this class are few, and most of them are men whom the Jewish Colonisation Association settled in Lower Galilee on the tenant-farmer system. Their holdings are comparatively large, and they have neither time nor need to work for others; on the contrary, they themselves need labour at certain seasons, and then these ex-labourers, having become employers, do not invariably employ Jewish labour! This last-mentioned phenomenon gave me much food for thought all the time that I was in Palestine. Among these farmers I knew some young men who had previously been regarded as among the pick of the labourers, not only from the point of view of efficiency, but also from that of character and devotion to the national ideal. If these men—I said to myself—could not stand the test, then perhaps it is really impossible for anybody to stand it, and whether it be for the reasons which the farmers suggest, or for other reasons, the fact is there all the same. But when I put this problem to labourers who had not yet become farmers, they replied that these comrades of theirs, when once they had become farmers, had lost their proletariat mentality and acquired a different psychology. Then I asked further: “If so, where is the solution? You yourselves tell me that most of your comrades came to Palestine in the hope of becoming farmers in course of time, and that as this hope grew fainter (because the Jewish Colonisation Association changed its system, and ceased to settle on its land labourers who had not a certain amount of money) the number of new arrivals grew less. But if the labourers come with the hope of becoming farmers, and then, when they have achieved their ambition, lose their idealism and employ non-Jews on their own land, how can you ever ‘capture labour,’ and what is the good of your efforts?” To this question the labourers nowhere gave me a satisfactory answer![80] * * * * *