the white hair of the consul, and the strange respect that many
Moslems feel for the minister of any religion. Once at least
th