THE

NINETEENTH

CENTURY.

No. LXXXVIII.-JUNE 1884.

4 'HOW LONG HALT YE BETWEEN TWO

OPINIONS?'

Ir has been my fate for many months to be the voice of one crying in the wilderness that the ways of the Government in regard to Egypt may be made straight.

Like most preachers, I have of course my own individual theory of salvation, a theory which has at least these two claims to consideration: that, being the only one as yet untried, it is the only one as yet unproved a failure; and that, whatever may be its defects, it could not be attended with worse results to Egypt than the numerous other remedies already applied.

But my object in this paper is not to recommend any one specific, but rather to point out the necessity of adopting some definite form of treatment, either in one direction or the other, instead of continuing a series of experiments under which the unhappy patient is becoming so exhausted that he will soon be beyond treatment.

In doing so I shall endeavour to avoid any debatable matter, and shall keep personal views as much as possible in the background.

The struggle which terminated with Tel el Kebir was, in a general sense, one between the people and their rulers, and it resulted in the defeat of the former.

But prior to their own defeat they had morally destroyed the power of the latter, and therefore after Tel el Kebir there existed authority neither on the one side nor on the other.

The sole power lay in the hands of the sixteen thousand British VOL. XV.-No. 88.

3 N

troops; and at their feet, to be disposed of as best seemed good to the conquerors, lay a mixed population of five million souls.

It would be quite foreign to my purpose to consider the policy or impolicy of the first step taken towards the restoration of order: it may have been the height of wisdom or the depth of folly; it may have been necessitated by, or totally opposed to, the previous policy of the existing or any former English Government. With all this I have nothing to do, but I note the fact that Lord Wolseley, upon his arrival in Cairo, telegraphed to the Khedive that he held his palace in the capital at his disposal; and when, within a few days, the Khedive arrived, the conquerors and the sole masters of Egypt passed in review before Tewfik Pasha standing under the royal banner of England, and left him installed in his palace the nominal ruler of the country.

Our first act, therefore, was the restoration of the Khedive, and in every subsequent act we have to bear this in mind.

The Khedive re-established, we had to provide for his support. We disbanded his own army and left a reduced force of 6,000 men to support his authority.

This second act was the recognition of our responsibilities to Egypt.

The Khedive thus established and supported, we proclaimed our intention of withdrawing that support so soon as a stable government was formed.

(This third act was the recognition of our engagements to Europe.) As we expressed the hope that this might be effected in six months, there was clearly no time to lose.

We had committed ourselves to the Khedive and to the establishment of a stable government, but to nothing else, when Lord Dufferin arrived in Cairo, and to him was left the further development of the problem.

There were obviously two different courses open to him—the one to leave the Khedive to form his own government while we remained to preserve order; the other to go a step further and ourselves to establish the Khedive's government.

Let us consider what would have been the result had we adopted the former course. The Khedive was by no means without friends: the ruling Turkish party had remained faithful to him; the Sultan, though never very cordial, would have respected a man protected by 6,000 British bayonets; the people would have forgiven everything to his success. A ministry would have been formed among the Turkish party, and Riaz, the most capable man in it, would have been named Prime Minister. Riaz is a man who has suffered much from Arabi, for he well-nigh lost his belief in his own infallibility, and Christian charity is a quality which he values too highly to use in profusion; his colleagues would have been of the same disposition;

the Khedive's feelings towards the leaders of the revolt were not sentimentally humane; so that, on the whole, it may be feared that the so-called National Party would have fallen upon evil times. Some thirty of their leaders might have suffered the extreme penalty; the remainder would speedily have become ardent supporters of the new order of things, and Tewfik would have lived for ever in the memory of his people as the just, because the successful, Khedive.

A Turkish army would have been established, less disciplined perhaps than that of Sir Evelyn Wood, leaving in many ways much to be desired, but yet capable of preserving order and in case of need of making some show of fight.

The anomalies of the capitulations would have remained; seventeen consuls-general would have continued to exercise each an imperium in imperio, but gratitude to England, who had restored the Riaz Ministry to power, would have given us great weight in their councils. The disinterestedness of our intervention would have been proved, and, in the event of our ever having to fight upon the side of Egypt, we should have been in the territory of a grateful ally.

We should certainly not have been able to suppress the Kourbash, nor torture, nor slavery, nor backsheesh; but we should very readily have obtained any number of decrees declaring them all very wicked and illegal.

We should not have succeeded in endowing the fellah with a vote which he does not want, nor in establishing a French criminal procedure which he does not understand; but the principle of equal justice to all would have been solemnly pronounced, and if a few unfortunates did unjustly suffer, we could console ourselves with the idea that we had not rendered even their lot more hard, that there was a fairly strong government, able to protect the large majority and less tyrannical than when we began our intervention in 1875.

In the Soudan we should probably have watched Abdelkader continuing his Fabian tactics with the Mahdi; the British public would have been still ignorant of the geographical positions of Khartoum and Suakim; the lives of Hicks, of Moncrieff, of Morice, and of how many others would have been spared. Chinese Gordon would have been undermining the seat of the Mahdi's power in the Congo, and by this time we should have been clear of the country, but, made wise by experience, would have kept upon it a watchful eye, and been prepared with all the prestige of a great success to prevent a relapse into anarchy.

But we did not adopt this course; we had higher aims, nobler aspirations; we felt bound to show that our intervention was not only in the interests of the bondholders, was not solely directed to the maintenance of the status quo, but was destined to leave things better than they had been, to ameliorate the lot of the fellah

and to sow the blessings of civilisation on the banks of the fertile Nile. We said that we had entered into this house, that we would sweep it with the broom of reform and garnish it with our British institutions.

The Kourbash, backsheesh, slavery, torture, these were abominations which must disappear, and in their place we would instal pure justice. Government by a class was wrong, so we would have brand-new representative institutions: the fellah should stand on a par with the pasha, the slave with his master. The might of England's justice should awaken the echoes of the silent Memnon.

Well, the ambition was a noble one, worthy of the ambassador who suggested it, of the country he represented, of the great party who governed it. I will say that, among all the Englishmen who inhabit the valley of the Nile, there was not one able to understand all that Lord Dufferin's report implied who did not feel proud of the task their countrymen had set themselves to accomplish. There was little even of scepticism in their comments; the people were docile, peaceable, easily taught, right-loving at heart, and if there were a nation willing to do this great thing, to confer on them the blessings which they themselves enjoyed, it was a work of unselfish good, of daring rectitude, and all who loved and knew Egypt wished them 'God speed.'

But how was it to be done? How were a people bred through many centuries of serfdom to become free, taught by hard experience to look upon government and oppression as synonymous terms, to realise that the function of government was to prevent oppression? How were the governing classes themselves, who had never recognised their miserable fellaheen as human beings, with wants and feelings like their own, suddenly to be taught that they possessed not those only, but rights and responsibilities as well?

There was and could be only one way by which the scheme was practicable. English ideas of right and justice and liberty could only be imposed by the strong hands of Englishmen themselves.

The acceptance of Lord Dufferin's scheme implied a pro

tectorate.

Lord Dufferin, or at all events her Majesty's Government, thought otherwise. They imagined that it was possible to leave all the outward and visible functions of government in the hands of Egyptian rulers, to leave all the necessary reforms to be carried out by them at the instigation of English under-secretaries. With this view Messrs. Vincent, Scott Moncrieff, Clifford Lloyd, and Benson Maxwell were placed respectively at the Ministries of Finance, Public Works, Interior, and Justice. For such a scheme to become even theoretically practical it would be necessary that each of the four ministers should be firmly convinced of the advisability in his own interests of following the advice of his subordinate, and that each of

the four under-secretaries should be possessed of the ability necessary to mould his own ideas with the greater local experience of his chief, as well as endowed with sufficient tact to conceal his own share in the measures recommended, and to make them appear as the voluntary act of the minister.

I am tempted to suggest an analogous situation. Imagine Mr. Firth charged with the mission of persuading the Lord Mayor to carry out in his own name the reform of the municipal corporations; and let it be borne in mind that the analogy is not perfect, for the two gentlemen mentioned have not been brought up under totally opposing creeds and habits of thought.

How was it possible to suppose that any such scheme had the faintest chance of success? To the Egyptian, office means the increase of his income by peculation, the placing of his relatives and protégés in more or less lucrative positions, the power to work his own lands at the State expense. And the essence of all reform was the direct negation of every one of these principles. The minister was bound to regard his subordinate as the rat regards the terrier. The subordinate, on the other hand, compelled to employ tact, is very much like the terrier muzzled. He sees the abuse and recognises the remedy he gives the advice; it is accepted with enthusiasm and treated with contempt. Finding the abuse still exists, he, after some difficulty, gets the order for its removal signed. A few days later, finding it unexecuted, he discovers that it has not been forwarded; he sees it delivered, hears that it is treated as a dead letter, inquires the cause, and finds that with the order were sent private instructions to take no notice of it.

We have lately heard much of individual want of tact. I am free to admit that the charge is not unfounded, but equally bound to state my conviction that under the present system no man at present created could exhibit the amount of tact and patience necessary to effect two reforms in a twelvemonth.

Let us suppose, however, that all these difficulties are overcome, that the subordinate is able to manage his principal, that the principal is willing to be managed, and that the composite administration is working as a happy family with the sole object of ensuring a strong, just, and equitable form of government.

We have not, however, in any country in the world yet arrived at a stage when even perfect government secures perfect content. In every country, and more especially in those which have been maladministered, we must expect to find a very large class who, like the Irishman, hold it as the cardinal point of their political creed to be 'agin the government.' This party will be stronger, or weaker, according as the government is weak or strong, according to its power to suppress discontent. If the executive be strong and likely to be durable, the majority of malcontents will gradually pass over to the