EGYPT'S PROBLEM

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 62, 15 March 1933, Page 3

EGYPT'S PROBLEM

THE CHARGE OF EMPIRE

WHERE BRITAIN ERRED

THE EXD OP AUTHOEITY

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The news that' a day or two ago Nahas Pasha, the loader of the Wafd, prayed in a mosque for ' the delivery of Egypt from the Imperialistic British, gives particular point to the situation now confronting Britain in that country. At this moment Egyptian statesmen are endeavouring to induce Great Britain to negotiate a treaty the effect of which could only be to end our present control, says E. C. Bentley in the London "Daily Telegraph." Plainly the occasion for that course has not yet arrived. Lord Lloyd, who has himself borne the burden of responsibility as High Commissioner for Egypt and the Sudan from 1925 till '1929, has published a timely volume, which will be of value to all who seek to appreciate the difficulties of Britain's task. Lord Cromer before him had written a book, "Modern Egypt," which has become a world's classic of history at first hand —history written by the man who had made it. What Lord Lloyd has set out to do is to continue the story from the point where Lord Cromer had left it, after twenty-five years of creative good government without a parallel in modern times. The sequel at present goes no further than the' landing of the Milner Mission in Egypt after the fatal breakdown of British authority in 1919; so that a long scries of unhappy chapters of the record has yet to be written. CROMER'S WORK. Essentially this volume is the story of a gradual decline—the falling away, through the successive pro-consulships of Gorst and Kitchener, and the confusion of the war years, from the tradition of Cromer. And the heart of that tradition, as Lord Lloyd brings out again and again) was the British acceptance of trusteeship for the well-being of the masses of the Egyptian people. As that has been enfeebled by the quest of rapid results in democratic progress, or by what Lord Lloyd calls '' tyrannical slogans "like self-determ-ination, our position in Egypt has weakened, and it met its decisive crisis in the outburst of anarchy in 1919, which forms the climax of this book. But apart from this weakening of grasp upon principle, there was, as Lord Lloyd insists, a fatal falling off in the mere machinery of British control in Egypt. If the High Commissioner, to say nothing of the Government in London, was taken completely by surprise when the storm broke in 1919, it was due to one cause alone. This was a lowering in. the quality of the British official personnel; a defect which had already begun to . show itself under Kitchener, and was "terribly accentuated" during the waT. And one especially disastrous aspect of this was the opening of a social rift between Europeans and Egyptians. SOCIAL CONTACTS. In Cromer's day, social contact between the British and the upper class Egyptians had been constant and intimate. Now, the British officials and their families tended to hold aloof and to shun all such contact. Apart from this, bad enough in itself, was the upgrowth of the bureaucratic tendency, of which Lord Lloyd furnishes a telling analysis. An autocrat may be papular if he moves freely among the people on familiar terms and is reasonably accessible. But irritation and resentment are excited by the official "who doea all his work at an office desk, closely guarded against interruption." And there is so vast an increase in the amount of work to be done! It was a part of the greatness of Cromer that he divined and warded off this danger. Early in this book Lord Lloyd quotes from Cromer's last annual report the deep-going precept that "to obtain the sympathy and goodwill of Egyptians is as important as to be honest and just." It was not merely sympathy and I goodwill, but all effective touch of any sort with the people that had been lost in 1919; so that those officials whose chief duty it was to advise the High Commissioner as'to the state of public feeling were declaring, on the very eve of the outbreak, that there was no danger from popular discontent. A typical instance of Lord Lloyd's detailed closeness of study is his account of the material reasons why the confidence and-regard of the fellaheen and the poorer class in general, which had been won by so many years of wise paternal government, wero lost during the war years, never to be regained. TORCED RECRUITS. Briefly, there was what amounted to press-gang recruitment for . the labour battalions, a task left to the corruption and private animosities of the village headman; the commandeering of transport animals; and an agricultural policy which had the unforeseen result of a serious food shortage. It was on such grievances that the lieTCe agitation of Zaghlul Pasha and his Nationalist associates worked with such fearful consequences. In March, 1919, they were arrested and deported to Malta, and instantly there took place that explosion which was heard of in this country, as most of us remember, with such complete bewilderment. Rioting and wrecking spread all over the country, communications were destroyed, lives of foreigners wero everywhere in danger; eight Englishmen were mobbed and tortured to death; for some weeks all pretence of government was at an end. It -was when order had been not yet fully restored by decisive military action that the event took place to which Lord Lloyd traces the final and irretrievable surrender of our old position in Egypt. General Allenby had been hurriedly appointed as Special High Commissioner to succeed Sir R. Wingate. It was the time of the most anxious strain in the peace-making activities in Paris. Lord Lloyd's account of that appointment is as follows:— "The Cabinet, entirely perplexed by the reports of its advisers in Egypt, had seized upon the^ nearest officer whose reputation and personality invited their confidence, and sent him out with wide discretionary powers." Before Sir Edmund Allenby had been in Cairo a fortnight—at a time when the repression of disorder was still incomplete—he issued a proclamation that the deportees were to bo set at liberty, and that freedom to travel whither they pleased—which had been firmly refused to them before —would bo theirs. Clearly he was acting under orders to end a desperate situation quickly. SERIES OF BLUNDERS. "Whether from an overdriven preoccupation with other matters, or from the sheer weakness of exhaustion, the Cabinet decided to cast all the responsibility upon their representative at Cairo and did not intervene to prevent a blunder from which British policy in Egypt—if not elsewhere—has never since recovered." From the time of that surrender Britain's real authority in Egypt was at an end. So Sir Reginald Wingate prophesied at the time; and so, Lord Lloyd declares, it was. The rest of the

tale —still in progress—has been "a series of pathetic and futile endeavours to secure the best terms we could" from the agitators whose claim to national leadership had been so recognised.

Nothing could have saved the situation but the complete shattering of the weapon of violence in the extremists' hands before the consideration of grievances was undertaken. That was not done. Britain's duty to act on behalf of the masses of the Egyptian people was compromised. It was soon to disappear altogether as a principle of her statesmanship. She conceded independence while trying to set up safeguards for Imperial interests and for the foreign communities; and it is the opinion of very many besides Lord Lloyd that independence with safeguards "appears as an attempt to shirk the responsibilities of Empire, and at the same time to take the profits."