LORD CROMER. T HE British people may be stupid, but they
know a man when they see him. That is why for the last thirty years they have honoured Lord Cromer. They felt him to be one of the greatest of Englishmen and of Imperialists, and they were right, though we doubt if even one per cent. of the nation could have given true and sufficient reasons for the belief that was in them. It was certainly not because he had added, in fact if not in name, a great province to the British Empire. Plenty of countries richer and greater have been drawn within the magic circle of the Pax Britannica without the men who accomplished the task having received anything approaching the recognition accorded to Lord Cromer. Again, it was not Lord Cromer's administrative skill that won him his fame, great though that skill was. In India and in East and West Africa we have had examples of successful development by great officials that have passed almost unnoticed. Lord Cromer's financial ability, or shall we say financial judgment? for he himself was the last man to profess any special and personal knowledge of figures, was doubtless very great ; but most of his countrymen were quite incapable of gauging its scope, or of understanding what he had done to produee order out of chaos, or how h3 had turned a bankrupt country into a solvent one. Deftness, no matter how great, in the placing of a loan, or in evolving financial freedom out of the mass of hostile checks and balances sought to be set up by the Powers in Egypt, would by itself have entirely failed to win him the acclamations which greeted him when some ten years ago he retired from active duty. Even his work as a diplomatist, though so supremely skilful, was never properly understood at home. There was a vague notion that he had played a lone hand against all the Powers and won it, but success here could not possibly have obtained for Lord Cromer that unbounded confidence which was shown him by the nation. In fine, the respect and veneration which the British public felt for Lord Cromer would, if his health had permitted, have called him to power at the moment of worst crisis in the war ; but those who called him could not have said why they felt sure he would prove the organizer of victory. They were content to believe that it was so.
What then was the quality that placed Lord Cromer so high in the regard of his fellow-countrymen throughout Britain and the Empire ? What was it that made him universally respected, and as much by soldiers as by civilians, by officials as by Members of Parliament, by Whigs as by Radicals, by Socialists as by Individualists ? The answer, we believe, is to be found in the spirit in which Lord Cromer worked. What raised him above the rank-and-file of our public men was obedience to a very plain and obvious rule. It was this : to govern always in the interests of the governed. This sounds a trite and elementary proposition, and yet the path it marks out is a very difficult one to follow. It may be straight, but it is so narrow that only the well-balanced man can avoid stepping off either to the right or to the left. It is always a plank across a stream ; sometimes it is a spear resting on the rocks in a raging torrent. There are a hundred temptations, many of them by no means ignoble, to divert the Imperial administrator from keeping the narrow path exactly. In certain circumstances it may seem a positive virtue to exploit some province of the Empire for the Mother Country, or for the Empire as a whole—to forget the interests of the governed in the interests of the great organism of which that province forms only a part. Plentiful are the arguments for leaning a little to the one side or to the other. Yet if they were listened to, on the ground, say, of the interests of the Empire as a whole—for it must be admitted that the temptation to think of the interests of the people of these islands is one which has been steadily resisted by all our great Proconsuls—they would 'bring disaster in their train. Strange as it may seem, nothing has proved a better or surer foundation of Empire, or has more helped even its material development, than the determination not to take advantage of the absolute power of the Mother Country over the Depend- encies and subject States, but, on the contrary, to develop them as a sacred trust. We have rightly asked for and taken far more help from the Daughter Nations during the war than from the Dependencies, for the very good reason that the Daughter Nations are their own mistresses and can do what they like. They stand on an equality with us. As for the Dependencies, we are not going to rob the children's money-box. We are trustees, as it were, for the widow and the orphan, and no temptation whatever, either for ourselves or for others, must allow us to budge one inch from ithe strait path. Here Lord Cromer was at his very strongest. He was an ideal trustee. And what made him this was the fact that he talked comparatively little about his trust, and never behaved in regard to it as a pedant or a prig. As long as the principle was firmly maintained, he bothered himself very little about matters of appearance.
If Lord Cromer kept the path successfully in this respect, he kept it equally well in regard to another temptation. The weak administrator is always liable to govern, not in the true interests of the governed, but in what the governed think their interests—to do what they actually desire rather than what they would desire if they were better judges. Weak governors, that is, act as if they were servants and not trustees.—To play the part of a public servant is right and necessary here, for we are over age, have no need of trustees, and govern ourselves. It is wrong when you stand in loco parentis to those whose affairs you administer.—We all know what is the kind of government that an Eastern people establishes for itself. In spite of the suffering that it inflicts upon the people, there is good evidence to show that, judged by the test of popularity, the governed prefer arbitrary personal rule to a just and efficient government. In the same way a child will tell you, and honestly tell you, that he prefers raspberry-jam and heavy pastry at odd times to regular meals of brown bread and butter, and that he is quite willing, in the interests of the pastry system of nourishment, to brave the pains which Mary experienced when she consumed both jam and pastry. The wise guardian does not say that it is his or her duty to let the child have what he likes.
In the same way, Lord Cromer, though perfectly willing to admit that in a truly self-governing State—the kind of State which, by the way, he was most interested in—it is the duty of the administrator either to resign or to carry out the will of his masters, the people, would never admit this in the case of an Oriental country. Yet this did not, as might be supposed, lead to a cold, harsh, or metallic system of government. Lord Cromer had far too much wisdom and moderation, was far too much of a Whig, as he himself would have said, to push to extremes the view that a native must have what was good for him, and nothing else. In small matters, indeed in all non-essentials, Lord Cromer strove to give the native what he wanted, and strove still more to refrain from forcing on him, because it was for his good, what he did not want. Lord Cromer was never tired of quoting what, in Bacon's phrase, he would call " luciferous " stories to illustrate the folly of the English administrator who thrusts physical improvements or the devices of European enlightenment upon the unwilling Oriental solely because they are good per se, or economical, or will make the governed richer or cleverer or happier. One of these stories which Lord Cromer was particularly fond of telling was that of the young Indian civilian who on his first day in a new district, and when he was entirely unknown, took a walk in the fields and saw an elderly ryot ploughing his land. Being good at the vernacular and full of zeal, the district officer asked the old man how things were in his part of the country. The old man, like all tillers of the soil, replied .with a kind of gloomy complacency that things were undoubtedly very bad, but that they might be worse, and that anyway the only thing to do was to go on tilling the land. " This year it is the cattle plague. Last year it was the Agricultural College. But since they are the will of God, both must be borne without complaint." That story the present writer remembers Lord Cromer telling him on his return from the opening of a model farm or some such agricultural improvement. Such zeal ought, no doubt, as Lord Cromer said, to make the task of the fellaheen much easier, but nevertheless it was certain that the majority of them would regard it as pure evil.
They wanted to be left alone, not taught how to get another fifteen per cent. of produce out of the land. Knowing this, Lord Cromer harried the native as little as possible. He was fond indeed of saying that there was very little you could do to make an Oriental people grateful.—" Why should they be grateful ? " he would interject. --There was however one thing which they could and did appreciate, and that was low taxation. It was no good to say to the Oriental : " It is true you pay higher taxation, but then look at the benefits you get for it—the road up to the door of your house which enables you to save immensely in transport, the light railway not far off, the increased water for irrigation, a school for your children, and so forth and so on." To all these benefits the Oriental taxpayer is totally indifferent, or at all events he refuses to see any con- nexion between them and the taxes paid. They come or do not cisme, like the rain from Heaven. All he is certain about is that the tax-collector is asking him double what he used to ask. So much for local improvements In fine, Lord Cromer, though he kept his rule to govern in the interests of the governed so strictly and was so exacting a trustee, was always human—never pedantic, professorial or academic in the carrying out of his rule. He was above all things a just man, and he realized that justice was not true justice unless it were humanized by self-sacrifice. Yet he knew and understood the benefits of strong eovernment, though he alwayitried so to harness his administration that the straps would gall as little as possible. That is why he won to such a strange degree the trust and admiration, we had almost said the love, of the Egyptian people. Peasant men and women who had never seen him, and who had the dimmest and vaguest idea of what he was and what he stood for, yet felt an unbounded belief in his desire that they should be justly treated. There is a well-known story which exactly illustrates the point we are making.
A young English officer engaged in sanitary work in the Delta pointed oat to a well-to-do farmer's wife in a cholera year that she was running terrible risks by having her cesspool quite close to the door of her house, and so placed that it was con- taminating all the drinking-water used by her and her family. At last after many ineffectual remonstrances he ordered the removal of this sure and certain road to death by cholera. The woman was furious, and ended up a battle royal by telling him that though for the moment he could oppress the poor and triumph over the godly, it would not be for long. " The man ICraluner " in Cairo would see her righted. She would appeal to him and he would protect her. Lord Cromer felt, and felt rightly, that this invocation was his best epitaph. Appeals, no matter how strange, were never frowned down by him but encouraged. However ill-founded, they taught something. They were often of an intimate character and couched in the wonderful language of the Babu—for Egypt has its Balm as well as Bengal. One complaint which had to do with an irrigation dispute began as follows : " Oh, hell ! Lordship's face grow red with rage when he hears to beastly conduct of Public Works Department." Last week we quoted, for an entirely different purpose, Macaulay's splendid tribute to Hampden. With very little alteration it would apply to Lord Cromer. I S was as true of him as of the first of our Whig statesmen to say that " others could conquer ; he alone could reconcile." It is also abun- dantly true that in him Britain will miss " the sobriety, the self-command, the perfect soundness of judgment, the perfect rectitude of intention," to which the history of administration furnishes, we will not say no parallel, but parallels which indeed are rare.
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