WHAT ENGLAND HAS DONE.

Evening Star, Issue 12763, 16 March 1906, Page 4

WHAT ENGLAND HAS DONE.

I Britons »u>6 always doing great tilings in tliOi Ibliely places of tlio earth, eo that the completion of the Nile-Red Sea Railway impresses us but little. To appreciate the 'significance of the achievement a man must be | there to Sec. Egypt’s whole story of latter ! days is Wonderful and inspiring. A Little Englander comes back from _ Egypt a perfervid Big Briton, looking out for Little Englanders to kick. Not the glory of conquest impresses him, but tbo moral value of , British rule. What does the Egyptian think of it. He has not imagination enough to be impressed by the colossal character of the Work Which iS being done; ho is too near. Besides, lio takes a hand in the labor at so ; many pence per day, and, seeing it grow automatically under his hands, regards it as a matter of course, mysterious but inevitable. Tho effect of British rule begins in his home, touches his daily life, and he values that more than' the material side of the enterprise. It was hereabouts that justice was, if not first bom upon earth, certainly first given definite articulate form and expression. A thousand year's before Moses gave laws to Israel, tho groat Hammurabi caused to be inscribed on itnperisbable stone the code of laws upon which all earthly laws have since been based. Five-and-fqrly centuries have come and gone since then. Dynasties have perished, nations arisen and decayed, but the civilised world has all this time been building upon tho decrees which, unknown tb any, hod . lain buried in old Porsepoiis, whither they had been caried long after Abraham and Ills cltosen went out from Ur of the Chaldees and triumphed over this very Hammurabi, the Amraphef of tho Old Testament. Justice has slept with her scales in hen hand, and it has remained to the Gentiles of these islands of ours to carry back “ tlio Judgments of Righteousness ” which ,Httmmurabb- the great king. Set up. jV • 'Po the simple native, then, British rule I means equal justice for > all, It begins at j home. The tribal ■ patriarch is no longer } terrttnt and, extortioner. He, equally with the

humblest, is ‘ amenable' fo T '(tSh hffiweridhg what iimpresses the native. A few-mcmths ago a native woman -was .punished for flinging -her .babe into a; :canai. Her punishment seemed to her oontemp6raries a of class legislation. But .’then a mighty man in Egypt was guilty rdf some maheasahce. He was so^ed—he, the leader Pharaoh of our cwn and tfied and sentenced to imprisonment. This was an object-lesson in Egypt which will not soon be forgotten. The tale travelled; and to-day it is talked of in the remotest villages in the land where tho Pharaohs rilled 1 . It is Wonderful and righteous in the eyes of ,tbe humble ones of Egypt, ahd exalts British Wle more than her miracles of engineering.