The Late Lord Melchett and Palestine: Mr. Bolitho Who is to Write His Biography Visits Palestine “to

The part which Palestine played in the life of the late Lord Melohett is being investigated here now by Mr. Hector Bolitho, the well-known writer, whose “Life of the Prince Consort” was published a few weeks ago, and who is how collecting material for his forthcoming biography of the late Lord Melchett.

The political and industrial chapters of Lord Melchett’s life belong to England, Mr. Bolitho said in an interview with the J.T.A. here, but the spiritual qualities in his life flowered in Palestine, and I feel here something of the passion with which he contemplated the valleys of this wonderful country.

I have been in every country of the British Empire, so that colonising and the conquest of the land are not new to me, Mr. Bolitho went on. I have seen the little houses the pioneers have built on the edgle of the New Zealand bush and the lonely farmhouses of the African veldt, but there is no object lesson in all the British Empire so dramatic as that which I saw on the morning I arrived in Palestine. As the car drove towards Nazareth, I looked up the hill and saw an Arab village picturesque but squalid, and in the field near by the equally picturesque Arab scratching the earth with his inadequate wooden plough.

I turned and looked down the hill and saw a Jewish settlement, fresh and shining with the prosperity which only youth and energy can bring to the new earth.

I am very anxious while I am here, Mr. Bolitho concluded, to absorb something of the spirit which inspired Lord Melchett in the later years of his life. I can well understand how Lord Melchett came here, and found so much to excite and inspire him.