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V.

ON THE EGYPTIAN CONSTITUTION.

OUTWARD

EVIDENCES OF ENGLISH RULE-A HEART-BREAKING HANDICAP-A TOPSY-TURVY CONSTITUTION- KHEDIVE, CONSUL-GENERAL, AND SIRDAR-FOREIGN CAPITULATIONS -CAISSE DE LA DETTE--THE REAL GOVERNOR OF EGYPT, THOMAS COOK AND SON-THE PROGRESS OF FIFTEEN YEARS.

December 24.-Egypt is very much like Turkey to the outward eye; yet almost from the moment of landing you begin to notice differences. The general effect of them is that Egypt seems to be being governed; Turkey does not. At Port Said you observe the coastguard and the police; their uniforms are not merely whole, but smart, clean, workmanlike. You go a little farther and you see a man carefully sweeping the street. A little farther a couple of men are mending the tramway-squatting down

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to do it in true oriental style, but the fact that they are mending anything at all is staggeringly un-oriental. As you travel about you notice that the railway carriages—that is to say, the newer ones-are comfortable, clean, and stoutly built; they bear the legend in English, "Boulac shops," with the date of construction. Each train has a post-van, an animal- van, and a couple of vans for fish and vegetables. The newer engines are well-set-up English-looking creatures: they have quality, as a cavalry subaltern well put it, unlike those underbred brutes, French locomotives.

When you get to a hotel, you are indeed asked for your name and dwelling-place; but not whence you came, whither you go, your vocation, religion, and all the rest of your biography, in which Continental Governments are so interested. The country is well managed, it seems, yet without fussiness. Even at Port Said and Suez, let alone Cairo, you find a well-worked system of telephones; such a thing could never be allowed in Turkey,

for it cannot be censored, like the telegraph, and people might hatch treason over it. In Cairo, again, you find a well-worked system of electric tramways-and is it not a proud reflection for the Londoner that both in telephones and tramways Moslem Egypt, Arab Cairo, is ahead of his own Imperial city?

Of course, you know why it is. "England has got Egypt now," you cheerfully say, and think no more about it. But not quite so fast. England, as you say, has occupied Egypt ever since 1882; but if you think occupation means doing as you like, then you go the way to do great injustice to the men who are doing England's work in this country. They do keep things fairly straight, but the British newspaper-reader can form not the faintest idea of the heartbreaking handicap they run under. Egypt has the most topsy-turvy constitution in the whole world; and it is impossible to understand in the face of what prodigious difficulties we have done our work in it, until you have

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some vague notion exactly how topsy-turvy it is. So, if it is not too much of a bore, I will try to tell you.

In theory, Egypt belongs to Great Britain no more than Shepheard's Hotel belongs to me. There happen to be British garrisons in Cairo and Alexandria, but that is quite an accident. They are there to maintain the authority of the Khedive and to restore order. They have been engaged in these modest duties for nearly sixteen years now; Egypt is as orderly a country as exists on earth, and the Khedive, for one, would be only too glad to try maintaining his authority without them—only, somehow, they still stay. In practice, as everybody knows, they are there to uphold the paramount authority of England in Egypt: in theory they came there at the time of Arabi's rebellion, and have not yet gone away.

Besides the army of occupation there are two classes of Englishmen doing England's work in Egypt. One is the staff of the British Agency. Its head, Lord Cromer, is,

as you know, the mouthpiece of our policy and, in practice, the ultimate ruler of Egypt. They say in Cairo that when Lord Cromer is feeling well, and well disposed to all the world, he goes to the Khedive; when he is not he has the Khedive to see him, and that in either case the Khedive does what he is told; though we must not pay too much attention to what they say in Cairo. Only in theory Lord Cromer is not even an Ambassador, but just a Consul - Generalwhich means a gentleman who concerns himself with ships' papers and small disputes between British subjects and also British Agent, which might mean anything or nothing at all. In theory, he has no more right to tell the Khedive what is, or is not, to be done than you have. He just happens to give advice, and the Khedive happens to take it.

The other class of Englishmen is in the Egyptian service. There is a financial adviser to H.H. the Khedive, a judicial adviser, English under-secretaries in the departments