BLACKWOOD'S EDINBURGH MAGAZINE. No. DCCCXXXIII. MARCH 1885. VOL. CXXXVII. 66 OUR EGYPTIAN ATROCITIES. FROM CAPEL COURT TO KHARTOUM. "FORTY centuries look down on you." So spoke the First Napoleon to his army of the Nile. Forty centuries look down on you," may in a more solemn, if less dramatic sense, be said to-day to the British Government in Egypt. From the time of the Pharaohs, the valley of the Nile has been the theatre of great historical events. Wave after wave of conquest has rolled over it, and left it much the same. Dynasty after dynasty has oppressed it, and the fellaheen have bowed their necks meekly to all. Ever a fascinating bait for the military adventurer, it has felt the heel of Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman. But in the long series of its conquests, there is nothing to parallel the unhappy condition which it presents at this moment. It has seldom, if ever, been so demoralised socially, and it was never so completely left without the poorest pretence of a Government. Had it been overrun by thirteenthcentury Norsemen, it would have VOL. CXXXVII.-NO. DCCCXXXIII. received some return for the sufferings inflicted on it, but the foreign occupation it now endures has hardly one alleviating feature. It has cut off the past, without opening up the slightest glimpse of a future. It has exacted from a long-suffering people great sacrifices, and, so far, it offers them not a ray of hope of compensation. The situation has grown up like a nightmare, without any visible origin or intelligible cause. Why there should be a British garrison at Cairo; why British troops should be fighting for their lives in the Soudan; why the fellaheen should curse in their hearts these brave fellows who are dying for themHeaven only knows. The British Ministers who preside over the holocaust, and who in the eyes of the world are responsible for it, have even yet no definite idea on the subject. They have floundered out of one desperate expedient into another, until Egypt seems to have no room left for a fresh catastrophe. Insolvency, revolution, Z conquest, and anarchy she has undergone in turn, and now she stands on the brink of an Arab invasion, bringing untold atrocities in its train. Poor Egypt! The ten plagues were only the beginning of her troubles. The Nile has been the grave of many a brilliant reputation: is it to swallow up Mr Gladstone's as it swallowed up Mark Antony's, and as it turned the tide of victory against Napoleon? A triple calamity like the fall of Khartoum, the murder of Gordon, and the isolation of the force that was to rescue him, is no ordinary reverse of arms. Humiliating as were Maiwand and Majuba Hill, this is an event of infinitely greater significance to its victims. It is a disaster suffered with the eyes of the world upon us, and which we cannot escape from by an ignominious convention, as we did from Majuba Hill. Cowardice itself could not lose hold of the Soudan until Gordon has been avenged and Khartoum recovered. The Upper Nile has to be regained if we are to remain in Egypt; and at the very time this catastrophe occurred, we were binding ourselves to remain, by solemn agreement with the European Powers. The very efforts of the Government to find a means of escape from an intolerable position, have fixed them more firmly in the meshes which they have all these years been weaving round themselves. For the fellaheen they have filled up the cup of affliction; but it has been fated that before they leave Egypt they shall fill to overflowing another cup. It will be one even more bitter than the first, and they will hold it to the lips of the British tax-payer. When the heart of the nation has been wrung with shame, and bowed down with sorrow, there will be the blood-money to pro vide. Moreover, while millions, and it may be tens of millions sterling, are being extracted from impoverished incomes, we shall still ask in vain why we are in Egypt, what we have been fighting for, and what the Ministerial policy was which has stained the Nile with wasted blood from Alexandria to Khartoum ? Great Britain has frequently been engaged in wars which the people followed with patriotic interest, and willingly made sacrifices for. But there was not till Khartoum fell a scintilla of such a feeling in this case. In the past we have fought for ideas which we deemed noble, or for objects which we thought essential to the wellbeing of the empire; but they were always clearly understood. Whatever errors diplomacy may have committed, the aim set before the nation was distinct and popular. Cromwell always knew what he unsheathed the sword for. Neither Chatham nor Pitt nor Palmerston struck blows at random, like a giant hitting in the dark. They required no help from the arts of sophistry and hair-splitting to jus tify themselves to their country. men. They did not drift into war, and then discover that it was a heritage of woe from a maligned predecessor. To their honest minds it would have seemed culpably reckless, not to say criminal, to involve their country in bloodshed which was neither war nor peace, attack nor defence. Their first duty in a foreign complication was to have a policy, and to set foot nowhere without having thought out, with all the gravity and care befitting responsible statesmen, what they were to do. Such has never been Mr Gladstone's practice. Wherever the vital issue of peace or war has come before him, he has, to use Mr Goschen's apt phrase, "fumbled his cards." It is not in his nature to face it with the courage of a statesman. He bandies words over it like a grammarian, and draws fine distinctions like a casuist. At last, when he seems to have involved himself inextricably in a cobweb of subtle reasoning, he breaks loose to strike some rash and unexpected blow. His campaigns are generally as abruptly cut short as they are rashly begun. To satisfy his conscience they must be perfectly fruitless, which he considers the acme of unselfishness. Hence Mr Gladstone has been to this country the costliest as well as the most disastrous of War Ministers. His victories have been as barren as his defeats have been humiliating and "bloodguilty." During the past four years in Egypt, the inherent vice of his foreign policy has been glaringly attested beyond the expectation of his severest critics. He has lived all the time in a close atmosphere of egotistical illusions. In everything he has done, whether fighting Arabi Pasha and the Mahdi, or dictating to the Khedive at Cairo, or inviting dictation from the European Powers, he has worn a mask. At every turn he has made use of tools he would not acknowledge, and of puppets whose responsibility was a transparent sham. Even the heroic life which was nearest and dearest to British hearts was not too sacred to serve him for a pawn on his political chess-board. Outside of dissenting chapels, not a single soul has ever been greatly deceived by his devices for disguising from himself and others the plain duty which lay before him. His Penelope's web of makeshifts and plausible expedients fell asunder as it was woven; but he might have gone on indefinitely weaving it, had not his Nemesis been roused at last to strike him that crushing blow at Khartoum. Before it, illusions, makeshifts, and fine phrases are swept away as by a whirlwind. A Gladstone policy in Egypt no longer exists. It has failed and discredited itself on all hands. Barely able to maintain order at Cairo, it has sustained in the same week a bitter check both in diplomacy and in the field. Thanks to it, Khartoum has been lost, Gordon sacrificed, Lord Wolseley's army imperilled; and our last hope of securing some slight relief for the cruelly taxed fellaheen has had to be given up. Our attempts to pose before Europe as the friend of the oppressed Egyptian peasantry have all ended in an arrangement with France, which secures to the bondholder his pound of flesh, and fixes the yoke more firmly than ever on the neck of Egypt. far from having done any good to the fellaheen, or gained any advantage for them from the national creditors, their position has been made in many respects worse than before. So It is a melancholy but indisputable fact, that the original source of the misery in which Egypt is plunged is the old mean story of spendthrift and money-lender. Reckless borrowing, with its inevitable sequel, a bankrupt exchequer, was the opening chapter of this infamous episode, which has brought ruin on Egypt and shame on Great Britain. The ghastly horror of the climax is rendered more ghastly by comparison with the sordid pettiness of its origin. But for the bondholders we should never have interfered in Egypt; and it is a grim though not unprecedented satire on our maxims of State, that they have been more or less violated all along. Since the days of Cobden, it has been a doctrine of the Foreign Office that its authority cannot be used for collecting the debts of private individuals in suggested and supported that tion long ago, in a matter whe colonial and imperial interests we strictly identical, and where t loyalty of the colonists to the Br ish crown and their fidelity to t British connection might proper have been stimulated by warm a hearty encouragement given fro Downing Street to their legitima aspirations. As the chronicle failures to which we have allude is brought in review before us, w ask ourselves in amazement-Ho long will public opinion submit these things? The British publ is indeed not easily roused, an assuredly of late years its apath has been one of the most remar able features of the age. Wheth it is that the rapidity with whi events move at the present tim and the regular and speedy succe sion in which the occurrences every day are presented to t public eye, prevent their retenti by the public mind, is a proble of which we must leave the so tion to philosophers. Certain is, at any rate, that events of t greatest importance appear to forgotten with incredible celerit and the memory of a disaster wh would have roused the last gene tion of Englishmen to the utm indignation against those who w responsible for its occurrence, dures but for a day, and apparen awakens no such righteous emot So it has happened that un the auspices of the Gladstone ( ernment we have seen our sold die unavenged and our flag dra through the dirt in South Af and yet the nation has been si In the same regions of the we have seen the pusillani abandonment not only of tory, but of faithful allies wh trusted to our strength and honour, and the nation has allow Mr Gladstone's as it andria to Khartoum! to me in, is no ordinary re feeling in this case terfered with the always clearly under le cured we were tify themselves to |