ADMINISTRATION IN THE EAST

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23442, 5 March 1938, Page 4

ADMINISTRATION IN THE EAST

FASCINATING RECORD BY SIR RONALD STORRS

"Orientations." By Sir Ronald Storrs, K.C.M.G. Illustrated. London: Ivor Nicholson. £1 Us 6d.

To some men ten talents are given, and at the end of their lives they have another ten. Among this company of happy labourers, Ronald Storrs must take an honoured place. He was exceptionally fortunate in his heredity and his opportunities. Born into the class that at-that time was governing the Empire, and into a family of scholarship and originality,.he possessed both the right social background and the right type of intellect for the eminence that he was to attain. Charterhouse and Cambridge formed his mind, and his own omnivorous reading developed it. His brief pen-pictures of his parents, of his masters, and of his tutors are brilliant essays in appreciation. He was clearly a happy child, and as clearly deserved his good fortune. Leaving Cambridge with a first, and with the foundations of his wide classical and Oriental culture well and truly laid, he was fortunate to begin his career in a country that was to be ruled' by a succession of great men, namely, Egypt. It was a curious and anomalous situation in which the young Storrs found himself, in a country where Great Britain was legally only primus inter pares, but actually very much cock of the roost. He was em-ployed-at first in various departments variously unsuited to his talents, but all the time was widening and deepening his knowledge of the East its peoples. In this;.book the most notable quality is the modesty of its author. This is so great that it would amount to a positive defect, were it not that it is comparatively easy to read between the lines. To be appointed Oriental Secretary to the British Con? sul-general at the age of 27 bespeaks something more than ordinary brilliance. And if that were not enough the quotation from T. E. Lawrence given on the dustcover supplies the deficiency. " The first of us," said Lawrence, " was Ronald Storrs, Oriental secretary of the Residency, the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East, and subtly efficient, despite his diversion of energy in love of music and letters, of sculpture; painting, of whatever was beautiful in the world's fruit . . . Storrs was always first, and the great man among us." ~,.., This, book is the record of a full life, sDent in exciting places, and it is not one to be read in a night. The author was Oriental secretary under Sir Eldon Gorst, and later under Lord Kitchener. From these men he received both kindness and confidence, and of both he writes in a style which is itself a rebuke to those modern depreciators miscalled historians. In another part Df his book he says "I am a pro-man, not an anti-man." and this notable quality shines through his whole writing. He was ever quick to see' the good in his fellows and his chiefs, and in appreciating their good qualities he called forth the best in them in response. He must have been an admirable subordinate, -as later he became a much-beloved chief. And in remembering' times past his attitude has in no way changed. Of Lord Kitcheaer, particularly, of whom so much has been written in denigration, it is pleasant to read in what way he was great, for great he undoubtedly was. But of everyone who appears m these pages, and it is a vast multitude, if there is anything good to say, the author says it. He actively seeks out the best, than which in an administrator there can be no greater quality The result was that, in personal relations, which are sometimes rather distinct from political ones, he never failed to win respect and often love. This must clearly have contributed in' very large degree to his outstanding success as an administrator of Eastern peoples, for it opened to him many doors that were closed for his countrymen. The Egyptians, the Arabs, even the Greek-thinking Cvpriots, everyone, indeed, but the intolerant and uncomprehending Zionist Jews, received him into friendship. And of his enemies it may be said that the most bitter were those with whom he had had no opportunity of coming into contact. ' His achievements, like his good qualities, are rather inferred than stated in these pages, but. reading again between the lines in many cases, an impressive record appears. After his period as Oriental Secretary, at the end of which, in the early days of the Great Wafr. he discovered the bright particular genius of Lawrence, and made possible those exploits which were to launch the Lawrence legend, he found his way to Jerusalem. That turbulent town was to make his name and win his heart for ever. General Allenby shares the happy fate of the rest of Sir Ronald's chiefs. He is here made known to the reader as never before, and his greatness illuminated by the generous searchlight of the author's prose.

In some ways the section on Jerusalem, of which Sir Ronald was for a number of years Military Governor, is the most interesting in the book. To

a large extent he may be said to be the maker, and even more the preserver, of modern Jerusalem. He founded and ran the pro-Jerusalem Society, with a team no other man could have kept together, comprised of representatives of every race and every faith that had a stake in the city. He collected thousands of pounds from abroad for the preservation and restoration of the ancient buildings, and used his despotic power as Governor to preserve the city from desecration and vandalistic building schemes. His experience in Egypt stood him in great stead in keeping his finger on the pulse of the most excitable city in the world, and his knowledge of the peoples concerned enabled him to keep the peace where many a man might have deemed the task impossible. The exposition of the difficulties of the Administration is brilliantly done, and after reading it even the bitterest opponents will probably begin to suspect that their judgments have not always been pronounced with full knowledge of the circumstances. He criticises seldom, though some of his chiefs in the Holy Land were not up to or near the standard of Sir Herbert Samuel. It is rather his silence than his utterance that condemns. This makes all the more forceful his severe criticism of the altitude of many Zionists, of their ignoring of the very rral Arab case, and of their complication of the diffi* culties of administration in the most confused population, racially and ref ligiously, in the Near East, which is to say, in the world. The chapter on Zionism, which presents the British case more clearly than it has ever before been put, will rank as a major contribution to that yet unsettled problem. The book rejects also the arguments of both sides based on, the alleged conflict of the McMahon Agreement and the Balfour Declaration, and shows that there was actually no conflict at all, thus settling a point which has troubled many students of the whole problem of the national home for the Jews. The final chapters, on the Governorate of Cyprus, are equally good in a different way. The author illuminates everything he touches, and his pen pictures of Cyprus are veritable gems of description. Here again the British case is put forward with a force and clarity that earn our assent, without the errors and hesitations that occasionally marred it being ever slurred over or forgotten. The problems of that island are related to the whole problem of colonial administration, instead of being dealt with, in vacuo as is so often done by special pleaders. The tragic burning of all the author's household goods is told with a restrained lack of resentment that only enhances the high opinion of his character already created by the earlier chapters.

This book is the best of history, in so far as history can be written so near the event, and is enlivened and lightened by portraits of personalities of every race and creed. Something is added to our knowledge of Lawrence and more to our knowledge of that brilliant society that is so distant from us here, the world of international letters, which has no frontiers and needs no passports. This is a book that will be found on the shelves of every one who is interested in the chequered pattern of his own times. For not only does it tell of a life that was lived to the full in every sense, but it is written in a prose that indicates that the Civil Service's profit was very much, a loss to literature. In a way it is a tour de force, for it was written almost without records, the majority of these having perished in the Cyprus fire, but that may have resulted as much in a gain in universality as it did in a loss in matter' of detail. One cannot regret the fact that certain particulars are unrecorded when in their place we have a prospect of the last thirty years which gains much of its sweep and breadth from that very lack. P. H. W. N.