University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XII

THE BREAKDOWN OF THE CONTROL

With the return of Mohamed Said to power, there
was once more a Government in Cairo, though not one
that carried much authority. The Prime Minister, in
particular, undoubted as was his ability and especially
his adroitness, enjoyed very little credit, and least of all
with those who remembered or knew how dubious a
part he had played as Minister in Butros Pasha's Cabinet
and afterwards as Prime Minister in the last years before
the war under the ex-Khedive Abbas.

But the gravity of the situation in Egypt had far outgrown
any mere change of Egyptian Ministers. Throughout
the Occupation Egyptian Prime Ministers, even the
ablest amongst them, had played only a secondary,
though often a very important and useful, part. It was
the British control, exercised through the Residency and
through the British officials attached to the various
Departments of the Egyptian Administration, that had
directed the policy of Egyptian Ministers and supplied
the driving power. The great lesson conveyed by the
recent upheaval, though the British Government was
slow to learn it, was that the old system of control which
had already shown signs of weakness and deterioration
before the war had broken down under the tremendous
war strain and required to be entirely overhauled. The
predominance of military over civil authority during
the war had not caused but it had precipitated the breakdown.

What had that system been? It had been from
beginning to end a patchwork of convenient fictions,
designed to cover up inconvenient realities, partly under
the stress of international difficulties, and partly from our
traditional predilection, not by any means always unwise,
for compromise, where the Frenchman, for instance,
prefers a situation nette. The first result was to leave
the Foreign Office in sole charge of Egypt, after the
British Government had assumed the right to have the
last word in matters, not only of policy, but of internal
administration in Egypt. The reason was obvious and
not in itself unsound. The Egyptian question did not
cease to be an international question after we occupied
Egypt in 1882. Far from it. The equivocal character
of our position in Egypt, the bitter hostility of the French,
and the suzerain rights, however circumscribed, which
Turkey still claimed to exercise, were a source of constant
embarrassment to the Foreign Office, and the Egyptian
question only began to lose some of its acuteness as an
international question with the Anglo-French Agreement
of 1904.

The Foreign Office remained, therefore, after as before
the Occupation, the Department responsible for Egyptian
affairs. But it was neither designed nor equipped to
deal with the administrative aspects of British control.
In Lord Cromer's time it fell into the habit of leaving
them entirely to him, and it continued with very rare
exceptions to leave them in the same way to his successors.
This was almost inevitable, for there was seldom, and
only accidentally, anyone at the Foreign Office—let
alone any constituted body of experienced advisers such
as the Secretary of State for India possesses—to whose
inside knowledge of Egyptian administration the Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs could turn for an informed
opinion. Similarly, at the Cairo end, His Majesty's
representative had only as a rule on his staff diplomatists
for whom Egypt merely meant an episode of uncertain,
but usually short, duration in a career that has nothing

to do with administration. So between Downing Street
and the Residency—a term I use to cover the direct
representative of the British Government in Egypt,
whether styled as before the war Agent and Consul-General
or, as since the Protectorate, Resident or High
Commissioner—the liaison has always been very slender.
It may therefore well be doubted whether the British
Government had ever realised the many changes both in
spirit and in form which the system of British control
had undergone since it ceased to be the "one man show"
that it was when Lord Cromer ran it, and could alone
run it so admirably, because he himself had made it.

When one begins to inquire at all closely into that
system, the question that soon arises is whether one
can properly talk of any system at all when the powers
and responsibilities of British and Egyptians engaged
in carrying on the government and administration of
Egypt have never been defined, and the limits of British
control have always remained uncertain, and seem to
have fluctuated according to the policy and personality
of the hour. The only principle ever laid down publicly
is to be found in despatch from Lord Granville which
dates back to the early days of the Occupation (January,
1884).

That principle underlay the veiled protectorate which
we exercised over Egypt for more than thirty years before
the Great War, and it presumably underlies the formal
protectorate which we proclaimed in the first year of the
war. But to what extent and by what means has it been
enforced?

It was never actually enforced against the head of the
Egyptian State until the ex-Khedive Abbas sided with
our enemies on the outbreak of war with Turkey, though

Lord Kitchener had been driven by the ex-Khedive's
incorrigible bad faith to contemplate the necessity of
enforcing it in 1914, had there been no war. That the
principle has occasionally been enforced against Egyptian
Ministers who definitely refused to follow British advice
there are cases on record to show. The first was that of
Sherif Pasha, whose refusal to agree to the abandonment
of the Sudan provoked Lord Granville's despatch. Sometimes
the issue was not so clearly stated, and the resignation
of various Egyptian Premiers, from Nubar and
Riaz down to Hussein Rushdi, has frequently been due
not so much to any difference on one specific point as to
a general divergency of views between them and the
British representative for the time being. The latter's
influence was anyhow almost always paramount in the
selection of a new Prime Minister and in the constitution
of his Cabinet. When, for instance, Riaz resigned in
1895, Lord Cromer told me at the time that he had had
to negative two or three suggestions made to him by the
Khedive as to who should succeed him, and had finally
been obliged to tell him point-blank that Nubar was, in
his opinion, the only Prime Minister possible in the
circumstances, and Abbas, much as he disliked Nubar,
sent for him and asked him to form the new Cabinet.

A much more obscure question is how the principle
laid down by Lord Granville adjusted itself to the normal
everyday relations between the Egyptian Ministers
and the Residency, and between British Advisers and
officials and their Egyptian colleagues in the different
branches of the Administration. Those relations were
certainly not and could hardly be governed by any
definite rules and regulations. The Residency dealt
officially with the Egyptian Ministers alone. With
regard to questions of administration it naturally relied
very largely upon the opinions of the English Advisers
and officials actually in the Egyptian services. It was
the custom, I believe, to summon them to conferences
at the Residency on matters deemed to be of primary

importance. But their Egyptian colleagues did not
attend such conferences, and even if they had been
previously consulted, their opinions reached the Residency
only at second hand. Decisions arrived at in those conferences
were conveyed sometimes by the representative
of the British Government direct to the Egyptian Prime
Minister or to the Minister specially concerned, and sometimes
by the Financial Adviser, the only British Adviser
with a seat on the Egyptian Council of Ministers. Did
the recommendation thus made partake of the nature of
advice, or was it an order? So long as it was accepted,
it could, of course, be treated merely as advice, but how
often was it only accepted lest it should be translated into
an order?

In questions of lesser and more purely departmental
importance it seems to have depended very much upon
the personality of the individual British Adviser or official
how far he consulted the Egyptian head of his department
or other Egyptian coadjutors. It was in any case again
through him that the Egyptian view was conveyed, if it
was conveyed at all, to the Residency. Many Egyptians
were no doubt quite satisfied to be relieved in this way
of any real responsibility. Others took advantage of it
to cast upon the British the responsibility for irregular
proceedings of their own, which neither the Residency nor
their British colleagues or superiors knew anything about,
or would have approved of, had they known. It was an
easy and pretty safe way of sheltering themselves against
criticism from their own people. On one occasion an
Egyptian Minister, who was supporting before the
Legislative Assembly a measure on which he had been
in full agreement with his British Adviser, lost heart when
he found himself being violently attacked, and having
been asked how he could venture to defend it, just pleaded
feebly: "The English wanted it." Weakness of this
sort was partly the cause and partly the result of a
tendency amongst some British officials to treat Egyptians
as mere inferiors who were there to take and carry out

instructions and not to have opinions of their own.
It is small wonder that Egyptian officials came to believe
that their advancement depended upon subservience
rather than good work.

Still worse was the effect of the belief which, after
Lord Cromer's time, steadily gained ground, largely as
the result of the indulgence granted to the Khedive
Abbas and his protégés, that it was the policy of the British
control to prefer Egyptian Ministers and officials who
never "give trouble," and in recognition of their docility
to turn a blind eye on their shortcomings. Such tendencies
soon spread, and there can be little doubt that
they became very marked in later years among some of
the British officials charged by their respective departments
with the inspection of the Egyptian Administration
in the Provinces. Nowhere could they be more dangerous,
for nowhere can a few bad failures bring a whole service
so quickly into disrepute. The strength of a chain is the
strength of its weakest links, and a very small number of
misfits suffice to destroy confidence. The relations
between the provincial authorities and British inspectors,
whose reports to headquarters may be decisive, are in
fact far more delicate and depend far more upon personal
tact and good feeling than the relations between the
higher Egyptian and British officials at the seat of government.
Had it not become the fashion with some of the
higher British officials to hold the Egyptians of no account,
such important duties as those of inspection would never
have been entrusted to young and inexperienced Englishmen
who, even if only through sheer ignorance, trod
heavily on Egyptian corns. The mere question of manners
is not so unimportant in an Oriental country as we are
sometimes inclined to hold it. A British official may be
extremely competent, but whether in the very responsible
position of an Adviser, or in a much more humble post,
he is of no use in Egypt if he is incapable by temperament,
or will not take the trouble, to get on with Egyptians,
and to treat them with the courtesy and personal for

bearance in which they are seldom themselves lacking.
It was a point on which Lord Cromer felt very strongly,
but it seems to have been forgotten under his successors.

The lower the scale of the official hierarchy into which
a British element was introduced the greater became the
jealousy with which it was viewed by the Egyptians.
They are more or less willing to recognise the need of
British advisers and of British experts if they are carefully
selected. Even in this respect their faith in the British controlling
power was put to a severe strain. But when young
Englishmen were imported in increasing numbers whose
qualifications were not often at once apparent, whilst
appointments were made in the higher ranks for which
it was difficult to make out any prima facie justification,
the Egyptian complained bitterly that he was not given
a fair chance and that Englishmen were preferred before
him simply because they were Englishmen. If it were
argued that there were no Egyptians fitted for the posts,
he disputed the argument, or he retorted with equal
bitterness, and with some show of reason, that the fault
lay with our own failure in the course of so many years
to educate and to train up, as we had ourselves undertaken
to do, Egyptians who should by this time have
been fit for responsibility.

No information with regard to the actual number of
Englishmen employed under the Egyptian Government
has been made public since Lord Cromer's Annual Report
for 1906, in which he gave the full figures in that year,
as well as in 1896. During that decade there had been
an increase from 286 to 662. The increase of foreigners
of other than British nationality had been only from 404
to 590. The increase in the whole strength of the Egyptian
Civil Service, foreigners and natives together, had been
considerable, viz., from 9,134 to 13,279, the number of
Egyptians having increased by 3,583. Lord Cromer was
evidently not quite happy about the large increase in
the number of Englishmen, and in his comments on the
subject he gave about the only indication to be found

in his Reports that the task of supervising the great
machinery of British control had grown too much for
him. "Although I have endeavoured," he wrote, "to
exercise some general supervision over the employment of
Europeans in the Egyptian services, and although
individual cases of special importance have been generally
referred to me, I have not for some years past made a
thorough examination of all the details." He clearly
showed that in his opinion the increase was such as to
require very full explanation. He contended that there
had been no departure from the general policy pursued
ever since the Occupation, which had been "to limit
the number of Europeans as much as possible, to employ
Egyptians in the great majority of the subordinate and
in a large number of the superior administrative posts,
and gradually to prepare the ground for increasing them
further." He pointed out that European agency was
required and would continue to be required for two
reasons: "In the first place to supply the technical
knowledge which until very recently the Egyptians have
had no opportunity of acquiring; in the second place to
remedy those defects in the Egyptian character which
have been developed by a long course of misgovernment."
He proceeded to justify the increase in each separate
Department, and the part of his defence which carries
the least conviction is the contention that the Department
of Public Instruction had done all that could
be reasonably expected to supply the demands of the
public services.

The chief point of interest, however, is that Lord Cromer
felt himself called upon to justify an increase which after
all had only brought the number of Englishmen employed
in the Egyptian public services up to 662. What would
he have said could he have known that according to the
Budget provisions for 1919-1920 that number would show
a further increase of over 150 per cent., viz., to 1,671!
If one reduces this figure by the number of Englishmen,
117, employed without a contract and hors cadre, a class

which Lord Cromer possibly did not take into account,
or if one allows also for the number, relatively small,
of British judges and employés of the Mixed Tribunals
whom Lord Cromer specifically excluded, the total
increase may be a little, but a very little, less. But it is
large enough to give one furiously to think. The rapid
development of Egypt and her growing wealth may
reasonably account for some of this increase. But what
the Egyptians saw was that this new Civil Service for
Egypt, recruited in England on the same lines as the British
and Colonial and Indian Civil Services, that was started
only in the last years of Lord Cromer's time, poured in its
annual contingents as a matter of course. Besides this,
several relatively new departments have indented for more
and more technical experts from home. That also may
have been to some extent inevitable, but the numbers
might have been smaller if there had not been a tendency
to yield to the temptation to get out young Englishmen
already trained to work on the accustomed lines instead
of laboriously training young Egyptians to do the
work.

But whether these or other reasons be good, bad, or
indifferent, the fact remains that the number of Englishmen
in the Egyptian public services has enormously
exceeded, in proportion to size and population, the number
employed in India, though it is through them that the
whole of British India is governed, whereas Englishmen
in Egypt are not, except in a few departments, executive
officers. Egyptians can hardly be blamed for resenting a
result that pointed, not to the increasing share we had
repeatedly promised them in the government and administration
of their country, but to a diminishing one.

Certainly the strongest part of the Nationalist case
is that which even moderate men who do not otherwise
fully subscribe to the programme of the Party of Independence
base on the steady deterioration of British control
even before the war. I will state it briefly and as far as
possible in the words in which it was set out to me. These

Egyptians recognised the necessity of a friendly agreement
with England, whose assistance and protection they,
however, carefully differentiated from control and protectorate.
They did not deny the material benefits which
the Occupation at first conferred upon Egypt, nor the
high standard of endeavour it preserved under the vigilant
supervision of Lord Cromer's great personality. But
they maintained that it had failed more and more
grievously as time went on to achieve even the narrower
tasks set before it, let alone the higher task of training
up Egyptians to govern themselves. Even the reports
issued by the Ministry of Education convicted it,
they contended, of dismal failure in respect of both primary
and secondary education, for in close upon forty years
it had barely reduced the overwhelming percentage of
illiteracy, and to-day, as in 1882, Egyptians who wanted
a real education were almost compelled to go abroad for it.
They read, though with much less reason, a similar confession
of failure into the report of the latest Committee
on Sanitation. Or, turning to the Irrigation Department,
formerly most popular and highly respected, where to-day,
they asked, was the confidence it once enjoyed? Not
only Egyptians but many Englishmen had ceased, they
asserted, to trust either its competence or its integrity
of purpose. In almost every department the British
personnel, they declared, had been steadily expanding,
even in the subordinate ranks which it had always been
understood should be filled by Egyptians, and while the
quantity had increased, the quality from top to bottom,
with rare exceptions, had deteriorated in efficiency, in
industry, and in manners. Egyptians in the public
services were treated more and more as inferiors and
not as collaborators, and the British official world had
steadily cut itself off from any intimate contact with
Egyptians, save with those who were prepared to have
no opinions of their own.

Such results, they contended, were not due merely to
a general deterioration of the British personnel. They

were due to the whole system of government and administration,
which was one of divided and ill-defined responsibilities.
In the Government itself, and in every public
department, there were Egyptians who, nominally the
superiors, were in fact merely the servants of English
subordinates. The best Egyptians had grown more and
more reluctant to accept such humiliating relations.
Hence there had been a parallel deterioration in the
quality of the Egyptians who were prepared to work
with or under the British.

Where to-day was there a Riaz or a Nubar? Egyptian
Ministers of that stamp had disappeared, just as had
Englishmen of Lord Cromer's stamp. Possibly the
Egyptian public sometimes held the English Advisers
responsible for things that were not done at all on their
advice. But how was the Egyptian public to know?
It knew that, as Lord Granville laid it down in the early
days of the Occupation, the Egyptians are expected to
abide by British advice. How was it to know where that
advice began and where it stopped? How was it to know
whether Egyptian Ministers, who perhaps inspired very
little personal confidence, were to be believed when they
sheltered themselves behind the alleged wishes of the
British? And had not the British themselves substituted
orders for advice and made subserviency the one essential
qualification for office instead of character and integrity?

Mutatis mutandis, did not the same apply to Palace
influences? On this point it would not be fair to reproduce
what has been said to me about present-day
influences. I prefer to confine myself to one instance
given to me out of the past. Many Egyptians were
encouraged by Lord Cromer to make a stand against
the arbitrary and corrupt tendencies displayed by the
ex-Khedive, but they were left to suffer for their pains
when Lord Cromer's successors thought it more politic
to give Abbas a freer hand, perhaps, as the Egyptians
themselves now suspected, not so much in order to
placate him as to give him enough rope to hang himself

with, and thus to have a pretext for abolishing the
Khediviate altogether.

To these arguments it is scarcely a sufficient reply that
if, before the war, British control had been pushed to
unwise lengths and exercised sometimes with little tact
or intelligence, we could at least show unbroken records
of material prosperity. For it was that material prosperity
that helped to disguise the effects of the hopeless
blurring of powers and responsibilities inherent to a
system that had certainly no parallel elsewhere. So for
a time did martial law during the war, as the military
authorities themselves assumed all power and responsibility.
In so far as they did not actively interfere with
the administrative machine, it went on working, driven
mainly by the momentum it had retained from peacetime.
But when under the pressure of military necessity
a crisis came that placed upon the administrative machine
a strain which had to be borne chiefly by subordinate
officials released from British supervision, it broke down
badly because the excessive centralisation of British
control had tended to discourage rather than to promote
amongst them a sense of responsibility proportionate to
the unaccustomed power suddenly devolved upon them.

The breakdown cannot in fairness be imputed to the
rank and file of British civilians, who never worked
harder than during the war. The Anglo-Egyptian Civil
Service, as it has developed since Lord Cromer's days,
may be open to criticism, but one cannot but sympathise
with the impossible position in which it was then placed.
At the outbreak of war there was, of course, the greatest
keenness to go to the front, and too many of the younger
men were actually allowed to volunteer for active service.
Then new organisations had to be created to deal with
special war demands. Every department that had
scouted the idea of any possible reduction of its British
staff in normal peace times found itself suddenly and
enormously depleted just when abnormal war duties made
the severest demands upon it. The work to be done by

those who remained increased proportionately, until it
became almost overwhelming. Just as there had been
no settled policy as to the exercise of control in the past,
so it ceased now to be exercised at all at the very moment
when the need for it became greater than ever before,
and native agencies were left free to revive in connection
with the recruitment of the Labour Corps and the requisitioning
of supplies all the old methods which British control
was supposed to render impossible. Worst of all,
they were left free to revive them to all appearances
under our authority and for our own benefit. An equally
disastrous failure occurred again later on when the
British Adviser to the Ministry of Interior showed himself
so entirely out of touch with what was going on in the
country that he whose business it was to be well-informed
was convinced, and affirmed, on the very eve of the rising
in March, 1919, his conviction, that there was no danger
whatever of any serious trouble.

The British control had paid the penalty of the narrow
bureaucratic spirit which had gradually crept in. Centralisation
had been carried to excessive lengths—not merely
departmental centralisation, but the centralisation of all
power in the hands of a few privileged individuals who
claimed to know all that was worth knowing. They held
aloof, not merely from the Egyptians, but also from the
foreign communities whose sensitive feelings required as
much consideration as the very large interests they had in
the country, and even from the British community outside
the official pale. There are many experienced British
officials as well as many unofficial Englishmen whose
business has brought them into close contact with the
Egyptian people outside Cairo. But they were seldom if
ever consulted, and the small ring of Advisers who
surrounded the Residency discouraged the freedom of
access to it which had been one of the most conspicuous
features of the Cromer régime. Public opinion, and
especially Egyptian public opinion, was treated as a
negligible quantity. Still less had any attempt been

made to create and guide it. In fact, sound public
opinion can only be created by a sound system of national
education, and that had been our worst failure—a failure
so deplorable in its consequences that it deserves to be
dealt with separately and at greater length. During the
war it had been deemed convenient to close down the
Legislative Assembly, the one constitutional mouthpiece
of Egyptian opinion, which could no longer even let
off steam in the Press, heavily muzzled by the military
censor. Whilst no explanation of British intentions was
vouchsafed to the Egyptian people, who saw their future
being shaped for them without ever being drawn even
into formal consultation, those British officials—and
there were plenty of them though they could not make
their voices heard — who were clearsighted enough to
gauge the danger of such complete estrangement were
themselves left without any guidance as to the purpose
and meaning of our policy, and often without any information
that could enable them to correct the many
mischievous statements deliberately put about with the
object of creating mistrust, or to encourage the Egyptian
friends or subordinates who applied to them for advice.
They could only grope their way in the dark and do what
good they could, by their individual efforts, and almost,
as it were, by stealth.

When Lord Allenby returned from his hurried visit to
the Peace Conference as Special High Commissioner to
find the country strewn with wreckage from a storm that
had only partially abated, his task was, or should have
been, not only to set the Egyptian Government on the rails
again, but also to repair the vital defects in the machinery
of British control which had produced so grievous a
breakdown. But the latter was an especially difficult
task for a man who had no previous experience at all as
an administrator and no knowledge of Egypt or of the
East save such as he had gleaned as Commander-in-Chief
of the Expeditionary Forces in Egypt and Syria. The
British Government had themselves not yet realised that

it was a pressing task, and Lord Allenby could therefore
scarcely be expected to do so. He was, at any rate,
quick to see the immediate necessity of important changes
in the personnel, if not in the system. In the Ministry
of Interior, where failure had been most glaring, Sir
Reginald Clayton succeeded Mr. Haynes as Adviser.
Sir Paul Harvey, who had resigned in Lord Kitchener's
time, was induced to return to Egypt as Financial Adviser,
a post which had not been filled since the death of Lord
Edward Cecil. Mr. Sheldon Amos was appointed to
succeed Sir William Brunyate as Judicial Adviser, and Mr.
Paterson became Adviser to the Ministry of Education
in succession to Mr. Dunlop. These appointments indicated
no real break with the old system, but they were
on the whole well received, and none was more warmly
welcomed by Egyptians as well as by Englishmen than
that of Mr. Paterson, though rather on account of his
personality than of any special qualifications or experience.
Upon him fell perhaps the heaviest of all our responsibilities,
for nothing is more difficult to make good than
the mistakes of a whole educational system, and our
mistakes both of omission and commission had been
manifold.