ficance even in our first survey, for it
suggests a truth easy to abuse, but I think impossible to ignore.
I mean that there is something non-political about Moslem morality.
Perverse as it may appear, I suspect that most of their
political movements result from their non-political morality.
They become politicians because they know they are not political;
and feel their simple and more or less healthy life is at a disadvantage,
in face of the political supremacy of the English and the political
subtlety of the Jews.

For instance, the tradition of Turkish rule is simply a joke.
All the stories about it are jokes, and often very good jokes.
My own favourite incident is that which is still commemorated
in the English cathedral by an enormous hole in the floor.
The Turks dug up the pavement looking for concealed English artillery;
because they had been told that the bishop had given his blessing
to two canons. The bishop had indeed recently appointed two canons
to the service of the Church, but he had not secreted them under
the floor of the chancel. There was another agreeable incident when
the Turkish authorities, by an impulsive movement of religious toleration,
sent for a Greek priest to bury Greek soldiers, and told him
to take his choice in a heap of corpses of all creeds and colours.
But at once the most curious and the most common touch of comedy
is the perpetual social introduction to solid and smiling citizens
who have been nearly hanged by the Turks. The fortunate gentleman
seems still to be regarding his escape with a broad grin.
If you were introduced to a polite Frenchman who had come straight
from the guillotine, or to an affable American who had only just
vacated the electrical chair, you would feel a faint curiosity
about the whole story. If a friend introduced somebody, saying,
"My friend Robinson; his sentence has been commuted to penal servitude,"
or "My Uncle William, just come from Dartmoor Prison," your mind
and perhaps your lips would faintly form the syllables "What for?"
But evidently, under Turkish rule, being hanged was like
being knocked down by a cab; it might happen to anybody.
This is a parenthesis, since I am only dealing here with the
superficial experience of the streets, especially in the snow.
But it will be well to safeguard it by saying that this unpolitical
carelessness and comprehensiveness of the indiscriminate Turk had its
tragic as well as its comic side. It was by no mea