I also refrain from making comment here--I have made it strongly enough elsewhere--upon the strange selection made by the Jews for their first ruler of the Arabs and Christians in Palestine. I will do no more than to say that a desire to shield the less worthy specimens of one's race is natural and even praiseworthy. One may even take a certain glory in that one is able to protect them from outsiders. But to give them too great a prominence is a mistake, and it is indeed deplorable that of the whole world of Jews--from crowds of Jews eminent in administration, and political science, known for their upright dealing and blameless careers--Mr. Balfour's Jewish advisers (whoever they were) should have pitched on the author of the Marconi contract and the spokesman of the famous declaration in the House of Commons that no politician had touched Marconi shares. * * * * * OUR DUTY CHAPTER XII OUR DUTY The solution which I propose, which I believe could be made stable, and which I further believe is the only stable one, demands a greater, a more necessary effort upon our side than upon that of our guests. It is the average man who must do his duty in the matter, and it is upon him that the responsibility will fall, if we take up once again that wretched sequence of ill-ease, persecution, reaction, which has marked so many centuries. We are the vast majority, we are the organism within which this small minority moves. We are, or could be if we chose, the makers of our own laws, and we are certainly the makers of our own political moods. I know it is the custom to throw all the responsibility upon the other side, to be perpetually devising instruments for their guidance which soon become instruments for their oppression, and in general to imagine a problem wherein the part of the European is purely negative and all the work has to be done by the Jewish stranger. That attitude is not only false but grossly undignified. When men accuse some one weaker than themselves of interference with, and even of acquiring power over, them they condemn themselves. It is in the main our fault if an equilibrium has so rarely been reached in all these sixty generations of debate. For however alien, however irritant the foreign body be, it is we who have in our hands the solvent of that irritant and of relieving the strain which it causes.