148 Egypt
and reformist movement.1 But they justified our inter-
vention and occupation by a justifiable confidence in their
own exceptional, though exotic, efficiency ; and by a less
justified conviction that the Egyptians had shown them-
selves incapable of self-government, and would, if left to
themselves, continue to be as incompetent. We to-day,
judging from the analogous case of Turkey, can see that
this second assumption was very questionable. We may
even ask ourselves whether the natural conservativism of
the British and their necessary conformity to existing
conditions did not galvanise much that might otherwise
have been got rid of. And whether the Egyptian
Nationalists, but for the British regime in Egypt, might
not have carried through a full and final social recon-
struction like that of Turkey in the time that the British
took to effect only a financial rehabilitation.
The presumption that because Egypt, since the com-
ing of the Ptolemies, had always been governed by aliens,
it would therefore always be so governed until the coming
of the Coquecigrues, which was accepted as axiomatic by
our fathers, has been rejected as a principle of policy by
English and Egyptians since they have seen how swiftly
a nationalist movement can revolutionise and revitalise a
subject Oriental people. And to us the best argument in
favour of the assumption that a term of British adminis-
tration in Egypt was inevitable and not injurious, is
the ready acceptance of it by all the Egyptians of
that day.
It would appear, indeed, as though British Imperialism
did indeed for long deprive Egyptian nationalism of its
1 See Cromer, Modern Egypt, vol. i., p, 324; also Mackenzie
Wallace (Lord Diifferm's private secretary), Egypt, p. 365. But
Sir V. Chirol, then in Egypt as a journalist, apparently retains
the popular view, The Egyptian Problem, p. 65.