presentative in form but financial
in fact. That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear;
and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum
after the official. It must be remembered that I am not at this
stage judging these groups, but merely very rapidly sketching them,
like figures and costumes in the street.

The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists;
who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy.
Among these also I am happy to have friends; and I may venture to call
the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote
from Zionism. Dr. Eder, the President of the Zionist Commission,
is a man for whom I conceived a respect long ago when he protested,
as a professional physician, against the subjection of the poor
to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence.
He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap
anybody else's child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness
they were themselves too feeble-minded to define. It was defended,
very characteristically, by a combination of precedent and progress;
and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws.
That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws
to people whom no sane man would call lunatics. It is as if they
were to alter the terms of a quarantine law from "lepers"
to "light-haired persons"; and then say blandly that the principle
was the same. The humour and human sympathy of a Jewish doctor was
very welcome to us when we were accused of being Anti-Semites, and we
afterwards asked Dr. Eder for his own views on the Jewish problem.
We found he was then a very strong Zionist; and this was long before
he had the faintest chance of figuring as a leader of Zionism.
And this accident is important; for it stamps the sincerity of the small
group of original Zionists, who were in favour of this nationalist
ideal when all the international Jewish millionaires were against it.
To my mind the most serious point now against it is that the millionaires
are for it. But it is enough to note here the reality of the ideal
in men like Dr. Eder and Dr. Weizmann, and doubtless many others.
The only defect that need be noted, as a mere detail of portraiture,
is a certain excessive vigilance and jealousy and pertinacity in
the wrong place, which sometimes makes the genuine Zionists unpopular
with the Englis