THE PRICE OF PEACE
"They have nothing to fear; are they not our people?"
Was it possible for the people of Cairo to have any better assurance
than these words of General Kleber, that the "Aman," or amnesty, that
was so loudly proclaimed and, by the French, so enthusiastically
celebrated, was to be the full and free "Aman" which alone is
understood by Oriental peoples? One would have thought not, but the
Cairenes were to learn differently. They were to be taught that
"amnesty" is a word which, like so many others, may be interpreted in
varying senses, and that it has no other meaning than that which the
user chooses to accord to it.
Among the rejoicings for the great victory of a strong, well-supplied,
and well-nourished army of well-trained and disciplined veterans over
a famished, half-naked, wholly undisciplined, and almost wholly
exhausted mob of civilians, there had been, among other things, a
great banquet, to which all the notables of the town were invited, and
at which they were received by Kleber in a gracious manner--so
gracious, indeed, that they went away full of pleasant dreams for the
future. General Kleber had taken the opportunity to invite a number of
the Ulema to meet him on the following Friday morning, and believing
that it was his intention, as indeed he had declared it to be, to
discuss with them the revival of the Dewan and other matters, they did
not fail to appear punctually at the appointed time, some of them
looking forward to receiving some recognition of their services in the
promotion of peace. Arrived at the General's, they were not long in
learning that the gala costume with which they had honoured the
occasion was most unhappily inappropriate.
As a first intimation of the vanity of their hopes they were kept
waiting in an ante-chamber until their patience was almost exhausted.
At length Kleber entered, and without any words of welcome or apology
straightway proceeded once more to censure them for having allied
themselves with the Turks. When the Sheikhs once more protested that
they had done so under his own instructions, given at the time that he
had announced the approaching departure of the French, he blamed them
for not having suppressed the "insurrection." They replied that this
was wholly out of their power, and that those who, as he was aware,
had made an effort to stop the fighting had been rudely treated, and
even roughly handled, by the people. But it was the old story of the
wolf and the lamb. Kleber was determined to bring the Sheikhs in
guilty in any case, and upbraided them with being double-faced. This
was not what the poor Sheikhs, who had honestly done their best in the
cause of peace, had expected as the reward of their efforts, or as the
natural sequence of the courtesies extended to them at the banquet.
All this, however, was but the preface to the announcement of what
was, in fact, the real object of their being summoned to meet the
General. This was nothing less than the seizing the Sheikhs as
hostages for the payment by the city of an enormous indemnity and the
infliction of exorbitant fines upon each of five of the leading
Sheikhs. While yet the Sheikhs, dumbfoundered by this novel
interpretation of the word "amnesty," were trying to assure themselves
that they were not the victims of an ill-timed jest, the General left
the room as abruptly as he had entered it, and the Sheikhs found that
they were prisoners.
When at length, late in the evening, the sorely-troubled Sheikhs had
recovered somewhat from the consternation into which they had been
thrown by the General's treatment of them, and the extravagance of the
demand he had made, they proceeded to draw up classified lists of the
inhabitants of the town and fix the sums that each class was to
contribute towards the payment of the indemnity. As a basis upon which
to allot the debt householders were assessed at a year's rent, and
every trade, business, and industry in the town, down to the street
musicians, jesters, and jugglers, was called upon to pay its share.
This done the Sheikhs were, with the exception of a few who were to be
imprisoned until they had paid the special fines inflicted upon them,
released, but under military guard. Among those imprisoned was the
Sheikh el Sadat, the Chief of the Shereefs, or descendants of the
Prophet, upon whom a fine of 500,000 dollars had been imposed.
Then began the darkest days in the history of the country. Thenceforth
tyranny and torture of every kind was adopted to force the payment of
the indemnity, and all that the superior civilisation of France had to
offer the wretched people to whom they had accorded an "amnesty," and
whom they termed "our people," was the introduction of refinements in
the tortures inflicted upon them, such as the bringing of the wife of
the Sheikh el Sadat to witness the tortures inflicted upon her
husband.
Historians glide lightly over this part of their story, and being
perforce compelled to mention some of these incidents, are not ashamed
to stoop to the contemptible excuse that such things were "the custom
of the East," that the French were only availing themselves of the
means that would have been employed against themselves in like case.
Indeed, this was the excuse the French offered at the time. "Living in
the East," said Vigo Roussillon, one of those present at the massacre
of the Turkish prisoners at Jaffa, "we adopted the morals of the
East."
There is an old chemical experiment in which the mixing of two
coloured fluids produces a clear, transparent one, but no such
experiment is possible in morality. Evil-doing is evil-doing, and
neither the casuistry of the Jesuits nor the art of man can make it
good or right doing. I myself believe that all evil eventually
produces good--"That every cloud that spreads above and veileth love,
itself is love;" but that affords no excuse for evil-doing. Nor could
the French have found a falser or more barren excuse than this one. It
is true that in the East, as in the West, tyranny and torture had been
for ages the tools of tyrants, but those tyrants had in using those
tools done so ignorantly and stupidly because they knew no better.
They acted upon the natural impulse of men who knew no law but that of
force, no right but that of the sword, no morality but their own
pleasure, and as the circumstances and conditions of the times seemed
to them to dictate. They had no sense of doing evil. To them there was
no other way of influencing men against their wills save by physical
or mental pain, and they acted accordingly. It was quite otherwise
with the French. They, with a perfect knowledge of what they were
doing, did this evil, knowing it to be evil, and they did it
deliberately, not in a moment of anger but with cool, thoughtful
determination, and all the sophistry in the world cannot free them
from the degradation and dishonour of having done so. But we must
remember that Europe in that day, greatly as it had advanced in
civilisation, was still far behind the point it has since reached, and
that if the French are to be censured for what they did in Egypt it is
not because we in England were incapable of evil; nay, what, after
all, was the torture inflicted upon the Sheikh el Sadat to that
inflicted by the law of England on a mere boy sentenced to be flogged
once a fortnight for two years? or to the flogging of a seaman "round
the fleet" that was so often carried out long after? For sheer
brutality and gross wanton inhumanity the world has scarcely any
record that can approach that of the "Holy Office," but the records of
England's prisons are not far behind, and leave us no room for
anything but shame and humility on the score of our humanity in the
past. It is not therefore to picture the French as monsters of
iniquity that I have spoken of this matter, but as the natural reply
of the Egyptian when he is accused, as he so often is, of ingratitude
and want of appreciation of the blessings that we good, kind-hearted
Europeans have so generously bestowed upon him. To the European critic
of Egypt and its affairs the benefits conferred upon the country and
its people by the introduction of European civilisation are so great
and so many as to overshadow and hide all else. Unfortunately it is
not so to the Egyptian. He knows only too well that there has been a
reverse side to the picture that the European draws. The evils of
which I have been speaking have long since passed away, but they have
left a trail of bitter feeling that still survives. Some of the most
prominent of the Egyptian citizens of Cairo to-day are the direct
descendants of the men who suffered so severely under the French.
Would it be human in them to forget that to the present day they are
sufferers from the ills their immediate ancestors had to bear? And yet
these men, true to the traditions of their families, are to-day as
they were in the time of the French, the men most ready to give a
cordial welcome to all real progress--men who, though they cannot
forget the past, are content to bury its bitterness and who fully
recognise that the Europe of to-day is not altogether the same thing
as the Europe of a century ago.
Yet one word more is necessary on this subject. Whatever truth there
was in the French excuse that they were but "doing in the East what
the Easterns did," this was not true of the Egyptians. All historians
agree in one thing--that from the earliest days down to the French
occupation (which, as we have seen, was the introduction of an era of
"liberty, equality, and fraternity") the Egyptian people had always
been the downtrodden slaves of the long string of foreign rulers who
had exploited them in the most merciless manner. Yet in these same
histories we find the people spoken of as if they had been the rulers,
and all the vices and sins of the Mamaluks, their followers and their
servants the Copts, are put down with a most generous impartiality to
the unhappy people who had to bear the bitter burthen these sins and
vices cast upon them. Tyranny, torture, bribery, corruption were rife
in the country, therefore the Egyptians were tyrannical, corrupt, and
so on. And the same writers, with a calm indifference to the claims of
logic and common sense not altogether peculiar to them, tell us that
the people were slothful, lacking in energy, content to live from hand
to mouth, servile and, to cap the pyramid of their faults and follies,
fatalists! How is it that these brilliant historians are unable to see
that the centre and controlling feature of all the history of the
country has been the utter irreconcilability of the characters of the
ruled and their rulers? This was so in the days of the Ptolemies and
of the Caliphs as in the days of the Mamaluks and of the French.
Crushing as was the indemnity imposed by the French upon the miserable
citizens of Cairo, it was not in the eyes of the Egyptians the worst
of the evils from which they had to suffer. We have seen that in their
day of trouble the Christians, if they had found assailants among the
Moslems, had also found very vigorous protectors. Now that the
Christians had an opportunity of showing their gratitude they hastened
to do so. The French, with a paltry spite that admits no excuse,
forbade the Moslems to ride, commanded them, under pain of the
bastinado, to stand up whenever a Frenchman passed, and in other ways
sought to humiliate them as much as possible, not the least being the
permission they tacitly, if not directly, accorded the native
Christians to insult, abuse, and ill-treat the Moslems. And all this
was done to "Our people" in virtue of the "Amnesty" that had been
granted, not in the fiery heat of open hostility or wrath, or to crush
opposition, but with deliberate vindictiveness when all excuse for
such brutality had ceased. And the native Christians, following the
good example set them and in gratitude for the protection they had
received from Moslem defenders, availed themselves to the utmost of
the privilege accorded them.
It has been said that this was but a recoil upon the Moslems of
ill-treatment they had in times past inflicted upon the Christians. No
falser excuse could be offered. It is true that, as I have before
admitted, the lower classes of the Moslems had constantly insulted
and ill-used the Christians, and under some of the Sultans these had
been subjected to degrading and vexatious tyrannies; but, as we have
seen, the better class of the people and the Moslem rulers in general
always afforded them the full and ample protection to which they were
entitled in accordance with Moslem law and religion, even when the
granting of that protection necessitated the shedding of Moslem blood.
Never once in the history of the country had the Christians been
without some of the Moslems for their protectors, and never once had
the Moslems, in cool blood or with deliberate malice, persecuted them
as native and European Christians now persecuted the Moslems. In
moments of wrath and of political excitement Christians had been
massacred and their houses pillaged, the lower classes were habitually
offensive to them, they had been subjected to humiliating conditions
and restrictions by some of the rulers of the land as they had been
petted and pampered by others, but with all this they had always been
not worse but better off than the bulk of the Moslems. Nor must it be
forgotten that it was not as Christians, but as the servants of the
Government, that the Christians were hated by the people. Bigots and
fanatics have existed, such as Nasooh Pacha, but they were and are
regarded by all true Moslems as little better than heretics and
infidels. Nowhere throughout Islam are Christians hated as Christians,
or for the sake of their religion, but for their actions towards and
treatment of Moslems.
No better evidence of the true relations between the two peoples or of
their conduct to each other can be asked for than that afforded by
Gabarty's history, with its perfect freedom from bigotry and
fanaticism. So far from exonerating or condoning the faults of the
Moslems, he speaks of and condemns these more frequently and more
freely than those of the Christians, and the fact that he does so is
the more noticeable, and by far the more significant, that he was
writing, not for Christian or European readers, but solely for his
countrymen and coreligionists. Nor can we forget in weighing its value
that, plain-spoken as it is on the faults and failings of the Moslems,
it is the most popular history written in their language. If the
Moslems of Egypt were the bitter fanatics they are so commonly accused
of being this could not be so. But that the Moslems never did oppress
the Christians is proved by the simple historical fact, attested by
all the Christian historians of the country, that, from the first
introduction of Islam into the country down to the present day, the
Moslem Egyptians have never had the power or means of oppressing or
tyrannising over the Christians or any one else. Not only so, but they
have never had the means or the power to protect themselves from the
tyranny and oppression of the Christians. Under the Caliphs and their
successors the Mamaluks whatever there was of tyranny and oppression
fell with fullest weight upon the Moslems. Their grievances were real
enough, and not, as were those of the Christians, little more than
sentimental; the kurbag, the corvee, extortion and injustice of every
kind, were the evils from which the Moslems had to suffer, while for
the most part the Christians escaped these and had as their chief
grievances the facts that they were treated socially as an inferior
race, were not allowed to ride horses, or to hold land, and had to
wear a distinctive dress. And as a set-off to these grievances they
had no small share in the golden harvest extorted by cruelty and
torture from the Moslems. What wonder if the Moslems felt bitterly
against them, or that their bitterness was increased by their
impotency to protect themselves. And yet, save for such wild outbursts
as that incited by Nasooh Pacha, they were content to leave the
Christians alone.
And when we recall the relative position of the Christians and the
Moslem people in the country we cannot be surprised that the
bitterness I have spoken of should develop into hatred. So far as the
people were concerned, it was the Christians, and the Christians
alone, who were mainly responsible for their sufferings. It was the
Christians who were the real oppressors of the people. They
constituted the one class in the country which, if it had willed to do
so, could have softened the endless sufferings of the people--the one
class that, without a complete change in the government, could have
benefited them. But far from benefiting they were the one and only
class that in season and out of season never ceased to pursue the
miserable people day or night, grinding them in the dust from pure
malicious hatred. It was they who carried on the atrocious tyranny
that wrecked the commerce of the country and well-nigh desolated the
land, for it was they who fixed and they who collected the assessments
that crushed and starved the peasantry. They might, with little loss
to themselves, have vastly bettered the condition of the people, but
far from doing so they pushed their power for evil to the utmost. That
is why the Moslems hated them. Ruthless, savage as were the Mamaluks,
they were always under some restraint. As a mere matter of policy they
could not wholly resist the intercessions of the Ulema, and so it was
to their Coptic and other Christian clerks that the Beys turned for
advice and counsel as to how much and how the people could be forced
to pay. The Beys thought nothing of annihilating a village that would
not or could not pay the sum demanded of it, but it was the Christian
clerks of the Beys who fixed the amount to be paid and who persuaded
the Beys that it was unwillingness and not inability that kept the
people from paying. These are facts that cannot be denied or disputed.
They are practically admitted by all historians, none of these failing
to point out that the administrative branch of the government has
always been in the hands of the Christians, though none of them seem
to have ever cared to recognise the logical and inevitable consequence
of this fact. It was not in the power of the Christians to have wholly
averted the evils from which the people had to suffer, but they might
have done much that would have vastly mitigated not only the
outrageous extortion practised but also the cruelty and brutality with
which it was enforced. It was, then, not as Christians but as their
heartless oppressors that the Moslems hated the Christians, and the
sole excuse that these could offer for their wanton inhumanity was the
contempt and social ill-treatment they received, not from the people
but from the men they served.
And as it was with the Christians of the country so it was with the
French--whatever of hatred the people had for them was due not to
religious fanaticism or bigotry but to the oppression they inflicted
upon the people.
I have dwelt upon this point at the greater length that I am convinced
of the importance of the European critics of Egypt and the Egyptians
learning to look at this question from the true point of view. At the
present day it is the commonly asserted belief of almost all the
Europeans in the country that the Egyptians are a bigoted and
fanatical race. I deny it entirely. I have travelled and lived among
Moslems in more lands than one, among Kurds and Afghans, Indians and
others, and I have never met a Moslem people not only so free from
fanaticism but so lax, from the Moslem point of view, as the
Egyptians. Nor must the reader forget two points that tend to show
that the bitterness of the people towards the Christians was the
result of political and not of religious animosity. These facts are
that Moslems of whose orthodoxy there was no doubt were during the
revolt and during the siege assaulted, ill-treated, and in more than
one case killed, by the mob on the accusation of befriending or simply
of being in sympathy with the French. The Sheikh El Sadat was one of
those who had to suffer in this way, and almost all of the Sheikhs who
had gone as a deputation to treat for peace during the siege. So, on
the other hand, the Jews, who have always refrained from interfering
in politics, and who have ever been studiously careful to avoid taking
sides with any party or sect in the country, although they are the
subject of far stronger personal and religious dislike than are the
Christians, were never the object of direct attack from the people,
though they, like the Moslems, on many occasions suffered when the mob
broke out against the Christians. In the time of the French occupation
the Harat el Yahoud, or Jews' Quarter, was situated, as it still is,
off the Mousky, then the principal residence of the Franks and
Christians, yet in the list that Gabarty gives of the quarters of the
town that had been raided by the mob this is not included. All through
the troubled days of the French occupation the Jews had to bear their
share of the ills that fell upon all; but the people bore them no
special hatred, had no special grievance against them, did not look
upon them as their personal enemies, and thus they escaped the direct
attacks that were made upon the Christians.
The hatred, then, with which the Egyptians had learned to regard the
French was not the hatred of fanaticism and had but little reference
to the question of religion. Had the French understood the people and
been willing and able to rule them with due regard for their
prejudices and desires, there was no reason why they should not have
gained the goodwill, and with certain limitations, the loyalty of the
people. It was not only possible for the French to have done this, but
it would have been easier for them to do so than to follow the mad
course they chose to adopt. The fact of the French being Christians,
for as such the Egyptians regarded them, would have had but small
weight if they had conceded to Moslem sentiment its reasonable
demands. To the Egyptian mind the Mamaluks were not much better
Moslems than the French might easily have been. This the French could
not see, and not being able to see it, or to understand the people,
they could find no other way to rule them but that which the Mamaluks
had adopted--force. And it was with them as with every government that
has ever existed or ever can exist, the admission that it is compelled
to use force to rule any people whatever is a confession that the task
of rightly ruling that people is beyond their strength, that it is one
for which they are unfitted and one in which they never can succeed.
It is a law of nature in the moral as in the physical world and one
from which there is no escape--that no force can operate without
creating resistance to its own action, and the greater the force the
greater the resistance. A given force may for a time appear to crush
all opposition, but if it could do so in reality it would be but to
find itself exhausted and effete. Unable to understand either the
people of Egypt or their history, the French could not see that while
for centuries the rule of the country had been founded upon force, it
had been maintained not by force but by the pliancy of its rulers. No
one knew this better than the Mamaluk chiefs. These cared nothing for
the people or their desires, and they never hesitated to drive them to
the uttermost, but they knew equally well that there was a limit and,
though they but yielded to conquer, they yielded when that limit was
reached. Nor did they, like the French, waste their force in
unprofitable directions or in exciting needless opposition, but
devoted it wholly and solely to the attainment of their one great
object--the procuring of the funds they needed.
In the East the shepherd goes before his flock; whither he leads they
follow, and his dogs serve only to bring up the stragglers or hasten
the steps of the laggards. It is much the same with the people.
Caliphs, Sultans, Beys, and French may seem to be driving them, but in
reality they are not being driven but led, led by perhaps unseen and
unknown shepherds that are yet more potent for good or evil than any
ruler that ever sat on an Eastern throne. Europeans cannot see this,
yet every Eastern who has given the subject a moment's thought knows
that it is so. As often as not the real leader and ruler of the people
is himself unconscious of his power or position. It was so in the days
before the revolt of Cairo. An open avowed leader the people would
most probably have distrusted, but the almost silent man who said but
little, who assumed no authority but rightly gauged the feelings
stirring around him and knew how, by simple words, to influence the
current of those feelings, could sway the people as he willed. The
demagogue who cries aloud in the market-places, bidding men accept him
as their guide and friend, obtains but a poor following. He may stir
up latent feeling to action, but he cannot direct either the feeling
or the action. So far as he can rightly interpret the feeling he may
pose as the spokesman and leader of a party, but true leader he never
is. Mahdis are for ever arising to preach, like Peter the Hermit, the
glory and duty of a "Holy War," but among the people of the East they
gain but poor success. The negro races flock to the standards of these
men and have died in thousands for their sake, but the Eastern asks
for a miracle before he will be convinced, and, holding aloof from the
would-be guide, follows all unknowingly some other.
If the reader has followed me so far he will now have pretty clearly
grasped the truth that the rule of the French in Egypt had proved an
utter failure, and to some extent he will have seen why this was so.
That failure was brought about by not one but many causes. Of these,
besides those that I have already dealt with, there is one that I may
speak of here.
I have shown in a previous chapter how, although the teachings of the
Christian and Mahomedan religions are almost identical as to the duty
of obedience to those in authority, the varying circumstances
affecting the peoples of England and those of the East lead these to
interpret and apply those teachings very differently. It is so with
other matters. Christianity and Islam are at one in ranking Justice
and Mercy as the greatest of the virtues. "The Lord thy God" is "a
just God," but also "a merciful God" is the teaching of the Koran as
well as of the Bible. It is the belief of the Moslem as well as of the
Christian. But the European conception of justice is to the Moslem,
and indeed to all Easterns, hopelessly imperfect, so imperfect that
in their eyes it becomes injustice. One law for all, for high and
low, rich and poor. That is the ideal of civilised Europe--an ideal
that never has been and in all probability never will be accepted in
the East. The man of high position who commits an offence should, says
the West, be punished in the same way and in the same degree as an
humbler man would be for the same offence. That, says the East, is
just in theory but impossible in practice. And the East is right. In
no conceivable case is it possible to accord to two men an exactly
equal amount of punishment. Whether it be a sixpenny fine or the death
penalty, every penalty inflicted affects the person upon whom it is
inflicted precisely in proportion to facts and circumstances that it
is not possible should be known to or weighed by his judge. That this
is so is admitted by all, but in England and other countries men are
content with an attempt at "justice" that almost wholly ignores this
fact. Not so the Easterns. That one of the Ulema, a Pacha or any other
person of position should be punished by a penalty such as might be
inflicted upon any ordinary citizen is to the Eastern mind not justice
but gross injustice.
But the difference in the Englishman's conception of justice and that
of the Eastern lies even deeper than this. To the English mind the
idea of justice is mainly associated with the administration of
punishment to the guilty and with abstention from injustice in dealing
with others. The Eastern, until he has acquired that tinge of European
thought and sentiment that unconsciously yet constantly causes him to
mislead Europeans as to what is and what is not Eastern thought on
such subjects, but rarely connects the idea of punishment with that of
justice. To him punishment is not the administration of justice but
the administration of a deterrent. That as such it may be just or
unjust he quite recognises, but the justice or injustice of a
punishment is to his mind an incident and not an essential of the
punishment, and the justice so often lauded in the East is not the
justice of the courts but the personal quality that prevents a man
wronging another or leads him when he has acted unjustly to admit his
error and seek to remedy it.
And while the two peoples are thus apart in their interpretation of
justice, they are still more widely so in the positions they assign to
justice and mercy. The European, and perhaps especially the
Englishman, places justice first and only allows mercy to come in a
long way off. Not so the Eastern. To him mercy is first and justice
second. That this should be so is a direct result of the conditions
under which the two peoples have lived for many centuries. As all
history shows, the races of Europe have always had a genius for and a
tendency towards organised government. Whether we peruse the records
of liberty-loving England or of thraldom-trodden Spain, of republican
France, or of despotic Russia, in every European country we find the
people regarding an organised government, a government acting in a
prescribed manner upon a prescribed system, as a natural complement of
existence as a nation. It is not so in the East. There the whole bent
of opinion tends towards autocratic if not to pure despotic rule. The
difference is due to various causes, but possibly to none more than
this--that in Europe the community of interests binding individuals
together and causing them to recognise each other as members of a
group are territorial, limited chiefly and sometimes wholly by
geographical boundaries, whereas in the East this community of
interest rests almost entirely upon the religious distinctions that
divide peoples living in the same countries. In Europe, though there
have been religious wars, war has in the main been the result of the
rivalries of peoples distinguished from each other by language,
habits, and character. In the East religion has in general been the
line of distinction. It has followed from this that in Europe the
peoples have been and still are obliged to group themselves as
nations, while in the East they group themselves by their religions.
The European nation or community is therefore a secular body, and as
such seeks a secular government, whereas the Eastern peoples are not
nations so much as religious communities. To each an organised
government is necessary for self-protection and internal adjustment.
This the European is obliged to find in the organisation of a special
governing body, while the Easterns find it ready to hand in the
organisation of their Churches. Now in the organisation of a nation
with regard to its internal affairs, justice is almost of necessity
placed before mercy, whereas in that of a religion, mercy is exalted
above justice. Hence a people like the English learn to look upon
justice, or whatever near approach to it can be attained, as the
greatest good to be sought for from their rulers and in their efforts
to attain this end, like the political economists of whom Ruskin
complained, forget the human equation, and that justice, however
finely balanced by tale and weight of legal prescription, can never be
more nor less than a failure, if it be not dominated by mercy. In
Europe peoples have again and again revolted against the tyrants that
have oppressed them that they might thereby secure justice and its
complement liberty, and they could do this because there was no higher
or conflicting interest to hold them back; but it has not been so in
the East. There all the organisation that the peoples have needed for
the administration of their internal affairs has always been found in
the organisation of their religion, and whether the tyranny and
oppression from which they have suffered from times immemorial
afflicted them through the hands and acts of their co-religionists or
from those of other and rival religions, the interests of their
religion, and therefore of their fellows, demanded submission to such
ills rather than a resistance that could not fail to injure that which
they deemed the higher and better cause. And in the sufferings they
were thus called upon to bear they naturally turned to their religion
for consolation, and found it in their belief in the ineffable mercy
of the Deity, and thus learning to look upon mercy as the highest
attribute of God inevitably rank it as the noblest virtue in man. And
to the Moslem the appreciation of mercy he thus acquires is enforced
by the teaching of the Koran. The law of retaliation, an eye for an
eye, is ordained to Moslems, but with the promise that to him who
exacts less his forbearance shall be accounted as a charity and as
such shall gain him a rich reward. To bridle one's anger, to forgive
men and to intercede "with a good intercession"--these are virtues
that are endlessly praised and commended in "The Book of God."
What a poor substitute for these is the "even-handed justice" that is
the boast of our vaunted civilisation!
Is it necessary for me to say now that the price the French asked the
people of Cairo to pay for the peace that had been accorded them, was
to them a violation of all justice? Or need I point out at length that
this incompatibility of ideals on the subjects of justice and mercy
was one of the principal causes of the failure of the French to
realise the anticipations with which they had entered the country, as
it is still one of the causes that hold the East and West apart, and
forms a never-resting cause of misunderstanding between all Orientals
and Europeans. Unfortunately in this, as in other matters, the
Oriental is too prone to keep his ideals as a standard whereby to
judge the merits and failings of others, rather than as a guide for
his own actions. It is one of the greatest of the Englishman's merits
that he does not do this. He strives as best he may to realise his
ideals, and in this it would be well indeed for the Egyptian to
imitate him. With both people, as indeed with all others if we would
judge them justly, we must, however, take account first of their
ideals and next of the sincerity and earnestness with which they seek
to bring these into practice.