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Salaried Splendor. Tall (6 ft. 3 or 4 in.), heavy of frame and slow of movement, Saud scarcely looks the part of a desert chieftain. The eldest of the Old Lion's 38 living sons, Saud was named heir over the objections of some of the family, who considered his young brother Feisal more intelligent and forceful. He has proved himself gentle, patient and kind, with none of the deviousness that has too often given Arab politicians a bad 'name. His brown eyes are warm, but so weak that even with heavy glasses he cannot read ordinary print (state papers must be specially prepared in oversized type). His smile, a trifle practiced, shows a gleam of gold in a front tooth.
More conscious of the outside world than his father (who never left the Arabian peninsula except for two trips to Egypt on the ground that naked-faced women would offend him), Saud seems far more eager to bring its advantages to his backward land. He cut off the allowances of his high-spending relatives and put them on salaries. Now 322 princes of the royal blood get $32,000 a year plus expenses (upkeep of palaces, cars, travel allowances). He installed Crown Prince Feisal as Prime Minister and Foreign Minister in a ten-man Cabinet which had few duties but provided jobs for four other princes (each of whom gets $320,000 as salary). But it was not easy to crack down hard. Each prince is the offspring of a mother from a particular tribe, and is regarded as the tribe's special voice in Riyadh palace. Any restraint was taken as a tribal slight. Furthermore, the princely spending had been on such a huge scale that it had become a major item in Middle Eastern trade. Lebanon, which estimated that the Saudis' princely patronage was worth $30 million a year, protested violently over Saud's puritanical parsimony. As a result, no one has paid much attention to a decree banning further export of capital from the country—Prince Feisal is building a $12 million apartment house in Cairo. Prince Talal, among others, owns 14 apartment houses there, and is building himself a palace in Cairo's suburbs.
Saud launched an extensive program of public works, ranging from irrigation dams to cement plants. He has built 36 new hospital buildings, including the King's hospital in Riyadh, which ranks among the Middle East's finest. He has stepped up the education program to which the old king never allotted more than 2% of the government's estimated total revenues. But all Saud's money cannot buy the trained manpower that centuries of illiteracy has denied Arabia. As late as 1947 the graduating class of the government high school totaled twelve students. For lack of trained men, the government's records are still kept in pencil, with no copies. For months the Saudi air force school had no students for lack of candidates with enough education to understand the courses. Millions of dollars of hospital equipment gathers dust for lack of trained medical men who could use it. Jiddah, the nation's biggest city with 200,000 people, has no daily newspaper and only one weekly.