CHAPTER III 



CROMER BEGINS TO MAKE MISTAKES 



My visit to Gros Bois that autumn on my way Eastwards was 

 a sad one, Princesse Berthe having died in the course of the summer, 

 and there were no visitors and none of the bright talk I had so 

 long enjoyed there. 



" We arrived at Shekh Obeyd on the 12th of November. That 

 same evening Sheykh Mohammed Abdu called and gave us a full 

 history of his adventures after leaving Newbuildings. At Oxford 

 he had found a number of Arabic manuscripts known by name only at 

 the Azhar, and among them the correspondence of a certain Arab 

 philosopher, El Sebain, with Frederick the Great. He is going to 

 have a number of them copied with funds supplied by the Awkaf 

 (the Ministry of Endowments). He then went to Switzerland and 

 on to Algeria and Tunis. He drew a black picture of the state of 

 things in French North Africa, compared to which he said the suffer- 

 ings of native Egypt at the hands of the English were as light to 

 darkness. In Algeria the whole administration is directed in the in- 

 terests of the European Colonists at the expense of the natives. For 

 these there is hardly any legal protection, and absolutely no liberty. 

 There is neither freedom of the press nor even of speech, espionage is 

 worse than at Constantinople, nor is the state of things better in 

 Tunis than in Algeria. It had been proposed to him at Tunis to 

 ask an audience of the Bey, but he had been informed by the 

 Austrian Consul General that permission would have to be first 

 asked of the French Resident, who would have sent a Frenchman 

 to be present at it. The Mohammedans of Tunis had said to him, 

 ' Your journals in Egypt complain of their lot under the English, 

 but all we ask of Providence is to be given five years of your 

 regime as a respite from the hell of our own.' The Mufti told me 

 these details because I had seen it published in the ' Figaro ' that 

 he had expressed himself as entirely pleased with the condition of 

 things for his fellow-Moslems under French rule. His account ac- 

 cords with all I have heard from other quarters about Tunis, and 

 with what I remember of Algeria in 1873. There is no doubt that 

 the English regime in Egypt is exceptional in the history of such 

 regimes, which are in their essence tyrannies and oppressions, and 



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