Lord Cromer
Loan Capstan was a man of letters as well as a man of action and he used his gifts in the first capacity to describe his work in the second. His biographer was therefore in a difficult position for he had to make his own story complete, without retelling the story told by Cromer. Lord Zetland's readers will agree that he has solved this problem with success, and that he shows in this well-planned book what kind of man Cromer was, and what were the influences that guided the development of his faculties and character. We are given an intimate and vivid picture of his self-education, his romantic marriage, his literary tastes, his political training ; we are enabled to see what it was that gave Cromer his remarkable power and what it was that defined the limits within which he could make use of it.
Those who read this book with a grasp of its dramatic interest will regret one omission. There is not a word about ,Cromer's reflexions on Denshawai : an incident which threw a shadow over the close of his long reign. A party of officers shooting pigeons in 1906 was suddenly and brutally attacked by the villagers of Denshawai ; one of them was killed. Several persons were arrested and sent for trial. At this stige Cromer left Egypt on leave. The tribunal passed sentences so severe that when Cromer heard of them in London he told Lord Grey, that though to override the decision of the local authority would be an even greater evil than to let the sentences stand, "if he had had a notion that such things might happen, he would never have left Egypt before the trial was over." Cromer's mind must have gone back forty years to an incident described in this book.. In 1865 he was in Jamaica on the staff of a brilliant soldier, Sir Henry Storks, who was presiding over a Commission of Inquiry into the suppression of an outbreak in Jamaica. Nothing illustrates better the liberal atmosphere in which young Baring received his training than the conduct of that Commission. At a time when some of the most respected Englishmen of the age, Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Kingsley, were praising Eyre for his stern discipline, an English officer was condemning his methods of suppression as accompanied by "deeds of excessive and unjustifiable severity." The Report of that Commission was well described by Mr. Herbert Paul in his History of Modern England as "a standing monument to the equity and courage with which English gentlemen, whether soldiers or civilians, can decide an issue between their own countrymen and men of inferior races." Cromer brought order out of chaos in Egypt under difficulties so vast and complex that his success seems a miracle. It was due partly to his skill as a financier (he did for Egypt what Peet and Gladstone had done for England), partly to his steady judgement ; his genius for administration, his unsparing devotion to duty. But it is clear from these pages that his strong sense of obligation to the weak owed something to his early training. He was all the more successful in ruling Egypt because, as a young man, he had been more liberal and romantic in his sympathies than most men of his class and profession, supporting Storks in Jamaica, and welcoming that cession of the Ionian Islands to Greece which seemed to British Imperialists, as it seemed to Bismarck, a confession of decadence.
The Gordon story, like the Syracusan expedition, keeps its terrible fascination for all time, and Lord Zetland re-opens the old controversies once again. To those who, looking hack to that tragedy, recall the first winter of the Boer War, the Gallipoli expedition, and the horrors of Mesopotamia, the blunders of Gladstone's Government seem less surprising than they seemed at the time. All history shows that a Cabinet, the best body for some of the tasks of government, is the worst when experts wrangle with experts on a problem of action. In this case everything followed from the Govern- ment's false step in letting General Hicks take his Egyptian army to defeat in the Soudan. From that moment the Government were faced with a problem of no ordinary kind : the problem of rescuing the garrisons without occupying the Soudan. Against that occupation Cromer set his face as sternly as Gladstone, and in his book he gave great praise to the Government for its insistence on that view. Gordon was one desperate solution. He was the alternative to force. But when Gordon went, all kinds of new problems arose. The best picture of the confusion of issues is given in the Life of Sir Charles Dilke with its vivid account of the Cabinet deliberations. Take one single issue. Gordon asked for Zobeir the old slave dealer. Gladstone and the Queen were for once agreed in accepting Gordon's view. Forster, who was ready to turn the Government out for deserting Gordon, was equally ready to turn them ciut if they did what Gordon wanted. Lord Salisbury, for whose wisdom Cromer had a great regard, agreed on this point with Forster, Gladstone clung to the Zobeir plan to the end. On all the other issues there was similar confusion. Cromer himself changed his view from time to time for he was at first adverse, and later favourable, to the Zobeir plan.. Lord Zetland points out with great fairness that one of his messages might have given the impression that he was more ready to take the fatal Gordon plan than he was. Everything had to be done in a hurry ; Cromer was new to Egypt ; the most delicate international questions were continually coming to the surface ; nobody knew where a war would end if once it began. Ministers were at: cross purposes. The blunders of the Government are intelligible and so was the retribution. For Gordon had seized the imagination of his age, and the English people would sooner have forgiven the loss of an army than the abandonment of "the man of England circled by the sands."
Cromer's last years were happy in the sense that he enjoyed his literary pursuits, but unhappy in the sense that the world had moved past him. He was against all the enthusiasms of his day ; Tariff Reform, Social Reform, liberal reform in the government of subject peoples. He was a wise and moderating influence in some of the fiercest of the contro- versies of party, but he looked to all the problems of his day with a mind that could draw little help from his own experi- ence. He had done one thing supremely well, but the English people were facing tasks that required other methods than those by means of which he had given Egypt order. If England had stood still between 1906 and 1914 the moral strain of the Great War would have been much more severe.
Lord Zetland applies, with justice, to some of Gladstone's speeches on Egypt the famous lines in the Rolliad, describing a speech by Shelburne. By a slip the lines are ascribed to the Anti-Jacobin, where indeed they might have appeared, for, if Shelburne first provoked the wit of Fitzpatrick by his quarrel with Fox, his opposition to the French war made him
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