TOPICS OF THE DAY.
OUR ORIENTAL EMPIRE. THE time has come when the country should demand from the Government a clear and definitely thought out policy in regard to the Oriental portions of the Empire. The British people ought to know exactly what is to be the fate of Egypt, India, Mesopotamia and the other Asiatic countries for which we are responsible. (Egypt must always be regarded rather as a promontory of Asia than as a portion of Africa.) If, as we fear is only too likely to be the case, the Government have no definite Oriental policy, but are living from hand to mouth— playing the old game of opportunism with interests so vast—then the sooner they are compelled by public opinion to think out and apply a coherent policy the better.
At present all signs seem to point to opportunism or expediency. According as we take an unkindly or a kindly view the policy can be described as " Danegeld," or as throwing overboard cargo which the ship cannot safely carry, sacrificing the part to save the whole. Such a policy of unloading, whether we like it or not, is of course perfectly intelligible. Indeed, it may be described in some ways as the most intelligible policy in the world because it is the one which man instinctively—nay, neces- sarily—takes to in times of trouble. He keeps as much as he can, but parts with what he cannot keep. But, intelligible or no, it is unfortunately one which cannot explain our present position. While we are lightening the ship on one side by throwing over cargo at a pro- digious rate, we are actually taking in cargo at the other side. And admittedly the cargo which we are taking in is not only heavier and less valuable, but generally much more difficult to deal with in an emergency than the cargo which we are throwing out. While we throw away India and Egypt with the one hand, we are steadily taking on greater and greater commitments in Mesopotamia with the other— commitments which are enormously costly, which raise a great deal of ill-feeling against us and which cannot possibly give us quick returns. Moreover, they are commitments which must, under the terms of our mandate and of the prevailing demands of public opinion, lead to the ultimate destruction of the building we are rearing. The native Government to whom we look forward to resigning our work is not likely, unless East becomes West, to worry about keeping it in repairs. Roads, railways, irrigation, canals, dams, and flood-gates are fanciful shapes of a plastic earth which weary the Oriental mind. They arc gross material things unworthy of the children of Allah.
To put the matter in a nutshell, whatever is right or wrong, it can only be a proof of imperial senile dementia to build up a new Oriental Empire in Mesopotamia while we are busily and conscientiously destroying the old one in India and Egypt. This is a form of the white man's burden which honestly is quite too much for us. The objections which we have just raised come out very clearly in the new Egyptian policy. Apparently all that we are now proposing to retain in the region where Asia joins Northern Africa is the stretch of desert through which the Suez Canal runs. On one side is to be the Jewish Republic which Sir Herbert Samuel and his friends are now eagerly preparing as a national home for the Jews of Poland and South Russia, and in which no doubt many a misunderstood Commissary from Moscow will ultimately find his physical and spiritual domicile. There some day Lenin and Trotsky will lie down with Rothschild and Mond, and Reading or Montagu will put his hand upon the cockatrice' den. And a little child, perhaps from Lympne, shall lead them. On the other side of the Canal Zone there will be an absolutely independent Egypt, but whether under a Sultan or a Moslem or Hebrew Soviet does not at present appear. At any rate, this disposition of the Canal will be thoroughly in the fashion. It will become a " Corridor." No doubt, in view of what is to happen to India, it is difficult to see why we should trouble about a corridor which will soon lead nowhere, or at any rate nowhere that will have any great interest for the British people. Still it is well to be in the mode. And all must admit that just now " Corridors " are " much worn " in inter- national circles.
So is to end a great and glorious dream. We do not, however, mean to cry over this or any other spilt milk. We will assume, indeed we admit we must assume, that so enlightened an Imperialist as Lord Milner would not have consented to such a scheme in Egypt unless his consent, for reasons not yet explained, had become absolutely necessary. That the British people will benefit from the material point of view by resigning their responsi- bilities in Egypt is not only probable but, we may almost say, certain. To retain Egypt under present conditions would mean a large military expenditure, and such ex- penditure is very inconvenient just now quite apart from the problem of raising a larger white volunteer army. But though we may have to imitate Danton's sombre acquies- cence when we lay down our task in Egypt, we are not going to make the hypocritical pretence that our resignation will confer benefits upon the people of Egypt. It will no more do that than it would confer benefits upon a family of children to hand over to them the keys of the electric power-house, the cellars, the safe, the heating apparatus, and the medicine cupboard. The result of handing over Egypt to be governed according to the will of the people who inhabit it may be foretold with certainty. For a few years the splendidly constructed building will appear to remain intact, yet the work of undermining the foun- dations will begin almost at once. The usurers, national and international, will get to work, and when they have sucked Egypt dry as a State, and also sucked dry the individual unity of the Egyptian people, there will be a period of revolt and anarchy following prosperity, such as history shows is always the alternating current of Oriental politics. In Egypt the difficulty will be increased by the fact that the country is still, as of yore, surrounded by a nomadic and predatory population of Beduin Arabs. As soon as these see the chance of loot they avail them- selves of it. It is true that the retention by the British of the Sudan, which we presume is contem- plated, will keep off the worst of the marauders, but plenty of Arabs can, and no doubt will, assemble both to the west and east of the Nile to destroy the armies and derange the finances of the Sultanate or the Soviet of the Delta. How long the process of disintegration and destruction will take it is difficult to say. We must not forget, however, that Egypt is far more vulnerable to the forces of revolution now than when we went there. In old days Egypt remained as it was in the time of Hero- dotus, the gift of the River. Now it is largely the gift of the hydraulic engineer. It will not require a very. great deal of anarchy to destroy the working of the irrigation system, even if a few packets of dynamite do not find their way into the walls of the great dam at Assouan. In all probability the pernicious anaemia from which Egypt will begin to suffer as soon as she becomes what is called self-governing—the real meaning is government by Levantine money-lenders and adventurers—will reduce her in thirty years to a condition so wretched that her people will call upon us or any other European Power to come and stay the tide of decay. Then we or some other Power will begin the old work all over again, trying, we presume, to console ourselves with the fact that the Egyptians have had " a jolly good lesson." If Sir Alfred Lyall were alive, what a poem he might write in the style of Browning— entitled, let us say, " The Irrigation Officer Prologizes " The officer resigns from the Egyptian Service in 1920, and at the age of seventy-five—fifty years after—revisits Egypt and watches the construction of some new flood- gates on what the young men of that time take for Ptolemaic remains. The remains are, in truth, all that is over from the pet designs of 1920. Then the poet would draw his picture of the half-starved fellaheen tilling the usurer's lands, not as they are tilled now, but with a reversion to something a great deal below the agricultural standards of the Nineteenth Dynasty.
We are not going to assert that because we can make the people of Egypt so much more comfortable than they can make themselves therefore we ought to insist upon ruling them. Neither do we say that it is better for them to be comfortable than free, though we are inclined to think that, though this is entirely untrue of European nations, it is in fact true of the fatalistic Oriental. If it is the real wish of the Egyptian peasant to be like Grattan's Irishman—able to glory in the fact that if he is in rags he is at any rate not in tutelage—then no doubt we must say, " Have it your way." Though we end our reign, do not let us pretend that we are engaging in a generous piece of self-sacrifice in order to bestow great spiritual and material blessings upon the natives of Egypt. We are not doing anything of the kind. Materially the benefit will be all on our side. Cobden and the men of his school were perfectly right when they said that the Oriental Empire was a huge material burden upon this country. Their mistake was that they did not realize that, though the Empire is materially a burden, it has raised us spiritually, and there- fore prevented us having that relapsing fever which comes to nations which live too much at ease—the relapsing fever which in the last resort destroyed Tyre, Sidon, and Carthage, and but for their daily dreadful battle with the sea might have destroyed the sturdy, pursy burghers of the Nether- lands. However, we need not as yet worry ourselves about the likelihood of getting too much ease, comfort and economy out of the new system of Empire, or rather non- Empire. As far as we can see, we are to retain our Oriental Empire wherever it means responsibility and expense, acid to abandon it only when it is a paying and going concern.
A cynic might sum up the results of all we have written and suggested by the reflection that, at'any rate, the men who have insisted upon the great revolution imminent in Egypt and in preparation in India will get their punish- ment and will rue the day that they forced us to give up our trusteeship. Unfortunately we cannot share in this piece of grim humour. It will be a poor consolation to think that the fellaheen in Egypt and the ryot in India will once more sink back into the slavish savagery from which we had so largely redeemed them, and become almost as suffering and as hopeless as the overburdened camel and the all-enduring mule and donkey, who at this moment are suffering such pain and misery at the hands of the Faithful. Mahomet may have been punctiliously kind and courteous to his cat, but his followers all the world over are in sore need of a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. Let us pray that they may not soon be in need of a society for the prevention of cruelty to men and women and children who are not officials, soldiers, usurers or members of their own families.
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