 | CHAPTER II The Egyptian problem |  |
CHAPTER II
FROM MEHEMET ALI TO THE OCCUPATION
Neither of Mehemet Ali's immediate successors left
any deep impress on the history of Egypt. Abbas I,
who as the eldest agnate had taken over the reins after
the death of Ibrahim during the last melancholy months
of the old Pasha's dotage, was a solitary and sinister
figure, seeking in retirement not so much a refuge from
the cares of State as privacy for the indulgence of his
morbid cruelty. Ibrahim had sometimes urged his
father to "let the people alone," and had he lived, he
might have relaxed the harshness without destroying
the structure of Mehemet Ali's system of administration.
Abbas did not even wait for his grandfather to
pass away before setting himself to undo out of sheer
hatred all that the great Pasha had done. He resented
above all the growth of European interests and European
influence. He disliked foreigners of all nationalities.
He would gladly have closed the doors of Egypt to all
of them impartially and put the clock back to the old
days before the nineteenth century when Egypt, forgotten
by the outer world, could ignore its existence. He
posed as a devout Mahomedan to whom the Infidel
and all his works were anathema. He dismissed a number
of European officials and closed the schools in which
the rudiments of European education had been taught.
He regarded European trade and industry as insidious
channels for the infiltration of European influence, and
though he could not interfere with them openly in defiance
monopolies and to close the factories created by Mehemet
Ali which had brought him into direct contact with the
European merchants. To that extent the fellaheen,
for whom Abbas had even less pity than his grandfather,
benefited by his reversal of Mehemet Ali's policy, for it
restored to them the advantages of a free market for
their produce. They benefited also by a large reduction
of the Egyptian army, which was cut down to 9,000
men, and they welcomed the momentary relief from the
intolerable pressure of the corvée brought by the abandonment
of many public works which Mehemet Ali had
started. But if Abbas ever contemplated any constructive
policy to follow the uprooting of Mehemet
Ali's work, he was not given time to disclose it. For
within five years of his accession he was murdered in
his palace by two of his slaves, leaving none to mourn
him. Sullen and morose, his life was a mystery to
his own people, who whispered to one another revolting
tales of the cruelties in which he delighted. To the
foreigners in Egypt he stood for insane reaction and
fanaticism.
Saïd, who succeeded him, was a younger son of Mehemet
Ali, and if he inherited very little of his father's ability,
he carried to still greater lengths his liking for European
customs and European society. He had had a French
education, he was of a tolerant and cheerful disposition,
and he was never seen to more advantage than when
he was dispensing hospitality. His vanity was unbounded
and he prided himself on being a good administrator,
because the country had begun to recover its extraordinary
natural prosperity with more than fifteen years of external
peace. There was no public debt, and a revenue of about
£3,000,000 amply covered expenditure. The first railway
in Egypt between Alexandria and Cairo had been built
in his predecessor's time at the instance of Great Britain.
Saïd steadily extended the railway system and developed
the canals for purposes both of transportation and of
display a paternal interest in the fellaheen, who obtained
some further recognition of their rights in the land.
He hated quarrelling with anyone, and he tried not unsuccessfully
to cultivate friendly relations with all the
Powers. He readily gave permission for British troops
to be rushed across Egypt during the Indian Mutiny;
he gave a concession to the Eastern Telegraph Company
and welcomed the foundation of an English bank. The
most important enterprise with which his name will be
connected in history was the Suez Canal, for which he
granted the original concession in 1856 under political
pressure from France, and perhaps even more under the
personal pressure of Lesseps, whom he had known and
liked from his boyhood. Its construction proved a far
heavier drain upon the financial resources of Egypt
than he was led at the time to anticipate, and whether it
has really enured on the whole to the benefit of Egypt
is still open to debate. British opposition to the scheme
soon became as obsolete as the scepticism which at the
time scorned even its feasibility. It has succeeded
beyond all calculation, and it has certainly exercised a
great and perhaps decisive influence on the destinies of
Egypt. To that extent Saïd, though a man of no importance,
must rank with Mehemet Ali as a maker of
modern Egypt. But just as, rightly or wrongly, he
could not bring himself to deny Lesseps, so, in smaller
matters, he could never say "No" to his friends, and
many were the foreign adventurers who wormed themselves
into his friendship. His very generosity prompted
him to extravagance, and he started Egyptian finance
on the downward plane by being the first to contract a
foreign loan on the European money market. He died
soon afterwards, still a relatively young man, and the
succession passed to his nephew Ismail, a son of Ibrahim,
who was only thirty-three years old and soon followed
Saïd down the same plane with immeasurably greater
recklessness and rapidity.
Ismail was in many respects a bigger man than Saïd,
but with vices where Saïd had only displayed weaknesses.
Saïd had been foolishly generous; Ismail became a
fraudulent spendthrift. Saïd had been grossly self-indulgent,
especially in the pleasures of the table; Ismail
was a sensuous, if more refined, jouisseur. Saïd had a
childish conceit of himself; Ismail was devoured with
unbounded megalomania. Yet he had something too
of his grandfather's finer ambitions, and also of his ruthlessness.
It was he who gave Sir Samuel Baker full
powers to extend his authority as Governor-General
of the Sudan to the Equatorial provinces, and it was he
who afterwards asked for Chinese Gordon, for whose
curiously erratic and quixotic genius he had an almost
superstitious admiration. At the same time the horrible
misgovernment, which neither Baker nor Gordon could
do more than mitigate, left Ismail personally quite cold.
He had a kindly as well as a cruel side to his nature,
and would often go out of his way to relieve individual
cases of distress that were brought to his notice. But
he was utterly indifferent to the sufferings of his subjects
in the aggregate, and where his own safety or his cupidity
were involved, he would strike mercilessly at his closest
friend. I visited Egypt for the first time in the last years
of his reign. His one trusted Minister was then the
Finance Minister, Ismail Sadik Mufettish, reputed to
be his foster-brother. His influence with the Khedive
was believed to be unbounded, and clients flocked every
day to his ante-chambers in larger crowds than even to
Abdeen Palace. The state in which he lived vied with
the Khedive's. He had five or six palaces of his own
in Cairo and immense estates all over the country. One
morning rumour had it that the famous Mufettish had
suddenly disappeared. Cairo shivered with excitement,
though none dared to express either horror or relief,
though relief predominated, as the hand of the Mufettish
had been even heavier than that of the Khedive. And
on this occasion rumour was no lying jade. In the
who had but just dined at his master's table, had been
dragged out of bed and conveyed in one of the closed
carriages of the hareem down to the Nile, where he was
put on to the Khedivial steamer, which steamed at once
up the river. None ventured to enquire as to his fate.
Only a scar as of teeth on the hand of the officer
charged to see him on board was said to tell a grim tale
of some last desperate struggle for freedom or for life.
He was gone. His palaces and his estates and the
vast fortune he had accumulated were confiscated, his
great establishments scattered, and his slaves put up to
private auction. Yet the Khedive appeared the same
night at the Opera, which was one of his many extravagant
hobbies, and a few days later I saw him at one of the
great functions at which he delighted in displaying a
more than royal and slightly barbaric hospitality, though
his Court was modelled on European lines. He was stout
and jovial, and chatted merrily in his curious slipshod
French, almost every sentence ending irrelevantly with
comme-ci, comme-ça, etc. He had a pleasant word for all
his visitors and a ready compliment for every European
lady. No one could look more free from black care,
let alone from the shadow of black deeds.
Nevertheless, he was already desperately far gone on
his Rake's Progress. The whole story of his reign is
one of colossal and inept extravagance, and it is after
all so sordid a story that it would scarcely deserve to be
recalled, had it not been pregnant with consequences
of decisive importance to Egypt and to Britain. It can
be recalled very briefly, for there is scarcely anything of
value to be placed against the monotonous record of debts
piled on to debts with increasing frequency and on more
and more usurious terms, though, thanks largely to the
tremendous rise in the price of cotton during the American
Civil War, the Egyptian revenue had risen to about
£7,000,000 per annum. Within the first five years of
his reign he had borrowed £11,000,000 abroad and
whilst he had agreed to increase the tribute paid to
Turkey from £320,000 to £600,000 a year, in return for
a Firman substituting primogeniture for the old Turkish
law of succession to the throne, and the grant of the
new-fangled title of Khedive in lieu of the old title of
Pasha of Egypt. Another loan for £11,890,000, which
doubled the existing funded debt, tided him over a costly
visit to Constantinople and the magnificent festivities
which marked the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869,
when the Empress Eugénie was the most brilliant of the
many royal and countless other guests invited to the great
pageant from all parts of the world.
The Sultan, fearing probably that his spendthrift
vassal would end by spoiling the European money markets,
on which he himself was making heavy calls, suddenly
forbade him to raise any more loans in Europe without
his specific consent, and to get this veto withdrawn
the Khedive had to make another ruinous pilgrimage to
Constantinople, where, according to the British Ambassador,
Sir Henry Elliot, a sum of £900,000 passed direct
from Ismail's hands into those of the Sultan Abdul
Aziz. This was in 1872, after the Mufettish had tried,
with very scant success, to raise the wind in Egypt by
a law styled the Mukabalah, which promised a freehold
title and a future reduction of 50 per cent. on the land
tax to every landowner who at once paid six years'
taxes in advance. Recourse had to be quickly made to
another loan for a record amount of £32,000,000 nominal
and at 8 instead of 7 per cent., which after various
deductions yielded little more than £12,000,000 in cash.
In 1874 a last and much smaller loan, for a trumpery
£3,000,000, was placed with great difficulty abroad,
and absolutely the only security that Ismail could still
pledge in 1875 were his Founder's Shares in the Suez
Canal, and he had already raised money on the dividends
accruing from them for the next twenty years. Lord
Beaconsfield slipped in and purchased them for £4,000,000,
British Treasury, but demonstrating to the whole world
that the British Government did not intend to let Egypt
go any further headlong to ruin.
When the final crash came on April 8th, 1876, with the
suspension of payment of Egyptian Treasury bills, the
public debt of Egypt, which had amounted only to
£3,293,000 in 1863 at the time of Ismail's accession, had
risen to over £94,090,000, whereof £68,000,000 was
funded and £26,000,000 floating. "Roughly speaking,"
writes Lord Cromer, than whom there can be no better
authority, "it may be said that Ismail added on an
average about £7,000,000 a year for thirteen years to
the debt of Egypt, and that for all practical purposes
the whole of the borrowed money, except £16,000,000
spent on the Suez Canal, was squandered," and, it may
be added, squandered on vulgar luxury and empty
ostentation. For during the same period, as the subsequent
financial inquiry showed, the ordinary revenue
of the country, also about £7,000,000 a year, had yielded
in the aggregate almost exactly the same sum—
£94,000,000—that Ismail had borrowed, and had, within
perhaps £3,000,000 altogether, provided enough to cover
all the legitimate expenditure incurred on the administration
of the country and on public works of unquestionable
utility, and even on the payment of the Turkish
tribute and a good many other items of more questionable
usefulness or policy. Something was done even during
Ismail's reign for the material development of the
country; new canals had added more than a fifth to the
cultivable area; a great network of telegraphs covering
6,000 miles had been carried right up to the Sudan;
instead of 250 miles of railway there were now 1,200;
the harbour works of Suez and Alexandria were enlarged;
the foreign trade of Egypt, import and export, had
multiplied threefold. This much may be placed to his
credit, and his grandiose policy of expansion in the Sudan,
and even his war with Abyssinia, disastrous as were its
excuse too may be found for the four or five millions he
spent at Constantinople to secure the alteration of the
Law of Succession in favour of his eldest son, and to rid
Egypt of a few more of the restrictions which still limited
her autonomy. But all this might have been done
without the insensate borrowings which loaded Egypt
with a heavy permanent debt and never even temporarily
eased the taxpayer's shoulders.
For never even under her Mameluke slave-kings,
who at least left some splendid monuments behind them
to redeem their names from oblivion, nor under Mehemet
Ali, who gave Egypt a new status in the world, did the
Egyptian people groan under more pitiless oppression
than under the vainglorious rule of Ismail, barren from
beginning to end of all great achievement. A wild
Nationalist, whom I met in Cairo, ventured to carry his
disparagement of British control to the extreme length
of telling me that I ought to have seen Egypt in the days
of freedom and prosperity which she enjoyed under her
own rulers before the British occupation. "Even,"
I inquired, "under Ismail?" "Yes, even under Ismail,"
was his reply. I asked him politely how old he was,
though it was evident he was too young to have seen
Ismail's Egypt with his own eyes. I unfortunately was
not too young, and I proceeded to describe to him what
I had seen in the last years of Ismail's reign, when Egypt
was "enjoying freedom and prosperity under one of her
own rulers"; the half-starved fellaheen dragged away from
their own fields to work on the huge estates which the
Khedive and his favoured pashas had filched from them;
the forced labour of the corvée, under the ever-present
menace of the whip, to keep the perennial canals running
for the benefit of others; the press-gangs employed to
drive into the depots the army recruits who were too
poor to buy exemption from what they regarded, too
often rightly, as an irrevocable sentence of death in the
far-away Sudan; the miserable mud villages frequently
of the fellaheen's feet could no longer wring a piastre
out of them to meet taxes often levied three or four times
over, and so even their land had been taken away from
them in payment; the crowds of wailing women and
emaciated children begging for a husk of maize; misery
and despair up and down that incomparable valley of
the Nile whilst Ismail held his Court in Cairo, and those
who preyed upon him, Egyptians and Europeans alike,
battened on his profligate extravagance.
My Nationalist friend, who was a doctor, shifted his
ground and assured me that at any rate far more encouragement
was given to education, and especially to
education for the scientific professions, than under the
British. I invited him to read for himself the description
given by Dr. Sandwith of the Kasr-el-Aini Hospital,
then the only, and still the chief, general hospital in Cairo,
as he saw it when he was first placed in charge of it after
the Occupation. I happen to be one of the few foreigners
probably now living who ever visited it before the Occupation,
and I could therefore vouch, not, of course, for all
the details contained in Dr. Sandwith's report, but for
the truth of the appalling picture which it presents.
"The building consisted of a quadrangle surrounding
waste land, studded with huge lebbek trees, which kept air
and light from the windows. The walls contained nests of
living snakes, in holes from which the plaster had long
crumbled away. The ground floor was composed chiefly
of dark, damp store-rooms, for here were situated the central
stores of equipment for all the Government hospitals. The
pharmacy was the one bright and fairly clean place, and near
by were several bins full of mouldy sulphate of iron, which
seems to have been a favourite antiseptic against cholera.
The patients' wards, as now, were in the upper two stories,
but so closed in by doors and windows that there was an
overpowering smell, and practically no ventilation, for most
of them were very small, measuring only 17 ft. by 13 ft.
The floors were made of broken, ill-fitting `ballats,' which,
being porous, soaked in any septic liquids, while the rough
walls and wooden ceilings were infested with bugs. The beds
were in the same condition, for they were wooden planks
sleep in the corridors at night to try and escape from the
vermin. There was practically no furniture except dirty
tin drinking pots and platters. At night there were no
candles available, and the corridors were dimly lighted by
a narrow wick floating in oil. But the pervading horror of
the hospital was the smell from the privies, which were built
into the walls, and communicated directly with huge
underground culverts, blocked at low Nile, and at other
times allowed to empty themselves into the river. The
so-called drains from the dissecting room and dead-house
also flowed into the Nile about a mile above the intake of the
water supply of the city. Water was somewhat scarce in
those days, and was brought upstairs by men carrying goatskins
from a tap near the entrance of the hospital. The
filtered water supply was unknown. . . . In the middle of
the kitchen there was an open hole in the floor, leading into
a cesspool, for the reception of offal and bones. . . . The
laundry was in the open air, supplied with muddy, cold
water, and a series of boilers in which the water never boiled.
It was, therefore, not to be wondered at that linen often came
back to the wards covered with lice. Perhaps it is not
surprising that hardly any single soul ever went to the hospital
of his own free will, the exception being beggars who were
driven there by poverty. The public of Cairo firmly believed
that the hospital was merely a prelude to the cemetery, and
that the sick were beaten and robbed by the attendants,
and then poisoned by the doctors. And yet the number of
hospital patients was often four hundred, made up of soldiers,
policemen, Government employés, prisoners, foundlings,
hospital children, idiots, and prostitutes, who sometimes
numbered as many as two hundred, and converted their
section into a pandemonium. All these different classes were
kept there by order of the Governor. . . . There was no
nursing, the attendants consisting entirely of worn-out old
soldiers, who had been dismissed from the army, with, of
course, no moral control over the patients. Serious cases
could not be kept in bed, and trivial cases were allowed to
lie in bed all day if they wished it. There was a systematic
absence of clinical teaching, note-taking, temperature records,
urine testing, or any thorough physical examination. The
medical diagnosis seldom advanced beyond `anæmia' or
`gastric catarrh.' The dispenser accompanied the doctor
on his round, wrote the prescriptions on a sheet of paper,
copied them afterwards into a book, and then administered
the medicine of twenty-four hours all in one dose. The
antiseptics, and were so fearful of anæsthetics that most
major operations, including lithotomy, were usually done
without them. Three hundred pounds worth of surgical
instruments lay neglected in the hospital, because no one in
Egypt was capable of repairing them, until we introduced an
English instrument - maker. Refractory patients were
punished by confinement and by chains, anklets, and handcuffs."
This quotation affords as striking an illustration as
could be found anywhere of the cruel parody of civilisation
with which Ismail deceived Europe, and perhaps
sometimes deceived himself, whilst he was heading straight
to the ruin of his country and his own. Everything was
to be on the European model, but seldom was anything
more than the label copied. Laws and regulations
were drawn up, often with the help of European experts,
and duly promulgated by the Khedivial decree. But
they never took effect. They looked well on paper,
but in practice Ismail had no use for them, and, as Lord
Cromer has written, who was himself an eye-witness,
no one ever thought of obeying them. The principal
officials concerned were indeed often ignorant of their
existence. New taxes were levied, old taxes were increased,
and changes introduced without any formal
authority. The village Sheikh executed the orders of
the Mamour, the Mamour those of the Mudir, and the
Mudir those of the Inspector-General, who, again, acted
"under superior order." The "superior order," which
was the Khedive's, in fact constituted the law. The
officials obeyed it even if it were only communicated
verbally; and no taxpayer ever dreamt of challenging
it. The Inspector-General of Upper Egypt, on being
asked by the Commission of Inquiry to whom the taxpayer
could address himself if he had any complaint
to make, answered, with a naïveté arising from long
familiarity with a system which he considered both just
and natural, "With regard to the taxes, the peasant cannot
complain; he knows that they are collected by `superior
To whom should he complain?"
But the Commission of Inquiry also established that
excessive taxation, arbitrarily imposed and mercilessly
collected, was only one of Ismail's methods of robbing
his people. The Khedive's private estates were cultivated
by forced labour. The corvée not only imposed
fearful hardships on the hundreds of thousands of fellaheen
who were commandeered for it. It was used also as a
pretext for extorting money from those who were not
actually liable to do corvée work. In order to fertilise
the Khedive's estates, irrigation water, without which
no land can be cultivated in Egypt, was denied to the
poor and helpless peasant, who saw it diverted from his
fields without any hope of redress, as there were no courts
to which he could appeal for justice. Nor did Ismail
rob only the fellaheen. He did not hesitate to lay hands
on the moneys belonging to the Wakf, i.e., to the department
entrusted with the administration of Mahomedan
religious endowments, and on the Beit-el-Mal, which
administered the estates of minors, and on the Orphans'
Fund and even on the funds of the National Schools.
Everything went into his bottomless pocket. As a variant
to Louis XIV's "L'état c'est moi," Ismail might well
have adopted as his motto "L'état, c'est ma poche."
For the State was only a huge engine of spoliation for
his own benefit. He strained it till it crashed.
The crash, when it came, though it assumed in the
first instance a financial shape, was in reality a collapse
of the whole iniquitous system of government, which
bled Egypt itself white whilst its credit abroad was
being at the same time sucked dry. It has been the
fashion in some quarters to denounce the foreign financiers
and the foreign bondholders as the cause of Egypt's
sufferings. I am not concerned to defend the financiers
who took advantage of, and perhaps even encouraged,
Ismail's criminal extravagance, and it may be argued that
bondholders who allow themselves to be caught by the
to thank if the promise is not fulfilled, and that their
Government should meet their appeals for help by merely
reminding them of the legal maxim, Caveat emptor.
But to Egypt, at any rate, the foreign bondholders
ultimately proved a blessing in disguise. For it was
their influence that in the first place drove the two Great
Powers chiefly interested, viz., Great Britain and France,
to intervene, and it was their intervention that procured
an international inquiry, without which the appalling
grievances of the Egyptian people against their ruler
would not have had a chance of coming to light and
obtaining some measure of redress. The foreign debt
of Egypt was not in itself an intolerable burden. What
was intolerable was the internal system of administration,
and the former became the instrument, almost cheap
at the price, for reforming the latter.
Ismail was well aware of the danger which threatened
his hitherto unquestioned despotism from any form of
international control, and for three years he wriggled
and fought to evade it. He had been compelled as early
as May, 1876, within a month of his public confession
of bankruptcy, to agree to the creation of an international
Commission of the Public Debt, an institution which,
though its composition and purpose have been from
time to time substantially modified, endures to the present
day as the Caisse de la Dette Publique. In the following
year there arrived in Egypt, as the first British representative
on it, the great Englishman who was destined
as Sir Evelyn Baring, and, later, Lord Cromer, to play
the leading part in rescuing Egypt from the slough of
despond. In his memoirs he has given a graphic picture
of the writhings and contortions of the Khedive to escape
the most obvious penalties of his sins. Of the 900,000
acres of land he and his family had secured to themselves,
he had already pledged nearly 500,000 to his creditors.
He magnanimously offered to give up nearly two-thirds
of what still remained unmortgaged, but it was quickly
was half as valuable again as the larger area he proposed
to give up.
The conclusions of the Commission of Inquiry were
an unpleasant pill for him to swallow, for they required
the cession of the whole Khedivial estates in return for
a fixed Civil List, and the adoption of the principle of
Ministerial responsibility. He made a virtue of necessity
and even claimed for himself the credit of the new system
which was to put an end to the errements anciens. He
accepted a Cabinet which might well have been called
the "Ministry of all the talents." The Prime Minister
was Nubar, the old Armenian statesman, who had, with
rare courage and perseverance, brought about the one
great reform which Ismail sanctioned without absolute
compulsion, viz., the creation of the Mixed Tribunals.
Riaz, who had boldly stood up to the Khedive in days
of stress and storm, was Minister of Interior, whilst an
Englishman, Sir Rivers Wilson, took charge of Finance,
and a Frenchman, M. de Blignières, of Public Works.
Ismail welcomed them cordially—and then at once
began to intrigue against them, and when trouble followed
blandly turned on them, washing his hands of everything
on the plea that, having subscribed to the principle
of Ministerial responsibility, he no longer had any power.
That he still had more than enough power for mischief
he soon showed. Army retrenchments gave him his
opportunity. He carried on a propaganda amongst
the officers, who readily responded to his incitements.
In the course of a turbulent demonstration Nubar and
Wilson were roughly handled, and as the Khedive had
taken care beforehand to warn the Consular body that he
was no longer responsible for the maintenance of public
order, and there was as yet no other authority behind
the Ministry to give it the necessary support, Nubar
had no option but to resign. The two foreign members
of the Cabinet followed his example. The Khedive
could boast that if he had lost the first game in the rubber
from his obnoxious Ministers, and he had yet a card up
his sleeve with which he was confident of winning "the
conqueror."
Though the British and French Governments had
hitherto acted in full accord, there were sections of public
opinion in both countries to which the policy of their
Governments did not appeal. In Great Britain especially
there were many who chose to believe that their Government
was being used as a catspaw by the big financial
houses interested in Egyptian loans. In France, on the
contrary, there were still more who were afraid that the
interests of the bondholders would be sacrificed to sentimental
considerations, or who, imbued with the old
jealousy of England, suspected her of trying to oust
France from the pre-eminent position which, according
to French traditions, rightfully belonged to her. Ismail
was quick to see that in both countries there were discordant
elements which he might exploit for his own
purposes if he appealed to them in the modern language
of democracy. His knowledge of Europeans was superficial
and shallow, but he was quick-witted, and the
idea of fooling Europe at its own game appealed to his
unfailing sense of humour. While the foreign representatives
in Cairo were discussing with their own
Governments how to recover the authority they
had lost with the fall of the Nubar Ministry, and had as
they thought squared the circle by securing the appointment
of the heir apparent, Prince Tewfik, to preside
over the Cabinet, the Khedive came out in the new
character of an ardent democrat who considered it his
"sacred duty" to consult the opinion of his people,
whose "national sentiment"—as voiced by a subservient
Chamber of Notables—had "revolted" against Ministers
who dealt with Egypt "as if the country were in a state
of bankruptcy." The Notables had submitted to him—
by superior order—a financial project of which he "fully
approved." He had therefore determined to entrust
confidence and esteem"—two of them, as a matter of
fact, were notorious for their corruption—with "the
preparation of electoral laws upon the model of those
which existed in Europe" for the election of a parliamentary
assembly "in conformity with the exigencies of the
internal situation and the aspirations of the nation."
It was an audacious move, but it came too late. The
final report of the Commission of Inquiry had probed
too deeply the evils from which Egypt was suffering, and
had made a series of far-reaching recommendations which,
though as essential to the welfare of the Egyptian people
as to the legitimate interests of Egypt's creditors abroad,
could not possibly be carried into successful execution
except with the consent and co-operation of the Egyptian
ruler. That consent and co-operation it was hopeless to
look for from Ismail, and so Ismail had at last to go.
The British and French Governments prevailed upon
the Sultan of Turkey to issue a Firman deposing him and
appointing his eldest son, Tewfik, to succeed him as
Khedive. Ismail, to give him his due, bowed submissively
to the inevitable, and retired with dignity. This was
in June, 1879, just sixteen years after his accession.
He was a bad ruler with no title to fame except preeminence
as a spendthrift, but inasmuch as the very
enormity of his extravagance precipitated the downfall
of the old despotic order of things, he too may be called
a maker of modern Egypt.
Ismail's swan song as a champion of democratic institutions
was not entirely wasted upon the Egyptian people,
who understood only enough of the bewildering events
of the last few years to realise that Egypt was in the
throes of a great and mysterious revolution of which
they were impotent spectators, and might yet have to
pay the costs. The deposition of a Khedive so recently
all-powerful had shaken their faith in the divine right
of rulers. They had little reason to believe in the good
will or the good faith of Europeans, whom they not unnaturally
of adventurers who had swarmed round Ismail and had
too often been his willing tools, if not his tempters. In
the eyes, moreover, of a Mahomedan people the sudden
ascendancy of Christian Ministers in a Mahomedan State
and the masterful dictation of Christian Governments
seemed as great an affront to their religious as to their
racial susceptibilities. For a time all these were only
vague stirrings. The young Khedive had accepted a
situation which he had inherited but not created. A
man of no great ability or originality, but of sound
judgment and unquestionable honesty, he co-operated
loyally with Ministers who were, like himself, reconciled
to the necessity of accepting a large measure of foreign
control. The sturdy old reformer, Riaz, was installed
as Prime Minister, Blignières and Baring were appointed
Controllers-General, and an International Commission of
Liquidation, which was mainly composed of the Commissioners
of the Debt, was instituted with full powers
to deal with the financial situation. For a time things
worked fairly smoothly. But when Ismail had tampered
with army discipline in order to upset a Cabinet which
he detested he stirred up dangerous passions to which
his last appeal to a new spirit of Nationalism gave an
orientation he certainly never anticipated.
When Mehemet Ali first organised an Egyptian army,
its officers were all Turks and Circassians and Albanians.
For a long time a real Egyptian could only rise to be a
non-commissioned officer. Then gradually Egyptians
came to be promoted to officers' rank, and under Saïd
and Ismail their numbers had steadily increased. But
the old Turkish caste, still very powerful in Egypt, maintained
its preponderancy in the higher ranks of the army
to which the Egyptian officers but rarely obtained promotion,
and it took good care that the latter should be
the first to go when, under financial pressure, large
reductions had to be made in the officer cadres. Ismail
had always taken the ascendancy of the Turkish caste
and shocked than he when the news reached him in his
exile that the next mutiny to occur in the Egyptian army,
in February, 1880, just a year after the one he had himself
instigated, was a mutiny of Egyptian-born officers against
their comrades of non-Egyptian stock. The lead was
taken by three colonels, one of whom, Arabi, an Egyptian
of fellah origin, was to become the leader of the first
Nationalist uprising. They presented their petition,
which denounced the Minister of War, Osman Pasha
Rifki, of course a Turk, for grossly unjust treatment
of the Egyptian officers, to Riaz, who was entirely ignorant
of military affairs and undertook to lay their grievances
before the Khedive, the titular head of the army. It
was resolved to arrest the colonels, but the secret leaked
out, and when, in obedience to a summons, they presented
themselves at the Ministry of War, they had
their regiments behind them ready to move if they did
not reappear within a given time, and their regiments
moved so effectively that the Khedive was advised to
dismiss the Minister of War, and appoint in his stead
the nominee of the mutinous troops, Mahmoud Pasha
Sami.
There was another lull, but only on the surface. The
officers watched the Ministers and the Ministers the
officers, both sides intensely suspicious and full of secret
fears. In July the soldiers invented a form of demonstration
which the latter-day Nationalists have made
their own. A gunner was killed in the streets of Alexandria.
His comrades marched with the corpse to the
Ras-el-Teen Palace, where the Khedive was staying,
and, forcing their way in, bore it into his presence, adjuring
him to avenge the army of which he was the chief. There
were intrigues and counter-intrigues, the foreign Powers
meantime staying their hands, and co-operation between
the British and French representatives growing less
cordial. On September 9th, an order was issued removing
one of the most notoriously disaffected regiments from
mutiny. Arabi, with 2,500 men and 18 guns, marched
into Abdeen Square. There was a dramatic moment
when the Khedive, accompanied by Sir Auckland Colvin,
who had succeeded Baring the year before as Commissioner
of the Debt, faced Arabi in the square and
ordered him to sheathe his sword. This Arabi did, but
proceeded to intimate that he was there to enforce three
demands "in the name of the Egyptian people": the
dismissal of the Ministry, the convocation of a Parliament,
and the raising of the strength of the army to 18,000
men. This was no longer a mere military mutiny. It
was a military pronunciamiento. The Khedive's judgment
failed him at the crucial moment. Had he then
ordered Arabi to withdraw his troops as he had ordered
him to sheathe his sword, stating plainly that, whilst
always willing to listen to the wishes of his people, he
could not recognise the army as the proper channel for
their expression, he might have been master of the
situation. But he lacked moral rather than physical
courage. He turned to Colvin, exclaiming, "You hear
what he says"; and was evidently ready to parley then
and there with the military chiefs. Had he done so,
there would have been an end not only of his own authority
but of all civil authority. Colvin saw the danger and
urged him to withdraw to the Palace. Negotiations
followed which were at first stormy, but ultimately led
to another compromise under the steadying influence
of a new factor which, to the surprise of both parties,
showed itself equally determined to resist a military
dictatorship and any revival of Khedivial prerogatives.
This new factor was the Chamber of Notables, which met
on September 13th—exactly a year before the battle of
Tel-el-Kebir, which would perhaps never have been
fought had the Khedive known how to utilise unfamiliar
forces of which he was still too inexperienced to appreciate
the value. If he dreaded a mutinous soldiery, all his
instincts and traditions revolted against the interference
openly, but the Notables could not remain unaware of
his real sentiments, and they inclined more and more
towards Arabi, until in the end, when he had made himself
practically the dictator of Egypt, they, who had refused
to bow down before the Khedive, bowed down before him
without realising that they had only exchanged masters.
Another and far more mischievous factor had in the
meantime appeared on the scene, namely, a Turkish
mission. The insubordination of the Egyptian army,
which was—and not merely in theory—part of the Ottoman
army, gave the Sultan a valid excuse for fishing in troubled
waters. He had even contemplated an occupation of
Egypt by Turkish troops. But England and France
were still sufficiently at one to dissuade him, though
Lord Salisbury was inclined not to exclude altogether
the idea of Turkish intervention as a last resort against
anarchy. The Sultan's envoys played fast and loose
with everyone. Arabi was induced both by his fear
of Turkish intervention and need of popular support
to divest his propaganda as far as possible of the antiTurkish
character which the mutiny of the troops had
originally borne, and to give it an anti-European
character with a flavour even of Mahomedan fanaticism.
Confusion became worse confounded when Gambetta
was overthrown early in 1882 and succeeded by Freycinet,
who was neither so convinced a believer in an Anglo-French
understanding nor so ready to face responsibility
for grave Egyptian complications. The Chamber of
Notables began to assume a more imperious tone, and
claimed the right to vote as well as to discuss the Budget,
and demanded a new Organic Law conferring that right
upon it should it be denied under the existing regulations.
The Prime Minister, Cherif Pasha, could neither resist
nor give way. So he resigned, and in the new Cabinet
Arabi himself became War Minister, whilst his brother
officer, Mahmoud Sami, who had hitherto held that
portfolio, became Prime Minister. The fusion between
the military party and the Nationalist party was complete,
his supporters leant more and more to Turkish intervention
as their one hope of salvation, and Arabi once
more proceeded to take strong measures against the old
Turkish element in the army. The Administration was
paralysed. The foreign communities dreaded an antiEuropean
outbreak. The British and French representatives
were at last driven to take a step which had
it been taken earlier might have been effective. They
demanded the resignation of the Cabinet and the retirement
of Arabi from Egypt and of his two chief coadjutors
into the interior. The military party were for a moment
frightened into submission, and the Cabinet resigned,
but none ventured to take its place, and after a short
interval of chaos Arabi was reinstated.
A British fleet arrived before Alexandria, but Arabi
was induced by Mr. Wilfrid Blunt and other European
sympathisers to believe that Gladstone would never
sanction single-handed British intervention and that the
French would never agree to co-operate. He was
grievously misled on the former point. The Sultan, it
is true, had still to be reckoned with, for, at the instance
of the Powers, two High Commissioners, reported to be
carrying far more definite instructions than the earlier
Ottoman mission, landed at Alexandria. But Arabi
had not much cause to fear them, for each had separate
instructions and, after Abdul Hamid's wont, of an opposite
character. A sudden outburst of fanaticism in Alexandria,
where over fifty Europeans were brutally massacred
on June 11th by a Mahomedan mob, precipitated the
catastrophe towards which all parties had been blindly
moving. The Powers made a last attempt to avert
the storm by convoking a Conference of Ambassadors at
Constantinople, but the Sultan hesitated to take part
in it. On July 11th he sent an assurance to the British
Ambassador, Lord Dufferin, that on the very next day
"he would be able to propose a satisfactory solution of
the Egyptian question." But Sir Beauchamp Seymour
was already bombarding the forts of Alexandria, in
was believed to be erecting fresh batteries. The French
fleet had sailed away the day before. Italy declined our
invitation to co-operate. The Sultan did not decline,
but procrastinated. Very reluctantly the British Government
undertook single-handed the task which none would
share with England, and within two months Sir Garnet
Wolseley had scattered Arabi's vaunted army at Tel-el-Kebir
and the British flag floated on the citadel of Cairo.
The authority of the Khedive was restored in name,
and Arabi, who had surrendered to our troops, was put
on trial for his life as a rebel, but ultimately spared at
our instance and sent in exile to Ceylon.
I saw him several times during the last few months of
his stormy dictatorship. He looked the fellah that he
was by birth. His heavy features betrayed a strain of
African blood, but he looked one straight in the face
and his manners were courteous. He was very ignorant,
and to some extent a tool in the hands of abler men.
But I believe he was honest and well-meaning, and a
patriot according to his lights. He strenuously denied
having been privy to the Alexandria massacre, and his
orders certainly availed to stop the disturbances there
as soon as he was prevailed upon to issue them. I saw
him again many years afterwards in Ceylon. He told
me frankly that though he had distrusted us intensely
in those troublous times, all he heard from Egypt since
the British Occupation had satisfied him that we were
doing great things for the fellaheen to whom he himself
belonged, and he could not but be grateful to us for having
befriended them. But he added in almost the same
words which an Egyptian statesman afterwards used to
me, who was for many years one of Lord Cromer's most
loyal coadjustors, "there will be no assurance of peace
in Egypt so long as the Turkish house of Mehemet Ali
has not been turned out of the country." The young Abbas
Hilmi had then just succeeded to the Khediviate, and
was already justifying "Arabi the Egyptian's" warning.
| CHAPTER II The Egyptian problem | |