SIR RIVERS WILSON'S MISSION
On leaving Cairo that spring of 1876 we paid our first visit to the
confines of Arabia. It was then more the custom with European tourists
than it is now to go on from Egypt into Syria by way of the desert, and
we took once more to our camels and our tent life, and with the same
Bedouins who had escorted us from Suez, crossed the Suez Canal and made
a long tour through the Sinai peninsula and on by Akabah to Jerusalem.
As we were strange to the country we passed through, and were still very
ignorant of Arabic and had with us no dragoman, we got into some rather
perilous adventures which are now amusing to recollect, though at the
time they were disagreeable enough. It is perhaps worth recording as a
curious accident of travel that as we were passing along the shore of
the Gulf of Akabah, which is fringed in places with coral reefs, we had
stopped to examine these and to admire the wonderful colours, purple,
gold, and vermilion, of the innumerable little fishes which live in
them. I was standing thus at the sea's edge, my gun, which I always then
carried, in my hand, when I saw a great commotion in the water near me
and suddenly, before I was well aware of the cause, a large shark, one
of a shoal, leaving the rest came straight to where I stood and was
already within a few yards of me before I understood what manner of fish
it was or that I was the object of its attack. I had barely time to
raise my gun when it turned, as these fishes do, on its side and rose
half out of the water to take hold of me, and it was so near me when I
fired that my charge of small shot killed it without the need of a
second barrel, so that we were able, with the help of a lasso, to bring
it high and dry on shore. It was a very large one, nearly ten feet long,
and I do not doubt that if I had been a little more careless than I was
I might have been carried from the rock into the sea by it. The
incident brought home to me the danger which was once so common in
Egypt for the fellahin from crocodiles in the Upper Nile, and I have
been cautious in the matter of sea bathing ever since.
We fell into trouble, too, with certain Arabs on our way, through our
ignorance of the rules and customs of the desert. When camped outside
Akabah, we received a visit from Abunjad the well-known Sheykh of the
Alawin, a branch of the Howeytat tribe, who had the customary right of
escorting travellers to Petra, and whom we managed to offend, with the
result that we ended by starting without escort or guides, our only
native companions being two Arab boys who had followed us from Mount
Sinai, and knew nothing of the northern country. With these we ventured
north for Palestine, and presently ran short of water. The wells, when
we by fortune found them, proved to be almost dry, and it was only after
great hardships under a burning sun that we at last reached an Arab
encampment. Things had become so bad for us one night that we had
resolved that if at noon on the following day we should have still
failed to find water we must abandon our baggage and push on on our best
camels for our bare lives to the settled country. An hour, however,
before the time agreed on, the happy sound of an ass braying told us
that a camp must be near, and presently we spied an Arab child perched
on a mound, and from him, under some compulsion of fear, got knowledge
of their watering place. It was a beautiful pool of rain water in the
hollow of a rock, and here we lay long and quenched our thirst and
filled our goat skins. By good fortune it was, the men of the place,
Azazimeh Arabs, were away or I doubt if we should have been allowed to
take so liberal a share of this "Bounty of God," for they were in
possession of the place and had sown a little barley field, as Bedouins
often do on the Syrian frontier for the chance of rain, and this was all
their drinking store till their corn should be ripe. Nor were they
otherwise than justly angry on their return, and we had to watch all
night for fear of an attack. It was not till morning that they came with
shouts and menaces, but we had already loaded our camels, and being well
armed held on our way. Knowing the ways of Bedouins better now, I feel
sure that we need not thus have quarrelled with them, and that with a
little explanation and payment for our disturbance of their rights they
would have received us well. But as it was, we were within a hair's
breadth of a serious misadventure, and deserve to be thankful that the
following day we at last reached the grass lands between Hebron and
Gaza. Here the more settled Arabs gave us a good reception, and having
made friends with them the memory of our past danger was soon forgotten.
This ended our travels for that year, and from Jerusalem we returned in
the early summer by the ordinary sea route to England.
The winter of 1877-8 saw us again in the East, this time with a larger
program of adventure. We visited Aleppo, and passed down the Euphrates
to Bagdad, and on our return journey made acquaintance with the great
Bedouin tribes of Mesopotamia and the Syrian Desert south of Palmyra. We
began now to know something of the language, and to understand the
customs of the Arabs, and made no more mistakes of the kind I have just
described. For this we were largely indebted to the wise counsels of the
then English Consul at Aleppo, Mr. Skene, who had had a large experience
of Bedouins and their ways, and who taught us to approach them on their
nobler side, and putting aside all fear to trust them as friends,
appealing to their law of hospitality. The history of this most
interesting and successful journey has been very fully written by my
wife in her "Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates," in reality a joint work,
in which my first political views in regard to Arabian liberty may be
traced by those who care to seek them. My sympathy with the Arabs as
against the Turks, with whom they were at chronic war, was the result of
no pre-conceived idea, and still less of any political plan, but was
caused by what I saw, the extreme misgovernment of the settled districts
by the Ottoman officials, and the happiness of the still independent
tribes. It was a time of much local disorganization. The Russo-Turkish
war was in its last desperate throes at Kars and Plevna, and though our
good wishes were all with the Moslem armies as against the invading
Muscovites, the sight of the miserable Syrian and Mesopotamian villagers
being driven in chains as recruits to the sea coast moved us to anger
against the imperial government, an anger which the hatred everywhere
manifested by the Arabs against the Turks daily intensified. It was
impossible in those days of far worse rule than now for any one with
the instinct of liberty to do otherwise than resent the Ottoman
misgovernment of its Arabic-speaking provinces. It was a government of
force and fraud, corrupt and corrupting to the last degree, where every
evil engine was employed to enslave and degrade the people, where the
Moslems were worse treated than the Christians, and where all alike were
pillaged by the Pashas. The Turk in his own home in Asia Minor has a
number of honest and manly virtues, but as a master in a subject land he
is too often a rapacious tyrant. Every vilayet had been bought with
money at Constantinople, and the purchasing Valy was making what fortune
he could during his term of office out of those he was given to
administer. The land of Bagdad, under Ottoman rule, we had seen turned
into a wilderness, Damascus into a decaying city. Everywhere land was
falling out of cultivation, and the Government, like a moral plague, was
infecting the inhabitants with its own corruption. Can it be wondered at
if, in view of these doings, we thought and spoke strongly, and, though
our Government at the time was in open alliance with the Porte, our
sympathies were with any scheme which might make the Arabian provinces
independent of the Empire?
On my return to England I find a record that on the 14th of May, 1878, I
was taken by my cousin, Philip Currie (now Lord Currie), who was then
his private secretary and one of the highest officials at the Foreign
Office, to see Lord Salisbury. Lord Salisbury had just accepted the
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and, though I knew nothing of it, must have
been at the point of signing the famous secret treaty with the Sultan
known as the Cyprus Convention, and our journey in Arabian lands had
excited his interest to learn from me something about them. In answer to
his questions I told him all my thoughts very frankly, and I remember
especially suggesting to him the possible independence some day of
Syria, and that it might join hands with Egypt against the common
misgovernment of their Turkish rulers. To this, however, he by no means
responded, saying that there could be no political connection between
the two provinces of the Ottoman Empire, and that the case of each stood
on a separate basis. He was more influenced by me, however, when I spoke
unfavourably of the then much talked of Euphrates Valley Railway scheme,
under English guarantee, in which I saw a new danger to Arabian liberty,
and I have reason to know that my arguments weighed with him to the
extent that he shortly after refused all Foreign Office support to the
enterprise, which has remained to this day abandoned. My conversation on
this occasion left me with a high opinion of Lord Salisbury's
intelligence on Eastern matters, and, though his view of them has never
been mine, I have always preserved a strong feeling of his personal
integrity, while it began a connection between us never intimate, but
always friendly on his part. To the last he allowed me to write to him
on these subjects, and though seldom agreeing he invariably responded to
my occasional letters with more than the usual official courtesy.
Any hopes, however, that I may have had of persuading Lord Salisbury to
my views about the Arabs were speedily dispelled by his attitude that
summer at Berlin, when his policy was publicly proclaimed of
guaranteeing to the Sultan the whole of his Asiatic dominions. The inner
history of the Congress of Berlin as it affected Egypt is so curious,
and at the same time so important, that it is necessary I should tell it
here as I learned it soon after the events had happened.
It will be remembered that the terrible winter of 1877-8 witnessed the
final scenes of the war between Russia and Turkey, and that the spring
of the new year found the Czar's army at the gates of Constantinople.
The same period had been one of extreme misery in Egypt. The Cave
mission, whose arrival I had seen at Cairo, had been followed by other
financial missions of less integrity, which had resulted in what was
known as the Goschen-Joubert arrangement of the Khedive Ismaïl's debts,
a truly leonine settlement, according to which the enormous yearly
charge of nearly seven millions sterling had been saddled on the
Egyptian revenue, an amount which could only be wrung out of the ruined
fellahin by forcing them, under the whip, to mortgage their lands to the
Greek usurers who attended the tax-gatherers everywhere on their rounds
through the villages. The last two Niles had been very bad ones, and
there had been famine in the land from the sea to Assouan. Many
thousands of the villagers--men, women, and children--had died that
winter of sheer hunger. There had been nothing like it since the
beginning of the century. Under these circumstances it was clear that
either the Khedive must go bankrupt or a reduction be made on the
interest of his debts, the Goschen-Joubert arrangement being abandoned.
The former course would have been the more equitable and by far the
better one for the country, but in the foreign bondholders' interests
this was put aside, and a final attempt was made by these, this time
successfully, to secure the diplomatic intervention of the great Powers
for yet another settlement between Ismaïl and his creditors. The moment
was a favourable one as far as England was concerned, for it coincided
with the resolve of the English Government, under Disraeli's guidance,
to play a forward political game, and take the leading part in the
affairs of the Ottoman Empire. Lord Derby, who so far had gone
unwillingly with his chief in his new policy of imperial adventure, now
would go no further with him and left the Foreign Office, and, as we
have seen, was replaced by Lord Salisbury. It was the signal of a
general diplomatic advance, not unaccompanied with menace. The British
fleet was brought through the Dardanelles into the Sea of Marmora, the
Russian army was overawed and prevented from entering Stamboul, and
under pressure of the English demonstration a treaty of peace was
hurriedly drawn up between the Czar and the Sultan, the treaty of San
Stefano. On the side of Egypt, at the same time, an official Commission
of Inquiry was appointed, which, though nominally international, was
intended at the Foreign Office to be mainly an English one, my friend
Sir Rivers Wilson being chosen as English commissioner. His appointment
was, I believe, almost the first Lord Salisbury signed on taking the
command in Downing Street.
It will also be remembered that two months later a secret convention was
negotiated at Constantinople by our then Ambassador, Sir Henry Layard, a
man of great ability and knowledge of the East, who had acquired the
personal confidence of the still youthful Sultan, Abdul Hamid, in
accordance with which the island of Cyprus was leased to England and a
guarantee given to the Sultan of the integrity of all his Asiatic
provinces in lieu of promises of reform to be enforced by the presence
in Asia Minor of certain ambulant English consuls, military men, who
were to give advice and report grievances. The idea of the Cyprus
Convention, certainly in the minds of Disraeli and Salisbury who signed
it and of Layard its true author, was to establish informally but none
the less effectually an English protectorate over Asiatic Turkey. The
acquisition of Cyprus was in their view to be the smallest part of the
bargain. The island was really of very little value to England as a
_place d'armes_, and its selection for that purpose was due less to its
fitness for the purpose than to a fantastic whim of Disraeli's, backed
up by the roseate report of its potential wealth sent in by one of our
consuls who had an interest in the island. Disraeli many years before,
as a quite young man, had in his novel "Tancred" advanced half jestingly
the idea of a great Asiatic empire under an English monarchy, and Cyprus
was to be specially included in it as recalling the historic fact that
our English king, Richard Coeur de Lion, had once been also its
sovereign. The whole thing was a piece of romantic fooling, but Disraeli
loved to turn his political jests into realities and to persuade his
English followers, whom as a Jew he despised, in all seriousness to the
ways of his own folly. The really important object aimed at by Layard in
the Convention--and it was certainly his rather than Salisbury's, who
was new to office and whose experience the year before at Constantinople
had made him anything but a Turcophile--was to acquire the strategic
control of Asia Minor, which it was thought might be effected through
the ambulant consular posts it created. These were to supervise the
civil administration in the provinces, and see that the peasantry were
not too much robbed by those who farmed the taxes, and that the
recruiting grounds of the Ottoman army were not depopulated by
mismanagement. Thus the advance of Russia to the Mediterranean might, it
was thought, be checked in Asia as their advance in Europe had been
checked at San Stefano.
Looking back at the position now, with our knowledge of subsequent
events, and especially of the Sultan Abdul Hamid's character, it seems
strange both that the Sultan should have signed such a Convention which,
if it had been carried out, would have put Asiatic Turkey as much into
English military hands as Egypt is to-day, or that our Foreign Office
should have believed in its success, and the epithet applied to it at
the time by Gladstone, who denounced it as an "insane Convention," seems
more than justified. It must, however, be remembered that as regards
Abdul Hamid he had really no choice, with the Russian army still at his
doors, but to accept the English alliance even if it should mean
tutelage, and also that up to that point England had always proved a
reliable and disinterested friend. Layard, on the other hand, was
conscious of his personal ascendency at the palace, and he knew how
great the prestige was in the Asiatic provinces of the English name. An
English Consul in those days held a position of absolute authority with
Valys and every class of Ottoman officials, and he may well have thought
that this could be indefinitely extended. The honour of England was so
great in all Turkish eyes, and her policy towards the Moslem Empire had
been so sympathetic that no suspicion existed anywhere of her having
selfish plans. Layard, too, was himself a believer in the Turks, and he
may have had dreams of playing the part at Constantinople of _Maire du
Palais_, which Lord Cromer has shown us an example of since at Cairo.
Now, it is only astonishing that such English dreams should ever have
been indulged in, or that by Moslems England's disinterestedness should
ever have been trusted.
Lastly, it will be remembered that a month after the secret signature of
the Cyprus Convention, the great European Congress of 1878 met at
Berlin. It had been called together principally at Disraeli's instance,
and was to be the most important meeting of the Powers since the
Congress of Paris. Like the earlier Congress its special object was to
determine the fate of European Turkey and of the Christian subjects of
the Sultan, and on England's part to revise the treaty of San Stefano.
On its success in this direction Disraeli had staked his whole
reputation as a statesman. England had intervened, according to his
showing, on the highest motives of policy as Turkey's best and most
disinterested friend, and it was on her approval as such by the other
great Powers that depended his political position at home no less than
abroad. So vital, indeed, to Disraeli did success at the Congress
appear, that he went himself to it as chief plenipotentiary, taking Lord
Salisbury, who was still new to diplomacy, with him as a second
ambassador, while Russia was represented by Prince Gortschakoff, France
by M. Waddington, and Italy by Count Corti, Prince Bismarck presiding as
host over the whole august assemblage. I may add that Currie accompanied
Lord Salisbury as _précis_ writer on the occasion, and Lord Rowton,
Disraeli.
The general proceedings of the Congress are of course well known, and I
need not here describe them, but what has never been published is the
following all important incident, of which, as already said, I learned
the particulars some little time after it occurred. The Congress
assembled on the 13th of June, and as the matters to be discussed were
of the highest moment, and there was not a little suspicion of each
other among the plenipotentiaries in regard to a possible partition of
Turkey, it was proposed at the outset that a preliminary declaration
should be made by each Ambassador affirming that his Government came to
the Congress unfettered by any secret engagement as to the questions in
dispute. This declaration Disraeli and Salisbury, who seem to have been
taken by surprise, and were unprepared to make a clean breast of their
secret doings with the Sultan, had not the presence of mind to refuse,
and no less than the others formally agreed and gave their word to--it
must be remembered that both were new to diplomacy. It may therefore be
imagined how high a surprise it was, and scandal at Berlin when a few
weeks later, 9th July, the text of the hidden Cyprus Convention was
published in London by one of the evening papers. One Marvin, an
Oriental traveller and linguist, but who had no official position at the
Foreign Office, had been imprudently employed as translator and copyist
of the Turkish text by Currie, and had sold his information for a round
sum to the "Globe." The publication came as a thunderclap on our Embassy
at Berlin, and though the authenticity of the text was promptly denied
in London, the truth at Berlin could not long be concealed. Our two
plenipotentiaries found themselves confronted with the unexplainable
fact that they had perpetrated a gross breach of faith on their European
colleagues, and stood convicted of nothing less than a direct and
recorded lie. The discovery threatened to break up the Congress
altogether. Prince Gortschakoff declared himself outraged, and he was
joined in his anger on the part of France by M. Waddington. Both gave
warning that they would withdraw at once from the sittings, and M.
Waddington went so far as to pack up his trunks to leave Berlin. The
situation was an ugly one, and was only saved by the cynical good
offices of Bismarck, on whom Disraeli, as a fellow cynic and a man of
bold ideas, had made a sympathetic impression. The German Chancellor,
as "honest broker," brought about the following compromise, with which
M. Waddington declared himself satisfied. It was agreed between the
French and English plenipotentiaries:
1. That as a compensation to France for England's acquisition of Cyprus,
France should be allowed on the first convenient opportunity, and
without opposition from England, to occupy Tunis.
2. That in the financial arrangements being made in Egypt, France should
march _pari passu_ with England; and,
3. That England should recognize in a special manner the old French
claim of protecting the Latin Christians in Syria.
It was in consideration of Disraeli's surrender on these three points
that Waddington consented to remain at Berlin and join the other
ambassadors in arranging the Balkan settlement, which eventually was
come to more or less on the lines of the English proposals. The price
thus paid to France by Disraeli of a province belonging to his ally the
Sultan, it is curious to reflect, enabled that statesman to return a
little later to London and claim a public triumph, with the famous boast
in his mouth that he had brought back "peace with honour." A curious
history truly, and deserving to be specially noted as marking the point
of departure for England of a new policy of spoliation and treacherous
dealing in the Levant foreign to her traditional ways. To the Cyprus
intrigue are directly or indirectly referable half the crimes against
Oriental and North African liberty our generation has witnessed. It
suggested the immediate handing over of Bosnia to Austria. It helped to
frustrate a sound settlement in Macedonia. It put Tunis under the heel
of France, and commenced the great partition of Africa among the
European Powers, with the innumerable woes it has inflicted on its
native inhabitants, from Bizerta to Lake Chad, and from Somaliland to
the Congo. Above all it destroyed at a critical moment all England's
influence for good in the Ottoman Empire. It embittered Moslem hearts
against her in 1881 and 1882, and, as I will show, was a powerful factor
in the more violent events of those troubled years in Egypt. Also it
most certainly defeated its own end in Asiatic Turkey if England's
co-operation in reform was really contemplated. The doings at the
Congress opened the Sultan's eyes to the danger there might be in any
English co-operation, and also beyond question hardened his heart to a
policy contrary to English advice, and in which he has been only too
successful, that of suppressing all liberty and self-government among
his own Turkish subjects. To it the Liberal party at Constantinople owes
more than to anything else its ruthless persecution, and it is even not
too much to say that whatever woes have been inflicted on the Armenians
have been caused by the false hopes raised at Berlin of their
emancipation by England's moral help, a help her own immorality has made
her powerless to give. The immediate effect in Egypt of the compromise
come to with M. Waddington was the despatch of a telegram from Berlin to
Wilson at Alexandria ordering him, much to his chagrin and surprise, to
see that in all the financial appointments made in connection with his
official inquiry, France should receive an absolutely equal share. It
was, indeed, though unknown to Wilson at the time, the determining
cause, a year later, of the Anglo-French condominium.[4]
Public affairs were in this position when in the autumn of that same
year, 1878, I found myself once more upon my road eastwards. My journey
of the winter before to Bagdad, and especially the success I had had in
a matter much more interesting to me than any politics, the purchase and
bringing safely home of the Arab mares which were to form the nucleus of
my now well-known stud at Crabbet, had roused considerable interest and
curiosity in England, and I had spent the summer preparing my wife's
journal for publication, and it was now in the Press. We were not
content, however, with this, and had made up our minds to a new
expedition still more adventurous than any we had yet attempted, and
were on our way back to Damascus, from which starting point we designed
to penetrate into central Arabia and visit Nejd, the original home and
birthplace of the Arabian horse. Our sea-voyage from Marseilles would
touch at Alexandria, and it so happened that I found on board the
Messageries steamer at Marseilles my friend Sir Rivers Wilson who had
just been appointed Finance Minister in Egypt, and in his company we
made the voyage. During the six days' passage I had ample opportunity to
learn from him all that had happened during the past two years at Cairo,
and the tale he told me of the condition of the country was a very
terrible one. I remember well his account of that most dramatic of the
many crimes of the Khedive Ismaïl, his murder of the Mufettish Ismaïl
Sadyk, an act of treachery which more than any other alienated from the
Khedive the allegiance, I will not say of his Egyptian subjects at
large, for that he had already lost, but even of that group of slaves
and servants by which he was surrounded.
Ismaïl Sadyk was an Algerian by birth but had come at an early age to
Egypt, and had by his abilities risen in the viceregal service, his
first connection with the Court having been, I believe, under Abbas I as
a superintendent of his stud. Under Saïd and Ismaïl he had served in
various official capacities and had made himself, as we have seen,
Ismaïl's _âme damnée_ in the work of extracting their last piastres from
the fellahin. With all his cruelties to them--and he had shown
inexhaustible ingenuity in devising means for their spoliation--he had
maintained a certain honourable repute at Cairo as an Arab gifted with
the traditional virtue of generosity and a large liberality in spending
the wealth he had acquired, and so as an old man was not unpopular. For
the last few years of his life he had been Finance Minister, and to
Ismaïl had always proved himself a devoted and faithful servant. Ismaïl
had nevertheless betrayed him a few months before the time I am writing
of basely to his death, and under circumstances so revolting that the
Egyptian world, used as it was to crime in high places, had been shocked
and confounded. The Khedive's motive had been the wholly base and
selfish one of screening himself by casting upon his too faithful
Minister the blame of certain frauds he had himself committed, and he
had insured his silence by having the old man murdered almost in his own
presence.
The details given me by Wilson were as follows: Ismaïl had been in the
habit, in his dealings with the various European commissioners whom he
had from time to time invited to inquire into his financial affairs, of
concealing as far as was possible from them the extreme truth of his
senseless extravagances, and with his Minister Ismaïl Sadyk's help had
once more now, as on previous occasions, presented to the new official
commission a false statement of his debts. The pressure, however, on him
was severe, as the commission had received a hint, if I remember
rightly, from Riaz Pasha, that they were being befooled on this point,
and he, fearing that the whole truth would come out, and when the matter
should be fully gone into by the commission his Minister might tell the
facts, determined to be beforehand with him and make of him his
scapegoat and victim. He took the execution of the deed into his own
hands. It was his custom with his Minister, with whom he was on the
closest possible terms of personal friendship, to call sometimes for the
old man in the afternoon at the Finance Office and take him for a drive
with him to Shubra or to one or another of his palaces; and so on this
occasion he did, and, suspecting nothing, the Minister mounted with him
and they drove together to the Jesireh Palace and there got down and
entered. No sooner, however, were they inside than Ismaïl on some
pretext left him alone in one of the saloons and immediately sent to him
his two younger sons Husseyn and Hassan and his aide-de-camp, Mustafa
Bey Fehmy, when the princes struck and insulted the unarmed Minister and
hustled him on board one of the viceregal steamers which was lying with
steam up beside the quay, and there, though not without a vigorous
resistance, the old man was despatched. According to Wilson, the actual
doer of the deed was Mustafa Bey, acting under the Khedive's order, and
he added that the truth had been disclosed through the young
aide-de-camp falling ill of fever soon after and telling it in his
delirium. I have reason, however, to believe that as far as Mustafa's
personal act went this was a mistake, though the rest of the facts have
been fully confirmed to me, and that the Mufettish was handed over by
Mustafa to Ishak Bey, in whose charge he perished, though whether at
once or a little later is uncertain. Some say that Ismaïl Sadyk was
thrown as many another had been thrown, with a stone tied to his feet
into the Nile, others that he was conveyed alive as far as to between
Waddy Halfa and Dongola and there strangled. All that is quite beyond
dispute is that once on board the steamer he was never seen again alive,
and that the steamer having gone up the river, it was some weeks later
officially announced that the Mufettish was away in Upper Egypt for a
change of air and ultimately that he had there taken to drink and died.
It is also certain that Mustafa, a mild young man and unused to scenes
of violence, and being himself, as the Mufettish was, of Algerine
extraction, was so horrified at the _rôle_ he had been ordered to play
in it that he had a long and dangerous illness. It was this experience
that a year later caused him to take the part he did against his master
Ismaïl and ultimately to join Arabi in the earlier phases of the
revolution of 1881-2. He is the same Mustafa Fehmy who has for so many
years filled the office of Prime Minister in Egypt.
Of all these things we talked as we sat day after day on the deck of the
Messageries steamer, and, especially, of course, of Wilson's own
important mission as Ismaïl Sadyk's successor. Wilson's hopes at that
time were high regarding his own administrative success, and he showed a
keen appreciation of the responsibility of the charge he had undertaken
of restoring Egypt to prosperity and rescuing the fellahin from their
financial bondage, but he was also fully aware of the difficulties which
lay before him. The Khedive's character he had learned to understand,
and he was prepared to find in him an astute and unscrupulous opponent.
But he counted on his own _bonhomie_, tact, and knowledge of the world
to be able to live on friendly terms with him, and to avoid what
personal risks he might run. He relied too on his French education, for
he had lived much at Paris, to preserve intact the dual character of the
Anglo-French Ministry, of which he formed a part, and above all he
relied on Nubar. In Nubar he reposed unlimited confidence, believing him
to be a heaven-born Eastern statesman, and one devoted to English
interests. He had, moreover, behind him, as he thought, the full support
of the London Foreign Office, and what was perhaps even a stronger stay
in Europe, the interest and power of the house of Rothschild. On this
last he knew he could rely, for he had just persuaded them on his
passage through Paris to advance that fatal loan of nine millions on the
Khedivial Domains which was to bind them to the cause of European
intervention whenever necessary on the part of the bondholders. To
myself, who knew Wilson well, though I sympathized to the full with his
humanitarian hopes and personal aspirations, there seemed to be certain
elements of doubt in his position which did not augur altogether well
for his success.
We parted at Alexandria in good hope that all would go well with him in
a mission so much one of despair to a ruined state, but with misgivings.
The difficulties before him we both guessed would be immense, and in
spite of his excellent qualities of heart and head and his great _savoir
vivre_, I had my fears for him. The event more than justified my
forebodings, and in a shorter time than either of us could have thought
possible.
Sir Rivers Wilson's brief career as Finance Minister in Egypt failed
through many causes. It was of ill omen, I think, at the very outset
that it should have commenced with a new and heavy loan, the proceeds of
which it is difficult to find were put to any serious purpose. Errors of
administration, too, there certainly were which inflicted great
injustice on the people, and which, as will be seen later, prepared the
way for a general discontent. It is not, however, necessary for me to go
into these, for they are matters of notoriety to be found in the Blue
Books. Wilson's excuse for them must be found in the fact that in all
matters of internal policy he trusted absolutely for guidance to Nubar,
and that he greatly overrated Nubar's power to deal with them. If Wilson
had been more of a statesman and less of a financier he would not have
blundered as he did into political difficulties which, with a little
more experience of the arts of government, might have been easily
avoided. Nubar was a weak reed on which to lean. As a Christian and an
alien it was not difficult for one so astute as Ismaïl to rouse
Mohammedan opinion against him, and when, thinking only of restoring the
financial equilibrium, Wilson began a series of crude retrenchments
among the native officials, a discontented class was at once brought
into existence which gave the Khedive his opportunity of diverting the
popular ill-will from himself to his Christian Ministers. What made it
the more easy for him was that in these retrenchments no European
salaries were cut down. The agreement with France had made it imperative
that each Englishman employed in Egypt should be duplicated with a
Frenchman, and Wilson did not dare touch one of them. Wilson, as holding
the purse strings, had to bear the odium of all this.
Nor did he, in spite of his good intentions, succeed in relieving the
peasantry in any way of their burdens. It was an essential part of his
program that the Khedive should remain solvent, and that meant that the
interest on the enormous debt should be punctually paid. The nine
millions advanced by the Rothschilds went mostly in paying the more
urgently immediate calls, and not a tax was reduced or a demand
remitted. On the contrary, the _régime_ of the whip went on, even more
mercilessly than before, in the villages, and an additional terror was
introduced into the agricultural situation by the institution, at great
expense and most futilely carried out, of a new revenue survey, under
English direction, which was interpreted as the prelude of a still
enhanced land-tax. Lastly, the project, lightly suggested by Wilson, of
rescinding the Moukabalah arrangement, which would have meant
confiscation by the Government of landed property representing something
like fifteen millions, disturbed every landowner's mind, and led to the
belief that even worse things might be expected of the English Minister
than any they had suffered from his predecessors. It seems to me
astonishing now with my better knowledge of Egypt that any one so
intelligent and well meaning as Wilson undoubtedly was should have
fallen into such errors, and I half suspect that some of them were
suggested to him for his discomfiture by the Khedive himself. The climax
of the Wilson-Nubar political unwisdom was reached when, without any
arrears of pay being given them, the native army, including 2,500
officers, began to be disbanded. This put the alien Ministry finally
into the Khedive's hands, and it was a chance Ismaïl did not throw away.
The history of the _émeute_ of February, 1879, which overthrew the
Nubar-Wilson Ministry, needs to be recounted here as it really happened,
for the truth about it will not be found in any published history. The
Khedive was, as we have seen, anxious to divert the popular hatred with
which he was regarded in Egypt from himself to his new Ministers, and he
was also most desirous of ridding himself of their tutelage. By an Act
called the Rescript of 1878 he had abdicated his personal control of the
revenue and the administration into their hands, and used as he was for
eighteen years to absolute power in Egypt it irked him already to have
lost it. He had only signed the Rescript as an alternative to
bankruptcy, and this being averted he did not intend to stand by the
letter of his bond. Being also an astute judge of character, he had seen
at once the weakness of the Ministry, how Wilson and his French
colleague, de Blignières, depended, in their foreign ignorance of
Egyptian things, altogether on Nubar for their knowledge how to act, and
also how helpless Nubar himself was as a Christian to rule a Mohammedan
country.
Nubar was known to the Mohammedan official class as an Armenian
adventurer, who had enriched himself as agent of the loan-mongers of
Europe at the public expense, and to the fellahin as the author of the
International Tribunals, an institution extolled by foreigners, but to
them especially odious as having laid them more than any other agency
had done in bondage to the Greek usurers. As these Courts were then
administered in Egypt, a fellah who had once put his signature to any
paper for money borrowed could be sued before foreign judges according
to a foreign procedure and in a foreign language, without the smallest
chance, if he was a poor man, of defending himself, or of showing, as
was often the case, that the figures had been altered or the whole paper
a forgery, and he might be deprived of his land and of all he possessed
before he well knew what the claim made on him rightly was. Nubar was
known especially for this, and was without following of any native kind
or supported by any opinion but that of the foreign commercial class of
Alexandria. It was therefore through Nubar that Ismaïl saw the new
_régime_ could be most easily attacked, and most surely reduced to
impotence. All that was needed to overthrow it was a public native
demonstration against the unpopular Christian, and this the discontent
of the 2,500 officers cashiered and cheated of pay and pension made it a
very easy matter to arrange.
Ismaïl's chief agents in getting up the _émeute_ of February
were Shahin Pasha, one of his own Court servants, and Shahin's
brother-in-law, Latif Effendi Selim, who, as Director of the Military
College, held a position specially advantageous for the purpose. By
these a demonstration of the students of the college was arranged, which
at the hour named marched through the streets of Cairo announcing their
intention of demanding the dismissal of the obnoxious Ministry, and they
were joined by the crowd and especially by such of the cashiered
officers as chanced to be upon their way, and it was so arranged that
they should arrive at the Government offices at the hour when the
Ministers were about to leave it. There they found Nubar Pasha in the
act of stepping into his carriage, and they insulted and assaulted him,
Nubar's moustache being pulled and his ears boxed. A general popular
demonstration followed, and presently the first regiment of the
Khedivial Guard under its colonel Ali Bey Fehmy, which had been held
in readiness, appeared upon the scene, and a little after the
Khedive himself. A few shots were then fired over the heads of the
demonstrators, and the Khedive having ordered them to their homes the
crowd dispersed. The program, arranged beforehand with Ali Bey, had been
successfully carried out, and the Khedive was able to claim of the
English and French Consuls, to whom he immediately appealed, the
necessity of Nubar's dismissal, and to persuade them that but for his
powerful intervention and authority with the people worse things would
have happened. Nubar therefore was advised to resign, and a Moslem
official of the Khedive's choosing, Ragheb Pasha, was allowed to be
named Prime Minister in his place. With Ragheb, a special adherent of
his own, at the Ministry of the Interior, Ismaïl knew that Wilson and de
Blignières would be powerless to administer the country, and that their
fall also must speedily follow.
Nubar having been thus successfully disposed of, Wilson's tenure of
office as Finance Minister became, as the Khedive had calculated, all
but impossible, and his fall was hastened by extraneous circumstances.
Our then Consul-General in Egypt, Vivian (afterwards Lord Vivian and
Ambassador at Rome) had been estranged from Wilson by a personal quarrel
which had taken place between them, and when in his political
difficulties Wilson appealed to him for support, the support was
grudgingly given or altogether withheld. Wilson's final discomfiture
soon followed; an incident, somewhat similar to that of February, was
arranged in March at Alexandria, on which occasion he and his wife were
hustled and hurt by the mob, and when Wilson laid his complaint before
the Foreign Office it refused him any efficient backing for redress. He
was advised, as Nubar had been, to resign, and, there being no other
course left him, he retired from office and returned to Europe.
I have an interesting letter from Wilson of this date. Writing on 30th
April, 1879, he says: "You will I daresay have heard that I have been
upset by that little scoundrel the Khedive. He didn't quite have me
assassinated, as you not without reason imagined might be the case, but
he had me attacked in the street and very roughly handled, and now he
has had the satisfaction of getting rid of me altogether, H. M.'s Govt.,
with their usual loyalty to their agents, having left me to my fate.
Crepy Vivian is the cause and chief abettor of this sudden overthrow of
arrangements which he was instructed specially to protect. Partly from
jealousy, and a good deal from want of intelligence, with the addition
of a great deal of vanity, he went at once into the Khedive's camp. His
Highness, whose highest art of government lies in the disunion of the
people he has to deal with, might reasonably have expected to make a
split between Blignières and myself, or between one or both of us and
Nubar, but in his wildest dreams he never could have hoped that the
English Consul-General would become his toady and instrument for the
overthrow of the Ministry imposed on him by an English Government.... We
leave on the 6th and shall get to London about the 15th. I am glad to be
out of the place now. The whole thing is going to the devil. The country
is pestilential with corruption. The French and English Governments seem
afraid of acting, and for the moment the Khedive rides rampant and is
bleeding the country to death. The smash cannot be delayed, but in the
interval it is dreadful to think of the mischief and misery that are
being worked."
FOOTNOTES:
[4] I have given the story of the arrangement made with Waddington as I
heard it first from Lord Lytton at Simla in May, 1879. The details were
contained in a letter, which he showed me, written to him from Berlin,
while the Congress was still sitting, by a former diplomatic colleague
and have since been confirmed to me from more than one quarter, though
with variations. In regard to the main feature of the agreement, the
arrangement about Tunis, I had it very plainly stated to me in the
autumn of 1884 by Count Corti who had been Italian Ambassador at the
Congress. According to his account, the shock of the revelation to
Disraeli had been so great, that he took to his bed, and for four days
did not appear at the sittings, leaving Lord Salisbury to explain
matters as he best could. He said there had been no open rupture with
Waddington, the case having been submitted by Waddington to his fellow
ambassadors, who agreed that it was one that could not publicly be
disputed, "Il faut la guerre ou se taire." The agreement was a verbal
one between Waddington and Salisbury, but was recorded in a dispatch
subsequently written by the French Ambassador in London, in which he
reminded the latter of the conversation held in Berlin, and so secured
its acknowledgment in writing.
See Appendix VI. as to the Berlin Congress.