19 FEBRUARY 1921, Page 11

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

[Letters of the length of one of our leading paragraphs are often more read, and therefore more effective, than those which fill treble the space.] PROBLEMS OF ZIONISM.

[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."] am obliged to Mr. Leonard SteM for correcting my financial reference, but whether it is Ottoman debt or Ottoman indemnity with which Palestine is saddled, my point remains unaffected. The "Palestine Mandate," published immediately after the appearance of my letter in your valued columns, is silent upon this Shylockian safeguarding of bondholders. I do not say it is unfair, but I ask our financial expert, Mr. Stein, to inform us whether the same principle has been followed in the other liberated countries, whether Poland, for example, bears its respective shares of the German, Austrian, and Russian pre-war debts? As for Mr. G. Burchett, he seems quite Ignorant of the book on which this correspondence is based. So far from holding that " no race can acquire a prescriptive right to domicile in any territory unless it occupied that terri- tory at the time of the dispersion of the. Jews," I fully recognize that the Arabs in Palestine have a right of domicile, modified only by their inefficiency, which has contributed to destroy rather than to develop the country, while as President of the Jewish Territorial Organization I have long urged that the Jews should acquire a territory in an emptier continent. In his other notion, that I would have unpopular minorities expelled., Mr. Burchett, like most of my critics, misconceives " the universe of discourse " (as logicians call it) in which my idea of race distribution is put forth. That universe is Wilsonian. It would surely be the function of a genuine League of Nations, in cases of invincible incompatibility, to redistribute populations, and I, for my part, would welcome a redistribution of Polish Jewry to more civilized countries, provided it were done in the same spirit of planetary goodwill as I would apply to the Arabs of Palestine.—I am, Sir, &c.,