 | CHAPTER XVII The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER XVII
THE NEED FOR AN HONOURABLE SOLUTION
We occupied Egypt thirty-eight years ago in order to
rescue it from anarchy and ruin, and we remained, as we
then declared and have again repeatedly declared since
then, as trustees for its people who had never governed
themselves and whom we could not leave to be misgoverned
as in the past by their own rulers. We promised
and honestly believed that our trusteeship would be
merely temporary, and that when we had discharged it
we would withdraw. But to discharge it we had to assume
ever-increasing responsibilities for the government and
administration of the country which made withdrawal
more and more difficult. During the earlier period of
the Occupation, it was only with the latent hostility of
foreign Powers, whose opportunities of obstruction were
manifold and frequent, that we had seriously to reckon.
We could set against it a general acceptance of British
control by the Egyptians from the head of the State
downwards, and by none with such an instinctive appreciation
of its value as by the masses, who could see and
feel for themselves that to them at least it had brought
release from ancient oppression and an undreamt-of
measure of prosperity. By the Anglo-French Agreement
of 1904, France, who had opposed us longer and with
more determination than any other Power, signified at
last her acquiescence in our presence in Egypt. Turkey
Ottoman Sultan had not renounced either his suzerain
rights or his underground methods of giving trouble in
Egypt.
Our veiled Protectorate did not even then receive any
formal international sanction, but our hands were much
more free, and we admitted frankly that we could set no
definite term to the Occupation. Perhaps on that account
we grew to be more careless of our trust when the great
Proconsul left Egypt who had consistently preached and
practised an exceptionally high standard of duty. A
change too of policy took place, which, however well
meant, resulted, to our own discredit, in strengthening
the evil influence of the Khedive rather than in enlarging
the liberties or quickening the political education of the
people. During this later period Lord Kitchener's
"Five Feddan Law" showed an almost solitary revival
of the generous spirit of the earlier days, and whilst an
Anglo-Egyptian bureaucracy, more centralised and more
mechanical as it grew rapidly in numbers, was losing
contact with the masses, the political restlessness of the
new middle classes, largely due to Western education,
and the Pan-Islamic reaction against the West prompted
from Constantinople found common ground in the
renascence of a fervid Nationalism directed against
tutelage by an alien Power.
Nevertheless, until the Great War threw Egypt with
the rest of the world into the melting-pot, we were able
to assume, without fear of contradiction, the consent of
the vast majority of the population to a Protectorate
which, though still, if rather thinly, veiled, had acquired
most of the elements of permanence. During the war
we deemed it necessary to transform the veiled Protectorate
into an openly proclaimed one, and in the Treaty of
Versailles we secured for it an international sanction
which the veiled Protectorate had always formally lacked.
With a strange irony, it was just then that the Egyptians,
who had remained quiet throughout the war and indeed
since the Occupation into tumultuous and widespread
risings against us. The disturbances were quickly
repressed, and martial law has since then prevented any
serious renewal of disorders. But it has by no means
restored peace. We are still confronted by an organised
political movement against the proclaimed Protectorate
to which leaders of undeniable popularity in the country,
with Saad Pasha Zaghlul at their head, have succeeded
in giving at least the appearance of a national protest.
The Sultan and his Ministers carry no weight in the
country, and least of all amongst the politically-minded
classes, that can be set against the whirlwind activities
of the Party of Independence. This party, which claims
to be "the nation," has adopted the formula of "complete
independence" as its watchword, and it insists that we
are bound by our own professions to apply the principle
of self-determination to Egypt and to withdraw forthwith
and altogether from Egypt when the Egyptian people,
speaking through its mouth, formally demand our withdrawal.
Without conceding the claim of the Party of Independence
to be or to represent "the nation," one must admit
that we can hardly go on assuming as we have hitherto
done the consent of the people of Egypt to the maintenance
of the Protectorate, or indeed of British control
in any form. We must face a situation which has never
before existed since 1882. After trying vague declarations
of policy that satisfied no one, and using strong language
that frightened no one, the British Government sent out
at the eleventh hour a Commission of Inquiry under Lord
Milner. It stayed three months in Egypt and it did its
work, though it was stubbornly boycotted by the Party of
Independence, who never budged from their position
that they could no more negotiate with the Commission
than with the British Government so long as the complete
independence of Egypt was not unconditionally
recognised.
Can we possibly yield to this demand unless we are prepared
to reply in the affirmative to the following vital
questions: Is the Party of Independence really qualified
to speak, as it professes to do, on behalf of the Egyptian
people? Has Egypt any case for claiming complete
independence as of right, and is she in a position to maintain
it if it is conceded? Does her past history any more
than her present condition of social, economic, or political
development warrant the belief that complete independence
is likely to conduce to the progressive evolution of
the Egyptian people themselves on the lines of modern
civilisation, or to the restoration of permanent peace
between the nations and more especially in the sorely
disturbed regions of the Middle East? I have failed to
attain the one object of this volume if I have not furnished
the reader with sufficient data for him to frame his own
answer to those questions.
But there are nevertheless, it must be admitted, certain
currents of opinion amongst Englishmen, both in Egypt
and at home, in favour of withdrawal from Egypt whatever
may be the answer to those questions. This conclusion is
reached from two opposite directions. Some take the
Party of Independence at its own valuation as truly
representing a nascent Egyptian democracy, capable of
governing itself, and refuse to admit any doubts as to the
applicability to Egypt of the principle of self-determination
which is with them an article of faith. Others,
frequently soldiers, contend that, the war having enormously
strengthened the whole position of the British
Empire in relation to other Powers, its interests can now
be adequately safeguarded without maintaining any
direct control over Egypt proper, and that we had therefore
better leave the Egyptians to stew in their own
juice and rid ourselves as quickly as possible of a political
entanglement which makes, or may make, an excessive
call on our military and financial resources. These,
however, would not subscribe to unconditional withdrawal.
The conditions which they usually profess to
territory and of the Sudan, together with an acknowledged
right of re-entry should an independent Egypt relapse
into a state of disorder so gravely affecting the interests of
other Powers as to render foreign intervention again
inevitable. Our retention of the Suez Canal territory,
which covers the most vulnerable of Egypt's land frontiers,
would be such a boon to an independent Egypt that they
cannot imagine any serious difficulty arising over it.
The Party of Independence, it is true, claims not only
the recognition of Egypt's complete independence, but also,
and very vociferously, the complete surrender to it of the
Sudan. But that claim is naturally dismissed as quite
untenable. The Egyptians could not possibly have
reconquered the Sudan for themselves, nor hold it to-day
if we did surrender it to them. So little indeed is the
Sudan regarded to-day, even by foreign Powers, as part
of Egypt, that since its reconquest it has remained outside
the domain of the Capitulations. More tenable would be
the claim that, if we left Egypt and retained the Sudan, we
should make good the expenditure which Egypt has
incurred in connection with its reconquest and its
subsequent administration under Anglo-Egyptian rule,
and also bind ourselves to supply Egypt in future with
the legitimate share of the waters of the White
and the Blue Nile essential to her existence. So reasonable
a proposal as our right of re-entry in the event of grave
internal troubles could not, it is urged, be rejected, as the
Egyptians would merely make a damaging admission
that they doubted their own capacity to govern themselves
and prevent the case for re-entry ever arising. Moreover,
the Egyptians need have the less anxiety on that score,
as the old burden of financial obligations abroad which
first led to foreign interference, and indirectly to the
British Occupation, no longer weighs upon them,
and they could easily raise to-morrow an internal
loan to repay the whole of the Egyptian debt still outstanding.
Assuming that the Party of Independence would agree
to such conditions as not too excessive a price for ridding
Egypt of the "usurpers," withdrawal represents a policy
more easy perhaps to defend from the point of view of
selfish British Imperialism than from that of advanced
Liberals to whom Imperialism is anathema. For though
the mere material difficulties in carrying it into effect
would be enormous, it has the attraction of following, for
the moment, the line of least resistance. But to state it
should be enough to show that we cannot adopt it without
a dangerously hasty, if not dishonourable, repudiation of
all the responsibilities we have assumed during the last
thirty-eight years. Self-determination may be an admirable
principle, but only unreasoning faith can urge that
it is of universal application or that it should be applied
to peoples as incapable of expressing themselves as the
Egyptian masses still are. The leaders of the Party of
Independence have themselves shown by boycotting the
Milner Commission that they were afraid to let it be put
to the test of any close inquiry into the wishes or even into
the conditions of life of their people. Many of the methods
of agitation and of intimidation practised by the Party of
Independence and its at least tacit condonation of violence
have grown painfully reminiscent of the methods of the
"Young Turk" Committee of Union and Progress, which
was equally lavish in 1908 of democratic assurances of
"Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity," with the results
that we know. Should we really promote the evolution
of the Egyptian people towards nationhood by handing
them over to a party which is appealing more and more
openly to the reactionary forces of the Islamic world?
What would be the effect in Palestine and Syria and
throughout the Middle East? Or should we serve the
cause of universal peace if, after having for the first time
now secured international sanction for British control,
we were suddenly to renounce it altogether, without any
regard for the welfare of the foreign communities established
in Egypt who look to us for the protection of their
economic life of Egypt is bound up?
Another policy would be simply to take our stand on
our paramount position already recognised by the
Treaty of Versailles, and presumably about to be confirmed
by our Peace Treaty with Turkey, and impose the
unconditional acceptance of British supremacy upon a
country which owes to our arms alone its release from
Turkish suzerainty, and has no title to claim as of right
an independence which it did not possess before the war
and has, in fact, for twenty-five centuries never possessed.
But such a policy, if it stopped there, would be the very
assertion of force from which, as Lord Curzon has stated,
the British Government recoiled when in 1914 it preferred
the proclamation of a Protectorate to the annexation pure
and simple of Egypt to the British Empire. As a policy
of force it would be incompatible with the sentiments
that govern the British democracy, or with the ideals
which the British Commonwealth of Nations has set
before itself. We could not justify it before the world,
and though a large army of occupation would doubtless
keep Egypt in subjection, it would be only too probably
a Sinn Fein Egypt, and the Sinn Fein spirit with
all the latent forces of Mahomedan fanaticism behind
it might well prove even more dangerous in the East
than in the West.
There should have been no need to allude to such a
policy, since it has already been implicitly and explicitly
repudiated in every declaration made by the British
Government, had not the Egyptians been led, partly by
our own blunders and procrastination and partly by a
long-drawn campaign of deliberate misrepresentation, to
distrust all official assurances. The policy to which the
British Government have pledged themselves is the same
policy, applied to Egyptian conditions and to the closer
relationship with the British Empire into which Egypt
has been brought by the war, that is now universally
recognised to be the only one that can knit the Empire
common defence and freedom to each to develop constitutionally
on its own individual lines. The policy of
association, not domination, has prevailed continuously
in the relations between Britain and the great Dominions
built up mainly by men of our own British stock. It
prevailed in the South African settlement when it was
applied for the first time to bring together two peoples
who, though both of European stock, had been driven into
collision by the conflict of different national temperaments
and traditions. It is being applied now for the
first time to the relations between Britain and the greatest
of her Oriental dependencies, whose people are infinitely
more remote from our own by race, religion, and civilisation.
That Britain means to apply it to Egypt should
be clear enough even from the terms of the Declaration
which Lord Allenby brought out from London last autumn.
That Declaration contained the essential promise of
autonomy and self-government—a promise we are bound
to keep, even though it did not satisfy the demands of
the Party of Independence, and it came too late to dispel
the atmosphere of wild suspicion and resentment which
many unfortunate happenings before, during, and after
the war had created, by no means amongst the politically-minded
classes alone.
Until it has been followed up by definite and tangible
proposals for giving effect to it, such as will, one may hope,
be contained in the recommendations of the Milner
Commission, we have nothing substantial to set against
the raging and tearing propaganda of the Party of Independence,
and the Egyptians will continue to treat our
assurances that all shall come in good time with just as
much impatience as we treat the assertions of the Nationalists
that nothing will satisfy Egypt but "complete
independence." What makes Englishmen who sympathise
with many Egyptian grievances despair of the
Nationalist leaders is that not one of them has hitherto
been found to explain what constructive policy they
independence." What makes Egyptians despair, who
realise their need of England's friendship and help, is
that we seem to be equally unable or unwilling to explain
by what process we propose to reconcile British supremacy
with Egyptian self-government, and that such indications
of policy as can be gathered from government by martial
law point not towards but away from the fulfilment of
our promises. For it is in the loss of Egyptian confidence,
largely due to our own mistakes, that must be sought the
main cause of our troubles, and the chief explanation of
the large amount of popular support that the Party of
Independence has won for its impracticable programme.
There have been other contributory causes in the revival
of racial and religious antagonism as well as in the ferment
of new ideas, equally intolerant of any alien tutelage,
but they have aggravated, not produced, the present
revolt against British control.
If we want to regain the confidence we have lost, it is
essential that we should understand why we have lost it
in order to know how to regain it. When one talks to
sober-minded Egyptians, one finds that, apart from a
certain deterioration in the quality of British control,
which it should be relatively easy to remedy as it has been
largely due to personal factors, the system has had two
evil results which have above all others provoked disappointment
and distrust. One is the increasing offacement
of Egyptian Ministers—so complete to-day that in
these critical times they never open their mouths in
public or attempt to give their people a lead—and the
other is the inadequate and generally quite subordinate
share given to Egyptians in the administration of the
country. Both are naturally regarded as incompatible
with any progress towards Egyptian self-government.
I have already pointed out how the effacement of Egyptian
Ministers has resulted from the failure to define the powers
and responsibilities of those who represent on the one
hand the authority of the British controlling power, and
dualism of a veiled Protectorate that blurring of powers
and responsibilities was perhaps inevitable, but it led to
constant friction and misunderstandings, it opened the
door to all manner of intrigues, and, as was seen in the
time of the ex-Khedive Abbas, to a revival of arbitrary
power equally harmful to the authority of British control
and to that of Egyptian Ministers. I have laid stress also
on our failure to give Egyptians the increasing share in
the administration to which we had repeatedly pledged
ourselves, and without which they cannot learn, or
be equipped, to play their part in a self-governing
Egypt.
We may adorn any scheme of reforms with the most
copious assurances of our anxiety to help Egypt forward
to self-government, and we may even set before them as
an ultimate goal national independence under the ægis
of the British Empire. The Egyptians will have no faith
in the honesty of such professions unless the scheme
provides a substantial guarantee for the redress of those
two outstanding grievances. It must clearly define the
limits of the control to be exercised by Great Britain as
well as the purpose for which it is to be exercised. Her
control, instead of being indefinitely stretched, should be
confined to those departments on which, until the final
goal is reached, she must retain a hold for the better discharge
of her responsibility for the external and internal security
of Egypt. Such would be foreign relations, the army,
public security, communications, and perhaps irrigation,
and so long at least as there is an Egyptian foreign
debt, finance. Outside the limits of British control
there would thus be left a wide sphere in which the
Egyptians would have plenty of elbow room for a practical
beginning of self-government. That sphere might for
instance at once include, or be periodically expanded so
as to include, besides local government, education,
agriculture, public works, sanitation, and other departments
in which, subject to common agreement on
the best judges of the methods suitable to their own
people. This does not mean that they should dispense
with British expert advice and assistance which the great
majority recognise they are not yet qualified to forgo.
It is important to discriminate between British control,
exercised by those who represent British authority, and
the advisory and administrative and even in certain
departments executive functions of Englishmen employed
in the Egyptian public services.
If dualism cannot at present be eliminated, it can at
least be frankly defined and delimitated. To that end
the powers to be vested in the High Commissioner must
be as distinctly specified as the limits of the control
he would have to exercise. All other powers, with the
responsibilities they carry, would then remain equally
clearly vested in the Egyptian Ministers. This involves
a complete separation of the agencies of British control
from the Egyptian Executive, such British advisers as
it would be necessary to retain being appointed by the
British Government and made directly responsible to
the High Commissioner, who would direct and control
their relations with the Egyptian Ministers. Advisers
and their inspectorial and personal staff should be
British officials instead of being camouflaged as they
are now as Egyptian officials. For one thing, we should
no longer be tempted to appoint, as has sometimes
happened, advisers who, having no special qualifications
and being obliged to learn their jobs after appointment,
could carry very little weight with Egyptian Ministers.
Whether Egyptian affairs remain under the Foreign
Office, which is, however, singularly ill-equipped to deal
with them, or are transferred to the Colonial Office or
to a new department in charge of the whole Middle
East, the Secretary of State, to whom the High Commissioner
would be responsible, ought not to be left
without the assistance of a small council with Egyptian
experience, and composed partly of Egyptians.
The whole question of the employment of Englishmen
in the Egyptian public services should be submitted to
an Anglo-Egyptian Commission representing the High
Commissioner and the Egyptian Prime Minister. In the
departments still reserved for British control the High
Commissioner should have the final voice in determining
the nature and the number of the posts required for
Englishmen, in all others the Prime Minister. Englishmen
should least of all be appointed to subordinate
posts. A permanent Committee could then be established
to superintend new appointments and promotions.
The question would thus no longer be that of creating
a post for such and such an Englishman, sometimes with
little regard for his qualifications, or of making room for
a number of young Englishmen annually recruited from
home, but of appointing the best Englishman available
to a post which no Egyptian was admittedly qualified
yet to fill. Englishmen thus appointed would form
part of the Egyptian service under the orders of Egyptian
Ministers, and on terms laid down by them, whether in
short time contracts or for long periods, with the one
proviso for their protection that before the expiry of
their engagements they could be removed only on reasons
shown and with the consent of the High Commissioner.
The Egyptians would know that they were getting as
large a share of administrative work as they were
qualified to get, and that it depended upon themselves
to enlarge that share by qualifying in increasing numbers.
There might, and probably would, be at first a considerable
loss of efficiency, but the friction arising out of constant
interference by British officials, without any clearly
defined right to interfere, would disappear or be reduced
to a minimum. Many of the Englishmen now in Egypt
would doubtless be requested to remain, and compensation
would of course have to be given to those who did
not remain.
The Egyptians certainly have yet to prove their
capacity for self-government. But we are pledged to
a sufficiently wide one to put them on their mettle and
develop their sense of political responsibility. We may
believe that it will lead—at first at least—to very much
worse government and to the revival of many old-time
abuses. But that is no reason for breaking the promises
to which we are committed. Nor does there seem
to be any reason why the Egyptians should not decide
for themselves what form of representative institutions
is best suited to their social and political development,
and how far Egyptian Ministers should be made responsible
to them in the whole domain of government and administration
left outside the limited range of British
control—a domain which we should moreover undertake
to enlarge as rapidly as possible in the light of experience
and results. As a natural corollary, the functions of
the head of the State should be confined to those of a
strictly constitutional ruler.
One of the most delicate matters of adjustment would
be the relations between the High Commissioner and
the Egyptian Legislature, and a new department would
probably have to be created at the Residency for keeping
not only the Legislature but also Egyptian public opinion
fully acquainted—as has never yet been done—with the
objects of British policy in general and with the reasons
for the particular exercise of the discretion reserved to
the controlling power whenever special circumstances
arose to call for it. The initial difficulty—and no slight
one—will be to define the limits of the legislative powers
of an Egyptian Assembly. They must, on the one
hand, correspond with the stages through which the
evolution of Egyptian self-government will pass, but
they must, on the other hand, be so circumscribed as to
avoid conflicts between them and the powers vested in the
Mixed Tribunals, which neither we nor any other foreign
Power can be reasonably asked to renounce until modern
conceptions of justice have taken much deeper root in
the country. A premature attempt to get rid of the
further back than the Occupation—would merely defeat
any proposals for the drastic revision of the Capitulations,
which it would be the first duty of Great Britain to press
forward in discharge of her new responsibilities. It is
at any rate of good omen that Mr. Hurst's project for
merging the jurisdiction of the Consular Courts into that
of the Mixed Tribunals—the one result of its labours
which the Milner Commission made public before leaving
Egypt—has been received very favourably.
The form to be given to such a settlement, and the
name that the new relationship between Britain and
Egypt should bear, may seem much less important than
the substance. But we ought not to make light of
Egyptian sentiment, which is now almost universally
embittered against the word Protectorate and its unfortunate
Arabic version himayat, however elastic in
practice may be the interpretation we are ready to place
on it. Is it worth while for us to insist upon a word that
in itself has even less meaning than the formula of
complete independence upon which the Egyptians insist,
to our thinking, so unreasonably? As to the form of
settlement, it might be embodied in a new Organic
Statute which would receive the approval of the British
Government, or, as the Egyptians themselves would
probably prefer, in a formal Treaty of Alliance, with a
preamble placing on record as the object of British
policy an ever-enlarging measure of self-government for
Egypt with, as its final goal, her national independence
in perpetual amity and association with the British
Empire. Either form would probably be more acceptable
to the Egyptians than the substitution for the Protectorate
of a mandate from the League of Nations,
which they might construe into an attempt to relegate
them to the position of inferiority which such mandates
appear generally to connote. On the other hand, they
would doubtless welcome as a spontaneous pledge of
good faith our willingness to communicate to the League
whatever instrument ultimately embodies the obligations
mutually entered into between the British and Egyptian
Governments.
Such a policy, had it been adopted as soon as the war
was over, would almost certainly have been welcomed
by the majority even of the politically-minded classes
in Egypt. Much, however, has happened since then,
and Egyptians have become hypnotised by the cry for
"complete independence." But the masses, though
they may no longer believe in us as they used to, have
not yet been carried away by it. A large proportion of
those who have a stake in the country or have had some
experience in the conduct of public affairs still distrust
it. Others have succumbed to it merely because we
have never met it by any explicit scheme to redress
legitimate grievances and meet reasonable aspirations.
It is not too late yet to rally them, not by vague assurances,
but by telling them what our policy really is and
means, and how we intend to carry it out. Even amongst
those who first raised the cry of "complete independence"
and who still seek to impose it as an article of patriotic
faith, there are probably not a few who would measure
the cost of barren resistance as soon as they realised that
we had spoken our last word, if only that word is reasonably
generous and conveys a fulfilment of promises to which
we are already pledged up to the hilt, and if it has the
old ring of sincerity which in the earlier days of our
veiled Protectorate converted Zaghlul himself and other
quondam followers of Arabi "the Egyptian" to belief in
British honesty of purpose. We are in no way bound to
yield to the vehement clamour of the Egyptians for
"complete independence," for we are free, and have the
right, to judge that issue on its merits and to reject it
as too dangerous a leap in the dark for them as well as
for us and for the peace of the whole Eastern world.
We are not free, and we have not the right, to refuse them
a large and progressive measure of self-government,
by our traditions, but by all our professions before and
during and since the war. There are dangers in this
course too, but none so great as in a breach of our plighted
faith. When, but not until, we have redeemed our own
promises, can we hold the Egyptians responsible, if they
reject all overtures for a settlement by mutual consent and
persist in their endeavour to defeat an honourable solution
of the Egyptian problem which should satisfy their sense
of separate nationhood and give them at the same time
such an assurance of security as, in this period of world-travail,
they can hardly hope to find elsewhere than in
close association with the great commonwealth of nations
that we call the British Empire.
Just as these last pages are going to press it is
officially announced that Saad Pasha Zaghlul has arrived
in London with several members of the Egyptian Delegation
and other political friends, in response to an
invitation from the Milner Commission, and that
negotiations have begun with a view to finding a basis
of friendly agreement. The mere fact that such negotiations
are taking place is a welcome proof that British
Ministers as well as the leaders of the Egyptian Party
of Independence have definitely abandoned the unbending
attitude which has kept them too long, and unwisely,
apart. Though much patience and good will may still be
required to overcome, not only the difficulties inherent to
the problem, but also the reactionary influences which, in
Cairo as well as in London, will not want to see them
overcome, one may reasonably hope that a settlement by
consent is now actually in sight.
| CHAPTER XVII The Egyptian problem | |