TOPICS OF THE DAY.
EGYPT FOR THE EGYPTIANS.
ILL-FORTUNE, or perhaps we ought honestly to say blundering, seems to have tracked the footsteps of the Government in everything they have done in or about Egypt. The publication of the report of Lord Milner's Committee, which took place last Saturday, looks as if it was destined to be perhaps the worst blunder of all. If the Government for good or ill intended to act upon the Report, we should not only make no objection to the publication, but rather should have thought it, from their point of view, most wise, To publish it, however, and then not to act upon it, which appears to be what is going to happen, seems to us, in the case of an Eastern people, a deliberate provo- cation of trouble and unrest. Easterns do not understand the idea of government by discussion and deliberation. With them government is that which undertakes to act and acts, and they will be first bewildered and then bitterly antagonized if the Government, having published a report so favourable in many ways to the full demands of the Egyptian Nationalists, do nothing. The Nationalists declare that they will not consent to any considerable modifications of the Report. But unless we are mistaken, a greatly modified set of proposals is the Government's plan. If this is the result, the Egyptian Nationalists are certain to say that we are tricking them. We appointed a Commis- sion to recommend what should be done, but when the recommendations were made and published to the world we tried to get out of a great part of our promises. Our whole action proved, indeed, how true were the things said against us by the Extremists. Anything more inept than the creation of a situation so dangerous would be difficult to imagine. No wonder that with such conditions prevail- ing a careless phrase in one of Mr. Winston Churchill's speeches has sent the anti-British sections of the population of Cairo, and indeed all the Egyptian intelligentsia, into a state of fury !
The whole situation in Egypt is topsy-turvy. The Egyptian Nationalists, or rather a certain section of the native population of Egypt, demand that what they call the people of Egypt shall be granted self-government and virtual national independence at once. They are to have their full pound of self-determination. Even the word Protectorate is to be abolished as a dire offence to the Egyptian Nationalists. One of the chief grounds for this claim of Egypt for the Egyptians is the alleged misgovern- ment of the British in the past. Only Egyptians can govern Egypt rightly. In proof we are told that conscription, though not allowed by law, was practised during the war. Next there was forced labour required for all sorts of purposes, and the Fellaheen were torn from their homes to carry out that forced labour, also contrary to law. Finally, it is alleged that food and other material required for the Army were requisitioned, and not at market prices, but at prices far below. In this way a terrible pecuniary burden was laid upon the farmers and traders. All this certainly sounds very bad, and even if only a tenth of it is true it is to be strongly condemned. When, however, we look more closely into the accusation, we 'find that the villains of the piece were not English administrators, but native Egyptian officials. It was they who imposed conscription. It was they who carried out forced labour and who commandeered supplies. They were enabled to do this very largely because the English administrators had either gone to the war or were busy with military organization. The rural parts of Egypt during the war were very largely left to themselves. No doubt we ought to have been much more careful than we actually were in supervising the administration in wartime, and no doubt our soldiers and officials—one and all, determined to win the war at all cost—were inclined to make very exacting demands upon the Egyptian Govern- ment, and so may be said to have encouraged, or at any rate to have profited by, the illegal acts of the native administrators.
Still it remains a fact that when accident once more allowed Egypt to be governed by natives the country relapsed to a condition of things which, though nothing like so terrible as that which prevailed under Ismail Pasha, had a considerable resemblance to the form of rule to which the Egyptians were accustomed before the English appeared on the scenes—i.e., before Lord Cromer's reforms were put into operation. The Nationalists, however, seem to care nothing for these things. We are the enemy. That is enough. The Egyptian administrator when left to himself is regarded as an angel, and we are in effect assured that all will be well if only the tyrannical foreigner has been got rid of.
This is what all Egypt is supposed to be thinking and saying. As a matter of fact, all Egypt is doing nothing of the kind. She is doing what all India is doing, and what the masses in Eastern States have always done throughout history. That consists in remaining quite quiet, looking after their own affairs, and not troubling their heads with matters of government. Egypt will continue to take this detached view. The attitude. of the Egyptian population as a whole reminds one of the accounts which the zoologists give of the courting conducted in a deer forest. The stags fight a fierce battle for the possession of the does. While the battle is going on the does graze quietly. Apparently they take no interest in a combat the result of which is to affect them so deeply. When one of the stags has been killed or driven off they at once with cheerful docility trot off at the side of the victor. That is what is happening in Egypt. There are a certain number of natives, mostly officials and ex-officials, who are intensely anxious to rule Egypt. They no doubt honestly believe that they can do the job better than the British, and, further, they believe that they have a moral right to enjoy power and office. If they are Mohammedans, as the vast majority are, their faith also directly inspires them with the belief that it is they who should sit in the seats of the mighty. Whether they number ten or twenty per cent. of the population is not material, for they know perfectly well that if they get their way they will get the support of the majority till such time as they, like their pre- decessors, are overthrown. Every Oriental ruler in his heart feels himself in the position of the Priest of Nemi. He is " The priest who slew the slayer, ' And shall himself be slain." - This fact, and fact it certainly is, detracts so greatly from the claim to self-determination that it almost forces one to doubt _the possibility of extending to Oriental countries, and especially to Mohammedan countries, anything in the nature of self-rule and the other institu- tions of the democratic State.
In the case of Egypt, however, beyond the insuperable difficulty of finding out what the majority of the Egyptians really want, and so of ascertaining in whose hands supreme power is to be placed, we come upon another capital obstacle. Egypt is from every point of view the least homogeneous country in the world. It is full of fragments of nationality. To begin with, there are the descendants of the old Egyptians, some of them repre- sented by the Copts, and still more represented by the primitive tiller of the fields, the peasant or fellah. Next, there are the remains, especially in the coast towns, of Greek and even Roman colonies. Then there are Arabs from the desert who have settled down and taken to peasant life. There are also the descendants of the thousands of Mameluke and other slave-soldiers who were taken there through the. Middle Ages by the Arabs and Turks. Next there are Abyssinians, Sudanese negroes, and Syrians who have come into the Nile Valley by a process of infiltration. Finally, and these are the most disturbing elements in the whole seething pot, we have colonies of Austrians, Germans, Italians, Greeks, French, 'English, Armenians, and Maltese. In many cases the families of these Europeans have lived in Egypt for several generations. Besides being Europeans in blood, they are Christians in faith. To these foreigners must be added the large Jewish community, some of them Turks, but many of them European Jews—Polish, Russian, Dutch, and German. It might be possible to say that these persons, having voluntarily come to Egypt, must take their chance and sink or swim with the country of their adoption. Unfortunately, this simple solution is not possible. The European Powers have again and again recognized their nationals in Egypt by solemn treaties ; and though these treaties may possibly be abrogated, and the half Egyptian be turned into a whole citizen, it can only be. done after a good deal of negotiation and the recognition of many claims. To put this side of the matter in its easiest terms, self-determination can be effectively applied only to a country which is homogeneous in character. That Egypt is not, and probably will not be for many centuries even if there be no fresh infiltration of Europeans.
We have suggested many and great difficulties in the way of applying democratic rule to Egypt, but there is yet another which forbids the banns of self-determination even more strongly. It is, however, a difficulty which it is not easy to explain to anyone who does not know the East at first-hand, and who does not realize that the Eastern sees little or no objection to demanding two perfectly contradictory things at one and the same time. A simple solution of the Egyptian imbroglio from our point of view would be, of course, to say to the Egyptians : " Since you are ungrateful and are doing your best to make our administration of your affairs impossible, and since, as you so repeatedly tell us, you detest us, we arc not only willing but glad to go and get rid, once and for all, of the responsibility of governing your country. The only thing that is essential to us is the maintenance of the great trade highway afforded by the Suez Canal. We shall retain the duty of protecting that, and shall see that it is not interfered with by any government which may take our place in Egypt. That accomplished, we leave you to do anything you like in the Delta or in the Nile Valley up to the boundaries of the Sudan."
Nothing is more certain than that the Egyptian Nation- alists would be anxious not to endorse but to negative any such proposal. They would no more welcome the idea of our withdrawing from Egypt than the subtle Brahmins of Poona would welcome our leaving India. Their idea is a very different one. The Egyptians want us to remain in Egypt, and to keep order and protect their government from being destroyed, whether by the native population, the Arabs from the desert, or the negroes of the regions not included in the Sudan.
They are even more frightened by another possibility. They think it highly likely that if we went, either France, or Italy, or Greece, or some other European Power of the future would find an excuse for stepping into the place we had abandoned. But the Egyptian Nationalists know that if this happened the kind of rule that would be set up would be very different from ours. Tho principle of " Egyptian hands and English brains " applied to Egypt by Lord Cromer would not be accepted by the new-comers. The present writer well remembers a Tunisian gentleman of education living in Egypt saying to him that, though he disliked English rule, he detested French rule far more keenly. When asked the reason, he gave it in a sentence : " In Tunis, a far smaller country than Egypt, there are 5,000 French Government employees, while in Egypt there are only about 100 English." The vast majority of the official loaves and fishes under our rule have always gone to the native Egyptians.
If what we have said is true, and we believe it is, we are perilously near a crisis, or perhaps we should say perilously near finding that after all the hopes we have raised and all the ill-blood that has been created the only sound plan would be to carry on. But that, unfortunately, is now impossible. We are too deeply pledged to do " something pleasant," and to do it quick.
We franldy confess that we cannot suggest any plan for getting out of the impasse into which the Government have brought us. Things will probably have to be a great deal worse before they are better. If one tried to prophesy, one could only say that presumably the Government, after a good deal of wrangling, will give the European National- ists nearly but not quite the whole of their demands, but will give it so ungraciously that the situation as a whole will not be improved, but aggravated. As soon as a National Government has been established, it will get rid of its limitations. That accomplished, the National Govern- ment will gradually fall into the condition of all Oriental Governments. It will be undermined with corruption, and not only with corruption among the men at the top but with corruption everywhere. Corruption, however, is a very expensive and disintegrating thing, and after, say, twenty years of it we shall expect to see Egypt financially ruined and a prey to insurrections of the kind which overthrew Ismail Pasha. When this happens we or someone else ax will have to come in to preserve order, and then the old round will begin all over again. A new Cromer will have to be found to rebuild the old machinery and restart it. Probably even the irrigation works will not have been kept up. We can imagine one of the British engineers noting how his father's or grandfather's work, though ruined by native folly and neglect, is still sound at its foundatioas !
Meantime, what of the peasant and the lower classes generally ? They will be once more trodden down into the mud from which we raised them, and will be quite unable to explain how it was that when the English, whom they were told to hate and did hate, went away, things, instead of getting better, got ten times worse. And here is the real crux of the question. If the Nationalists have their way, it is not we who will suffer. On a balance of account it will bo extremely good business for us to clear out of Egypt proper while guarding the Canal. Wo have never as a nation made anything out of Egypt, for English people held little or none of the Egyptian Debt, which we doubled in value, nor of the irrigated land to which we gave a fourfold increment.
It is not we but the Egyptian who will suffer, as he has always suffered throughout history at the hands of Pharaohs, Ptolemies, Romans, Arabs, Mamelukes, Turks, and the rest. When the poor sweated Egyptian peasant fell dead at his water wheel or while driving his primitive plough, there was always another dark-skinned worker to take his place and endure his tale of misery and oppres- sion. His rulers took from him everything except just the amount of produce necessary for his survival. He had a value as a taxpayer, and therefore he must be allowed to live.
The only time in his history when the Allah was some- thing more than a true Proletarian was from 1890 to the present time. During that period, at any rate, he had his rights and was protected from the tax-collector and the usurer who stood behind the official plunderer. And now, poor wretch, it looks as if the wheel of fate is to turn once more, and he is to be again condemned to a type of suffering which can be compared only to that of the dumb, patient, long-cared beast which so appropriately bears the heavy burdens of the heavily burdened.
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