44 2 Appendix II 



longer a Mohammedan but a European Government, and one therefore 

 unfit to discharge any duty connected with the pilgrimage conflicting with 

 the freedom of the pilgrim highway. At the same time it is wholly im- 

 probable that he should have any design of menacing either Egypt or the 

 Suez Canal from so remote a point as Akabah, seeing that a much nearer 

 road of invasion is already in his hands by way of the comparatively well- 

 watered road passing through Arish, the traditional road of all invaders of 

 Egypt. I think His Majesty's Government is quite needlessly alarmed on 

 this head and unduly suspicious of the Sultan's honesty. If there has 

 been sharp practice in these negotiations as far as they have as yet been 

 published, it seems to me, if I may say it without offence, to be rather on 

 the other side. The Grand Vizier's telegram declaring that ' in the Penin- 

 sula of Tor Sina the status quo is maintained, and that it will be adminis- 

 tered by the Khedivate in the same manner in which it has been adminis- 

 tered in the time of Ismail Pasha and Tewfik Pasha ' cannot under the true 

 circumstances of the case have been meant as a cession of territorial 

 rights, at least in these uninhabited districts of Akabah. Still less can it 

 have meant a cession of such rights in the districts north of the pilgrim 

 road, which have never been geographically or administratively part of the 

 Peninsula. Yet Lord Cromer twisted the phrase into an admission of such 

 cession, and His Majesty's Government seems now determined to hold the 

 Sultan to his fanciful interpretation. It has, I fear, been decided that the 

 Sultan should be coerced into an acceptance of a line of boundary never 

 heard of in history and arbitrarily drawn ' from a point a short distance to 

 the east of El Arish to the head of the Gulf of Akabah.' I need hardly 

 point out that the fact of the English Consul-General at Cairo having 

 communicated his interpretation of the telegram to a Minister of the 

 Khedive at Cairo has no legal value whatever as between England and the 

 Sultan, nor has it been asserted in any official way that the Sultan endorsed 

 the interpretation. Lord Cromer's logic is of a kind which no doubt is 

 often used in dealing diplomatically with Asiatic States. But a civilized 

 Government loses much, by resorting to it, of its moral standing when the 

 logic leads to a quarrel. It is inconceivable that it would be supported or 

 the case given in our favour were it submitted to arbitration. 



" Under the circumstances, then, is it not unwise to press this extreme 

 claim of the Arish-Akabah boundary and the evacuation of Tabah on the 

 Sultan as a preliminary to all negotiations? A fair settlement would 

 probably be to leave to the Sultan the almost uninhabited region east of 

 Wady el Arish, the ancient Biblical boundary between Egypt and Palestine. 

 The Sultan would doubtless be satisfied with this, as would, I am sure, be 

 all Egyptians, who have no practical interest in the far-away region except 

 that of the Mecca pilgrimage. To press the matter to a violent issue, 

 when the ground of right is so very doubtful, by a formal ultimatum, which 

 will probably be disregarded, is to run the certain risk of a religious 

 quarrel of indefinite magnitude with the whole body of Mohammedan 



believers. I am > e *-C, 



"Wilfrid Scawen Blunt." 



