Rebellion and Independence 231
wealthy, well-to-do, and workers. Egypt was still an agri-
cultural community, but it had now incipient industries.
It had also small bodies of better-class workers—railway-
men, dockers, etc.—who were organised and capable of
strike action. Last, but not least, the Nationalist party,
which included all lively political elements, had improved
both its organisation and its objective by a study of the
methods of the Turkish Committee and of the Russian
Communists. The movement, in consequence, contained
a new republican and a new revolutionary element,
though it was still, in the main, straight nationalism. In
its motives, though not in its methods, it was the true
product of its Kemalist and Arabist progenitors.
The nationalist movement that in 1914 had deliber-
ately retired into a funk-hole reappeared on the field in
1919 as a far more formidable affair than anything
that the British occupation had previously encountered.
Before the war the movement had been a demand for
some sort of self-government. It now reappeared as a
demand for complete sovereignty. Its active member-
ship had previously been confined to speakers and writers
of the lawyer-journalist class, but it now included
the whole polity, from old co-operators and Cabinet
Ministers, such as Saad Zaglul, down to the boys in the
schools and the elders in the villages. Its procedure was
no longer to be confined to Press and platform propa-
ganda, but was to combine a clever and cautious strategic
direction of affairs by leaders as experienced in the weak-
nesses of their Egyptian supporters as in those of their
English opponents, with a resolute tactical use of such
formidable weapons as Moslem, fanaticism and mob
violence, lightning strikes, and moral boycotts.
Nor was there now any class in Egypt who would join
with the British authorities in discouraging their com-