The suggestion was eagerly
taken up by other creatures of the same kind, and I really do not see why
it was not carried farther and applied to other lamentable uprisings in
history. Thus, it is a remarkable fact that the weather is generally
rather warm in Egypt; and this cannot but throw a light on the sudden and
mysterious impulse of the Israelites to escape from captivity. The
English strikers used some barren republican formula (and as the
definitions of the medieval schoolmen), some academic shibboleth about
being free men and not being forced to work except for a wage accepted by
them. Just in the same way the Israelites in Egypt employed some dry
scholastic quibble about the extreme difficulty of making bricks with
nothing to make them of. But whatever fantastic intellectual excuses they
may have put forward for their strange and unnatural conduct in walking
out when the prison door was open, there can be no doubt that the real
cause was the warm weather. Such a climate notoriously also produces
delusions and horrible fancies, such as Mr. Kipling describes. And it
was while their brains were disordered by the heat that the Jews fancied
that they were founding a nation, that they were led by a prophet, and, in
short, that they were going to be of some importance in the affairs of the
world.
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