One often wonders what some of the great figures of the past would say on today’s topics, if they could be brought back for a few minutes to the conference table. No doubt conditions have changed. But much also remains the same.

And it is very much to be doubted whether we are any the wiser today than we used to be. For as the English writer, Cyril Connolly, has said: “We come mentally of age when we discover that the great minds of the past, whom we have patronized, are not less intelligent than we because they happen to be dead.”

Perhaps in the midst of all today’s troubles in the Middle East the one man who might best be called back for consultation would be Earl Cromer. From 1877 to 1907 he held one important commission after another from the British Government. In his latter years he summed up the accumulated wisdom of his experiences in an article in The Spectator in 1913.

If Earl Cromer were here today he would point out that “nationalist movements” in the Middle East are nothing new. They are not a phenomenon of our times. They have occurred again and again. The important thing, he would say, is to judge the depth and reality of the movement and to deal with it accordingly.

Earl Cromer would suggest that the type of nationalism that deserves firm treatment is that which is being manipulated by some demagogue for his own interests. Very often this demagogue will be afraid that his own sins are about to descend upon his own head, and will stir up a nationalistic unrest to offset the unrest that may be seething about his own palaces.

Such a demagogue may be exceedingly troublesome. But no matter how great his skill in mass manipulation, he will bring about his own doom. To conciliate him only helps him to elude his just deserts, and gives an apparent substance to his false witness. In the Middle East it is not possible, even for the shrewdest leader, to support an effective nationalist uprising if he himself is an utter sham.

No doubt Earl Cromer would see the application of this rule to King Farouk of Egypt, one of the weakest and most callous rulers in Egypt’s history. But he would take a very different estimate of Premier Mossadegh of Iran. Whatever the timidities or instability of Premier Mossadegh may be, he has united his appeal to nationalism upon the solid miseries of his people.

It should be the purpose of policy, Lord Cromer would emphasize, to prevent the rise of this kind of nationalism. And this policy, is, quite simply, to give “careful attention to the material interests of the people.” He himself, in his own career, had steadily advocated and administered measures for education, relief from taxes, the abolition of forced labor, plans for irrigation, and the maintenance of peasant proprietors.

No power, he would emphasize, can avoid nationalistic disturbances, if it allows widespread misery to arise, or to be tolerated. And when such disturbances do arise, they will not be artificial, or a mere splutter. They will not be merely an attempt to switch the blame or distract the attention. They will “possess a real rather than a spurious vitality.”

And Earl Cromer drew a lesson that nothing has changed, nor ever will. “The lesson,” he wrote, “is that the best, and indeed the only, way to combat successfully the proceedings of such demagogues or agitators is to limit their field of action by the removal of any real grievances which, if still existent, they would be able to use as a lever to awaken the blind wrath of Demos.”

No doubt Earl Cromer would say that firmness in Iran could not now avail because the nationalistic grievances were allowed to become too real.

And no doubt he would also say that firmness in Egypt would be the only policy, because the grievances there being exploited for the sake of nationalism are really domestic, and will sooner or later gather before the palace gate of Egypt’s own ruler.

It had been Earl Cromer’s experience that British politicians and a greater part of the British press, tended to see eastern “nationalisms” without any clear distinction. As the result they called for firmness where they ought to have conciliated, and conciliated where they ought to have stood firm.

No doubt Earl Cromer would suggest today that the whole success of any British policy in the Middle East would depend directly upon the ability of those in charge not to mistake the real nationalism for the spurious, or the spurious for the real. And no doubt Earl Cromer would still be right.