These experiences were made near the troglodyte village es-Sal; and as Mr. Oliphant peeped into the subterranean dwellings and dark caves, with a view to his colonization company, he exclaimed, "Indeed, there is probably no country in the world where an immigrant population would find such excellent shelter all ready prepared for them, or where they could step into the identical abodes which had been vacated by their occupants at least 1,500 years ago, and use the same doors and windows."[68] It is just possible, however, that emigrants might not care to have their necks and wrists circled with rings of fire, and their bodies covered with swarms of loathsome insects, for the romantic delights of living in underground dens that had not been occupied for 1,500 years. Mr. Oliphant's scheme only contemplates Jewish emigrants, to whom such conditions would not be altogether novel. "I should not," he says, "expect men to come from England or France, but from European and Asiatic Turkey itself, as well as from Russia, Galicia, Roumania, Servia, and the Slav countries." He has, however, his eye on the whole Jewish race throughout the world when he says:-- "As the area of land which I should propose, in the first instance, for colonization would not exceed a million, or, at most, a million and a half acres, it would be hard if, out of nearly 7,000,000 of people attached to it by the tradition of former possession, enough could not be found to subscribe a capital of £1,000,000, or even more, for its purchase and settlement, and if, out of that number, a selection of emigrants could not be made, possessing sufficient capital of their own to make them desirable colonists."[69] This article is not a review of Mr. Oliphant's interesting book, and therefore I shall not follow him into the details of his colonization scheme, where he narrows it, first, to Oriental Jews exclusively, and second to the elevation of such Jews into petty landlords. "It has been objected," he says, "that the Jews are not agriculturists, and that any attempts to develop the agricultural resources of the country through their instrumentality must result in failure. In the first instance, it is rather as landed proprietors than as labourers on the soil, that I should invite them to emigrate into Palestine, where they could lease their own land at high prices to native farmers if they preferred, instead of lending money on crops at 20 or 25 per cent. to the peasants, as they do at present."[70]