BRIGANDAGE IN EGYPT
The summer of 1890 I spent in large part at Paris with Lytton at the
Embassy, and was one of the most delightful in my experience, but it
contained little of a political nature or that can be repeated here. Our
talks were mainly of literature, and more especially of dramatic
literature, on which he was just then engaged, the detail of his
official work being left principally to his staff, though I would not be
understood to mean that he was a mere figurehead. As Ambassador, on the
contrary, his political influence at Paris was greater than that of his
predecessor, Lord Lyons. With all the latter’s dignity and discretion
and solid good sense, he had never succeeded in obtaining any kind of
popularity, and in his time the relations between France and England had
become the reverse of cordial. Lytton, however, by the very qualities
which had proved his defects when in India, had obtained an immediate
personal success at Paris, and had in large measure restored the
international good feeling. His literary Bohemianism and lack of
pomposity, his devotion to the stage, his ready patronage of artists,
actors, and those _littérateurs_ who count for so much in Paris
journalism, had been a passport for him to favour with the Press, and
through the Press to public opinion. Lytton was by taste a Bohemian, and
Paris, which is also so largely Bohemian, recognized him as a brother
artist. It was impossible to regard him as representative of the _morgue
britannique_, of which not only Lord Lyons but Lord Cowley before him
had been such notable examples. Treated with a light hand, many a
difficult question was in his time easily circumvented, if not
permanently solved, and this at the expense of no real dignity. It was
felt that he wished well to Frenchmen and French views of life, and that
was sufficient.
In the intervals of my Paris visits I find notices of my life in
England, showing that I, too, had learned to take life more lightly than
in previous years. I busied myself not at all with parliamentary
politics, and even about Ireland I ceased to take any absorbing
interest. The prospects of Home Rule were better assured just then in
all appearance than they had been since Gladstone’s defeat in 1886. The
result of the great “Times” prosecution had been a notable victory for
the Nationalists, and had re-established Parnell’s character as a
responsible statesman at a higher point than ever before in English
eyes, so that it was confidently expected that at the next general
election Gladstone would be returned to power with a majority sufficient
to overcome the opposition of the House of Lords, and carry his Home
Rule Bill into law. It was, therefore, with a free conscience that I led
an idle life at home, writing my verses and enjoying social pleasures in
the company of my friends. It was in that summer that the Crabbet Club,
which was to acquire a certain social celebrity, was established on a
footing which was to gain for it a character almost of importance. It
will not be out of place, seeing that our memoir writers of the day have
included it, or rather have not left it unnoticed in their
recollections, if I say a few words here as to what it really was.
The Crabbet Club was in its origin a purely convivial gathering,
unambitious of any literary aim. It began in this way: When George, Lord
Pembroke (the 13th Earl) came of age in 1871, having been a very popular
boy at Eton, with many school friends, and afterwards at Oxford, he
thought it would be amusing to continue in some measure the life they
had led by having them to stay with him once or twice every summer at
Wilton, for a day or two at a time, to play cricket, and row on the
river, and otherwise divert themselves, and they took the name of the
“Wilton,” or “Wagger” Club, and it proved a great success. In 1876,
though much older than the rest of the members, I was asked to join it
as one who had known the Herberts from their school days. Pembroke was
staying with me at Crabbet, and his two brothers and their sister Gladys
(afterwards Lady Ripon), and several of their friends, and several of
mine, and I drove them all to Epsom for the Derby (Silvio’s year), and
we had a cricket match and a lawn tennis handicap (lawn tennis was in
the process of being invented, and we played on a court 20 feet longer
than what afterwards became the regulation length), and it was on this
occasion that I joined the club. The party at Crabbet had proved such a
success that the next year it was proposed that the club should make one
of its regular meetings there, and so it gradually came about that the
members came to Crabbet annually. The members of the club were never
more than a few, a dozen to twenty, and consisted, besides the Herbert
brothers, of Eddy Hamilton, who was afterwards Gladstone’s private
secretary, Lord Lewisham, Jocelyn Amherst, Granny Farquhar, Lionel
Bathurst, with Harry Brand (afterwards Lord Hampden), Nigel Kingscote,
Godfrey Webb, Button Bourke, Frank Lascelles, Mark Napier, and half-a-
dozen more of my own intimates, and these came regularly to Crabbet
every summer, and we gradually adopted the “Crabbet Club” as the name of
our branch.
Though we professed no kind of politics, and looked to amusement only,
nearly all the members of it were Tories, two or three of them in
Parliament, and when in 1882 I took the somewhat violent line I did
about Egypt and war ensued, several of the members taking offence ceased
their attendance, and the Club as far as the Crabbet meetings were
concerned became less popular, and this state of things was aggravated
when I stood for Parliament as a Home Ruler in 1885 and 1886, and it was
all but submerged by my imprisonment at Galway. Hardly any of the old
Wilton members would answer the invitations to it, and Pembroke himself,
the most tolerant of men, as an Irish landlord with large interests at
stake in the county of Dublin, felt it a grievance that I should have
identified myself with the Land League and the Plan of Campaign. All
this was natural enough, and I could not complain of the defection. The
Club as the “Crabbet Club” was still continued, but reconstructed on
different lines with a number of young men, Oxford undergraduates, most
of them professing Home Rule opinions. The chief of these were the two
Peels, Willy and George, sons of the Speaker, Arthur Pollen, Herbert
Vivian, Leo Maxse, Percy Wyndham (son of Sir Hugh), Theodore Fry,
Theobald Mathew, Artie Brand, and Loulou Harcourt, the only three of the
old set being Mark Napier, Eddy Hamilton, and Nigel Kingscote.
The young men thus got together, most of them fresh from the
Universities, though also bent on amusement, had tastes more
intellectual than their predecessors, and besides our lawn tennis
handicaps, we had much after-dinner speaking, and a verse competition
with the election of a poet laureate for the year. The Club was in this
condition when in 1889 George Wyndham, becoming a member, took it in
hand, and seeing its intellectual capabilities brought new blood into it
by introducing friends of his own, already holding a certain position in
the political world, and who have since no few of them climbed to fame.
Among these were George Curzon, Harry Cust, Houghton (now Lord Crewe),
Frederick Locker, Umphreville Swinburne, cousin of the poet, St. George
Lane Fox, Eddy Tennant, Laurence Currie, George Leveson Gower, Esmé
Howard, Elcho, Dick Grosvenor, Alfred Douglas, Charles Gatty, Morpeth,
and his brother Hubert Howard, and on a single occasion Oscar Wilde, and
it was in the company of these that our meetings of the early nineties
were held. They were really brilliant meetings, with post-prandial
oratory of the most amusing kind, and were productive of verse of a
quite high order. The number of the members was limited to twenty, and
there was much competition when a vacancy occurred. The poetry of the
Crabbet Club has been preserved in print, and is one of the curiosities
of literature, deserving a place, I venture to think, in company with
the best verse of a not serious kind, including even perhaps that of the
Mermaid Tavern. My own part in these meetings, which were essentially
convivial, was that of Chairman and President, an anomalous one seeing
that I was a teetotaller, but which yet worked well.
The latter half of the summer of 1890 was darkened for me by the final
illness and death of my cousin, Francis Currie. He had been my Mentor,
not always in the ways of wisdom, during my youth at Paris, and had
remained there a constant and very dear friend for close on thirty
years. On my visit to Paris in the Spring I had found him ill with an
ominous cough, and other symptoms of a decline, but his French doctor,
whom I consulted about him, persisted in declaring that it was nothing
more than the legacy of a fever he had long before contracted in India
while serving in the campaign of the Mutiny, and encouraged him to go
for change of air to the Alps, though to my eye, and to that of his
faithful _bonne_ Julienne he was already “_un homme frappé_.” Now,
however, soon after my return to the Paris Embassy in July, I learned
that he was at Aix les Bains, and, as it seemed, in an almost hopeless
state. This broke short my stay at Paris, and took me first to Aix, and
then moving him away from the great heat there to Glyon in Switzerland,
where, a month later, in spite of our care, he died. The history of
those few weeks, as of the rest of the summer of 1890, belongs, if ever
I write it, to my most private memoirs.
On the 18th of October we again left England for Egypt, spending three
more weeks on our way with the Lyttons at Paris, and then on by
Marseilles to Alexandria and Sheykh Obeyd, where we once more spent the
winter. The political position in Egypt at this time was as follows:
Riaz Pasha was still in office under the Khedive Tewfik, and the
provinces of Lower Egypt, laxly ruled, were much disturbed with
brigandage, especially in our immediate neighbourhood. Riaz, who at that
time was working with the Khedive in secret opposition to Baring and the
British Occupation, allowed the brigandage to continue, with the idea
that it would serve as a proof of the unpopularity of the English
_régime_ and its powerlessness to preserve order. Baring was occupied
now almost exclusively with the struggle to make both ends of Egyptian
finance meet, being convinced on his side that a prosperous balance
sheet was the best argument he could use with the British public in
favour of retaining Egypt as a permanent British dependency. In this he
was supported by Lord Salisbury at the Foreign Office, who had made up
his mind, now that the Wolff Convention for a withdrawal of the British
garrison had failed, to stay on in military occupation without any legal
settlement of England’s position on the Nile. It was argued that the
legal road to such a settlement had been barred by the Sultan, who, when
the Convention had been agreed to, had withheld his signature of
ratification. Though I did not know it at the time, our Queen (Victoria)
had taken the Sultan’s action as a personal slight, seeing that she had
affixed her own royal signature in ratification before the Sultan’s
refusal, nor is it possible to say that she was without justification in
feeling the matter strongly. In accordance with this, Baring was
beginning those changes in the fiscal and administrative domain which
were intended to transfer all real power in Egypt, little by little,
from the Turco-Circassian class represented by Riaz which he had
hitherto patronized, into his own. The new policy, however, was as yet
only in embryo, and the intention of remaining in Egypt was not avowed.
It was impossible to do so openly, not only through the fear of trouble
with France, but also because Liberal opinion in England was not
prepared for it, and unless it could be converted to the idea before the
next general election, which was to take place in 1892, it was always
possible that Gladstone, coming once more into power, might suddenly
reverse the whole process of absorption, and without further waiting
recall the troops from Cairo.
It was with this fear before his eyes that Baring had obtained the
services in Egypt of Alfred Milner, a journalist of distinction, the
same whom I had known in 1884 as sub-editor of the “Pall Mall Gazette”
under Stead (see “Gordon at Khartoum”), and who, a year later, had been
taken on by Goschen as his private secretary. It was through Goschen’s
recommendation that Baring gave him a place in Egypt of £1,000 a year at
the Ministry of Finance, nominally for administrative work, but in
reality with a mission of organizing a press campaign in London in
favour of a continuance of the Egyptian occupation. For this work no man
could have been better chosen. He was nominally a Liberal, and had stood
as a supporter of Gladstone at the general election of 1885, while his
experience in Northumberland Street had put him in touch with all the
chief writers of the English Liberal press. No man better than he knew
the length of the English electoral foot. At Cairo, without appearing
personally in his journalistic character, he knew how to bring the case
he had to argue forward by encouraging the various Englishmen officially
employed there to write articles in the monthly magazines and elsewhere
in praise, not of their own, but of their fellow-administrator’s
achievements in the way of reform, knowing well that if it could be
proved that Egypt, instead of a burden on the British Exchequer, was
becoming a paying concern, the battle would be won with the new
government, should a Liberal one come into office, even with Mr.
Gladstone. And so, in fact, it happened. The appearance of Milner’s very
able volume, “England in Egypt,” in which he drew together all these
threads of argument in lucid and attractive form, and which was
published a few months before the general election of 1892, effected, as
I will show later, exactly the object aimed at. Milner’s reward for this
service was not delayed. The same year he was relieved from his nominal
functions in Egypt, and given the important place at home of Chairman of
the Inland Revenue Board. I saw him pretty frequently at Cairo during
his stay there, and liked him, as I had liked him when in his humbler
position as Stead’s assistant editor. He did not display, at that time,
anything of that violent Imperialism which led him later to aspire to
the sublime heights of Tory officialdom which he now occupies.
This was the position in Egypt in the early spring of 1891. I was now on
excellent terms with Baring, whom I found willing to listen to any
suggestions I might make to him for improving the lot of the fellahin, a
matter which I understood, while he, shut up in his office and seeing
practically nothing of native Egypt beyond the tame officials whom he
had attracted to his camp, lived in comparative darkness, and I was able
in this way to effect a good deal in the direction that most interested
me, and I did not fail to bring before him once more the case of Arabi’s
return; but he was still too strongly opposed to it, though, he
explained, if it was decided to occupy Egypt permanently he should have
no objection. Failing in this, as far as Arabi was concerned, I now
limited my pleading to an attempt to interest him in other members of
the former National Party, and at the suggestion of my old friend,
Sheykh Mohammed Abdu, who was now living in my part of Egypt as judge of
our chief country town, Benha, and whom we now saw pretty frequently, I
brought before him a plan that he should take these old Nationalists
into his councils and substitute for the Circassian Pashas who had so
far been the only class of Mohammedans permitted to hold office under
the restored régime since Tel-el-Kebir, an Egyptian fellah government.
Neither Riaz, nor Nubar, nor any other of the ministers who had held
office during the past seven years, though patriotic some of them to the
extent of having it for their aim to get rid of all foreign elements in
the administration, had taken any real interest in bettering the
condition of the fellahin, and it seemed to me a lack of intelligence on
Baring’s part that he had failed to understand the popularity he might
have gained by the creation of a fellah ministry, and the comparative
ease with which he could have introduced the reforms he professed to
have at heart, and really at that time had. I find this alluded to in my
diary:
“_20th Feb._—A few days ago, there being a ministerial crisis, I wrote
to Baring suggesting that he should take new men into the ministry
instead of Riaz and the Circassians, who, despising the fellahin, look
only to their own class interests. He answered me favourably, and to-day
I called on him, and after luncheon we discussed the position. Riaz has
already given in, so nothing is to be done at present; but he expressed
himself willing to make the acquaintance of any men of the fellah class
whose names I could suggest, and I am to write to him again on the
subject in a few days. He fully admitted that Riaz was an obstructive;
‘but where,’ he said, ‘is there anyone better?’ It was a doubtful
question whether it was possible to put Mohammedans on any road of
reform. I said: ‘If you give up that hope you give up everything, but
you have not tried the Liberal party to help you in reforms.’ He said he
‘was quite willing. If the National party in 1882 had not allied itself
with the army it might have been supported.’ ‘That was the fault,’ I
said, ‘of the Joint Note.’ He agreed that ‘the Joint Note was a
mistake,’ and, I think, was impressed with what I said, and we parted on
the understanding that I was to give him the names of persons I thought
able to afford him political help, but he enjoined on me complete
secrecy. ‘I will take some opportunity,’ he said, ‘of making their
acquaintance, but there is a difficulty sometimes in my seeing the
people.’ I shall wait until Hassan Pasha Sherei returns from Upper
Egypt, and then see if we cannot make out a fellah Cabinet together.” I
have a few letters which passed between me and Baring at this time. They
are of importance as showing that the policy of introducing reforms
through native Egyptians of the Mohammedan Reform Party was laid before
Sir Evelyn Baring, and its advantages more or less acknowledged by him
full fifteen years before he, as Lord Cromer, adopted it as the only one
which could give a hope of making self-government in Egypt possible.
(See his Reports for the year 1905.)
Our life at Sheykh Obeyd that Spring was not without incident, as our
immediate neighbourhood was disturbed almost nightly by gangs of
robbers, who visited the country houses round, breaking into them in the
night time and coming in armed conflict with such of the owners as
resisted them. The bands were composed principally of Bedouins, with
whom were associated certain refugees from Upper Egypt and a few broken
men escaped from the prisons at Toura, but the direction of them was in
Bedouin hands. For this reason we, who were on good terms with the
tribes, were left unmolested, though every one of our near neighbours
suffered. This is from my diary:
“_7th March._—Last night at half-past twelve I heard a great noise of
dogs barking, and occasional shots. I went out on to the balcony and
listened, and was about to go to bed again, for the guards have a habit
of firing without reason in the night to show they are awake, when I
heard cries, and I called to Deyf Allah, our head ghaffir, and asked him
what it was. He answered, ‘there are robbers at Selim Bey’s.’ I
consequently dressed hastily and ran down, having first awakened Anne,
and taking my Winchester rifle and a revolver sallied forth, followed by
Deyf Allah and Mahmud the Berberin. It was a dark night and I held my
rifle ready to fire as we went through the palm grove where I thought I
saw one or two people moving. As we got near to Selim Faraj’s house (a
quarter of a mile from ours) the noise of the dogs increased and mixed
with it there were groans, while occasional shots were still being fired
at a distance. I went cautiously up to the house where I met an Arab
with whom I exchanged greetings. He was probably one of Selim’s guards.
At the door lay a fellah groaning with his head cut open. There was a
light at the window, and women began to scream. On my coming close they
told me they had been robbed, and I found the window bars wrenched open.
Presently Selim appeared at the door [he was a County Court Judge, a
Syrian Christian] his face a coagulated mass of blood, and he let me in
and told me the history of what had happened. There had been a noise of
knocking at his door, and on his opening it, thinking it was the guard,
he received a blow from a _nabout_ (a quarter staff) on his shoulder,
but managed to slip back inside and bar the door. Then a number of men
attacked the house, calling on him to open, and on his refusal they
broke through the windows, while he struck at them with a meat chopper,
but they pushed him back and got through, six of them, and called for
his money. He proposed to them to pay next day, but they declined to
wait and broke open his chests of drawers and made search. While this
was going on, he hid with his little girl in the scullery, but later
issued out again to defend his property, and received three wounds on
his head with some sharp instrument. Then the robbers, having found the
money they were looking for in his pockets, £37, and hearing me coming,
for there was a cry of ‘_tarbush_,’ their watchword for the police,
decamped. The wounded fellah was a servant whom they had cut down
outside with their _nabouts_, but nobody paid him the least attention,
and I had great difficulty in getting him carried inside the house. The
ladies begged me to stay on with them, but I refused, as I had my own
people to look after, and so went back, and nothing further happened
till daybreak. On my return in the morning I found Selim in bed, and
heard his story again. The men, he said, were nearly naked, but had
their faces masked. They spoke the Mogrebbin dialect. They were Arabs of
the West. I then went with Sheykh Hassan Abu Tawil, the chief of our
local Arabs and a tracker, and we followed the track of seven men, which
was very distinct in the sand, running towards Matarieh. When within a
quarter of a mile of the railway station there, they had sat down and
then separated, one who had been wearing shoes going to the ostrich
farm, the rest towards the tents of Prince Ahmed Pasha’s guard. It is
generally thought that they are local people, though Abu Tawil insists
they are Mogrebbins, who once lived near the Obelisk (of Heliopolis),
and come back every year to rob. One of them had enormous footprints,
probably a Negro. I have taken Selim Bey into Cairo, first to Baring,
who, however, was too busy to see him, and then on with a note from him
to Baker Pasha, the English Chief of Police, an old military fogey whom
I worked up into unwonted action by telling him that the state of the
country was worse than either Greece or Asia Minor.”
The curious part of this episode, though I do not find it in my diary,
was Selim Bey’s attitude in the affair. He was a native Christian Judge,
and had been a man of the law all his life, but it was with the greatest
difficulty that I could persuade him to report the attack made on him to
the police. “It would only put me on bad terms with the neighbours,” he
said, worse than those he was already on, for he was very unpopular, and
it was only on my declaring that I would myself report it that he
consented to go in with me to Cairo.
“_14th March._—The attack on Selim Bey has made a stir and his house is
guarded by the regular police. The Mudir has been there and Baker Pasha.
They have made nine or ten arrests, among them the two Ghaffirs. Poor
old Eid, our _bowab_ (gatekeeper), being one of them. I found him
sitting disconsolately among the prisoners with his little child he is
so fond of. I am sorry I troubled myself in the matter, for I do not
believe one of the arrested men had anything to do with the business,
but this is the fourth serious case round about us in eighteen months,
and last time they killed a man, and a woman died of fright. Selim Bey’s
wound is rather serious, and the servant may yet die; he is in hospital.
The Mudir took from me a deposition, but it was very meagre, and I had a
difficulty in preventing the insertion in it of things quite untrue.”
This affair put an end for the time to the night attacks. I came to the
conclusion later that the tolerance the bands had so long enjoyed had
been due to Riaz’ tacit complicity joined to Baker’s muddle-headed
incapacity (he was replaced soon afterwards). I took advantage of it to
draw a moral for Baring, and wrote a letter to him recapitulating my
arguments in favour of a fellah government, sending him a list of the
names of men of the fellah party who might make up a Reform Ministry.
The list was drawn up in consultation with Sheykh Mohammed Abdu and
Mohammed Moelhi. These are the names:
Hassan Pasha Sherei of Minieh.
Baligh Bey.
Emin Bey Fikri.
Saad Effendi Zaghloul.
Ahmed Effendi Mahmoud.
Ibrahim Effendi el Wakil.
Mahmud Bey Shukri.
Ahmed Bey Heshmet.
Yusuf Bey Shoki.
Sheykh Mohammed Abdu.
It is to be remarked that this list includes the name of Saad Zaghloul,
whom fifteen years later Cromer made Minister of Public Instruction, as
well as Sheykh Mohammed Abdu’s, afterwards Grand Mufti, whom he declared
to be the chief hope of Liberal Islam in Egypt. Baring, however, missed
his real opportunity by neglecting my recommendation of Hassan Sherei,
who politically was of far greater weight than any of them, and who had
died before Baring could bring himself to accepting a fellah Ministry.
“Baring, however, answers: ‘I do not think there is a ghost of a chance
of the Khedive forming a fellah Ministry.’ Still Baring may come to it,
as Riaz has been coquetting with the French, and has brought about a
fine diplomatic storm. Our only policy is to wait the disappearance, one
after the other, of the old ministers, and sooner or later they must
come to us if they do not annex. Sherif is gone and Nubar, and now Riaz
seems going.
“_4th April._—To Cairo and saw Baring. I asked him first about the drink
shops, and he said that though he still hoped to be able to issue his
regulations, there was great opposition to these for political reasons
from the French; the question of public security was much more
important; it was a difficult job; he should put an end to it in time,
but he hardly knew how; with regard to the native government it was
impossible to get men capable and honest; things were going badly and
were leading to a new smash-up; he had only to work on as he could. I
asked him what he thought would happen if we evacuated. He said
everything would go to smash, but we should not evacuate. I said we
might be obliged to do so if there was a change of government at home.
He said, ‘I shall protest against it, and, if it is insisted on, I wash
my hands of the consequences.’ I said, ‘It is impossible you should not
be responsible if you do nothing to prepare for it.’ He said, ‘They are
all alike (meaning the Egyptians). I know most of the men you wrote of.’
‘And Hassan Sherei?’ I asked. ‘No, not Hassan Sherei, but they are all
alike.’ He said, ‘The Khedive is in favour of reform.’ ‘Yes, as long as
he thinks you stronger than the French, but if England were forced to
evacuate, you would see how soon he would go over.’ ‘I daresay. My
experience of Easterns is all that way, but we shall not evacuate; we
shall have a war with France.’ I reminded him of our conversation of
1883, when I told him he could make nothing of Tewfik and the
Circassians. He said, ‘Whom would you have had? There would only have
been Halim, and it would have been the same thing. At any rate, it is
too late now to change.’ And so we parted.”
All this is of interest now as showing how little reality there was in
the excuse so commonly made for the breach of our declarations that we
were going to leave Egypt, and that our remaining on there was thrust
upon us against our will. It was only true in the sense that it was
impossible to leave Egypt and at the same time remain its lords and
masters politically; only one way was really possible, and that we
always refused to take, to restore the National party with its liberal
ideas, and thus earn its gratitude and confidence. Egypt might then have
remained, not a dependency of the British Empire, but its very good
friend and the faithful guardian of the route by the Suez Canal to
India. The mistake made on this head by Baring was among the many causes
that led, as I shall show, to England’s being obliged to take part in
the quarrel between France and Germany in the great war of 1914. Lord
Cromer’s obstinacy on this point was a misfortune. Another was the
unlooked-for secession which occurred that spring of Lord Randolph
Churchill from the counsels of the Tory party at home. Churchill had,
ever since 1882, been a powerful advocate with Lord Salisbury of Egypt’s
claim to a restoration of her independence so unwisely taken from her in
that year, and his quarrel now with his party left my advocacy of
Egyptian liberty without support at the Foreign Office of effective
Cabinet kind.
We left Sheykh Obeyd for Europe in April, taking Rome again on our way
home and Paris.
“_23rd April_ 1891.—Landed at Naples this morning, having finished a
letter yesterday to Lord Salisbury about Egyptian affairs, and I hope he
may pay the attention to it it deserves.
“Having seen our things through the custom house we drove to Agnano and
the Grotto del Cane. The lake which used to be the beauty of the place
has been dried up these twenty years by a French company, which thought
to find the ancient Roman town but found nothing; their operations have
left a desolation hideous to the eye. How horrible civilized man is. All
day the spectacle of these Neapolitans in their modern slop clothes has
been to me a nightmare; all nature is defiled by them. What countenances
of filthy passions! what abominations to the senses! what foul rubbish
heaps! what stenches! We looked into the Grotto del Cane where criminals
they say were cast in the days of Nero. It must have been a merciful
death; witness the custode’s little dog which has ‘died daily’ there for
sixteen years and still wags its tail at each new performance. A
nightingale was singing, the only thing quite in harmony with the beauty
of the sky and hills. Later we saw the young Duke, the heir to the
Italian throne, a small timid-faced young man, very unlike the House of
Savoy of which he is to be the head. The prince is physically
unimposing, though on horseback he looks well enough.
“_At Rome, 24th April._—To Monsignor Stonor’s, who showed me a huge
correspondence he has been having with O’Shea on the subject of a libel
committed on him by Dr. McCormack, Bishop of Galway, O’Shea having
appealed to the Pope. There was one specially interesting letter he gave
me to read. It related to Parnell’s doings with Chamberlain in 1885, and
his acceptance of a local government scheme, also to the part played by
O’Shea, Dr. O’Dwyer, and Cardinal Manning in the appointment of Dr.
Walsh to the Archbishopric of Dublin. They had all, according to the
letter, guaranteed Dr. Walsh as a sound champion of law and order. ‘Law
and Order,’ however, meant another thing in 1885 from what it has meant
since. Monsignor Stonor says that Cardinal Moran was already appointed
to Dublin and on his way from Australia to Rome, when his nomination was
reversed and Dr. Walsh appointed instead. He laments now the ignorance
of the Vatican, which sees in Ireland only a faithful Catholic land
oppressed by a Foreign Government. I am staying on at the Minerva, Anne
and Judith having gone home straight from Naples.
“_25th April._—To the Irish College where I saw my old friend the
Monsignore Rector, who spoke despondingly of Ireland, praying only that
God’s will might be done. Not so Prior Glyn and Archbishop Walsh whom I
next saw. They are very confident of beating Parnell out of Ireland, and
winning the English elections (next year); if not they agree that the
cause of Home Rule is hopeless, for Irish America would not continue to
support a parliamentary struggle, but would fall back on secret
societies and assassination. Dr. Walsh estimates Parnell’s party in
Ireland after the elections at sixteen out of a total of eighty Home
Rule Members. Prior Glyn’s last words to me were ‘We shall meet again at
College Green when the Parliament is opened.’
“_28th April._—Called on Dufferin at the Embassy, who showed me a number
of drawings he had made in former times, including one of his mother,
done at Athens in the year of our first acquaintance, 1859. He talked a
good deal on Eastern subjects, but he skilfully avoided politics, making
it clear that he wished the visit to be one of friendship only.”
At Paris I stayed four days, principally with the Lyttons, the talk of
the day being of the French failure at Tonkin.
“_30th April._—To a coiffeur in the Rue de la Paix to be trimmed and
washed and combed after the fashion of the country. The man who attended
me was very voluble, having been a soldier in Tonkin and a blood-thirsty
one to boot, by his own showing. ‘Ah, Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘quel
gouvernement que le notre, un gouvernement qui ne sait rien faire
marcher. Figurez vous qu’on vous envoie des civils pour gouverner la
Colonie, des hommes de science qui s’imaginent que tous les hommes sont
frères. Ce n’est pas cela qu’il faut à la Colonie, en agissant avec des
brutes il faut être brutal. Si j’avais été nommé gouverneur pendant un
mois seulement, j’aurais exterminé tout ce monde Tonquinois. Il faut les
assommer, Monsieur, comme fait le gouvernement Anglais aux Indes. Voilà
un gouvernement qui a la main raide; c’est ce qu’il faudrait à nos
colonies.’ He asked me whether I was not of his opinion. I said,
‘Perhaps not quite.’”
On my arrival a few days later in London I had a momentary hope about
Egypt, seeing it announced in the “Times” (13th May) that the Riaz
Ministry had resigned. I had heard the news the night before from Rivers
Wilson, and was full of hope that the new men who, the “Times” said,
were to take their place would be of the Fellah Party, but the hope was
speedily dispelled, as it proved to be merely a shifting of places, no
single member of the new Ministry being of the National Party or of the
native fellah class. Also Lord Salisbury, 21st May, made a speech about
Egypt, which seemed to exclude all thought of preparing for evacuation.
It put an end for a while to my pleading for the Egyptian cause, except
with my few political friends, Evelyn, Labouchere, Auberon Herbert, and
Sir Wilfrid Lawson. Soon after this:
“_2nd June._—I saw Sir William Gregory in London, who was interesting
himself in the hoped-for return to Egypt of the Ceylon exiles. We agreed
that Lord Salisbury was hopeless, and that we had better put Labouchere
on our Egyptian business, so to Labouchere I went. He has moved into a
delightful house in Old Palace Yard exactly opposite the Houses of
Parliament. I met him on the doorstep just coming in from the House, in
an old skull-cap which he wears instead of hat, and he took me in to
luncheon. We talked about Egypt, as to which he has always been sounder
than any other politician except Randolph. I was glad to find that he
was not prepared to evacuate _unconditionally_, but intended, when the
Liberals came into power, to get Egypt neutralised, and I think he will
serve us better than anyone else can. ‘If you have any influence with
the French,’ he said, ‘get them to propose terms of neutralization.’ I
explained to him what the position in Egypt was. He was very amusing
about the actual state of the Liberal party, ‘Gladstone in his dotage
pulled this way by one and that way by another. They don’t expect a
dissolution until next year, but hope to keep the old man alive like the
Tycoon of Japan, even after he is dead.’ All agree that there will be a
general break up in the party when Gladstone dies. Labouchere is looking
old, he tells me he is fifty-eight, but I trust he may last long enough
some day to lead his party.”
With Lawson I had a long talk, June the 4th, and “found him nearly as
much a pessimist about the human race as I have become. In England he
looks to the advent of a really democratic parliament as a last chance,
beyond which, if it fails, there is nothing to hope.” With Morris, too,
whom I again saw much of, I found the same political despondency. He had
just published his “News from Nowhere.” “The picture he draws in it of
social communism is pretty, but he, too, is not very hopeful of its ever
coming true. I am determined now to get on with my ‘Secret History of
the Invasion of Egypt,’ so as to have it ready for publication when
Gladstone comes back to office. My old friend, too, Eddy Hamilton, I
saw. I found him occupying the ground floor rooms of No. 10, Downing
Street. His sitting room is that in which the Cabinet Councils have
always been held, and many a scurvy decision been come to in the last
hundred years.” Hamilton was now permanent official head of the
Treasury, and the rooms had been lent him by Lord Salisbury who did not
occupy them. He was suffering, however, with the disease, creeping
paralysis, of which some years later he died, and we did not talk much
on Egypt or on politics.
In my disappointment about Egypt I turned with redoubled zest to my
social pleasures of the year before, and at this time saw much of that
interesting group of clever men and pretty women known as the “Souls,”
than whom no section of London Society was better worth frequenting,
including as it did all that there was most intellectually amusing and
least conventional. It was a group of men and women bent on pleasure,
but pleasure of a superior kind, eschewing the vulgarities of racing and
card-playing indulged in by the majority of the rich and noble, and
looking for their excitement in romance and sentiment. But this is not
the place in which to describe the life we led, though it well deserves
being eternalized in print. It harmonized well with my literary work,
and the verses I was preparing for a new edition of the “Sonnets and
Songs of Proteus.” This William Morris had proposed to print as one of
the earliest volumes of the Kelmscott Press, and I was much with him in
connection with it.
“_10th June._—There is a great turmoil in the papers about Lord
Salisbury’s Treaty or Agreement with Italy in 1887. It appears now that
King Humbert told Prince Napoleon about it, and at last it has come out.
This coincides with the change of policy in Egypt, and the determination
to remain there.” [This Agreement, which has never been officially
admitted by our Foreign Office, related to an intended seizure by Italy
of Tripoli, and a promise that England would help Italy if it led to a
quarrel between her and France. The reality of the agreement, however,
has since been acknowledged by Crispi in his Memoirs.]
To London in the evening and dined in Park Lane (a small dinner arranged
by George Wyndham, in which I was to meet Arthur Balfour and bury the
hatchet with him of our Irish quarrel). The party consisted of George
and his wife, Lady Clifden’s daughter, Miss Ellis, Mrs. Hardinge, Lord
Edmund Talbot, Bo Grosvenor (Lord Ebury), Charles Gatty, with Balfour
and me. It was a pleasant party, and after the ladies had left we stayed
on talking till past one o’clock. I had not met Balfour since my Irish
campaigning, and we did not talk politics, discussing instead
literature, and especially the influence of Arabia on the Middle Ages.
Balfour was agreeable and the conversation brilliant, and he showed
especial amiability to me as if to make up for past severities, offering
me a place in his brougham to go home in when we went away. Why, indeed,
should we quarrel? He has mitigated his prison rigours in Ireland and I
am aloof from politics.
“_11th July._—Arabi’s case has been brought forward in Parliament by
Labouchere, and the Foreign Office answer is fairly satisfactory.
Ferguson says that the Government has uttered no _non possumus_ about
the exiles, and is seeing what can be done.
“All the world is agog just now about the visit of the German Emperor to
London, and the Liberals are just as absurd (in their adulation) as the
Tories. I met Justin McCarthy to-day in the street with his son Huntly,
and walked some way with them. They were jubilant about the Carlow
election and Parnell’s collapse, but Huntly told me he did not intend to
come forward again in Parliament, but would stick to literature. His
talk about Egypt was quite in the Imperialistic vein, justifying what I
have always predicted that the Irish, once free, would be more English
than the English in enslaving the weaker nations.
“_15th July._—To see Cardinal Manning, taking with me a basket of roses
from Crabbet for his birthday, of which I was reminded by Hedgecock’s
remark in the morning that to-day was ‘Swithums.’ The old man is less
infirm, I thought, and we talked politics and literature. He told me of
two new poets, Symons and Mrs. King. He is satisfied with the way things
are going in Ireland, and asked me what I thought of the Pope’s Labour
Encyclical. It is, in truth, a rather colourless pronouncement, saying
too little.
“_6th Aug._—At Coombe, where I heard from Bertram Currie the history of
the Baring financial crisis, and the part he had played in averting its
being an absolute crash. The collapse was due to Revelstoke’s having
gambled outside the line of his ordinary business. He had had his head
turned by the million he had made over the Guinness affair, and he had
come to think that everything he touched must turn to gold, and he went
on to his ventures in South America, which let him in. The House of
Baring would have broken altogether if he, Bertram, had not got the Bank
of England to secure its liabilities for a million and taken half a
million himself and persuaded Lord Rothschild as late as six o’clock in
the evening to take another. The prospects in South America are bad, as
things there do not settle down and Ned [Revelstoke] has only £500 a
year settled income. [This was a case that had made an immense sensation
in the City. But the House of Baring has happily survived it.]
“_7th August._—Lunched at Kelmscott House when Mrs. Morris took me to
see the printing. Morris’s own poems were being struck off, most
beautiful they are with their rubrics. The sheet I saw being printed
contained the Ballad of John a Wood.”
This also of nearly the same date relates to the Kelmscott Press. “Had
supper with Morris and his wife and her sister, Miss Burden, and a Mr.
Walker [Emery Walker], who helps in the printing work. Morris was busy
drawing a title-page for his ‘Golden Legend’ and there were some sheets
of his new volume of poems, which is to be uniform with the volume he is
printing for me. He was immensely pleased when I told him that I had
read his ‘News from Nowhere,’ and that Anne also had read it. He gave an
amusing account of an old house ‘that that fellow Watts (the painter)
had been daubing over. But a coat of whitewash,’ he said, ‘would soon
set that right.’ I told him in return about George Wyndham’s visit to
Swinburne at Putney, a few months ago, when the other Watts, Theodore
Watts-Dunton, had insisted on talking politics with him instead of
literature, to George’s disgust, and how it had ended in Watts reading
out his own poems instead of letting Swinburne read his. Watts, George
tells me, keeps Swinburne prisoner, as a keeper keeps a lunatic. He had
explained to George that some years ago he had found Swinburne in bed,
dying of what is called ‘drunkard’s diarrhœa,’ and that having got him
round, he now considers Swinburne as his own property, and treats him
like a naughty boy, ‘a case,’ said George, ‘for police interference.’
Morris was greatly amused at this.”
The month of September saw me in Scotland for a fortnight’s grouse
shooting at Castle Menzies, which had been rented for the season by my
friends the Wagrams, where I had the advantage of meeting a number of
French royalists who were staying there to pay their court to the Comte
de Paris, who rented a moor close by, the Broglies, the Jaucourts, and
the Hautpouls, as well as Count Mensdorff, afterwards Austrian
Ambassador in London. With these I made friends, and also had more than
one opportunity of seeing the Comte and Comtesse de Paris and their
beautiful daughter, Princess Hélène, who was at one time so nearly
marrying the heir to our own English throne, and who afterwards married
the Duke of Aosta (I had already met her once before at the Wagrams’).
My diary describes the life led by these most worthy Pretenders to the
throne of France in their summer Highland home thus:
“_13th Sept. Sunday._—We drove over to Loch Kinnaird, a lovely place in
a fir wood high up on the moors. The house is a wooden one without any
kind of pretension. The inside of varnished deal, no upper story, no
garden, and no attempt at beautifying inside or out. There we found the
Comte de Paris, a lean, bent, grisly-bearded man, on the wrong side of
middle age, undistinguished in appearance or manner, though courteous
and amiable, difficult to recognize as the descendant of French kings or
the representative of divine right in the world. His Queen, a masculine,
plain woman.
“With them, the flower of their wilderness, Princesse Hélène de France
et de Navarre, a tall, very tall, slight girl of immense charm and
distinction, whom I taught to play lawn tennis at Castle Menzies three
years ago. She remembered it well and was very nice to me in her
greeting. She poured out tea for us, and we all sat down to it, a
regular meal in the dining-room. The little conversation I had with the
Comte de Paris was only about shooting.” I saw them again on the 15th,
when they came to Castle Menzies for a great _chasse_ of blue hares on
Shehallion. “It was close opposite Shehallion on the tops of the hills,
and to these the hares were driven, poor timorous beasts of the blue
mountain kind. We got four hundred of them, a terrible massacre. The
party consisted of the Comte and Comtesse de Paris, with three French
gentlemen of their suite, of Wagram, the Prince de Broglie, Lord
Crawford and his son Balcarres, Algy Grosvenor, Godfrey Webb, Needham,
and me. The Comtesse de Paris shoots well. I walked the last two miles
across the moor with her and saw her kill a brace of strong flying
driven grouse in excellent style. She marches over the heather like a
grenadier, shouts at the beaters, and jokes in rough country fashion
with those near her. The Comte is equally without pretence. They are
addressed as Monseigneur and Madame—sometimes, but rarely, as
Altesse—their conversation a long sequence of royal commonplace. They
are full of _bonhomie_. Coming to the high road on our way home a gipsy
woman stopped the Count, and he gave her two sixpences.
“_20th Sept._—At 1, came the Comte and Comtesse de Paris, and the little
Princess looking lovely in a hat with pink flowers. I was put next her
at luncheon, and we talked all the time, Balcarres being on her right
hand. We talked about the East, and she promised to come to Egypt and
that I should be her dragoman and take her to Mount Sinai. She told me
about her life at home at Stowe, where she rides and hunts with the Duke
of Grafton’s hounds, and at Loch Kinnaird where she walks about the
hills alone each summer with her dogs. I asked her, ‘Have you no
governess with you?’ ‘I should like to see the governess,’ she said,
‘who would undertake to look after me.’ And she looked proudly out of
her blue eyes. In Spain, where they spend part of their winters near
Seville, they hunt wild camels on horseback. We talked, too, about her
brother, the Duc d’Orléans’ imprisonment at Paris, and mine in Ireland.”
On my way back south I paid a first visit to the Glen, where most of the
Tennant family were assembled, though Margot was away. Lucy and Charty,
however, were there, and I made great friends with old Lady Tennant, a
quiet little old lady, very well dressed, active and alert, whom I found
exceedingly pleasant and conversable, with a heart overflowing with
kindness. She showed me a book about Souls, which gives diagrams of the
various kinds of souls, the surface soul, the deep soul, and the mixed
soul, half-clever, half-childish (the book had something to do, I think,
with the name given to the set of which her daughters were such notable
members).
“Talking about Gladstone, she tells me that Gladstone’s grandfather
lived in this neighbourhood at Peebles. He was a baker, spelling his
name Gladstanes, but known locally as ‘licht bap,’ on account of his
selling his bread at false weight, ‘bap’ being the name of a kind of
loaf. After luncheon we all drove to Traquhair, an interesting old house
much fallen into decay, the present owner taking no interest in it. We
were shown over the rooms by his brother, who might have been one of
Scott’s Osbaldistones. The family pedigrees were lying littered round
the library, hardly legible for damp.
“_30th Sept._—To Kelmscott Manor, to wish the Morrises good-bye for the
winter. It was very perfect weather and we did our gudgeon fishing and
took our walks as usual there. Jenny is better than she has been for
several years. Her devotion to her father is most touching and his to
her. Morris in high feather. He read us out several of his poems of his
best, including ‘The Haystack in the Floods,’ but his reading is without
the graces of elocution. He did it as if he were throwing a bone to a
dog, at the end of each piece breaking off with ‘There, that’s it,’ as
much as to say, ‘You may take it or leave it, as you please.’ He is to
lecture on art at Birmingham on Friday. Politically he is in much the
same position as I am. He has found his Socialism impossible and
uncongenial, and has thrown it wholly up for art and poetry, his earlier
loves. I fancy I may have influenced him in this.”
The early autumn saw me once more in Paris, where the unrest of the
military party which had given Boulanger his chance two years before, a
chance which he had failed to take, had given place to apathy. “Poor
Boulanger,” I write, 1st October, “has blown his brains out over the
grave of Madame Bonnemain. Politically he was already defunct, and this
is a graceful and dramatic exit”; and a week later, “Parnell is dead.”
Here I spent my time, as usual, mostly at the Embassy, where Lady
Salisbury was staying with her daughter, Lady Gwendolen, and her sister-
in-law, Lady Galloway, both very charming women. Lady Salisbury, too,
was clever with much dry wit. I find the following in my journal: “I sat
between Lady Salisbury and Lady Galloway to-night at dinner, and during
it she told us a story of a visit she had paid long ago to old Lady
Palmerston, and how Lady Palmerston had said to her, _à propos_ of the
bondage of social observances: ‘My dear you will some day be in my
position (of Prime Minister’s wife), and when you are I advise you to
pay no visits at all.’ ‘So I never pay any,’ she said, ‘except to the
Foreign Ambassadresses. Of course,’ she added, ‘I don’t include those of
the South American Republics or any others of the people who live up
trees.’”
The question of the evacuation of Egypt was being a good deal discussed
at that time in Paris, as the French Government, suspecting Lord
Salisbury of the intention, he in fact had, of making the Occupation
there more permanent, was beginning to give trouble, and I found both
Lytton and Egerton, first Secretary of the Embassy, an old friend of
mine, who did much of the work of the Embassy, and had been acting as
Chargé d’Affaires during Lytton’s absence on leave during the summer,
anxious to hear what I had to say on the subject, and I discussed it
thoroughly with both. I had learned from my Egyptian friend, Sanua, who
had just been at Constantinople and had had an interview with Sultan
Abdul Hamid, that the Sultan had declared positively to him that he
would take action to enforce the evacuation. There was a perfect
understanding now between the Turkish Government and the French,
probably also the Russian Government, who had repented the pressure they
had put upon Abdul Hamid to prevent his ratifying the Wolff Convention,
and were pressing the Sultan to re-open the question. Lytton, poor
fellow, had returned to Paris from a cure he had been taking in England,
very seriously ill, and the doctors had enjoined upon him complete
idleness, a remedy which would involve his giving up his Embassy, but he
was interested in what I told him, and asked me to write him a
memorandum on the whole subject of Egypt, and especially that I should
discuss it with Egerton. This I did and found Egerton strongly in favour
of my views. “To my surprise he told me that he was in favour of
evacuating Egypt seeing the pledges that had been given. ‘We have
managed,’ he said, ‘to set everybody there against us except that stupid
fool the Khedive who counts for nothing,’ and urged me strongly not only
to write but to publish my memorandum, if only anonymously in the
‘Times.’” Later (the same day, 27th October) I saw George Curzon who is
staying in Paris with Condy Stephens. He, Curzon, of course, talks all
the other way, and says the whole Conservative party will oppose
evacuation tooth and nail. I breakfasted with him, Oscar Wilde, and
Willy Peel, on which occasion Oscar told us he was writing a play in
French to be acted in the Français. He is ambitious of being a French
Academician. We promised to go to the first representation, George
Curzon as Prime Minister. A day or two later, with Lytton’s approval and
Egerton’s, I gave my memorandum to Blowitz (the “Times” correspondent),
and it appeared in due course in the “Times” without my name, and
accompanied with a leading article. Lord Salisbury, however, had already
made up his mind, and in a new speech reiterated his intention to remain
in Egypt. “Lytton,” I write, 11th November, “is delighted with Lord
Salisbury’s boldness in refusing to evacuate. Egerton says it is
foolhardy.”[3]
It is worth noting that, if Egerton’s view had prevailed, and our
quarrel with France had then been solved on the basis of our evacuating
Egypt, it would in all probability have forestalled the mistake made
twelve years later of effecting the reconciliation, through the fatal
error of basing it on “compensating” France by encouraging her seizure
of Morocco. The Entente with France, begun in 1904 by an act of
aggression on a harmless neighbour, involved France necessarily in a
quarrel with Germany, who had earmarked Morocco as her share of the
plunder of North Africa; it revived at Paris the half-forgotten dream of
a _guerre de revanche_ for Alsace-Lorraine, and strengthened the war
party on both sides the Rhine. England it involved in the Entente with
Russia, cemented with the betrayal of a second weak Mohammedan state,
Persia, and drove progressive Turkey, in fear of a third betrayal, into
an alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm.
I left Paris a few days later for Rome and Cairo. During the fortnight
that I had been at the Embassy, Lytton’s condition had rapidly grown
worse, and when, on the 13th of November, I was taken in to where he lay
in bed to say good-bye, I felt that our farewell might be the last.
“Give my love to Dufferin,” were his last words, “when you are at
Rome—_that_ he always has—and tell him I am a wreck, but do not mean to
make a vacancy yet.” And so we said, God bless you and good-bye. It was
less than a fortnight later (25th November, at Fogliano) that a telegram
reached me, forwarded through Lord Dufferin at Rome, from Paris, telling
me that my friend had died. His death was a loss I can hardly estimate,
and to many more than me, for by the public in Paris it was looked on as
a State calamity. He had managed to make himself beloved there as no
English ambassador had been since Waterloo, and as Dufferin, who, as had
been expected, succeeded him, with all his great social gifts was never
able to achieve. It was not merely that Lytton was popular, but he was
beloved. His death was a loss to the cause of our good understanding
with France, and I think to Egypt too, for though too pronounced an
Imperialist to wish to see England’s hand over the Nile relaxed, no one
could so well have settled the conditions of an evacuation as Lytton
could have done had it been so decided. And he placed value on my
opinion in the matter.
During the few days I spent at Rome that November I attended a Peace
Congress, to which as member of the acting committee of the Arbitration
and Peace Society I had been invited, but I was very unfavourably
impressed with the Italian tone in regard to international matters where
the rights of non-European nationalities were at stake. The Italians,
like the French and all the Latin races, seemed to me incapable of
grasping the idea, which we in England at any rate admit in theory if
seldom in practice, that the nations outside the community of Christian
civilization have any rights at all. I did not speak on this occasion,
but I left the meeting convinced that the establishment of international
peace if it could be secured for Europe would bode no good for Africa or
Asia, and that as far as these regions of the world were concerned the
old proverb probably held good, “When thieves fall out honest men come
by their own.”
From Fogliano we went straight on without returning to Rome, and so by
the first boat to Alexandria, reaching Sheykh Obeyd on 7th December,
where we spent the rest of the winter.
About the close of the year 1891, I received the following letter from
Sir William Harcourt in answer to one of mine from Paris, inclosing a
copy of my Paris memorandum. As it is of great importance I give it
textually here:
“Malwood, _16th December_ 1891.
“DEAR WILFRID BLUNT,
“I have not written before to thank you for your paper on Egypt, as you
sent me at the time no address. I was greatly impressed by the ability
and moderation of its views, and the fulness with which the question was
discussed in every aspect. I forwarded it to John Morley, who entirely
concurred with me, in the high opinion I had formed of its merits.
“The question is, no doubt, one of great complexity and cannot be
rushed. At the same time I have never varied in my opinion of the
mischief and danger of the continued occupation, as far as England is
concerned, and though probably you will not agree with me I regard this
as by far the most important consideration. It is quite impossible for
the Government to take a high line as to occupation after the Drummond-
Wolff negotiations. The whole thing is summed up in a nutshell by Wolff
in his concluding despatch, after the ratification by the English
Government of the Convention for the Evacuation in 1887, within the
space of three years. He says, ‘It has more than once been suggested
that England should take permanent possession of Egypt. This would have
been a violation of the traditional policy of England, of her good faith
to the Sultan, and of public law. In time of peace it would have exposed
her to constant jealousy and danger. In time of war, it would have been
a weak point, entailing a constant drain on her resources. Her Majesty’s
Government have disclaimed all idea of annexing Egypt or of establishing
a Protectorate over it.’
“This language was approved by Salisbury, and was a deliberate renewal
in the face of Europe of the pledges given in 1881. Salisbury undertook
to ‘guarantee the neutralization of Egypt as the mandatory of the other
Powers, that duty being regarded as a burden rather than a privilege.’
The great mischief, as you properly point out, is that since that period
the policy of Evelyn Baring has been to administer the Government of
Egypt in such a manner as to make it constantly less instead of more
able to stand by itself, and so to make the task of fulfilling our
obligation more rather than less difficult.
“I hope by this time you are enjoying your wild life in the desert. We
are raising our rural tribes here, who are rallying round the Mahdi
Schnadhorst—but I forgot you have sworn off British Politics, a wise
determination to which I advise you to adhere.
“Yrs. sincerely,
“W. V. HARCOURT.”
This is a very important letter, as it indicates doubtless what Mr.
Gladstone’s view at the time was, for Sir William Harcourt and he worked
together on questions of foreign policy. It is also of importance as
showing that John Morley then shared their opinion. It was a combination
of Baring, and of Milner, acting under his direction on the London
Press, with Rosebery, that prevented an honest solution of the Egyptian
question when the Liberals, shortly afterwards, returned to power.