988 EGYPT 



British authority " (Egypt No. i (1911) p. 3). The general acceptance of this idea led 

 to the comparative failure of the experiment (the provincial councils proved a distinct 

 success). An official declaration made in the House of Commons in June 1911 on be- 

 half of the British government that there could be no hope of further progress in Egypt 

 until the agitation against the British occupation ceased had its effect, and for a time 

 the Nationalist agitation died down. 



After the murder of Boutros Pasha the cabinet was rearranged. Mohammed Said 

 Pasha, minister of the Interior, became Prime Minister, while retaining his former 

 portfolio. The only new minister was Yusuf Saba Pasha, who became minister of 

 Finance. Sir Joseph Saba, K.C.M.G., as he was known in European circles, a 

 Syrian and a Roman Catholic, had been twenty years at the head of the Egyptian Post 

 office and had earned a well deserved reputation as a capable and zealous administrator. 

 The co-operation of the ministry with the British authorities helped to undo the harm 

 caused by the excesses of the Nationalists. Boutros was a Copt, and the endeavour of 

 the Nationalists to present his murderer as a patriot and defender of Islam produced 

 strained relations between the Copts and the Moslems. Owing to the precautions of 

 the government no serious collision occurred between the two factions, and later the 

 Copts turned their grievances against the government. A Coptic Congress was held 

 at Assuit in Upper Egypt, where the Copt is prosperous but not popular, in March 1911, 

 and a list of grievances was drawn up, but Sir Eldon Gorst had little difficulty in showing 

 that their complaints of unfair treatment by the government were ill founded. 



Soon after penning his annual report for 1910, which constitutes the best apologia 

 for his period of control, the health of Sir Eldon Gorst failed. He returned to England 

 in April 1911 ; on July 6th he resigned his office, and on the i2th of the same 

 Kitchener month he died. Four days later (July i6th) Lord Kitchener 1 was appointed 

 becomes British Agent, a selection popular both in Great Britain and with the ma- 

 Ageat. jority of Egyptians. Kitchener, who had been made a knight of St. Patrick 



on July loth, had maintained unimpaired his interest in Egypt and the Sudan, 

 and had early in 1911 visited both countries as well as Uganda and British East Africa. 

 He reached Alexandria on September 28, 1911. Writing six months later, he drew atten- 

 tion to the divisions into political parties and factions of the formerly homogeneous 

 body of Egyptian Moslems; a division which " does nothing to elevate or develop the 

 intelligent character of an oriental race " (Egypt No. i (1912) p. 2). In March 1912, a 

 few weeks previous to this condemnation of Nationalist activity, Mohammed Bey Farid 

 had delivered an inflammatory address at the annual congress of the party, of which he 

 was president. He then went to Switzerland, but was (April 30, 1912) sentenced, in his 

 absence, to a year's imprisonment for seditious speaking. He had previously been 

 convicted of a similar offence in January 1911. In July 1912 a plot to murder Lord 

 Kitchener, the Khedive and the premier, was discovered by the Cairo police; and on 

 August 13, 1912, three young men for their share in the plot were sentenced to fifteen 

 years imprisonment. The investigations made disclosed the existence of a secret society 

 directed against the government, in which many influential Egyptians were involved. 

 This society was shown to be in relation with the Young Turk Committee of Union and 

 Progress, and in September Sheikh Abdul Aziz Shawish, one of the Egyptian Nationalist 

 leaders, who also conducted a newspaper in Turkey, was arrested in Constantinople, 

 charged with being implicated in the conspiracy against the Khedive and Lord Kitch- 

 ener. Shawish was brought to Cairo, but the evidence against him being inconclusive 

 he was released (Oct. 18, 1912). On Nov. i6th a man named Mukhtar was sentenced 

 at Alexandria to ten years imprisonment for publishing seditious circulars. 



These plots and conspiracies were confined to a numerically small party, and the 

 people in general were little concerned. Lord Kitchener, by the firmness of his adminis- 

 tration, created a feeling of confidence which the Nationalist plots did not much dis- 

 turb. Greater excitement was caused by the outbreak of war in Tripoli (Oct. 1911). 

 Geographical proximity, the close relationship between the people of Benghazi and the 



1 See E. B. xv, 838. 



