226 Egypt
speculation at his expense, and the million or so of profit
made by the Control was returned to Egypt as war
pensions. But State trading has its political dangers in
relationships such as that between the British Empire and
Egypt. Socialism and imperialism are incompatible.
To these specific grievances must be added the general
disturbance and discontent that the war produced in
Egypt, as elsewhere, and that in Egypt, as elsewhere,
found a revolutionary expression. But in Egypt the only
expression available was through nationalism, not, as else-
where, through socialism. When the Egyptian had to buy
low quality Japanese tobacco at high prices he cast the
blame on the British war control. When the war blockades
brought home to the Egyptians their neglect of
industrial development, they cast the blame on the
British for starving technical education and for draining
away local capital for foreign creditors. When a spirited
experiment in the subsidising of home industries by the
Nationalist Minister, Sidki, had little result, it was not
Egyptian indolence that was held to be responsible, but
British malevolence. When the necessary food and fuel
control, police and sanitary regulations, or other workings
of the war machine caused inconvenience, the Egyptian
Government succeeded invariably in transferring the
blame to the broad shoulders of the British.
The burdens of war would have been more cheerfully
borne by Egypt but for the constant suspicion that they
were being used to bring the Egyptian people under
permanent bondage. Nor were these suspicions without
excuse. For example, Aboukir, near Alexandria, cele-
brated as the scene of the assertion of British sea-power
in Egypt, had become, as a base for the Royal Air Force,
the centre of a new British command of the air. The
Army Council had approved it as a permanent air base