THE DISCHARGE OF OUR EGYPTIAN TRUST.
1../ITRING the past few months—that is, before as well as after the murder of the Egyptian Prime Minister— the news from Egypt has been of a disquieting character, and has shown that the British Government and people are about to enter upon a period in which they will find the discharge of their trust in the Nile Valley one of increasing difficulty. That this news has not been exag- gerated or ill-founded is proved by the Report on the condition of Egypt and the Soudan . by Sir Eldon Gorst, issued on Thursday as a Foreign Office White-paper. The Report is not sensational or alarmist in its language, but it is clear to those who read between the lines that the dis- tinguished official responsible for the administration of Egypt interprets the signs of the times very much as do outside observers, and expects conditions of storm and stress in the near future. We are neither discouraged nor alarmed at the prospect, for difficulties are neces- sarily incidental to the Imperial work which the British people has undertaken. Also we are not surprised that the situation is about to become acute. The experiment in regard to the conduct of the Egyptian Administration which has been attempted. by the present Government, and loyally carried into execution by Sir Eldon Gorst, was, in our opinion, an experiment which was bound sooner or later to give rise to difficulties and dangers. It was an experiment exceedingly well meant, but one which has been tried before under various forms in Eastern countries, and has always ended in failure and disappointment. And for this reason. It rests upon a fundamental misconception of Eastern character, habits, and mental attitude. It rests upon the assumption that an Oriental people wishes for self-government. This is what no purely Eastern people* has in reality ever wished for, or ever will wish for unless some fundamental change comes over the Eastern mind. We know the history of the Oriental peoples for many thousands of years, and we know that they have tried many forms of government. But the one form of government which they have never established, or attempted to establish, by themselves, except of late as a half-hearted and feeble imitation of Western models, is democratic representative self-government. To use an American phrase, they have no use for it. When we say this we do not of course mean to allege that Eastern peoples are therefore always content with other forms of government, or especially with government by foreigners. Again, we are far from saying that there are not in every Oriental country large sections of the population who are fiercely clamorous to undertake the government of their fellows, and to enjoy those honours and emoluments which fall to office and government in every community. Round every throne, round every judgment-seat, round every office-stool, in Eastern as in Western communities, there are plenty of people eager and anxious to do the work of government, and to displace those in possession. Further, these would-be governors and office-seekers are, according to the latest fashion of the East, most willing to call themselves "the people," and to base their demand for ruling their fellows on a travesty of democratic principles. " Nationalists," " Democrats," and " Patriots " are capital words, and no doubt a certain number of those who use them are temporarily, and also unconsciously, influenced by them, and are almost persuaded that they want democratic ideals as we know them in the West to prevail. In spite of this, the great mass of the people do not want to govern themselves, and find in the Western ideas of representation and self-government nothing upon which their minds can really bite. They may talk, but they never think or will, self-government. Some of them under- stand government—in the Eastern sense of the term— and all understand being governed, but they do not understand as we understand the system of Government of the people by the people for the people.
To assert what we have just asserted is in no sense to say that Oriental peoples do not value good govern- ment. They value it as greatly as do Western peoples, and are quite as ready to resist what they consider to be bad government. They expect and demand justice from their governors quite as much as we do, and they hold perhaps more strongly than Western peoples the notion that there are certain inalienable rights possessed by the subjects of Government which can never be taken away from them. We are apt to carry to the extreme point the notion that the will of the majority must prevail over every obstacle, and that the majority when suffi- ciently large and well marked possess a sovereignty which is absolutely unlimited. As Burke pointed out,t even the worst King has somewhere a conscience and feels a sense of responsibility, whereas the people fully believe that they can do no wrong, or at any rate cannot be held,
• We have not forgotten Turkey. The Young Turk movement is in essence a European movement. The strength of the Old Turks is in Asia.
t "A perfect Democracy is therefore the most shameless thing in the world. As it is the most shameless, it is also the mostfearless. No man apprehends in his person that he can be made subject to punishment. Certainly the people at large never ought; for, as all punishments are for example towards the con- servation of the people at large, the people at large can never become the subject of punishment by any human band." either as individuals or in the aggregate, responsible for what is done in carrying out their will. Circumstances, the march of events, or by whatever name we call the development of the impulses and instincts which have controlled the British people and given them a particular political destiny, have placed us in India and Egypt in the position of trustees. As long as we remain there we must fulfil our trust, which is to govern India and Egypt, not according to abstract political theories suited to the West, but in the interests of the governed. We must therefore either resign our trust altogether—action at present unthinkable without a dereliction of duty amounting to a capital crime—or we must discharge our trust in accordance with the principle we have just laid down. As in the case of trustees, our business is not to do what the subjects of the trust ask us to do or think they want, or, again, to do what we think they think they want, but to do what is right and just. If we do that, we shall remain in India and in Egypt until some change in circumstances, or possibly in the faith and mental configuration of the peoples we govern, makes our rule no longer necessary or useful. What we must not do is to abandon our trust merely because of our own doubts and fears,—through some dread, that is, as to our own competence. Only men who are feeble or negligent, or both, and have lost their nerve, back out of a difficult position because they think they are not equal to the task or because they are subject to criticism and complaint. If we are to rule India and Egypt successfully, we must concentrate our thoughts and energies on giving good government, and not on following the delusive spectre of educating the people to govern themselves. To do that is to follow a will-o'-the-wisp.
If an Eastern people is ever to become capable of self- government, it will be by some great internal revolution, moral and religious, and not through our petty efforts to Westernise them. Our so-called attempts to fit Eastern peoples for the work of self-government are built upon the sand, upon a foundation of shams and paradoxes and meaningless rhetoric. No doubt we can, and ought to, train portions of the peoples we govern to be good instru- ments of government, for we do not for a moment suggest that the detailed work of government should be placed in European hands. The impulse, control, and direction must be ours, but the greater part of the machinery may very well be, nay, ought to be, home-made. But between training and preparing Indians and Egyptians as instruments of government, and teaching the people to become what they never can become, Westerners inspired with the Teutonic ideals of representative democracy, there is a vast gulf fixed, a gulf across which no stable bridge can ever be built. When we tell the Eastern peoples that we are teaching them to govern themselves we are talking nonsense, and very dangerous nonsense. We are, in fact, only exciting hopes in that section of an Oriental people which aspires to govern its fellows that we are about to hand over the peoples under our rule to their political exploitation. That is what it means to them, that is " how it strikes a con- temporary." What we ought to do is to say :—" As long as we remain here we shall govern the people entrusted to our care in their best interests, and in doing so we shall make use wherever possible of native instruments of government. We shall by this means be doing not only what is beet for the people as a whole, but also giving them what they at heart wish for. If for any reason we become incapable of doing this work, or if by some miracle they change their attitude and want, not the most efficient form of government, but self-government, then we must lay down our task and abandon our trust." Self-government is not a thing which can be shared with an external Power. When a trustee gives up deciding on the way in which a trust is to be administered for the benefit of the subjects of the trust, the trust has auto- matically come to an end. There is no longer any place for the trustee. As we have said above, we have in the case of Egypt been pretending, or half pretending, for the last four or five years that we can act on another principle— the principle ofpreparing the people to do what they never really will be able to do and do not want to do, to govern themselves—with the result that we have brought about confusion and discontent, and therefore have so far not governed in the interests of the governed. If we are wise we shall now own our error, and make it absolutely clear to the Egyptian people that we are governing them, and mean to govern them as long we remain in Egypt, as trustees, and in no other way. There is a great deal of good sense as to points of detail in Sir Eldon Gorst's Report, but unfortunately we miss from it any note of this kind, and we should not be doing our duty as critics of public affairs if we did not comment on and deplore this omission. Very possibly Sir Eldon Gorst might reply that it was not his business to take such a step, but that it should be taken by his masters, the British Government. If that is so, then all we can say is that it is very much to be hoped that Sir Edward Grey will speak out on this point and make the position clear. If he does, we are convinced that it will greatly improve the position, and may prevent a state of affairs arising in the near future which can only be fraught with evil for the Egyptian people. If he does not, but allows matters to drift on from paradox to paradox, the result is certain. The discontented classes in Egypt, encouraged by our rhetoric to believe that we have only got to be asked sharply enough to give up our trust to give it up, will be led into some act of folly or crime, or both, which will necessitate stern action. The people of this country are not going to abandon their hold upon Egypt. That is the central fact, and it is our business to make it clear to the comparatively small body of people who have usurped the name of Nationalists, and use the fanaticism which always exists in Eastern countries as their tool. We have no right, nay, it is a gross breach of duty upon our part, to give any section of the Egyptian population the impression that we mean to do something which we all know at heart we do not mean to do.
We have dealt with Sir Eldon Gorst's Report on broad lines ; but if we had space to criticise it in detail, we might examine one or two specific acts where the Egyptian Government under our direction has made very grave errors. The most important of these we can only refer to briefly. If the Egyptian Government did not mean to carry out the suggested alteration and extension of the Suez Canal concession according to the very sensible terms which were arranged, they ought never to have mooted the subject. In our opinion, having once broached the scheme, they should have carried it through. Instead of that, they weakly submitted it to the so-called Legislative Council, a body perfectly incapable of dealing with it in a wise or reasonable spirit, and when that body refused to accept it, allowed the scheme to drop. The futility of the action taken, in our judgment, deserves the gravest condemnation. It is an example of exactly how not to carry on the work of government in an Eastern country. A Government which adopts the attitude of " Oh how I should like to do this or that if you would only allow me !" is certain to be despised. In a Western country such things may not matter, but in the East it is never safe to proclaim one's impotence. We have felt compelled to criticise the Egyptian Adminis- tration, though we admit that in all probability the chief part of the blame should rest upon the Home Government; but before we leave the subject we must say a word as to the perfectly monstrous personal attacks that have been made of late upon Sir Eldon Gorst. We know those attacks to be baseless fabrications, deserving the contempt and condemnation of all good citizens, nay, of all honour- able and fair-minded men, and we can only express our bewildered amazement that any decent newspaper should have been found to print them. Sir Eldon Gorst, like all other English officials, must expect criticism, and we do not doubt that he would fully admit this, and would, indeed, welcome it as beneficial. To assail a man as he has been assailed is to do a cruel wrong to an indi- vidual, and to impede the due carrying out of our Imperial task. As long as the British Agent-General is attacked in the way in which he is being attacked, all decent men and all true Imperialists should rally to his support. The work of administering the Empire will be rendered absolutely impossible if the instruments of Empire are to be exposed to attacks such as those of which he has been made the victim.
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