While busy at home, the English had been busy outside of their
island. Five years after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), Lord
Beaconsfield, then the Conservative Prime Minister, bought nearly half
of the canal property from the Governor of Egypt. Since then England
has kept her hand on the country of the Pharaohs and the pyramids, and
kept it there greatly to the advantage of the laboring class.
About ten years later (1881), Arabi Pasha, an ambitious colonel in the
native army, raised the cry, "Down with all foreigners--Egypt for the
Egyptians!" Lord Wolseley defeated Arabi's forces, and the colonel was
banished from the country.
Two years afterwards (1883) a still more formidable rebellion broke
out in the Sudan,--a province held by Egypt. (See map facing p. 428.)
The leader of the insurrection styled himself the Mahdi, or great
Mohammedan Prophet. Then (1884) Gladstone sent General Gordon to
withdraw the Egyptian troops from Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan.
The Mahdi's forces shut up the heroic soldier in that city, and before
help could reach him, he and all his Egyptian troops were massacred.
No braver or truer man ever died at the post of duty, for in him was
fulfilled Wordsworth's eloquent tribute to the "Happy Warrior."[1]
[1] See Wordsworth's poems "The Happy Warrior."
Many years later, Lord Kitchener advanced against the new Mahdi, and
at Omdurman his terrible machine guns scattered the fanatical
Dervishes, or Mohammedan monks, like chaff before the whirlwind. The
next autumn (1899) the British overtook the fugitive leader of the
Dervishes and annihilated his army.
Since then British enterprise, British capital, and American inventive
skill have transformed Egypt. The completion of the great dam across
the Nile, at Assouan (1902), regulates the water supply for lower
Egypt. The creation of this enormous reservoir promises to make the
Nile valley one of the richest cotton-producing regions in the world.
The "Cape to Cairo" railway, which is more than half finished, is
another British undertaking of immense importance. (See map
opposite.) When ready for traffic, through its whole length of nearly
six thousand miles, besides its branch lines, it will open all Eastern
Africa, from the Cape of Good Hope to the Mediterranean, to the spread
of commerce and civilization.