said about Jerusalem as a knot of realities.  It is especially a knot of popular realities.  Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is so small a place, it is a domain and a dominion for the masses.  Democracy is never quite democratic except when it is quite direct; and it is never quite direct except when it is quite small.  So soon as a mob has grown large enough to have delegates it has grown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are often much the more representative of the two.  Now in a place so small as Jerusalem, what we call the rank and file really counts.  And it is generally true, in religions especially, that the real enthusiasm or even fanaticism is to be found in the rank and file.  In all intense religions it is the poor who are more religious and the rich who are more irreligious.  It is certainly so with the creeds and causes that come to a 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.