collision in Jerusalem.
The great Jewish population throughout the world did hail Mr. Balfour's
declaration with something almost of the tribal triumph they might
have shown when the Persian conqueror broke the Babylonian bondage.
It was rather the plutocratic princes of Jewry who long hung back
and hesitated about Zionism. The mass of Mahometans really are
ready to combine against the Zionists as they might have combined
against the Crusades. It is rather the responsible Mahometan
leaders who will naturally be found more moderate and diplomatic.
This popular spirit may take a good or a bad form; and a mob may cry
out many things, right and wrong. But a mob cries out "No Popery";
it does not cry out "Not so much Popery," still less "Only a moderate
admixture of Popery." It shouts "Three cheers for Gladstone,"
it does not shout "A gradual and evolutionary social tendency towards
some ideal similar to that of Gladstone." It would find it quite
a difficult thing to shout; and it would find exactly the same
difficulty with all the advanced formulae about nationalisation
and internationalisation and class-conscious solidarity.
No rabble could roar at the top of its voice the collectivist
formula of "The nationalisation of all the means of production,
distribution, and exchange." The mob of Jerusalem is no
exception to the rule, but rather an extreme example of it.
The mob of Jerusalem has cried some remarkable things in its time;
but they were not pedantic and they were not evasive.
There was a day when it cried a single word; "Crucify." It was
a thing to darken the sun and rend the veil of the temple;
but there was no doubt about what it meant.

This is an age of minorities; of minorities powerful and predominant,
partly through the power of wealth and partly through the idolatry
of education. Their powers appeared in every crisis of the Great War,
when a small group of pacifists and internationalists, a microscopic
minority in every country, were yet constantly figuring as diplomatists
and intermediaries and men on whose attitude great issues might depend.
A man like Mr. Macdonald, not a workman nor a formal or real
representative of workmen, was followed everywhere by the limelight;
while the millions of workmen who worked and fought were out
of focus and therefore looked like a fog. Just as such figures
give a fictitious impression of unity between the crowds fighting
for different flags and frontiers, so ther