University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER IV

THE FIRST PHASE OF THE OCCUPATION

The Nationalist movement of 1882 was born of a
merely military mutiny, and so little was there ever
of any deep national feeling behind it that it collapsed
like a pricked bubble as soon as the Egyptian army,
which under the impulse of a handful of leaders had
supplied the one driving power, broke at Tel-el-Kebir
almost before the sun had risen, and was scattered to
the winds before sunset. A few battalions made a
short stand when their trenches were first rushed in
the dark, but neither Arabi himself nor his army put up
the slightest resistance when daylight disclosed the full
force of the British attack. Arabi surrendered and his
troops simply melted away, a mere mob of officers and
men tumbling over each other to cast off their uniforms
and escape across country to the safe shelter of their
own homes. Not a shot was again fired. The only
other important Egyptian force, at Kafr Dawar outside
Alexandria, made its submission quite cheerfully the
same afternoon, just about the same time as the British
cavalry reached Cairo. The Occupation became at
once a military promenade, not a military operation.

I do not remember to have seen at the time so much
as an angry face amongst the Egyptian people. Even
the Nationalists, who most keenly resented our presence,
turned almost at once to us for protection from the wrath
of the rulers against whom they had rebelled. Arabi

and many others owed their lives to us. The people,
exhausted by the long years of oppression which had
driven them to welcome any form of revolt, returned
patiently to their daily toil, and quickly learnt to look
to us for the deliverance they were helpless to achieve
for themselves. The chief difficulties which British
control encountered during the first two decades of the
Occupation arose out of the more or less covert opposition
of the old ruling classes to reforms which threatened their
ill-gotten privileges, or, as has been shown in the previous
chapter, out of the international situation and the opportunities
that foreign Powers still possessed for constant
interference in the internal affairs of Egypt.

If those difficulties merely hampered but never arrested
the great work of reconstruction carried out with almost
unfailing success during that period, the credit belongs
in the first place to the genius and unconquerable patience
of Lord Cromer, and to the ability and devotion of the
small band of British fellow-workers who served him
with equal industry and loyalty. It is sometimes assumed
that from the moment he was sent to Cairo, towards
the end of 1883, as Agent and Consul-General, the
British Government gave him the free hand which he
afterwards unquestionably had. That is not so. Not
only had he not created the situation with which he
had to deal, but, so far as the British Government had
any policy, it had been inspired before he ever reached
Egypt by Lord Dufferin, who was dispatched from
Cairo to Constantinople within the first two months of
the Occupation, in the hope that his resourceful brain
would provide British Ministers with a scheme for shaping
the future of a country of which they had so reluctantly
been driven to take charge. Lord Dufferin did evolve
a scheme which he embodied in one of the most brilliant
and adroit despatches in the annals of British diplomacy.
It served its purpose for the moment, and though some
of his recommendations were sufficiently practical to
serve as a basis for subsequent reforms, he left it to

others to deal with many of the hard facts which he was
too clear-sighted to ignore, but too tactful not to disguise
under auspicious generalisations. It fell to Lord Cromer
to dispel slowly but steadily the illusions which were
still prompting the British Government to shower promises
of speedy evacuation on an incredulous world, not by
attempting to dictate any policy to them, but by bringing
them constantly into contact with those hard facts.
He had been long enough in Egypt in the last years of
Ismail to see that there was only one policy possible
if we were to discharge the responsibilities we had assumed
towards the people of Egypt by our armed intervention
in their affairs—a slow and laborious policy of reconstruction
which might in the fulness of time allow us
to withdraw honourably, but in which most haste would
certainly prove worst speed. He relied on the hard
facts themselves rather than on any arguments of his
own to bring conviction home to the minds of British
Ministers, and he bore meanwhile patiently with all
their vacillations, though they often handicapped him
heavily. No British representative can ever have been
placed in a more unpleasant and even humiliating
position by his own Government than Lord Cromer
was during the two years, 1885-1887, when Sir Henry
Drummond Wolff was hovering between Cairo, Constantinople,
and London on a mission of which he
profoundly distrusted the methods and the object.
A lesser man might have rebelled against it, but he
went plodding away unperturbed at the task he had set
before himself. Little by little the British Government
came to realise the soundness of his judgment and the
value of his work. The egregious failure of the Drummond
Wolff mission opened Lord Salisbury's eyes, and he
and his successors learnt to trust Lord Cromer more
and more implicitly, until, for nearly twenty years
up to the time of his retirement, his word almost became
law with them. They had recognised with him that the
only policy for England to pursue for a long time to
come in regard to Egypt was a policy of efficient and
honest administration.

I shall only review briefly the most important achievements
that must be placed to its credit, for the subject
has been already far more authoritatively dealt with
by those who actually helped to accomplish them, by
Lord Milner in his "England in Egypt," by Sir Auckland
Colvin in "The Making of Modern Egypt," and, last
but not least, by Lord Cromer himself in the two volumes
in which, shortly after his retirement, he supplemented
the masterly Reports issued by him from year to year
whilst he was in Cairo with a fuller and more intimate
account of his stewardship, under the title of "Modern
Egypt."

Lord Cromer was nothing if not thorough. His
knowledge of Egypt in Ismail's days saved him from
any illusions. He would have to build everything up
from the very foundations if he was to save Egypt from
the worst penalties of bankruptcy; the only foundations
on which he believed it possible to build were those
of sound finance, severe retrenchment wherever useless
or extravagant expenditure could be cut down, and,
on the other hand, no stinting, even if it meant fresh
borrowing, where production could be stimulated and
the people encouraged to take heart and put forth fresh
energy. He had little faith in the so-called ruling classes
of Egypt, but he had great faith in the industry of the
masses, and it was their interests and their good will
which he applied himself from first to last to cultivate.
His experience as Finance Member of the Viceroy's
Council in India, where he had come in for some very
lean years, stood him in excellent stead. In Sir Edgar
Vincent, who succeeded to Sir Auckland Colvin as
Financial Adviser to the Egyptian Government, he had
a brilliant helper, but he was himself such a master of
finance that so long as he was in Cairo it did not very
much matter who was the Financial Adviser. His
first Budgets were marvels of accurate adjustment.

In the crucial one of 1886-1887, when the jealous eyes
of other Powers were looking with confident expectation
for the deficit which would have thrown the door wide
open for foreign interference, only temporarily held in
abeyance by the London Convention of 1885, the situation
was only saved by a surplus of a little over £20,000,
after insolvency had twice seemed almost inevitable.
That very awkward corner once turned, Egyptian
finance got into smoother waters, though it still remained
subject to the cumbersome but very effective system
of jealous checks and counter-checks which the foreign
members of the Caisse continued to enforce under the
provisions of the London Convention, even after the
necessity for them had passed away so long as Lord
Cromer kept his trained and vigilant eye upon expenditure.

The risk could now be taken of proceeding to the abolition
of the corvée—a reform in some respects more sensational
and revolutionary than any other for which the fellaheen
were to be indebted to British control, even if Arabi
must in fairness be credited with the original idea,
which might or might not have matured had he had
more time. A stop had indeed been put from the beginning
of the Occupation to the worst abuses of the corvée
in the days of Ismail, when the fellaheen were marched
off in gangs, often to great distances, to do forced labour
on the Khedivial estates, or for any other purpose that
the Khedive wanted. But until money could be found
to pay for contract labour and dredging, the corvée
had to be maintained for the indispensable task of maintaining
the protecting earthworks at high Nile and of
clearing silt from the canals at low Nile. It was estimated
in 1884 that the number of men engaged on the latter
class of work alone was equivalent to an army of nearly
100,000 men working for 130 days a year. They were
recruited under a system which left almost inevitable
loopholes for favouritism and extortion. An inquiry
in one district showed that the owners of 53,000 acres

out of 145,000 cultivated and revenue-paying acres
supplied the whole of the corvée. The State Domains
paid redemption money for half their tenants, the larger
proprietors got off scot-free, and the poorer fellaheen
had to supply double the number of hands working twice
the time lawfully required of them. The men on corvée
received no payment; they had to provide their own
food; they slept on the bare ground without any shelter;
their own land had often to remain uncared for whilst
they were absent. It was from the merely economic
point of view a very wasteful system. Experiments
were made on a small scale for replacing it by contract
work, and when these were successful, application was
made to the Powers to facilitate the financial arrangements
necessary for a more sweeping reform. It took
three years to obtain their consent, but an unexpected
expansion of revenue made it possible to abolish the
iniquitous old system finally and completely by the
end of 1889.

The abolition of the corvée furthered, instead of
hampering, as some interested objectors had prophesied,
the progress of irrigation, and it was irrigation that
was steadily to change the face of Egypt from the abject
misery of pre-occupation days to the abounding prosperity
of the present time. For without coal or other
minerals, at least in any appreciable quantity, Egypt
has only one great source of natural wealth, the prodigious
fertility of the soil when supplied with water, and in a
rainless climate the water can only be supplied by
irrigation from the life-giving Nile. The rest of Egypt
is desert. Irrigation was, of course, no new thing in
Egypt, which had once been the granary of Rome. Its
importance had not escaped Mehemet Ali, and the
French engineers brought over by him designed great
things which they were only allowed to carry out imperfectly.
Like everything else, irrigation had suffered
grievously under Ismail. Fortunately, the Public Works
Department was promptly rescued not only from indigenous

mismanagement and corruption, but also from
the blighting influence of internationalism. Too many
cooks spoil the broth, and never more surely than when
they are of different and rival nationalities. India,
the great school of modern irrigation, was at once called
in aid, and she sent of her very best, Scott-Moncrieff,
Garstin, Willcocks, Ross, Western, and others, all men
of highest scientific attainments, and hard-workers who
never spared themselves. By one of them, Sir William
Willcocks, whose name will always remain conspicuously
associated with the great Assuan dam, the fascinating
story of Egyptian irrigation has been written in two
big volumes. The old system in the Delta, where
drainage and irrigation canals had come to be disastrously
mixed up, was first of all restored to usefulness, and
improved methods were introduced for clearing away
the accumulation of silt after the annual season of
fertilising floods. Perennial irrigation, of which Mehemet
Ali had recognised the necessity for the cultivation of
cotton and sugar, the most valuable of Egyptian crops
was rapidly developed and now covers the whole of the
Delta and some districts of Upper Egypt, in substitution
for the more primitive system of basin irrigation which
is only possible in flood time. It is perennial irrigation
that enables Egypt to have a summer as well as a winter
crop by securing a constant supply of carefully meted
out water even when the Nile is low, instead of the short
inrush limited to the season when it is in flood. Perennial
irrigation, however, requires much deeper canals, and
it soon became evident that it could not achieve complete
success unless some of the vast volume of water
that flowed down and was wasted in the sea during the
flood season could be held up and stored for distribution
during the low Nile season. Mehemet Ali's French
engineers had been quite aware of this, and the great
Barrage on the Nile just below Cairo, though too faultily
constructed to serve anything like the full purpose for
which it had been designed, still stood as a sign-post
for their British successors. In the face of derisive
scepticism, the Barrage was patched up experimentally
and then completed in 1890, with immediate results
of almost incalculable value, besides the earnest of
success for still greater schemes of the same character
in the future. It was in some respects a greater feat
than any other, for, to borrow Scott-Moncrieff's very
apt comparison, it was like "mending a watch without
stopping the works." The whole stream could never
be shut off at one and the same time, and the work had
to be carried on during the very short working seasons
alternately on one and then on the other part of the
barrage. Many other, only less important, works followed
in due course, such as the Assiut and Zifta barrages,
which, like the Cairo barrage, do not actually store water,
but raise the water levels sufficiently to feed the great
canals dependent upon them. The time had then come
for the crowning enterprise of the great Assuan dam,
which actually stores up an immense head of water in
a huge reservoir stretching many miles up-stream.
Completed in 1902, it has not only provided for the old
cultivable area of the Nile valley for a thousand miles
downwards to the Mediterranean an almost certain
insurance against the hazards of abnormally high or
low Niles, but has also enabled the area to be very largely
extended. Nor did the creation of the Assuan reservoir
bring the story of Egyptian irrigation to a close, though
it may be regarded as closing its first and perhaps most
pregnant chapter. The cost of the chief works ran
into many millions. But never were millions more
usefully expended, and the inception of it all can be
traced back to the prescience which induced Lord Cromer
to apply to the development of irrigation the small
free balance of £1,000,000 left to the Egyptian Government
out of the £9,000,000 loan sanctioned by the London
Convention of 1885. A million sounds a very small
sum nowadays, but at the time it was Egypt's one little
nest-egg.

No greater boon was ever conferred upon the people
of Egypt. But in order that the full benefit should
reach the fellaheen it was essential to see that they
should not again be defrauded as in the past of their
rightful share of water by powerful neighbours or corrupt
officials, and that unfair taxation and extortionate tax-gatherers
should not rob them of the proceeds of the
richer harvests which irrigation was to give them. One
simple and effective step was the issue by the Finance
Ministry of warrants recording the exact amount of
land tax each peasant had to pay. That amount once
paid, he soon learnt to defy all attempts to extort more
from him. A measure requiring much more time and
labour was the readjustment of the land tax all over
Egypt. Already the financial situation had so far improved
that between 1890 and 1894 some small reductions
of the land tax could be granted in the southern districts
of Upper Egypt, which had hitherto derived less benefit
from the new irrigation works. But the land tax was
the chief source of revenue and the State could not afford
any wholesale reduction all over the country. Nor
was the land tax in the aggregate an excessive impost, if
equitably levied. The last settlement, however, had
taken place in 1864, and even if it had then been equitable
—which is a very large assumption—conditions had
changed so much within thirty years that the incidence
of the land tax had become in many places grossly unfair,
and especially, as was to be expected, to the smaller
folk. A careful valuation of all lands was therefore
undertaken in which the various conditions affecting
each were taken into account, and whilst the aggregate
of taxation remained the same, the incidence was so
readjusted as to remove the most glaring inequalities.
It took about ten years to complete the work, which
was begun in 1896, under the direction of Sir William
Willcocks, and entrusted to ten commissions, on each of
which the British official in charge had an Egyptian
closely associated with him. In all 3,385 villages and

about 1,100,000 landowners were dealt with. The
number of appeals diminished steadily and about two-thirds
were dismissed. No other measure brought home
more directly to the fellaheen the desire of the British
control to do even-handed justice to poor and rich alike.
It served also, like the irrigation works, to bring the
fellaheen into constant and close contact with the British
officials, who in turn gained an intimate acquaintance
with the country, as they had generally to camp near
to their work and all day long they moved about among
the people in their fields and villages.

These were the measures and the methods and the
men that, with Lord Cromer's driving power behind them,
produced not only prosperity but confidence in the
beneficent Power whose presence in Egypt had transformed
the face of the country. The days of the
Oppression were still fresh in the fellaheen's memory and
the sense of relief was paramount. With the reorganisation
of the army begun by Sir Evelyn Wood, military service,
though it never became popular with the Egyptians,
was robbed of its old terrors. Conscripts too poor
to bribe the authorities were no longer marched off
handcuffed and in chains like hunted criminals. People
came to know that the rules which now governed both
conscription and exemption were enforced with fairness
to all under the supervision of British officers, who
insisted on discipline and obedience, but not on bakshish,
and treated their men as human beings and not as slaves.
When in Kitchener's hands the Egyptian army had been
converted into a well-equipped and efficient force, and
had shown itself capable of playing a creditable part in
the reconquest of the Sudan, Egyptian mothers ceased
even to regard the Sudan any longer as the certain grave
of every Egyptian soldier that was sent in former times
to serve and, more often than not, to die there.

That in other directions progress was slower and
more doubtful did not directly affect the welfare and
the contentment of the masses. They heartily disliked

sanitation, which seemed wantonly to disturb familiar
habits, whereas their congenital fatalism was ready to
accept all the consequences of grossly insanitary conditions
as the will of an inexorable Providence. Nevertheless,
the violent outbreak of cholera which occurred
the year after the Occupation, and the appearance of
bubonic plague imported from India, forbade inaction,
and Sir John Rogers, and, after him, Sir Horace Pinching,
had the tact and good sense not merely to impose
obnoxious if necessary regulations, but also to try to instil
into the village barber, who has from time immemorial
fulfilled the functions of doctor and medical officer,
the rudiments of sanitary laws. Hospitals, especially
eye-hospitals, in a country devastated by ophthalmic
diseases, afforded, moreover, object lessons of which
the most ignorant could not dispute the value. In
the last of his annual Reports Lord Cromer stated that
in 1906 31,000 in-patients and 128,000 out-patients
had been treated in Government hospitals, which had
been established by that time in the chief provincial
towns, besides such complete novelties as a foundling
hospital and a lunatic asylum.

In some departments the fear of stimulating international
jealousies which were liable to react very quickly
on the political situation was not unnaturally always
present to Lord Cromer's mind. For instance, the judicial
system we found in Egypt was based on the Continental
model, which differs from our own almost as widely in
spirit as in procedure; and the large areas of jurisdiction
reserved for the Consular Courts, and for the Mixed
Tribunals, hampered the British reformer in one direction
quite as much as in another, the no less important field of
jurisprudence and jurisdiction, covering all questions of
personal status, marriage, divorce, guardianship, succession,
etc., which in a Mahomedan country must be
left to Mahomedan courts, alone competent to administer
the canonical laws of Islam. There were many who
pressed Lord Cromer to make, at least in the native

courts, where Egypt was not fettered by actual treaty
engagements, a clean sweep of a system founded on
French substantive law and procedure, and some early
and rather injudicious attempts, of which Lord Cromer
himself misdoubted the wisdom, were made to introduce
Englishmen into the Ministry of Justice, and to strengthen
the European element in the native courts by appointing
a larger proportion of foreign judges—measures which
two Prime Ministers so widely different as Nubar and
Riaz successively resisted. But no new departure of
abiding importance was made until Lord Cromer had
satisfied himself that the time had arrived, not for any
revolutionary changes, but for a careful inquiry into the
existing system with a view to the removal of the more
glaring evils. Sir John Scott was brought in 1890 from
the High Courts of Bombay to be the first Judicial
Adviser to the Egyptian Government. A better choice
could hardly have been made, for he was cautious and
tactful, and his recent Indian experience, together with
an earlier knowledge of Egyptian conditions, had taught
him how far it is possible to harmonise Western and
Eastern conceptions of justice. He and his successor,
Sir Malcolm MacIlwraith, confined themselves to practical
though not unimportant measures of reform, intended
to simplify procedure and to diminish the interminable
delays of the law. In order to do something for the
improvement of the Mehkemeh Sheraieh, the courts
which administer Mahomedan sacred law, Lord Cromer
applied himself not unsuccessfully to secure the cooperation
of Sheikh Mohamed Abdu, a remarkable
personality, who had been one of Arabi's ardent followers
and had come round to believe that British influence
was being honestly directed towards some at least of the
best purposes which the few enlightened Nationalists
of 1882 had had at heart.

Western education, originally imported into Egypt
under French auspices in Mehemet Ali's time, was likewise
cast in a French mould. It was not substantially

disturbed, though it was obviously necessary to encourage
Egyptian boys to learn English instead of French if the
schools were to produce Government servants to work
under British officials. A man of Lord Cromer's wide
culture and great literary attainments was the last to
undervalue the importance of a sound system of liberal
education or of the diffusion of elementary knowledge
amongst the totally illiterate masses, yet it must be
confessed that in no other field has British guidance
failed so signally as in that of education. The subject
will need to be dealt with more fully in connection with
recent political developments in which Egyptian schools
and colleges have played so deplorably prominent a
part. Our failure as far as the higher purposes of education
are concerned was not so conspicuous during the
first period of the Occupation as it has now become,
and the extent of our failure, even judged by the narrow
test of examinations which dominated the whole system,
has only been recently disclosed. Lord Cromer's hands
were doubtless more than full with other matters over
which he considered himself more competent to exercise
personal control and supervision, for though he took a
keen personal interest in education, he never professed
to be an educational expert. That he had at least
begun, though rather late in the day, to distrust the
fruits which the system was yielding in the rising generation
of Egyptians he showed very clearly, not long before
he retired, by appointing a keen Egyptian, who had
entered public life as one of the Nationalist followers
of Arabi, to take over the Ministry of Education. His
choice fell upon Saad Pasha Zaghlul. It was a courageous
choice. In the light of Zaghlul's later activities, some
may think it was an unwise choice. But could Lord
Cromer have remained on indefinitely in Egypt, might
not his influence have averted much that happened
after his departure and explains to some extent even
Zaghlul's evolution?

For the first period of the Occupation bears in all its

aspects the stamp of the one great personality who
presided over it. Lord Cromer was not, and certainly
never claimed to be, infallible. He made, and himself
admitted that he made, mistakes. He was not always
a good judge of character, and he allowed his judgment
to be sometimes overborne by his loyalty to those who
served under him, but no one could ever suspect him of
favouritism. There was nothing mean or selfish in him
or in his policy. In the great measures directly due to
his own initiative, Egyptians and Englishmen alike knew
that he was prompted by a profound sense of responsibility
for the welfare of the people committed to his charge.
The best work done by England in Egypt can be traced
back to his master mind, and it is the work that has
endured. He found the mass of the Egyptian people
plunged in the slough of despond by the ruthless despotism
and extravagant profligacy of their rulers. Though his
own Government gradually gave him as free a hand as
was compatible with the international anomalies of
England's position in Egypt, he had constantly to contend
with reactionary obstruction on the part of the very
classes in Cairo to which alone he had to look for assistance
in carrying on the executive work of administration.
With a patience as indomitable as his energy, he transformed
a bankrupt and exhausted country into a land
of plenty and contentment unprecedented in its own
annals. To that extent at any rate, when he left Egypt
at the end of his long tenure of office he could rightly
claim to have proved our title to the guardianship which
the force of circumstances had driven us to assume over
the people of Egypt.

The charge is now commonly heard amongst Egyptians,
and it was sometimes brought by his own fellow-countrymen
even before he retired, that he had applied himself
too exclusively to the material advancement of Egypt
and had deliberately neglected the intellectual and
moral improvement of her people. He felt very keenly
the injustice of that charge, and in the farewell speech

delivered by him on the eve of his final departure, when
his physical strength had almost reached the breaking
point, there was no more eloquent and moving passage
than that in which he hotly repudiated it.

If a fine example can help to promote the moral
advancement of a people, there could be no finer one
either of public or of private morality than that which

Lord Cromer set before Egyptians and Englishmen
alike during a full quarter of a century. He cannot in
fairness be held responsible for the essential artificiality
of a system of control which had to be adapted to
abnormal conditions without a parallel in history.
But it can be truthfully asserted that to the sincerity
of his commanding personality, and to the respect, perhaps
not always unmixed with fear, which it universally
inspired, was above all else due the large measure of
acceptance, and even of confidence and gratitude
amongst the masses of the Egyptian people, which
British control secured, in spite of the many imperfections
of the system, during the first period of the
Occupation.