Nationalist Renascence 189
Assembly, which, without going into its merits at all,
rejected the proposal by a straight Nationalist vote.
Only one member had the courage to vote for it, and
two days later the Premier, Boutros, who had proposed
it, was assassinated. The General Assembly was not
again convoked. In the administration Egyptian Ministers
were given greater freedom from control by their advisers
and on these latter, in some cases, objecting they were
removed. While at the bottom of the bureaucratic pyra-
mid the intrusive Syrians were again removed in favour
of the indigenous Copt.
It was, however, in respect to the rights of the Anglo-
Egyptian Civil Service that Gorst's policy of <( Egypt
for the Egyptians " caused most criticism. It was Gorst
himself who, in 1898, when at the finance Ministry, had
sanctioned the selection of young University men for
permanent Egyptian employment. Some of these same
men were now among those summoned by Gorst to a
meeting at the Residency for what was, in their view, a
massacre as perfidious as that of their predecessors, the
Mamelukes. This involved, of course, a pretty sharp
collision with the British ruling class at home. In which
Gorst showed as much courage as he had in dealing with
the Nationalists. But the inevitable result was a bad Press
in London and what at times almost amounted to a social
boycott of the Agency by Cairo. Any stick was good
enough to beat the British reformer. Roosevelt, visiting
Egypt, was encouraged to make an attack that would
normally have been angrily resented as an impertinence.
" If you can't keep order in Egypt, get out of Egypt/'
barked the American energumen on a public occasion.
By this sort of attack Gorst was embarrassed and em-
bittered during the last years of his life. And by this
time his sufferings from cancer were such as would have