Greater Britain Part 42

Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or Egyptian peasantry, are apparently the most miserable of human beings, and their slouching shamble is a sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The slave-market of Cairo has done its work; indeed, it is astonishing that the English should content themselves with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo continues to be all-but open to the pa.s.ser. That the Egyptian government could put down slavery if it had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During my week's stay in Alexandria, two such cases came to my notice:--in the first, one of my fellow-pa.s.sengers unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and was shot at by one of them with a long pistol. A number of Englishmen, gathering from the public gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and beat off the cava.s.ses, and the next morning marched down to their Consulate and demanded justice. Our acting Consul went straight to the head of the police, laid the case before him, and procured the condemnation of the man who shot to the galleys for ten years, while the policeman who had looked on was immediately bastinadoed in the presence of the pa.s.senger.

The other case was one of robbery at a desert village, from the tent of an English traveler. When he complained to the sheik, the order was given to bastinado the head men and hold them responsible for the amount. The head men in turn gave the stick to the householders, and claimed the sum from them; while these bastinadoed the vagrants, and actually obtained from them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the village. "Stick-backsheesh" is a great inst.i.tution in Egypt, but the Turks are not far behind. When the British Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some years ago, our Consul telegraphed the fact to the Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at once:--"Bastinado forty men"--and bastinadoed they were, as soon as they had been selected at random from the population.

Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is inclined to believe that, while our Indian government is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt is misgoverned in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of fact, however, it is not fair to the King of Egypt that we should compare his rule with ours in India, and it is probable that his government is not on the whole worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up as a "civilized ruler," the King of Egypt performs the duties of his position by buying guns which he uses in putting down insurrections which he has fomented, and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to think that he has done all that Peter of Russia himself could have accomplished, when he sends a young Egyptian to Manchester to learn the cotton-trade, or to London to acquire the principles of foreign commerce, and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage the soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The aping of the forms of "Western civilization," which in Egypt means French vice, makes the Court of Alexandria look worse than it is:--we expect the slave-market and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt superadds the Trianon, and a bad imitation of Mabile.

The Court influence shows itself in the action of the people, or rather the influence at work upon the Court is pressing also upon the people.

For knavery, no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One word, however, is far from describing all the infamies of the city. It surpa.s.ses Cologne for smells, Benares for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for vice. There is a layer of French "civilization" of the worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but still the town is chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the other hand, is completely Europeanized, and has a white population of seventy or eighty thousand.

The Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifications, and French is the only language spoken in the shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town.

It is evident enough that the Suez Ca.n.a.l scheme has been from the beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, and that, however interesting to the shareholders may be the question of its physical or commercial success, the probabilities of failure have had but little weight with the French government. The foundation of the Messagerie Company with national capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt, and it is not certain that we should not look upon the occupation of Saigon itself as a mere blind.

Of the temporary success of the French policy there can be no doubt; the English railway-guards have lately been dismissed from the government railway line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one waves over the hotel; the King of Egypt, glad to find a third Power which he can play off, when necessary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in the ca.n.a.l. It is when we ask, "What is the end that the French have in view?" that we find it strangely small by the side of the means. The French of the present day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is a sort of desire to extend the empire of their language, their dance-tunes, and their fashions; and the natural wish of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that will outlast his life prevents their having any such permanent policy as that of Russia or the United States. An Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when he said, "There is nothing permanent about France except Mabile."

The Suez Ca.n.a.l is being pushed with vigor, although the labor of the hundreds of Greek and Italian navvies is very different to that of the tens of thousands of impressed fellaheen. The withdrawal from the Company of the forced labor of the peasants has demonstrated that the King is at heart not well disposed toward the scheme, for the remonstrances of England have never prevented the employment of slave labor upon works out of which there was money to be made for the viceregal purse. The difficulty of clearing and keeping clear the channel at Port Said, at the Mediterranean end, is well known to the Pacha and his engineers:--it is not difficult, indeed, to cut through the bar, nor impossible to keep the cutting open, but the effect of the great piers will merely be to push the Nile silt farther seaward, and again and again new bars will form in front of the ca.n.a.l. That the ca.n.a.l is physically possible no one doubts, but it is hard to believe that it can pay. Even if we suppose, moreover, that the ca.n.a.l will prove a complete success, the French government will only find that it has spent millions upon digging a ca.n.a.l for England's use.

The neutralization of Egypt has lately been proposed by writers of the Comtist school, but to what end is far from clear. "The interests of civilization" are the pretext, but, when summoned by a Comtist, "civilization" and "humanity" generally appear in a French shape. Were we to be attacked in India by the French or Russians, no neutralization would prevent our sending our troops to India by the shortest road, and fighting wherever we thought best. If we were not so attacked, neutralization, as far as we are concerned, would be a useless ceremony.

If France goes beyond her customary meddlesomeness and settles down in Egypt, we shall evidently have to dislodge her, but to neutralize the country would be to settle her there ourselves. It would be idle to deny that the position of France in the East is connected with the claim put forth by her to the moral leadership of the world. The "chief power of Europe" and "leader of Christendom" must needs be impatient of the dominance of America in the Pacific and of Britain in the East, and seeks by successes on the side of India to bury the memories of Mexico.

One of the hundred "missions of France," one of the thousand "Imperial ideas," is the "regeneration of the East." Treacherous England is to be confined to her single island, and barbarous Russia to be shut up in the Siberian snows. England may be left to answer for herself, but before we surrender even Russia to the Comtist priests, we should remember that, just as the Russian despotism is dangerous to the world from the stupidity of its barbarism, so the French democracy is dangerous through its feverish sympathies, blundering "humanity," and unlimited ambition.

The present reaction against exaggerated nationalism is in itself a sign that our national mind is in a healthy state; but, while we distrust nationalism because it is illogical and narrow, we must remember that "cosmopolitanism" has been made the excuse for childish absurdities, and a cloak for desperate schemes. Love of race, among the English, rests upon a firmer base than either love of mankind or love of Britain, for it reposes upon a subsoil of things known: the ascertained virtues and powers of the English people. For nations such as France and Spain, with few cares outside their European territories, national fields for action are, perhaps, too narrow, and the interests of even the vast territories inhabited by the English race may, in a less degree, be too small for English thought; but there is India,--and the responsibility of the absolute government of a quarter of the human race is no small thing. If we strive to advance ourselves in the love of truth, to act justly towards Ireland, and to govern India aright, we shall have enough of work to occupy us for many years to come, and shall leave a greater name in history than if we concerned ourselves with settling the affairs of Poland. If we need a wider range for our sympathies than that which even India will supply, we may find it in our friendships with the other sections of the race; and if, unhappily, one result of the present awakening of England to free life should be a return of the desire to meddle in the affairs of other folk, we shall find a better outlet for our energy in aiding our Teutonic brethren in their struggle for unity than in a.s.sisting Imperial France to spread Benoitonisme through the world.

We cannot, if we would, be indifferent spectators of the extravagances of France: if she is at present weak in the East, she is strong at home.

At this moment, we are spending ten or fifteen millions a year in order that we may be equal with her in military force, and we hang upon the words of her ruler to know whether we are to have peace or war. Although it may not be wise for us to declare that this humiliating spectacle shall shortly have an end, it is at least advisable that we should refrain from aiding the French in their professed endeavors to obtain for other peoples liberties which they are incapable of preserving for themselves.

If the English race has a "mission" in the world, it is the making it impossible that the peace of mankind on earth should depend upon the will of a single man.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE ENGLISH.

In America we have seen the struggle of the dear races against the cheap--the endeavors of the English to hold their own against the Irish and Chinese. In New Zealand, we found the stronger and more energetic race pushing from the earth the shrewd and laborious descendants of the Asian Malays; in Australia, the English triumphant, and the cheaper races excluded from the soil not by distance merely, but by arbitrary legislation; in India, we saw the solution of the problem of the officering of the cheaper by the dearer race. Everywhere we have found that the difficulties which impede the progress to universal dominion of the English people lie in the conflict with the cheaper races. The result of our survey is such as to give us reason for the belief that race distinctions will long continue, that miscegenation will go but little way toward blending races; that the dearer are, on the whole, likely to destroy the cheaper peoples, and that Saxondom will rise triumphant from the doubtful struggle.

The countries ruled by a race whose very sc.u.m and outcasts have founded empires in every portion of the globe, even now consist of 9 millions of square miles, and contain a population of 300 millions of people.

Their surface is five times as great as that of the empire of Darius, and four and a half times as large as the Roman Empire at its greatest extent. It is no exaggeration to say that in power the English countries would be more than a match for the remaining nations of the world, whom in the intelligence of their people and the extent and wealth of their dominions they already considerably surpa.s.s. Russia gains ground steadily, we are told, but so do we. If we take maps of the English-governed countries and of the Russian countries of fifty years ago, and compare them with the English and Russian countries of to-day, we find that the Saxon has outstripped the Muscovite in conquest and in colonization. The extensions of the United States alone are equal to all those of Russia. Chili, La Plata, and Peru must eventually become English; the Red Indian race that now occupies those countries cannot stand against our colonists; and the future of the table-lands of Africa and that of j.a.pan and of China is as clear. Even in the tropical plains, the negroes alone seem able to withstand us. No possible series of events can prevent the English race itself in 1970 numbering 300 millions of beings--of one national character and one tongue. Italy, Spain, France, Russia become pigmies by the side of such a people.

Many who are well aware of the power of the English nations are nevertheless disposed to believe that our own is morally, as well as physically, the least powerful of the sections of the race, or, in other words, that we are overshadowed by America and Australia. The rise to power of our southern colonies is, however, distant, and an alliance between ourselves and America is still one to be made on equal terms.

Although we are forced to contemplate the speedy loss of our manufacturing supremacy as coal becomes cheaper in America and dearer in Old England, we have nevertheless as much to bestow on America as she has to confer on us. The possession of India offers to ourselves that element of vastness of dominion which, in this age, is needed to secure width of thought and n.o.bility of purpose; but to the English race our possession of India, of the coasts of Africa, and of the ports of China offers the possibility of planting free inst.i.tutions among the dark-skinned races of the world.

The ultimate future of any one section of our race, however, is of little moment by the side of its triumph as a whole, but the power of English laws and English principles of government is not merely an English question--its continuance is essential to the freedom of mankind.

Steaming up from Alexandria along the coasts of Crete and Arcadia, and through the Ionian Archipelago, I reached Brindisi, and thence pa.s.sed on through Milan toward home. This is the route that our Indian mails should take until the Euphrates road is made.