have been done long since, and Egypt will control her own foreign policy and send abroad her own diplomatie representatives. Only one concession seems to be made to Great Britain: the rights of present British officials will be safeguarded, and those of them who prefer not to serve under Egyptian heads of departments will be generously compensated. Now, even the politicians who defend the secret and sudden action of the British Government do not pretend that the change will enhance the happiness or the prosperity of Egypt. The Egyptians are not trained in the wiles and tricks of democracy, and since, of course, they will enjoy all the blessings of popular government, since they will start at the point whereat we have arrived after centuries of experience, the result of the hazardous experiment can easily be foreseen. Nor can the debt which Egypt owes to England be easily estimated. We have brought the Egyptians out of the land of bankruptcy and set their feet upon the solid rook of health and wealth. We have built the dam at Assouan and given fertility to the Egyptian soil. And we take our dismissal without reason and without argument. The work which has been done by English wisdom and English courage goes for naught. It may well be in vain that Lord Cromer worked and Gordon died. Nor сад the plea be advanced that the war has completely changed the situation. If there has been any change, it has been, from England's point of view, a change for the worse. And the reckless Ministers who are responsible for the new policy can find neither comfort nor support in the settled and recorded opinions of Mr Alfred Milner and Lord Cromer. Let us turn, for instance, to Mr Milner's well-known book, 'England in Egypt.' That distinguished statesman was resolute upon one point-that it was impossible to say when our work in Egypt would be finished, "The truth is," he wrote, "that the idea of a definite date for the conclusion of our work in Egypt is wholly misleading. The withdrawal of Great Britain, if it is not to end in disaster, can only be a gradual process." So far as we can understand the purpose of our present Government, there will be nothing gradual in the process. Our retirement is to be sudden and complete. Then, proceeds Mr Milner, "no doubt the presence of the troops is even now an important element in the maintenance of our influence. out." That is precisely what every one can and will say. We have been pushed out by the menaces of Zaghlul and his friends. We have not gone at our own time, but at theirs. And our departure is a triumph not of British policy but of Egyptian nationalism. Even if we had withdrawn our troops at our own free will, it would still be necessary, thought Mr Milner, "that the position of the British officers in the Egyptian Army should be maintained." That position is not likely to be maintained. And Mr Milner closed his argument by asserting that the case for perseverence held the field. "If it can be proved," he wrote, "and I maintain it is proved, that we have been true to the spirit of our declarations, and that the literal fulfilment of them would be fraught with ruin to the Egyptian people, and with mischief to Great Britain and to Europe, then we are undoubtedly justified in persevering in the course on which we are engaged." As we were justified then, se we should be to-day, if we had not renounced our responsibility under pressure. Our governors do not seem to care whether the Egyptian people be ruined or not. The word "self-determination " has been whispered in their ears by interested Germans, and they have forgottten that ever they assumed the burden of governing Egypt with wisdom and justice. Whether Lord Milner is in agreement with Mr Alfred Milner or not we do not know. There is not much doubt what Lord Cromer's opinion would be. "Is it," he asks, "possible to ensure the existence of a fairly good and stable government in Egypt if the British garrison were withdrawn? That is the main question that has to be answered. . . . I can only state my deliberate opinion, formed after many years of Egyptian experience and in the face of a decided predisposition to favour the policy of evacuation, that at present, and for a long time to come, the results of executing such a policy would be disastrous, Looking to the special intricacies of the Egyptian system of government, to the licence of the local press, to the ignorance and oredulity of the mass of the Egyptian population, to the absence of Egyptian statesmen capable of men capable of controlling Egyptian society and of guiding the very complicated machine of government . . . it appears to me impossible to blind oneself to the fact that, if the British garrison were now withdrawn, a complete upset would probably ensue. ... A transfer of power to the present race of Europeanised Egyptians would, to say the least, be an extremely hazardous experiment-so hazardous, indeed, that I am very deoidedly of opinion that it would be wholly unjustifiable to attempt it." Lord Cromer wrote these words twelve years ago, and events have made what seemed unjustifiable then far less justifiable to-day. And that there might be no uncertainty, Lord Cromer brought that part of his argument to an end with these memorable words: "It may be that at some future period the Egyptians may be rendered capable of governing themselves without the presence of a foreign army in their midst, and without foreign guidance in civil and military affairs; but that period is far distant. One or more generations must, in my opinion, pass away before the question can be even usefully discussed." Twelve years have passed away, and the question has not been discussed; it has been settled without discussion, and in a sense which Lord Cromer would justly and indubitably have deplored. handed in treachery, is condemned to a modest term of two years, and makes up his mind to commit suicide. Food is provided for him and he refuses to eat it. Instantly a clamour strikes the sky in all quarters. We are told by hundreds who should know better that it is the Government's duty to enlarge the man at once, to implore him to return in freedom to his own home, that his health may be comfortably restored. Alas! the eighty murdered men are beyond recall, and as they died with no halo of crime about their heads, they are not worth considering. Besides, their deaths were involuntary. They had no thought of suicide. And here is a Lord Mayor of Cork, who is obviously worth far more than eighty or a hundred servants of the crown, condemning himself to death because he objects to being in prison. What merey was shown to the gallant soldier who was massacred as he stood in his club? He was not given even the option of a hunger strike. We can no longer hope for any sense of proportion in the treatment of public affairs. The essential and superfluous long since changed places, and nobody can be sure of universal applause save the convicted oriminal. Some eighty brave and honest members of the Royal Irish Constabulary have been foully assassinated this Now what happened to the year for no other reason than Lord Mayor of Cork was not that they have done their duty. of national importance. If he They have gone to their graves chose to starve himself to unhonoured and unsung. The death, and if he could square rascals who are responsible for the sin of suicide with the their deaths, and who intend, tenets of his Church, there if they can, to set up an in- was not another word to say. dependent republic in Ireland, And what happened? The utter no word of protest. press, which should have governors they would make, known better, wrote daily whose hands are foully stained leaders, published daily bulwith the blood of innocent letins, and set a criminal upon men! And then the Lord a throne of martyrdom. The Mayor of Cork, caught red- Americans, after their in Fine variable fashion, found in a trivial incident another chance In of insulting Great Britain, we have seen nothing for many a day fit to be compared with a book entitled 'A Constitution for the Socialist Commonwealth,' by Sidney and Beatrice Webb (London: Longmans, Green, & Co.) Everything in this work is out and dried. The authors live and move in & vacuum. The book is close and stuffy from beginning to end, as though it had been written in a house where the windows were never opened, and where the sun had never a chance to penetrate. And the whole argument is based upon a misstatement. "The manual-working wage-earners, comprising two-thirds of the So we live in a world of population, obtain for their topsy-turveydom. So, when maintenance much less than honour is to be done to the half the community's net narrow-minded fanatics now product annually." So say called the Pilgrim Fathers, it Mr and Mrs Webb, and we is the Earl of Reading, a noble- prefer to accept the evidence man of Jewish blood, who is gathered by Mr A. L. Bowley despatched to Plymouth, that in his analysis of the national he may make an appropriate income before the war. oration upon the rebellious 1911, he tells us, that 42 per Christians of three centuries cent of the aggregate income ago. The Pilgrims were was paid in wages, and 42 per solemn gentlemen no doubt, eent cannot be described as but even they, if they could "much less than half."1 And look upon the earth, would this is not all. The amount of laugh at the pompous incon- old-age pensions, free educagruity. Lord Reading and tion, and free meals at school, the Pilgrim Fathers! There must be included in the sum has been no episode like it paid to the wage-earners. since Sir Alfred Moritz Mond And if, as we should, we described Stonehenge as the class with the wage-earners place in which "our ancestors" those who are in receipt worshipped. of salaries less than £160 But for sheer lack of humour a year, we shall find, with In 1 It is noteworthy that before Mr Bowley published his analysis, Mr and Mrs Webb roundly asserted that "two-thirds of the population, that is to say, the manual workers, obtain for all their needs only one-third of the produce of each year's work." They have modified their statement now, but not enough. It adds insult only to those who are consumed by envy. And what do this couple mean by licentious pleasures and insolent manners? Where have they lived Since they lived all these years, blind or blinkered? Do they really still believe in the wicked baronet? What people have they known, what books have they read? Perhaps they spurn literature as anti-democratio; if they do not, then we suppose that Mrs Webb has dedioated her leisure to penny novelettes, and Mr Mr Webb counts among his favourites Tom Wildrake and Jack Harkaway. And if Mr and Mrs Webb consider it a crime in others to own anything, we have a right to ask them if they themselves are guiltless. Are they owners, or have they lived by the sweat of their brows? They cannot evade the question by saying that in a socialist state they would pool their wealth. We make Mr Bowley, that more than 60 per cent of the whole income of the country is in the hands of the wage-earning class. Such were the figures before the war. Since the war the balance in favour of the wage-earners has appreciably increased. Moreover, from the 40 per cent remaining, in Mr Bowley's words, "a great part of national saving is made and a large part of national expenses is met; when these are subtracted, only £200 to £250 millions remain, which on the extremest reckoning can have been spent out of home-produced income by the rich or moderately well-off on anything of the nature of luxury." In brief, says Mr Bowley, "the spendable wealth of the nation derived from home industry has been grossly exaggerated by loose reasoning," and if we would be better off there is but one thing to do: employers and employed alike must increase production. But Mr and Mrs Webb dislike those who are better off than their fellows as bitterly as they grudge them the reward of their own brains or of their parents' intelligence and thrift. "The continued existence of the functionless rich," they say, without exp.aining where they are to be found, "of persons who deliberately live by owning instead of by working, and whose futile oocupations" (why futile, Mrs Webb, why futile ?)-" often licentious pleasures and inherently insolent manners, undermine the intellectual and moral standards of the community, adds insult to injury." our own erimes, and if Mr and Mrs Webb are the owners of a single sovereign which they have not earned, they must be oriminals in their own eyes as they are hypocrites in ours. However, the State, directed and advised by Mr and Mrs Webb, has not the spending of the £200 to £250 millions which "on the extremest reckoning can have been spent on anything of the nature of luxury," and to lay hands upon that sum they are prepared to plunge the country into a sea of blood. For it is quite clear that the revolution sketched by these two "humourists will not be a peaceful revolution. There are still men and |
