yj6 Shame of the Nineteenth Century [1900 



spending fifty millions a year on slaughtering the Filipinos ; the King 

 of the Belgians has invested his whole fortune on the Congo, where he 

 is brutalizing the negroes to fill his pockets. The French and Italians 

 for the moment are playing a less prominent part in the slaughter, but 

 their inactivity grieves them. The whole white race is revelling openly 

 in violence, as though it had never pretended to be Christian. God's 

 equal curse be on them all ! So ends the famous nineteenth century into 

 which we were so proud to have been born. 



" 25//1 Dec. — Christmas Day. I have embodied some part of my 

 feeling in a letter to the ' Times,' if they will print it (' The Shame of 

 the Nineteenth Century'). The Boers have shown themselves alive 

 within the last week and have won two battles, capturing over 500 men, 

 and are now in full march forward into Cape Colony. The railroads 

 are cut behind them and Kitchener seems pretty well bewildered. 

 There is something like a panic in London for the last week of the old 

 century. 



My old friend and neighbour here, Sheykh Hassan Abu Tawil, at 

 last is dead. I went to see him four days ago and found him lying- 

 speechless with his eyes closed, in the little closet he used as his sleeping 

 room. He looked. the picture of frail, worn-out humanity, with a Job- 

 like Eastern patience on his fine old countenance, over which the flies 

 were crawling as they doubtless crawled in his childhood in the tent 

 where he was born. He died last night at midnight, and we heard the 

 women wailing a short mile away at daybreak, while we were breakfast- 

 ing on the roof. Now they have buried him, walking in beautiful pro- 

 cession, men and women, past our gates to his grave in the desert. 

 These country funerals are touching things, with the flags flying and 

 the chaunting and the wailing, dignified, and with something in them 

 of triumph as well as grief, which mitigates the ugliness of death. Old 

 Sheykh Hassan has gone to his grave, full of years, the last of the old- 

 world Arab Sheykhs of Lower Egypt. His tribe, the Aiaide, were all 

 tent-dwellers when he was young, a wicked, turbulent lot, whom he 

 has controlled with a mild humanity much to his credit. With me he 

 has always been on more than friendly, on affectionate terms, and I 

 grieve for him as sincerely as his own people. It is a link broken for 

 me with a pleasant past which will not be joined again, for the fashion 

 of the old world passeth fast away at Sheykh Obeyd and we shall soon 

 be engulfed in the town. 



" 31^ Dee. — I bid good-bye to the old century, may it rest in peace 

 as it has lived in war. Of the new century I prophesy nothing except 

 that it will see the decline of the British Empire. Other worse Em- 

 pires will rise perhaps in its place, but I shall not live to see the day. 

 It all seems a very little matter here in Egypt, with the Pyramids watch- 



