 | CHAPTER V The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER V
A PERIOD OF TRANSITION
Lord Cromer's retirement marked the end of a period.
He was conscious of it himself, not because he was one
of those who believe that no one is capable of filling
their place, but because he felt that the conditions
which had enabled him to concentrate in his own hands
the immense influence he had wielded to the best of
his great abilities were passing away—had in fact already
passed away—and that the days of a paternal autocracy
almost unlimited within its sphere were over. He had
himself had to create the machinery best calculated in
his judgment to reconcile the needs of Egypt with the
entanglements of a political situation which the British
Government had always hesitated to define, and clumsy
as in the circumstances that machinery was bound to be,
he had been able to keep it in fairly smooth working order
because it was he who had built it, piece by piece, and
he kept a close and constant touch with, and was always
accessible to, the small but picked body of Englishmen
who ran it under his guidance and supervision. One of
the most notable features of British control during that
first period is the small number of British officials then
employed in Egypt, though the best work we have done
in that country was accomplished during that period.
But the machinery, to which new pieces had been
necessarily added from time to time to meet the
steady expansion of the work it had to do, had already
exceptional his ability and experience, and however
untiring his industry.
Moreover, for the first time the British Government
were now in a position to cast off to some extent the
embarrassing reserve to which they had hitherto felt
themselves constrained, in regard at least to the duration
of the Occupation. Assurances of an early evacuation
had long ago been dropped, but only recently had they
frankly admitted that they were unable to set any term
to the duration of the Occupation. Lord Cromer had
entered upon his task when British Ministers contemplated
and honestly desired an early withdrawal from
Egypt, and he had approached it from that point of
view. So long as there was a chance of an early withdrawal,
he had no option but to make the best of an
abnormal situation with all the disabilities it involved.
His policy had been essentially an administrative policy,
because only in matters of administration, and by no
means, as we have seen, in all such matters, had his hands
been relatively free. The large measure of prosperity
which he had restored to Egypt had gradually enabled
him to loosen some of the restrictions to which Egypt
was subjected by international obligations both of
ancient and more recent date. But decisive relief
only came with the Anglo-French Agreement of 1904,
when France finally acquiesced in our predominant
position, and, by agreeing to far-reaching changes in
the functions of the Caisse, which she had used frequently
and effectively as a weapon of sheer obstruction, gave
an earnest of her determination to drop henceforth the
part she had too often played, not merely of a vigilant
if aggressive watch-dog, but of mere dog-in-the-manger.
In spite of the hostility displayed towards him for many
years by Frenchmen in Cairo and in Paris, Lord Cromer
had himself worked steadily for a rapproachement, because
he realised more fully than anyone that it would open up
new possibilities for England in Egypt, which he was
No sooner, indeed, had the Anglo-French Convention
been signed than he devoted the short time still left to
him to the preparation of an exhaustive scheme for
a far-reaching revision of the Capitulations, which had
been outside the range of practical politics until it became
possible to count on the friendly co-operation instead of
the stubborn opposition of France, and to hold out
to the other Powers, as a sure safeguard for the interests
of their communities, the prospect of an indefinite continuance
of British control.
Lord Cromer was at the same time not unconscious
that there were among the Egyptian people themselves
the stirrings of a new spirit which might, if prudently
encouraged and directed, rally new forces to the cause
of progress and reform in those very spheres of national
life upon which alien agencies were unsuited to bring
any controlling influence directly to bear. He believed
that the Egyptians had to work out their moral and
intellectual salvation for themselves. What he had
regarded as his primary duty was to redeem them from
material conditions of abject misery and despair which
paralyse all moral and intellectual effort. It was an
achievement that had been within his compass, because
sound statesmanship, exceptional powers of organisation,
unremitting vigilance, and unwearying perseverance
could command success; because in the main it needed
only a succession of practical measures in which cause
and effect could be accurately calculated; because he
was in a position to supply the driving power in the
shape of an efficient and upright staff of workers, and
to uphold their authority against all serious attempts
at indigenous obstruction.
The moral and intellectual regeneration of a people is
not a task in which it is possible for any man or group
of men to command success—least of all if they are
aliens and of a different religion and civilisation. For
it provokes at once the resistance of incalculable forces,
and creed, of a mentality and psychology which often
escape analysis, but of which the antagonism is none
the less real because it is imponderable. It cannot
in any case be the work of a few years, even in our rapidly
moving times, nor is there much hope of carrying it
through when practically no help can be looked for from
the other side. And with few exceptions there were
scarcely any influential Egyptians who were prepared
to assist and not to obstruct such efforts as Lord Cromer
could make for the regeneration of the Egyptian people.
For most of the very measures taken to restore the
material progress of the country placed increasing restraints
upon the old despotic and corrupt methods of
government. The enforcement of equal treatment for
rich and poor in the matter of taxation and of water
rights, the abolition of the corvée, even judicial reforms,
meant so many attacks upon the vested interests of
the old ruling classes—interests far more precious to
them than the moral regeneration of their nation, even
had they believed in such a thing.
To those ruling classes belonged for the greater part,
by birth or by common traditions, the official hierarchy
from which under a hybrid system, which still vested
all executive authority in Egyptians and assigned only
advisory functions to Englishmen, Ministers and provincial
governors still had to be drawn. Few of them were in
principle inclined and competent in practice to cooperate
with the British controlling power. The Armenian
Nubar, who had played an honourable and often
courageous part under the old régime, stood in many
respects quite apart from the rest, in culture and intellect
as well as in character. The sufferings of his own race
in Turkey had, he told me on one occasion, taught him to
sympathise with the sufferings of the fellaheen in Egypt,
as both were due to the cruel and irresponsible selfishness
of arbitrary power. The reforms which appealed to
him were, however, those of which he could clearly
abolition of the corvée, which he supported heart and
soul. But though imbued with French official formalism,
he was not an administrator, and whilst he admired the
English, and readily admitted that their presence in
Egypt was indispensable, he resented, not only their
occasional brusqueness, but also their businesslike methods,
and above all Lord Cromer's insistence on rigid economy,
which savoured to him of parsimony. Hence, though
Nubar was more than once called upon to step into the
breach as Prime Minister, a fundamental incompatibilité
d'humeur prevented sustained co-operation between two
men who had more in common than either of them had
with other Egyptian Ministers.
To Riaz Pasha, for whom Lord Cromer had a strong
personal liking, the abuses of the old régime, against
which he had also courageously stood up when it required
great courage to do so, were as hateful as to Nubar, but
he wanted to reform them in his own way, which was an
anti-European way. For he was too convinced a Mahomedan
to believe that good could really come to a
Mahomedan country through European intervention.
He recognised at times the necessity of working with
Lord Cromer, and he tried honestly to do so, but he
was too rugged and too unbending to adapt himself to
new conditions, even though he was fain to accept them
as at least temporarily inevitable. It was not until
Mustapha Fehmi took office in 1895 that Lord Cromer
found an Egyptian Prime Minister who, with far less
originality, possessed the sound common-sense, the modest
unselfishness, and the patient industry which enabled
him to render solid but unobtrusive service in that
capacity both to his own country and to the British
controlling power for nearly fourteen years.
Of greater importance even than the Prime Minister
was the personality of the Khedive, who could not so
easily be removed. Fortunately for nine years, i.e.,
during the most critical years of his pro-Consulate,
always count on the loyalty and generally on the intelligent
good-will of the Khedive. Tewfik had behaved
with great dignity and real courage during the stormy
months of 1882, refusing sturdily even to seek shelter
on a British man-of-war during the bombardment of
Alexandria, though the city was in the hands of an
army in open rebellion against him. He knew, nevertheless,
that he owed the safety of his throne solely to British
support, and he learnt to realise that, not only his own
dynastic interests, but also the interests of his people could
best be served by acquiescence in the policy of the British
controlling power. A good Mahomedan, clean-living,
naturally kind-hearted, and with little of the Oriental
despot about him, he had a genuine dread of religious
fanaticism, of which he had experienced the dangers.
But he had not the greatness or the energy to place
himself whole-heartedly at the head of an Egyptian
party of reform. Lord Cromer has pithily summed
up the real service that Tewfik rendered to his country:
"He should be remembered as the Khedive who allowed
Egypt to be reformed in spite of the Egyptians." His
qualities were negative rather than positive, but even
with those limitations they were extremely helpful to
Lord Cromer, who was less than ever tempted to underrate
them when Abbas Hilmi became Khedive on his
father's death in 1892.
The French, for whom Tewfik had very little liking,
would have been extremely jealous had he sent his son
to be educated in England. So to give umbrage to
neither of the two great rival Powers, he sent the boy to
Vienna. The choice was not a happy one, for the reactionary
and militarist atmosphere of the Austrian
capital tended to encourage a naturally self-willed disposition.
Abbas brought back with him to the Abdeen Palace
the ideas of the Hofburg, and within a short time of his
accession he tried a fall first with Kitchener, who was
then Sirdar of the Egyptian army, by affronting in public
and then with Cromer by wantonly provoking
a Ministerial crisis. The result of these petulant outbreaks
in both cases taught him to be more discreet as
long as Lord Cromer remained in Egypt. Nevertheless,
the influence, however circumscribed, which the head of the
State can always find opportunities of exercising, was henceforth
used, whenever and wherever he thought he could
safely do so, for petty intrigues and irritating obstruction.
How was the younger generation of Egyptians likely
to shape that had been growing up since the Occupation?
Would it provide the active support for which even
in questions most vital to the material progress of Egypt
Lord Cromer had looked, generally in vain, to the older
generation? Would it accept even with the same
reluctant submission as its elders the continuance of
an alien tutelage? Would it apply itself seriously to
the work of social and religious reform, which alone
can rescue a nation from the tyranny of ancient customs
and beliefs, and train it up to modern conceptions of
progress and freedom? Would it learn the right lessons
from Western education and increasing contact with the
West? Would it resist the temptations of the worse
side of Western civilisation and absorb its better spirit?
An educated or semi-educated middle class, small in
numbers but of considerable potential influence, was
growing up, with new aspirations and a new sense of
independence. There were signs that a new Egypt was
in the making. Was it to be really a new Egypt rebuilt
on more solid social foundations and fashioned on finer
moral and intellectual lines, or was it to be only the
old Egypt over again, in which "the big fish swallow the
small," with just a sham Western façade?
There were only a few tests that could be applied
for the purpose of answering these questions. Egypt
had been endowed with rudimentary representative
institutions according to the recommendations embodied
in Lord Dufferin's Report of 1883, to which effect was
the constitution of a Legislative Council and of a General
Assembly, as well as of Provincial Councils. The Legislative
Council consisted of thirty members, of whom
fourteen, including the President and one of the Vice-Presidents,
were nominated by the Khedive, and the
other sixteen were elected on the basis of universal
but indirect suffrage. Every village elected its own
delegate, and these delegates elected the members of
the Provincial Councils, which chose from among themselves
the representatives who were to sit in the Legislative
Council. The General Assembly was merely
an expansion of the Legislative Council obtained by
the addition to the latter body of the Ministers for the
time being and of forty-six Notables, eleven representing
the principal towns and thirty-five the rural districts, all
elected by the same process as the members of the
Provincial Councils. These bodies possessed only one
substantial hold over the Executive. No direct tax,
land tax, or personal tax could be imposed without the
assent of the General Assembly. But the Capitulations
so completely tied the hands of the Egyptian Government
in the matter of new taxation that only on one important
occasion did the General Assembly have an opportunity
of exercising a right which in theory is of the essence
of popular control over the Executive. In all other
respects both bodies were merely consultative bodies
with powers analogous to those of the Indian Legislative
Councils as at first constituted. Every law and every
decree of an important administrative character had to
be submitted to the Council before promulgation, but
Government was not compelled to accept any amendments,
though it was bound to state its reasons. The
same was the case with Budget estimates, as well as with
financial accounts. The Assembly had also to be consulted
as regards public loans, the construction of intraprovincial
railways and canals, and certain questions
affecting the land tax.
The Provincial Councils, very much smaller bodies,
also elective, of which the Governor was ex-officio President,
had to be consulted in matters of local interests and in
regard to measures for the improvement of agriculture,
sanitation, and education. None of these bodies could
be described as really representative of the people, for
the election of the primary delegates by the villages
was in most instances a mere farce, or at least a foregone
conclusion. In his utter lack of education, political or
other, the fellah's vision could not be expected to extend
beyond the limits of his village life. Within those limits
he was either the humble servant of the Omdeh, or his
bitter enemy, for most villages are a constant prey to
internal dissension. The Omdeh, or village headman,
who was himself a Government official, could usually
enforce the election of his own nominee, unless there
happened to be a more powerful rival faction, whose
chief object in that case was to blacken the Omdeh's
face by returning the opposition candidate. But the
opposition was apt to cease as soon as the successful
delegate got to headquarters and took part in the election
of the Provincial members, when his chief anxiety was to
ingratiate himself with the higher authorities. On the
whole, the system was probably the only one practicable
in the circumstances, and experience would, it was hoped,
gradually mitigate its defects. In any case, the Provincial
Councils were too small and met too rarely to play any
very important part except in the constitution of the
Legislative Council and the General Assembly.
These bodies had been content at first to discharge the
very modest and inconspicuous duties allotted to them,
and it must be recorded to their credit that as far back
as 1889 the Legislative Council, in which the large landowners'
interest preponderated, displayed genuine public
spirit in assenting to the increase, though a small one, of
the land tax required by Government to defray part of
the cost of the abolition of the corvée, which could not be
covered in any other way owing to the obstructive attitude
activity, it unfortunately assumed the form it generally
takes in assemblies that have never been given the
chance of acquiring any sense of responsibility from
the exercise of real power. The lawyers and other
representatives of the newly educated classes took the
lead and were prone to indulge in voluble eloquence and
unsparing criticism not always based on any knowledge
or recognition of the facts. But even unintelligent or
exaggerated criticism is probably better for a Government
than no criticism at all, and as Ministers learnt to take
the Legislative Council more into its confidence, and to
explain its own position and purposes more clearly,
there had been a marked improvement in the tone and
substance of discussions, and the recommendations made
by the Council had often been such that Government
was fain to accept them in whole or in part, or at least
to give adequate reasons for their rejection or postponement.
Lord Cromer certainly did not despair of
the future of self-governing institutions in Egypt, though
he strongly advocated caution and patience in regard to
them.
One of the most encouraging symptoms was the growing
interest shown by the provincial towns in the creation
and extension of municipalities. Here again the Egyptian
Government was terribly hampered by the Capitulations,
which made it practically impossible to impose municipal
taxation from which foreigners could remain exempt.
The idea of paying voluntary taxes was at first very
uncongenial to the Egyptian mind, but gradually the
people of several important towns, where foreign residents
had the good sense to set the example, became reconciled
to it, and by the year 1906 Mixed Municipal Commissions,
on which Egyptians and foreigners sat together, had
been established in Mansourah and five other important
towns, the Central Government merely making certain
contributions to their expenditure. At the same time,
Local Commissions, which had the same powers as the
were introduced in twenty-seven smaller towns with the
object of stimulating their interest in the management
of their own affairs, but in all these Government still
had to defray all expenditure.
If, on the other hand, the Press was to be taken as
reflecting the sentiments or expressing the opinion of
young Egypt, the outlook was discouraging. Few of the
foreign newspapers published in Egypt, though their
number was considerable, had ever set before the Egyptians
any very high standard of journalism. They
catered each for its own small circle of readers belonging
to different nationalities, and their horizon was generally
narrow. The Franco-Egyptian Press during the first
fifteen years of the Occupation had set a deplorable
example in its calculated malevolence towards the
British controlling power and indeed towards every
British official in Egypt. It is perhaps not very surprising
that the native Press followed suit. Journalism was not
regarded at first as a profession of much account. It
attracted chiefly the failures of the Europeanised schools
and colleges, whose hopes of employment in the public
services had been disappointed, and who were proportionately
embittered. The ordinary Egyptian who has
a small difference of opinion with his neighbour at once
shrieks at the top of his voice, cursing his antagonist's
forebears to the third or fourth generation, whilst the
other neighbours gather round to enjoy the ferocious
repartees that are bandied about. The newspapers
caught that unfortunate habit, and it evidently was to
the taste of their readers, for violence was invariably
rewarded with an increasing circulation. One of the
worst tendencies they developed was to show gross
intolerance and unfairness towards all those who differed
from them, and polemics on public questions were apt
to degenerate into personal attacks which savoured sometimes
of blackmail. Newspaper proprietors were mostly
men of straw open to various methods of Oriental persuasion.
or close reasoning found little favour with either
writers or readers. They preferred rhetorical generalities
or vehement political lucubrations with high-sounding
catchwords.
With the revival of Egyptian Nationalism, it was
the more extreme school that captured nearly the
whole of the native Press. Englishmen are seldom disposed
to resent even the most hostile criticism if conveyed
in some other shape than mere vulgar abuse.
British officials tired of reading long diatribes as monotonous
as they were violent. These were the chief
stock-in-trade even of men like Ali Yusef, the editor of
the Muayyed, and Mustapha Kamel, the founder of the
Lewa, both in their way remarkable personalities, whose
influence survives to the present day. They too relied
on scathing denunciation rather than on arguments in
the conduct of their great journalistic campaigns against
British supremacy. Lord Cromer says in one of his
Reports that he tried at one time to follow the native
Press carefully in the hope that something might be learnt
from it in regard to questions of administration and to
local matters, and possibly as to legitimate grievances
which might be remedied or deserve inquiry. But he
failed to find a single accurate, well-argued, or useful
article on such matters even as education or finance,
or the working of the judicial system. He was nevertheless
too staunch a believer in the freedom of the
Press to curtail it, though pressed to do so by many
Egyptians, and not only by those of the old school to
whom it had always been anathema.
The unmeasured recklessness of the Press was not
the only disquieting feature of a new movement which
was in itself neither unnatural nor reprehensible. The
resistance which British protection enabled Egypt to
offer to any further encroachments by Turkey and by
the other Powers on Egyptian rights had to that extent
strengthened her position as a separate, though still
and Firmans of 1840-1841, and it tended at the same
time to stimulate amongst the Egyptian people a sense of
nationhood, which led the more impatient amongst them
to resent being kept in tutelage even by the Power
whose authority shielded them from aggression. Benefits
conferred by another nation seldom elicit any deep or
abiding gratitude, and a new generation was growing
up in Egypt which had not known Pharaoh and could
not draw for itself the only rational conclusions possible
from a comparison between the cruel hardships of the
old régime and the occasional and much slighter vexations
of the new order of things. As the number of British
newcomers increased who knew little of the people or
of their habits and language, friction became more
frequent. The lamentable Denshawi incident is not
forgotten to the present day. The extreme severity of
the judicial retribution that followed an affray between
ignorant, if brutal, villagers and a small party of British
officers out shooting was honestly regarded by most
Egyptians, and not only by Egyptians, as needlessly
vindictive. No Englishman can read the story of the
wretched men's execution without a qualm of compunetion.
Trivial grievances, often of a personal character,
help to explain the increasing jealousy of British ascendancy
in the newly-educated classes and especially amongst
Egyptian officials, but it is Denshawi that rankled in the
memory of the fellaheen.
Few Egyptians, however, at that time denied that
they had learnt many admirable lessons from us, but
they claimed that there were other and greater lessons
which they had been learning for themselves from contact
with the Western civilisation brought by us as never
before to their very doors. Why should we continue
to deny to them the opportunity of applying to the
governance of their own country the principles of freedom
to which we professed to owe our own greatness? Why
should we refuse them the rights of self-government
Transvaal who had only recently stood up in arms against
us? To fortify passionate appeals of that sort, Western
education always provides the East with abundant
arguments drawn from our own history and literature,
and the usual reply, however well founded, that the East
is not yet ripe for the boons for which it clamours, is too
deeply wounding to its susceptibilities and self-confidence
to be accepted as adequate. Oriental impatience to
assimilate the lessons of political independence which
it learns from the West is seldom accompanied by a
similar impatience to emancipate itself from the self-imposed
trammels of social conditions and domestic
institutions and religious beliefs far more fundamentally
incompatible with Western ideas of liberty and progress.
On the contrary, appeals based upon the right to enjoy
the full benefits of admission to the higher plane of
Western civilisation very often coincide with a parallel
movement to conjure up memories of a more or less
mythical past in order to rehabilitate Eastern civilisation
and exalt it as at least potentially superior to the vaunted
civilisation which has given the West for the time being
a dominant position in the world.
This curiously illogical attitude was very marked
amongst some of the most influential leaders of young
Egyptian Nationalism. The new Nationalist movement
claimed to be merely a revival of the movement which
had actually originated in the fertile brain of the Khedive
Ismail as a last desperate attempt to evade interference
by the Powers with his methods of criminal profligacy,
and had been afterwards developed by Arabi and directed
by him in the first instance against the ascendancy
in the Egyptian army and bureaucracy of the old Turkish
caste, with the ruling Khedivial house as its foremost
representative. The Nationalist movement of Arabi's
time ultimately assumed to some extent a racial and
religious character, anti-foreign and anti-Christian. But
it never ceased to hate and distrust the Turk, even when
both as Sultan and as Khalif. In the new Nationalism
there were many different currents, but one of the strongest
flowed from Constantinople, where Abdul Hamid's Pan-Islamic
propaganda, covertly encouraged by William II,
who saw in him a useful instrument of his own ambitions,
had reached out, not unsuccessfully, into Egypt.
The Nationalist leaders no doubt had no wish to revive
Turkish political domination in Egypt, but they thought
they could safely use the religious sentiment, which must
always draw a Mahomedan people towards Turkey in
any differences arising between her and a Christian Power,
to obtain popular support for a campaign against British
control which, as a mere agitation on the part of the
educated classes for self-government and for the elimination
of British influence from the administration of
the country, left the masses at that time more than cold.
As was shown by a chance quarrel in the streets of
Alexandria which had led to an ugly outbreak of Mahomedan
violence, the cry of Din! Din!—"Our religion!
Our religion!"—is always a potent cry in all Mahomedan
countries, even in Egypt, where there is probably less
religious fanaticism than in most; and some of the leading
Nationalists had tried covertly to raise it, in a more
subtle and far more dangerous form, even in such a
clearly and exclusively political issue as that which
arose in 1906 between England and Turkey over the
invasion of Egyptian territory in the Sinai peninsula
by Ottoman troops. Pan-Islamism in its larger aspects
was not likely to get a permanent hold of Egypt, nor
did Egyptian Nationalism as a whole come under its
influence; but that it was actually impressed into the
service of a movement that claimed to represent progress
and enlightenment could not but give food for reflection.
For apart from its political aspects, Pan-Islamism at the
very best is inspired by a belief in the superiority of Islam,
not merely as the only form of religion that makes for
man's salvation in a future life, but also as a social system
point with our modern civilisation, and at none more
irreconcilably than at that of the relations between the
sexes.
There were, however, fortunately, also other and
more hopeful forms of Egyptian Nationalism, which in one
way derived far more directly from Arabi's Nationalist
movement. Not a few of his followers recognised, as
he himself did, that the British had worked wonders for
the fellaheen, and had secured to every Egyptian a
new sense of individual freedom. They believed that
our presence was still the main bulwark against the
predatory ambitions of the Khedive Abbas and the revival
of the old régime of despotism and corruption. They
looked forward to national independence as an ultimate
goal, but only to be reached when the masses, and not
merely a few privileged classes, had attained to the
consciousness of nationhood. What they asked was that
Great Britain should gradually and cautiously relax her
tutelage, give a larger number of young Egyptians
a share in the administration, and afford a wider scope
to representative institutions in which the people could
be taught the art of self-government. Many of them
were far more devout Mahomedans than those who
had associated themselves with Pan-Islamism. They
belonged to a school so profoundly imbued with faith
in human progress as an essential part of faith in a
beneficent Providence, that they did not consider it
a sin to seek to interpret the laws derived from the
Koran and the Traditions in the light of human needs
which did not exist in the seventh century amongst
Arab tribes almost isolated from the rest of the world,
but which undeniably exist in the twentieth century
when isolation is no longer possible. The leader of this
school was Sheikh Mohamed Abdu, who had been closely
associated with Arabi in 1881-1882, and sentenced in
consequence to internment. He was one of the first of
Arabi's friends to see how premature and misdirected
which, if they could have obtained it, they would have
been quite unable to preserve, and he became a genuine
and staunch convert to British influence, whilst remaining
a frank critic of our shortcomings as he saw them. After
a time he had accepted a judgeship in a Mahomedan
court and risen in 1899 to the position of Grand Mufti,
in which he exerted for a time a great and liberalising
influence on the teachers and students of El Azhar.
His death in 1905 was a serious loss to sober Egyptian
Nationalism and to the progressive school of Mahomedan
thought.
Though Lord Cromer had reached an age at which
most people, and especially those who have long enjoyed
almost undisputed authority, are apt to resent the
intrusion of new ideas and new men, he knew the older
generation of Egyptians too well not to realise that, if
it was ever to become possible for the Egyptians to
work out their own salvation, the only hope lay in the
younger generation, and that amongst them there were
elements of considerable promise whose co-operation he
was not too proud to seek against both reactionary and
revolutionary forces which he was too wise to underrate.
The reactionary forces at least had been gathering
strength at Yildiz Kiosk on the Bosphorus and in the
Palace in Cairo, and he was quite aware that they were
only waiting for his departure from Egypt to become
more actively aggressive. He felt, as he had perhaps
never done in earlier years, that in the new "politically
minded" Egypt that had grown up around him the
great work he had done lacked the support of some
organised party whose programme, as he said in the last
Report penned by him from Cairo, should involve "not
opposition to, but co-operation with Europeans in the
introduction of Western civilisation into their country."
He hoped he had found it in the moderate group of
Nationalists whose evolution he had watched with
interest and sympathy. It may at first sight seem
as typical of all that was best in that group, and as the
most promising representative of sober Egyptian
Nationalism, was Saad Zaghlul, whose appointment he
recommended to the Ministry of Education as the one
in which a wisely progressive influence was most needed
for guiding the footsteps of a yet younger generation.
It may be well to recall in his own words the opinion
which Lord Cromer had formed of Saad Zaghlul, who
was one of the very few Egyptians to whom he made
special reference in the farewell speech from which
I quoted another passage in the preceding chapter:
"Lastly, gentlemen, I should like to mention the name
of one with whom I have only recently co-operated, but for
whom, in that short time, I have learned to entertain a high
regard. Unless I am much mistaken, a career of great public
usefulness lies before the present Minister of Education,
Saad Zaghlul Pasha. He possesses all the qualities necessary
to serve his country. He is honest; he is capable; he has
the courage of his convictions; he has been abused by many
of the less worthy of his own countrymen. These are high
qualifications. He should go far."
The part which Saad Zaghlul has played in the last
Egyptian crisis, and especially as head of the Egyptian
Nationalist Delegation in Paris, is hardly that for which
Lord Cromer had cast him. But is he alone to blame
for the change that has come over him?
The wonderful transformation scene effected during
the first half of the Occupation was over when
Lord Cromer left Egypt. He had rescued her from
oppression and ruin and raised her to an unprecedented
pitch of material prosperity. At the same time, British
influence and increased contact with Western ideas had
helped to liberate new and conflicting forces which made
new demands upon British statesmanship. It had a
great opportunity, for the Anglo-French Agreement had
given Great Britain a much freer hand in Egypt than
she had hitherto had, and the General Election of 1905
had brought the Liberal party once more into power.
political party, and by family traditions as well as by
temperament he was a Liberal rather than a Tory.
But his retirement from a post of immense but undefined
responsibility following within a relatively short time
the change of Government at home made it unquestionably
much easier to modify the lines on which British control
had hitherto been conducted, and adapt them as far as
possible to the new conditions which, with his usual
clearness of vision, he had himself discerned. To turn
this opportunity to good account, it was, however,
essential that there should be no departure from the
principle ever present to Lord Cromer's mind that our
position in Egypt was that of trustees for her people.
| CHAPTER V The Egyptian problem | |