Financial Reconstruction 173
brougham that was waiting to drive him into exile, it is
clear that Cromer, having caught him in an unsupported
position, forced on him a capitulation that discredited him
as champion of the Egyptian cause by convicting him
of a want of courage. Nowadays we no longer believe in
spanking spirited children, and our old spare-the-rod
spoil-the-child form of education is inapplicable to the
East. An Oriental has the delicacy of life-long childhood
and the dignity of age-long culture. Like a child, he
readily forgets an injury, but never forgives an insult. In
this episode that so tickled our jingo journalists, we can
see an epitome of all the tragedies of British Cassars with
their Eastern Cleopatras.
The incipient nationalist movement thus broken up,
Riaz was replaced by Nubar, and he again by Mustapha
Fermy (1895). The Conservatives resumed office in
London, and Abbas, realising that his open opposition
only brought him defeat and discredit, began to under-
mine British authority through the provincial politicians
and the Pan-Islamic propagandists. But here again he
found himself headed off. The establishment of a new
Ministry of the Interior with a British Adviser (1894)
interrupted his communications through the Central
Government. Other precautions (1898) cut him off from
direct contact with the provincial authorities. Before the
end of Cromerism he was an embittered, but an encircled,
enemy, driven to the backstairs of palace intrigue and
into the burrows of Pan-Islamic conspiracies. It was not
until 1906 that these intrigues produced a practical result
In a Turkish move against the peninsula of Sinai. Then a
British ultimatum roughly shattered the alliance between
Khedive and Sultan (May, 1906) and ended any hope of
support from Turkey.
It never seems to have occurred to Cromerism that