By W. R. BARKER, C.B. 794 By GEORGE PILCHER, M.P. 809 The St. Lawrence-Great Lakes Deep Waterway By H. P. HAIN FRISWELL 892 By COULSON KERNAHAN A Literary Experiment: The Spanish Farm' and '6494 ' 910 By L. F. EASTERBROOK 925 LONDON: CONSTABLE & CO. LTD., ORANGE STREET, LEICESTER SQUARE, W.C.2 PARIS: MESSAGERIES HACHETTE, 111, Rue Reaumur. NEW YORK: LEONARD SCOTT PUBLICATION Co. All rights reserved. PRICE THREE SHILLINGS LORD BALFOUR has long since returned from his ill-advised expedition to the Holy Land, where on April 1 he duly performed, according to programme, the somewhat premature ceremony of opening the Hebrew University-premature because the University is not yet born and no more than an embryo in the womb of expectant Zion, and not only premature, but entirely superfluous, for the University had already been opened! Short indeed is the public memory, but on the afternoon of December 22, 1924, as The Times correspondent at Jerusalem then duly recorded, 'in the presence of Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner for Palestine, the Institute of Jewish Studies in connection with the Hebrew University on Mount Scopus was opened. This is popularly regarded as the real opening of the Hebrew University, of which the foundation-stone was laid by VOL. XCVII-No. 580 781 3 F General Allenby in 1918.' The necessity for a second inaugural function under auspices more brilliant than those of the High Commissioner for Palestine may not be clear to the casual observer, but is obvious enough nevertheless, and may be discussed in connection with the motives of the Zionist leaders who led Lord Balfour into danger. Those motives were mainly of a financial order, but not entirely. Whatever modifications of principle or interpretation may have supervened with the passage of time, the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 was intended by its Zionist coauthors to pave the way for a Jewish domination of Palestine, and that intention was still uppermost in the minds of men-and practically unchallenged, as we had not then broken our promises to the Arabs-when in 1918 Lord Allenby laid the foundationstone of the new temple, the temple of Mammon. Since then those foundations have been buried by the sands of controversial storms, and Jewry has been discouraged by the apparent recoil of the British Government before the many-headed monster which it has failed to exorcise. And the murmuring is loud against the princes,' for the utmost that Israel will concede to the inhabitants of the land is that they should be hewers of wood and drawers of water unto all the congregation, as the princes had promised them.' If that ideal is not to be realised, there are as good universities among the Gentiles as ever there will be on Mount Scopus. one. But the leaders of Zion are wise in their generation. They know that the British Government, for all its good-will, is subject to certain limitations in a land where the Hivites, the Jebusites, the Perizzites and the rest of them, outnumber Israel as nine to The official census of 1922, which did not fully account for the nomad Arabs of Southern Palestine, showed but 83,000 Jews in a population of 757,000 souls, and the proportion is much the same to-day as it was then. They know, moreover, that the achievement of a Jewish national home in Palestine is an essential preliminary to the transformation of Palestine into a national home for the Jews. And their one concern is to maintain a steady influx of Jewish immigrants into the country against 'the day.' The University is their sheet-anchor, for education is a prime necessity of the chosen race; but to fill its yet unbuilt courts a practical demonstration of the political future of Zion was needed. And none so fit to grace that demonstration as the author of the great covenant-or, rather, perhaps, the captain of the Lord's host.' Lord Balfour did not go to Palestine to study the measure of Arab hostility to the scheme which bears his name. He went convinced that it existed only in the imaginations of ' enthusiastic intermediaries,' and he left Palestine, after a triumphal progress through the Jewish Home, confirmed in his conviction. But he would have been wiser to wait till he was out of the wood before he shouted. He certainly shouted too soon, and the incidents which clouded and abruptly curtailed his visit to Syria would seem to require some explanation in view of the painful impression, mixed with universal satisfaction at his own escape, which they have created in the public mind. The facts are plain enough. From them conclusions will be drawn as various as the sentiments of men. But this country and other countries—to say nothing of the League of Nations-must base their policy on the conclusions which appeal to the average man, that is to say, to the majority; and it will not be without interest to sum up the evidence provided by Lord Balfour's visit for the benefit of the jury of the world's democracy, on which lies the responsibility of finding a verdict. Be the pros and cons of the Zionist policy what they may, there were many among its friends and supporters who viewed with misgiving the project of a visit to Jerusalem by one who, justly or unjustly, is saddled in popular estimation with specific responsibility for a dispensation, admittedly distasteful to the great majority of the population of the country on which it has been imposed-by force. Lord Balfour, however, was at the moment a private individual and free to go whither he would at his own risk, and the responsibility for making a decision in the face of prevalent misgivings lay on himself, on the Palestine Government and the Colonial Office, which could of course have prevented or discouraged him, and finally on the Zionist leaders. The latter were mainly concerned, for financial reasons, to revive enthusiasm for a scheme on which the hopes of Zion are largely founded. Financial support could only be obtained by some striking effort of publicity, and they decided in favour of the visit and got their subscriptions-very considerable subscriptions. Lord Balfour was willing to risk his life in a noble cause, and His Majesty's Government, acting of course behind the effective screen of the Palestine Government, saw to it that the risk should be reduced to a negligible minimum. Everybody concerned is to be congratulated on the very effective manner in which the arrangements were carried out, and, as Government servants do not ordinarily receive remuneration for overtime services, it is to be hoped that their devotion will be duly recognised in the next distribution of Birthday' honours. We are told that these arrangements involved no extra expense to the Palestine Government, or therefore to the British taxpayer. That is satisfactory enough, and, while a statement of fact in the House of Commons cannot always be taken as absolute evidence of its truth, we may be content to suppose that the Zionist Executive paid the bill |