Chapter V: The Beginning of Grey’s Blunders—akabah (1)

About this date an incident occurred which was to prove the beginning of a series of violent mistakes made by Cromer in Egypt, and endorsed by Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, and which, as will be seen, led to the long quarrel between our Government and the Mohammedan world, as represented by the Sultan at Constantinople. This was what was known as the Akabah incident, which was briefly as follows:

It arose more or less accidentally. A young Englishman, Bramley, had for some time past been making camel journeys in the Libyan Desert, and with such success as to attract Cromer’s attention, and, though not in the Government service, had been given a kind of commission by him to make a tour of the desert East of the Suez Canal, and report to him about the Bedouin tribes inhabiting it, a district known generally as the Sinai Peninsula. An ostensible object was to inquire into disputes that had occurred among them, but in reality to find out what truth there might be in reports which had reached Cairo of an intention on the Sultan’s part of making a branch line from Maan on the Hedjaz railway to Akabah. During the course of his perambulation Bramley had come across a small detachment of Ottoman troops camped around a well at an uninhabited spot called Tabah, a few miles outside Akabah on the Suez road. With them Bramley had come to loggerheads, and had reported the incident in a serious light, and Cromer had taken it up as seriously, seeing in it a first step on the Ottoman part in the pretended railway scheme, not only to Akabah, but beyond it, towards Egypt, and as such a danger to the British Occupation. On this very slender suspicion, for it was nothing more, a claim had been raised by him in the name of the Khedive to the whole of the Sinai Peninsula as forming part of Khedivial Egypt, which geographically it had never been, for it had always been reckoned part of Arabia, and so of Asia, not yet politically, except in connection with the land pilgrimage between Cairo and Medina, and a very doubtful grant to Mohammed Ali of the fortresses on the pilgrim road. The claim had been pressed with quite unnecessary violence by Cromer, and the evacuation of Tabah demanded of the Sultan in peremptory terms (as to which see later and in the Appendix and my letter to Sir Edward Grey).

It was a trifling quarrel pushed to extreme lengths, and most foolishly engaged in by our Government, who ought to have known that its connection with the pilgrim route was sure to rouse Mohammedan feeling against us and place it on the Sultan’s side. And so it proved, as will be seen.

“_31st March._—To-day John Redmond came to see me, and stayed an hour and a half talking. I asked him how they were getting on with the new Parliament, and he said they were doing capitally. All on the Government side except a very few were with him. Bannerman was sound about Home Rule and Reid, and he thought he could count on Bryce and Morley and on the rank and file. The Whig section of the Cabinet, Grey, Haldane, Asquith and Fowler were opposed, but had hardly a handful with them. If he, Redmond, were to propose a resolution in favour of Home Rule of however complete a kind, he should have a large majority for it in the House; he only did not propose one, because he was waiting to see what the Government would bring forward as a measure next session, and he did not wish to embarrass them. Talking about Morley I noticed a kind of hesitation in what he said of him, and I put in ‘Yes, Morley is a wretched fellow,’ to which he answered, ‘You may well say so, he is exactly that. Last year when I was bringing forward my resolution in favour of Home Rule, which I got the whole Liberal party to vote for, I wrote to Morley and asked him to look through the terms of it, and suggest amendments. This he did, and struck out the words “National self-government,” and other expressions of the kind. But after the vote, Bannerman told me, “You might just as well have left in the words you struck out, we should have voted for it all the same.” Morley has no courage, you can’t depend upon him. Yes, he is a wretched fellow.’ I then asked about the quarrels there had been in the Irish party, and he said, ‘It is entirely a personal matter between O’Brien, and Dillon, and Sexton.’ O’Brien and Dillon had been at two ever since the Parnell split, and now they were quite at loggerheads, did not even speak when they met. O’Brien insisted there should be a round table conference about Home Rule as there had been about the Land Bill, but the conditions of the two cases were not the same. About the Land Bill, both sides wanted to come to an agreement. On Home Rule, the Ulster members and the Home Rulers were hopelessly at odds. All they could hope for this Parliament was to get a half-way house as an _instalment_. No half- way house could last, and it must end in Home Rule. About the influence of the priests in Ireland, he said it was quite untrue that it had increased in the last twenty years. On the contrary it had never recovered from the shock it had sustained from the time of the Parnell split. The best proof of their little influence to-day was that the priests could not carry a single constituency against the Parliamentary Party at an election. Archbishop Walsh was a man of little influence, he was too constantly changing his mind. Even on the University question it was impossible to say what his present opinion was.

“From this we went on to South Africa, which is the question of the moment, the Government having first intervened to reprieve twelve Kaffirs sentenced to death in Natal by a court martial, and then having climbed down for fear of Colonial white opinion. He said the Radicals were very angry at Lord Elgin’s pusillanimity, and the case was to be debated on Monday. The Radicals were angry, too, at the Whig section of the Cabinet not having voted for the Trades Union Bill. Altogether they had lost much ground already this session. If the opposition had any men of ability they might make an effective attack; as it was, George Wyndham was their only good man. Of George Wyndham he spoke nicely, said he had been sorry for him at the time of his breakdown last year when he resigned, but he had quite recovered his position now. I told him I should not be surprised if George helped them to get Home Rule, and I also repeated to him how Arthur Balfour had told me long ago that if they were to have Home Rule at all he hoped it would be _separation_. On the whole Redmond was most satisfied with the position. The Labour members went solid with the Irish, so that they made a compact party of 120 or 130 members. Redmond is a good-hearted fellow, getting up several times to arrange my invalid pillows for me while we were talking.

“_7th April._—The interest of the week has been about the Zulu rising in Natal. Our wretched Whig Government, after intervening to reprieve the twelve men sentenced to be shot, gave in to the Natal colonists, whose Ministry had resigned, and on Monday the unfortunate Zulus were executed. This is a dastardly business, and has disgusted the Radicals with Lord Elgin, and there has since been a serious Kaffir rising. How it will end no one knows, but the Government has now committed itself to the general principle of protecting the natives.

“_8th April._—Sir Wilfrid Lawson called, much broken with age, I am sorry to see, but still full of interest in the things that interested us both twenty-five years ago. I think that with his help we have put a spoke in Cromer’s wheel, and prevented a bombardment at Akabah.”

This was the last time I saw Sir Wilfrid, whose death, a few weeks later, was an immense misfortune to the cause of liberty, and the rights of backward races and small nationalities oppressed by British Imperialism. He was fearless, unselfish, and absolutely honest, with an inexhaustible fund of wit and rough eloquence, an old-fashioned Cumberland squire of the best possible type.

“_10th April._—Neville sent me word this morning that Bernard Shaw was sitting to him for his portrait, and I looked in (his house is next to mine), and spent an hour with him. Shaw was in the papal robes in which Neville is painting him, seated in an ancient cinquecento chair, a grotesque figure, with his trousered legs showing through the lace cotta transparent to his knees. He is an ugly fellow, too, his face a pasty white, with a red nose and a rusty red beard, and little slatey-blue eyes. Neville’s portrait is wonderfully like. Shaw’s appearance, however, matters little when he begins to talk, if he can ever be said to begin, for he talks always in his fine Irish brogue. His talk is like his plays, a string of paradoxes, and he is ready to be switched on to any subject one pleases, and to talk brilliantly on all. He was talking about his marriage when I entered. ‘I should never have married at all,’ he said, ‘if I had not been dead at the time. I tumbled off my bicycle, and the surgeons made a hole in my foot which they kept open for a year, and me in bed. I thought I was dead, for it would not heal, and Charlotte had me at her mercy. I should never have married if I had thought I should get well. Then I tumbled again, this time downstairs from top to bottom. When I found myself on the floor in the hall with every bone broken I felt satisfied. I could not do more and I took to my bed again.’ These particulars were _à propos_ of my having said that there were two quite happy moments in one’s life, the first when one took to one’s deathbed, and the other when one got up from it. He told us next his experiences in public speaking, and how shy he had been, and described his first open-air speech in Hyde Park when he had practised on three loafers lying on their backs on the grass, and how one of them without getting up had called out ‘’ear! ’ear!’ He said the great art of speaking was to get somebody to interrupt you with a question, and for you to misunderstand it, and he gave us some funny instances. I then got him to give his views on land reform, which he said was a very simple matter. You had only to get all the agricultural labourers to migrate into the towns, where they would make themselves useful by loafing in the streets and attending music halls, the only thing they understood, and by sending the townspeople down into the country to cultivate it by electricity and explosives. If he had a farm he thought he would plough it by firing cannon up and down it—amusing rubbish, which I fancy concealed a complete ignorance of the agricultural branch of the socialistic case. Shaw is a capital fellow all the same, and one I should like if I knew him better. He showed himself personally kind and of much practical dexterity when I got him to help me to my feet from the sofa on which I was, when the sitting was over.

“_15th April (Easter Sunday)._—It being a beautiful day I was taken out for the first time in a kind of invalid chair, where I am able to lie flat, to Rotten Row, and lay there in the sun looking at the hyacinths and tulips by the Serpentine pond head. No smart people to be seen, only shopkeepers and working men of the London variety.

“_21st April._—To Clouds at last. I thought I should never get there, my journey having been so often put off by my illnesses, but all has gone successfully, and I have travelled up in my wheeled chair from Semley station. There is the usual Easter family party in the house, with Arthur Balfour, Sir Oliver Lodge, and Butcher, M.P.

“_22nd April._—I was able to get downstairs this afternoon and to lie in the smoking room, where they all came to talk to me, Arthur Balfour with much kindly unction giving me a two-handed greeting. We had not met here since September, 1887. This time we did not talk any politics, but art, poetry, and science, the last especially with Lodge. Lodge, though somewhat pompous, is a good fellow, and talks well on his own subjects, and, as I had just been reading Haeckel’s ‘Life,’ and being engaged on my ‘Religion of Happiness,’ I was able to discuss materialism with him to some effect. He is really much more of a materialist than his books suggest, and except that he believes in a future life and some kind of God, there is not much difference between us. He admits the probability of a material origin of life through spontaneous generation, and his God is not God the Creator but a very shadowy being devoid of personality.

“_23rd April._—Lodge has gone back to Birmingham but he came up to my room for a final talk before he left. He is grateful to me for having cured a toothache he had with a small dose of morphia. He has left his book against Haeckel with me to read and invites me to answer it in print.

“Percy tells me he was present at the celebrated conference at Oxford in 1860 when Huxley defended Darwin’s theory, and the Bishop of Oxford, Wilberforce, denounced it. He remembers Haeckel being there in support of Huxley, which is curious, seeing that Haeckel’s biographer says that Haeckel did not till two years later accept Darwinism.

“Arthur Balfour has been doing a rest cure for some time in London, recovering from his political defeat, and is still an invalid. I find him singularly unaware of current events, as he still refuses to read newspapers, expecting others to supply him with news of what goes on. An odd instance of this took place to-day. He received a telegram by mistake addressed ‘Balfour, London,’ from San Francisco, telling him that some property had been saved from the earthquake, and he could not make it out. ‘What earthquake?’ he asked; ‘what earthquake?’ having heard nothing of what all the newspaper world has been talking about for the last five days, and he was put out at not having been told. ‘I told you, at any rate,’ one of them said, ‘of the eruption of Vesuvius,’ an event three weeks old, but he did not seem to know much about that either.

“_24th April._—Maurice Hewlett was here to-day, a literary man of some standing, and his wife, who talked to me about the Arabs on the strength of a visit to Algiers. Butcher has left us, a man of no importance, and absurdly deferential to Balfour as his party chief, yet member for Cambridge University.

“_28th April._—Arthur Balfour went away to-day. The last two evenings I have dined with the rest of the company downstairs, and have had a good deal of conversation with him, very little on politics, but much on unimportant things. In conversation he is a pleasant trifler, avoiding serious discussions, and showing, as I have remarked already, a curious ignorance of things of general information. He had no idea, for instance, last night, on what the Duke of Orleans and Don Carlos founded their respective claims to the French and Spanish thrones, and he jumbled up the Soudan with Somaliland. He told us a story which specially amused us. During the North Sea crisis, when there seemed a probability of war with Russia every hour, he happened to be at Panshanger for Sunday, and they wanted a fourth to play bridge. Lady Cowper, knowing the Russian _chargé-d’affaires_ was the best bridge player in London, a telegram was sent asking him to come. The Russian, of course, thought that the Prime Minister had some grave news to tell him, and hurried down to Panshanger, and there had been great difficulty in persuading him that he had nothing really to tell. To me Balfour shows a great deference (if I may use the term) and when he wished us all good-bye after luncheon, he came round especially to me where I lay on my couch and addressed me in a little speech which was almost affectionate. I am touched at this and return it, and it is a feeling he very generally inspires. Ego is here, a very charming fellow, a tall intelligent Oxford undergraduate. They talk of putting him into the army, though he does not really fancy it.

“_29th April (Sunday)._—Matters with the Sultan have come to a violent crisis. The Sultan has refused point-blank to evacuate Tabah (just opposite Akabah), and it is universally believed that Kaiser Wilhelm stands behind him. All the papers in London have become truculent, including the ‘Tribune,’ and I have written a long letter to Redmond suggesting that he and the Labour members and the extreme Radical section should adjourn the House, and debate the situation as one of urgency. This is how I explain the case to him:

“_29th April_, 1906.

“Dear Redmond.—Would it not be possible to adjourn the House so as to get explanations from the Government about this quarrel with the Sultan? Up to the present Grey has refused papers, and everybody is in the dark about it. Then the next step will be to send an ultimatum—and then they will say it is too late and that the honour of England is engaged.

“As far as I can make the matter out, the Egyptian frontier as granted in 1841 to Mohammed Ali was drawn in a straight line from Suez to El Arish on the Mediterranean, El Arish being a village situated near the mouth of a small river or rather stream which was the ancient boundary between Egypt and Palestine, and is mentioned as such under the name of the ‘River of Egypt’ in the Bible. I find that in 1840 the boundary of the Pashalik of Acre contiguous to that of Egypt was officially drawn at that time from Suez to El Arish. In the firman granted to Mohammed Ali in the following year the passage occurs: ‘I have reintegrated you in the Government of Egypt comprised within the limits drawn on the map which has been sent you.’ I think this map should be asked for, as I am convinced that it would show the boundary to be the Suez to El Arish line.

“All the subsequent ‘firmans of investiture’ granted to the Viceroys of Egypt have followed much the same lines, the exact frontier not being specified. This was the case with Ismaïl Pasha’s firman in 1866, and Tewfik’s firman in 1879, and, I believe, Abbas’ in 1892, though I have not got a copy of it.

“The origin of the claim in the Sinai Peninsula raised now for Egypt is to be found in a permission given to Mohammed Ali, who, it will be remembered, reconquered for the Sultan the province of Hejaz in Arabia, with the holy cities Medina and Mecca, that he should garrison certain stations on the pilgrim road from Egypt. These were Nakhl [a fort half way between Suez and Akabah], Akabah, Moelhe, and Wej, the last two being small ports on the eastern shore of the Red Sea. All these were considered to be in Arabia, and are marked as such on European maps of as late date as after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, though the forts remained in the occupation of the Egyptian Government till 1892. Akabah, Moelhe, and Wej were then, if I remember rightly, abandoned by Egypt, the pilgrimage no longer being made by land, the only post on the pilgrim road still occupied with a small garrison of perhaps a dozen men being Nakhl. In 1892, though nothing definite was said about the boundary in the firman, a letter was written by the then Grand Vizier (I believe it has been published but I have not a copy of it) saying that the boundary of Egyptian administration would be a line drawn from El Arish to Akabah, the Egyptian Government holding the former, the Ottoman Government holding the latter. No exact demarcation, however, of the village district of either El Arish or of Akabah was made, and I believe that in fact the Egyptian Government has exercised jurisdiction for a number of miles east of El Arish. The boundary stone spoken of as having been recently removed by the Turks is, I suspect, considerably east of the village and of the Wady of El Arish (the River of Egypt). So that if the Sultan now claims some miles of land west of the Akabah fort and village he is probably doing no more than the Egyptian Government has long been doing at the other end of the frontier line. It is obvious that a frontier line cannot be drawn exactly to the walls of either village.

“As to the exercise of administration in the disputed district, that is to say, the desert between the southern inhabited limit of Palestine and the Suez Canal, there has been practically none by either Government. In 1876, and again in 1881, I travelled through the whole of it, and can affirm that with the exception of the fort of Nakhl there was then no permanently inhabited place, and that the very few Bedouins camped in it owned allegiance to neither Government.

“The Bedouins of the Sinai district, which lies south of Nakhl, are very poor and few in number. Before the Suez Canal was made, they lived by trading their dates and such small curiosities as their district produced, including rough turquoises, at Cairo, and by conducting Russian and Greek pilgrims to the Sinai monastery. The cutting of the canal, however, has made a barrier between them and Egypt, which has practically ruined them, through the imposition at first of tolls for crossing the canal and later by quarantine regulations either for themselves or their animals. I know well their sufferings on this head, as for the last twenty-five years they have made me the confidant of their complaints. Moreover, a concession was given of their turquoise mines to a European company, now I believe abandoned as unworkable, whereby they were much harassed, and the whole peninsula has been treated as an infected district through the establishment of a quarantine station at Tor for the Mecca pilgrimage. Thus they have shared in no way in the material prosperity of Egypt and have been persistently ignored by its government, until apparently for a political reason we find Lord Cromer, in his this year’s Report, detailing the benefits he proposes to bestow on them. The scheme he mentions of irrigation for the Peninsula is mere nonsense, as the whole district is dry desert without streams, for the most part an elevated plateau with a very rare rainfall, and no alluvial soil. I mention these matters because it is sure to be put forward that in opposing the Turkish occupation of Tabah we are defending the inhabitants from Ottoman oppression. No such inhabited place as Tabah existed when I was in the country, and there probably exists none now, the whole district being many miles away from any Arab camping ground.

“As to the excitement in Egypt, it is the natural consequence of the system of a ‘Veiled Protectorate’ which we have been pursuing there for the last twenty years, and of the repression of all political liberty or exercise of self-government. Before we came with an army of occupation to Egypt we were popular with the natives of all classes, and the Sultan was either ignored or despised. Now it is we who, in spite of the material prosperity fostered by Cromer, are hated and despised; and it is the Sultan who is looked upon as the only possible protector against perpetual foreign domination. Cromer, though a very able administrator, is no statesman in any constructive sense. He has allowed nothing in the way of self-government to make even the beginning of a reappearance in Egypt from the day when it was put down at Tel-el-Kebir. He has governed through the weakness not through the strength of the native population, and more and more every year through Englishmen. Whatever patriotism there is left in Egypt is strongly anti-English, and it is just as well that our credulous people here should learn how things stand politically and morally, and should discount Cromer’s self-glorifying annual Reports on any point but that of Egypt’s material progress. These Reports always remind me (to compare small things with great), of the first chapter of Genesis, where ‘the Lord saw all the things that he had made and found that they were very good.’ This calling for reinforcements by Cromer, who less than two years ago boasted that he could govern Egypt without any army of occupation at all, would be amusing if it was not likely to lead to a collision. I suspect the Khedive is playing partners with the Sultan in the Akabah affair. Certainly a quarrel on such a question, involving as it does the protection of the pilgrim road, will make a great ferment in the Mohammedan world from China to Senegal and may cost us dear.

“I should be glad if you would show this letter to some of the Labour members and those Radicals who care more about peace and retrenchment than Imperial glory—and get them to try and put a little sense into the Government—or they will go exactly the same way to ruin as Gladstone went after the elections of 1880. I see all the Radical papers are beating the war-drum just as they did in 1882, but perhaps something may be done in the House of Commons.

“It is worth noting that on the 23rd of March, 1886, just twenty years ago, the excellent Campbell Bannerman, as representing the War Office, announced to the House that the evacuation of Egypt would be effected with as little delay as possible.

“You will of course consult Dillon, to whom I wrote about the matter on Friday, if he is back in London. You will not forget that Balfour, in one of his speeches in the House three years ago, defined Egypt as ‘a province of the Ottoman Empire in the military occupation of England.’ We have of course no legal right there by any rule of international law, nor by any European instrument except the private agreement lately made with France. We are sure to be called to account internationally for our presence there one of these days, as the position on the Suez Canal is too important in the world for the other Mediterranean Powers to acknowledge it permanently.

“Yours very truly.

“W. S. B.”

“A Cabinet Council sat yesterday, and the King is returning in haste from the Mediterranean; a pretty kettle of fish it is. Cromer has called for reinforcements in Egypt, not, I imagine, to attack the Turks with, but to overawe the Nationalists, and because he cannot depend upon the Egyptian army in a case where the Sultan is concerned. The great doubt is about the Khedive’s attitude; that he hates the English _régime_ is certain, and also that he has of late years been hand in glove with the Sultan, but the London papers announce that he has just been entertaining the Prince of Wales at Cairo, and that he has promised to pay him a return visit in England this summer. Abbas, however, has become such a double dealer that he is probably on the Sultan’s side secretly, and towards Cromer is playing precisely the same old game played by his father and grandfather of running with the Nationalist hare and hunting with the European hounds. Cromer has just published a grandiloquent Report of his year’s achievements, and he has shoved into it a plan of reforms and improvements for the Sinai Peninsula, doubtless in view of the Tabah dispute which began as long ago as January. If the Sultan stands to his guns I don’t see precisely what our people can do in Egypt. They have not the force there to turn the Turks out of the disputed territory, and they cannot bombard Constantinople without a gross breach of the European peace. A naval demonstration is their only remedy. They will probably blockade Hodeida and so endeavour to apply pressure, but I doubt if the Emperor William will allow action at Smyrna of the kind taken by France a few years ago. In Natal, too, they are in difficulties through a Zulu revolt, so that it may well happen that our splendid Radical government, pledged up to the eyes to peace and retrenchment, may find themselves with two wars on their hands within six weeks of their coming into office.

“_2nd May._—As to my letter to Redmond I see that Grey and Fitzmaurice have explained themselves. Also Cromer’s Report has come, and I have written a long article on it of 2,000 words for the ‘Manchester Guardian,’ criticizing Cromer’s political as contrasted with his administrative policy in Egypt, explaining his relations with the Khedive and blaming his quarrel with the Sultan.

“_6th May (Sunday)._—The ‘Manchester Guardian’ has published my article on Cromer in a prominent way with a leading article adopting my view that the present troubles are largely caused by Cromer’s having failed to re-establish the Liberal National Party in 1883, and later by his injudicious brow-beating of Abbas. It says that self-government ought to be begun now in Egypt. On the other hand the ‘Tribune’ has gone right round, and is extravagantly jingo, denouncing the Sultan, and printing an aggressive picture of John Bull threatening to demolish him. The ‘Daily News’ is preaching a crusade. It says, ‘it is a maxim of Liberal policy that no foot of land abandoned by the Turk can ever belong to him again,’ all this in consequence of the announcement that an ultimatum has been addressed to Constantinople.

“_7th May._—I have decided to write a public letter to Grey expostulating with him on the ultimatum, and have spent the whole day over it, from half-past two in the earliest morning, but I feel it to be necessary. As far as I can understand the case, our Government is technically in the wrong in asserting a claim for Tabah as _territory_ of the Khediviate, or at any time within the ancient boundaries of Egypt, or that it has ever been administered from Cairo, except in connection with the Pilgrim Road.

“_9th May._—I left Clouds and came up to London. I have sent in my letter to Grey, and Eddy Tennant (who is an intimate friend of Grey’s) has promised to speak to him about it. He is to give him a message, too, from me, that my letter is written in no hostile sense to the Government, but that if I receive no answer I shall consider myself at liberty to publish. I have also sent a copy of it through Arthur Ellis to the King. I fear, however, that it is too late to stop warlike operations. [_Note._ For the text of my letter to Grey see Appendix.]

“Meynell dined with me. He talked a good deal about the Education Bill, which is now much discussed. Birrell, he says, repudiates it as his own, saying that it is really Lloyd George’s drafting forced on Birrell by a Cabinet majority.

“_11th May._—Percy Wyndham came to lunch with me, and immediately after John Redmond. They had not met before, but Percy made a polite speech about their having sat together twenty years ago in Parliament, and then left us to our talk. This was principally about Akabah. The Radical members, Redmond says, are so furious against the Sultan that they will none of them join in any protest against the ultimatum, though not one of them understands in the least what the quarrel is about. I explained the matter to him, and he said there would be papers published on the case on Monday, and opportunities of discussion Tuesday and Thursday on the Estimates. He would send Dillon to me.

“There is a report to-day of the quarrel with the Sultan having been arranged, but the British fleet is assembled at the Piræus, and almost anything may happen. The Emperor William has backed out of any encouragement he may have given at Constantinople, and clearly cannot help the Sultan in a material way. I am inclined to think that if it comes to a naval demonstration it would be one of forcing the Dardanelles and threatening the Sultan at Yildiz.

“_12th May._—The ‘Daily News’ and ‘Tribune’ publish epitomes of my letter to Grey, and the ‘Manchester Guardian’ gives it in full, with a good leading article in support. John Dillon lunched with me, and we discussed Akabah, of course. He knows more about Egyptian politics than anybody now in the House of Commons, but, like Redmond, he says, the Radicals will do nothing to stop the war.

“_13th May (Sunday)._—The ‘Observer’ announces that the Sultan has yielded to the British demands, these being (1) That all the positions occupied by the Turks should be abandoned; (2) That the Sinaitic frontier should be delimited by a mixed commission. This is hailed as a complete triumph for Sir Edward Grey.”

The triumph proved an unfortunate one for our Foreign Office, as it was the beginning of the long quarrel between Sir Edward Grey and Constantinople, which resulted eight years later in the alliance of Turkey with the central European Powers in the Great War, a combination which gave to Germany its victory over Russia. Not a soul in England understood its importance, or cared to understand. For this reason I print the details here at full length.

“Philip Currie is dead after a long illness and a week of unconsciousness, the papers say. In his youth Philip was a merry fellow, one of the smart young men of the Foreign Office, where he had rooms for many years as resident clerk, with his retriever ‘Pam,’ so named after Palmerston, his first chief. He had wit and a pleasant tongue. He figures as second hero of Violet Fane’s poems, ‘From Dawn to Noon,’ whom he afterwards married. Clare Vyner being her first hero. Philip rose in the Foreign Office to the rank of permanent Under Secretary of State, and then got himself made Ambassador at Constantinople, and later at Rome, retiring on a pension some three years ago, his time being out. We were cousins and good friends always, without being quite bosom friends. He was a good official friend to me while I was in diplomacy, though my incursions into foreign politics in later years estranged us at times. The last time I saw him was two years ago in the Park, being wheeled there in a bath chair in broken health, and I went home to lunch with him in Prince’s Gate. Now both he and Violet Fane have disappeared into the eternal nothing.

“_22nd May._—The Sultan has yielded everything about Akabah. Though Redmond and Dillon promised me to press for papers, they have not done so, and our Foreign Office has explained nothing. I am disgusted with the Irish for playing thus into Grey’s hands, politic though they may find it to be for their own purpose of getting a Home Rule Bill out of the Government. Not that I expected much other result, for I have always felt that the Irish, if they once got their own freedom, would join England and the other robber nations of the world in the work of Imperial spoliation. Parnell’s declaration in favor of Imperial Federation twenty years ago was an indication of this to me. It was my main reason for retiring from Irish politics, and for the future I shall economize my subscription to their Parliamentary Fund.

“_28th May._—I have been all last week in Chapel Street, seeing my various friends. To-day Betty Balfour came to lunch with me, having first sent me a new batch of her father’s letters to read and advise as to publishing. They deal mostly with his Indian Government, and I have advised her to abridge and cut freely, as the volume is to be one of private, not political letters. We discussed the respective intellectual powers of her husband Gerald, and of Arthur.

“Curiously enough, precisely the same question turned up later in the afternoon, when I had a visit from Margot. She has, of course, known Arthur intimately for the last twenty years before she married. She insisted that Arthur’s real mind was metaphysical and religious, that he had a vivid sense of the present life being of very little importance, an ante-chamber to another life. On one occasion he had told her that, in his view death, apart from the physical pain of it—‘and I am a coward in regard to pain,’ he had said, ‘being altogether without that kind of courage’—was an incident no more alarming than the passage ‘from this room into that,’ the world to come being infinitely more interesting and important. ‘It is for that reason,’ Margot said, ‘that he has no profound convictions about politics, they attract him only as a game which he thinks he plays well, and which amuses him much as a game of chess might do, but he does not really care for the things at stake, or believe that the happiness of mankind depends on events going this way or that.’

“Dillon was to have come to me to-day, but has had to go suddenly to Ireland to see Davitt, who is in a dying state. Betty Balfour, talking of Dillon, was very severe about his ‘lying and insincerity,’ but I could not get her to give an instance of either. I told her that for my part I had the highest respect for Dillon, and had always found him perfectly honest and straightforward, a far better patriot than others whom she was praising.

“_31st May._—To Newbuildings for the Whitsuntide holiday, Anne being expected home from Egypt on the 4th.

“_11th June._—This is the anniversary of the Alexandria riots, a date always memorable to me. On Saturday we made an expedition to Chanclebury Ring, I in my wheeled chair with a donkey, the others in the American trap, and we took luncheon with us. While we were there, a horseman rode up who turned out to be Goring from Wiston, who is owner of the Down, and we renewed acquaintance. He told us, among other things, that his father’s and his grandfather’s lives together covered 180 years, their tenure between them of the Wiston estate 150 years. The Gorings got Wiston by a marriage with the Fagges, who had bought it of the Shirleys, when these became involved in the civil war troubles. It is the history of more than one Sussex estate, of the Burrels at West Grinstead, and of ourselves at Newbuildings.

“_20th June._—Anne arrived last night from Egypt. She confirms my view of the political situation there, saying that while nobody wants the Sultan’s rule at Cairo, they nevertheless take his side about Akabah. This is the case with even the most advanced of Mohammed Abdu’s disciples. As to the Khedive’s attitude, it is not known precisely what line he took, as he seems to have held one language to Cromer and another to Mukhtar Pasha. There can, however, be little doubt that he was with the Sultan in the affair, as he has just gone to Constantinople, which certainly would not be the case if he had taken the English side. It has been a year of terrible drought for the Bedouins.

“_21st June._—To-day the ‘Manchester Guardian’ has published a protest I have drawn up against the intended execution of certain fellahin, near Tantah, for the so-called ‘murder’ of a British officer, and the hurting of several more, which took place on the 13th. [This was the notorious Denshawai affair, which led to world-wide results.] It is an abominable case. As far as one could learn from the telegrams and some slight admissions made by Grey in Parliament, the officers were part of an English military force, making a promenade through the Delta, with the object of demonstrating for political purposes the military power of Great Britain. Finding themselves encamped near Tantah, they could think of nothing better to do than to shoot the tame pigeons in a village hard by, and went out, seven of them, in uniform for the purpose. They say they were invited there by an Omdeh of the village, but when they got there the villagers objected, and as none of them knew Arabic they got frightened; a gun then went off in the hands of one of them; a woman and some men were killed or wounded, and the officers were belaboured with _nabuts_. Two of these ran away, it is said to bring help from their camp, seven miles off, and one of them was found dead four miles from the village. This is exactly like all these cases, except that it is the first time an officer has been killed, and Reuter’s telegrams are violent for punishment of the natives. I got Dillon to ask some questions in Parliament on Monday, and yesterday there was a special telegram in the ‘Daily Chronicle’ saying that Cromer had decided to have the villagers shot. This, be it remarked, before any trial had taken place, and all treat it as a case of murder with prearrangement, not on the part of the officers, but of the fellahin. It is the usual course these affairs take in Egypt, but a more than usually plain demonstration of the kind of justice dealt out between Englishman and native. Fortunately the ‘Manchester Guardian’ has taken up the matter strongly, and may perhaps save some lives, but I doubt it. English feeling on these matters has become absolutely callous, and I believe if Cromer ordered a dozen of the villagers to be crucified or impaled, no serious objection would be made to it here, still I have done what I could, and there is a chance. The ‘trial’ is to be on Sunday.

“_23rd June._—I see a telegram in the ‘Pall Mall’ which seems to show that Cromer has received a hint to be moderate in his zeal. It is reported that he has ordered Captain Bull’s body to be exhumed and examined medically, with the result that it has been discovered that he died not of wounds but of sunstroke.

“_27th June._—Still writing to Dillon, the ‘Manchester Guardian,’ and the ‘Tribune,’ about the abominable Denshawai affair which is to be judged to-day, or rather to be sentenced, for the whole thing has been judged by Cromer already and the so-called ‘trial’ will simply record his decision.

“_28th June._—They have condemned four of the Denshawai villagers to death, four to penal servitude for life, three to fifteen years’ imprisonment, six to seven years, three to one year with fifty lashes, and five to fifty lashes, thirty-one acquitted. This is a monstrous sentence and ought, I think, to do more to break up the legend of Cromer’s paternal rule in Egypt than anything we have seen since its commencement. Dillon is bringing forward the case in parliament, but nothing is likely to stop the executions.

“_29th June._—I have worried myself all day about the Egyptian villagers, and I see now that they were hanged yesterday under circumstances of revolting barbarity. All day I have been writing, and the thing is weighing on me like a nightmare still.

“_30th June._—Terence Bourke came down from London for the day and gave me news of Tunis. The French, he said, have turned over a new leaf there and are trying to reconcile the Arabs to their rule. He thinks they are succeeding. He is now for an Arabian Caliphate under English protection. The Germans, however, are making a vigorous propaganda in their own interests in North Africa. Anne has left for London, and I am alone here.

“_1st July (Sunday)._—George Wyndham came down by the early train, and Cunninghame Graham a little later, and we spent a pleasant day in talk. The executions in Egypt were our chief topic. I had fortunately finished my letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’ before they came, and I read it out to them. Graham is to get the Labour members to support Dillon, when he proposes a reduction of Grey’s salary on the Foreign Office vote on Thursday. George, though he will not help, will look on with ‘benevolent interest.’ We sat all day under the trees of the Jubilee garden. After lunch Graham went away, and George and I stayed talking poetry. He read me his essay on Ronsard, and some of his translations, which are admirable, and we had much intimate personal as well as literary talk, and I told him the history of my religious opinions. It is odd his championing the cause of High Church Christianity, he who really believes in nothing of these things, altogether a day of extreme beauty and intellectual pleasure.

“_3rd July._—Chapel Street. Cromer has been given the Order of Merit! Dillon came to luncheon and stayed for an hour and a half talking over the Denshawai case. He is hopeless of getting a good hearing for it in Parliament, though the Radical feeling is strong of indignation, but every kind of pressure is being put upon members of the Government to get them to be silent, and the press also is being appealed to. What a state of things! Here we have a judicial crime of the largest dimensions committed by our Representative in Egypt, the thing hardly denied, quite undeniable and defaming the fair face of English justice throughout the world, yet on the very day the hangings take place our Representative is honoured with the supreme reward of the Order of Merit! Sir Edward Grey, for the Government, when questioned as to the trial and executions, alleges that he cannot give any information, _because he does not know_, and he must wait till a detailed report arrives from Egypt, and this although Cromer is in England and was actually in the Gallery of the House of Commons while the questions were being put, Cromer who knows every detail of the affair and is the sole person responsible. The truth, however, of the situation, Dillon tells me, is this. The Radicals had designed to have a full dress debate in condemnation of the Congo atrocities committed by the King of the Belgians, and are enraged to find that atrocities quite as startling have been committed by our own officials in Egypt. With what face can they now denounce the mote in the Belgian eye, yet we are hypocrites enough to do this even with this Denshawai beam, astounding as it is, in our own eye, but the Radicals are fools and deserve their fate of jackaling their Whig leaders, and I am a fool to fash myself with the abomination of our rule in the world.

“Sir Wilfrid Lawson is dead, the only quite true man on the Radical side in Parliament. Dear good man, we shall not see another like him.

“_4th July._—To Clifford’s Inn, to see Neville’s exhibition of pictures, his Bernard Shaw portrait among them.

“_6th July._—I have had a letter from Keir Hardie, the Labour leader, asking my opinion about Grey’s statement, and have answered him. [The peculiarity in Hardie’s letter was that it showed him to be entirely ignorant even as to where the atrocities had taken place, imagining it to be somewhere in the Soudan.]

“_8th July (Sunday)._—The new Egyptian Nationalist leader, Mustapha Kamel, writes to me from Paris saying he wishes to see me, and I have telegraphed back proposing that he should come over to England, and offering to lodge him at Chapel Street. There was a sickening account on Friday in the ‘Pall Mall’ of the Denshawai executions. I think it _must_ smash Cromer. There are a number of French and English papers, too, come from Cairo which make a damning case of abuse of justice in the trial. I intend to write a pamphlet to be called ‘Atrocities of Justice under English Rule in Egypt.’[6]

“_11th July._—Anne and I spent yesterday writing in connection with this, and translating the Egyptian newspapers. I have written as well as telegraphed to Mustapha Kamel urging him to come to England without delay. The moment is most propitious for a National Egyptian demonstration. To-day being the anniversary of the bombardment of Alexandria, I headed my letter ‘Anniversaire du bombardement d’Alexandrie. Que Dieu le venge.’ He has telegraphed in return that he will come to London on Saturday, and sends in the meantime a manifesto addressed to the English nation and the world at large, which he is having published in the ‘Figaro.’ Robertson, too, the Radical member for Newcastle, in whose hands Dillon left the case while he is away in Ireland, writes saying he wants to see me. So I went up to London. Robertson tells me that he has seen Grey, and he ‘has hopes that Grey will propose reforms in the way of a new edict, which will make the sentences of the special tribunal subject to appeal, and stop _public_ executions and _perhaps_ all floggings.’ This is all rubbish; the Appeal Court is too entirely under Cromer’s thumb to be of the least use, except, perhaps, to delay future executions. As to stopping _public_ executions, it would only make matters worse for the Egyptians, who would then be hanged and flogged in private, to them a greater punishment, and more beyond the control of English and native opinion. Of course this privacy is exactly what Cromer would like, and I hope Robertson would refuse to accept it as any mitigation.

“_12th July._—There is a splendid article in the ‘Tribune,’ thanks to Meynell, who got them to put it in, the best we have yet had in any paper. Robertson came to breakfast, and I had a good two hours with him. He has put down a number of questions for this afternoon in the House, and altogether things seem warming up. At least we have gained it that Parliamentary papers have been promised for this day fortnight, and an opportunity of discussion before the session closes.

“_14th July._—Back to Newbuildings yesterday, much knocked up by my work, leaving it to Neville to take my place at the luncheon I was to give to Mustapha Kamel and Robertson on Monday.

“_15th July (Sunday)._—Mustapha Kamel arrived by the early train and we spent the whole day together in the Jubilee garden. He is certainly a very wonderful young man, more like a very clever young Frenchman than an Egyptian, though it is physically quite evident that he is really one, without any taint of northern blood, Circassian or other. He tells me his family have lived for the last three generations at Cairo, though originally from the provinces, and he has the good sense to pride himself on his pure Egyptian birth. He is enthusiastic and eloquent, and has an extraordinary gift of speech, but he is no mere babbler, but a man with perfectly clear ideas—a thing so rare in the East—and a knowledge of men and things really astonishing. I take him, too, to be quite sincere in his patriotism, and I could not detect throughout the whole of his talk to-day a single false note. He also has great courage and decision of judgement, not scrupling to disagree with any opinion expressed in conversation where his own differs. He has given me the information I wanted about himself. First as to his relations with the Sultan, he, like all educated Egyptians, hates and distrusts Abdul Hamid as a tyrant and a dangerous man who at any moment, for some personal interest or through fear, might barter away Egyptian independence to England, and make some _entente_ with her, such as the French have made, a thing which would be death to all their hopes. For this reason Egypt cannot afford to quarrel with Abdul Hamid, and the connection of Egypt with the Ottoman Empire is a guarantee to her, while it lasts, against annexation by an European Power. His hope lies in Abdul Hamid’s death, and in getting a liberal and reforming successor to the Caliphate.