University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER VIII

THE CLAIM TO "COMPLETE INDEPENDENCE"

The Armistice and the end of the Great War when
it at last came may have taken other people in Egypt
somewhat by surprise, but not so the Nationalist party.
Indeed some credit must be given to their perspicacity
for having realised in good time that, when peace came,
the fate of Egypt would be in the hands of the Allied and
Associated Powers. They quickly changed their orientation
and made a close study of all the utterances
of Allied statesmen, and especially of Mr. Lloyd George
and President Wilson, which could be used in support of
Egypt's claim to a full share in the fruits of a victorious
war waged for the world's freedom, and to the unfettered
exercise of the right of self-determination repeatedly
promised to all the small nations. Before the war they
had been content to demand self-government and a
larger share in the administration of their country.
Now "complete independence" was their cry, and an
immediate notice to Great Britain to quit. They could
fairly claim that they had waited patiently until Great
Britain was released from the overwhelming anxieties
of war before raising their voices, but they lost no time in
doing so as soon as the war was over.

Two days after the Armistice, i.e., on November 13th,
1918, Saad Pasha Zaghlul and some of his friends called
at the Residency and in the name of the Egyptian people,
whose representatives they declared themselves to be,

laid before the High Commissioner, Sir Reginald Wingate,
a formal demand for the abolition of the Protectorate
and the recognition of the complete independence of
Egypt. Sir Reginald Wingate listened to them very
courteously, but according to the account of the conversation
published in the Nationalist Press, which is probably
quite accurate on this point at least, the only reply he
was in a position to make was that he was not acquainted
with the intentions of His Majesty's Government in regard
to the future of Egypt. Zaghlul was doubtless prepared
for this reply, for a few days later he asked the High
Commissioner to support his request to the military
authorities for permission for himself and his colleagues
of the Delegation to leave for England, where they wished
to place the Egyptian case before the British people.
That request was refused after reference to His Majesty's
Government, and with less than Sir Reginald's usual
tact the refusal was notified, not in a letter from the
High Commissioner himself, but in a somewhat curt
note from his private secretary. Zaghlul after all had
been for several years an Egyptian Minister, and he may
be excused for having taken umbrage at the form in which
the refusal of a request in itself perfectly legitimate had
been conveyed to him by the Residency. He appealed
then to higher quarters, and in a series of skilfully argued
letters to Mr. Lloyd George, M. Clemenceau, M. Orlando,
and President Wilson he adjured each of those statesmen
in turn and with increasing vehemence to apply to Egypt,
whose invaluable co-operation during the war entitled
her to a hearing, the lofty principles they had proclaimed
in defining their war aims.

When the Peace Conference met in Paris, the Nationalist
Delegation, which henceforth represented the Party of
Egyptian Independence, sent to all the Plenipotentiaries
an exhaustive Memorandum in which the Nationalist programme
was fully set forth. It was a plausible document.
It gave a somewhat highly coloured picture of the immense
progress made by the Egyptian people in the days of

Mehemet Ali and his successors, which had enabled the
Khedive Ismail to boast that "Egypt was no longer in
Africa, but was a part of Europe." It passed lightly
over the disorders which brought about the British
Occupation, but laid stress on the repeated assurances
given by Great Britain that the Occupation was to be
merely temporary, and, whilst not ignoring altogether
the good work done by Englishmen during the Occupation,
it dwelt on the disabilities it had imposed upon Egyptians
and the damaging effects of an alien tutelage, for which
there had ceased to be any excuse, upon the moral and
intellectual development of the nation. It enumerated
and emphasised the very great services of different kinds
which Egypt had rendered to the Allied cause in the
prosecution of the war. It denounced the Protectorate
as a war-measure which had no moral or legal value,
as no attempt had ever been made to obtain for it the
consent and approval of the Egyptian people. It went
on therefore to formulate the Egyptian demands, which
were the recognition and free enjoyment of national
independence and of Egypt's full and sole sovereignty
over the Sudan as well as over Egypt proper. In return,
it promised ample security for the discharge of Egypt's
financial obligations and for the rights enjoyed by the
foreign communities settled in the country. It affirmed,
in conclusion, the unprecedented unanimity with which
the Egyptian nation had entrusted its cause to the
Delegation, and it registered an indignant protest against
the arbitrary action of the British authorities in refusing
permission for its members to proceed to Paris in discharge
of their mission.

Meanwhile, Egyptian Ministers had begun to grow
alarmed at a movement which left them entirely out of
account. But they felt just as strongly as the Delegation
itself that the time had arrived to press for a
definition of the position which Egypt was to occupy now
that the war was over and the conditions which had led
to the proclamation of the Protectorate had passed

away. An Anglo-Egyptian Commission had been appointed
in 1918 at the instance of the Egyptian Prime
Minister to report on the constitutional reforms which
it was admitted would have to be introduced when peace
was restored. All that has been made known to the
public in regard to its labours is that Sir William Brunyate,
the Judicial Adviser, drew up at the request of the
Egyptian Ministers a Note on Constitutional Reform in
Egypt, which, though marked "confidential," leaked cut
and gave great offence. It was almost too much to expect
that the Prime Minister would be able or willing to
keep it secret. Nor did the Censorship interfere when
its tenor appeared in the native Press, and as the author
was one of those unbending Anglo-Egyptian officials who
were regarded by Egyptians as specially hostile to all
their aspirations, there was a lively chorus of criticism
and condemnation. The Report was an able paper,
but it entirely ignored the existence of the national
sentiment which the war and the democratic ideals of
the war had stimulated in Egypt as elsewhere. It bore
the stamp of Sir William Brunyate's domineering personality,
which was indeed apt to make enemies for him
amongst his own fellow-countrymen almost as much
as amongst Egyptians. Though chiefly concerned with
constitutional changes and with the very cognate question
of the Capitulations, it did not spare the deficiencies of
the politically-minded classes in an incisive review of
their past activities. Of the specific proposals which
it contained, the most important was the creation of a
new Legislature consisting of two chambers, in the upper
one of which—the Senate—not only British Advisers and
Egyptian Ministers were to have seats, but also
representatives of the large foreign communities, chosen
by special electorates, to voice their commercial, financial,
and professional interests, which could not be left entirely
in the hands of Egyptian legislators so long as
the Egyptians themselves took scarcely any part in the
economic activities of the country. No particular
alterations were recommended in the constitution of
the National Assembly, but it was clearly to be retained
only as a lower chamber, subordinate to the Senate,
whose opinion was to prevail in all matters of essential
legislation. It was this pre-eminence assigned to an
upper chamber composed of a considerable number,
though not a majority, of non-Egyptians that aroused
the indignation of the Egyptians, especially as it was
clearly proposed with a view to secure the passage of
whatever legislation the British Government might
consider necessary for the maintenance of their controlling
authority.

The whole Note was doubtless based on the statement
of British policy conveyed to Sultan Hussein by the Residency
at the time of the proclamation of the Protectorate.
For this Sir William Brunyate could not reasonably be
held altogether responsible, for in the absence of any
later pronouncement it was necessarily part of his brief.
But the manner and the tone were his, and his whole
conception of the Protectorate was as masterful as his
conception of the relations between British and Egyptian
officials had usually shown itself. The wrath of the
Nationalists against their bête noire rose to white heat,
and especially of the influential section recruited from the
Bar, who also ascribed to Sir William a scheme for introducing
British jurisprudence and the exclusive use of
English into the Law Courts—a revolution which would
have been absolutely disastrous to men trained on the
lines of continental jurisprudence and whose only foreign
language was in most cases French.

How far the Prime Minister's indiscretion was a calculated
one is not a material point. But the storm of
protest which it raised helped to lend weight to the
proposal that he was then making officially that he and
Adli Pasha, the Minister of Justice, should proceed to
England to confer personally with the British Government.
The proposal was not unreasonable, and it could scarcely
be alleged, as it was in the case of the Nationalist Delegation,

that two Egyptian Ministers were not sufficiently
responsible persons to be furnished with passports. But
the answer they received, though couched, of course, in
more courteous terms and expressing polite regret that
the British Ministers were too much engrossed in the
preoccupations of the Peace Conference to find time for
discussing Egyptian affairs, was in effect the same.
Their proposal was negatived. Rushdi Pasha, who had
been in office all through the war, and the whole Cabinet
with him, resigned on March 1st.

The excitement in Egypt grew fierce. The very reason
given for the refusal to receive the Egyptian Ministers
made it the more galling, for the most moderate Egyptians
already resented the exclusion of Egypt from the Paris
Conference. Those most friendly to England argued
that if the Protectorate had been designed to bring her
within the fold of the British Empire, she was a sufficiently
important partner in the Empire to be allowed some special
representation in Paris. Others contended that the
mere fact of her international status having been forcibly
changed during the war gave her as good a title to have
a seat at the Conference table as any of the new States
that had sprung out of the war, especially when the
Emir Feisal was seen to take his seat there, at the instance
of the British Plenipotentiaries, as the representative of
the newly-made King of the Hedjaz, whose people the
Egyptians not unnaturally regarded as standing on a far
lower level of civilisation and power than themselves.
Nor did it escape notice that whilst the Egyptian
Delegation were refused passports, deputations bound
on analogous errands from Cyprus and from Syria
were allowed to travel without let or hindrance to
Europe.

A tremendous impetus was thus given to the agitation
already in progress throughout the country in support
of the full programme of Egyptian independence.
Zaghlul had developed it with his customary eloquence
early in January, in a speech delivered at a gathering in

his honour under the significant presidency of Hamid
Pasha el Bassal, a member of the Legislative Assembly,
and, what is far more important, a Beduin chief of great
influence amongst the tribes to the east of the Nile.
Local committees had been formed and public meetings
held all over the provinces, and mass signatures collected,
until the authorities interfered, for the "mandate"
formally investing the Delegation with authority to act
on behalf of the "nation." The great majority of
the native Press joined in the campaign with all its
wonted vehemence. So far, however, as the Nationalists
are quite justified in pointing out, the movement had been
kept within lawful bounds. Probably for that very reason
its significance was underrated, though it had assumed
alarming dimensions. In unofficial circles and amongst
the older Anglo-Egyptian officials outside the inner
ring there were some who saw danger signals ahead.
But they had no access to the small group who were in
authority, and of these none apparently could read the
writing on the wall. The British Adviser to the Ministry
of the Interior, the Department specially responsible for
law and order, scouted the idea of any serious trouble.
Sir Reginald Wingate had been already brought back
to England in order, it was officially stated, that Government
should confer with him, though his friends declare
that his wiser counsels were not listened to, perhaps because
they were not urged with sufficient insistence.
The Egyptian official world was in the throes of a
Ministerial crisis, and there was no Egyptian Government
to share even nominally the responsibilities of
British policy.

Yet this was the time that was chosen for a most
momentous decision. The British Government, still
believing apparently that the Nationalist movement
was merely the outcome of a shallow propaganda
engineered by a handful of discontented politicians,
imagined they could stamp it out by striking at the
leaders. At six o'clock on the afternoon of March 6th,

Saad Pasha Zaghlul and nine other members of the
Party of Independence were summoned by the General
Officer Commanding His Majesty's forces in Egypt and
sternly lectured on their conduct in promoting a great
political agitation directed against the existing régime.
General Watson reminded them that the country was
still under martial law, and warned them against any
action likely to disturb order or hamper the work of the
Egyptian authorities. Otherwise, severe measures would
be taken. It was a short, unequivocal statement. Some
of the party wished to reply, but the General was not
prepared to enter into any discussion. The party went
away more in anger than in fear, and when next day they
had sufficiently recovered their composure, they issued a
firm but not undignified protest and a complete account
of their interview with the General, which they circulated
all over the country. The protest was considered to be
so worded as to constitute a flagrant defiance of the
warning. No time was wasted, and on the afternoon of
the 8th four of the most prominent members of the
Delegation were arrested and conducted to the Kasr-el-Nil
Barracks. On the following morning they were sent to
Alexandria and placed on board a British destroyer,
which conveyed them to Malta. The four were Saad
Pasha Zaghlul, Hamid Pasha el Bassal, Ismail Pasha
Sidki, to all of whom I have already referred, and
Mohamed Pasha Mahmoud, who after being educated
in England and having distinguished himself at Oxford
had risen to the post of provincial Governor in Egypt,
and been dismissed from it, as many Englishmen in
Egypt consider, very unfairly. Within a few days the
whole valley of the Nile from Alexandria to the Sudan
frontier was in a ferment of revolt.

But before describing the chief events of the next
few weeks, which suddenly illuminated, and with a sinister
light, the grave situation into which we had drifted
largely through our own blunders (not merely during the
last few months or during the war only, but throughout

the later period of British control before the war), it
may be well to try to gauge the real forces that lay
behind the Nationalist movement. This movement was
not by any means a new movement. Its origin, as we
have seen, could be traced back to the semi-military
revolt in the days of Arabi, and it had begun to revive
some time before Lord Cromer left Egypt. It had shown
marked activity when Sir Eldon Gorst succeeded him,
and though driven for a while underground in Lord
Kitchener's time, largely by the prestige attaching to
that great soldier's name, it received a great deal of secret
encouragement from the Khedive Abbas, who hoped to
use it as an effective weapon against the British administrative
control which he detested, and it played at times
an unpleasantly prominent part in the Egyptian Legislature.
It could always rely on Mahomedan feeling for a
large measure of support. In the El Azhar University
the establishment of the Protectorate, which placed
Mahomedan people under the paramount authority of a
Christian Power, was resented, in spite of all our assurances,
as a blow dealt at the spiritual rights of the
Ottoman Sultan as Khalif. Its thousands of turbaned
students became as ardent champions of complete
independence as the pupils, past and present, of the
Government schools and colleges who had imbibed from
their Europeanised education a crude belief in Western
ideals of liberty and in the saving virtue of democratic
institutions. The lawyers and practically all the professional
classes were imbued with Nationalism, which
found its loudest if not its wisest champions in the native
Press. The sense of injustice generated by the rapid
increase in the number of Englishmen employed in the
Egyptian public services and the attitude of aloofness,
if not worse, adopted by some of them even in the higher
ranks towards their Egyptian colleagues and subordinates
had given a great impetus to Nationalist sentiments in
the large army of Government servants employed in
almost every Department. To a new class of idle rich
that had suddenly sprung up with the fabulous harvest
of wealth reaped during the war by everyone who owned
any land, Nationalism afforded in many cases the novel
excitement and notoriety of political activity, and as
money was always forthcoming to provide the necessary
sinews of agitation, politics became for the first time a
paying as well as a patriotic trade.

Mixed with some meaner elements there was at the
back of the movement some real earnestness of purpose
and a genuine faith in the high ideals set by the Allied
statesmen before their peoples during the war, and in the
advent of a new and better world in which, according
to President Wilson, "the rights of the weakest shall be
as sacred as those of the strongest." To the Egyptian
masses political theories and arguments had meant
nothing before the war. But in Egypt, as in every other
country, all the conditions of life, and especially the
enormous rise in prices, had produced a wave of social
unrest which took many different forms. Whilst the
politically-minded classes for the most part held their
peace so long as hostilities lasted and seemed to accept
even the Protectorate with passive resignation, the
poorer classes in the towns had been taught, either by
their own hardships, which had been growing steadily
more acute since the proclamation of the Protectorate,
or by an insidious propaganda, to associate all their new
grievances with the fateful word Protectorate, which
they readily believed to mean "slavery." For the rise
in wages, considerable as it had been, had often not
kept pace with the inordinate rise in prices for the very
necessities of life. This was the case amongst the
landless labourers in the rural districts, and still more in
the urban centres, where the lower classes—workmen,
carters, cab-drivers, shopkeepers, and a host of minor
employees—were hard put to it to make both ends
meet.

Is it surprising that when these humble folk, whose
ignorance is abysmal, saw their country swarming as

never before with Englishmen, and contrasted their
own penury with all the outward signs of affluence and
extravagance in which Englishmen seemed to them to
live and move and have their being, they should have
lent a ready ear to their educated fellow-countrymen who
told them it was all the fault of the English and of the
Protectorate, which was reducing the people of Egypt
to unending slavery? Is it surprising that they should
have so quickly come to believe that the only remedy
was to get rid of the English altogether out of the country,
and that the first step towards that happy consummation
was to join the crowd of Zaghlul's followers and unite
their voices with those of the great patriots who would
free them from the accursed Protectorate, and lead
them into the millennium of national independence?

Far more substantial had been the grievances of a great
many of the fellaheen. I have already described them.
Though recruiting for the Labour Corps ceased even
before the Armistice, there was no immediate or effective
attempt to right the wrongs which had been undoubtedly
committed in regard to war requisitions of supplies and
transport. Had a proclamation been issued recognising
the great value of all the contributions made by the
fellaheen for the successful prosecution of the war,
acknowledging that under the pressure of military
necessity real hardships had been, however unwillingly,
inflicted upon them owing to the lack of British supervision,
and promising prompt inquiry and redress, the
harm done to our reputation for kindliness and justice
might have been to some extent repaired. A few hundred
thousand pounds judiciously and promptly expended
would have gone far to remove the sense of bitterness.
After all the Syrian expedition would have been scarcely
feasible without Egyptian labour and Egyptian supplies,
and some expression of gratitude would not have marred
its glory. But the saving word was never spoken;
and the payments due from the military authorities
continued to lag for months behind, and the ugly past

was generally left to take care of itself. So it had come
to pass that in the eyes of the fellaheen not only had the
English long ago ceased to be their friends as in the early
years of the Occupation, but had brought back for their
own benefit the dark days of Ismail. For them too the
beginning of this new "slavery" coincided with the
proclamation of the Protectorate, and they were easily
persuaded that their best hope of salvation lay with
Saad Zaghlul and his friends, whose names they had
scarcely heard of in former times.

But though all these different elements had been
gradually hardening against the British controlling
power, they would not have burst forth simultaneously
into such sudden and explosive activity had there not
been somewhere in the background real power of organisation.
The East has always had its secret societies,
but in contact with the West it has now learned to
organise and sustain great political movements which,
whatever their underground ramifications may be, work
freely in the open and claim to derive their sanction
from the force of public opinion behind them. We
have seen this in the Indian Home Rule movement,
and also in Persia, and even in China. But Egypt has
naturally been much more closely affected by Turkish
Nationalism. Not a dozen years have elapsed since,
like a bolt from the blue, the Committee of Union and
Progress struck down the Hamidian régime at Constantinople
to the short-lived cry of Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity for all the races of the Ottoman Empire.
Badly hit by the Balkan wars, it gambled on its alliance
with German militarism and plunged Turkey into the
Great War. When her own armies and those of her
allies had been finally crushed and she like them had to
sue for peace, we fondly imagined that the Committee's
power was broken for ever. But it merely bent for a
while to the storm. Its organisation had been scotched,
but not killed, and the vigorous resurgence of aggressive
Turkish Nationalism was bound to find a responsive

echo amongst a certain school at least of Egyptian
malcontents, with whom Nationalism is apt to be merely
a form of Pan-Islamism.

Egyptian Nationalism is made of a very different
stuff from Turkish nationalism. The Turks have always
been a fighting race and a ruling race. The Egyptians
have not. Little love is or has ever been lost between
the Egyptians and the Turks, who were so long their
masters. But the common tie of Islam must not be
underrated. In Hamidian days Turkish political refugees
often took sanctuary in Egypt. Many of the great
families, including the Sultan's, are still more Turkish
than Egyptian, and after the Turkish revolution of 1908,
the Khedive Abbas, who could play the Nationalist
when it suited him, and many of the Egyptian leaders
of the pre-war Nationalist movement, kept up very close
relations with the "Young Turks."

One need not assume, now or in the past, any direct
and intimate co-operation between Egyptian and Turkish
Nationalists. Their ultimate aims are too clearly destined
to clash. But that the Egyptian Nationalists largely
modelled their political organisation on that of the
Turkish Nationalists can scarcely be doubted. It may
lack the Turkish virility, but it makes up for it by remarkable
flexibility, and it displays no little adroitness
in exploiting the fluctuations of the international situation
and the peculiar idiosyncrasies of the Western nations
with which it has to reckon. There is even less reason
to assume any co-operation between the leaders of
Egyptian Nationalism and Muscovite Bolshevism, but
the Bolshevist spirit is abroad all over the East as well
as the West, and any violent political movement, however
peaceful the vast majority of those engaged in it may
desire to keep it, inevitably attracts a large number of
hangers-on whose anarchist instincts are always against
peace and order. These have supplied a contingent of
irregular forces to Egyptian Nationalism which has
brought much discredit upon it, but which its leaders

have unfortunately been unwilling to repudiate and
probably at times powerless to control. For it is one
thing to show, as Egyptian Nationalism has done, very
great capacity for organisation, and quite another thing
to control the forces that have been organised when once
some unforeseen accident has set them, perhaps prematurely,
in motion.