But I am not so certain as I should like to be, that I should at that moment enjoy the personality of the Copt.
For these reasons it seems really desirable, or at least defensible, to defer any premature reconstruction of disputed things, and to begin this book as a mere note-book or sketch-book of things as they are, or at any rate as they appear.
It was in this irregular order, and in this illogical disproportion, that things did in fact appear to me, and it was some time before I saw any real generalisation that would reduce my impressions to order.
I saw that the groups disagreed, and to some extent why they disagreed, long before I could seriously consider anything on which they would be likely to agree.

I have therefore confined the first section of this book to a mere series of such impressions, and left to the last section a study of the problem and an attempt at the solution.
Between these two I have inserted a sort of sketch of what seemed to me the determining historical events that make the problem what it is.
Of these I will only say for the moment that, whether by a coincidence or for some deeper cause, I feel it myself to be a case of first thoughts being best; and that some further study of history served rather to solidify what had seemed merely a sort of vision.
I might almost say that I fell in love with Jerusalem at first sight; and the final impression, right or wrong, served only to fix the fugitive fancy which had seen, in the snow on the city, the white crown of a woman of Bethlehem.
But there is another cause for my being content for the moment, with this mere chaos of contrasts.

There is a very real reason for emphasising those contrasts, and for shunning the temptation to shut our eyes to them even considered as contrasts.
It is necessary to insist that the contrasts are not easy to turn into combinations; that the red robes of Rome and the green scarves of Islam will not very easily fade into a dingy russet; that the gold of Byzantium and the brass of Babylon will require a hot furnace to melt them into any kind of amalgam.

The reason for this is akin to what has already been said about Jerusalem as a knot of realities.

It is especially a knot of popular realities.
Although it is so small a place, or rather because it is so small a place, it is a domain and a dominion for the masses.
Democracy is never quite democratic except when it is quite direct; and it is never quite direct except when it is quite small.
So soon as a mob has grown large enough to have delegates it has grown large enough to have despots; indeed the despots are often much the more representative of the two.