EGYPT AND THE BRITISH OCCUPATION.
THE Egyptian Nationalists have not been permitted to hold a Congress in Paris. To judge from their proceedings at Brussels, it is improbable that they would have been able to do the existing order of things any serious harm, even if they had been allowed to carry out their original intention. The more public they make their designs, the plainer it becomes that the real interests of the Egyptian people have no place in them. Our debt to the French Government for the course they have taken has to do with Europe rather than with Africa. It is not so long since any intervention on the part of France in Egyptian affairs would have been held as a matter of course to involve some consequences inconvenient to Great Britain. To-day she is only anxious to show the goodwill with which she regards our position on the Nile, and how far she is from desiring to put any difficulties in the way of our maintaining it. In part, no doubt, this change of attitude is due to a clearer conception of the common interests of the two Powers in Northern Africa. Nationalism in Egypt, like Nationalism in India, rests on a theory which is wholly inconsistent with the government of the country by European agents or on European lines. Its success would mean the handing over of the Egyptian people to a handful of fanatical politicians,—some possibly well meaning, but many more merely self-interested. Now that the true character of the movement has become evident, it is not likely to find a supporter in a Government which is confronted with a not very dissimilar problem in Algeria and Tunis. But the prohibition of the Congress has another and a more important significance nearer home. It is an additional example of that happy change which has converted France from an imaginary natural enemy to a real natural ally. It is a service which we could not have suggested, far less solicited, but which we may be permitted to welcome with sincere satisfaction when it is freely tendered. The Times of Tuesday contained two very interesting letters on the Egyptian question. The more important of them is from the eminent archaeologist, M. de Naville, who, in addition to the knowledge gained from his long residence in the country, has the advantage of having been present at the recent meeting of the Young Egyptian Com- mittee at Geneva. A great part of the letter is consequently taken up with the speech there made by Mr. Keir Hardie, whose detestation of his own Governmentgives him apowerof movement which almost amounts to ubiquity. M. de Naville very properly makes no comment on the purely English part of this speech. Ho leaves Sir Edward Grey to defend—if defence were needed—his recent declaration that our occupation of Egypt is no longer intended to be a merely temporary measure. But of the Egyptian part, and of the manifesto by which Mr. Heir Hardie proposes to explain to his countrymen " the real state of things," M. de Naville has a good deal to say. That manifesto is likely, he thinks, to give " only a very wrong idea of the state of the country." He has known Egypt for forty-two years, and since 1882 he has been there more than twenty times, and has lived and worked with the fellaheen for months together. In this way he has a first-hand acquaint- ance with their condition which is not shared by any of the Nationalist agitators. England, he tells us, has been from the beginning the protector of the fellah against his former masters, and she is his protector still. The most striking result of this protection is the change in his conception of money. Formerly it was something to be hidden ; now it is something to be used. He understands that what he earns is safe from the hands of his oppressors ; consequently, " instead of burying it., he will buy a piece of land, sometimes at a very high price."
There can hardly be a more striking illustration of the progress he has made during that occupation which Mr. Heir Hardie thinks so iniquitous. The amount of land which he and his fellows have purchased during the last ten years is enormous. But though he has become a landowner, he retains one characteristic of his former condition. He " has an instinctive distrust of the effendi and the pasha." The memories that oppression leaves behind it are long memories, and they have possibly been revived from time to time by some chance ill turn which a native official has been able to do him. The fellah is still " too ignorant and too timid to defend himself," and with the English officials gone he would be an easy prey to all the abuses which the admirers of Nationalism are so 'anxious to re-establish. There is a curious parallel between the case of the Egyptian fellah and that of the Indian ryot. All that either has gained has been the gift of his English masters. The measures by which the ryot has been benefited have often been carried through the Indian Councils by the votes of the English official class against the determined resistance of the class which now furnishes recruits to the Nationalist agitation. M. de Naville, who does not know Mr. Heir Hardie quite so well as his countrymen do, is astonished at his inconsistency. We are in Egypt, Mr. Heir Hardie declares, solely in the interest of the foreign capitalists. It has never occurred to him that the real foes of the fellabeen are those of his own household. The withdrawal of England would be the signal for the re-establishment of those native capitalists whose tyranny the fellaheen have such bitter reason to remember. In Mr. Heir Hardie's eyes only white men can be moneylenders. The numberless shades of coloured usury are hidden from his eyes and from his imagination. The Labour Party, according to M. de Naville, " should insist on the occupation being prolonged until the lower classes have risen sufficiently to be able to manage their own affairs." But this would require a faculty of preferring things to words which as yet the Labour Party show only by fits and starts. They are too often so carried away by names that they do not stop to inquire whether they stand for the same thing in different countries. In order to make a healthy Nationalism you must first catch your nation, and in Egypt and India this preliminary step has still to be taken. There is reason, however, to expect that for some time to come Mr. Keir Hardie will find ample scope for his energies in England, and so be incapacitated from stirring up further strife in Egypt. On his way home from Geneva he stopped at Magdeburg, and attended a Congress of German Socialists. He is a welcome speaker at such gatherings, because he can always be trusted to lift a discussion out of a dry economic atmosphere into one charged with revolutionary lightning. The message from England which he delivered last Sunday was quite of this type. He promised the Congress, and through the Con- gress his own countrymen, that before a year is out the leaders of the English Trade-Unions will be " sitting in prison." Provided that Mr. Heir Hardie is among them every wellwisher of Egypt and India will by this means bc; relieved of a constant, if not very serious, anxiety.
On the other letter to which we referred we do not pro- pose to dwell at any length. M. Kyriakos Mikhail is a Copt, and he wishes to bring before Englishmen what he holds to be the hardships which his countrymen suffer at the hands of the Egyptian Government. As we have not the means of checking his statements, we shall only say that they certainly disclose a prima -facie case. The Copts are thoroughly loyal to the British rule, though according to their spokesman they have not much cause to be so. M. Mikhail maintains, with much appearance of truth, that the Nationalist movement is at bottom prompted by religious fanaticism. Consequently the Copts, being Christians, are the objects of constant attack at the hands of the agitators. When one of them became Prime Minister he was promptly shot by a Nationalist, and the shop of the murderer has been kept open by Nationalist money as a memorial of his heroic deed. To this danger the British officials are equally exposed ; but there is a minor form of wrong which the Copts have to them- selves. They do not complain, says M. Mikhail, that the British show them no favour because they are Christians. But they do expect to be treated on their merits " irrespective of any religious consideration."
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