Nationalist Renascence 179
literature, and not even a national language. The Copts
or "Gypts," the survivors of the ancient Egyptians,
had become no more than a minority of about a million,
or one-tenth of the population, belonging to the despised
Christian religion, and to the no less despised clerical
class. The mass of the population were Moslem, of
mixed race, mostly of a Nubian type and speaking
Arabic. The ruling class, as we have seen, were of
foreign race like the Georgian Mamelukes or the Arnaut
mercenaries, and all spoke Turkish and some French.
Of the new middle class, the effendiat, three-quarters
spoke both French and Arabic. Arabic was slowly super-
seding Turkish, and subsequently English was to some
extent supplementing French. For the British, with
characteristic long-suffering or short-sightedness, did not
for the first twenty years of their occupation encourage
education in English. British officers dutifully drilled the
army in Turkish, while British officials laboriously corre-
sponded with one another in French. Under these cir-
cumstances the new Egyptian nationalism, excluded as it
was from all expression in either the Legislature or in
literature, found vent in leading articles. Worse than
that, it had to be not only purely political, but purely
polemical. It could not extol indefinitely the glories of
Egypt, but it could indefinitely execrate the crimes of
England. So its main activity became a vituperative anti-
British agitation in French and Arabic journals, which
were discussed in the town caf6s and declaimed aloud in
the villages. Its spokesmen were journalists, its thinkers
were lawyers, and its fighting men were propagandists.
The Press Law of 1881 was so leniently enforced that
there was practically complete liberty of the Press—a
condition unknown in any country of North Africa or
Western Asia. Newspapers and journals multiplied, and