 | CHAPTER III The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER III
THE FICTIONS AND LIMITATIONS OF BRITISH CONTROL
The British Occupation came as Mehemet Ali had
long ago foreseen; but it came, not from any set purpose
of British policy, but as the inevitable resultant of forces
which he had himself originally set in motion. He had
galvanised Egypt into life again at the very time when
its life was destined to affect more closely than for centuries
before the interests of Europe in general and of
Great Britain in particular. For the application of
steam power to navigation was reopening the old direct
trade route to India and the Far East across the Isthmus
of Suez, which had been for three hundred years diverted
to the longer ocean routes round the Cape, and the disintegration
of the Ottoman Empire, which Mehemet Ali
did so much to accelerate, was bringing the strategical
importance of Egypt once more into relief. That was
the first stage. The second stage covers the failure of
Mehemet Ali's successors, and notably of his grandson,
Ismail, to consolidate his work. Instead of entrenching
the new Egyptian State behind the bulwarks of economic
prosperity and progressive liberty, they brought it to
the verge of ruin, whilst the opening of the Suez Canal
was creating a fresh European and essentially British
interest in the maintenance of peace and order in Egypt.
Egyptian bankruptcy might never have led to the British
Occupation if it had not been followed by Egyptian
anarchy. Neither Lord Salisbury, who was in office
had succeeded him when bankruptcy had led to anarchy,
had the slightest desire to see Great Britain take the
burden—least of all the undivided burden—of intervention
on her shoulders. But none ultimately could
be found to share it with her, and all, however grudgingly,
admitted that she could not shirk it.
The history of the Occupation, like the history of
modern Egypt before the Occupation, falls naturally
into two periods. The first period, from 1882 to 1907,
coincides roughly with that of Lord Cromer's long tenure
of office as British representative in Cairo, armed after
the first few years, in practice, with almost full powers.
The second period, towards which the Anglo-French
Agreement of 1904 prepared a transition, began with
Lord Cromer's retirement, and we have not yet emerged
from it, though the Great War and the proclamation of
the British Protectorate have precipitated a crisis which
must, one way or another, end it.
For there is one feature common to both periods
which even the proclamation of the Protectorate has
not removed, but has, indeed, of late merely accentuated,
and that is the peculiarly anomalous nature of the relationship
with the British Empire into which Egypt was
brought by the Occupation.
When the bombardment of Alexandria in 1882 was
followed by the dispatch of a large expeditionary force
to Egypt, and Mr. Gladstone assured Parliament that we
were not engaged in war, but merely in the operations of
war, he merely propounded the first of the many fictions
to which his Government and every other British Government
since his day has from time to time resorted in
order to avoid any clear definition of the relationship in
which Egypt stands to us. The British Government
shrank—rightly or wrongly—from annexation in 1882,
just as it shrank from it again—rightly or wrongly—
during the Great War. In 1882 they certainly never
realised the difficulties of the situation which "the operations
a long time in believing that the Occupation into which
they had drifted would and could be merely temporary.
In accordance with that belief, they not only pledged
themselves repeatedly to a speedy withdrawal, but
anxiously explored every means of escape compatible
with the responsibility they had assumed towards the
people of Egypt by military intervention. But the
longer we remained in Egypt the more the conviction
forced itself slowly on their reluctant minds that withdrawal
would simply mean the relapse of Egypt either
into the state of chaos from which our military intervention
had rescued it, or into the old system of misgovernment
and oppression which had ultimately plunged it into
chaos. The whole structure of government and administration
had gone to pieces, and if it was ever to be
restored, it had to be built up again from the very foundations.
Neither in the interests of Egypt nor in our own
interests was it possible to abandon the country to its
fate, and if we did abandon it, there was yet another
danger to be reckoned with. At the first opportunity,
which would assuredly not have been slow to arise,
some other Power would have stepped into the place
we had vacated. There was Turkey with her suzerain
rights which Abdul Hamid was always plotting to assert,
though the nerve to do so effectively always failed him at
the crucial moment. There was France with Russia
behind her, who had not yet forgiven us for the loss of
her former position in Egypt, though she had only herself
to thank for her own refusal to share in the "operations
of war" which had placed us in occupation of the valley
of the Nile. There were, it is true, other Powers, such as
Germany, whose attitude for the time being was less
unfriendly and whose ambitions would not then have
been served by our withdrawal from Egypt. But whereas
all the Powers had actually acquiesced, however reluctantly
in some cases, in the British Occupation, it was
difficult to foresee what might be the consequences of
dangerous to the peace of Europe as to the slight elements
of stability which the Occupation was beginning to
restore in Egypt itself. So the Occupation was prolonged
from year to year, and the possibility of ending it became
more and more remote as the work of reconstruction to
which the Occupation had committed us compelled us
to extend and tighten our grip on every branch of the
administration. We were at least able to restore security
and prosperity such as Egypt had never before known,
and as all the large foreign communities established in
Egypt shared exactly the same benefits as the British
community, foreign Powers were less and less inclined to
quarrel with us for remaining in Egypt. The rulers of
Turkey, whether Old Turks or Young Turks, were never
reconciled to the ascendancy of a Christian Power in a
Mahomedan country over which they still claimed and
exercised a not unimportant remnant of their ancient
rights of sovereignty and a still less unimportant influence
in virtue of a common faith. But French hostility abated
with the growing menace of the Kaiser's ambitions,
which drew Great Britain and France together, and the
Anglo-French Agreement of 1904 finally removed the
danger of all serious friction between the two Western
Powers over Egypt as well as over other colonial issues
which had been sometimes scarcely less acute.
British Governments had long since ceased to talk
about withdrawal, but never until after the Anglo-French
Agreement had they openly acknowledged that
no definite term could be set to the Occupation. Not
even then were its implications frankly faced. The
Occupation had assumed the shape of a veiled Protectorate,
but no attempt was ever made—nor has been
hitherto made since the veiled Protectorate was converted
into an open Protectorate in 1915—to define the actual
relationship thereby established between Egypt and Great
Britain. From the moment we occupied Egypt we had
to assume responsibility for its governance. But we
either to the Egyptians or to the Powers, or perhaps even
to ourselves, what that responsibility involves. We have
been virtually the rulers of Egypt since 1882, but we
have always refrained from claiming any executive
authority. We have thus been driven to all sorts of
convenient fictions in order to disguise the fact. Until
1915, when he was given the title of High Commissioner,
the British representative in Cairo continued to rank
with those of other Powers, over whom, as Agent and
Consul-General, he enjoyed no official precedence other
than that which seniority of appointment might happen
to confer upon him. Yet he could make and unmake
Egyptian Ministers, who had to follow his advice in all
matters of first-rate importance or resign their offices.
One after another every Egyptian Minister was given
a British Adviser whose advice was also frequently, in
all but name, an order, and so on throughout nearly
the whole range of Egyptian government and administration,
until there grew up in later years a regular
Anglo-Egyptian bureaucracy with powers and responsibilities
never defined but none the less real for being
based on the fiction that executive authority was reserved
to the Egyptians.
The Khedive Tewfik, who owed the safety of his
throne and dynasty to the Occupation, accepted these
fictions, and his successor, Abbas Hilmi, never openly
repudiated them, though he secretly struggled against
them. Egyptian Ministers could always be found to
accept them, and for a long time the great majority of
the Egyptian people accepted them, at first with a
measure of real gratitude for the benefits they had received
from the Occupation, and later on, as the memory
of the old evil days before the Occupation receded, with
a growing impatience of the tutelage they believed themselves
to have outgrown.
To the many causes which contributed to this change
in the attitude of the Egyptians towards the British
and after it was openly proclaimed, I shall have occasion
to refer later on, as well as to the peculiar methods and
agencies by which the Protectorate was exercised. During
the first period of the Occupation our difficulties were
due to quite other causes. They were due to the uncertainty
of our tenure both as to duration and title.
For so long as the British Government were not prepared
to remove that twofold uncertainty, they had to square
their own responsibilities for the governance of Egypt
after the Occupation with the international engagements
into which the Egyptian Government had entered before
the Occupation. That was no easy problem, especially
during the first period of the Occupation, when some of
the Great Powers were by no means yet reconciled even to
the temporary ascendancy which our military occupation
necessarily gave us, and the safety of Egypt even within
her own frontiers was at times in serious peril. For
the treaty rights of other Powers were very far-reaching
and gave them a formidable handle for unfriendly interference
even in the internal affairs of Egypt, whilst the
whole international situation was pregnant with the
danger of foreign complications.
Only when one bears clearly in mind the manifold
restraints which were thus placed on our freedom of
action, whether by foreign treaty rights in Egypt or
by considerations of general policy, can the magnitude
of the task which fell to Lord Cromer during the first
period of the Occupation, or the success with which he
accomplished it, be justly appraised.
The first danger point was the Sudan, and it may
be well to recall what happened there, as it seems to
have entirely escaped the memory of the Egyptian
Nationalists, who demand our withdrawal from it as
well as from Egypt. One leading Nationalist told me
point blank that we had "robbed" Egypt of the Sudan,
as if the Egyptians had not been driven headlong out by
the Sudanese themselves, who, but for us, would have
really believed that it was Egyptian troops who alone
reconquered the Sudan, and he was quite confident that
Egypt, when once she had achieved "complete independence,"
would be not only able to retain it unaided,
but justified in holding it by force, however much the
Sudanese might, also in their turn, clamour for "complete
independence," as they, unlike the Egyptians,
are still, he unblushingly contended, quite unripe for it,
and, indeed, could never be allowed to aspire to it, since
Egypt must, in her own interest, always control the upper
waters of the Nile.
Since Mehemet Ali conquered it, the Sudan had remained
an unruly province, and even men like Samuel
Baker and Gordon had only been able to counteract very
intermittently the universal hatred of Egyptian rule
throughout that vast region stretching from the Equator
to Upper Egypt and from the Red Sea to Darfur. Whilst
chaos was reigning in 1882 in Cairo, one of those strange
figures that Islam from time to time throws up out of
the mysterious depths of an ever latent fanaticism was
sending a fiery call to salvation through the Sudan.
Half prophet and half adventurer, the Mahdi had proclaimed
himself invested with a divine mission to rescue
the Sudan from Egyptian misrule, then to march upon
Egypt and drive out the Turks, and finally to subdue the
whole world to the faith of the Prophet. Encouraged
doubtless by rumours of Egyptian anarchy, the people of
the Sudan flocked to his victorious standards. The
Egyptian garrisons were scattered and overwhelmed.
The Kordofan province and El Obeid fell early in 1883,
and with the annihilation of Hicks Pasha's ill-armed
and ill-equipped army on November 5th it became clear
to all but the most light-hearted of Egyptian Ministers
that not even Khartum could be saved without military
support from England. And England, unwilling to give
that support, advised and even enforced the abandonment
of the whole of the Sudan as the only course compatible
The Dervishes themselves proceeded forcibly to hasten
the evacuation, but not until England, after many disastrous
hesitations, had been compelled, in the course of
1884-1885, to dispatch two military expeditions into the
Eastern Sudan and one up the Nile towards Khartum in
vain attempts to relieve beleaguered Egyptian garrisons,
and above all to save Gordon, who had undertaken the
heroic but hopeless feat of effecting a peaceful evacuation.
Nor did the Sudan after its evacuation cease to be a
menace to Egypt and a drain upon its exchequer. For
some time Upper Egypt was constantly threatened with
invasion, and Dongola too had to be evacuated before
the flowing tide of Dervish conquest was arrested, after
the Mahdi's death in 1885, by a small Anglo-Egyptian
force which held up at Ginnis the Khalifa who had
succeeded him. The new frontier was withdrawn still
further north to Wadi Halfa, which the Dervishes only
once seriously threatened. The attack failed utterly,
and the death of Wad Nejumi, killed at Toski, deprived
the invaders of their ablest and bravest leader.
But Wadi Halfa remained altogether for over a decade
the southern bulwark of civilisation against the devastating
flood of African barbarism, and from the quarters in which,
on one occasion, I spent a couple of days with Lord
(then Sir Herbert) Kitchener during one of his tours of
inspection as Sirdar of the Egyptian army, I could see
the Dervish pickets on the not far distant hills, beyond
which, for 2,000 miles, Mahdi-ism still held the whole
Sudan in its murderous grip. I asked the future hero of
Omdurman how long this abomination would have to
be tolerated. "With luck," he replied, "not more than
another seven or eight years." That was in 1890, and
Omdurman was fought in 1898. The "luck" came when,
in 1896, the British Government were moved by the
urgent appeal of Italy, backed by the German Emperor,
after the Italian disaster at Adua in Abyssinia, for an
Anglo-Egyptian diversion on the Nile which should
the Italian position in Erythrea. The great problems of
irrigation in Egypt and the scheme for the big dam at
Assuan, which was then preparing, had already brought
home to the British and Egyptian Governments the
necessity of eventually reoccupying the Sudan in order
to control the essential waters of the Blue and White Nile.
But financial considerations were still delaying the
final decision when they had to yield to the exigencies of
international policy. Before the end of 1896 Dongola
had been recovered; in 1897 the Dervish hordes had been
pushed back as far as the confluence of the Nile and the
Atbara, on the upper waters of which, in the Eastern
Sudan, Kassala, abandoned by the Italians, had been
reoccupied by a small Egyptian column.
On September 2nd, 1898, Mahdi-ism received its death-blow
on the stricken field of Omdurman, and the British
and Egyptian flags were hoisted side by side on the ruins
of the old palace, near the spot where Gordon was known
to have died a hero's death nearly fourteen years before.
The Khalifa, however, escaped, and more than a year
elapsed before he and the remnants of his followers
were brought to bay by Sir Reginald Wingate. He
died fighting together with his principal Emirs and
many of his followers. The rest surrendered. It was
the end of Mahdi-ism, which in sixteen years had reduced
the population of the Sudan from over eight to under
two millions, and wiped most of the large towns and
thousands of villages out of existence. From start to
finish the expedition had been brilliantly conducted,
and to have created a new Egyptian army that, even
when stiffened by a large British force, could meet and
stand up to the fierce Dervish warriors before whom the
Egyptians had so often fled in the past was in itself
no mean feat. But the actual fighting represented only
one aspect of the difficult task involved in the reconquest
of the Sudan. Though the expedition together with
the laborious construction of hundreds of miles of railway
economy, it imposed financial sacrifices upon the Egyptian
Treasury which it could still barely afford. On one
occasion the British Government had to come to the
rescue, for, under cover of the rigid control which foreign
Powers were still able to exercise over Egyptian expenditure,
France and Russia, out of sheer opposition to
Great Britain, instructed their representatives on the
Commission of the Egyptian Debt to enter a suit in the
Mixed Tribunals—and won it—restraining the Egyptian
Government from devoting certain financial reserves to
the purposes of the Sudan expedition. Infinitely more
dangerous to Anglo-French relations was the famous
Marchand expedition, which crossed the African Continent
from the Niger and hoisted the French flag at Fashoda on
the White Nile, at the very moment when the victorious
Anglo-Egyptian forces, having reached Khartum, were
working their way up the river from the north. But
for the wisdom of the British and French Governments
and the personal tact displayed by Kitchener in
dealing with Colonel Marchand and in inducing him to
withdraw from an untenable position, the reconquest
of the Sudan might have ended in a disastrous conflict
between England and France.
For more than twenty years now we have been slowly
but steadily reclaiming the Sudan to a prosperity it
had never yet known. If Egyptian Nationalism resents
the British flag waving beside the Egyptian flag over
Khartum, it would do well to remember that, were
our flag to disappear, that of Egypt would go with it,
for even the Mahdi's reign of terror has not weakened the
hatred and contempt in which the Sudanese hold the
Egyptians.
Our position in Egypt was from the first day of the
Occupation beset with so many international pitfalls
that Lord Salisbury, as soon as he returned to power
in 1885, made a very determined attempt to obtain
relief from the Sudan trouble and to get out of Egypt
Sultan. Egyptian Nationalists are found of talking of
the independence which Egypt enjoyed before the
Occupation. But they conveniently forget the fact
that the Sultan still possessed certain very definite rights
in Egypt which had never been challenged. On the
contrary, the Powers had themselves induced him to
exercise them effectively, when he issued the Firman
deposing the Khedive Ismail, in 1879, and they had sought,
less successfully, to induce him to exercise them again
during the prolonged crisis that preceded the Occupation.
Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, an adroit if eccentric
diplomatist, who enjoyed in a singular degree Lord
Salisbury's favour and confidence, was sent out in 1885
as High Commissioner to negotiate, in concert with a
High Commissioner appointed by the Porte, the basis of
an agreement which was originally intended to secure
the military co-operation of Turkey in the Sudan, and,
when that failed, was at any rate to lay down a scheme
of reforms to be carried out under Anglo-Turkish auspices
in Egypt, and to provide for the withdrawal of the
British Occupation within a term of years, subject in
certain circumstances to an eventual Anglo-Turkish
reoccupation. The many vicissitudes of that diplomatic
adventure need not be recalled, but, if only to measure
the distance that we have travelled since then, it may
be worth while to reproduce one passage from the instructions
issued by Lord Salisbury to his special envoy.
"It is the wish of Her Majesty's Government to recognise
in its full significance the position which is secured to His
Majesty the Sultan as Sovereign of Egypt by Treaties and
other instruments having a force under international law.
They are of opinion that the authority of the Sultan over a
large portion of the Muhammadan world which exists under
his rule will be much assured by a due recognition of his
legitimate position in respect to Egypt."
The joint efforts of the two High Commissioners during
a prolonged stay in Cairo failed, however, to produce
work on which Sir Evelyn Baring and his small band of
British fellow-workers were already engaged. Nevertheless,
Lord Salisbury, who had not yet realised that
he was backing the wrong horse, sent him on to Constantinople,
and after much haggling a Convention was
actually signed, on May 22nd, 1887, between Drummond
Wolff and the Ottoman Minister for Foreign Affairs for
the defence and reorganisation of Egypt and the withdrawal
within three years of the British Army of Occupation.
The Ottoman Government was to be free thereafter
to "use its right to occupy Egypt militarily" in certain
more or less clearly defined emergencies, in which case
Great Britain "might" also send troops to co-operate with
the Ottoman forces. To this British right of re-entry
France and Russia took very strong exception, and
they prevailed on the Sultan not to ratify the Convention.
Neither England nor Egypt had any reason to regret
this diplomatic rebuff. But Turkey—very fortunately—
lost her one great chance. The Sultan still retained,
however, his suzerain rights, and however much they had
been curtailed under Mehemet Ali and his successors,
they could still be used to embarrass both Egypt and
Great Britain, as they were, for instance, in 1892, when
the Sultan tried hard to import new conditions into the
Firman confirming Abbas Hilmi's succession to the
Khediviate on the death of his father, Tewfik. The
Porte, moreover, could also always exploit Egyptian
frontier questions, which, in 1906, suddenly assumed
serious proportions, when Turkish encroachments towards
Akaba and in other parts of the Sinai Peninsula were only
stopped by the dispatch of the British fleet into the
Eastern Mediterranean, and the delivery of a very stiff
Note, amounting almost to an ultimatum, by the British
Ambassador at Constantinople, who intimated that
"His Majesty's Government had no intention of making
the suzerainty of the Sultan over Egypt incompatible
depended upon His Imperial Majesty whether it became
so." Last, but not least, we had constantly to reckon
with the underground influence which the Sultan as
Khalif could, and sometimes unquestionably endeavoured
to, exercise to our detriment over a Mahomedan population
which, great as was its hatred of the Turks as a ruling
race in Egypt, recognised the Sultan as the spiritual head
of Islam.
French antagonism was more subtle and therefore
still more difficult to deal with. Nothing perhaps
illustrated it more forcibly than the attitude of France
towards the Drummond Wolff mission when the French
Government preferred to defeat an agreement binding us
to evacuate within three years rather than to tolerate the
reservation of our eventual right of re-entry. That
France had herself broken away from the policy of
Anglo-French co-operation in Egypt by withdrawing her
fleet from Alexandria on the very eve of the bombardment
in 1882 made it none the less galling for her to see herself
ousted from the pre-eminent position she had long
enjoyed in a country where, apart from her political and
material interests, her language had been for half a
century the chief vehicle of European culture. It was
a period of acute colonial rivalry all over the world,
and Egypt was only one of the many points—but with
the French the sorest point—where England seemed to
them to have scored heavily at their expense. If France
could not compel our withdrawal, she could put many
awkward spokes in our wheels, and whilst the Triple
Alliance was quite content to see Anglo-French antagonism
intensified by the Occupation, neither Germany, nor
Austria-Hungary, nor Italy, nor other smaller Powers
were averse from helping France to maintain the many
restraints upon Egypt by which they believed their own
interests to be equally benefited.
Some of those restraints arose out of the international
arrangements described in the last chapter for liquidating
Ismail had bequeathed to Egypt. Immediately after
the Occupation, the British Government had intimated
to France that the arrangement under which, in 1876,
Egyptian financial control had been primarily vested in
two joint controllers, one English and one French, must
cease, and that there would no longer be room for a
French controller in Cairo. France had acquiesced, but
she still remained firmly entrenched in the International
Commission of the Public Debt, commonly known as the
Caisse, which derived considerable powers of control
from the famous Law of Liquidation. In view of
the heavy expenses—including a sum of £4,000,000 for
compensation for the destruction by Arabi's troops of
a large part of Alexandria—into which Egypt had been
plunged since the Law of Liquidation, that enactment
stood admittedly in need of drastic revision if the
Egyptian Government was ever to be placed financially
on its feet again. A Conference of the Powers which
assembled in London in 1884, on Lord Granville's invitation,
failed, mainly through French obstruction, to
arrive at any settlement. A one-sided attempt to set
aside the Law of Liquidation had to be dropped ignominiously
when the French representative on the Caisse and
his Italian and Austrian colleagues appealed to the Mixed
Tribunals. Only in 1885 was a modus vivendi reached,
considerably modifying the Law in favour of the Egyptian
Treasury with the assent of the Powers, including now
also Germany and Russia as well as Turkey, and Egypt
was allowed to raise a loan under their collective guarantee
for certain specific purposes, including the Alexandria
indemnity, for which foreigners of all nationalities were
waiting impatiently. This modus vivendi gave Egypt
breathing time and a little more latitude as to the limit
and nature of expenditure allowed by the international
guardians of her financial conscience, but it still tied up
any surplus revenue in such a way as to arm the Caisse
very frequently with a practical right of veto, even in
increased expenditure. Moreover, the term of grace
accorded for a temporary reduction of interest on
the Debt was to expire within two years. Failure to
balance revenue and expenditure would have meant at its
expiry a fresh avowal of bankruptcy and relapse into
unmitigated internationalism. The next two years were
a race against bankruptcy, won by a very short head,
against French expectations and hopes. But even then
the reduced opportunities of the Caisse to obstruct
Anglo-Egyptian policy were sufficient for frequent pinpricks,
though they became less effective with the revival
of Egyptian prosperity, until the desire to inflict
them passed away gradually with a new orientation of
French policy in Europe and the Anglo-French Agreement
of 1904 at last removed all excuses for friction.
But there were other restrictions of a more permanent
character placed by international treaties on Egypt's
freedom of action. All the Great Powers, including
Great Britain, and a number of smaller ones, making
altogether fifteen before the Great War, possessed
and still possess extraordinary privileges conferred by
treaty on their subjects resident in Egypt. These
privileges, known as the Capitulations, are derived from
charters of immunity granted in ancient times by the
Ottoman Sultans to the subjects of Christian Powers
established in or trading with their dominions, in which
Egypt was included. The nature and extent of these
privileges deserve to be examined somewhat closely, as
the Capitulations have endured to the present day, and
the question of their abolition or modification has become
one of very great urgency. As the Christian Powers
waxed stronger and the Ottoman Empire waned, the
privileges grew into rights, and nowhere has the use and
abuse of them gone to greater lengths than in Egypt.
Originally intended to safeguard the collective interests
of the foreign communities against the arbitrary power
of Oriental despots, and the life and property of the
myrmidons and the venality of their judges, they have
been turned into very effective weapons in the hands of
foreign Governments to hamper Egyptian legislation,
even when its reasonableness cannot in principle be
denied, whilst the less reputable members of the foreign
communities have sought shelter behind them for dubious
and often criminal practices which would otherwise
have brought them within the reach of the Egyptian
police.
The most serious restraints to which Egypt is subjected
by the Capitulations are the following:—
First, no direct tax can be imposed on foreigners
resident in Egypt without the consent of all the Capitulation
Powers.
Secondly, all civil and commercial cases and all cases
relating to land between foreigners and Egyptians, or
between foreigners of the same or different nationalities,
are tried by the Mixed Courts, which consist largely of
foreign judges.
Thirdly, all criminal charges against foreigners, with
a few exceptions which come within the jurisdiction of
the Mixed Tribunals, are tried in the Consular Court of
the defendant's own nationality.
Fourthly, no domiciliary visit can take place in the
premises of a foreigner without the previous consent of
his own Consular authority, and the Egyptian police
cannot without such authority enter any foreigner's
house, except in case of fire or of an unmistakable cry
for help against violence.
Now what do these restraints mean in practice?
The first one means that whatever may be the needs of
the Egyptian Treasury there cannot be any great broadening
of the basis of taxation so long as a number of Powers
have the right to veto the enforcement of any new direct
taxes upon the foreign communities resident in Egypt,
who not only form a very important and wealthy fraction
of the population, but handle almost the whole of the
the country.
The only important sources of revenue which the
Capitulations cannot affect are the land tax, Customs
and Excise, to which the duty on imported tobacco
contributes about one-third, and judicial and registration
fees. The readjustment of the land tax, begun in 1899,
was based on a settlement to last for thirty years, which
precludes any increase till the expiry of that term, except
possibly by way of super-tax on large holdings. The
elastic sources of revenue derived in other countries from
income tax, succession duties, duties on commercial
transactions, etc., are closed against the Egyptian
Treasury, because so long as the Capitulations are in
force no new imposts of that nature can be levied upon
foreigners without the consent of all the foreign Capitulation
Powers, and as the Egyptian Government cannot
be expected to differentiate against its own subjects by
making them liable to heavy taxation from which the
large foreign communities remain exempt, it has to forgo
important sources of revenue that are, so to say, staring
it in the face.
Experience has shown how hopeless it is to obtain such
unanimous consent in matters of first-rate importance,
and even in small matters it involves almost interminable
negotiations. A few years ago, when an improved system
of drainage was introduced into Cairo and it was proposed
to levy a small tax on all house-owners who benefited
by it, the Portuguese Government, with barely a
dozen Portuguese house-owners in Cairo, held up for
six months an agreement arrived at for the purpose with
all the other Powers, and only gave its consent in return
for a promise from the British Government to settle in
favour of Portugal some quite irrelevant colonial question
in South Africa.
The second restraint placed upon Egypt under the
Capitulations means the maintenance of tribunals which
do not derive their authority from the Egyptian State,
the majority of the judges of the Mixed Tribunals, whose
formal appointment alone has been left as a mere matter
of courtesy to the ruler of Egypt, and these judges are
themselves foreigners and considerably outnumber
their Egyptian colleagues. In many ways the creation
of the Mixed Tribunals, which was the result of Nubar
Pasha's far-sighted statesmanship some years before
the Occupation, has been of the greatest benefit to
Egypt. It at once curtailed some of the extravagant
rights hitherto enjoyed by foreigners under the Capitulations
by bringing the bulk of civil cases between
foreigners and Egyptians, as well as between foreigners
themselves, within one single jurisdiction, instead of
leaving them, as formerly was the case, to the mercy of
a number of Consular Courts of varying competence and
integrity, and it established at the same time a strong and
unified judicature which in spite of occasional scandals
has on the whole set up a higher standard of equity and
of honesty than Egypt had ever before known. Egyptians
themselves have constantly recognised this by agreeing
to submit their own civil cases to the Mixed Tribunals
rather than to the Native Courts. Nevertheless, and for
that very reason, foreign influence is unquestionably
more strongly entrenched than ever in these tribunals,
which have already shown at times how effectively their
authority can be invoked for political purposes against
the Egyptian Executive, very few Continental judges
being trained in traditions of judicial independence that
would enable them to resist the pressure of their own
Governments. Interference of this kind, however, became
far less frequent when international friction
diminished during the later period of the Occupation,
and may be expected to disappear altogether if once
politically stable conditions are established in Egypt,
whilst foreign jurisdiction cannot possibly be eliminated,
though many practical reforms are admittedly desirable,
so long as the Egyptian educated classes hold almost
business of the country, out of which most of the cases
arise that come before the Mixed Tribunals.
In regard to the third point, reserving the trial of all
criminal charges against foreigners to the Consular Court
of the defendant's own nationality, Egypt cannot expect
foreign Powers to surrender that privilege until the
Native Courts have been raised to a far higher standard of
efficiency and to a far higher conception of justice.
But the Powers themselves must realise the drawbacks
and sometimes the scandals that arise out of the inconsistencies
in the administration of criminal law by a
number of different Consular Courts following different
procedures and having not only different rules of evidence,
but different ideas of equity and impartiality. The
remedy for the present would seem to lie in the extension
to criminal cases of some such jurisdiction as the Mixed
Tribunals possess in civil cases.
The fourth restraint imposed upon Egypt by the
Capitulations is far more serious, for it operates mainly
nowadays for the protection of the foreign evildoer.
When the Ottoman Empire was a formidable Power
and the foreigner was only admitted on sufferance because
the Turk, incapable of creating a commercial organisation
of his own, was fain to recognise his usefulness as a trader,
it was no mean achievement for the Christian Powers to
have obtained by treaty for their subjects personal
immunity from arbitrary arrest and the security of
their homes and warehouses from molestation, save
with the express sanction of their Consular authorities
and in the presence of a Consular official. Nor did the
Turk himself consider provisions of this nature unreasonable
or inconvenient at a time when he had to
deal with small foreign communities, living only in a
few seaports and all confined within one particular
quarter of the town. In Egypt to-day there are foreign
subjects numbering scores of thousands, some of them
scattered all over the country, and each of these large
natives, who have been allowed by methods which, at
any rate in the past, would not always stand inquiry
to acquire the same rights of protection as those enjoyed
by residents of undoubted foreign extraction. Amongst
them are to be found some of the most undesirable
elements of the Levant, who chiefly use the privileges
conferred by the Capitulations to defeat the law of the
land and often to escape the penalties which, in any
other country, would speedily overtake their nefarious
practices. Nor is that all. They lend their names to
Egyptian subjects of the same kidney, with whom they
enter into clandestine and collusive partnerships. Every
illicit trade can thus be carried on with relative impunity
not only by foreign but also by Egyptian subjects under
cover of the Capitulations. By the time the Egyptian
authorities have fulfilled the necessary formalities to
enable them to enter the premises of a receiver of stolen
goods, of a petty tradesman using false weights and
measures, of a keeper of a gambling hell or a house of
ill-fame, or of a dealer in forbidden drugs, he will in
nine cases out of ten have got wind of what is coming
through some of the many channels of information
always available in an Oriental country, where notoriously
nothing is ever kept secret, and when the Egyptian police
arrive with the Consular official in attendance, the premises
have been swept and garnished and every trace of offence
carefully cleared away. Even when the law can be
and is at last enforced, it is generally only after incredible
delays, and then it is probably not the real
offender but some man of straw who is at last brought
to book. There have been cases in which the ownership
of premises used for illicit purposes has been found to
be vested jointly or successively in foreigners of four
different nationalities. Lord Cromer's annual reports
and those of his successors teem with instances that
illustrate the resourcefulness of the law-breakers in
exploiting the benefits of the Capitulations and the
Capitulations stand in the way of the application of
new laws to foreigners as well as to Egyptians. Whatever
may still be the defects of the Egyptian police
and of the Egyptian Administration, there has long
since ceased to be any excuse for such a scandalous
state of affairs. But whilst this is more or less reluctantly
admitted by most of the Powers, they, or some of them
at least, have persisted hitherto in regarding it as a
lesser evil than the surrender of any part of the Ark
of the Covenant in which the Capitulations are enshrined.
It is surely unnecessary to labour any further the point
whether, before the Occupation, Egypt, even though
nominally autonomous, really enjoyed in any sense
that can properly be attached to the word the national
independence of which we are supposed to have robbed
her. When Lord Cromer first took charge of the conduct
of Egyptian affairs, Egypt had to reckon with the
suzerain rights of the Ottoman Sultan, which, however
circumscribed, afforded him frequent opportunities of
mischievous interference; with the international restraints
placed upon her power to raise and spend revenue pending
the liquidation of her foreign debt; and with the whole
system of servitudes imposed upon her by the Capitulations.
All these things must be borne in mind in measuring
the work he was able to perform. As we shall see,
he successfully parried the worst attempts of the Sultan to
revive the political ascendancy of Turkey, and he released
the Egyptian Treasury from the grip of the foreign
bondholders; but the burden of the Capitulations was
one which he was not in a position to lighten, as they
cannot be touched without the consent of all the Powers
concerned, and it was only after the Anglo-French
Agreement of 1904 that he was able even to suggest to
the British Government the possibility of framing a
scheme for their revision which under British auspices
might overcome foreign opposition to any change. The
Capitulations remained and still remain what they were
it is prepared to differentiate against itself, is debarred
in a great measure by foreign treaties from making new
laws which its own interests clearly demand, and even
from enforcing upon foreign residents laws that are
already in existence, and of which nobody denies in
principle the reasonableness and propriety, it is preposterous
to talk of any independence to which mere
formal recognition would lend reality.
That is the price which, we may admit, Egypt has had
to pay for the fictions that have continued to underlie
the reality of our controlling influence, but the price
had to be paid in accordance with previous obligations
into which Egypt had entered before the Occupation.
Our critics, and most of all our Egyptian critics, should
remember this when they seek to depreciate the great
work done by England in Egypt, and more especially
during the first period of the Occupation.
| CHAPTER III The Egyptian problem | |