Transcriber's Note:
Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as
possible, including non-standard transcriptions of Arabic and some
inconsistent hyphenation. Some changes of spelling and punctuation
have been made. They are listed at the end of the text.
Italic text has been marked with _underscores_.
OE ligatures have been expanded.
Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt
BOOKS BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
_PROSE_
THE FUTURE OF ISLAM 1882
IDEAS ABOUT INDIA 1885
THE SECRET HISTORY SERIES
I THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH OCCUPATION OF EGYPT 1907
II INDIA UNDER RIPON 1909
III GORDON AT KHARTOUM 1911
IV THE LAND WAR IN IRELAND 1912
V MY DIARIES PART I. [THE SCRAMBLE FOR AFRICA] 1919
VI MY DIARIES PART II. [THE COALITION AGAINST GERMANY] 1920
_POETRY_
LOVE SONNETS OF PROTEUS 1880
THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND 1883
IN VINCULIS 1889
A NEW PILGRIMAGE 1889
ESTHER AND LOVE LYRICS 1892
GRISELDA 1893
SATAN ABSOLVED 1899
SEVEN GOLDEN ODES OF ARABIA 1903
POETICAL WORKS. A COMPLETE EDITION 1914
SECRET HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH
OCCUPATION OF EGYPT
Being a Personal Narrative of Events
By
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
NEW YORK ALFRED·A·KNOPF MCMXXII
COPYRIGHT, 1922,
BY WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT
_Published, October, 1922_
_Set up and printed by the Vail-Ballou Co., Binghamton, N. Y._
_Paper furnished by W. F. Etherington & Co., New York, N. Y._
_Bound by the Plimpton Press, Norwood, Mass._
MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
PUBLISHER'S NOTE
When I first arranged with Mr. Blunt to publish _The Secret History of
the English Occupation of Egypt_, I suggested that he write for the
American Edition a brief foreword bringing the book into even closer
relation to the Anglo-Egyptian situation as it stands today. He thought
this idea a good one, and agreed to write such a note. But Mr. Blunt was
born in 1840, and has for a number of years been in failing health. In
June he wrote me that he was so ill as to be quite unable to finish the
foreword, which he had actually commenced to write. He felt furthermore
that any advantage the edition would gain by having a new preface by him
would be more than counterbalanced by any delay in the appearance of the
book "at the present extremely critical moment."
He remarked further: "What could I have said more appropriate today as a
new preface than the few words which already stand as the short preface
I set to the first edition of my _Secret History_ (published in London
and which you reprint in this new edition). This and my poem _The Wind
and the Whirlwind_ (which you also give as an Appendix). Both are
absolutely true of the present shameful position of England in Egypt and
the calamity so closely threatening her Eastern Empire. What could I say
more exactly suited? This is the punishment we are reaping today for our
sin of that sad morning on the Nile which saw the first English gun open
its thunder of aggression just forty years ago at Alexandria in the name
of England's honour. What could I add to my words of grief and shame
then uttered and repeated here? Let these stand for my new preface. My
day is done. Alas! that I should have lived to see those words come true
of England's punishment, more than true."
A. A. K.
PREFACE OF 1895
I desire to place on record in a succinct and tangible form the events
which have come within my knowledge relating to the origin of the
English occupation of Egypt--not necessarily for publication now, but as
an available document for the history of our times. At one moment I
played in these events a somewhat prominent part, and for nearly twenty
years I have been a close and interested spectator of the drama which
was being acted at Cairo.
It may well be, also, that the Egyptian question, though now quiescent,
will reassert itself unexpectedly in some urgent form hereafter,
requiring of Englishmen a new examination of their position there,
political and moral; and I wish to have at hand and ready for their
enlightenment the whole of the materials I possess. I will give these as
clearly as I can, with such documents in the shape of letters and
journals as I can bring together in corroboration of my evidence,
disguising nothing and telling the whole truth as I know it. It is not
always in official documents that the truest facts of history are to be
read, and certainly in the case of Egypt, where intrigue of all kinds
has been so rife, the sincere student needs help to understand the
published parliamentary papers.
Lastly, for the Egyptians, if ever they succeed in re-establishing
themselves as an autonomous nation, it will be of value that they should
have recorded the evidence of one whom they know to be their sincere
friend in regard to matters of diplomatic obscurity which to this day
they fail to realize. My relations with Downing Street in 1882 need to
be related in detail if Egyptians are ever to appreciate the exact
causes which led to the bombardment of Alexandria and the battle of
Tel-el-Kebir, while justice to the patriot leader of their "rebellion"
requires that I should give a no less detailed account of Arabi's trial,
which still presents itself to some Egyptian as to all French minds, in
the light of a pre-arranged comedy devised to screen a traitor. It does
not do to leave truth to its own power of prevailing over lies, and
history is full of calumnies which have remained unrefuted, and of
ingratitudes which nations have persisted in towards their worthiest
sons.
SHEYKH OBEYD, EGYPT.
1895
PREFACE ON PUBLICATION
Since the first brief preface to my manuscript was written twelve years
ago, events have happened which seem to indicate that the moment
foreseen in it has at last arrived when to the public advantage and
without risk of serious indiscretion as far as individuals are
concerned, the whole truth may be given to the world.
Already in 1904 the original manuscript had been thoroughly revised, and
in its purely Egyptian part remodelled under circumstances which add
greatly to its historic value. My old Egyptian friend, Sheykh Mohammed
Abdu, of whom so much mention is made in it, had taken up his country
residence at my doors at Sheykh Obeyd, and I found myself in almost
daily intercourse with him, a most precious accident of which I did not
fail to take full advantage. That great philosopher and patriot--now,
alas, lost to us, for he died at Alexandria, 11th July, 1905, the day
being the twenty-third anniversary of the bombardment of that
city--after many vicissitudes of evil and good fortune had attained in
the year 1899 to the supreme position in Egypt of Grand Mufti, and
having thus acquired a wider sphere than ever of influence with his
fellow countrymen, had it at heart to bequeath to them a true account of
the events of his time, events which had become strangely misunderstood
by them, and clothed with legends altogether fantastic and unreal.
On this subject he often spoke to me, regretting his lack of leisure to
complete the historic work, and when I told him of my own memoir, he
urged me very strongly to publish it, if not in English at least with
his help in Arabic, and he undertook to go through it with me and see
that all that part of it which related to matters within his knowledge
was accurately and fully told. We had been personal friends and
political allies almost from the date of my first visit to Egypt, and
with his garden adjoining mine it was an easy matter for us to work
together and compare our recollections of the men and things we had
known. It was in this way that my history of an epoch so memorable to us
both took final shape, and I was able (how fortunately!) to complete it
and obtain from him his approval and _imprimatur_ before his
unlooked-for death closed forever the chief source of knowledge which he
undoubtedly was of the political movement which led up to the revolution
of 1881, and of the intrigues which marred it in the following year.
The Mufti's death, a severe blow to me as well as to Egypt, postponed
indefinitely our plan of publishing in Arabic, nor till the present year
has the time seemed politically ripe for the production of my work in
English. The events, however, of 1906, and now Lord Cromer's retirement
from the Egyptian scene, have so wholly changed the situation that I
feel I ought no longer to delay, at least as far as my duty to my own
countrymen is concerned. We English are confronted to-day in our
dealings with Egypt with very much the same problem we misunderstood and
blundered about so disastrously a generation ago, and if those of us who
are responsible for public decisions are, in the words of my first
preface, to "re-examine their position there, political and moral,"
honestly or to any profit, it is necessary they should first have set
before them the past as it really was and not as it has been presented
to them so long by the fallacious documents of their official Blue
Books. I should probably not be wrong in asserting that neither Lord
Cromer at Cairo nor Sir Edward Grey at home, nor yet Lord Cromer's
successor Sir Eldon Gorst, have any accurate knowledge of what occurred
in Egypt twenty-five years ago--this notwithstanding Lord Cromer's tardy
recognition of the reform movement of 1881 and his eulogium of Sheykh
Mohammed Abdu repeated so recently as in his last annual Report. Lord
Cromer, it must be remembered, was not at Cairo during any part of the
revolutionary period here described, and, until quite recently, has
always assumed the "official truth" regarding it to be the only truth.
For this reason I have decided now finally on publication, giving the
text of my Memoir as it was completed in January, 1905, the identical
text of which my friend signified his approval suppressing only certain
brief passages which seem to me still too personal in regard to
individuals living, and which could be excised without injury to the
volume's complete historic value. I can sincerely say that in all I
have written my one great aim has been to disclose the _vérité vraie_ as
it is known to me for misguided History's sake.
If there is at all a second reason with me, it must be looked for in a
promise publicly made as long ago as in the September number of the
"Nineteenth Century Review" of 1882 that I would complete some day my
personal _Apologia_ in regard to events then contemporary. At that time
and out of consideration for Mr. Gladstone, and for the hope I had that
he would yet repair the wrong he had done to liberty in Egypt, I
forbore, in the face of much obloquy, to exculpate myself by a full
revelation of the hidden circumstances which were my justification. I
could not clear myself entirely without telling facts technically
confidential, and I decided to be silent.
There is, however, a limit to the duty of reticence owed to public men
in public affairs, and I am confident that my abstention of a quarter of
a century will excuse me with fair judging minds if I now at last make
my conduct quite clear in the only way possible to me, namely, by a
complete exposure in detail of the whole drama of financial intrigue and
political weakness as it was at the time revealed to me, substantiating
it by the contemporary documents still in my possession. If the
susceptibilities of some persons in high places are touched by a too
candid recital, I can but reply that the necessity of speech has been
put on me by their own long lack of candour and generosity. During all
these years not one of those who knew the truth has said a confessing
word on my behalf. It will be enough if I repeat with Raleigh:
Go, Soul, the Body's guest,
Upon a thankless errand.
Fear not to touch the best,
The truth shall be thy warrant.
Then go, for thou must die,
And give the world the lie.
WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT.
NEWBUILDINGS PLACE, SUSSEX.
_April_, 1907.
CONTENTS
PREFACE OF 1895 vii
PREFACE ON PUBLICATION, 1907 ix
I. EGYPT UNDER ISMAÏL 1
II. SIR RIVERS WILSON'S MISSION 19
III. TRAVELS IN ARABIA AND INDIA 38
IV. ENGLISH POLITICS IN 1880 51
V. THE REFORM LEADERS AT THE AZHAR 73
VI. BEGINNINGS OF THE REVOLUTION IN EGYPT 92
VII. TRIUMPH OF THE REFORMERS IN EGYPT 109
VIII. GAMBETTA'S POLICY. THE JOINT NOTE 129
IX. FALL OF SHERIF PASHA 146
X. MY PLEADING IN DOWNING STREET 162
XI. THE CIRCASSIAN PLOT 186
XII. INTRIGUES AND COUNTER INTRIGUES 210
XIII. DERVISH'S MISSION 228
XIV. A LAST APPEAL TO GLADSTONE 251
XV. THE BOMBARDMENT OF ALEXANDRIA 270
XVI. THE CAMPAIGN OF TEL-EL-KEBIR 285
XVII. THE ARABI TRIAL 323
XVIII. DUFFERIN'S MISSION 349
APPENDICES
I. ARABI'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY 367
II. TEXT OF NATIONAL PROGRAMME 383
III. TEXT OF EGYPTIAN CONSTITUTION OF 1882 388
IV. LETTER FROM BOGHOS PASHA NUBAR 397
V. NOTE AS TO THE BERLIN CONGRESS 401
VI. THE WIND AND THE WHIRLWIND 404
Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt
CHAPTER I
EGYPT UNDER ISMAÏL
My first visit to Egypt was in the winter of 1875-6, when I spent some
pleasant months as a tourist on the lower Nile. Before, however,
describing my impressions of this my earliest acquaintance made with the
Egyptian people, it may be as well, that, for their benefit and the
benefit of foreign readers generally, I should say a few words in
explanation of what my previous life had been as far as it had had any
relation to public affairs. It will show them my exact position in my
own country, and help them to understand how it came about that,
beginning as a mere onlooker at what was passing in their country, I
gradually became interested in it politically and ended by taking an
active part in the revolution which six years later developed itself
among them. I was already thirty-five years of age at the date of this
first visit, and had seen much of men and things.
I began life rather early. Belonging to a family of the landed gentry of
the south of England with strong Conservative traditions and connected
with some of the then leaders of the Tory party, I was placed at the age
of eighteen in the Diplomatic Service, in the first instance as attaché
to the British Legation at Athens where King Otho was still on the
throne of Greece, and afterwards, during a space of twelve years, as
member of other legations and embassies to the various Courts of Europe,
in all of which I learned a little of my profession, amused myself, and
made friends. I was thus, between 1859 and 1869, for some weeks at
Constantinople in the reign of Sultan Abd-el-Mejid; for a couple of
years in the Germany of the Germanic Confederation; for a year in Spain
under Queen Isabella; and for another year in Paris at the climax of the
Emperor's prestige under Napoleon III; and I was also for a short time
in the Republic of Switzerland, in South America, and in Portugal.
Everywhere my diplomatic recollections are agreeable ones, but they are
without special political interest or importance of any official kind.
Our English diplomacy in those days, the years following the Crimean
War, which had disgusted Englishmen with foreign adventures, was very
different from what it has since become. It was essentially pacific,
unaggressive, and devoid of those subtleties which have since earned it
a reputation of astuteness at the cost of its honesty. Official zeal was
at a discount in the public service, and nothing was more certain to
bring a young diplomatist into discredit at the Foreign Office than an
attempt, however laudable, to raise any new question in a form demanding
a public answer. We attachés and junior secretaries were very clearly
given to understand this, and that it was not our business to meddle
with the politics of the Courts to which we were accredited, only to
make ourselves agreeable socially, and amuse ourselves, decorously if
possible, but at any rate in the reverse of any serious sense. It is no
exaggeration when I affirm it that in the whole twelve years of my
diplomatic life I was asked to discharge no duty of the smallest
professional importance. This discouraging _régime_ gave me, while I was
in the service, a thorough distaste for politics, nor was it till long
after, and under very different conditions and under circumstances
wholly accidental, that I at last turned my attention seriously to them.
My pursuits as an attaché were those of pleasure, social intercourse,
and literature. I wrote poems, not despatches, and though I assisted
diplomatically at some of the serious dramas of the day in Europe, it
was in the spirit of a spectator rather than of an actor, and of one
hardly admitted at all behind the scenes. On my marriage in 1869, which
was soon followed by the death of my elder brother which left me heir to
the family estates in Sussex, I retired without regret from the public
service to attend to matters of private concern which had always
interested me more.
Nevertheless my early connection with the Foreign Office, though it was
never to be officially renewed, was maintained on a friendly footing as
of one honourably retired from the service, and this and my experience
of Courts and capitals abroad, proved later of no little value to me
when I once more found myself thrown by accident into the stream of
international affairs. It gave me the advantage of a professional
knowledge of the machinery of foreign politics and, what was still more
important, a personal acquaintance with many of those who were working
that machinery. Not a few of these had been my intimate friends. Thus at
the very outset of my life I had found myself in official fellowship
with Lord Currie, who for so many years directed the permanent policy of
the Foreign Office, with Sir Henry Drummond Wolff, Sir Frank Lascelles,
Sir Edward Malet, Lord Dufferin, Lord Vivian, and Sir Rivers Wilson, all
closely connected afterwards with the making of Egyptian history, with
Lord Lytton who was to be Viceroy of India in the years immediately
preceding the crisis of 1881, and amongst foreign diplomatists with M.
de Nélidoff, Russian Ambassador at Constantinople, Baron Haymerly, who
died Prime Minister of the Austrian Empire, and M. de Staal, for twenty
years Russian Ambassador in London. With all these I was on terms of
personal intimacy long before I paid my first visit to Egypt, and it is
with a full knowledge of their individual characters that I am able to
speak of them and judge them. Having been myself, as it were, of the
priesthood, I could not well be deceived by the common insincerities
which are the stock in trade of diplomacy, or mistake for public policy
action which was often only personal. It is far too readily believed by
those who are without individual experience of diplomacy that the great
events of the world's history are the result of elaborate political
design and not as they are really in most instances, dependent upon
unforeseen accidents and the personal strength or weakness, sometimes
the personal whim, of the agents employed.
For the first few years of my retirement from the service I occupied
myself entirely with my domestic affairs, and, as I have said, it was
only by accident that my mind was gradually turned to politics. In 1873,
finding myself in indifferent health, and to escape a late spring in
England, I made with my wife our first common journey in Eastern lands.
We went by Belgrade and the Danube to Constantinople, where we found Sir
Henry Elliott at the Embassy and renewed acquaintance with other friends
connected with it, among them with Dr. Dickson, of whom I shall have
afterwards to speak in connection with the tragical death of Sultan
Abd-el-Aziz, and who attended me with great kindness during a sharp
attack of pneumonia I had there and for whom I contracted a sincere
regard. The Ottoman Empire was then enjoying a period of comparative
tranquillity before the storm of war which was so soon to burst over it,
and I troubled myself little with its internal broils, but my
sympathies, such as they were at that time, were, in common with those
of most Englishmen of the day, with the Turks rather than the Christians
of the Empire. On my recovery from my illness, I bought half a dozen
pack horses at the At-maidan, the horse market at Stamboul, and with
them we crossed over to Scutari and spent six pleasant summer weeks
wandering in the hills and through the poppy fields of Asia Minor, away
from beaten tracks and seeing as much of the Turkish peasant life as our
entire ignorance of their language allowed. We were impressed, as all
travellers have been, with the honest goodness of these people and the
badness of their Government. We judged of the latter by what we saw of
the ways of the Zaptiehs, our semi-military escort, whose manner with
them was that of soldiers in an invaded country. Yet it was clear that
with much fiscal oppression a large personal liberty existed in rural
Turkey for the poor, such as contrasted not unfavourably with our own
police and magistrate-ridden England. The truth is that everywhere in
the East the administrative net is one of wide meshes, with rents
innumerable through which all but the largest fish have good chance of
escaping. In ordinary times there is no persecution of the quite
indigent. I remember telling some peasants, who had complained to me
through my Armenian dragoman of hardship in their lives at Government
hands, that there were countries in still worse plight than their own,
where if a poor man so much as lay down by the roadside at night and got
together a few sticks to cook a meal he ran the risk of being brought
next day before the Cadi and cast into prison; and I remember that my
listeners refused to believe my tale or that such great tyranny existed
anywhere in the world. My deduction from this incident is the earliest
political reflection I can remember making in regard to Eastern things.
The following winter--that is to say, the early months of 1874--we spent
in Algeria. Here we assisted at another spectacle which gave food for
reflection: that of an Eastern people in violent subjection to a
Western. The war in which France had just been engaged with Germany had
been followed in Algeria by an Arab rising, which had spread to the very
outskirts of Algiers, and the Mohammedan natives were now experiencing
the extreme rigours of Christian repression. This was worst in the
settled districts, the colony proper, where the civil administration was
taking advantage of the rebellion to confiscate native property and in
every way to favour the European colonists at the native expense. With
all my love for the French (and I had been at Paris during the war, and
had been enthusiastic for its defence at the time of the siege) I found
my sympathies in Algeria going out wholly to the Arabs. In the Sahara,
beyond the Atlas, where military rule prevailed, things were somewhat
better, for the French officers for the most part appreciated the
nobler qualities of the Arabs and despised the mixed rascaldom
of Europe--Spanish, Italian, and Maltese as well as their own
countrymen--which made up the "Colonie." The great tribes of the Sahara
were still at that time materially well off, and retained not a little
of their ancient pride of independence which the military commandants
could not but respect. We caught glimpses of these nomads in the Jebel
Amour and of their vigorous way of life, and what we saw delighted us.
We listened to their chauntings in praise of their lost hero
Abd-el-Kader, and though we misunderstood them on many points owing to
our ignorance of their language, we admired and pitied them. The
contrast between their noble pastoral life on the one hand, with their
camel herds and horses, a life of high tradition filled with the memory
of heroic deeds, and on the other hand the ignoble squalor of the Frank
settlers, with their wineshops and their swine, was one which could not
escape us, or fail to rouse in us an angry sense of the incongruity
which has made of these last the lords of the land and of those their
servants. It was a new political lesson which I took to heart, though
still regarding it as in no sense my personal affair.
Such had been the preliminary training of my life, and such its main
circumstances when, as I have said, in the winter of 1875-6 I first
visited Egypt. The only other matter which, perhaps, deserves here a
word of explanation to non-English readers, and it is one that in Europe
will receive its full appreciation, is the fact that my wife, Lady Anne
Blunt, who accompanied me on all these travels, was the grandaughter of
our great national poet, Lord Byron, and so was the inheritor, in some
sort, of sympathies in the cause of freedom in the East, which were not
without their effect upon our subsequent action. It seemed to us, in
presence of the events of 1881-2, that to champion the cause of Arabian
liberty would be as worthy an endeavour as had been that for which Byron
had died in 1827. As yet, however, in 1875, neither of us had any
thought in visiting Egypt more serious than that of another pleasant
travelling adventure in Eastern lands. We had on leaving England the
plan of entering Egypt from the south, by way of Suakim, Kassala, and
the Blue Nile, and so of working our way northwards to Cairo in the
spring, but this, owing to the issue, just then so unfortunate to Egypt,
of the Abyssinian campaign, was never realized, and the only part of our
program which we carried out was that instead of landing at Alexandria,
as was then the universal custom, we went on by the Canal to Suez and
there first set foot upon Egyptian soil.
My first impression of all of Egypt is of our passage on the last day of
the year 1875 through Lake Menzaleh, at that time the unpersecuted home
of innumerable birds--a truly wonderful spectacle of prodigal natural
life--to a point on the Canal north of Ismaïlia. What a sight it was!
Lake Menzaleh was still an almost virgin region, and the flocks of
flamingos, ducks, pelicans, and ibises which covered it, passed all
belief in their prodigious magnitude. The waters, too, of the lakes and
of the Canal itself were alive with fish so large and in such great
quantities that not a few were run down by our ship's bows in passing,
while everywhere they were being preyed on by fish hawks and cormorants,
which sat watching on the posts and buoys. I imagine that the letting in
of the sea for the first time on land never before covered with water
provided the fish with feeding ground of exceptional richness, an
advantage which has since been lost. But certain it is that both fish
and birds have dwindled sadly since, and it seems unlikely that the
splendid spectacle we saw that winter will be again enjoyed there by any
traveller's eyes.
We landed at Suez in the first days of the year 1876, and the news of
the great disaster which had overtaken the Egyptian army in Abyssinia
was the first that greeted us. The details of it were not generally
known, but it appeared that seven ortas, or divisions, of the Khedivial
troops had perished, while a tale was in circulation of the Khedive's
son, Prince Hassan, having been captured and mutilated by the enemy, an
exaggeration which was afterwards disproved, for the prince, a mere boy
at the time, had been carried away from the battlefield of Kora early in
the day, at the very beginning of the rout, as had Ratib Pasha himself,
the Egyptian general in command, who was in charge of him. Loringe
Pasha, however, the American, had really lost his life with many
thousands of the rank and file, and the misfortune put a final limit to
the Khedive Ismaïl's ambition of universal empire on the Nile. In our
small way it affected us, as making our thought of a journey to Kassala
impossible, and deciding us on a less adventurous one immediately in
Lower Egypt.
We were anxious, nevertheless, to see Egypt in a less conventional way
than that of ordinary tourists, and, having our camping equipment with
us for the longer journey, we hired camels at Suez and went by the old
caravan route to Cairo. It is not necessary that I should say much of
our journey across the desert. The four days spent in it alone with our
Bedouin camel-men gave us our first practical lessons in Arabic--in
Algeria we had been dependent wholly on a dragoman--and they laid the
basis, too, of those relations with the desert tribes of Arabia which
were afterwards to become so pleasant to us and so intimate. On the
fifth morning we entered Cairo, greeted on our arrival at Abbassiyeh by
the whistling of bullets fired by the Khedivial troops at practice, for
we had unwittingly encamped overnight just behind their targets and the
aim of the recruits was very uncertain, but no harm was suffered. We
little thought at the time that we should ever be interested in the
doings of these soldiers as a fighting army, and still less that our
sympathies would one day be with them in a war against our own
countrymen. I was as yet, though not perhaps even then enthusiastically
so, a believer in the common English creed that England had a
providential mission in the East, and that our wars were only waged
there for honest and beneficent reasons. Nothing was further from my
mind than that we English ever could be guilty, as a nation, of a great
betrayal of justice in arms for our mere selfish interests.
Neither need I say anything in detail about Cairo, through which we
passed that day without stopping longer than to ask for our letters at
the Consulate. Our object was to see the country districts and not to
waste time on a city already in part European, and we thought to find
camping ground immediately beyond the Nile. So we rode on. We did not
understand the entreaties of our camel-men that we should alight and let
them and their camels go back, or realize that we were doing them an
injustice by forcing them to break the tribal rule which forbade them as
Bedouins of the eastern desert to cross over to the west. In spite of
their expostulations we held on our way by the Kasr-el-Nil bridge and
the road to Ghizeh. We had caught sight of the Pyramids and pushed on
eagerly in their direction, and were only stopped by the failing light
which overtook us at sunset close to the little fellah village of
Tolbiya, the last but one before the Pyramids are reached. It was there
that we made our halt and alighted for the first time on the black soil
of the Nile, as yet hardly dry from the autumn inundation.
The good people of Tolbiya, in their hearty fellah fashion, received us
with all possible hospitality. Though living on the tourist road to the
Pyramids and accustomed to treat Frank travellers in some sort as their
prey, the fact of our alighting at their village for a night's lodging
gave us a character of guests they at once recognized. Of all the
Europeans who for many years had passed their way, not one had made a
pause at their doors. Thus our relations with them were from the outset
friendly, and the accident served us as an introduction in the sequel to
other villagers when, after a few days spent among these, we went once
more on our way. We had no choice at the time but to stay where we were,
for in the morning our Bedouins refused to go a mile farther with us,
and, having received their hire, departed with their camels. Other
camels then had to be found. So it happened that my first week in Egypt
was occupied in going a round of the neighbouring village markets in
search of the needed beasts, and making purchases of pack saddles and
water, skins and all kinds of travelling gear for our further journey.
The fellahin at that time were in terrible straits of poverty. It was
the first of the three last terrible years of the Khedive Ismaïl's
reign; Ismaïl Sadyk, the notorious Mufettish, was in power; the European
bondholders were clamouring for their "coupons," and famine was at the
doors of the fellahin. It was rare in those days to see a man in the
fields with a turban on his head, or with more than a shirt to his back.
Even in the neighbourhood of Cairo, and still more in the Fayûm to which
we took our way as soon as the camels were procured, I can testify that
this was the case. The country Sheykhs themselves had few of them a
cloak to wear. Wherever we went it was the same. The provincial towns on
market days were full of women selling their clothes and their silver
ornaments to the Greek usurers, because the tax collectors were in their
villages whip in hand. We bought their poor trinkets and listened to
their stories, and joined them in their maledictions on a government
which was laying them bare. We did not as yet understand, any more than
did the peasants themselves, the financial pressure from Europe which
was the true cause of these extreme exactions; and we laid the blame, as
they did, on Ismaïl Pasha and the Mufettish, Ismaïl Sadyk, little
suspecting our English share of the blame.
The villagers were outspoken enough. Englishmen in those days were
popular everywhere in Mohammedan lands, being looked upon as free from
the political designs of the other Frank nations, and individually as
honester than these in their commercial dealings. In Egypt especially
they stood in amiable contrast with the needy adventures from
the Mediterranean sea-board--the Italian, Greek, and Maltese
money-lenders--who were sucking the life blood of the Moslem peasantry.
Already there were rumours in the air which had reached the village of a
possible European intervention, and the idea of it, if it was to be
English, was not unpopular. The truth is that the existing state of
things was wholly unendurable, and any change was looked to with joy by
the starving people as a possible relief. England to the fellahin in
their actual condition of beggary, robbed and beaten and perishing of
hunger, appeared in the light of a bountiful and friendly providence
very rich and quite disinterested, a redresser of wrongs and friend of
the oppressed, just such, in fact, as individual English tourists then
often were, who went about with open hands and expressions of sympathy.
They did not suspect the immense commercial selfishness which had led
us, collectively as a nation, to so many aggressions on the weak races
of the world.
In the year 1876 I too, as I have said, was a believer in England, and I
shared the common idea of the beneficence of her rule in the East, and I
had no other thought for the Egyptians than that they should share with
India, which I had not yet seen, the privilege of our protection. "The
Egyptians," I wrote in my journal of the time, "are a good, honest
people as any in the world--all, that is, who do not sit in the high
places. Of these I know nothing. But the peasants, the fellahin, have
every virtue which should make a happy, well-to-do-society. They are
cheerful, industrious, obedient to law, and pre-eminently sober, not
only in the matter of drink, but of the other indulgences to which human
nature is prone. They are neither gamblers nor brawlers, nor licentious
livers; they love their homes, their wives, their children. They are
good sons and fathers, kind to dumb animals, old men, beggars, and
idiots. They are absolutely without prejudice of race, and perhaps even
of religion. Their chief fault is a love of money, but that is one
political economists will readily pardon.... It would be difficult to
find anywhere a population better fitted to attain the economical end of
the greatest happiness for the greatest number. In politics they have no
aspirations except to live and let live, to be allowed to work and keep
the produce of their labour, to buy and sell without interference and to
escape taxation. They have been ill-treated for ages without losing
thereby their goodness of heart; they have few of the picturesque
virtues; they are neither patriotic nor fanatical nor romantically
generous. But they are free from the picturesque vices. Each man works
for himself--at most for his family. The idea of self-sacrifice for the
public good they do not understand, but they are innocent of plots to
enslave their fellows.... In spite of the monstrous oppression of which
they are the victims, we have heard no word of revolt, this not from any
superstitious regard for their rulers, for they are without political
prejudice, but because revolt is no more in their nature than it is in a
flock of sheep. They would hail the Queen of England, or the Pope, or
the King of Ashantee with equal eagerness if these came with the gift
for them of a penny less taxation in the pound."
Such were my first thoughts about Egypt in the early days of 1876, not
altogether inaccurate ones, though I was far from suspecting the growth
already beginning of political ideas in the towns. Neither did I
understand the full influence of European finance in the hardships from
which the peasantry were suffering. Nevertheless, on our return to Cairo
in March I saw something of the reverse of the medal. Mr. Cave's
financial mission had arrived during our tour, and was established in
one of the palaces on the Shubra Road, and from its members--one of whom
was an old acquaintance, Victor Buckley of the Foreign Office, and from
Colonel Staunton, our Consul-General--I learned something of the
condition of financial affairs; while a little later Sir Rivers Wilson,
also my friend, who was to play later so prominent a part in Egyptian
affairs, appeared at Cairo and joined the other members of the financial
inquiry. What their report was of the condition of affairs I need not
here relate in detail, but it will help to an understanding of the
matter if I give a very short account of it and how their mission came
to be appointed, the first of its kind in Egypt.[1]
The Khedive Ismaïl's reign had begun in the full tide of a period for
Egypt of high material prosperity. His predecessor, Saïd, a man of
fairly enlightened views, had had the good sense to give all possible
encouragement to the fellahin in agricultural matters. He had abandoned
the claim of the Viceroy to be sole landlord on the Nile, had recognized
proprietary rights in the existing occupiers of land, and had fixed the
land tax at the low figure of forty piastres to the feddan. This had
resulted in a general enrichment of the population, and the fellahin,
emancipated from their old condition of serfdom to the Circassian
Pashas, were everywhere accumulating wealth. Egypt at the close of
Saïd's reign had become not only the most prosperous province of the
Ottoman Empire, but one of the most progressive agriculturally of the
Eastern world. The revenue, though small in comparison to what it is
now, probably not more than four millions sterling, was easily
collected, and the expenses of administration were insignificant, while
the public debt amounted to only three millions. It is true that in his
later years Saïd had granted a number of concessions to European
adventurers on terms which were becoming a heavy burden on the state,
but the general wealth of the country was so large that this was not
more than its light taxation could bear, and the Viceroy had at his
disposal, when all yearly claims had been discharged, probably not less
than a couple of millions for his free expenditure. Certainly there
never had been an age in Egypt when the mass of the native inhabitants
had been so materially prosperous; and to the fellahin especially it had
come to be spoken of as, for them, the "age of gold." Ismaïl, when in
1860 he succeeded to the Viceroyalty, was without question the richest
of Mohammedan princes and master of the most prosperous of Mohammedan
states.
Ismaïl's character, before he became Viceroy, had been that of a wealthy
landed proprietor managing his large estates in Upper Egypt according to
the most enlightened modern methods. He was praised by nearly all
European travellers for the machinery he had introduced and the
expenditure he had turned to profit, and it is certain that he possessed
a more than usual share of that natural shrewdness and commercial
aptitude which distinguishes the family of Mohammed Ali. His succession
to the Viceroyalty had been more or less a surprise to him, for until
within a few months of Saïd's death he had not been the immediate heir,
and his prospects had been only those of an opulent private person. It
was perhaps this unexpected stroke of fortune that from the beginning of
his reign led him to extravagance. By nature a speculator and
inordinately greedy of wealth, he seems to have looked upon his
inheritance and the absolute power now suddenly placed in his hands, not
as a public trust, but as the means above all things else of
aggrandizing his private fortune. At the same time he was as
inordinately vain and fond of pleasure, and his head was turned by his
high position and the opportunity it gave him of figuring in the world
as one of its most splendid princes. He was surrounded at once by
flatterers of all kinds, native and European, who promised on the one
hand to make him the richest of financiers, and on the other the
greatest of Oriental sovereigns. In listening to these his own
cleverness and commercial skill betrayed him, and made him only their
more ready dupe. Ismaïl, before his accession, had been an astute
money-maker according to the ways in which money was then made in Egypt,
and he had had, too, a European education of the kind Orientals acquire
on the Paris boulevards, superficial as regards all serious matters, but
sufficient to convince him of his capacity to deal with the rogues of
the Bourse with the weapons of their own roguery. In both directions he
was led astray.
His first act of self aggrandizement was simple and successful. The
revenue, which rested chiefly on the land tax, was low, and he raised it
by progressive enhancements from the 40 piastres where he found it, to
160, where it has ever since stood. The country under his hand was rich
and at first could afford the extra burden. Men gave of their
superfluity rather than of their necessity, and for some years did so
without complaint. This enhancement, however, of the revenue was only
part of his rapacious program. His native flatterers reminded him that
in the days of his grandfather the whole land had been regarded as the
Viceroy's personal property, and that, moreover, Mohammed Ali had
claimed and exercised for some years a monopoly of its foreign trade.
Ismaïl schemed to revive these rights in his own person, and though he
did not dare, in the face of European opinion, to commit any great acts
of open confiscation in regard to the land, he gained to a large extent
his ends by other means, and so rapidly that in a few years he managed
to get into his own hands a fifth of the whole area of the cultivable
land of Egypt. His method was by various means of intimidation and
administrative pressure to make the possession of such lands as he
desired to acquire a burden to their owners, and to render their lives
so vexatious that they should be constrained to sell at prices little
more than nominal. In this way he had, as I have said, possessed himself
of an enormous property in land, and he doubtless thought that this was
to prove to him a correspondingly enormous source of personal income.
But his very covetousness in the matter proved his ruin. It was found in
practice that while under his personal management as a comparatively
small owner his estates had been well worked, and had brought him
wealth, his new gigantic ownership laid him open to losses in a hundred
ways. In vain he laid out enormous sums on machinery. In vain he laid
whole villages and districts under contribution to furnish him forced
labour. In vain he started factories on his estates and employed
managers from Europe at the highest salaries. He was robbed everywhere
by his agents, and was unable to gather from his lands even a fraction
of the revenue they had brought in taxation when not his own. This was
the beginning of his financial difficulties, coinciding as it did with
the sudden fall in agricultural prices, and especially of cotton, which
soon after set in, and it was the beginning, too, of the ruin of the
peasantry, whom, to supply his deficiency, he now loaded with irregular
taxation of all kinds. Ismaïl Sadyk, the notorious Mufettish, was his
chief agent in this disastrous history.
It was not long, however, before Ismaïl fell into much more dangerous
hands, and embarked in much more ruinous adventures than these early
ones. To say nothing of the enormous sums which he poured out like water
on his own private pleasures, of his follies of palace building, his
follies with European women, and his follies of royal entertainment,
there were schemes of ambition vast enough to drain the purse of any
treasury. It is not known precisely how many millions he expended at
Constantinople in procuring himself the Khedivial title, and in getting
the order of the viceregal succession altered in favour of his son. But
it must have been very many, while still more went in hair-brained
schemes of speculation and in liabilities contracted towards European
syndicates. Lastly, there was the conquest of the Upper Nile, and the
attempted conquest of the kingdom of Abyssinia. To provide for all these
immense expenditures loans had to be raised, at first on a small scale
with local bankers and Greeks of Alexandria, and presently in more
reckless fashion on the European Stock Exchange. Here his worst
counsellor and evil genius had been Nubar Pasha, the Armenian financier,
who, by a strange inversion of ideas, has come to be regarded by a
certain class of Egyptian opinion ignorant of history as an "Egyptian
patriot." Nubar was, however, in fact, the one man who, more than any
other after Ismaïl himself, was responsible for Egypt's financial
ruin.[2] Commissioned by his master to find him money at any cost to
meet his extravagant wants, he raised loan after loan for him in Europe
on terms which realized for him hardly more than 60 per cent. of the
capital sums he inscribed himself for as debtor, while he, Nubar,
pocketed as commission several millions sterling. Of the ninety-six
millions nominally raised in this way, it has been calculated that only
some fifty-four reached Ismaïl's hands.
At the date which I am writing of the whole of this liability had not
yet been incurred, but already the interest on the foreign debt amounted
to four millions yearly, and to raise sufficient revenue to meet it and
to carry on the administration and pay the huge expense of the
Abyssinian war, the peasantry were being fleeced, as I have described,
under pressure of the whip, of their last hoarded piastres. Those who
talk lightly in these days of Ismaïl as a prince rather unfortunate than
guilty, and to be pitied in some sort for the betrayal of the country
financially to Europe, know nothing of the truth, nor do they realize
the enormity of the ruin inflicted by his selfish folly on his fellah
subjects. It has been calculated that the total cost of his reign to
Egypt amounted to something like 400 millions sterling, nor is this in
my opinion an exaggerated estimate, for it had gathered in the whole of
the peasant savings of a number of prosperous years, and nearly the
whole of their agricultural stock besides the public debt, and left
them, moreover, indebted privately to the amount of something like
twenty millions to the Greek and other local usurers.
Such had been the causes of Egypt's misfortunes as I learned them at
Cairo in the spring of 1876. With regard to the origin of our financial
intervention, it was certainly at that time Ismaïl's own foolish doing,
and was not, as far as I know, prompted by any direct political motives
in England. He most certainly applied to the English Government for
financial assistance through Colonel Staunton in the autumn of 1875, and
in a way that almost necessitated the assistance having a political
character. His reason for choosing England rather than France as the
recipient of his confidences was that at the time England was in a far
better position financially to help him. The French Government was still
crippled by the expense of the war with Germany of 1870, and was really
unable to assist him in any effectual way, while, as I have already
said, the friendship long existing between England and Turkey, and the
abstention of Englishmen so far from commercial intrigues in Egypt had
probably convinced him, in company with the general opinion of the
Mohammedan East, that England was a non-aggressive power as far as the
Ottoman Empire was concerned. Especially in the matter of the Suez Canal
the French Government had become an object of suspicion, and it was
therefore natural that when Ismaïl resolved to sell his shares in the
Canal, it was to England rather than to France that he made the offer of
them. I remember well the impression produced in England at the time. It
was by no means one of general approval, and Disraeli was much blamed
for involving the Government in a transaction which had almost
necessarily political consequences. What is, I think, not generally
known, at any rate in Egypt, is that the agreement to purchase the
Khedive's share for four millions sterling was made not by the English
Government collectively, for Lord Derby was averse to it, but on the
personal responsibility of the Prime Minister who, without consulting
his colleagues other than Lord Derby, they being absent from London,
arranged with the London house of Rothschild to advance the money. What
may have been in Disraeli's mind politically about it I do not know, but
I am very sure that Lord Derby, who was then at the Foreign Office, had
no idea connected with it of political aggression. Lord Derby was a man
whose view of foreign policy was essentially one of non-intervention,
nor had Disraeli as yet succeeded in indoctrinating his party with his
own imperialistic ideas. The transaction, nevertheless, was one of evil
augury for Egypt, and especially by reason of the part played in it by
the Rothschilds. As will be seen later, the financial connection of this
too powerful Hebrew house with Egypt was the determining cause, six
years later, of England's military intervention.[3]
Mr. Cave's mission, which followed immediately on the purchase of the
Canal shares, was without any question Ismaïl's doing also. The object
in Ismaïl's mind, as is perfectly clear, when he asked for it, was still
further to work the new mine of English political assistance he had
discovered, with a view to further loans. He wanted to get some public
testimonial, in the shape of a published report, in favour of his
continued solvency, and so to re-open to him the European stock
exchanges. It was for this purpose that he applied to Colonel Staunton
for an English inquiry, and to a large extent he succeeded in his plan.
Mr. Cave, who was chosen by the English Government for the inquiry, was
a worthy and, I believe, quite disinterested man, but one who lacked
experience of the East, and so was specially easy to deceive; he lacked
also the fibre necessary for dealing quite courageously with all the
facts. Ismaïl, like most spendthrifts, when it came to the point of
showing his accounts, had always concealed a part of them, and, with the
assistance of Ismaïl Sadyk, now gave a fanciful budget of his revenue,
which Cave too readily accepted. He also allowed dust to be thrown in
his eyes to some extent as to the misery of the fellahin. It was the
Khedive's plan to surround distinguished financial visitors whom he
desired to captivate with the show of great wealth. The mission was
splendidly entertained and taken about everywhere by the Khedive's
officers, who arranged things beforehand, and prevented as far as
possible the nakedness of the land from being seen. Thus Cave's report,
when it was published, gave only a partial truth. I think too that Cave
might have insisted, if he had been of a stronger character, on the fact
which lay at the bottom of all Egypt's financial difficulty, namely,
that in justice, and indeed it might have been maintained in law,
Ismaïl's debts were personal not public ones, and should have been so
treated. Cave's weakness on this point was the beginning of the
political intervention in favour of the bondholders, and his report led
by a necessary logic to the recognition of Ismaïl's debt as a public
obligation. Sir Rivers Wilson, who immediately followed him, though a
far abler man, was equally inexperienced, and was at that time chosen, I
believe, principally for his knowledge of the French language. I knew
him intimately, and I knew also, but in a less degree, Cave; and I
continued in correspondence with Wilson for some years and am well
acquainted with all his Egyptian doings.
My last recollection that winter at Cairo is of a barbaric banquet
offered by the Khedive to Mr. Cave and the members of his commission, to
which I was by accident invited. It was given in the Viceregal Kiosque
at the Pyramids, and was one of those extravagant entertainments Ismaïl
was accustomed to dazzle European eyes with, nor was there anything
wanting to point the contrast between the wealth of the entertainer and
the poverty of those at whose expense it was really given. The table was
spread for us literally under the eyes of a starving multitude of
peasants, the very peasants Mr. Cave was there to save from ruin. Yet
none of us seemed to feel the incongruity of it all. We feasted
elaborately, and drank champagne of the best, and went our way, and it
is only now that, with a better knowledge of the whole circumstances, I
recall the real character of the scene and recognize it for what it in
all verity was with its waste and surrounding misery, a true presentment
of the twin causes of the coming revolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Note. For a fuller and better account of the finance of that time
serious students of Egyptian history should consult "Egypt's Ruin" by
Theodore Rothstein published by A. C. Fifield, 13. Clifford's Inn,
London, in 1910 with an introduction by me.
[2] Note in correction as to Nubar's wealth _see_ Appendix.
[3] Since this was written much new information with regard to the
purchase of the Canal shares has been made public, modifying in some
degree the account here given; the main facts however regarding the
Rothschilds' connection with it and Disraeli's remain untouched.