CHAPTER XII

THE WAR WITH GERMANY DECLARED

From this point my diary contains little that is of historical

importance till the breaking out, a year later, of the Great War of

1914. With George Wyndham’s death my most intimate connection with the

parliamentary world ceased, and my mind busied itself more and more with

its local surroundings and with that refuge from sadness, verse, which

has always been its consolation. I therefore end my transcriptions in

their integrity here, and add only to the present volume such few

extracts as may suffice to carry my record of public events to the verge

of the final catastrophe, reserving a full account of the war itself to

yet a third part, still perhaps to come.

To complete my record of the crisis which decided Turkish patriotism to

take definite part with Germany rather than with the Entente Powers in

the coming struggle I will continue to tell it in as few words as

possible.

My latest entries of 1913 show that about the time of George Wyndham’s

death I had satisfied myself that Grey was beginning to see the danger

of his coalition policy against the Central Powers, and was beginning to

look round him for a means of conciliating its War Lord, Kaiser Wilhelm,

in whom the maintenance of peace chiefly lay. These were the days of

Lichnowsky’s Embassy in London a mission which undoubtedly was intended

at Berlin to smooth the diplomatic wheels with us. Lichnowsky was a

quite honourable man and personally friendly to England, but I notice

that in all our English appreciations of him as such he is invariably

claimed as an exception among _Germans_ for this or that good quality,

an enemy witness giving testimony in our favour. This is to exaggerate

and mistake the case. Prince Lichnowsky, a Polish nobleman of ancient

family, though in the German diplomatic service, was no German either by

birth or sentiment, and his friendly feeling for England was that common

to all the Polish aristocracy, and it was for that reason, as also to

conciliate his fellow Poles, that the Kaiser Wilhelm sent him to London

on a friendly mission which he undertook _con amore_. I see no reason

for doubting that Wilhelm, at that moment, was sincere in wishing to

keep on terms with England. In 1913 he had made up his mind to bring

matters to an issue with France on the very next opportunity rather than

submit to any new rebuff, such as he had sustained at Agadir, but it was

certainly no part of his plan to have England on his hands again as well

as France and Russia. It is altogether improbable that he was seeking a

quarrel just then with us, whatever he might dream as to an eventual

trial of strength with us at sea.

It is, I believe, quite a mistake to suppose Kaiser Wilhelm otherwise

than personally well inclined to England. He liked English society, and

his summer visits to Cowes more than anything he could find on the

Continent, and he enjoyed being adulated by our aristocracy. He had far

rather have had England with him than against him; but he resented our

Foreign Office having allied itself with his two most dangerous enemies,

Russia on his eastern, France on his western, frontier. Nor, in my

opinion, was the resentment unjustified. Our policy of helping the

Russian Czar financially after his defeat by the Japanese, and so

enabling the Czar to renew his military strength, seemed to Wilhelm a

gratuitous menace as obliging him to increase his own army on that side,

while our Entente about Persia seemed a menace to the development of his

commercial plans connected with the Bagdad railway. Nor, doubtless, was

it unknown to him that part of our plan was that Russia should be put in

possession of Constantinople, and thus permanently block for Germany her

trade route eastwards. All this added to our support of France in

Morocco, was resented at Berlin, and as I have said, not without

reasonable cause.

This, however, is not the same thing as saying that a war between

England and Germany was inevitable sooner or later through the Kaiser

Wilhelm’s designs against us. I am convinced that even so late as June

1913 not only our own peace, but the peace of Europe might have been

saved for an undefined period had we then found a statesman at the

Foreign Office possessed as Grey was of the ear of the House of Commons,

but with better knowledge of Europe and of the true needs of our Eastern

Empire, and with the courage of acting on his knowledge. Such a one

might have insisted on a withdrawal from the false position we had taken

in Egypt and at Constantinople through our ill-omened Ententes with

France and Russia, chief enemies, both of them, of Germany, and also of

that Mohammedan world with which we were so closely connected in India,

and so have averted all that happened to ourselves and others. The gain,

if it had only been of a few years longer peace between France and

Germany, would have given time for the socialistic forces in either

country to gather strength, and if it had been openly known, that

England would take no part in it, France certainly would not have

invited war for Alsace-Lorraine or given that excuse to Germany by

making Russia’s quarrel with Austria her own over so small a wrong as

Servia’s.

For, be it understood, the Great War which has destroyed all Europe and

half destroyed ourselves, was essentially in its origin an Eastern, not

a Western War, and the inclusion in it of Turkey to its immense

prolongation was due to our blundering diplomacy at Constantinople. Had

England been reasonably ambassadored there and free in her dealings with

the Porte from the evil counsels of her sad confederate the Czar, it is

impossible she should have failed to retain the Ottoman goodwill, once

so strong for her and even as lately as the days of the revolution of

1908. But Egypt always had forbidden. The obstinacy of remaining on in

occupation there in spite of right and law and promises, and now the

Russian partnership, which regarded the dispute in the Balkans with

Russian eyes and the dismemberment of Turkey as a crusade—these were the

true obstacles to peace. That Grey was beginning in the early summer of

1913, as I have said, to suspect the danger of general war to which his

policy of Entente was leading in the East there are several indications,

and I give here a single entry from my diary, the last of importance of

that year:

“_11th June._—H. arrived, bringing the ill news of Shefket Pasha’s

assassination at Constantinople. This is, doubtless, the result of the

Russian intrigue there, Shefket being head of the Young Turk Party, and

the most capable military leader of the Independent Ottoman policy

allied with Germany. How far our diplomacy is responsible for the deed I

cannot say. Grey seems of late to have withdrawn from his Russian

Alliance, but Fitzmaurice’s influence is probably still supreme at our

Embassy, and one cannot help remembering that the intrigue of a year ago

which caused Shefket’s resignation of the Ministry of War and replaced

Kiamil in power, was an Anglo-Russian intrigue, also that it closely

preluded the Balkan war. I connect the present assassination with

Kiamil’s return the other day to Constantinople. Kiamil arrived there

suddenly, and though allowed to land, was kept by Shefket, a prisoner in

his own house, till he could be shipped back to Smyrna, whence he had

come. This new _coup d’état_ would seem to synchronize with the re-

opening of the war in the Balkans, Russia’s object being, as always, to

prevent any settlement of the Turkish question which should keep her

fleet permanently out of the Mediterranean. This may be the first move

in it. H——, who has just come from Paris, declares that people there all

believe in the imminence for them of an European War.”

The assassination of Shefket Pasha here recorded proved a great

misfortune for the chances of that peaceful period which I was hoping

for for the Caliphate, in order to give the Young Turk’s régime at

Constantinople time to consolidate its administration and effect its

reforms on a basis of Liberal pan-Islamism, which I had come to see was

the only possible one for an Empire so divided in race and speech as was

the Ottoman, and where the bond of nationality had for so many centuries

been replaced by those of religion, the largest section of the

population being Mohammedan. Religion was the only strong sentiment, at

any rate, which could re-establish Turkey as a virile community able to

defend itself against its many enemies, and everything else was

secondary to that. It was the true reason why, when it came to a choice

between alliance with Kaiser Wilhelm and trust in English goodwill,

Young Turkey necessarily chose the first. Grey, with Russia prompting

him, had nothing better to propose than disarmament and economy in an

emasculated State sterilized of all religious ardour. This the Young

Turks saw could only prove slow death to them, while alliance with

Germany, a military Power which offered to reconstruct their army for

them and restock their arsenals, gave them at least a chance of new

national life. All the patriotic Turks whom I came in contact with gave

me this account of it. The German Government, they said, does not seek

our dismemberment, it wishes us to be strong. What it wants of us is not

political but commercial advantage, whereas Russia wants political

possession of our provinces, while you at the English Embassy, so far as

you wish us good, wish it for the Christian section of our people only.

And this was true. Our Embassy at Constantinople in Lowther’s day had

been, and still was in 1913, under the influence of Fitzmaurice, the

Embassy chief dragoman who saw things through the spectacles of the

Christian Missionary Societies, as did such of our Radicals in

Parliament as took an interest in Turkey. Grey’s Eastern policy, the

Young Turks perfectly understood, was before all else an anti-Islamic

policy, and this struck at their one surviving element of strength. They

preferred to trust Kaiser Wilhelm’s pagan attitude, and his promise of

protecting Islam, made on his Syrian tour, and more than once renewed.

What was a special misfortune in Shefket’s death was that he, unlike

Talaat Pasha, who succeeded him as Vizier, was a sincere Moslem of the

Liberal school which understood the necessity of uniting all the Ottoman

forces in a common pan-Islamic patriotism. He was their most capable

soldier, too, and his loss universally ascribed to the Anglo-Russian

party acting under Kiamil, England’s _protégé_, though it did not result

in Kiamil’s recapture of the Vizierate, placed sole power with those who

by their racial arrogance had driven Arabia into rebellion against the

Sultan. I do not, of course, suppose that our Embassy was cognizant of

the design to assassinate Shefket. Crimes of this sort are outside the

range of English diplomatic activities. But the plot to restore Kiamil

was probably known, while a much larger responsibility may have lain

with the Russian Embassy. The curse of Grey’s policy of Entente with the

Czar in Asiatic affairs is, that it involved us in practices of violence

foreign to our English traditions.

Moreover Grey, as recorded in my Diary, was at that time becoming aware

of the danger, and was seeking to relax his solidarity with Russia’s

action in the East, and to get on less hostile terms with Berlin in the

West. These were the days when an attempt was being made to settle the

Bagdad railway quarrel with Germany. It failed through this very cause,

the objection of Russia to our recognizing any extension of German

rights in that direction as likely to prejudice extensions of her own

‘sphere of influence’ in Persia—this and, in our dealings with the

Porte, our insistence on remaining in Egypt.

My Diary contains nothing more of importance during that year. I

continued to receive letters from India, telling me of Moslem gratitude

for my work in placing the true nature of Grey’s anti-Islamic policy

before them, and assuring me of its success in counteracting the

officially inspired utterances of the Agha-Khan on the subject, and

asking me for advice as to the attitude they should assume, and this led

me to write a long letter to one of them, the concluding paragraphs of

which, as it had a wide circulation in the Mussulman community, I may

print here. My concluding words were as follows, dated 28th July, 1913:

“The duty of the Mohammedan community of India, therefore, under the

circumstances, seems to me to be pretty clearly marked out. As regards

Persia, Afghanistan, and the still independent provinces of the Ottoman

Caliphate menaced by Christendom, a courageous public attitude should be

adopted, which should let our Government clearly understand that Indian

sympathy with these is so strong that it will not permit any further

participation by England in attacks made on them, and that none such can

be indulged in without the certainty of incurring the dangerous

resentment of every Moslem subject of the King. Let there, when

complicity in these attacks is suspected, be no hesitation in denouncing

it. Let there be no such milk-and-water appeals to the Government’s

better feeling as allowed Sir Edward Grey two years ago to treat the All

India Moslem League with contempt when he made himself the accomplice of

France and Italy in their invasions of Morocco and Tripoli, but plain

language of the most indignant kind, worthy of the force of 80,000,000

Moslems behind it, and which it represents. In this way only can their

duty to their co-religionists outside India be performed effectively.

“Besides this, they have another duty to themselves within the borders

of the Indian Empire, taking an active part in that of preparing for the

great changes which are most surely coming there, as throughout all

Asia. You know that from the very beginning of the Congress movement in

1884, I urged on the Indian Moslems that they should take part in it

with the Hindoos, and I am therefore rejoiced to-day to learn that it

has at last been decided that the policy of abstention recommended in

opposition to my advice by the late Seyd Ahmed of Aligarh, and so long

followed, should cease. Much ground has been lost, I fear, by this long

period of inaction, but it is ground that can be recovered, and I trust

now to see the Mohammedan body taking its full share in the movement for

self-government. What it is necessary to insist on is the danger of

delay. Time needs to be taken by the forelock, lest while you are

waiting the British Empire should collapse prematurely, and find the

machinery of a native administration which is to replace it not yet

ready for its work. This would be a great misfortune. Indeed, I will go

so far as to say that in Mohammedan interests the imperial connection

between England and India should be prolonged rather than shortened, and

in this sense the Moslem subjects of King George may well continue to

display their loyalty. It is another thing, however, to be what is

called loyal to the existing régime of the Anglo-Indian Civil Service.

The servile attitude of helping this alien body to maintain itself in

place and power against all native effort at self-government is neither

dignified nor profitable, and will not in reality serve the interests

even of the Empire, for nothing is more certain than that the only way

in which the English connection with India can be placed on a basis of

any permanence is, by obtaining the consent of the Indian peoples, and

their active zeal in administering their country under its imperial

shield. As self-governing Colonies the provinces of British India might

survive many a shock under which the Indian Empire, as now administered,

must certainly succumb.

“My present motto, therefore, for Indian patriotism, Mohammedan and

Hindoo alike, would be ‘Loyalty to the Imperial Crown but insistence on

self-government under it.’ And these are, in all probability, the last

words of advice on Eastern matters I shall presume to utter in any

public form. If you should think them worthy of a wider consideration

than that of just yourself or your personal friends, you are at liberty

to publish them, but that point I leave to yourselves to judge. And so

may God prosper you and hasten the day of Islamic and Asiatic

independence.”

This letter, part of which was published in India, was instrumental, to

a large measure, in causing the resignation which took place in

November, of the Agha Khan, my principal opponent, of his position in

the All Moslem League of India, an event which synchronized with an

apology made at home by Grey on the shortcomings of his Eastern

diplomacy. A short entry of that date, says: “The truth is, no foreign

policy ever more completely failed. My work has been to put all the dots

upon the i’s in a way that has convinced Mohammedan India that the Agha

Khan and Ameer Ali, who have been preaching loyalty to the British

Empire, are blind guides leading to an impotent result.”

Again, two months later, I find myself writing to the “Westminster

Gazette,” warning our English peace lovers of the futility of their

trust in the so-called “Concert of Europe,” armed to the teeth, under

Grey’s un-armed leadership, in preventing the coming European war. It

was my last appearance in print, and I have remained silent since,

notwithstanding solicitations to speak not a few times during these

astonishing five years of fighting folly, and white man’s suicide,

knowing I should be powerless while the war fever lasted, to obtain a

hearing for a word of truth in a world of illusion befooled, but happy

in its patriotic blindness.

The year 1913 closes with this personal lament: “I am alone just now

here and in this dark world I am overwhelmed with woe. I see myself as

one sees the dead, a thing finished which has lost all its importance,

whatever it once had in the world. I realize how little I have

accomplished, how little I have affected the thought of my generation in

spite, as I am still convinced, of the soundness of my view of things,

and of some skill and courage in expounding it. I have made almost no

converts in Europe, and am without a single disciple at home to continue

my teaching after I am dead. Even in the East, though my ideas are

bearing fruit and will one day be justified in act, I have founded no

personal school where my name has authority. The consciousness that it

is so wounds me with a sense of failure and I despise myself the more

for feeling it as strongly as I do. Why should I mind? I ask myself, and

I find no answer. Perhaps the immediate cause of my gloom has been a

life of Gobineau which has been sent me by a Dr. Schemann. Gobineau was

in some ways like myself, a man of ideas opposed to those of his own

people and his own generation, and who, though his talent was recognized

as a writer, failed to find disciples in France. He was an aristocrat in

a democratic age, an orientalist, out of harmony with received

orientalist ideas, a poet who was never popular, and an artist who was

never more than an amateur. It has been reserved for this little group

of Germans to discover his value twenty and more years after his death,

a discovery due mainly to the devotion of a single disciple, this good

Schemann who has sent his book to me. Gobineau, like me, had his

romantic side. There are many pieces of poetry inserted in their

original French in it, of one of which I made a translation this

morning. It is called “Don Juan’s Good Night,” a pleasant piece of

cynical French wit which deserves to live, perhaps, when the rest is

forgotten.

The Spring of the year 1914 found me, like the rest of our English

world, thinking more of Ireland than of the coming Armageddon. Some of

the vicissitudes of the Irish case are noted in my diary:

“_28th March,_ 1914.—There has been an astonishing crisis in Parliament

over the Ulster business. What has happened is this. Winston and Seely,

at the Admiralty and War Office respectively, seem to have made up their

minds to deal drastically with the Ulster Volunteers, and arranged a

combined movement of sea and land forces to put them down. Of course, it

ought to have been done a year ago, but Redmond persuaded Birrell that

the Ulster movement was all bounce and it was allowed to go on. Now it

has got beyond them and has been taken up on a large scale by English

Unionists, and worked up by the London press and in the army by old Lord

Roberts, and at last they got King George to approve, so it came to pass

that the garrison at the Curragh refused to move when ordered to Belfast

without a guarantee that they should not be used against the Orange

volunteers. This frightened the two Ministers. Seely patched up things

by giving the assurance wanted, and Winston counter-ordered the warships

he was sending to Belfast, whereupon a hullabaloo in the House of

Commons and a Cabinet crisis with the usual lying and denying, which

ended in Seely’s offering to resign as scape-goat for the rest, and

Asquith refusing to accept his resignation, a little comedy played on

much the same lines as that used in the Marconi crisis, Seely admitting

an error of judgment and Winston using swear words to cover their

retreat.

“_31st March._—Asquith appoints himself War Minister in Seely’s place.

“_5th April._—Belloc was here to dinner. Baker, one of Asquith’s private

secretaries, has just explained to him the recent Ulster crisis. The

resolution to send troops in force to Belfast was agreed to by the whole

Cabinet, who also agreed to the letter which was to be written to

General Gough, and they had just dispersed, leaving Seely behind them

with Morley, when Gough’s letter arrived. Seely saw at once that it

meant that something more than the draft agreed to would be needed to

get Gough’s assent, and he added some words, pledging the Government not

to employ the troops actively against Ulster, and Morley only half

understanding what it was all about, agreed to the addition. All then

would have gone well but for Gough’s boasting of having coerced the

Government. Belloc’s view is that Asquith allowed the arming in Ulster

to go on as a way of putting pressure on Redmond to give in politically

and allow a separate Ulster while for the same reason he won’t allow

Catholic Ireland to be armed.

“_7th April._—The Irish Home Rule Bill has passed its second and final

reading by a majority of eighty. This is due to Redmond’s insistence,

for Asquith, Grey, Haldane and the rest of the Whigs in the Cabinet have

been quite ready to throw the Bill over in favour of some scheme of all-

round Devolution, any time since they came into office.

“_26th April (Sunday)._—I am writing a letter in answer to one sent me

from Dublin by Mrs. Colum, asking me to say a word in favour of a plan

of arming Catholic Ireland as a counter demonstration against the arming

of Protestant Ulster, and as a precaution against a possible betrayal of

Home Rule by Asquith.

“It is announced that the United States Fleet has landed troops at Vera

Cruz in Mexico, President Wilson at the same time declaring, in

imitation of Gladstone when he sent troops to Egypt, that he is not

making war with the Mexican Republic, but with a person named Huerta,

who calls himself President of Mexico. Rothstein, whom I saw yesterday,

attributes this to Wilson’s _naïveté_, which believes it possible to

reconcile moral principles of Government with the rascalities of

financial politics.

“_30th April._—My answer to Mrs. Colum is this:

“‘Thank you for the Volunteer Manifesto. You know I have always been a

Fenian in my sympathies, and, though it is twenty-five years since I was

in Ireland and I am living now quite away from politics, I confess it

rouses me to hear talk again of physical force. I never believed much in

the Union of Hearts without a reserve of the other, and a long

experience of British Imperial ways has taught me (if I may be allowed

the bull) that in dealing with British Governments, the best sort of

moral force is always material force. Our people cannot be trusted to go

straight without two strong incentives, money in front of them (like the

carrot in front of an ass) and a big stick behind. The Irish National

Volunteers must be the big stick.

“‘I am not sure whether it will not prove a useful reminder to your own

parliamentary people. Some of them have been talking a deal of Imperial

nonsense lately, and it is time they should remember that until the

Irish Parliament is actually open in College Green, the British Empire

is still _the enemy_. I send you £10 for your Defence of Ireland Fund,

as a small token of my sympathy and a proof that I remain true to the

old motto, “Ireland a nation and as much and well armed a nation as you

can make it.’”

“_14th May._—Sir Roger Casement came to lunch and to talk over the

Volunteer movement in Ireland, of which he is one of the chief

organizers. He had seen my letter to Mrs. Colum, which it appears was

published in a Dublin newspaper, and wished to consult me. He is an

interesting man of the same Irish type as was Michael Davitt, only much

bigger and better looking, still very like him; an Ulsterman, he tells

me, and a Protestant, but his mother was a Catholic, and he now is of no

religious complexion, only a strong Nationalist. He is not in favour

with Redmond, who considers him a dangerous revolutionist, being anti-

imperialist, and opposed to the Parliamentary alliance with the English

Radicals. He holds Dillon greatly responsible for this, and that it

is demoralizing Irish patriotism. Hence his zeal for the Volunteer

movement. He considers that unless the rest of Ireland arms itself as

the north-west of Ulster is arming it will be cheated out of Home Rule.

There are two difficulties in their way, the first is a lack of money;

they have no rich men to help, and secondly, a lack of officers. Of men

there are plenty, ex-soldiers of the British Army, but they are unarmed,

and the question is how to get the arms. He believes if they could

obtain only 5,000 rifles they would be in a position to coerce the

Government. He is working in conjunction with Professor McNeill and has

to be back in Dublin on Saturday. He told us also a good deal about his

Congo experiences and in South America, and described a talk he had had

with King Leopold of Belgium, who had tried to get hold of him when he

was first appointed Consul on the Congo, and of how old Leopold had

managed even to shock Rhodes by the crudity of his ideas of native

exploitation. In describing his interview with Leopold he told how the

old king in tempting him had watched him the whole time through his

fingers, shading his face with his hand. On the whole, Casement’s

statement of the Irish case does not sound to me very encouraging. The

want of funds will prevent any great effect being given to the Volunteer

movement in the South, where they have nobody like Lord Londonderry in

the north to subscribe the thousands needed, nor will the American-Irish

help. These take their view of Irish affairs entirely from Redmond and

the Parliamentary party, and until these last declare themselves in

favour of it, money will not be subscribed. Also, and this seems to me

the most serious side of it, the movement is more one of the towns than

of the country. All the same I wish it well, and if anyone can manage

it, Casement seems to be the man. He is well bred, well educated,

altogether vigorous, and a good talker.”

It is worth noting that in this entry of my conversation with Casement

there is no mention of anything connected with Berlin or European

politics, nor I am sure, was there anything suggesting that his mind was

in that direction. During the following few weeks I received three

letters from him (see Appendix VI) which treat entirely of Irish

affairs. The only thing omitted in the diary that I can recollect was

that we discussed Mrs. O’Shea’s revelations just then being printed in

one of the London papers. Casement’s remark about it was that if the

revelations had been made two years ago there would have been no statue

of Parnell to-day in the streets of Dublin.

“_16th May._—Patrick Butler came for the day, being on leave from

Clonmel. We talked about the National Volunteer movement, with which he

is entirely in sympathy. Butler, however, is alone in his opinion at the

Curragh among the officers there, and says that the army will not act

against the Ulstermen, while it will certainly act against the National

Volunteers. He also says that the three Protestant counties of Ulster

would accept the Emperor William as their king rather than obey the

Dublin Parliament. He is for giving them a separate status, with a

Parliament and an executive of their own, ‘like the Isle of Man,’ I

suggested. That perhaps would be best. In the meanwhile he was emphatic

on the evil being done to the Catholic Irish by the English garrison. He

says that it is no longer the case that the women refuse to have to do

with the English soldiers. On the contrary, it is becoming as bad in

Ireland and worse than in English garrison towns, _corruptio optimi

pessima_, the whole country is being demoralized, especially by the

cheap English papers, with their indecent illustrations. These the

country girls get hold of, for they are sold at every railway station,

and read in secret, sitting under hedges, in spite of the prohibition of

the priests, and so go the way of prostitution. He says it is worse in

Dublin far than in London, girls beginning there at fifteen and sixteen

in the streets. Drink and gambling are destroying the country side. We

talked about the O’Shea revelations. Everybody is reading them all over

Ireland.

“_17th May (Sunday)._—Belloc to dinner. He tells me it is now certain

that Asquith connived all through at the arming of the Ulster

Protestants in order to get out of his agreement with Redmond for

National Home Rule. Asquith has always been in favour of Federal

Devolution for Scotland and Wales as well as Ireland. Now he will

deprive the Home Rule Bill of what little autonomy it gives by an

amending Bill voted in conjunction with the Tories.

“_22nd May._—Dillon writes asking my opinion of Mrs. O’Shea’s book. He

says about the situation in Ireland: ‘I am strongly in favour of the

Volunteer movement, but it is playing with fire, and unless it is kept

under reliable control it might at any moment utterly ruin the national

movement and repeat the disasters of 1798. We are getting a very

exciting, strenuous time here (the House of Commons), but I think we

shall pull through successfully. The forces against us are terrible, and

a Radical Government is always weak and timorous.’

“_26th May._—The Irish Home Rule Bill has passed its final reading in

the House of Commons by a majority of seventy-seven, but without

enthusiasm, as it is threatened with an amending Bill depriving it of

its entire efficacy by giving a full status to the Protestant counties

of Ulster, and so nobody is pleased.

“_28th May._—Mrs. Padriac Colum writes me a long letter about the

Volunteer movement in Ireland and upon the great effect my letter has

had on it. Casement also writes at great length, and the movement,

according to both, is assuming large dimensions.

“_11th June._—About the Volunteer business, which has taken a prodigious

start since I first heard of it a month ago, Dillon says: ‘The Volunteer

business is a VERY serious one. Sir Roger Casement is, I have no doubt,

an excellent and able man, but he knows no more of Irish politics than I

do of the Congo, and Irish politics are no more safe for amateur

idealists to play about in than a powder magazine for children.’

“_20th June._—Dillon arrived for the week end, and we sat up till past

midnight talking. He told me many interesting things. He and Redmond

were in great alarm at the Curragh fiasco, which he says was grossly

mismanaged through the fault principally of General Paget. Dillon

believes that if the men at the Curragh had been simply ordered to

Belfast to preserve order without any explanation or inquiry whether

they were willing they would have obeyed, but the thing was terribly

bungled. He was surprised at what I told him of Butler being the only

officer at the Curragh who was not disaffected to the Government. It was

the Curragh incident that convinced him that the National Volunteers

should be openly supported, for it was beginning to be thought that

nobody in Ireland cared any longer for Home Rule. Indeed, the vehemence

of the feeling in connection with the volunteering had surprised him.

Now the Parliamentary party have regained all their authority both in

Ireland and America. All the same it was a dangerous game they were

playing—arming the whole country.

“_21st June (Sunday)._—Drove with Dillon to Judge Mackarness’s at

Steyning, where we found Sir Henry Cotton, Lajpat Rai and Gupta, all

these being friendly to Home Rule. Dillon gave us his views at length. I

had a long talk with him later about Ireland. He does not think the

Volunteer movement will lead to civil war, though there is always danger

of local riots. On the contrary, he thinks that both sides being armed

will inspire mutual respect. We talked, too, about religion, _à propos_

of his son’s education. His eldest boy, who is eighteen, has just left

Downside, and he is sending him to the new Catholic University at

Dublin. The boy had learned nothing at Downside except to write good

English, and he was unhappy there, being an ardent Home Ruler with all

the other boys opposed to him. Politics was all he cared about. Dillon

has always been against clerical interference with politics, especially

Vatican interference, and succeeded in getting the new University put

under lay management. This has made the Jesuits very hostile to him, and

they spare no occasion of doing him an ill-turn. He is convinced they

are the ruin of every political cause they favour, and have always been

blunderers in public affairs.

“_25th June._—A new expedition is projected in Somaliland. A force is to

be raised at Nairobi to start at the end of the summer. It is to pass

from Nairobi through Abyssinia, or Italian territory, and another

expedition at the same time from Berbera, a punitive affair to avenge

the death of one Corfield, killed last winter by a band of Somalis in

Abyssinia.”

At last we come to the first premonitory thunderclap of the European

storm.

“_30th June._—There has been another assassination, this time of the

heir of the Austrian Emperor. I do not quite know how it affects the

political situation.

“_20th July._—The ‘Times’ to-day announces that the King has invited

eight leading politicians to a conference on Ireland—Asquith, Lloyd

George, Lansdowne, Bonar Law, Redmond, Dillon, Carson, and Craig. This

is a quite new departure, a move probably of the King in conjunction

with the Whig section of the Cabinet—Grey, Haldane, and Winston—and

agreed to by Asquith. I do not expect any great result from it one way

or other, as neither the Nationalists nor the Ulster people are prepared

to give in.

“_22nd July._—Margaret Sackville came down unexpectedly, bringing with

her Ramsay Macdonald, leader of the Labour Party in Parliament, who had

expressed a wish to make my acquaintance. I found him intelligent and

reasonable, with many ideas in common with mine, especially on India,

which he has just been perambulating as member of the Commission of

Inquiry into the Civil Service, and sufficiently anti-Imperialist. He is

a man of forty-five or fifty, and talks with a slight Scotch accent. He

told us some amusing stories of his Indian tour. I had a thorough talk

with him about the situation in Ireland, and gave him as my advice to

have nothing to do with the attempt to compromise on the Ulster

question—‘Let the Ulstermen do their damnedest and get the Government to

arm the National Volunteers.’ He said he believed that if the Conference

at the Palace broke down, which it probably will, the Government would

enrol the Volunteers as a Government force, and arm them and use them to

keep order if the Ulstermen broke it. He told me he had been approached

about having an invitation as Leader of the Labour Party to the

Conference, but had not encouraged the idea. He does not think the King

will refuse his consent to the Home Rule Bill if the Amendment Bill is

thrown out. If there is a dissolution in October the Liberals will fail

to get a majority. He has no high opinion of Grey’s intelligence, but

considers him sure of Asquith’s succession, as he has a great hold over

Liberals in the House of Commons. If Grey were to leave the Government

on the Ulster question, the Liberal party would be split in two, while

it would not matter if Winston resigned; Grey was indispensable. Of

Lloyd George he has a mean opinion, a very high one of Dillon. I asked

him whether if the democracy really got into power in England the Labour

party and the Socialists would continue to be anti-Imperialist. He said:

‘I think they would, but I understand your doubt.’

“_24th July._—The Conference at Buckingham Palace has failed. A much

more important matter is an ultimatum addressed by the Austrian

Government to Servia, which may very likely lead to real war between

Austria and Russia.

“_26th July (Sunday)._—The quarrel between Austria and Servia seems

certain now to result in war, and war with Russia. Belloc dined with us.

He says Germany is afraid of war, but I am inclined to think it is

pushing it on, the occasion being a convenient one, especially in view

of our Irish difficulties.

“_27th July._—To-day’s papers are sensational. War seems to have begun

on the Danube, and there has been rioting in Dublin, with firing on the

mob and a bayonet charge, with two or three people killed and many

wounded. This will bring things to a head and oblige Asquith to allow

the arming of the National Volunteers if he does not throw up his cards

and resign. This is an astonishing show of weakness and mismanagement. I

see the Labour members are threatening a revolt from Asquith and a

hundred Liberals as well if he does not withdraw the Amendment Bill and

keep the Army in order.

“_28th July._—The riot in Dublin has, I think, improved Home Rule

prospects, showing that there is at least as much danger of trouble in

disappointing the National hopes as in displeasing the Ulstermen.

“As to the larger matter of war abroad Grey has come forward amid a

flourish of trumpets in the press to offer his little remedy of a

conference of Ambassadors in London. But it is not likely to be more

effective than his interventions of a year and two years ago. It will

only make our diplomacy still more ridiculous. Belloc, however, thinks

Germany is afraid of fighting, being unprepared for war. My view is that

it is Russia that is unprepared, and that the fatal year 1913 having

passed by, Kaiser Wilhelm thinks he may try his luck at last, and means

to stand his ground with Austria against the Franco-Russian Entente,

England being practically negligible just now.”

[This allusion to the fatal year 1913 refers to the prediction made in

1871 to Kaiser Wilhelm’s grandfather, Wilhelm, the first Emperor, that

in 1913 would see the downfall of the Hohenzollerns. It was made to him

by a gipsy, but, unlike such gipsy predictions, was based upon the

mathematical calculation in which the letters of the Emperor’s name were

represented by figures which worked out very exactly at 1913. I remember

hearing several years before the war that Kaiser Wilhelm was so deeply

impressed by it that he would not dare fight with France till the date

was over.]

“_29th July._—It is announced that Austria has declared formal war on

Servia; the question is now whether Russia will join in. There is every

probability she will, as it is a question of predominance in the Balkans

between the two Empires and the two religions, Catholic and Orthodox,

and this will bring in Germany, and Germany will bring in France. There

is wild excitement in London, and people are beginning to talk of

England’s fulfilling her promises to France, but I do not believe in

this, or in there being any definite promises. It would be too stupid

even for Grey.

“_30th July._—The crisis is worse than ever, with panic on all the Stock

Exchanges of Europe and our own. Advantage is being taken of it to defer

any settlement of the Irish question on the ground that all parties are

of one patriotic mind, Irish as well as English, towards events abroad.

This is of course absurd, but so long as the King puts his signature to

the Home Rule Bill, the rest will not matter. The first shots have been

fired in Servia.

“_31st July._—The ‘Times’ to-day has a special article in largest print

recommending England to go to war in aid of France against Germany, but

I do not believe in any such folly. Belgrade has been bombarded, and it

is all but certain now there will be general European war, but not for

us. Belloc and I differ in this. He is convinced that France is stronger

than Germany. I am not. He talks of Germany as calling out to our

Foreign Office to mediate. I believe Germany means war, and is rejecting

Grey’s foolish intervention.

“_1st Aug._—There is a general panic, the London Stock Exchange closed,

and the Bank rate raised to 8 per cent. Germany has sent ultimatums both

to Russia and to France; general war is certain, but the ‘Times’ has a

letter from Norman Angell in large print to-day contradictory of its

yesterday’s article. The ‘Nation’ and all the Liberal papers denounce

the idea of war, and I cannot believe we shall be such fools as to take

part in it if we are not attacked. Italy is proclaiming neutrality; we

shall do the same.

“_2nd Aug. (Sunday)._—Belloc dined with us again to-night, and we had

another great argument, whether to join in the war or not. Belloc is for

it, I against. He looks upon Prussia as a ‘nation of atheists,’ who, if

they beat the French, will destroy Christianity, whereas if the French

beat them, ‘Prussia would be hamstrung.’ Russia, he thinks, will never

be a danger to Western Europe. If we do not side with France now we

shall be left without a friend. England will cease to be a great Power.

My view is a very simple one. It seems to me that having no army of any

value it would be ridiculous to fight, and would only hasten our

discomfiture. Between France and Germany one seems to me as atheistical

as the other, and Russia worse than either. England is in no condition

to fight any but a naval war, and France does not need us at sea. Grey

might have stopped all the trouble three years ago by forbidding Italy

its raid on Tripoli. It would have been a cheap display of strength. He

will hardly be fool enough now to send a twopenny-halfpenny Army Corps

to the Continent where he can effect nothing. No. Asquith will announce

neutrality to-morrow, not perhaps a very _beau rôle_, but less absurd

than the other.

“_3rd Aug._—Things are marching fast. The Germans have begun their

campaign against France by seizing Luxembourg, and seem to be already in

Belgium. The news of this they say reached the Cabinet while it was

sitting last evening (the second in the day, and that Sunday), and

united all the Ministers to resolve, it is not said what. The naval

reserves are being called out.

“_4th Aug._—Grey’s declaration turns out to be not quite what the

evening papers said. It is evidently a compromise between the two

opinions in the Cabinet. It denies the obligation to assist France

against Germany, except to the extent of preventing bombardment by sea

of the French seaboard in the Channel, but it affirms the duty of

defending Belgian neutrality, and will lead us farther than the peace

division think, for it must be remembered that all the action will be

left in Grey’s hands at the Foreign Office, and in Winston’s at the

Admiralty, and it will be easy for them to manipulate accidents into a

case of necessity for despatching a land force to Antwerp. So we are not

out of the wood yet. On the contrary, the British Army has been formally

mobilised, and the reservists called to the colours. Our local policeman

called to-day to inquire how many horses I could put up in my barns.

Both Burrell and Leconfield have had a number of horses ear-marked for

service, Leconfield as many as forty. I said I could put up twenty under

cover, but everything connected with soldiering is hateful to me. There

is talk of a British ultimatum to Germany, demanding an answer about the

neutrality of Belgium being respected.

“_5th Aug._—The thing has been decided faster than we imagined.

Yesterday Asquith announced in the Commons that Grey had sent his

ultimatum to Berlin about Belgian neutrality, and had received an

unsatisfactory answer, and to-day the morning papers publish ‘British

Declaration of War against Germany.’”

With this last entry I close the present volume, reserving my Diary of

the War itself for a posthumous occasion, if it should seem worth

transcribing to those I may name literary executors of my last Will and

Testament, for I am entering on my eightieth year this month, August,

1919, and shall make no further venturings in my lifetime with

publicity. Suffice it here to say that my attitude during the four years

the war lasted was from the first day one of severest abstention. I

called it “unarmed neutrality.” I knew enough of our Foreign Office ways

and past doings to be quite certain that the reasons put forward by Grey

and Asquith for their declaration of war were not and could not be the

real reasons, and I refused to follow the pacific herd in its shameless

_volte-face_ from Opposition to support of the war, or find excuses for

its weaknesses in the absurd false doctrine of “My country, right or

wrong.” I knew, especially, that the plea put forward by Asquith of “a

necessity of honour” obliging us to fight for Belgium, was a false plea,

good at most as a forensic argument, but quite untrue in fact, for there

was not a word in any of the Neutrality treaties affecting Belgium which

entailed an obligation on England, or any other Power, collectively or

individually, to go to war for a breach of it.

The neutrality of Belgium was indeed already a by-word in the European

Chancelleries for obsolete ineffectiveness as long ago as when I was

myself in diplomacy (and I left it in 1870)—nor would any one then have

been much shocked at the treaties concerning it being spoken of as

“scraps of paper,” which in fact they were as far as entailing any

_obligation_ of war on any of the signatories to maintain it went. To

suppose the contrary would be to have entailed the impossible condition

of a single Power being called upon in honour to fight the other four

Powers had these combined to partition Belgium between them, an

extremity of logic amounting on the principle of _qui nimium probat

nihil probat_ to initial disproof. The plea might be good enough for the

occasion as a lawyer’s argument addressed to an ignorant Parliament, but

could not be the real one. The real cause of the quarrel with Germany, I

well knew was no more honourable a one than that of our dread of a too

powerful commercial rival and the fear of Kaiser Wilhelm’s forcing

France, if we stood aside, into commercial alliance with him against us

in the markets of the world—that and a gambler’s venture almost

desperate, seeing that we were without an army fit to take the field

abroad, and were dependent on the thousand and one chances of the sea

for our daily bread at home. In this madness I would take no part. That

these were the true causes of the war, and not the pretended altruistic

ones I have since acquired a certain knowledge from one of its chief

promoters.

The obligation of fighting in alliance with France in case of a war with

Germany concerned the honour of three members only of Asquith’s Cabinet,

who alone were aware of the exact promises that had been made. These,

though given verbally and with reservations as to the consent of

Parliament, bound the three as a matter of personal honour and were

understood at the Quai d’Orsay as binding the British Nation. Neither

Asquith nor his two companions in this inner Cabinet could have retained

office had they gone back from their word in spirit or in letter. It

would also doubtless have entailed a serious quarrel with the French

Government had they failed to make it good. So clearly was the promise

understood at Paris to be binding that President Poincaré, when the

crisis came, had written to King George reminding him of it as an

engagement made between the two Nations which he counted on His Majesty

to keep. Thus faced, the case was laid before the Cabinet, but was found

to fail as a convincing argument for war. It was then that Asquith, with

his lawyer’s instinct, at a second Cabinet brought forward the

neutrality of Belgium as a better plea than the other to lay before a

British jury, and by representing the neutrality treaties of 1831 and

1839 as entailing an obligation on England to fight (of which the text

of the treaties contained no word) obtained the Cabinet’s consent and

war was declared. This, I have full reason to know, was the true history

of this astonishing venture entered on by Asquith through a

miscalculation of the military value of Russia, and saved only from

supreme disaster by the fighting tenacity of our ignorant boy soldiers,

who believed what they were told, and throughout the war pretended, that

it was one for liberty waged in the defence of weak nations, and to set

the whole world free.

I write out here, as my last word to-day, George Wyndham’s pathetic

verses, repeated to me more than once by him, and which have rung ever

since in my ears. I read them as prophetic of the world’s doom, a doom,

alas, which he, by a strange contradiction of his better nature, was

nevertheless among the most active to bring about:

The waves climb to the cliff and the cliff repels them,

So the waves sing their long desire of the land.

The winds ask their way of the night, but she never tells them,

Complaining still of a sorrow she cannot understand.

The conquered Nations of Earth have lost their birthright,

They sing of the long ago when their rulers were kings,

All their value that rose once proud to set the Earth right

Sinks in a sob of sorrow and sobbing sings.

Woe for the kings who conquer, their pride, their glory!

The wage of victory see, new battles to be fought—

Those who adventuring lose, sing their souls in story

In the voice of wind and waves whose endeavour is nought.

The music heard afar in the void’s unanswering blindness

Is only of love poured out and lost in space.

All songs are children of love and the loved’s unkindness

Sad with rain that implores the beloved’s face.

These are the voices of God to the lost souls’ anguish,

Wounded souls that complain when they cannot climb,

Souls that aspire to heaven yet only languish,

Captives of life in pain and the bonds of Time.

APPENDICES

I. THE GRAND MUFTI OF EGYPT TO COUNT LEO TOLSTOI

II. THE AKABAH QUARREL

III. DHINGRA’S DYING SPEECH

IV. MR. BLUNT’S MEMORANDUM ON PRISON REFORM

V. THE ITALIAN MASSACRE IN TRIPOLI

VI. SIR ROGER CASEMENT’S LETTERS

VII. MISS FRANCES JENNINGS TO MISS ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

VIII. CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

APPENDIX I

THE GRAND MUFTI OF EGYPT TO COUNT LEO TOLSTOI

AIN SHEMS, NEAR CAIRO, _April 8th_, 1904.

TO THE ILLUSTRIOUS LEO TOLSTOY,

Although I have not the pleasure of being personally acquainted with

you, I am not without knowledge of your spirit; the light of your

thoughts has shone upon us, and in our skies the suns of your ideas have

risen, making a bond of friendship between the minds of the intelligent

here and your mind.

God has guided you to the knowledge of the mystery of that inborn

essential nature according to which He formed men, and He has shown you

the end towards which He has directed the human race. And you have

grasped this, that man has been planted in this present existence that

he may be watered by knowledge and that he may bear fruit by labour,

which may be a weariness of body bringing repose to his mind, and a

lasting effort through which his race may be elevated.

You have perceived the misery which has befallen men when they have

turned away from the law of their nature and have employed those powers

given to them to obtain happiness in a way which has disturbed their

repose and has destroyed their peace.

You have cast a glance on religion which has dispelled the illusions of

distorted traditions, and by this glance you have arrived at the

fundamental truth of Divine Unity.

You have raised your voice calling men to that whereto God has guided

you, and have gone before them in practice. And as by your words you

have guided their intellects, so by your deeds you have stirred up in

them firm resolves and great aims. As your ideas were a light to bring

back those who had gone astray, so was your example in action a model to

be imitated by searchers for truth.

And as your existence has been a reprimand from God to the rich, so has

it been a succour held out by Him to the poor.

Verily the highest glory you have reached, the most sublime reward you

have received for your labours in advice and teaching is what they have

called excommunication and interdict. It was nothing—what you incurred

from the heads of religion—nothing but a confession declaring to the

world that you were not among those men who had gone astray.

Give praise to God that they have cut themselves off from you as you

also had abandoned them in their creeds and in their deeds.

This, and verily our hearts are in expectant desire of what shall come

anew from your pen in the future days of your life—may God prolong its

extent and preserve your strength and may He open the doors of men’s

hearts to understand what you say, and may He urge men’s souls to

imitate you in what you do. And salutations.

MOHAMMED ABDU.

APPENDIX II

THE AKABAH QUARREL

MR. BLUNT TO SIR EDWARD GREY, 9TH MAY, 1906

SIR,

“The demand made on the Ottoman Government within the limit of ten days

to evacuate Tabah and other points in the neighbourhood of Akabah is so

serious a matter that, as one acquainted with the district in dispute

and interested for thirty years in Egyptian affairs, I feel it my duty

to lay before you my reasons for thinking that the demand is an

excessive one and due to a serious mistake as to facts.

“I am, of course, ignorant of the secret reasons which may possibly be

impelling His Majesty’s Government at the present moment to force on a

quarrel with the Sultan, and if there are such what I have to say will

necessarily pass unheeded. I notice that the chief organs of the Liberal

press seem to regard the quarrel somewhat in the light of a crusade. But

I am unwilling to believe that any such thought inspires the attitude

taken by the Government, and am inclined rather to the view that they

would be glad to avoid a violent issue. I therefore venture to make the

following observations:

“(1) His Majesty’s Government, believing their case to be a just one,

probably calculate that, inasmuch as the Sultan has on several occasions

yielded to pressure vigorously applied by European Powers, the same

result will now be obtained. It is possible that it may be so, but the

chances, I think, are otherwise. In the cases of Dulcigno, Smyrna, and

Crete, to take typical examples, it was the rights and interests of

Christians that were in question, and the Ottoman Government has always

acknowledged a certain moral, if not legal, right in Christendom to

intervene for their protection. In the present instance, however, there

is no question of Christians being oppressed. It is a matter purely

domestic and purely Mohammedan, and one in which the Sultan doubtless

feels that the whole moral right no less than the legal right is his.

The positions occupied in the neighbourhood of Akabah are closely

connected with the pilgrim road and the facilities of pilgrimage to

Mecca, and in Mohammedan eyes it is the Sultan’s right and duty to guard

them. If, therefore, the dispute with England should lead to hostilities

the Sultan knows that he will be enthusiastically backed by the all but

universal approbation of his coreligionists. It is almost impossible,

indeed, without abandoning his whole religious claim to leadership, that

he should yield to Christian menace without fighting.

“(2) I believe from an examination of printed documents and from matters

within my personal knowledge that the case of His Majesty’s Government

is technically less strong than they perhaps understand it. The delay in

publishing recent correspondence prevents me, of course, from knowing

what has passed lately between the Foreign Office and the Ottoman

Government, but, taking the older documents as they stand with the

statement made by you yesterday in the House of Commons, I think it not

difficult to show that the position taken up by Lord Cromer in 1892 was

founded on a double error both as to these and as to the local facts.

“Lord Cromer’s contention originally was that the Sinai Peninsula, in

which he seems to have included not only the geographical triangle known

as Tor Sina, but the desert lands north of the pilgrim road between the

Suez Canal and the Syrian frontier, was part of the old Pashalik of

Egypt, and he made appeal to its “ancient boundaries.” But a closer

examination of historical documents has shown that this was an error,

and I observe that the reference to ancient boundaries has been

abandoned by His Majesty’s Government in favour of another hardly better

founded.

“The contention now is that the district in question has been

administered by the successive Viceroys since Mohammed Ali’s time in

such a way as to constitute a territorial right. This I believe to be a

wholly untenable view, in accordance neither with the facts of the case

nor with a right interpretation of the political situation. With regard

to the facts, my recollection of the district as it was in the time of

Ismail Pasha and later in that of Tewfik is clear. My first visit to it

was made in the spring of 1876, and I have continued ever since in touch

with the Arab tribes who are its almost sole inhabitants. At that date

there certainly existed nothing in the way of civil administration, and

military authority was only represented by a score of soldiers holding

the small isolated fort of Nakhl, seventy miles eastward from Suez on

the pilgrim road, whose sole duty it was to prevent Bedouin interference

with the highway for the protection of travellers. Civil authority there

was none. No taxes were collected, no justice was dispensed, no

conscription was enforced. I believe I am right in saying that no part

of the Peninsula was included in any Egyptian mudirieh. With the

exception of the monks in the Mount Sinai convent and a few persons,

principally Greeks, at the port of Tor, connected with it, there was

absolutely no settled population. The few Bedouin tribes, grouped

principally in the south, governed themselves precisely as in Arabia,

according to tribal custom—and so long as they did not interfere with

the pilgrim road or molest travellers they were free to all Government

interference. There was not a soldier or policeman except at Nakhl.

“As to the Gulf of Akabah, I travelled up its western shore from Mount

Sinai to the fort of Akabah, a distance of some seventy miles, and found

not a living soul on my way, except one naked Arab, who had his home

under a tussock of rough grass and was living on shellfish. I can

testify, if necessary on oath, that neither the island of Faraoun nor

the well of Tabah possessed a single inhabitant. It was only at the head

of the Gulf, in the Wady Akabah, that I found any Bedouins. The eastern

half of the Peninsula is without camel pasturage, and the Sinai Bedouins

do not frequent it. The talk, therefore, of this shore as having been at

any time administered has really no meaning. The commandant of the fort

of Akabah would no doubt have dealt with any disturbance at the head of

the Gulf threatening the pilgrim road either at Tabah or elsewhere, but

the disturbance would not have come from the Peninsula, but from the

Bedouin tribes north and east. There was no military force westwards

nearer than Nakhl, eighty miles away. The contention, therefore, of the

Ottoman Government that Tabah, within seven miles of the fort, is

included in the military radius of Akabah is perfectly correct.

“The same year, 1876, I went on from Akabah north-westwards to the

neighbourhood of El Arish, Rafeh, and Gaza. The few tribes I met on the

road, Azazimeh, Teaha, and Terrabin, belonged to Syria, if to any

settled Government. In the year 1881 I again visited this Northern

district, which was then almost unknown, travelling eastward from

Ismailia across the sand-dunes to the hills of Magara, Hellal, Yellak,

and the rest. I found Jebel Magara, which lies west of Wady Arish,

occupied by the Aiaide tribe, a section of which is to be found in

Egypt, and so having a certain connection with the Nile valley, but

beyond the Wady, which, it may be mentioned, is held to be identical

with the river of Egypt mentioned in the Bible as the boundary of

ancient Egypt, the tribes owned no such connection. Jebel Hellal, almost

due south of El Arish, was certainly considered by the Bedouins as

within the district of Palestine. They lived, it is true, under their

tribal law, and were at chronic war with each other, but taxes had at

times been levied on their casual crops by the Turkish Caimakam of Gaza,

and the Sheikhs of two of the tribes had been recently imprisoned by him

at Jerusalem. Jebel Hellal, it may be noted, was a long way west of a

line drawn from Akabah to El Arish, and still more of one to Rafeh.

Certainly no part of the district had ever been administered from Egypt.

“It seems to me, therefore, that when the Sultan withdrew Akabah in 1892

from the military garrisoning by the Khedive he logically withdrew also

the military control, and with it all territorial right to its

uninhabited neighbourhood. The truth is that the garrisoning of Forts

Akabah and Nakhl had no administrative character in a territorial sense,

and had been merely entrusted to the Viceroys of Egypt in connection

with the pilgrimage, and that the land pilgrimage having now been

abandoned, the _raison d’être_ of the garrison at either place had

ceased. I am quite sure that if you will make further inquiries you will

find this to be the case.

“I am convinced also that it is a mistake to suppose ill-faith in the

present instance on the Sultan’s part. The Sultan is doubtless a master

of diplomatic craft, and I have never been his apologist or admirer; my

sympathies having always been, on the contrary, with liberal as opposed

to reactionary Islam. But I am sincerely of opinion that he has been

guilty here of no trick. He is deeply interested in all matters

connected with the pilgrimage, and I do not for an instant believe that

his recent occupation of Tabah had any other motive than to secure the

anchorage of Akabah from the possible occupation of a hostile Christian

Power. He considers, doubtless, and rightly so, that the present

Government of Egypt is no longer a Mohammedan but a European Government,

and one therefore unfit to discharge any duty connected with the

pilgrimage conflicting with the freedom of the pilgrim highway. At the

same time it is wholly improbable that he should have any design of

menacing either Egypt or the Suez Canal from so remote a point as

Akabah, seeing that a much nearer road of invasion is already in his

hands by way of the comparatively well-watered road passing through

Arish, the traditional road of all invaders of Egypt. I think His

Majesty’s Government is quite needlessly alarmed on this head and unduly

suspicious of the Sultan’s honesty. If there has been sharp practice in

these negotiations as far as they have as yet been published, it seems

to me, if I may say it without offence, to be rather on the other side.

The Grand Vizier’s telegram declaring that ‘in the Peninsula of Tor Sina

the _status quo_ is maintained, and that it will be administered by the

Khedivate in the same manner in which it has been administered in the

time of Ismail Pasha and Tewfik Pasha’ cannot under the true

circumstances of the case have been meant as a cession of territorial

rights, at least in these uninhabited districts of Akabah. Still less

can it have meant a cession of such rights in the districts north of the

pilgrim road, which have never been geographically or administratively

part of the Peninsula. Yet Lord Cromer twisted the phrase into an

admission of such cession, and His Majesty’s Government seems now

determined to hold the Sultan to his fanciful interpretation. It has, I

fear, been decided that the Sultan should be coerced into an acceptance

of a line of boundary never heard of in history and arbitrarily drawn

‘from a point a short distance to the east of El Arish to the head of

the Gulf of Akabah.’ I need hardly point out that the fact of the

English Consul-General at Cairo having communicated his interpretation

of the telegram to a Minister of the Khedive at Cairo has no legal value

whatever as between England and the Sultan, nor has it been asserted in

any official way that the Sultan endorsed the interpretation. Lord

Cromer’s logic is of a kind which no doubt is often used in dealing

diplomatically with Asiatic States. But a civilized Government loses

much, by resorting to it, of its moral standing when the logic leads to

a quarrel. It is inconceivable that it would be supported or the case

given in our favour were it submitted to arbitration.

“Under the circumstances, then, is it not unwise to press this extreme

claim of the Arish-Akabah boundary and the evacuation of Tabah on the

Sultan as a preliminary to all negotiations? A fair settlement would

probably be to leave to the Sultan the almost uninhabited region east of

Wady el Arish, the ancient Biblical boundary between Egypt and

Palestine. The Sultan would doubtless be satisfied with this, as would,

I am sure, be all Egyptians, who have no practical interest in the far-

away region except that of the Mecca pilgrimage. To press the matter to

a violent issue, when the ground of right is so very doubtful, by a

formal ultimatum, which will probably be disregarded, is to run the

certain risk of a religious quarrel of indefinite magnitude with the

whole body of Mohammedan believers.

I am, etc.,

“WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.”

APPENDIX III

DHINGRA’S DYING SPEECH AND EXECUTION

AS REPORTED BY THE “DAILY NEWS,” 18TH AUGUST, 1909

Dhingra, the Hindoo murderer of Sir Curzon Wyllie and Dr. Lalcaca, was

executed yesterday morning at Pentonville.

A copy has been placed in our hands of the statement which he drew up

before the murder, intending it to be read as if it had been

subsequently drawn up. To this document the prisoner referred in the

course of the trial, but it was not given to the public. We may add that

a copy has been for some time in the possession of certain of Dhingra’s

compatriots. The statement is as follows:

“I admit the other day I attempted to shed English blood as an humble

revenge for the inhuman hangings and deportations of patriotic Indian

youths. In this attempt I have consulted none but my own conscience. I

have conspired with none but my own duty.

“I believe that a nation held down by foreign bayonet is in a

perpetual state of war, since open battle is rendered impossible to a

disarmed race. I attacked by surprise; since guns were denied me I

drew forth my pistol and fired.

“As an Hindoo I felt that wrong to my country is an insult to God. Her

cause is the cause of Shri Ram, her service is the service of Shri

Krishna. Poor in wealth and intellect, a son like myself has nothing

else to offer to the Mother but his own blood, and so I have

sacrificed the same on her altar.

“The only lesson required in India at present is to learn how to die,

and the only way to teach it is by dying ourselves. Therefore I die,

and glory in my martyrdom.

“This war will continue so long as the Hindoo and English races last

(if this present unnatural relation does not cease).

“My only prayer to God is may I be reborn of the same Mother, and may

I re-die in the same sacred cause till the cause is successful, and

she stands free for the good of humanity and to the glory of

God.—BANDE MATARAM.”

At the police court, it will be remembered, Dhingra claimed his right to

commit the deed as a patriot, and at the Old Bailey he denied the Lord

Chief Justice’s power to pass sentence upon him. After one of the

shortest trials of a capital charge on record, lasting hardly an hour,

he was found guilty by the jury, and listened to the passing of the

dread sentence without a tremor of his features.

Some little time before the execution took place a large crowd gathered

outside the approach to the prison, but it was noticeable that there

were very few Indian students among those present. Shortly after nine

o’clock the Under-Sheriff left the prison, and in reply to a question as

to how the execution passed off, said that everything had been in order,

and that death had been instantaneous. Pierpont was the executioner. An

application for leave to have the body cremated was refused, and it will

be buried, in accordance with the usual custom, within the walls of the

prison.

At the inquest at the prison, Mr. J. S. Master, representing the

“Parsee,” Bombay, was the only Indian admitted to the inquest. The jury

found that the sentence of the law was duly executed.

Mr. Master applied to the Deputy Under-Sheriff for admission to the

prison, but was refused. He was referred to the Home Office, where,

after waiting an hour and a half, he received an intimation to the

following effect:

“The Under-Secretary of State is directed by the Secretary of State to

say that he regrets that Mr. Master’s request to be allowed to visit the

prisoner Dhingra cannot be complied with.”

APPENDIX IV

MR. BLUNT’S MEMORANDUM ON PRISON REFORM, ESPECIALLY AS TO THE TREATMENT

OF POLITICAL PRISONERS

_Forwarded to the Home Secretary, Mr. Winston Churchill, M.P., 25th

Feb._ 1910

As the question of prison reform has become one of urgency in connection

with the suffragette movement and the many women who have recently

undergone detention for offences, more or less political, I offer these

remarks founded on an experience of some years ago, which I think may be

of use.

In the early months of 1888 I served a sentence under the Crimes Act in

Ireland, of two months in Galway and Kilmainham gaols. My treatment was

that of an ordinary prisoner with hard labour, though hard labour was

not named in the sentence—that is to say, I was made to wear prison

dress, sleep on a plank bed, pick oakum and perform the other duties

assigned to hard labour prisoners. I was forbidden to receive visits or

write letters, or to have any books to read but a Bible and a Prayer

Book, except during the last week of my confinement, which was strictly

silent and separate during the whole two months. With the exception of

the plank bed, which prevented sleep for more than a very short portion

of the long winter nights passed in darkness, I found little to complain

of in the way of physical hardship. The cells were clean and fairly well

aired, the food sufficient, and the exercise, a dull round in the prison

yard, more than I needed. The oakum picking was so little a trouble to

me that I came to be glad to secrete a piece of the tarred rope on

Saturday nights so as to have it to pick on Sundays. It gave an

occupation to the hands and slightly to the brain of the kind that

knitting gives. It was pleasant to the sense of smell and to the eye.

The life under these physical heads was hardly worse than one has to put

up with on a sea voyage and may pass without special comment. The

suffering inflicted on prisoners under the present system I found to be

of a different kind, moral, not physical. But this was severe.

The silent and separate system in the treatment of prisoners was, I

believe, introduced as a humanitarian reform with the idea of preventing

the less depraved among these from contamination with companions wholly

vicious. Some reform of this sort no doubt was needed. But I doubt if

those who devised it either understood its full effects or intended that

it should be pushed as far as has been the case. Carried out as we see

it under the present regulations it is a punishment in addition to the

loss of liberty which I do not think society has any right to inflict

for less than the most serious crimes, while its effect on the sufferers

is wholly evil. Judges who pass long sentences on comparatively innocent

breakers of the law, and visiting justices who go the rounds of cells

periodically and find all neat and clean, do not understand the severity

of the suffering inflicted by leaving the minds of prisoners for long

periods of months and years deprived of any spiritual sustenance

whatever. It is starvation of a kind quite as real as the cutting off of

meat and drink and more enduringly pernicious.

Perhaps I am the better qualified to speak on this head because my

experience in the two gaols, Galway and Kilmainham, is diverse in regard

to it. Galway gaol was an old-fashioned, rambling place, with cells of

various sizes, and the one I was given was well-lighted, showing a good

patch of sky and the windows of a building opposite, so that there was

some pleasure to be got from watching the sea-gulls as they hovered

overhead, and the jackdaws and sparrows, to which it was even possible

to throw bread crumbs. The discipline was lax and the warders, most of

them Nationalists, were entirely friendly. I was allowed to do many

small things contrary to strict regulation, such as to sit on my blanket

on the floor, instead of perched on a stool, to have a Bible with good

print instead of the hardly readable regulation Bible, and even to

scribble verses on its fly leaves. These small infractions of the prison

code were connived at, if not permitted, and they mitigated the rigour

of the cast-iron laws which rule gaol life, and so made it tolerable.

The warders always stopped on their rounds for a few minutes to chat

with me; they were polite and kind; the Governor of the gaol paid me a

daily visit of a quarter of an hour; the chaplain brought me little

packets of snuff besides his spiritual consolation. I was not unhappy.

In the first fortnight I read the whole of the historical books of the

Old Testament, which for a political prisoner and for one who, as in my

case, was acquainted with the East are most consolatory reading from

their description of free life in the desert and the trust they inspire

in a final justice for the oppressed and the promises they hold out of

vengeance on the wicked. “Thou shalt bring my soul out of trouble, and

in Thy mercy Thou shalt destroy my enemies.” Thus Galway gaol was for me

a house of penance rather than of punishment, and my time in it, for the

first fortnight, a kind of spiritual retreat. I still look back on it

with affection as a softening influence in my life.

A change, however, came with the visit of the Official Inspector of

Prisons from Dublin. He happened to be a connection of my own, Charlie

Bourke, a brother of the late Lord Mayo, and being a violent Unionist,

he made it his business to put a stop to the irregularities he detected

in the treatment accorded me. My quarto Bible was taken from me and a

regulation one with small print, which hurt my eyes, was substituted.

The friendly warders were reprimanded and eventually dismissed, not

nominally on my account but later on, as occasion offered, on charges of

drunkenness (all prison warders in Ireland at that time were addicted to

drink, and so easily dismissable) and the small amenities of my life

were stopped. Nevertheless, as long as I remained at Galway, things went

fairly well. It was only on my removal to Kilmainham that I was

subjected to the full rigours of prison discipline and came to

understand the extent of its demoralizing influence and the hatred it

excites against society and what is called the “law and order” which

maintains it.

Kilmainham was a gaol of the scientific modern type, with cells all of

one pattern set in a circle round an enclosed central hall in such a way

as to enable the chief warder to have his eye on each one of them and so

to prevent any irregularity on the part of his subordinates. The

discipline was thus perfectly preserved and to the prisoners a cause of

constant irritation as to spying. Here, no kind of familiarity was

permitted nor the least show of kindness between warder and the men

under his charge. All was gloom and severity. At Galway there had been a

pleasant feeling, or what was near it, between them, at least when the

Governor and Chief Warder were out of sight, the warders and prisoners

being much of the same class, peasants born, with the same natural

ideas, virtues, vices, and weaknesses. The Galway prisoners were none of

them in gaol for serious crime, the most criminal among them being a man

who had got drunk and stabbed a sheep at a fair. The most of them were

very pious Catholics, as their demeanour in the prison chapel testified,

and I suspect that their moral lives were at least as good as the

warders’ and better than my own.

At Kilmainham, on the contrary, our inmates were thieves and

pickpockets, the rif-raf of the Dublin streets, and a stricter rule was

doubtless excusable. But, excusable or not, the effect was of the most

deadening kind, deadening and at the same time exasperating. It is not

good for any man to be treated for weeks and months only with contempt,

and prisoners shut off in separate cells from their fellow creatures and

subjected to ignominious treatment from callous masters (for such their

warders were) lose all their self-respect as men, and acquire the ways

of slaves. Silence and solitude when prolonged beyond a certain point of

time have a physical effect upon the nerves and brain allied to mental

disease and play havoc with the imagination. The sense of proportion in

things is destroyed and the mind revolves upon the axis of its own

imaginings to its spiritual hurt. I myself, though I had nothing really

to reproach myself with, for all my crime had been to call a meeting in

a proclaimed district at which I had not been given time to finish so

much as a single sentence, felt myself drawn into sympathy with the

Dublin criminals, my fellow sufferers, and into a revolt with them

against the barbarities of civilization. How much more must it have been

with these poor wretches condemned to long terms of an iron system of

repression for deeds of which they were really in their hearts ashamed.

Everything was done in Kilmainham to shut us out of the poor natural

pleasures of light, air and sunshine, which the least beast, bird or

insect can enjoy. The windows of our cells, high up and out of reach,

were glazed with ground glass to prevent us from seeing the smallest

patch of sky. All our actions were regulated as by machinery, and no

word was spoken to us but of command. The prison chaplain was a man with

a smug, false face, chosen for his subservience to the Castle, a weigher

of his words and an economizer of his sympathies. The doctor was much

such another, and the Governor, a worthy man I believe, at heart, was

officially reserved in his brief visits to our cells. The silence of the

place was a systematized oppression worse to my mind than the noisy

discomfort of the rude prisons I had seen in the East, where men,

perhaps in chains, are at least permitted to sit together in the sun and

talk, if it is only of their sufferings. How willingly would I not have

exchanged the cleanliness of my Kilmainham cell for the dirty prison

yard at Aleppo where I had seen murderers and honest men placed cheek by

jowl on a common footing of humanity. Here there was no humanity; it was

forbidden by the rules and regulations of the Prison Board.

I left Kilmainham at the end of my two months in a spirit of revolt

against all Society—a feeling which I am certain is the predominant one

in every released prisoner at its gates—I left it without a smile with

the eightpence halfpenny in my hand which I had earned by my good

conduct—without a smile, though the worthy governor of the gaol had been

good enough to tell me mine had been exemplary, and had added (good man)

that instead of the customary advice given to prisoners on their

discharge he would inform me of a pleasant piece of news—his wife had

been brought to bed two days before, and it had been decided by him and

her to name their child after me.

Such is an imperfect record of my experience of twenty-two years ago in

a gaol managed on the silent and separate system. Certain alleviations

in the treatment have, I understand, been since introduced, but the

silence and the separation still continue without practical change in

all English prisons. It is this part of prison discipline that I would

see modified—I do not say abolished, for seclusion has its uses—but

humanized and made less absolute.

Apart from crimes of violence which need to be treated penally—and for

my part I should be quite prepared to see corporal punishment of the

severest kind inflicted in cases of rape, wife-beating, cruelty to

children, and the like, with capital punishment still for murder—I do

not see any advantage in severity of treatment for crime unattended by

violence, more than is necessary to keep loafers out of our gaols. The

loss of liberty is in itself sufficient penalty to deter all but the

most hardened, and for these hard labour is probably the only cure. Yet,

even with the habitual thief, though he should be made to dig till he

sweats and be put to labour of the least lenient kind, I see no reason

that his taskmaster, the prison warder, should deny him a cheerful word,

or look upon him sourly. Nor do I understand that the prison dress which

he is forced to wear should be made the obvious garb of infamy it is.

The Spanish Inquisition in its day clothed the heretics it burned in

fantastic robes with the object of robbing its victims of all human

sympathy. Our twentieth century prisons should make an end of this

barbarity. It is an infamy to clothe a grown man, used to decent dress,

in a boy’s jacket and knickerbockers and deny him skirt enough to cover

his loins. I felt the indignity of this so strongly at the outset of my

prison life that I rebelled (it was my only rebellion) and made appeal

to the visiting justices, and with the result that a skirted coat was

ordered me, as may be seen in the annexed photograph. Why should not all

the convicts be thus provided? It should be no part of the prison system

to degrade, even while it punishes the most severely.

Beyond and above this class of the hardened criminal, there need, I

think, be two classes only—the one which should be in the nature of a

reformatory rather than of what are now the second and third divisions,

and the other identical with what is now the first division.

My second class, which is by far the most important, should be treated

in some sort as a school, of which the warders should be the teachers,

as well as guardians. This would, of course, require a quite different

class of guardian from that from which our present warders are drawn and

one much more highly paid. The kind of men for the work should be that

which is found in Scotland Yard, and the result, I am convinced, would

be well worth the cost. These should control the working shops by day

and preside over the common midday meal, and the common recreation hour

in the evening. The men would still be locked up in their separate cells

at night, and also for one whole day in the week so as to give the

warders their Sunday holiday, but it should be with books, writing

materials, and some solitary game to play, a cup and ball, a box of

wooden bricks or one of moveable letters.

With regard to the hour of recreation I have just mentioned, nothing

struck me more strongly in prison than the immense waste of opportunity

displayed—an opportunity of good, whether religious or of instruction,

which nobody made use of. It has been said that “a prison is a convent

without God”—and such is the fact. Gaol life has the austerity without

the sanctifying motive. Yet it might easily be made, at least in

Ireland, into a nursery of saints. In England, where we do not ask for

saints, it might be turned to intellectual profit by any zealous

humanitarian who would give his evening hours to the work of penny

reading and lecturing. At present the English prison is a school without

a teacher. I throw out this idea believing that devoted men would not be

wanting for the work of instruction were it officially encouraged.

My first and highest class of all would be what is now the first

division of misdemeanants. This should include, with others already

enjoying it, all who for their opinion’s sake have disobeyed the law.

The prisoners under this head should be treated more or less as

prisoners of war are treated, honourably, that is, and as opponents whom

the law has captured. England, I believe, is the only country of Europe

where no distinction is made between political and ordinary offenders.

It is time the two classes should be recognized as separate and the

distinction legally drawn. The absence of it brings the law into

contempt through the impossibility of persuading the public that a

conscientious breaker of the law is a real criminal. And this leads me

to what is the most important part of what I set myself to write, the

position of the Government where it finds itself, as now, determinedly

opposed by a small party of religious or political reformers who persist

in infractions of the law to further their opinions.

As the law at present stands, it is probably impossible to deal

satisfactorily with cases where assaults are committed or damage done to

property so as to draw public attention to a public grievance; and until

the magistrates who judge such cases are empowered to decide upon the

motive of the act, whether it is public or private, there will always be

confusion. A man resists the police in the execution of their duty, he

breaks a plate glass window or he strikes a Prime Minister with a cane.

He is arrested. His motive may be anything. It may be political, or it

may be a personal grievance, or that he is hungry and wants to be lodged

in prison, or merely that he is a drunken rowdy. The magistrate already

possesses a certain option in these cases, but I think it should be

obligatory on him, where the evidence is that the motive is honestly a

public one, that he should send the prisoner to the first division. The

argument put forward in recent cases by the Government, that political

propaganda should not be allowed to be carried on in prison, and

therefore that the second division should be enforced seems to me an

unwise one, and one which has defeated its own end. The Government

cannot stop the advertisement, and would do better in its own interests

to give it full scope by allowing all the privileges accorded to first

division prisoners. The public would not for more than a very short time

interest itself in letters or interviews written in prison, unless

indeed the political grievance was a just one, in which case it ought to

be attended to and remedied. The Government has no right to order the

seclusion of the second division merely to save itself from

inconvenience.

As to more serious political cases which amount to crime, assassination,

armed assault and the rest, they need not be considered here. The

magistrate would refer the accused to the Assizes as untried prisoners.

I am of opinion all the same that the nature of the sentences imposed

requires special legislation. The Government has every right to inflict

death on political assassins, or to detain them for life or for shorter

periods in prison so as to prevent a recurrence of their acts, but not,

I think, to confound them with ordinary criminals under penal servitude.

They should be confined as State prisoners, or prisoners of war, under

special conditions not personally degrading.

There remains the question of how to treat those prisoners who for

political or other reasons refuse to conform to prison rules, with the

mass of prisoners. Under the reformatory system I have proposed it

would, I think, be found that refusals would seldom occur, and, if they

did, that they could be dealt with by deprivation of privileges and

relegation to a separate class for punishment. I do not believe in the

continuation of the hunger strike to the point of death, or permanent

injury to health, by any but political or religious fanatics. I would,

however, risk that rather than continue the practice of forcible

feeding, which is a form of torture no civilized Government has a right

to inflict. As applied to political prisoners, it seems to realize the

ideal of the mediæval torturers, that of inflicting the maximum of pain

without touching any vital organ, and with the least risk to life or

health. For the case of the suffragette ladies, I consider that the

proper treatment would be to give them the fullest privileges of the

first division, with leave to see their friends daily, and to provide

their own food and their own medical attendance. If, under those

circumstances, they continued to refuse food, the Government would be

free of responsibility.

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.

NEWBUILDINGS, SUSSEX,

_24th Feb._, 1910.

P.S. I cannot send in this memorandum without adding a word of protest

(though it is rather apart from my general subject) against the modern

practice of executing prisoners condemned to death within the precincts

of our gaols. My experience of a prisoner’s feelings after he has been

kept for even a short period in the solitary confinement of his cell,

leads me to be sure that it is a great aggravation to the penalty of

death that he should be denied the right, always extended to sentenced

men in former times, of dying in the open air and in the presence of his

fellow-men. Like many other so-called humanitarian reforms, the

abolition of public execution was brought about very much less in the

interests of the condemned man than to spare the feelings of those who

condemned him, the soft-hearted public which, while it consented to his

death, was shocked at being forced to see him die. To the man himself,

shut in for weeks by the four walls of his prison, with nerves unstrung

by solitude and that perpetual longing for a sight of trees and fields,

and contact once more with the busy life he formerly enjoyed, it must

surely have lessened by a great deal the pang of death to be set for one

last half hour in the light of day outside those walls, and thus get a

breath of the open air of Heaven, and with it the courage to endure his

pain, even were it in the presence of an angry mob rejoicing to see him

hanged. The thought of this was constantly with me in prison, and the

horror which must come on a poor soul led out one morning from his cell

to the gloomy prison yard, and there, without that small indulgence,

strangled secretly by those in charge of him. It is not through

inhumanity that these hideous new incidents of prison life and prison

death have been devised, but through lack of imagination, and I have

sometimes thought that before power should be given to any man to

condemn his fellow-man to long punishment in gaol, he should have served

his own personal month to teach him what it means.

APPENDIX V

THE ITALIAN MASSACRE OF ARAB PEASANTRY IN TRIPOLI

MR. BLUNT’S LETTER TO MR. WILLIAM STEAD

DEAR MR. STEAD,

I am, of course, in complete—indeed, in violent—sympathy with all you

say in denunciation of the Italian raid, and I entirely agree with you

that a strait waistcoat must be applied, and applied at once. I go even

farther than you do, knowing how absolutely destructive of their

domestic and moral life such a government as modern Italy would impose

on the Arabs of Tripoli would be. The modern Italian has divested

himself of all restraint, moral or religious. He has cast off his

mediæval beliefs and, apart from his still remaining superstitions,

acknowledges no principle we in England connect with the name of

Christianity. The Italian of the South especially, to establish whom as

colonist the raid has been devised, is an utterly depraved being. His

establishment in North Africa would mean the establishment of the drink

shop, the brothel, and the gambling hell. It is against these, and in

defence of their domestic life far more than against dogmatic

Christianity that the Mahommedans of Tripoli are fighting. There need be

no doubt as to which side in the present quarrel represents the cause of

God and which of the Devil.

In all this I am sure that your view and mine are pretty much the same.

What I have, however, a doubt about in your programme is the efficacy of

the means you propose for putting an end to the war and defeating the

proposed iniquity. I cannot think that there is the smallest chance at

the present stage of the affair of an appeal to arbitration being

listened to, and something much stronger than argument is needed to

apply what you call the strait waistcoat on the wrong-doer. The Italian

fleet is cruising loose in the Mediterranean and is threatening new

murders everywhere among the sea-coast towns and villages of the Ottoman

Empire. What is wanted now, and at once, is not a court of law to settle

where the right and the wrong is, but a policeman to arrest the

disturber of the peace. The Hague Tribunal, though excellent as a Court

of Appeal, has no executive authority. Some Power stronger at sea than

the Italian must be persuaded or forced by agitation to intervene and

insist upon an evacuation of the invaded territory. Then, if you will,

we can go to The Hague for a final settlement.

If you agree with me in this, as the right order of procedure, I would

suggest that the first point to determine at your meeting on Tuesday

will be which of the Great Powers of Europe is in the best position to

apply the needed force, and which can best be acted upon and constrained

to undertake the executive duty. It is clear that none of them are

willing, and, that being so, it is all but hopeless to expect them to

act in concert. In my own opinion, I have no hesitation in saying that

the duty of intervention is rightly England’s own. England is, in the

first place, by far the strongest power at sea, and this is essentially

a naval affair. Secondly, England is far more free than the rest to act.

Were the German Powers to intervene, there would always be the risk of a

combination against them of Italy with France and England. Were France

to act, there would always be danger of such a combination with the

German Powers. England’s island position and her entente with France

leaves her free. Lastly, England is in reality the Power more than any

other responsible for the partition of North Africa, the cause of the

present trouble and Italy’s excuse for aggression. I need not argue this

point—our position in Egypt, our agreement with France seven years ago

about Morocco, are sufficient proof, even without the all but certainty

we have that Sir Edward Grey was secretly cognizant this summer of the

intended raid on Tripoli, and consented to and approved it. It is,

therefore, England’s duty, one of reparation, more than the duty of any

other Power, seeing what inhuman results have followed from Sir Edward

Grey’s connivance, to intervene now and bid Italy go no further.

I will not do Sir Edward Grey the injustice of supposing that he

foresaw, when he consented to the raid on Tripoli, that it would be

carried out by the Italians as a war of extermination against the Arab

population. Sir Edward Grey is a worthy English country gentleman of

old-fashioned Whig opinions, and he cannot have foreseen the massacres

that have resulted, the lust of slaughter, the murder by hundreds of

women and children. Sir Edward is neither brutal by nature nor callous,

but he is singularly ignorant of any country but his own, and he is

entirely without imagination, and woefully ill-advised by his

subordinates. He probably had been told that the Arabs, because they do

not love the Turks, would greet the Italians with joy as deliverers. And

he gave consent on this understanding in England’s name. The raid was,

of course, immoral in itself, but not more immoral than many an English

raid which he and statesmen of his Whig type of Imperialism have

schooled themselves into regarding as necessities of civilisation. He

foresaw nothing except, perhaps, a little bloodshed of the ordinary

military type. All the same, he has made one of the most ghastly

mistakes ever an English Foreign Secretary committed this country to. If

you want to do any good with your agitation, you should therefore begin

with Sir Edward Grey and our own Foreign Office. You should insist on

his making a clean breast of the whole affair. If he says he knew

nothing of it, tell him he ought as Foreign Secretary to have known. The

result has been criminal, his ignorance in itself was criminal. If he

admits his knowledge and consent, then insist on his resignation, as the

admission involves a double criminality. Above all, insist on reparation

at once being done and the murderous work being put an end to; insist on

a cessation of hostilities.

Sir Edward, when closely pressed, will probably plead that England

cannot withdraw from her plighted word to Italy; that England has

declared neutrality; that she cannot now resort to force or to anything

more than expostulation. These are idle words. It is a maxim in law that

an immoral agreement cannot be enforced; it is not binding either in law

or equity. It is null and void. Neither is a dishonourable agreement

binding in honour. Insist, with Mr. Asquith’s Government, that the

language his Foreign Secretary shall use to Italy shall be this: “When

we agreed that you should take possession of Tripoli, we thought that

the Sultan, its legal owner, would be willing to part with a province,

useless to him, for money; we thought that the Sultan’s subjects there

would be glad to transfer their allegiance from him to you; we thought

that things would go easily, that it would be a walk over for you; above

all, we thought that you would behave like a civilized people, not like

wild beasts, in your conduct of the war. We see we were mistaken, that

you are without honour, without civilization, without Christian decency.

We will have no farther part in this affair. We will not continue to be

your accomplice; we summon you to recall your fleet and evacuate the

ports you have seized. We insist that this war shall cease.” This,

translated into the polite phraseology of diplomacy, would suffice;

Italy would give in. If she does not give in, insist that England shall

make common cause with Turkey and mobilize the British Fleet. We have no

right to remain neutral. There is a saying of the late Lord Salisbury

which I was reading only yesterday in Mr. Holland’s “Life of the Duke of

Devonshire,” and which applies well to the case: “Those,” said Lord

Salisbury, “who have the absolute power of preventing lamentable events,

and, knowing what is taking place, refuse to exercise that power, are

responsible for what happens.”

As you were good enough to ask my opinion, this is what I send you,

believing it to be the right and reasonable way, and I shall esteem it a

favour if you will read my letter in its entirety to the meeting and

invite a decision on it. Also I shall be glad to help you in any way I

can to carry on an agitation on the lines suggested, including a

subscription towards expenses. I believe I could raise a very handsome

sum from among my Mohammedan friends.

Believe me, very truly yours,

WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.

APPENDIX VI

SIR ROGER CASEMENT’S LETTERS TO MR. BLUNT

I

50 EBURY STREET, S.W., _12 May_ 1914.

DEAR MR. BLUNT,

My name may be known to you—either as a friend of Mrs. Dryhurst and the

late “Egypt”—or perhaps in connection with Congo and later Amazon rubber

crimes. Now I am only out to end the Irish crime—and I write you on that

account.

Your letter to the Women’s meeting in Dublin was very welcome to us

all—particularly the reference to the “Stick behind.” I came over from

Dublin with Professor Mac Neill of the N. University on a Volunteer

mission (we are both among its chief organizers). He had to go back to

Dublin on Saturday night much regretting he could not see you. I thought

you were still in Chapel Street where Mrs. Dryhurst told me you used to

be—only to-day I got your address in the country. Professor Mac Neill

said the last time he saw you was in convict’s clothes at the Four

Courts (I think) where he used to work. He would very much have liked to

see you—so too should I. Your “Land War in Ireland” I have often

rejoiced over.

If you would care to see a wild Irishman (something of the type possibly

of your old Irish Bishop who wanted the dynamite!) I would come down for

an hour. There are things I would like to say to you, and hear from you

before I go back to Ireland very soon. If, then, you feel disposed to

have a wholly Irish talk for an hour or two with one somewhat in need of

advice I should be very glad to come and see you. I go back probably

Saturday to Ireland.

Yours very truly,

ROGER CASEMENT.

II

50 EBURY STREET, S.W., _14 May_ 1914.

DEAR MR. BLUNT,

I want to thank you very warmly for the delightful day and kind welcome

you gave me. The copy of your book I shall treasure. Were it for nothing

else but that noble preface I should treasure it.

Please God we _shall_ have the Harp without the Crown some day. I may

have some writings of my own—on Ireland—out before long and if so I

shall so gladly send you a copy. They do not omit the “Empire” and the

other “lost causes,” India, Egypt, &c.—I feel always they are links with

ours and we must help them. Meantime I send you a “leaflet” on the Irish

language—for I see in your book that you realized how the language, too,

had been marked out for destruction. So very few Englishmen, even

friends of Ireland politically, ever knew or dreamed there was such a

thing as an Irish language! This leaflet I wrote some years ago (1905)

for propagandist purposes in the North of Ireland—and it went broadcast

over National Ulster and is still going. When the momentary collusion of

English Whig and Tory has passed away, and a resurgent and free Ireland

emerges, with a Volunteer Army to guard and keep its liberty, rest

assured that army of a recovered Ireland will _not_ be used “as a new

weapon of offence in English hands against the freedom of the world

elsewhere.” Wherever I go to-day in Ireland (and I go widely) I say that

we stand in the forefront of human freedom—fighting a battle that is

world-wide—and that altho’ we fight it to-day with unarmed hands we

shall see the day when we’ll fight it with armed manhood.

I came over to London only about the Irish Volunteers, and now I return

to Ireland, glad to have seen you and talked with you. When I get back

to Malahide I will send you a letter I recently wrote to the Irish press

on that very point—in which I cite Egypt and India. Meantime I hope the

_flamboyant_ appeal in this leaflet for the old tongue of Ireland will

not shock you. It was written for popular gatherings—in a style they

like—and it is always something to get them, in Ireland, to read at all.

Yours sincerely,

ROGER CASEMENT.

III

City of Dublin Steam Packet Co.’s

_R.M.S. Ulster_,

_May 16_, 1914.

DEAR MR. BLUNT,

The inclosed article from to-day’s “New Statesman” may interest you. I

have not any idea of the identity of the writer—but he, or she, is

fairly right in the line of criticism. Whoever it is has read the Dublin

papers because they only, I think, had your letter; and they only, I

know, had the quotation I have marked with double lines which is from a

speech of mine at Tullamore on the 19th April, to a great Volunteer

gathering. I am now returning to Ireland and shall go to Ulster very

soon, and try to get the Ulster Nationalists—Protestant and

Catholic—pledged to fight against Exclusion and any “clean cut.”

I am taking over an air gun—to shoot pellets—in the sure and certain

hope it will be seized by the Customs at Kingston on arrival. The people

who cannot prevent 20,000 (or 50,000) rifles with 3,500,000 cartridges

from being imported by special vessel into Ulster are powerful

elsewhere! The grave and unprecedented outrage in Ulster goes unchecked,

unchallenged, and unpunished—and I’d wager 5 to 1 my boy’s air gun, this

evening, will be triumphantly confiscated and the packet of pellets too.

I am more and more convinced that Asquith and Co. mean to betray Home

Rule after they have got their Parliamentary Act put to the test, by

successfully passing a bare and empty formula. The “Amending Bill” will

kill Home Rule. If we had 10,000 rifles in the rest of Ireland we’d kill

the British Empire. The young men in the Volunteers are out for one

thing only—to revive the Fenian spirit, and please God will do it.

I had often thought of you and wanted to meet you—years ago when I read

of your championing the cause of Egypt—and wondered how any Englishman

could be brave enough and unselfish enough to attack the British Holy of

Holies—their right to exploit weaker peoples.

Now that I have met you I am glad—and if I never see you again I shall

carry with me always the memory. I wish you were young and able to come

and help us in Ireland as you did in the Land War, now thirty years ago.

We have so few to lead in the brave direction—and there are none of

those old Bishops left. We must get some rifles in for the Volunteers.

If only we could arm Irishmen again the question of Irish freedom would

be settled then and there, I believe—for the British Empire can grow fat

and rich but it dare not fight. A free Ireland will mean a free

India—and a free Egypt in the end. I send you a most treasonable

pamphlet called the “Elsewhere Empire.” Read it if you are not shocked,

for it is not polite literature but a crude appeal to nationality versus

Imperialism. It is an instance, a poor one perhaps, of the new

Ireland—an Ireland reverting to ’48 and ’98—when Irishmen preached not

freedom for themselves alone but freedom for all others.

Forgive a hurried line on the boat going over and believe in the very

sincere regard and esteem of an Irishman who puts national life and

realization wherever it may struggle in the forefront of human causes.

Yours sincerely,

ROGER CASEMENT.

I cannot find the pamphlet on board, I’ll get it at Malahide and send it

to you. R.C.

IV

MALAHIDE, CO. DUBLIN, IRELAND,

_22 May_ 1914.

DEAR MR. BLUNT,

I came across the review of your “Land War” from a small Irish paper

(“Sinn Fein”) to-day in looking thro’ Home papers and thought it might

interest you. The writer is the Editor—Mr. Arthur Griffiths.

The Irish Volunteers are swelling daily! The whole countryside is

pouring in—and if we had rifles we could get 100,000 men inside a

month—and in six months they’d be one of the best forces in Europe—for

the young men take to drill like a duck to water.

Yours sincerely,

ROGER CASEMENT.

APPENDIX VII

MISS FRANCES JENNINGS TO MISS ELIZABETH LAWRENCE

Your long letter did put some spirit into me. So few say to me “_go on_”

to St. Winefreds Well;—they all say “stay,” “stop,” “you can’t.” I am

feeling my way in that direction, but just now I am not moving fast.

I’ve discovered a splendid way of getting through the mid-winter, I am

travelling from farm to farm, making my houses of great barns. Outside I

hear the storms raving, but my great beams don’t even creak. They are

such beautiful houses, great oak beams, with the scales of the bark in

their hollows, and with beautiful curves in their bodies, and I see the

barn-cats run and sit along the beams; and spots of sun, and often in

the same house with me are milky calves and wooden chests of meal and

gold straw and cider casks that bubble like a spring, or as if a mouse

jumped under the water. And heaps of red apple must, which they use to

bank up their fires with, the same as with peat. Then in the same house

are many little mice, and big rats; and in the Spring they say they are

full of singing wild birds making their nests above. I am in the cider

country now (Herefordshire). As soon as I crossed the border I heard the

talk of cider, and beautiful apple dumplings and apple cake. They say

the farm hands here know of nothing but cider; it is their whole world.

They rise to drink it, and they would not work without the cider. They

think of cider alone! What a simplicity of thought! They are cider, body

and soul, so they are a queer people. I drank mulled cider (warmed in a

copper cup like a dunce’s cap, to push deep inside the fire) with spoons

of honey in it and a lump of butter out of a lustre basin.

The man here tells me: “Apples for sleeplessness—apples clear the brain,

apples for the brain—juice of apple dabbed in the eye makes you see

beautiful—apples give you appetite. Cider makes you eat—cider makes you

hearty,” etc.

My small cart is put inside the barns, they usually have three bays, and

I have a cask (an “apple-pot” they call it here) turned up for a table,

and a bundle of straw for a seat—most often I am on the stone threshing

floor of the barns or on an earthern floor.

I am not feeling the cold at all and now have friends by the hundreds in

the country I have passed across; but few as yet in front.

I have stayed with shepherds, cowmen, blacksmiths, bakers, a poet, a

barber, a cobbler, at the village shop, applemen, nurses, basket makers,

waggoners.

I am going to move now from Hereford to Aberystwith, then around the

coast to Holywell, and to see a certain mountain they tell me is shaped

like a pyramid; and is not a mountain but is a God!

I want to reach the sea and hear talk of the sea. The man here (above

Stoke Edith) tells me that the hawkers and gypsies many of them used to

make turf huts on the common above. They dug a hollow in the ground and

piled a wall around of turf, and gradually made it round, and had a

little hole in the top for their smoke to escape, and the grass grew all

over the top and cast off the rain, and they had a little fire in a

corner inside. Now they are driven away. I want to try and sleep a night

in a manger and put up in a kiln some days and nights. I find it is a

long way I have set out into.

My journey so far has been alongside the wall of the Sussex Hills. The

northern border of the New Forest, across Salisbury Plain, into the

Cotswold and now into what might be called Apple-land; of what is coming

I am in ignorance. Lately I’ve slept some nights on people’s hearths and

nursed the fire asleep (_i.e._, into darkness). In one village they

called me, “Princess,” but usually I am “The Tramp-woman,” “The poor

woman.”

I hear some queer tales of men whose loud singing can be heard miles, of

a shepherd called Basil, more than six feet tall, who, going down a

steep hill, fell, standing on his head—of people so fat that they are

mountains—and so old that they never die, and so strong. And at each

farm I am told their milk is the richest and sweetest, and that their

clay makes the best apples, and each woman tells me how she is beautiful

more than all the rest; and it’s all truth.

The woman I am staying with at present wears a strange sea-green glass

snake at her neck, it is black and white, and sea-green, and seems

Egyptian in a way. Another one I stayed with, dressed in black, wore at

her neck a great silver Bee, with wings as beaten petals and scales.

This farm is called “Hazel,” and many springs of water burst out about

it, and the master of it has the blackest brows above his eyes, and a

grand lot of words. I feel you are my friends and remember the smallest

details of your kindness to me. I hope I shall see you again and hear of

you.

FRANCES JENNINGS.

Received _February 13_, 1913.

APPENDIX VIII

CHRONOLOGY OF EVENTS

LEADING TO THE GREAT WAR OF 1914 AND ESPECIALLY TO ENGLAND’S QUARREL AND

WAR WITH TURKEY

1875 Ismaïl, Khedive of Egypt, having involved his country in a heavy

foreign debt, Disraeli (English Prime Minister) purchases his

Suez Canal shares, Rothschild advancing the necessary four

millions.

1876 Servia and the other Christian Provinces of European Turkey,

aided by volunteers from Russia, revolt against the Sultan. They

are repressed with great severity by the Turkish irregular

forces. Agitation in England is roused by Gladstone’s “Bulgarian

Atrocities” campaign.

1877 Czar Alexander threatens war on Turkey as a crusade in their

support.

A revolution breaks out at Constantinople under Midhat Pasha,

leader of the Liberal party. Sultan Abdul Aziz is dethroned. A

Constitution is proclaimed under the Sultan’s next heir, Murad,

who, being found insane, gives place to Abdul Hamid, and a

Parliament assembles amid a general rejoicing of all religious

sects of the Empire. War is declared by Russia.

1878 A Russian Army, having forced the Balkans at Plevna, imposes on

the Sultan the Peace of San Stefano under the walls of

Constantinople.

Disraeli, objecting to the Treaty as a violation of the

International Peace of Paris of 1856, orders a British fleet

into the Sea of Marmora and Indian troops to Malta. Derby

resigns the Foreign Office and is succeeded by Salisbury.

A Congress is summoned by Bismarck to meet at Berlin to deal

with the Ottoman case.

While the Congress is assembling Salisbury concludes two secret

Agreements regarding Ottoman affairs, the one with Russia about

Turkey in Asia, the other with the Sultan, known as the Cyprus

Convention, whereby Cyprus is leased to England, with rights of

supervision in Asia Minor, in return for an English guarantee of

the Sultan’s Asiatic dominions and promised reforms.

Salisbury denies in Parliament the existence of any convention.

He accompanies Beaconsfield to Berlin, and at the first sitting

of the Congress, _13th June_, declares in common with the rest

of the Ambassadors that he enters the Congress free of all

secret Agreements regarding Turkey. The next day, _14th June_,

the full text of the Agreement with Russia is betrayed to the

London press, and the Cyprus Convention also becomes known at

Berlin.

Waddington, the French Ambassador, threatens to leave the

Congress, but is pacified by Bismarck, Salisbury promising

Waddington that in return for Cyprus the French Government shall

be allowed (1) to take possession at its convenience of Tunis,

(2) to be given an equal share with England in the financial

control of Egypt, and (3) that the French claim to protect Latin

Christians in Syria shall be acknowledged by England.

A new treaty, in place of that of San Stefano, is signed at

Berlin regulating European Turkey, the Peace of Berlin.

Beaconsfield and Salisbury return to London announcing “Peace

with Honour,” and are banqueted at the Mansion House. England

takes military possession of Cyprus, and appoints perambulating

Consuls in Asia Minor, as arranged by the Convention.

The Anglo-French control established in Egypt. Rivers Wilson

appointed Finance Minister, Baring Controller and Blignières

French Minister of Public Works, Nubar Pasha (an Armenian) Prime

Minister. Rothschild finances the new régime with a loan,

raising the total debt to £68,000,000.

1879 Financial Reforms are introduced by the new Control in the

interest of the Bondholders rather than of the people. These

increase the misery of the fellahin and bring the foreign

Control into discredit.

Wilson and Nubar, with the Khedive Ismaïl’s complicity, are

mobbed in the streets. The Khedive dismisses both, and decrees a

Constitutional Government in native hands.

Rise of the first National Egyptian Movement.

Bismarck makes alliance with Austria against Russia.

Wilson, returning to Europe, appeals to Rothschild for help. The

English and French Governments being unwilling, Bismarck

intervenes.

The Sultan is invited to depose Ismaïl. His son Tewfik is named

by the Sultan in his place with limited rights of borrowing.

The Dual Financial Control restored under Tewfik with a new Law

of Liquidation, moderating the excessive claims of the

bondholders.

An Egyptian Ministry is appointed by England and France

conjointly.

1880 Gladstone succeeds Beaconsfield. Granville at the Foreign

Office.

Granville threatens to bombard Dulcigno in company with the

French fleet in order to enforce on Turkey a rectification of

the Greek frontier.

Sultan Abdul Hamid suppresses the Ottoman Constitution at

Constantinople. Much religious unrest in the Mohammedan world.

1881 The French, under St. Hilaire, on the pretext of punishing a

tribe on the Tunisian frontier of Algeria, send a French army,

which crosses the frontier, marches unopposed to Tunis, and

forces the Bey to sign the Treaty of Bardo accepting a French

Protectorate.

The Sultan, as suzerain of Tunis, protests, but the _fait

accompli_ is accepted by Granville, Salisbury in opposition

maintaining silence.

General rising in the Tunisian Regency against the French.

Sfax is bombarded by the French fleet and given up to pillage.

The Mohammedan rising spreads through North Africa and affects

Algeria. The Mahdi first heard of in Kordofan.

In Egypt it strengthens the hands of the National Movement, and

is joined by the army. Arabi, being in command of the Cairo

garrison, is recognized as National Leader.

An attempt having been made to arrest Arabi, he heads a popular

demonstration before Abdin Palace, and demands the summoning of

a Chamber of Notables. This, contrary to the English Financial

Controller’s advice, is promised by the Khedive Tewfik, and the

Notables are summoned. Great popular rejoicings.

Gambetta, alarmed at the violence of feeling in North Africa,

persuades Granville to issue a Joint Note with the purpose of

detaching Tewfik from the Egyptian Nationalists and promising

him support against them. The Joint Note is published, causing

extreme popular anger at Cairo.

1882 _1st Jan._—The first Nationalist Programme is published in the

“Times.”

The Notables having met, insist on Constitutional Government

with power, vested in a Legislative Chamber, of voting the

annual budget, except that half of it affecting the interest of

the National Debt.

The Controllers refuse to allow Financial Control of any kind to

the Chamber.

The Notables insisting, the Ministers resign, and are succeeded

by a Nationalist Cabinet, with Arabi as War Minister.

_7th Feb._—A Constitution is decreed by Tewfik.

Preparations are made by Gambetta at Toulon for sending French

troops to Egypt to put down the Constitution, England to send

ships to Alexandria, but this is prevented by Gambetta’s defeat

on a question of home policy, and his retirement from office.

He is replaced by Freycinet, who adopts a friendly attitude

towards the Constitution. Granville remaining hostile.

Blignières, the French Controller, is withdrawn by Freycinet.

The Egyptian Parliament meets at Cairo and announces a programme

of reforms. Order is maintained throughout the country.

Nevertheless, under financial pressure in England, and through

false reports of disorder in Egypt, Granville insists with

Gladstone on intervention by force.

British and French men-of-war sent to Alexandria under Beauchamp

Seymour.

The Sultan is once more invited by Granville to exert his

authority as Suzerain in Egypt.

He sends a Turkish Commissioner, Dervish Pasha, with

instructions to arrest Arabi and place himself in command of the

Egyptian Army and restore order.

Dervish fails to intimidate the Nationalists, and confines

himself to making peace between the Khedive and Arabi, on whom

he confers a high decoration from the Sultan, with the title of

_Ferik_ (Field Marshal).

The British fleet continuing at Alexandria, great popular

excitement ensues.

_11th June._—Riots occur with loss of life, and the English

Consul at Alexandria is mobbed.

_11th July._—The Europeans having been withdrawn from Cairo on

board ship, Admiral Seymour bombards Alexandria, the French

Admiral having refused to join in it.

The city being on fire, Arabi withdraws his forces to a

defencible position inland, and Alexandria is burnt and given up

to pillage.

Dervish Pasha escapes in his yacht to Constantinople, and Tewfik

places himself under the protection of the British fleet.

A Grand Council assembles at Cairo, and declaring the Khedive to

have deserted to the enemy, assumes supreme authority, order

being well maintained. It entrusts Arabi with the defence of the

country.

A conference meanwhile of Ambassadors assembles at

Constantinople, the lead being taken by Dufferin to decide on a

course of action.

The Ambassadors sign a protocol of disinterestedness in any new

Egyptian settlement on behalf of their Governments.

The Sultan is once more invited to restore order, but while he

hesitates to send troops, Gladstone despatches an army of 34,000

men to Egypt, the French Government refusing as before to take

part in it, so also does the Italian Government, invited by

Granville.

The British Army under Wolseley occupies the Suez Canal in spite

of French protests, proclaiming that it has come, not to take

possession, but to re-establish the authority of the Khedive and

maintain the Sultan’s suzerain rights. A similar declaration had

been previously made by Seymour at Alexandria.

_13th Sept._—Wolsey, marching on Cairo defeats Arabi at Tel-el-

Kebir with the slaughter of 20,000 Egyptians, most of them

unarmed peasants. Arabi surrenders to General Drury Lowe.

Cairo is occupied and the Khedive replaced in authority. An

intention is announced of hanging Arabi, but is prevented by

feeling in England. Many thousands of the Nationalists are

arrested and imprisoned, and a reign of political terror

prevails.

Liberal opinion in England, shocked at these extremities of

repression, expostulates with Gladstone, and Dufferin is sent as

High Commissioner to Cairo to make a settlement on Liberal and

Constitutional lines.

Arabi, induced by a private agreement with Dufferin to plead

guilty to rebellion, all other charges being withdrawn, he is

condemned to death, but his sentence is at once commuted to one

of honourable exile. A general amnesty is proclaimed.

Riaz Pasha resigns office, and Sherif Pasha is appointed to

succeed him.

1883 The Joint Financial Control is abolished in favour of a single

English Adviser, with full financial power.

Dufferin, in an eloquent despatch, while ignoring the existing

Constitution of 1882, sketches a future of freedom, happiness

and self-government for the Egyptians under free institutions.

It is hailed as a charter of Egypt’s liberty. The English Army

of Occupation is to be withdrawn as soon as order can be made

secure.

Dufferin’s new institutions for Egypt are to consist of a

Consultative Chamber without power of naming Ministers, and a

General Assembly vested with the sole right of vetoing new

taxation.

The French Government, resenting its exclusion from the

Financial Control of Egypt, and prompted by Bismarck, turns its

attention to Colonial matters. It takes possession of

Madagascar.

Baring returns to Cairo as Consul-General, with special mission

to set the finances on a sound footing and carry out Dufferin’s

recommendations as to self-government.

He announces that the British garrison shall be withdrawn from

Cairo by the end of the year, leaving only “a Corporal’s Guard”

at Alexandria.

Bismarck’s “Three Emperor” League.

A large Egyptian Army, under an English General, Hicks, is

defeated by the Mahdi, who advances on Khartoum. A military

police force, under General Valentine Baker, is sent to Suakim

to act against the Mahdists. Baker is defeated, and Suakim is

beleaguered by Osman Digna.

The Egyptian Government, being left without an army, Baring

insists on the Khedive abandoning the Soudan.

1884 This being refused by the Khedive, Cromer dismisses Sherif, and

takes the Government into his own hands. He reappoints Nubar

Pasha Prime Minister. The withdrawal of the British garrison is

postponed _sine die_.

King Leopold of Belgium is entrusted by the Powers with the

founding of the “Congo Free State” in the “interests of

humanity,” and as a bar to Mahdist progress in Central Africa.

Gordon is sent to Khartoum to withdraw the Egyptian troops from

the Soudan. He is defeated by the Mahdi and is besieged in

Khartoum.

1885 Granville, to create a diversion, encourages the Italians to

take possession of Massowah on the Red Sea and the French of

Zeila, both being possessions of the Khedivate. The Sultan

protests, but is disregarded.

An English army is sent up the Nile under Wolseley to relieve

Gordon. It arrives too late, Khartoum having fallen to the Mahdi

and Gordon having been slain.

Wolseley’s army is ordered home. The Soudan is abandoned south

of Wady Halfa.

Gladstone resigns office, and is succeeded by Salisbury.

Salisbury sends Drummond Wolff to Constantinople to arrange

terms with the Sultan for evacuating Egypt.

News of the Mahdi’s death.

1886 _Feb._—Gladstone returns to power. He continues the occupation

of Egypt. The Drummond Wolff Mission makes no progress.

1887 Salisbury, once more in office, renews negotiations for

evacuating Egypt.

_22nd May._—The Drummond Wolff Convention is signed. It provides

that the British troops are to be withdrawn from Egypt at the

end of three years, unless prevented by external or internal

danger: on ratification the Powers to be invited to recognize

and guarantee Egypt’s territorial inviolability; the Ottoman

Government reserves a right to occupy Egypt in above said cases

of danger, but failing to restore order, England may reoccupy.

A Turkish Commissioner is appointed to reside permanently at

Cairo, representing the Sultan’s authority.

France, supported by Russia, threatens the Sultan with hostility

if he should ratify the Convention, and at the last moment he

refuses his signature, although Queen Victoria had already

signed.

Salisbury, regarding the Sultan’s refusal as an insult to her

Majesty, resolves to remain in Egypt, with or without legal

warrant.

Cromer’s policy of the Veiled Protectorate.

The Franco-Russian Alliance dates from this incident.

Stanley’s Expedition up the Congo.

1888 Italy joins Germany and Austria in the Triple Alliance.

Kaiser Wilhelm II succeeds his father as Emperor.

1890 Treaty of Madrid assigning joint powers of Protection to the

Great Powers, including Germany, over Morocco.

Bismarck is dismissed by Kaiser Wilhelm II.

France fortifies Bizerta contrary to agreement, and talks of

annexing Tunis.