Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt. Blunt Wilfrid Scawen

now in progress. Early in May the French Government with hardly a note of warning, and in pursuance of the secret arrangement made at Berlin three years before between M. Waddington and our Foreign Office, invaded Tunis and, on the fanciful pretext of protecting the Bey from a quite unreal danger threatened him by his subjects, occupied the western portion of the Regency and proclaimed a French Protectorate. This sudden act of aggression on a perfectly inoffensive and harmless neighbour was justified by nothing in the condition of the province either in the way of ill government or danger to Europeans or even financial embarrassment. The Bey himself was a mild and respectable personage, and had in no way forfeited the goodwill of his people. The seizure of his person by General Bréart, and the usurpation of his authority by the French Republic was an act of cynical illegality almost without parallel in the history of modern aggression upon weaker nations, if we except the invasion of Egypt by Bonaparte in 1799, and was generally condemned in England where the history of the Berlin betrayal was not as yet suspected. In the Mohammedan world it lit a flame of anger and dismay which gathered in intensity as the truth became slowly known. The western Tunisians, taken wholly by surprise at first, had hardly fired a shot against the French, and the Bey had been forced to sign the Treaty presented to him at the sword's point by Bréart, which surrendered the independence of the Regency, before the real state of the case came to be understood. But in the eastern provinces the tribes of the desert took up arms, and before the middle of summer the revolt had spread to the Algerian Sahara and a wave of anger against Christendom was rolling eastwards which, as will be seen, had begun to affect Egypt dangerously, and remains in truth to this day responsible for precipitating the action of the liberal reformers there and of the army in demanding self government.

      It is worth noting, as showing the complicity of our Government in this scandalous affair, that Lord Granville allowed himself to be content with an assurance given him by the French Government, that the occupation of the Regency was only for the restoration of order, though it was patent that order had not been so much as threatened, and that it would not continue a day longer than might be necessary to secure the safety of the Bey's Government – a line of falsehood closely imitated by Lord Granville himself the following year when the positions of France and England were reversed in Egypt. It is most noticeable too that, though Parliament was sitting at the time, Lord Salisbury, the leader of the opposition, maintained an absolute silence about Tunis, though his followers, who did not know his secret reasons, were clamorous for explanations. Bismarck was equally silent at Berlin, and no single Power of those who had been represented at Berlin dissented, though the Italian public was deeply aggrieved by the French action. The Sultan alone of them recorded his public protest, Tunis having been always reckoned as part of the Ottoman dominions. By the European Governments it was accepted speedily as a fait accompli.

      The history of the rise of what in the summer of 1881 began to be known as the Egyptian National movement needs here to be told. It had its origin as a practical idea in the last desperate efforts made by the Khedive Ismaïl when he had quarrelled with Wilson to maintain himself in power against the consular tutelage in which he had, by his folly and his debts, placed himself. He sought to recover the moral status he had lost and the goodwill of his subjects by making to them a popular appeal for support, and in the spring of 1879 he proclaimed his intention of calling together an assembly of Notables. There is little doubt that his intention was, under the cloak of a national demand, to repudiate at least a portion of the debt, and though no one in Egypt, except perhaps certain European residents, thought him sincere, the idea of a constitutional form of government as a remedy for the ills they were suffering began from that time to be popularized at Cairo. Sheykhs Jemal-ed-din and his school had always maintained that the growing absolutism of Mohammedan princes in modern times was contrary to the spirit of Islam which in its essence was a Republic where every Moslem had the right of free speech in its assemblies, and where the authority of the ruler rested on his conformity to the law and on popular approval. Ismaïl was condemned by the Azhar reformers on the double ground of his being a breaker of the law and a political tyrant. In the spring of 1879 it had been much discussed among them in private how, and by what means, he could be deposed or even, if there were no other way, removed by assassination. It was the consciousness of his double peril, both at home and from Europe, and of the opinions held at the Azhar that determined him to appear as a Constitutionalist. Constitutionalism, it must, moreover, be remembered, was much in the air just then not only in Egypt, but at Constantinople, where an assembly had met convoked by decree of the Sultan only five years before. Little, therefore, as Ismaïl was trusted by the Reformers, his new move was one of which they could not but approve, and it was taken up and expounded by such printed organs of opinion as had furtively begun to be established at Cairo under their direction. Apart from the Azhar, there were not a few of the high officials who at this time were Constitutionalists, notably Sherif Pasha, Ali Pasha Mubarak and Mahmud Bey Sami el Barodi. Nor was this all. The Khedive's heir apparent and eventual successor, Mohammed Tewfik, had come under Jemal-ed-din's potent influence, and through him was in close communication with the Reformers, and had given them repeated pledges that if ever he came to the Khedivial throne he would govern on strictly constitutional lines. Ismaïl's latest Ministry, which lasted three months, included Tewfik and Sherif, Constitutionalists both, and they were actually in charge of the administration when the old Khedive was deposed.

      Tewfik's accession was therefore greeted by Jemal-ed-din and the Reformers as a stroke of good fortune, and, though they regretted that it had not been in the power of the Egyptians themselves to depose the tyrant, they looked forward to the new régime with the confident expectation of men who had at last obtained a lever to their wishes. The new Khedive, however, like many another heir apparent when he has succeeded to power, was not long in changing his opinion, and a month had hardly elapsed before he had forgotten his promises and betrayed his friends. Tewfik's character was one of extreme weakness. The son of a woman who had been a servant only in his father's house, he had been from his childhood treated as of small account by Ismaïl and brought up by his mother in bodily fear of the unscrupulous Khedive, and in those habits of insincerity and dissimulation which in the East are the traditional safeguards of the unprotected. He had grown up in this way, in the harem more than with men, and had been unable to rid himself of a certain womanish timidity which prompted him always to yield his opinion in the presence of a stronger will than his own, and after yielding, to regain his ground, if possible, by indirect means and covertly as is the habit of women. He had, too, a large share of the womanish quality of jealousy and of the love of small vengeances. Otherwise, in his domestic life he was well-conducted as compared with most of his predecessors, and not unadorned with respectable virtues. As a ruler his was too negative a character not to be a danger to those who had to deal with him. His first impulse was always to conceal the truth and to place upon others the blame of any failure that might have occurred by his fault. His resentments were shown not by open displeasure, but by tale-bearing and false suggestion and the setting of one against another where he desired to prevail or be revenged. It has been said of him that he was never sincere, and that no one ever trusted him who was not betrayed.

      When therefore on his accession Tewfik found himself placed between two forces with opposite ends in view, the force of his reforming friends urging him to fulfil his constitutional promises, and the force of the consulates forbidding him to part with any of his power, a power they intended to exercise in his name themselves, he consented first to his Minister Sherif's suggestion that he should issue a decree granting a Constitution and then at the instance of the Consuls refused to sign it. This led to Sherif's resignation, and the substitution in his place of a nominee of the Consulates, Riaz Pasha, on whom these counted to carry out their ideas of financial reform while leaving him full power, under the Rescript of 1878, to carry on the internal administration as he would, without check from any Council or Assembly, in the Khedive's name. The weakness shown by the Khedive in this, the first important decision of his reign, was the cause of all his future troubles. Had he remained loyal to his promises to the Reformers and to his Ministers, and summoned at that time a Council of Notables, he would have had his subjects enthusiastically with him and would have been spared the intrigues and counter intrigues which marked the next two years and prepared the way for the revolution of 1882. As it was, he found himself by his compliance deprived of all authority, and treated as a mere dummy prince by Consuls whose will he had obeyed and by his new Minister.

      The character of Riaz has been much debated. At