University of Virginia Library

CHAPTER XVI

GOVERNMENT BY MARTIAL LAW

One of the awkward features of the deadlock into
which we have drifted in Egypt is that, even for measures
quite remote from the controversial sphere of politics,
proclamations under martial law have to take the place
of ordinary legislative sanction. For instance, a recent
law concerning house rents, which was a belated and
somewhat slipshod attempt to mitigate the hardships of
an acute housing crisis, could only be made operative by
a solemn proclamation under martial law, and if experience
shows it to require amendment, the amendments will
have to be enacted in the same way. It is rather like
using a sledge-hammer to crack a nut. But it is the
only procedure now available.

New laws can still be drafted in the usual way and
they can be approved by the Council of Ministers, but
they cannot be carried through the next constitutional
stage, which requires them to be passed by the Legislative
Assembly. For the Legislative Assembly held its first
and only session in 1914, before the war, just after it
had been elected under the new Organic Statute promulgated
during Lord Kitchener's tenure of office in Cairo.
Since then it has been repeatedly and at last indefinitely
prorogued. It has never been dissolved, but it is a moot
point whether its powers have not by this time expired,
as the periodical elections by which it should be partially
renewed every two years have not taken place. It is,

anyhow, less than ever likely to be convoked again in
existing circumstances after the very clear indication
which its members chose to furnish of its present political
orientation. From time to time many members had
individually declared their adhesion to the Party of
Independence, whose leader, Saad Pasha Zaghlul, was
its one elected Vice-President. There had been some
talk of collective action whilst the Milner Commission
was in Egypt, but none took place until just after its
departure. When they at last decided to make a
demonstration they made it as dramatic as possible.
To the number of about five-sixths of their total strength,
they met at Zaghlul's house in Cairo, invested their
proceedings as far as they could with the solemnity of a
regular sitting of the Assembly, elected the senior amongst
them to the chair, and passed unanimously a series of
subversive resolutions which need not be enumerated,
since one of them contained the quintessence of all the
rest. It declared all laws and decrees promulgated
since the prorogation of the Assembly before the war to
be null and void—that period including, of course, the
decrees that had announced the deposition of the ex-Khedive
and the accession of the late Sultan Hussein
and the proclamation of the British Protectorate. Another
resolution affirmed the right of Egypt to complete independence
and declared Zaghlul to be the only recognised
mandatory of the nation, whilst a very lengthy one,
divided into various subheads, affirmed the sovereignty
of Egypt over the Sudan and the indissoluble union of
the two countries, and protested with great emphasis
against the execution of the Nile projects in the Sudan
without the consent of the Egyptian people. The meeting
was obviously unlawful, as under the Organic Statute
which created the Legislative Assembly it can only be
convoked by decree, and the resolutions were in any case
ultra vires, as they related to matters which under the
same Organic Statute it is specifically precluded from
dealing with. But as an act of demonstrative defiance
it was boldly planned and well carried out. Martial law
might have prevented the meeting being held at all, but
Lord Allenby may well have thought it impolitic to
presume unlawful action on the part of members of so
responsible a body. When it had taken place, he immediately
issued a proclamation under martial law forbidding
its repetition under severe penalties, and the preventive
censorship of the Press having been revived under martial
law only a few days previously, all reference to the meeting
in Zaghlul's house was strictly excluded from the newspapers.

Apart from constitutional difficulties from which
proclamations under martial law afford at present the
only practical means of escape, martial law is also the
only reserve force that upholds the authority, in itself
more nominal than real, of Egyptian Ministers and even
of the head of the State. That whilst Sultan and Ministers
acquiesced in the dispatch of the Milner Commission to
Egypt and gave it an official welcome they were powerless
to prevent the boycott to which it was subjected by
order of the Party of Independence gives the measure of
their actual authority in the country.

Sultan Fuad was a child when he accompanied his
father, the Khedive Ismail, into exile in 1879, and he
spent so much of his life abroad, mostly in Italy, that he
has never learnt to speak Arabic properly. It is not
altogether his fault that he is looked upon as a foreigner
rather than an Egyptian, and that the Mahomedans
distrust even his orthodoxy. Unfortunately, he lacks
even the qualities which make for popularity in the East.
He never shows himself to his people, and he spends his
extravagant Civil List on the pomp and circumstance of the
little Court he holds in his Palace of Abdeen, very rarely
venturing outside its gates, and surrounded by a small
ring of courtiers, many of whom are undesirable survivals
from the ex-Khedive's entourage. The Egyptian public,
to whom he is unknown, swallows greedily all the
stories told against him, which one can only hope contain

more fiction than fact. It is scarcely surprising that
pious Mahomedans should have deemed it little less than
blasphemy when he seized the occasion of his last birthday
to introduce into the solemn Friday service a new prayer
for his personal glorification as a model of all the virtues
and brought his own name directly into conjunction with
that of Allah and of the Prophet. With their nerves
already on edge as to the fate of the Ottoman Sultan and
Khalif, the politically-minded were quick to suspect an
insidious design on the prerogatives of the Khalifate,
which we have solemnly pledged ourselves to safeguard.
There were angry protests and violent scenes in several
mosques, and so many copies of the egregious prayer
had been printed and issued from the Palace to the
principal mosques all over the country that the silence
imposed by the censor could not check the widespread
indignation aroused by this gratuitous challenge
to Mahomedan feeling. Nor was the indignation
directed only against Sultan Fuad. As we had placed
him on the throne, it was not unnaturally, though quite
wrongly, assumed that he would never have dared to
take such risks except at our instigation or at least with
our consent. Not for the first time we were made to
realise what a blunder had been committed when we chose
as a successor to the late Sultan Hussein, who was universally
respected, one who, as an Egyptian put it aptly,
if rather bluntly, is "universally disrespected" by his
subjects. Unpleasant as it is to say it, I have found
scarcely a single Egyptian, and very few Englishmen, to
dispute the accuracy of that unkind description. At a
time when we have enough to do to regain the confidence
which we have lost amongst so many classes in Egypt,
it is deplorable that we should have to expend so much of
our moral authority on bolstering up a ruler who has none
with his own people. That we should go out of our way
to identify ourselves still more closely with him by committing
ourselves to recognise his infant son as heir to
the Sultanate can only be interpreted by the people of
Egypt as an arbitrary attempt to prejudge a great
constitutional issue on which, if we honestly mean to
give them any genuine measure of self-government, they
are surely entitled to be consulted.

The members of Yusuf Wahba's Cabinet are men of
good repute and of considerable experience in the conduct
of public affairs. They certainly deserve no little credit
for personal courage, as the lives of the Prime Minister
and of three of his colleagues have already been attempted,
though happily without success, in the course of their
short tenure of office. They cannot, however, be said to
govern. They scarcely profess to. They have no public
support behind them. They have their friends and
well-wishers, but none who will come out into the open
and do battle for them. There are plenty of Egyptians
who have a greater insight into the practical needs of
their country than the majority of Zaghlul's followers.
They are just as good Nationalists in the best sense of
the term. They may even heartily dislike the Protectorate,
but they realise the futility of mere sullen opposition and
still more the grave menace to the foundations of social
order in the more violent forms of resistance. In private
they make no secret of their desire for a friendly settlement
with Great Britain, and, whilst resenting some of the
methods of British control, recognise the necessity of its
maintenance in the interests of Egypt itself within definite
limits, which it should not be difficult, they believe, to
determine by common agreement. But they have never
had the courage to emerge from the tents in which, often
for personal reasons, they prefer to sulk. Once a few of
them seemed on the point of combining to form a new and
distinct political party. They even issued a programme
and described themselves as "Independent Liberals."
But they soon fell out amongst themselves or succumbed
to various forms of pressure which are peculiarly effective
in an Oriental community. The new party expired almost
before it had drawn breath.

But if Egyptian Ministers may complain that even

those who are more or less of their own way of thinking
give them no practical or public support, is it not largely
their own fault? Their country is in the throes of a
dangerous political agitation of which they cannot but
foresee and dread the consequences. Yet they have never
braced themselves up even to point out its perils to their
fellow-countrymen. They have never raised a warning
voice or sought to give a wiser lead to public opinion.
They have never enunciated any programme of their
own in opposition to the programme of the Party of
Independence. They have never challenged the propaganda
carried on all around them for the subversion
not only of British authority but of every principle of
authority for which they doubtless themselves stand.
They have never reprobated even the campaign of violence
and intimidation which is demoralising the schools and
colleges that their own children attend. Denounced day
in and day out by the extremists as traitors to Egyptian
Nationalism, they bear themselves with dignity when
they are from time to time bombed by frenzied students,
but they are roused to no effort of their own to wrestle
with the whole spirit of criminal lawlessness that lies
behind these crimes and is doing far graver mischief to
the nation than to them. For more significant than the
crimes themselves are the indifference with which the
Egyptian public has learnt to treat them and the absence
of any emphatic sign of disapproval from the leaders of
the Party of Independence, whose humble followers the
would-be murderers profess to be.

Egyptian Ministers might doubtless reply that it has
never been the custom for them to appear on public
platforms or to address themselves direct to their people,
and that ever since 1914 martial law has closed the doors
of the Legislative Assembly, where it would have been
their business to meet hostile criticism and define their
own position. But it is not by masterly inactivity that
Saad Pasha Zaghlul and his friends have acquired their
hold upon the country. The Party of Independence has

a formulated policy and definite aims, and it is not afraid
to state them. Its policy may be merely destructive and
many of its methods very discreditable, but one has to
recognise its capacity for organisation and its untiring
energy. Its leaders do not spare themselves. They not
only fill the Press with fiery articles and pour out their
eloquence at public meetings. They travel about the
country, setting up local committees and sub-committees,
canvassing every interest that can be enlisted in support
of their cause, even spreading their nets abroad wherever
they can hope to capture foreign sympathies. They
never allow people to forget for a single day that they are
making history.

Ministers meanwhile sit in their offices in Cairo and let
them make history in so far as martial law does not
interfere with the making of it by disorderly or flagrantly
unlawful demonstrations. It has been hard enough indeed
to find any Egyptians willing to take office since Rushdi
and his Cabinet, who had kept an Egyptian Government
in being throughout the long five years of war, resigned,
when, even after the Armistice, the British Government
refused to allow him to come to London to discuss what
the Protectorate was to stand for, after peace was restored.
Mohamed Said's only political utterance whilst he was
Prime Minister was to protest against the dispatch of the
Milner Commission. For the rest, he publicly washed his
hands of politics. His successor, Yusuf Wahba, has
never expressed any views at all on the great political
issues with which the future of Egypt is bound up. He
and his colleagues, like their immediate prodecessors,
carry on as best they can in the circumstances the administrative
work of their departments. But when Ministers
have ceased to exercise any authority as a Government,
they can hardly be expected to supply the driving power
required to keep the provincial administration going in a
country in which even the highest officials have not yet
learned to rely upon themselves. Governors and subgovernors
do not know where to look for guidance, and

so long as the present political turmoil continues, most of
them deem it wise either merely to mark time or else to
swim with the current of extreme Nationalism, even if
they are not at heart only too willing to do so. The Bar,
which is a great political institution in the provinces as
well as in Cairo, is ultra-Nationalist almost to a man, and
the countryside swarms with students from El Azhar,
who are given almost unlimited leave to carry on in the
rural districts an anti-British propaganda, upon which the
authorities deem it prudent to turn a blind eye. The
Party of Independence even sends round quite openly its
emissaries to collect subscriptions for its funds, and officials
themselves help to circulate the lists.

The British Residency and the British officials have
been scarcely less hampered by the uncertainty of the
future. They could not know what would be the outcome
of the Milner Commission, which has been hanging over
them since May, 1919, and though Lord Allenby at last
brought out with him in November a declaration of policy
which has been from time to time accentuated by forcible
speeches from British Ministers, the mere fact of the
Milner Commission's presence in Cairo was naturally taken
to indicate that that declaration had yet to be finally
interpreted, and that its interpretation might substantially
modify the meaning originally attached to it. On
the other hand, Englishmen continued to be brought out
to join the Egyptian public services, and appointments,
sometimes rather questionable, were made just as if the
whole question of the employment of Englishmen were not
to come under review by the Commission. If the only
element of real stability was provided by martial law, its
application was sometimes strangely perplexing. Arrests
and internments took place from time to time for reasons
which the Egyptian public found it as hard to understand
as the subsequent orders of release. Whilst special tribunals
had dealt summarily with the minor fry caught red-handed
in the rebellion, the real wirepullers had been allowed to
escape scot-free, and even Under-Secretaries of State who

had played a prominent part in the prolonged strike of
Government officials retained their appointments. On
the other hand, many Egyptians who had remained loyal,
and even some who had helped to save the lives of Englishmen
during the worst troubles, received no reward or
recognition. The handling of the Press was equally
difficult to understand. Lord Allenby had abolished the
censorship over the Press shortly after the suppression of
the active and passive rebellions of March-April, 1919.
Many Egyptians themselves questioned at the time the
wisdom of conceding such very wide freedom to a largely
irresponsible Press. Freedom indeed very soon degenerated
once more into intolerable licence, and when the
autumn brought back a recurrence of riotous demonstrations,
some of the most rabid newspapers were occasionally
suspended under the provisions of the ordinary Press law
for inciting to violence, and then almost immediately
allowed, rather unaccountably, to reappear. Whilst the
Milner Commission was in Egypt, the Nationalist papers
fulminated against it with complete impunity. To have
attempted to muzzle it then would have been regarded
as a vindictive retort to the boycotting of the Milner
Commission. But no sooner had the Commission departed
than martial law re-enacted the preventive censorship
imposed during the war. It is perhaps the only really
effective form of censorship, and it was applied with more
intelligence than during the war, but so violent a swing
of the official pendulum seemed to require more explanation
than was given.

Lord Allenby, however, it must be remembered, was
sent to Cairo as Special High Commissioner to restore
public order and security after a formidable outbreak of
violence, and he has remained in Cairo as High Commissioner
to maintain them and to uphold the Protectorate.
He carried out his instructions in the spirit of the fine
soldier that he is, whose business is to obey orders and see
that his own orders are obeyed. Few will contend that
he could have dispensed with martial law, and still fewer

will deny that the use he has made of it, as an instrument
of repression, has been free from all excessive harshness.
But he himself would probably be the first to admit that,
however indispensable so long as the Party of Independence
held the field with its war-cry of "Down with the
Protectorate," it is a singularly clumsy instrument for
dealing with the practical problems of government, which
are none the less pressing because they have nothing to
do with the political controversies of the hour.

One of these problems arose suddenly and in a very
acute form in the first months of 1920 out of an appalling
rise in the price of foodstuffs, and especially of those foodstuffs
upon which the poorer classes in Egypt live almost
exclusively. It was partly due to the general rise in
prices all the world over, and partly to the diminishing
production of cereals in Egypt itself, where the promise
of extravagant profits has induced many of the large
landowners to put an excessive proportion of their land
under cotton instead of cereals. The rise in the price of
foodstuffs had caused some anxiety during the later
years of the war, for amongst the urban working classes
and the landless labourers in the rural districts it had
been by no means covered by a general and sometimes
not inconsiderable rise in wages. Already in 1917 Dr.
Wilson, of the Kasr-el-Aini Hospital in Cairo, a recognised
authority on the conditions of life and nourishment
amongst the poorer classes, estimated at two millions the
number of men, women, and children who were seriously
underfed. Nor did the end of the war bring the expected
relief, and prices continued to go up after the Armistice.
But it was hoped that its effects had been to a great
extent countered by a further readjustment of wages.
The Egyptian Government itself recognised the necessity
of granting an increase of 60 per cent. to all its officials,
which would, however, have been more effective had it
been so graduated as to afford greater proportionate
relief to the small employees who stood most in need of
assistance. Anyhow, towards the end of 1919 the worst

was supposed to be over, and the official tariffs, which had
been from time to time imposed, without much success, to
keep prices down, were again removed. But all calculations
were disastrously upset when within three months
there was another and quite unprecedented rise. The
following figures speak for themselves. Between
December 1, 1919, and March 1, 1920, the price per ardeb
of maize, which is the favourite foodstuff of the people,
rose from 213 piastres to Pt.450 (97½ piastres = £1)
per ardeb; wheat from Pt.336 to Pt.535; barley from
Pt.218 to Pt.450; beans from Pt.350 to Pt.650, and
lentils from Pt.356 to Pt.745. Tibn, or chopped straw,
the chief fodder for animals, which had been purchased a
year ago at the tariff price of Pt.70 per quarter-ton load,
rose from Pt.155 to Pt.215. In many parts of the
country prices soared locally to even greater heights,
and the landless poor, who derived no benefit from the rise
since they had no produce to sell, could not possibly buy
sufficient food for themselves and their families out of their
inadequately increased earnings, and in many cases the food
was not there to be bought even if they had the money.
Yet landlords were all the time clearing more land for
cotton, and occasionally even pulling up for the purpose
young crops of cereals in their haste to reap a golden
harvest on the Alexandria cotton market. In 1915 the
Government had restricted by law the area under cotton,
but removed the restriction in 1916, when it at once
jumped from 1,186,004 feddans (or acres) in the preceding
year to 1,635,512 feddans, and increased again slightly in
1917. In 1918 it was again restricted and brought down
to 1,315,572 feddans. But the restriction was then once
more taken off, and the area under cotton for 1919
expanded to 1,573,662 feddans. All through the last five
years the area under foodstuffs of all kinds, except lentils,
has been almost uninterruptedly shrinking, and in most
cases the shrinkage has been very considerable; for
wheat, for instance, from 1,533,801 feddans in 1915 to
990,945 last year.

Thus, whilst Egypt as a whole had grown extraordinarily
prosperous, and huge fortunes had been made and the
fellaheen taken in the aggregate had waxed fat, there was
widespread and acute misery amongst numerous classes,
and with misery went the growth of discontent, especially
when there were political agitators only too keen to fan
the embers of discontent into flame. Even if there was no
deliberate attempt to increase the food shortage by
inducing native traders to hold up their supplies or only
to offer them for sale at preposterous prices, the Extremists
went about the country whispering that the shortage was
due to the enormous requirements of the British Army,
and the expansion of the cotton area to the selfish demands
of Lancashire. Both from the political and from the
economic point of view, not to speak of mere humanity,
there was a dangerous situation which called for prompt
and generous action. But Ministers who can barely carry
on, and officials, British and Egyptian, handicapped by
the increasing uncertainty of the political situation as
well as by an outworn system of hopelessly divided powers
and responsibilities, do not readily appreciate the necessity
for prompt and bold decisions and are not easily accessible
to outside pressure. Some effective measures were at last
taken, and with the assistance of the British Government
considerable imports were rushed into Egypt, with the
promise of more to follow, and stores were opened for the
sale of flour to the public under cost price. More forethought
and more energy might have brought much earlier
relief, but in such matters they are hardly to be looked
for in Egypt under existing conditions of government.
The one bright spot was the capacity for self-help which
some of the Egyptians themselves displayed. An organisation
started by a young nationalist lawyer of Damietta,
Ameen Effendi Yusuf, indeed showed a better way to
the authorities. The co-operative association which he
initiated in his own native town, one of the poorest in
Egypt, where 24,000 out of a total population of 32,000
were in sore need of assistance, and which he subsequently

extended to Mansourah and other towns, not only in the
Delta, but in Upper Egypt, laid itself out at once to
discriminate between those who clearly deserve relief and
those who do not, whereas the Government scheme left
many loopholes for the well-to-do and especially for the
big traders to reap the benefit of the sale of foodstuffs
under cost price. Lord Allenby very wisely did not
allow himself to be deterred from giving official support
to this promising movement by the prejudice which its
Nationalist origin seemed at first to raise against it.

To the inveterate habit of procrastination and secrecy,
which are not altogether of recent growth in Anglo-Egyptian
administration, may be still more directly
traced the sudden exacerbation of Egyptian feeling over
the projects for the storage of the Nile waters in the
Sudan, which coincided with the resignation of the Minister
of Public Works, Ismail Sirri Pasha. His resignation,
it was authoritatively stated, had nothing to do with that
question, but was due solely to reasons of health. He
too had been bombed, and though he escaped any actual
injury, he had suffered severely from the shock. His
resignation nevertheless came at a singularly awkward
moment. The bitter controversy that had raged for more
than a year over the Nile projects had not been arrested
by the appointment, long overdue, of a fresh Committee
of Inquiry, consisting of three independent experts, two
of them Anglo-Indian engineers and one an American.
The British Government had still failed to measure the
distrust provoked in Egypt by the mystery in which the
projects had been enveloped from the start and the
persistent refusal to take the Egyptian public into their
confidence with regard to schemes involving not merely
a large expenditure of Egyptian money but the permanent
and vital interests of Egypt, whose very life
depends upon an abundant supply of water from the Blue
and the White Nile that flow down together from the
Sudan. No Egyptian was put on to the Committee, and
this was a fresh and not unreasonable grievance. The

Extremists took the matter up as soon as they saw the
opportunity it offered for shaking still further the confidence
which the fellaheen had formerly placed in British
control, for whatever the fellah's lack of political understanding,
anything that may affect or menace the supply
of water for the irrigation of his land touches him on the
raw. The merits or demerits of the Nile projects are
bound up with technical issues which no layman can be
competent to discuss, but the very grave charges brought
against the British Adviser to the Ministry of Public
Works by so distinguished an expert as Sir William
Willcocks, and reinforced by the testimony of Colonel
Kennedy, an able engineer formerly in the service of the
Sudan Government, provided the Nationalists with all
the materials for a sensational campaign. They conducted
it with their usual violence, and one immediate
result was that when the Residency obtained permission
from London to try to repair at least one blunder by
inviting an Egyptian to join the new Committee of
Inquiry, none could be found to accept the invitation.
Even the vacancy at the Ministry of Public Works could
only be filled by prevailing upon Mohamed Shafik Pasha
to take over that Department in addition to his own
Department of Agriculture, which, at a time of severe
food shortage, made an already excessive call upon his
undoubted capacity for administration. Ismail Sirri, it
is true, gave his parting blessing to the Nile projects, but
though he is one of the few Egyptians qualified to speak
with authority as a highly trained and experienced engineer,
his statement fell flat, because as a Minister he shared the
discredit into which a Government is bound to fall that
systematically abdicates one of its most important
functions, namely, the guiding of public opinion. An
official assurance, rather haltingly worded, that all
construction works connected with the Nile projects
which involved the expenditure of Egyptian money
would be suspended until the new Committee of Inquiry
had reported was received with the same scepticism.
Under martial law, the censor can forbid all discussion in
the Press, but the stress laid upon this thorny question
in the resolutions passed at the conclave of members of
the Legislative Assembly shows that, whilst had it been
handled with wisdom and frankness from the beginning
it might have always remained an economic question, it
has now passed into the dangerous domain of politics.

There are other and larger economic and financial
problems which it was difficult to deal with under the
restraints imposed on our veiled Protectorate. They
ought to be far less difficult under our proclaimed Protectorate,
and their solution is becoming more urgent.
But they are forgotten in the sterile turmoil of political
agitation. Egypt is proverbially the land of paradox,
and if it is startling to find an agricultural country par
excellence exposed to acute distress from a shortage of
essential food supplies, it is an almost more surprising
paradox that, even when it has been enriched beyond the
dreams of avarice by a war which has impoverished the
greater part of the world, its legitimate demands for
increased expenditure by the State on purposes of uncontroverted
utility cannot be satisfied because under an
antiquated treaty system a large part of its enormously
increased wealth lies beyond reach of taxation. The
political troubles in Egypt may be rightly regarded up to
a certain point as part of the great cosmic disturbance
caused by the war, but there is one fundamental difference
to be borne in mind. Most countries in which the fever
of political discontent is raging are reeling under the
appalling financial burdens of a struggle which has shaken
to its very foundations the whole fabric of economic if
not of national life. Egypt, on the contrary, has never
known such prosperity as the war has brought her. Our
war expenditure is believed to have poured altogether
at least £E.200,000,000 (the Egyptian pound equals
£1 0s. 6d.) into the country. Its one great source of
national wealth, the productivity of its soil, was never
impaired, but, on the contrary, appreciated enormously

in value. Egypt is being, perhaps unwisely, converted
into a mainly cotton-growing country. But the immediate
results are amazing. Egyptian cotton, which
before 1916 very rarely sold for more than £E.4 a kantar,
then considered a record price, topped £E.20 a kantar
in 1919 and was even driven up at one moment
by wild speculation to the giddy height of £E.40 a
kantar, from which it has only fallen back to £E.30-34.
The value of last year's cotton crop cannot be estimated
at less than £E.100,000,000, which would more than pay
off the whole Egyptian debt. Indeed, the Egyptian
debt, formerly held almost entirely abroad, is passing now
steadily into Egyptian hands, as so many of the nouveaux
riches do not know what else to do with their plethora of
money. To the big foreign banks, whose business has
largely consisted in making advances on agricultural
land, the rate at which these are being reimbursed to
them is almost embarrassing. The trade balance in
favour of Egypt for 1919 amounted to £E.33,000,000.
A recent Note by the Financial Adviser sets forth Egypt's
foreign investments between 1915 and 1919 as amounting
to £E.152,000,000, and of the £E.65,000,000 of paper
money issued since 1914, it states the great bulk to have
been hoarded.

Remote indeed are the lean years of the eighties, when
every Budget was a race against bankruptcy won by the
shortest of heads. The last of Lord Cromer's Budgets,
that of 1906, after taxation had been considerably lightened,
already showed a revenue of £E.15,377,000, with a
surplus of £E.2,175,000 over expenditure. The Budget
for 1919-20 was calculated to balance at £E.28,850,000,
a figure which must, however, be considerably discounted
in view of the large inflation due to war prices. The
Budget Estimates for 1920-21 have leapt up to
£E.40,000,000—an increase again almost wholly due to
inflation. Nevertheless, these figures testify to the
almost uninterrupted expansion of Egyptian revenue
which has been going on since the early years of the

Occupation without any material change in the character
of taxation. But there lies the rub. Mere expansion of
revenue, so long as there is no material change in the
character of taxation, cannot meet the growing need of
the country for better education, better sanitation, better
housing, better policing, better communications, etc.
Many of the public services, unavoidably stinted in the
lean years, remained, less unavoidably, stinted in the
fatter years that followed. Egyptian criticism of the
parsimony in such matters, enforced or tolerated by
British control, and in some cases due to sheer lack of
interest and intelligence, has not always been unwarranted,
and some of the causes of the present discontent can be
traced back to it. To-day the State would have ample
resources to meet a far more liberal increase of expenditure
if it were free to take toll of the nation's prosperity for
national needs. But, as I have already pointed out, the
large sources of revenue (with the one exception of the
land tax) which direct taxation affords in other countries
are closed against the Egyptian Treasury by the Capitulations,
which, by securing immunity from increased taxation
for foreigners without the consent of the Capitulation
Powers, in effect secure the same immunity for Egyptian
subjects, as no Egyptian Government could be expected
to differentiate against its own subjects by subjecting
them to taxation from which foreigners remained free.
The same restrictions hamper the development of local
government. Foreigners in most of the large townships
have been wise enough not to stand on the letter of their
rights and have agreed to contribute their share of
voluntary taxation for municipal purposes. But to
build on any large scale on voluntary taxation is as risky
as building on a quicksand.

These restraints on the fiscal independence of Egypt
constitute a real Egyptian grievance, all the more real
in that in no country in the world probably are larger
fortunes made by foreigners, who contribute by way of
taxation little or nothing in return beyond the payment

of import duties. Take such cases as the following.
There is a huge establishment of universal providers in
Cairo run by Syrians which is stated to have made
£350,000 profit last year on a capital of £600,000. Not a
penny does it contribute to the State, except import
duties, which it passes on to its customers. Or take a Greek
subject who comes to Egypt as a penniless lad and
becomes in time a millionaire. Sometimes, like a good Greek
patriot, he leaves the whole of his fortune made in Egypt
to his native town in Greece. Neither during his life nor
at his death does the Egyptian State get a drachma out
of his income or his estate, though it is Egypt that has
made him rich. Not only are such conditions fatal to
sound finance, but they are politically dangerous. For
the sense of injustice they engender feeds the antiforeign
feeling, from which few Egyptians are altogether
free.

The Capitulations stand equally in the way of labour
legislation, the need for which has been brought home to
employers as well as to the men by the recent epidemic of
strikes, though they may have been as often due to
political agitation as to economic causes. The Party of
Independence now professes to make light of the Capitulations
because their abolition or revision is not likely to be
granted by the Powers in the event of a British withdrawal
from Egypt. Before political passion ran so high the
Nationalists themselves made it one of their chief reproaches
against England that she did nothing to rid Egypt
of such intolerable servitudes. But Great Britain is now
pledged to move in the matter, and she cannot do so
effectively until political stability is sufficiently ensured
in Egypt to induce foreign Powers to listen to reasonable
proposals.

There are other big questions which may not be affected
by the particular form which the connection between
Egypt and the British Empire ultimately assumes, so
long as it is a connection that restores mutual confidence
and good will. These are questions with which the welfare

of the fellaheen masses is as closely bound up as those on
which Lord Cromer wisely concentrated the efforts of
British control during the early years of the Occupation.
The fellaheen population as a whole has benefited greatly
by the enormous rise in the value of agricultural land and
of the products of the land which constitute the chief
wealth of the country. But there are rocks ahead. The
big landlords are usually absentee landlords, and of these
the number and the wealth have increased suddenly and
dangerously. For though a very large proportion of the
fellaheen themselves own some land, it is often only a few
feddans, and like those who own no land of their own,
they try to rent as much as they can possibly afford from
their more fortunate neighbours, and these have taken
advantage of recent conditions to impose extortionate
rents. There are many landowners who lease out part of
their land to-day for a larger annual rent per feddan than
the feddan cost them to buy twenty years ago. Land
hunger is as strong a passion amongst the Egyptian as
amongst any peasantry in the world, and the peculiar
climatic conditions of the valley of the Nile limit the
cultivable area to the area of possible irrigation, which
cannot be indefinitely extended. The State still owns a
relatively small remnant of the old Khedivial lands
handed over to it in the course of the great financial
liquidation in the days of Ismail, and, instead of putting
them up for auction, which usually means handing them
over to the already plethoric landlords, facilities might be
given to the small landowners and landless fellaheen to
purchase at reasonable rates. But that is only a very
partial remedy. Legislation will almost certainly be
needed to protect the small man against the greed of the
big rackrenters and to place land rentals on some reasonable
basis of fixity. The land tax itself no longer bears
any appreciable relation to the enormous appreciation in
the value of land since the last assessment. The renting
value of agricultural land in Egypt was then estimated
at £17,000,000. It may now be estimated at close on
£100,000,000. The land tax was then settled to yield
£5,000,000 per annum for a term of thirty years which
does not run out for another decade. It is impossible to
alter the assessment, but it has been suggested that, without
proceeding to any reassessment, a steeply graduated
super-tax might be imposed on owners of more than five
feddans, and that no landlord should be allowed to lease
out his land for cultivation at a rental higher than three
times the land tax and super-tax he would then be
paying. It is a difficult question, but it will have to be
taken in hand, or Egypt may be threatened with a serious
agrarian movement.

If the appalling prevalence and steady increase of crimes
of violence in the rural districts did not point to the
necessity of reforming the whole system of village governance
and police, it could scarcely be indefinitely shelved
after the lurid light thrown upon it by the abuses which
were committed during the war in connection with the
levying of supplies and the recruitment of the Labour
Corps in the villages. The fellah was delivered by
Lord Cromer from the exactions of the tax-gatherer and
the hardships of the corvée. He has yet to be delivered
from the petty tyranny of the village Omdeh.

It was by large measures of reform unmistakably conceived
in the interests of the Egyptian masses and directly
brought within the range of their experience and intelligence
that we won and retained for many years the
confidence and good will of the great majority of the
people of Egypt. We had the courage to take great risks
in those days when the poverty of the Egyptian exchequer
might have excused some pusillanimity. Though our
hands were much more free, the later years of the veiled
Protectorate were only once touched with the same spirit,
when Lord Kitchener came to the rescue of fellaheen
indebtedness with his "Five Feddan Law."

The spirit of that first period when British control
really meant the discharge of a great trusteeship is just
as much needed to solve the problems of the present day.

It is needed in the first place to put an end to a political
deadlock which paralyses all fruitful effort. Not till we
have left behind us the No Man's Land of government by
martial law can we hope to regain the confidence of a new
generation of Egyptians by applying to the altered conditions
which any measure of self-government must
imply the same broad constructive statesmanship which
won for us the confidence of an older generation.