LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.
THE FOX-HUNTING INCIDENT IN EGYPT.
rTo TIM EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1
venture to write to you, on a subject which by now will probably be forgotten in England, but which you may Perhaps consider to be a useful object-lesson in methods. I allude to the incident of Mr. Blunt's " garden " near Cairo, Which according to his account was forcibly broken into by a Party of English officers. The garden in question is a walled enclosure near a railway line, containing a house, a palm- grove. a cotton-field, and a horse-breeding establishment, where Mr. Blunt resides during the winter season. The facts of the case appear to be, briefly, that some British officers with five couple of hounds were riding past Mr. Blunt's enclosure with a view to fox-hunting in the desert ; that the hounds went over the wall ; that two of the officers went round by a gap to bring the dogs out ; that they were assaulted by some Arab servants of Mr. Blunt ; that the servants were prosecuted for the assault, and a letter of apology for the trespass despatehed to Mr. Blunt. In committing the assault the servants were no doubt acting under Mr. Blunt's orders and imitating his example. In the trial it appeared that trespassers had been beaten in Mr. Blunt's presence. Such a treatment of trespass is contrary to local custom, and the only similar instance which occurs to me happened on the Khedive's property. The servants were, however, condemned to various terms of imprisonment by the Court of First Instance. Before the second trial took place (which was delayed, at the request of Mr. Blunt's counsel, on a domestic plea) a letter written by Mr. Blunt appeared in the anti-English foreign Press and in various Arab journals. In that letter (which appears to be identical with that written to the English papers) he accuses (among other allega- tions) the British officers of cowardice for not having met force with force, and states that the Arab defendants have no prospect of a fair hearing in the native tribunals. I am a resident in Cairo, not connected with the Army, or the British civilian service in Egypt. I should like to ask your readers, of the two parties in the dispute, which is more worthy of commendation,—the British officers who held their hand under great provocation, and appealed to a Court on which, as a matter of fact, no British Judge was sitting. or the Englishman who issued the arbitrary orders under which his servants acted, who did not give himself the trouble of coming himself to attend the trial, but preferred to stay iL England in order to circulate misleading statements in the English papers and to work the Press in Egypt through his agents ? I would add that Mr. Blunt himself on an occasion when he met with violent treatment at the hands of Arabs pleaded with energy his rights as a British subject. Like others, he lives in comfort and peace in this country partly owing to the action of the men to whose beneficent work he has never in one single instance offered a helping band. Where, as it seems on the present occasion, his personal position is affected, he makes an accusation of a peculiarly cruel kind against young Englishmen who behaved with extraordinary self-control under most trying circumstances.—I am, Sir, Fik., X. Cairo, August 18th.
[Whatever may be the rights or wrongs of the trespass squabble, and the merits of hunting squabbles are pro- verbially complicated, Mr. Blunt had no right whatever to impute cowardice to the officers in question. The suggestion was, of course, a perfectly childish one,—both foolish and contrary to fact, as any one must admit who knows anything of the gallant regiment inquestion. In our opinion, the officers, even if they made a mistake in the original trespass, behaved with great good sense and self-restraint throughout the rest of the incident.—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
