153 Egypt
much under the influence of the Press, whose licence
should be restricted/' The insignificance of the Pro-
vincial Councils appears in his recommendation a quarter
of a century later (1908), that they should be made '' real
working bodies acting as advisers to the Mudir."
It is clear, therefore, that Dufferin's conception of a
balance of power between English administration and
Egyptian autonomy, which would allow self-government
the ground and growth it required, was not a system that
the Agent-General Cromer and the Conservative Govern-
ment were prepared to work. The sanction on which they
relied was not a '' power of attorney '' for Egyptian demo-
cracy, but the military power of the British Empire and
the moral prestige of its representatives. As Cromer
himself says : '' The motive power (of Egyptian govern-
ment) was furnished by the British officials" (vol. ii.,
p. 279). But for a governmental structure of this char-
acter a different status was essential from that which was
provided in the Dufferin settlement. If the real govern-
mental sanction was the military occupation, then the
first essential was an assurance that this occupation
would be maintained. But no such assurance was obtain-
able during all the difficult period of reconstruction. On
the contrary, France had to be conciliated in crisis after
crisis with promises of an early evacuation. A French
critic (Cocheris, p. 531) has unkindly enumerated no
less than forty formal official undertakings between 1899
and 1900 to evacuate Egypt, and even he has omitted
more than one. That Cromerism should in such condi-
tions have been able to do as much as it did is a good
example of the Englishman's preference for forcing his
own way to a very limited practical objective, when by
making use of foreign facilities he might have gone much
farther and faster with less time and trouble. Our Han-