Nationalist Renascence 199
as Regent, and aided by a capable Cabinet, including
Adli, Sarwat, Serri, Yusuf Wahba, and Ismail Sidki.
The Egyptian civil authorities were at first left very
much to themselves ; but as war conditions developed
both English and Egyptian civilians came to be more and
more subordinated to the military organisation.
It is sometimes assumed that the war materially
changed the relations of Egypt to the Empire. Whereas
the only change that the war effected was that it cleared
away the diplomatic figments and altruistic fig-leaves
that decorously apparelled what would otherwise have
been a naked military occupation. The Great War
clearly showed what the Italo-Turkish war had already
suggested—that the English were not in Egypt as officials
and officers of an Ottoman Sultan or even of an Egyptian
Khedive. Though they wore fezzes and observed the
forms of the Khedive's sovereignty and of the Khalif's
suzerainty, they were, as a matter of fact, there by right
of sea-power to guard the main waterway to the Asiatic
possessions of the Empire and to garrison the main base
of its African provinces. They were there, secondarily,
to develop the resources of Egypt to the advantage of
Europe in general and of England in particular, and to
convert both Egypt and the Sudan into profitable
dependencies of the Empire. Thirdly, they were there
to continue educating the Egyptians until they became
English.