25S
mission had coincided with a sudden doubling of food
prices, while at the same time land already sowed for
food crops was being reploughed and planted with cotton
to take advantage of the rise in cotton prices from £4 a
kantar in 1916 to £20 in 1919, and to nearly £40 in
1920. The result was that huge fortunes were being
made by financiers, and the fellah was well-to-do as never
before ; while more than a million urban and landless pro-
letariat were starving. Flour was imported and relief
distributed by the authorities ; though the Nationalist Co-
operative Association, started by Amin Yusef in Damietta
and extended throughout the Delta, showed itself more
efficient and energetic in dealing with distress. It was,
indeed, obvious that a country passing through such
political changes and economic crises as was Egypt
could not be indefinitely governed by martial law, how-
ever mild in its application.
The departure of the Commission was celebrated by
the meeting at Zaglul's house of five-sixths of the
members of the old Legislative Assembly, who unani-
mously passed a resolution nullifying all measures en-
forced since the prorogation of the Assembly, including
the decree proclaiming the Protectorate. Other resolu-
tions proclaimed national independence, the mandate of
the Wafd, and Egyptian sovereignty over the Sudan.
The rather ineffective retort of the British was the re-
introduction of the preventive Press censorship, relaxed
since the restoration of order.
The recommendations of the Commission when they
appeared came as a shock to those British who had been
living in a Fool's Paradise and looking on it as eternal
For the Commission recognised in principle that the rela-
tionship between the Empire and Egypt could only be
made to work by a bilateral bargain. The Empire must