Item 04: G. O. Hawkins letters to his family, 2 January 1915-November 1917 - Page 18
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[Page 18]
2
One fact regarding limited capacity of the human being is this:
The more he come to know his surroundings and becomes familure with details of what was a first a strange and unknown environment, the less he knows as an historian.
The Arabs here are interesting to new world people like ourselves
where labour is cheap that progress we call advancement is almost unknown. It pays better to employ hundreds to carry road metal in baskets on their backs at a small wage than it does to engage five horses and drays for instance. Machinery has no value. For a people like the Arabs their laws [indecipherable] and other tools of the Carpenters trade are as they were 2000 years ago, yet they were Carpenters when we of the English stock were savages.
Advancement as the Westerner knows it is not understood nor desired by the Eastern mind.
The old water wheel with its wooden toothed mill driven by oxen power is a picturesque example of this, so is the old wooden plough which still services its purpose and is as yet sufficient for the Arab who tills a small area of very rich soil. There are many poor but life seems easy, most of the natures times seems spent in the rest a high state of civilization