This fancy was fatal to the Germans; it is fatal to the Anglo-Saxons,
whenever any of them forswear the glorious name of Englishmen
and Americans to fall into that forlorn description.
This is not so when the nation is felt as a noble abstraction,
of which the individual is proud in the abstract.
A Frenchman is proud of France, and therefore may think himself
unworthy of France. But a German is proud of being a German;
and he cannot be too unworthy to be a German when he is a German.
In short, mere family pride flatters every member of the family;
it produced the arrogance of the Germans, and it is capable of producing
a much subtler kind of arrogance in the Jews. From this particular
sort of self-deception the more savage man of the desert is free.
If he is not considering somebody as a Moslem, he will consider
him as a man. At the price of something like barbarism, he has
at least been saved from ethnology.

But here again the obvious is a limit as well as a light to him.
It does not permit, for instance, anything fine or subtle in
the sentiment of sex. Islam asserts admirably the equality of men;
but it is the equality of males. No one can deny that a noble
dignity is possible even to the poorest, who has seen the Arabs
coming in from the desert to the cities of Palestine or Egypt.
No one can deny that men whose rags are dropping off their backs can
bear themselves in a way befitting kings or prophets in the great
stories of Scripture. No one can be surprised that so many fine
artists have delighted to draw such models on the spot, and to make
realistic studies for illustrations to the Old and New Testaments.
On the road to Cairo one may see twenty groups exactly like that
of the Holy Family in the pictures of the Flight into Egypt;
with only one difference. The man is riding on the ass.