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sentiment being shared by the Khedive, as he is far too intelligent not to realise the great advantage to Egypt of being insured for the future against any possible recurrence of Dervish raids under some Mahdi or Khalifa of the future. I have little doubt also that his association with the King of England as his fellow Sovereign of the Soudan must have been gratifying to his personal self-respect. He is not likely, with his intimate knowledge of British policy in Egypt, to have imagined that his share in the administration of the Soudan would be more than nominal, and on that account he naturally attached the more importance to his titular rank as coSovereign with the King in their joint dominion. When the Port Soudan railway was sufficiently completed to permit of its formal opening, it was thought at the British Agency, which in those days regulated the affairs of the Soudan as well as those of Egypt, that there ought to be an official inauguration of the Port Soudan line which opened up direct railway communication between the Soudan and the Red Sea. It was generally expected that the Khedive would in the unavoidable absence of his fellow Sovereign be the leading personage in the State visit to the Condominium. But this expectation was not fulfilled. The arrangements for the State visit were conducted at the British Agency, and it was at once made known that the King of England would be represented at the Soudan by the British Consul-General and the Khedive of Egypt by the Sirdar.

I am well aware that there were many questions of precedence and etiquette as well as of a more material and commonplace character which may have actuated the British Agency in the decision come to in this matter, and I have no right to say that the decision was unwise or unjust. I cannot, however, but express my own opinion that the Khedive's non-inclusion in the State visit to the Soudan was an incident which required more explanation than has ever yet been given, and can hardly have failed to give unnecessary offence.

It may be said from an English point of view that such incidents as I have referred to are unworthy of serious consideration. But the Eastern point of view is entirely different from our own. Moreover, in countries where the titular Sovereigns have no individual rank, other than that conferred by the external recognition of their sovereignty, they are bound in their own interest to stand upon titular dignity.

If it is necessary, to use a French saying, 'to put the point upon the I,' it would have been well-nigh impossible for the dual rulers of Egypt to understand each other or to appreciate each other's merits or demerits. Apart from the fundamental differences between the East and the West, they were hardly in a position to regard each other justly. Lord Cromer, not unnaturally, never quite realised that the Prince-whom he had known as a lad, and who, in his opinion, had well deserved the rebuke administered to him in the early days of his

reign-had become a full-grown man, had studied carefully the conditions of his tenure of power, had acquired a personal insight into the sentiments entertained by his subjects, and was much more in touch with the beliefs and aims and ideas of Egypt of to-day than any British official, however highly placed and however great his experience, could ever hope to be. On the other hand, the Khedive had learnt to look upon our British Consul-General as a sort of overseer, always ready to find fault whenever the occasion arose, and to throw the responsibility of his own policy upon the shoulders of the Prince, though the latter had had no voice in its adoption. To speak the truth, the Viceroy looked upon our Consul-General very much as an ambitious Duke of Languedoc must have regarded his Maire du Palais. If this version of the respective attitudes of the Khedive and the British Consul-General is approximately correct it is easily intelligible why the relations between the British Agency and the Khedivial Court were never cordial and were generally strained. The vast Palace of Abdeen is nowadays never used except for State receptions. The lovely palace of Gesireh, which was the favourite residence of Ismail Pasha, was sold by the Commission of Liquidation and is now converted into an hotel, chiefly frequented by British tourists. It is reported that the chief consideration which caused his Highness to take up his abode at the suburban palace of Koubbeh on the borders of the Suez desert lay in the fact that it is five miles distant from the British Agency. Anyone acquainted with the East will have no difficulty in understanding that both the de facto and the de jure Courts of Kasr-el-doubara and of Koubbeh should have been the habitual resorts of two cliques of courtiers who were more Royalist than the King. The hangers-on of the two Courts were interested in earning the favour of their respective patrons. In consequence many arbitrary acts, which gave umbrage to honest public opinion in Egypt, owed their origin and their execution to the ill-regulated zeal of subordinate partisans.

So much for the past. All that remains to me is to say something of the future as modified by the final retirement of Lord Cromer from the post in which he has played so long and so conspicuous a part. The basis of the policy on which Egypt has been administered under Lord Cromer was the assumption that it lay in the power of England to depose the Khedive if he declined to follow the advice tendered him by our Consul-General at Cairo. In a certain sense this assumption was just. No sane person can doubt that, so long as Egypt is under our military occupation, we could depose and deport the Khedive by British troops, and, if we chose, declare a British Protectorate. But it is by no means clear that we are in a position to do so to-day. We could have done so without the risk of any intervention on the morrows of the battle of Tel el Kebir, of the victory of the Atbara, and of the capture of Khartoum, but I should hesitate to

affirm that we could rely nowadays on the tacit acquiescence of Europe in so high-handed an action. The Congress of Algeciras has decided that the Anglo-French agreement is invalid in respect. of the proposal of a French Protectorate over Morocco; and the German Emperor, though he has expressed his cordial approval of the manner in which Great Britain has administered Egypt under our military occupation, has in no sense committed himself to a similar approval in the event of our wishing to make our occupation permanent. The old saying 'He who wills not when he may, when he wills he shall have nay' is one singularly likely to prove true in our relations with Egypt.

Even, however, if we dismiss the risk of foreign intervention as not worth consideration, I am unable to see what we should gain if we deposed Abbas the Second, while I see very clearly what we might lose. So long as the Viceregal Throne is occupied by its lawful Sovereign, the Prince acts as a sort of buffer between the dominant Christian Power and the Mussulman State of Egypt. Some nine-tenths of the whole population of the Nile land are fervent, if not fanatical, followers of the Prophet, and under the nominal rule of the Prince, who is known to be a devout believer in Islam, his people are free from apprehensions that any measures will receive his sanction which might be incompatible with the laws, customs, usages and rules of Mahomedan life as ordained by the Koran. To take a case in point. The British authorities in Egypt have at last made up their minds, rightly or wrongly, to undertake the task of providing Cairo, at a huge expense, with a thorough system of water drainage. The population of the capital are absolutely indifferent to the advantages of water drainage. They object to the outlay which would be required for this purpose, and they bitterly resent the regular entrance of inspectors into private dwellings in order to ascertain whether the waterworks, drains and sinks are kept in order. But unless such inspection is allowed the experiment must prove an utter failure. It is obvious that the effectuation of this great sanitary reform. would be greatly facilitated if the Khedive could be induced to give his individual sanction and support to the scheme in question. The same principle applies to scores of reforms which our British administration would like to see introduced into Egypt. To work with the co-operation of the Khedive or against his approval is tantamount to the difference between rowing with or against the

current.

There are two illusions of the Cromerian era which should be dispelled if we wish to understand the Egyptian question. The first delusion is that the rank and file of the population are keenly alive to the oppression and extortion they suffered under Ismail's reign owing to his extravagance and his land hunger. We conclude that Egyptians must necessarily shrink with horror from the bare idea of

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any restoration of similar oppression and would view the withdrawal of the British troops as a national calamity. I do not say that, as an Englishman in Egypt, I should not think that the protection of my life and property, subject to the same conditions as a native, as indeed I might be if the Capitulations should ever be abolished, my exemption from the Conscription and the Corvée, were amply sufficient to cause me to feel deep gratitude towards the administration under which I had become comparatively free, comfortable and prosperous. The absence of any gratitude for the material benefits they have derived from the British administration may indicate a mental delinquency on the part of the native population; but, however this may be, I-if I were a fellah born and bred-should entertain no personal gratitude for the amelioration of my condition under foreign rule, and should feel little or no personal resentment towards the memory of the first and greatest of the Khedives. Imagination exercises a far larger influence in the East than it does in the West, and the grandiose character of Ismail's projects, his passion for the acquisition of land, his gorgeous entertainments, his extension of his empire to the then unknown Dark Continent, and his reckless extravagance for the glorification of Egypt, as represented by himself, combined with his personal bonhomie, appealed to the imagination of an Oriental race, who, throughout ages of servitude, have always cherished the memory of the rulers under whom Egypt had played a leading part in the world's history. You must take men as you find them, and it puzzles me to understand how anybody knowing Egypt and the Egyptians could expect them, to use an Americanism, to enthuse' over the material benefits conferred upon them by a British administrator, who did not understand their language, who had no sympathy with their creed, their traditions and their ambitions, and who had not, and could not have, any hold upon their imagination.

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If I have succeeded in making my meaning clear, the grave defect in the administration of our Pro-Consul was in the first place his inability to remain on friendly relations with the reigning Khedive, and in the second place his failure to secure the active co-operation of the Khedive in his projected reforms. His Highness is a man of exceptional intelligence, and is well-disposed towards England and the English. I can say also that, in as far as it is possible for an Oriental to understand the West, he has succeeded to a remarkable degree in appreciating the strength and the weakness of the British Empire as an Imperial Power. It would be unreasonable to expect him to be an enthusiastic advocate of our military occupation, but I am sure he is convinced that the idea of an independent Egypt is a chimera for many years to come, and that, this being so, the virtual protectorate of England is the best thing for Egypt as compared with the protectorate of any other European Power.

The above statement expresses in general terms the view which Abbas the Second is supposed by those most in his confidence to entertain concerning the British occupation, but on such a point absolute certainty is almost unattainable. In the East it is not the fashion, whatever it may be in the West, to wear your heart upon your sleeve, and in all Oriental Courts there exists a certain element of intrigue, about public as well as private affairs, which seems to my mind to be based on hereditary instincts. I allude to this aspect of Oriental character because the charge most frequently brought against his Highness by his hostile critics is that his views of the political situation in Egypt are often contradictory, according as they happen to be expressed to Englishmen or to his fellow countrymen.

By a curious concatenation of circumstances one of the most definite results of the Cromerian era in Egypt has been the restoration of the personal influence of the Khedive. The Egyptian public, however unjustly, never pardoned the readiness with which Tewfik Pasha apparently acquiesced in the military occupation of their country. In like fashion they were slow to overlook the promptitude with which Abbas the Second gave up his attack on Lord Kitchener as soon as the British Agency had expressed disapproval of his conduct. But when it came to the knowledge of the Egyptians that the Khedive was no longer a persona grata at the British Agency he rapidly recovered his lost influence with his own countrymen. It was hardly reasonable to expect that a very energetic, able and ambitious Prince, eager to take an active part in the administration of his own country, should acquiesce without an effort in his virtual exclusion from public life. For the reasons I have already indicated an entente cordiale could never be permanently established between Koubbeh and Kasrel-Nil so long as so masterful a ruler as Lord Cromer held sway in Egypt. Obviously it was difficult for the Khedive to forfeit the influence he had acquired by his supposed sympathy with Nationalist ideas, unless he saw reason to believe that the policy of the British Agency was likely to be different from what it had been under our late Consul-General.

Under these circumstances the appointment of Sir Eldon may prove a benefit to both England and Egypt, which have a common interest in the cordial co-operation of the British and Egyptian authorities. He has had so far little or no opportunity of displaying administrative ability, or of formulating any policy distinct from that of his former chief. He has, however, succeeded already in securing the confidence of the Khedive, and has, I believe, done much to remove any suspicions which may have been entertained at home or in Egypt as to his good faith and loyalty. The Khedive, I fancy, is very willing to be the friend of England if England is willing to treat him as a friend; and his friendship may be of very considerable value to us at no distant period. The Khedive has never failed to

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