THE EGYPT GENERAL MISSION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 21022, 10 May 1930, Page 11

THE EGYPT GENERAL MISSION

VISIT OF MISS REEVES PALMER. THE KEY TO EGYPT'S PROBLEMS. Miss. Muriel peeves Palmer (missionary, member of the Egypt General Mission, and member of the Field Couneil) has spent 20 years in the country. She is at present on furlough in New -Zealand. and is visiting many centres in the Soutli Island. She will be taking part in a “ Moslem Conference ” to bo held in this city shortly. She offers the following commentary on Egypt’s political and economic problems;—“ Wc read hints about unrest in Egypt, and hear of the claims of the Nationalist Party there, for control in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, and the evacuation of Egyptian territory by British troops; and it is difficult to realise that all this unrest and awakening national consciousness is confined to but a very small portion of the inhabitants of that land, yet so it is. Nine out of every 10 Egyptians work on the land, very many having a part ownership of the land worked, and the desires of this nine-tenths of the population may Bo summed np in the one word, water.

f Water, cheap, justly distributed an.d plentiful for the ali-important irrigation, without which this rainless land is a desert. Such water baa been provided for years under the irrigation system largely controlled by British supervision, and while individual engineers may have been unpopular, and even very occasionally one be found open to more or less concealed bribery, on tbe whole Egyptians have realised that justice and fair play ruled, and the rich man could not easily get advantage over the poor in his water supply. “ For the_ last few years this control has passed into the hands of Egyptians, well trained and competent, but is is whispered that things are not as they j were, and the small cultivator wonders j whether low Nile floods are entirely responsible. He has been told that tbe recent irrigation deve’opments in the Sudan, really ; designed further to conserve the water supply in case of such , low floods, may lessen the amount of water that reaches Egypt, and this is one of the main causes behind what popular protest there is against a solely British control of the Sudan. “The cultivator is in the main illiterate, and largely inarticulate. Those who talk and agitate, chiefly belong, to the student class, who have everything to , gain for themselves,' and nothing to lose

by the multiplication of petty officials, and who saw, under the earlier British control, a demand for ever increasing efficiency, and a steady sifting out of the slackers and half-qualified men. To the Egyptian who has passed even the equivalent of a proficiency examination, it is a disgrace to live by any manual labour, better for the lad to sit at borne idle and half starving than work at an honest trade. Hence the unrest and discontent among the students, hence also the unemployed agitation of the city. “Egypt is very densely populated in the Delta and Nile Valley, outside this there are but a few wandering Bedouin, : but within it the density of population is equal to that of the great Plain of China or the Plain of Flanders. This cultivated land is strictly limited to the surface that can be irrigated, and that again, by the means used to conserve and control Nile water, such control having to be exorcised far up in the Sudan as well as in Egypt itself. Hence we realise bow true it is that ‘ Egypt is the gift of the Nile,’ and that the key to the Egyptian problem is water, controlled, abundant, fairly distributed. Whoever will secure this is inthe long run the ruler desired by tlie bulk of the Egyptian nation, and whoever can persuade the small cultivator that he will secure this for him, is the leader who will be followed- ■