By the New P&O A PLEASURE CRUISE Oil-burning Steamship RANCHI 16,600 tons. EDINBURGH 15,000 Horse-power. LONDON ROTTERDAM BALHOLMEN BERGEN OSLO STOCKHOLM DANZIG NORWAY AND THE NORTHERN CAPITALS 23 DAYS-AUG. 15 to SEPT. FARES from 30 GUINEAS On this cruise passengers w have a brand-new P. & 0. li as their pleasure yacht at and their floating hotel in per The RANCHI,' the second: be completed of four beauti 16,600-ton vessels designed the Indian Mail Service, has fo passenger decks, an electric pa senger lift, handsomely appoin: public rooms, including loung writing and card rooms, smoking saloons and large airy and well-lightdining saloons; broad promenade decks, a first-class orchestra and a skil culinary staff. There is a limited number of cabines-de-luxe. The cabr are unusually large, and not more than two passengers will be berthed in a cabin unless by request. Besides exploring the beautiful Sogne and Hardanger Fjords, the RANCHI will visit the more attractive of the norther capital cities. A plan of the itinerary is shown above. A programme, pic turing the 'RANCHI' and 1er cruise, with a cabin plan and any desire further information, may be had on application:— P. & O. CHIEF PASSENGER OFFICE (F. H. GROSVENOR, Manager), P. & O. HOUSE, 14, COCKSPUR STREET, LONDON, S.W.. GIBRALTAR, MARSEILLES AND EGYPT AT HOLIDAY FARES Programme on application as above. 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 Samue', 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 |