It was a purely mechanical distinction between the military and civil government that would lend to such figures the stiffness of a drumhead court martial.
And even those who differed with him accused him in practice, not of militarist lack of sympathy with any of those he ruled, but rather with too imaginative a sympathy with some of them.
To know these things, however slightly, and then read the English newspapers afterwards is often amusing enough; but I have only mentioned the matter because there is a real danger in so crude a differentiation.
It would be a bad thing if a system military in form but representative in fact gave place to a system representative in form but financial in fact.

That is what the Arabs and many of the English fear; and with the mention of that fear we come to the next stratum after the official.

It must be remembered that I am not at this stage judging these groups, but merely very rapidly sketching them, like figures and costumes in the street.
The group standing nearest to the official is that of the Zionists; who are supposed to have a place at least in our official policy.
Among these also I am happy to have friends; and I may venture to call the official head of the Zionists an old friend in a matter quite remote from Zionism.

Dr.Eder, the President of the Zionist Commission, is a man for whom I conceived a respect long ago when he protested, as a professional physician, against the subjection of the poor to medical interference to the destruction of all moral independence.
He criticised with great effect the proposal of legislators to kidnap anybody else's child whom they chose to suspect of a feeblemindedness they were themselves too feeble-minded to define.

It was defended, very characteristically, by a combination of precedent and progress; and we were told that it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws.
That is to say, it only extended the principle of the lunacy laws to people whom no sane man would call lunatics.