Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/434

430 of human activity. The factor of time is indispensable in all such movements. The ancient Hebrews of the Exodus spent forty years in the wilderness before they were ready to adopt an agricultural existence, and it is a new generation nurtured in the wilderness of modern Palestine who now appreciate the need of a more effective conquest of the art of agriculture.

The persistence of the colonists in the face of so many difficulties naturally arouses interest in what might be accomplished if a people capable of so much devotion and self-sacrifice should really face the problem of developing an agricultural civilization adapted to the local conditions. As the colonists had not been farmers in Europe, the life they undertook in Palestine broke absolutely with all their previous existence. What the previous existence must have been can best be judged, perhaps, by what the colonists are willing to accept in Palestine as an improvement. The absence of agricultural knowledge or experience means that they must work at first at the greatest possible disadvantage, and encounter all manner of unnecessary toils and hardships that people with agricultural traditions would readily avoid. But even after incredible perseverance has overcome the handicap of unskillful and inefficient labor and brought material prosperity, the lack of agricultural ideals is even more apparent, for the colonists have still to appreciate and utilize the opportunities that are within their reach, in the direction of securing the normal advantages of agricultural life. And yet in some respects the conditions appear extremely favorable for progress along new lines. The very existence of the colonies is evidence of a strong determination to escape the artificial restrictions represented by the conditions of life in the European cities whence most of the colonists have come.

In the effort to resume a simple agricultural existence the colonists may be said to have gone back about 3,000 years to the time of the ancient theocracy, before the establishment of kingly government in the persons of Saul and David. The provisions of the law of Moses evidently contemplated the development of a purely agricultural civilization, and made no provision for the control of urban populations by a permanent centralized government. The modern colonies are also free from any attempt at governmental organization and it may be this that has enabled them to develop peaceably in the midst of a population traditionally hostile, but actually much more tolerant than many European communities.

The reasons of safety that might have impelled the early colonists to crowd themselves together in small slum-like villages no longer justify the continuance of such methods at the present time. The more settled state of the country and the development of telephones and other means of communication would make it possible for each family to live on its