Jews, forced to pay so extravagant
a compliment to the Christian religion as to suppose it the ruling
motive of half the discontented talk in clubs and public-houses,
of nearly every business man who suspects a foreign financier,
or nearly every working man who grumbles against the local
pawn-broker. Religious mania, unfortunately, is not so common.
The Zionists do not need to deny any of these things;
what they offer is not a denial but a diagnosis and a remedy.
Whether their diagnosis is correct, whether their remedy
is practicable, we will try to consider later, with something
like a fair summary of what is to be said on both sides.
But their theory, on the face of it, is perfectly reasonable.
It is the theory that any abnormal qualities in the Jews are due
to the abnormal position of the Jews. They are traders rather
than producers because they have no land of their own from
which to produce, and they are cosmopolitans rather than patriots
because they have no country of their own for which to be patriotic.
They can no more become farmers while they are vagrant than they
could have built the Temple of Solomon while they were building
the Pyramids of Egypt. They can no more feel the full stream
of nationalism while they wander in the desert of nomadism than
they could bathe in the waters of Jordan while they were weeping
by the waters of Babylon. For exile is the worst kind of bondage.
In insisting upon that at least the Zionists have insisted upon
a profound truth, with many applications to many other moral issues.
It is true that for any one whose heart is set on a particular
home or shrine, to be locked out is to be locked in.
The narrowest possible prison for him is the whole world.

It will be well to notice briefly, however, how the principle
applies to the two Anti-Semitic arguments already considered.
The first is the charge of usury and unproductive loans, the second
the charge either of treason or of unpatriotic detachment.
The charge of usury is regarded, not unreasonably, as only
a specially dangerous development of the general charge of
uncreative commerce and the refusal of creative manual exercise;
the unproductive loan is only a minor form of the unproductive labour.
It is certainly true that the latter complaint is, if possible,
commoner than the former, especially in comparatively simple
communities like those of Palestine. A very honest Moslem Arab
said to me, with a singular blend of simpli