Of this attitude, I repeat, I am now less likely than ever to repent.  I have lived to see the thing that was dismissed as a fad discussed everywhere as a fact; and one of the most menacing facts of the age.  I have lived to see people who accused me of Anti-Semitism become far more Anti-Semitic than I am or ever was.  I have heard people talking with real injustice about the Jews, who once seemed to think it an injustice to talk about them at all.  But, above all, I have seen with my own eyes wild mobs marching through a great city, raving not only against Jews, but against the English for identifying themselves with the Jews.  I have seen the whole prestige of England brought into peril, merely by the trick of talking about two nations as if they were one.  I have seen an Englishman arriving in Jerusalem with somebody he had been taught to regard as his fellow countryman and political colleague, and received as if he had come arm-in-arm with a flaming dragon.  So do our frosty fictions fare when they come under that burning sun.

Twice in my life, and twice lately, I have seen a piece of English pedantry bring us within an inch of an enormous English peril.  The first was when all the Victorian historians and philosophers had told us that our German cousin was a cousin german and even germane; something naturally near and sympathetic.  That also was an identification; that also was an assimilation; that also was a union of hearts.  For the second time in a few short years, English politicians and journalists have discovered the dreadful revenge of reality.  To pretend that something is what it is not is business that can easily be fashionable and sometimes popular.  But the thing we have agreed to regard as what it is not will always abruptly punish and pulverise us, merely by being what it is.  For years we were told that the Germans were a sort of Englishman because they were Teutons; but it was all the worse for us when we found out what Teutons really were.  For years we were told that Jews were a sort of Englishman because they were British subjects.  It is all the worse for us now we have to regard them, not subjectively as subjects, but objectively as objects; as objects of a fierce hatred among the Moslems and the Greeks.  We are in the absurd position of introducing to these people a new friend whom they instantly recognise as an old enemy.  It is an absurd position because it is a false position; but it is merely the penalty of falsehood.

Whether this Eastern anger is reasonable or not may be discussed in a moment; but what is utterly unreasonable is not the anger but the astonishment; at least it is our astonishment at their astonishment.  We might believe ourselves in the view that a Jew is an Englishman; but there was no reason why they should regard him as an Englishman, since they already recognised him as a Jew.  This is the whole present problem of the Jew in Palestine; and it must be solved either