F. P. A. 
 Pamphlet No. 31 
 Series of 1924-25 
 
 £ 
 
 British Policy in Egypt 
 
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 DISCUSSED BY 
 
 Major-Gen’l Sir Reginald EIoskin s, K. C. B., 
 
 C.M.G., D.S.O. 
 
 and 
 
 X 
 
 O 
 
 CO 
 
 7T 
 
 CO 
 
 Dr. Herbert Adams Gibbons 
 
 With Remarks by 
 
 Rt. Hon. Sir Willoughby Dickinson, K. B. E. 
 
 Mr. Bishara Nahas Hon. Henry Morgenthau 
 
 Mr. Syud Hossain Mufty-Zade K. Zia Bey 
 Mrs. Marguerite Harrrison 
 
 A STENOGRAPHIC REPORT OF THE 
 
 72ND New York Luncheon D ISCUSSION 
 DECEMBER 20, 1924 
 
 of the 
 
 Foreign Policy Association 
 
 national headquarters 
 
 NINE EAST FORTY-FIFTH STREET 
 NEW YORK 
 
Speakers 
 
 MAJ.-GEN’L SIR REGINALD HOSKINS, K. C. B., 
 
 C. M. G., D. S. O. 
 
 Nile Expedition, 1897-99; 1915-19, with British Army in Egypt, serving 
 zvith General Allenby; Commander British General Staff in Egypt, 1919-23; 
 Retired, 1923. 
 
 DR. HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS 
 
 Former European Correspondent, New York Herald; Author of Introduc¬ 
 tion to World Politics; Europe Since 1918; The New Map of Africa. 
 
 Leading the Discussion : 
 
 RT. HON. SIR WILLOUGHBY H. DICKINSON, K. B. E. 
 
 Former Delegate from Great Britain to the League of Nations Assembly; 
 Chairman of Committee on Minorities, League of Nations Union, England. 
 
 MR. JAMES G. McDONALD, Chairman 
 
 SPEAKER S’ TABLE 
 
 Mufty-Zade K. Zia Bey 
 
 Judge & Mrs. Pierre Crabites 
 
 Mr. John Crane 
 
 Mr. John Langdon-Davies 
 
 Sir Willoughby & Lady Dickinson 
 
 Professor Edward Mead Earle 
 
 Miss Gertrude Emerson 
 
 Mr. Glenn Frank 
 
 Mr. & Mrs. Jackson Fleming 
 
 Dr. & Mrs. Herbert A. Gibbons 
 
 Mr. Huntington Gilchrist 
 Professor Richard Gottheil 
 Sir Reginald & Lady Hoskins 
 Miss Freda Kirchwey 
 Mrs. Crane Leatherbee 
 Dr. Robert Morss Lovett 
 Mr. David Mitrany 
 Hon. Henry Morgenthau 
 Mr. Bishara Nahas 
 Mr. Savel Zimand 
 
 Those who took part in the discussion were Mr. Bishara Nahas, an 
 Egyptian Merchant; Hon. Henry Morgenthau, former Ambassador to 
 Turkey; Mrs. Marguerite Harrison, author and lecturer, who recently 
 returned from a year in the Near East; Mr. Syud Hossain, editor of 
 the New Orient; and Mufty-Zade Zia Bey, a Turkish merchant and author. 
 
 Ji 
 
British Policy in Egypt 
 
 MR. JAMES G. MCDONALD, Chairman 
 
 B EFORE I introduce General Hoskins, I am going to try to do what 
 I am told I must do, which is to give you the background of Egypt’s 
 history, some 7,000 years of it, in less than seven minutes. 
 
 I dispose of the period prior to the conquest by Alexander, the period 
 of roughly four or five thousand years, made up of thirty dynasties, by 
 saying that it is an extremely interesting period, but for us has only this 
 significance, that as early as the sixth dynasty—about three thousand 
 years before Christ—the Egyptians were extending their influence in what 
 they then called Ethiopia, which is the present Northern Sudan. 
 
 The two following periods, that of the Romans down to the middle 
 of the Seventh Century and, that of the Moslems down to the Turkish 
 Conquest, need not concern us here. Of the Turkish period, 1517 to 
 1914, I stop first to remind you that Mehemet Ali, 1805-1849, was one of 
 the makers of modern Egypt. He was important for three things: First, 
 he loosened, almost to the breaking point, the ties between Egypt and 
 Turkey; second, he began the development of cotton raising in Egypt; 
 and third, he conquered the Sudan. 
 
 It will be generally agreed that after Mehemet Ali the most important 
 Egyptian figure in the nineteenth century was Ismail, 1863-1879. He 
 made a brilliant beginning; he effected many reforms and modernized 
 Egypt until as he said it became “almost European.” The greatest achieve¬ 
 ment of his reign was completion of the Suez Canal. Unfortunately his 
 manifold projects combined with reckless personal extravagance brought 
 him and his country into hopless bankruptcy. In the end he was deposed 
 by order of the Sultan. Just before his deposition his shares in the Suez 
 Canal were purchased by Great Britain—one of the brilliant diplomatic 
 achievements of Disraeli, later Lord Beaconsfield. 
 
 Egyptian bankruptcy led directly to foreign intervention which during 
 the 1870’s and the beginning of the 1880’s took the following forms: 
 First, the Mixed Tribunals which still continue, second, the Debt Com¬ 
 mission representing French and British financiers, and third, the Dual 
 Control which placed an Englishman in charge of revenue and a French¬ 
 man in charge of expenditure. In 1882 occurred the revolt of Arabi, 
 primarily against foreign influence. This was crushed by the British 
 acting without the French who had refused to take part in a joint opera¬ 
 tion. The defeat of Arabi ended the Dual Control and gave Britain 
 for the first time a lone hand in Egypt. It should be noted also that at 
 this time Sir Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, came to Egypt. He 
 lemained there as British Chief Agent until 1907. 
 
 A year later after the crushing of the insurrection in the north, there 
 occurred, in 1883, in the Sudan the revolt of the Mahdi. An Egyptian 
 army of ten thousand men under an English officer, Colonel Hicks, sent 
 against the rebels, was annihilated. In 1884-85 came the tragic incident 
 of General Gordon. He had been in the Sudan for a number of years 
 
 3 
 
and knew how to get on with the Sudanese admirably. He was asked 
 by the British and Egyptian Governments to go to Khartum, and if 
 possible to effect the retreat of the British and Egyptian troops, besieged 
 there. Gordon went to Khartum. But being brilliant and daring rather 
 than discreet he did not retreat. Instead he attempted to stand out 
 against the Mahdi. As a result the city was taken and he with eleven 
 thousand of his men were massacred, two days before the arrival of 
 reinforcements. 
 
 Following this disaster Britain and Egypt for the next thirteen years 
 practically withdrew from the Sudan. But in 1898 General Kitchener 
 moving up the Nile finally defeated the forces of Mahdism at Omdurman. 
 This victory led, however, to a very dangerous clash beween the British 
 and French at Fashoda. While Kitchener was advancing southward 
 along the Nile, Captain Marchand, a French explorer with an indefinite 
 commission from his government, was moving across Africa to the Upper 
 Nile. He arrived at Fashoda a few weeks before Kitchener and raised the 
 flag of his country above the town. For months it appeared not only 
 probable but likely that war between France and Britain would ensue 
 over the clash of interests there. France eventually withdrew and shortly 
 afterwards arranged with Britain a delimitation of their respective spheres 
 of influence which has remained substantially the basis of division be¬ 
 tween the two countries until now. 
 
 The victory of Kitchener, and the withdrawal of the French led to 
 the establishment for the first time of the British position in the Sudan 
 on a definite basis. The so-called “Anglo-Egyptian Sudan” was to be 
 governed by a sort of benevolent dictatorship. Sovereignty was to be 
 exercised jointly by Britain and Egypt. A British Governor-General 
 in command of Egyptian and British troops, with British officers in all 
 except one of the Provinces was to administer the country. In the mean¬ 
 time, of course, Britain was acting as advisor to the ruler of Egypt. 
 This anomalous situation was changed in 1914 by Britain’s declaration 
 that Egypt was no longer a part of the Turkish Empire and by the 
 establishment definitely of a British Protectorate. 
 
 In 1922 Britain granted independence to Egypt, but reserved for later 
 consideration four major points: Imperial communications, the Sudan, 
 the protection of foreign interests and minorities, and the defense of 
 Egypt. The most important of these for the purposes of today’s dis¬ 
 cussion is the Sudan. A few weeks ago the British Commander in the 
 Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, was murdered. The day of the funeral General 
 Allenby delivered his ultimatum to the Egyptian government. Zaghlul 
 Pasha resigned and the new ministry assented to the British terms. 
 
 I hope that this analysis has not been colored. I have given you this 
 “A B C” of the background of Egypt’s history not because I think you 
 members of the Association do not know it already, but because some 
 of your friends whom you have brought with you may need it! 
 
 We think we are particularly fortunate to have as our first speaker 
 today a man who has lived in Egypt a great portion of his life, who has 
 been intimately connected with the British army there, and who, there¬ 
 fore, can give us a sense of the situation in Egypt which it would be dif¬ 
 ficult for anyone without his experience to give. Major-General Sir 
 Reginald Hoskins was with the Nile Expedition in 1897 to 1899, and 
 
 4 
 
again in Egypt from 1915 to 1919 with the British army, serving with 
 General Allenby. He was Commander of the British General Staff in 
 Egypt from 1919 to 1923, and he retired from the army last year. 
 
 General Hoskins is not, he tells me, an orator, and I am glad that he 
 isn’t. He is not speaking on behalf of the British government, and he 
 is not speaking—primarily, at least—as a person acquainted with political 
 situations; rather he is speaking as an individual, as a former soldier who 
 will give us as best he may in twenty or twenty-five minutes his impressions 
 of the situation in Egypt today: General Hoskins. (Applause.) 
 
 MAJOR-GENERAL SIR REGINALD HOSKINS 
 
 L ADIES AND GENTLEMEN: It is quite right, I am not an orator, 
 ^but I said I would come here and speak quite frankly as a soldier about 
 some of the things that I know of the countries which you are considering 
 today. I rather demurred when the Secretary of this Association ap¬ 
 proached me. I thought I couldn’t fill the bill, but she is very hard to 
 resist and I said I would come and just make a frank talk. 
 
 I have been in those countries for the greater part of my life, the part 
 of my life that I have enjoyed most, I think. I know the people of Egypt 
 well and the people of the Sudan very well. I have very good friends 
 among the Egyptians and among the Sudanese, and among the Arabs, and 
 the only thing that I really have at heart is the happiness of those peoples. 
 
 The history has been extraordinarily well and succinctly put by your 
 Chairman. That saves me from trying to do what I thought I might have 
 to do, a good deal of preliminary history work. But in an audience of 
 this kind, in a continent far away from Africa, it is only to be supposed 
 that a great many of you don’t know clearly what sort of country and 
 what sort of peoples we are talking about, and so I will try to make a little 
 atmosphere. I will, so to speak, throw the ball in for the debate by telling 
 you something about the country and the people. 
 
 The country of Egypt is, you may say, just the Nile and the Suez Canal. 
 The Nile is a river that comes from Uganda, as you will see from your 
 maps,* Uganda being a British Protectorate which uses the/ water of the 
 Nile. It runs through the Sudan into Egypt and at Cairo breaks into 
 several channels, forming the Delta of the Nile, one of the most valuable 
 agricultural districts in the world. Without the Nile, Egypt would not 
 exist. Her people, generally speaking (about ninety per cent of them) 
 ate fellahin—peasantry living on the waters of the Nile—clinging to its 
 banks, busy all day in the fields, and they have been living so for genera¬ 
 tions back. 
 
 The rest (perhaps ten per cent) of the people are very largely the Turks 
 and those who came in with the Turks in the time of Mehemet Ali, and a 
 great number of Europeans who have been attracted to that country and 
 have engaged in commerce of various types, great and small, and also some 
 professional men, and in the wake of those Europeans came a great 
 many Levantine rapscallions of all sorts trying to get a living, not always 
 honestly. 
 
 Now, those ninety per cent of the people of Egypt that we spoke about, 
 the fellahin, are illiterate. They go out to the fields in the morning and they 
 come back in the evening, and it is very important to remember that when 
 you are considering a political problem, because the minds of people of 
 
 •See map on page 31. 
 
 5 
 
that sort are very different from the minds of literate people who read for 
 themselves and think for themselves. 
 
 The Suez Canal, which doesn’t bother Egypt very much, is of the great¬ 
 est importance to the British Empire. It is a link in her communications 
 which is so important that she cannot permit any anarchy or any serious 
 disturbances to take place in a country in close proximity to it. So, as your 
 Chairman was telling you just now, when there was a revolt under Arabi 
 in Egypt, when we asked France, Italy and Turkey to join us in putting 
 down that revolt, and they would not do it, we had to do it ourselves, and 
 we did do it, and that was what started us in the occupation of Egypt which 
 has been going on until now. 
 
 Under Lord Cromer, tbe prosperity of the country grew enormously. 
 The administrators whom he put in were almost without exception success¬ 
 ful to a greater or lesser degree, and out of bankruptcy a fine and pros¬ 
 perous country has been made. This has been made possible only by the 
 British occupation. 
 
 During the Great War, we had to make up our minds that the political 
 position of Egypt had to be clarified. We could have annexed it perhaps. 
 We could have done that many times, but we never wanted to; it wasn’t 
 our intention and it wasn’t our policy to do that. We srdd that we would 
 go out when she could govern herself, and that is what we adhere to 
 still. 
 
 During the war, as I say, we could have annexed Egypt. We could have 
 said to Egypt—and the Egyptians probably would have done it—“make 
 some act of aggression as against Turkey,” and she would have been 
 committed then on the side of the Allies; but we thought it better—at least 
 for the purposes of the war—to declare a Protectorate. When we did 
 that, we told the people of Egypt that we were going to run the war our¬ 
 selves and we weren’t going to call upon them for any help. As a matter 
 of fact, they helped very willingly in such things as labor corps, camel trans¬ 
 port corps, and many other auxiliary services which were very, very use¬ 
 ful ; in fact, I hardly know what we should have done without them in 
 Palestine. 
 
 However, while that was going on, the young inspectors that we have in 
 all the provinces of Egypt came and said, “We want to go and join a 
 regiment. We don’t want to stay here.” When young fellows insist like 
 that, unfortunately people give in, and those young men who used to be tbe 
 great friends of tbe fellahin were allowed to go and join regular regiments, 
 and the result was that the fellahin. or peasantry of Egypt, were left at 
 the tender mercies of sheiks and omdehs in the villages who brought about 
 the same sort of regime that used to be there before we went into the 
 country. That is to say, that when the sheik or omdeh wanted to do any¬ 
 thing or was told to do anything, he did it harshly and then he said, “It 
 is the British who told me to do it.” 
 
 The Nationalist Party, which had been strong and growing stronger, 
 took full advantage of the war, and when they saw this sort of thing going 
 on, one can imagine how easy it was for them to get hold of these simple 
 fellahin, tell them what brutes these British were who were allowing all 
 this to go on, and so work on the feelings of these illiterate peasants that 
 they joined, in a sort of way, the Nationalist Party. It was, of course, 
 most unfortunate that we ever took those young inspectors away. 
 
 6 
 
I must admit there were many ways in which the British could have 
 improved the conduct of the war, so far as the Egyptians were concerned, 
 had they thought of it; but in the war, if you will look back, there were 
 so many considerations that were purely military that some of the civil 
 considerations got rather overlooked, and so the Nationalist Party found 
 a very easy held on which to work among the more ignorant of the Egyp¬ 
 tians. They took full advantage of it. 
 
 Among the more enlightened Egyptians one might think that they might 
 have had more difficulty, but it is the nature of the Egyptian, I think, to 
 intrigue. Politics, especially politics in a coffee-house, he loves, and that 
 is the place where this party has very largely grown in numbers anyhow, 
 if not in weight. We, in our system of education, taught to become young 
 government officials dozens of times more men than there were ever likely 
 to be places for them to go into, so that there were certain Egyptians of the 
 middle class who had a smattering of education—the sort of education 
 that made it possible for him to read and understand any newspapers that 
 might be about and to talk with some fluency about it all in the coffee¬ 
 houses ; and when those young men saw that there was no place for them 
 and that a great many of the places were filled by the British, they very 
 naturally said, “I am just as good as that fellow; why shouldn’t I have 
 that job? What is the good of the British staying here any longer? Let 
 us run the country ourselves.” That is easily understood. 
 
 At the end of the war, that being the situation in Egypt, there was a 
 great alarm in the Mohammedan world as to what was going to happen 
 about the Caliphate, that is to say, the head of the Mohammedan com¬ 
 munity, seeing that Turkey had been beaten in the war. 
 
 This was taken up with a good deal of eagerness in Cairo generally and 
 in particular at their Mohammedan University, el-Azhar. It was a flame 
 which grew and spread broadcast over Egypt just after the war. This 
 made a situation of such unrest in Egypt, all those things combined, that 
 you can imagine what they felt when there fell among all the tired peoples 
 of the world that blessed word “self-determination.” They said, “Here 
 is the very thing,” and they asked for their delegates to be received at the 
 Conference at Paris and in London. Then (I think, very unwisely) we 
 not only didn’t assist them there, but we said they couldn’t go, or be heard 
 if they did go. 
 
 Well, now, when they got back to Egypt there was another trouble, 
 there was another fire, and I think that is really largely responsible for 
 the present state of affairs. So we sent a commission under Lord Milner, 
 and the members of that commission were men of the greatest experience, 
 and the class of men of character and temperament who would get on with 
 —and most of them did know well—the leading Egyptians. It took them 
 a long time before they could get the statesmen of Egypt to come and talk 
 to them, but eventually they did. The result of their inquiry was to 
 advise the British Government to give independence to Egypt with cer¬ 
 tain reservations, and those reservations were that the question of the 
 Canal and the Sudan were things that we reserved to ourselves for dis¬ 
 cussion with Egypt, and that as far as defending Egypt against any foreign 
 aggression from outside, we would look to that, and that as far as looking 
 after the interests and the properties and the lives of nationals of foreign 
 countries in Egypt, we would look after that, too. So when that Treaty of 
 
 7 
 
Independence was made, it was part and parcel of the Treaty that those 
 matters should be discussed as soon as possible between Great Britain and 
 Egypt, and that decisions should be come to on those four questions in a 
 spirit of mutual accommodation. 
 
 Great Britain was ready to meet and treat with the Egyptian representa¬ 
 tives at any time they desired, but Egypt has not seen fit to come forward 
 and discuss the matter. Tentatively she has sent one or two men who 
 have always said, “We have got to have the Sudan. You mustn’t stay in the 
 country. We will have nothing to do with your control of the Canal.” 
 
 In fact, they want entire independence without any of those reservations, 
 and we said that without those reservations the treaty wouldn’t stand. At 
 the same time that we did that, we told all the powers of the world 
 that we considered our relations with Egypt a domestic question and that, 
 in fact, we should resent any interference from any other power, and 
 that was perfectly clearly stated at the time. But the Egyptians thought that 
 if they hammered on, they would get their independence and they would 
 be able to snap tbeir fingers at these four reservations. They thought if they 
 could keep on agitating long enough they would win, and so the agitation 
 has been growing. This Nationalist Party has been led by a few very ex¬ 
 treme Nationalists, who were stronger than the rest and more obtrusive, 
 and they have worked up the rest of their party. They have ramifications 
 all over Egypt and in the Sudan, and their one ambition is to make every¬ 
 thing difficult for Great Britain, and they will stop at nothing. 
 
 The other day, you will remember, they assassinated General Stack, 
 the Governor-General of the Sudan—just a cold-blooded murder in the 
 street. There is a position of the greatest gravity. I knew him well. 
 He was a great friend of mine for thirty years. He was a man of the 
 most charming character; never did anybody any harm; the most lovable 
 of men. He never had an enemy there, I am perfectly sure, so it is not 
 he, but just the office; it is just Great Britain that they are aiming at, and 
 that is the situation, and that is the moment that they choose to appeal to 
 the League of Nations. 
 
 Now, suppose the Philippine situation were a little more analagous than 
 it is—it is fairly so—suppose that, and suppose there was a Panama Canal 
 question mixed up with that at the same time, and suppose, we will say, 
 General Leonard Wood were assassinated by the Filipinos, would that be 
 a moment to treat of that question with the League of Nations? No, of 
 course it wouldn’t be. 
 
 Luckily we have got a man there; we have got Lord Allenby, and he 
 dealt with that situation quite firmly, but by no means harshly, and so long 
 as he is there, I have great hopes that things will straighten out. Much 
 more danger is likely to come from men far cleverer than Lord Allenby, 
 perhaps, but who are at a distance and don’t see things so clearly as he 
 does, and perhaps haven’t got the same high character and frankness and 
 clearness of outlook that he has. 
 
 Now, the Sudan is absolutely a different question. Just lately it bas be¬ 
 come badly mixed up in the Egyptian matter, but it is an absolutely dis¬ 
 tinct question. We heard that Egypt used to govern the Sudan. She prac¬ 
 tically never has governed it. For any sort of government you have to go 
 and look back to some indistinct history of the Pharaohs. When Mehemet 
 Ali sent people there, it was no good government, no administration, so 
 
 8 
 
the country became a hopeless, corrupt, slave-trading, black spot of Africa, 
 and we had to get them out. If they go there again, alone, somebody will 
 have to get them out again. I don’t believe for a moment that the Arabs 
 or the Sudanese will admit of Egypt’s governing it alone. Anyhow, we 
 don’t mean that they shall try. We have gone there. We have spent per¬ 
 haps no more money than Egypt has, perhaps no mere lives, but anyhow, 
 we have } roduced the administration that has made the Sudan prosperous. 
 We have got it there, and it is for the good of the Arabs and the Sudanese 
 that it shall stay there until they can govern themselves. 
 
 We were quite right to make a condominium with Egypt when we took 
 the Sudan together with her, and as far as she can come and take her hand 
 in that government, let her come, but while she sends no one but these 
 young students into the small offices of the government to give trouble, to 
 work against the British, then she had better stay out. Nobody hears any¬ 
 thing from Egypt about self-determination for the Sudan. There is not an 
 Egyptian native in it. They are either Arabs or Sudanese, not Egyptians. 
 It is not their country. 
 
 Well, that is just how I feel about it, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause.) 
 
 I don’t for a moment want to queer the pitch for anybody, but I just 
 want to tell you frankly what my feeling is, and I am sure it is like that 
 of all other Englishmen and a great many other Europeans who have lived 
 some time in Egypt; they would agree with me almost throughout. It isn’t 
 just my opinion. It is the opinion of most of the people like me, and all 
 I would say to you is not to listen to those, of whom there are a great many, 
 who will go around government waste paper baskets or go around listening 
 to the small politics of the coffee-houses; don’t listen to that. Try to get 
 the picture in your mind firmly yourself, until you feel yourself forced 
 to certain conclusions and I believe they will be mine. (Applause.) 
 
 The Chairman: I think we are all debtors to General Hoskins for 
 the frankness and directness with which he has put what he probably rightly 
 calls a typical British point of view. 
 
 Now, the next speaker is an old friend of ours. You all know Dr. 
 Gibbons. You all know about his books, some of which I would recommend 
 to you; one of which I would distinctly not recommend to you. It isn’t his 
 book on Africa. It is another book in which he discusses American policies. 
 He knows much more, I think personally, about Europe than he does about 
 what American foreign policy should be. (Laughter.) We usually pre¬ 
 fer to have him speak on these things about which he knows most. 
 
 Now, it happens that Egypt is one of these. He has been in the Near 
 East, as you know, a great deal. He has been closely associated with many 
 people in Egypt. He was, I know, a personal friend of the assassinated 
 British Governor-General, and he has been personally associated closely 
 with many of the Egyptian Nationalists. So, I am sure we look forward 
 with keen interest to see how much he will tell us of what he thinks in his 
 twenty-five minutes. (Applause.) 
 
 DR. HERBERT ADAMS GIBBONS 
 
 M R. CHAIRMAN, ladies and gentlemen: I was fascinated by 
 the talk that General Hoskins has just given. It is, as our Chairman 
 has rightly said, and as the general himself has claimed, the point of view 
 not only of himself, but also of many men, perhaps of most of those who 
 
 9 
 
have given their lives to building up British power in Africa. It is the 
 point of view of most of the foreign residents, I know, who are at the 
 present time and who have been for many years in Egypt. These men 
 have not been to the coffee-houses. They have never sat down at table 
 with the natives and have never heard or listened sympathetically to their 
 point of view. 
 
 In my work in the Near East, I have always endeavored (not always with 
 success, I will confess) to maintain the objective point of view. I have tried 
 to look at these different great questions in their bearing upon world con¬ 
 ditions. I have been in dissent from the point of view in regard to our 
 entry into the League of Nations, so dear to the heart of our Chairman and 
 to a great many of the members of the Foreign Policy Association. 
 
 Perhaps I have been too objective in what I have set forth as to American 
 policies in the past and in the present, and my prophecies have been too 
 realistic, I presume, concerning the trend that those policies are likely to 
 take in the future. 
 
 In the Egyptian question I feel that our speaker who has just finished 
 has made a fair presentation of what we have come to call in the last ten 
 years the “Uebermensch,” the superman, theory. It is the point of view 
 generally adopted by the white race in connection with Africans and 
 Asiatics. It is the point of view particularly of the English-speaking 
 peoples, and among the English-speaking peoples of a certain group that 
 we find in high places in Great Britain and in the former German Empire. 
 
 In the year 1914 I heard Herr von Mach, who had been for a long time 
 the administrator of the Polish districts of Prussia (it was he who had 
 attempted that famous, or infamous, or nefarious colonization project), talk 
 about the Poles and their capacity for self-government. He gave a brief 
 sketch of the history of Poland. Let me say that his presentation of the 
 situation in regard to Poland was almost word for word and paragraph for 
 paragraph the presentation that we have heard of the situation of the Egyp¬ 
 tians, and it might hold, I fear, as General Hoskins’ views regarding any 
 people of Asia or Africa. 
 
 We go over these points one by one. Of course, first of all, that ninety 
 per cent of the people are illiterate; second, that the protecting power 
 which comes in to dominate has given them great material blessings; and 
 third, that they are not in a position to goven themselves, but when they 
 are, of course, they will have all the rights of self-government given to 
 them. 
 
 I heard virtually the same kind of an interpretation of the situation in 
 Eastern Europe at Christmas-time in the year 1914, the first year of the 
 war, sitting in the Ball Platz in Vienna and talking to the famous Minister 
 of Foreign Affairs of Austro-Hungary, who wrote the ultimatum to Ser¬ 
 bia. He went back into the past history of the Serbians. He asked me if I 
 was aware of the fact that more than ninety per cent of these people were 
 ignorant peasants who couldn’t read or write, that a little coterie of poli¬ 
 ticians had taken them in hand, that they had been attempting to break up 
 the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He dilated upon the virtues, of course, of 
 the Archduke and of his wife and the horror of the assassination that had 
 taken place in Bosnia. He spoke of the ineradicable differences that sepa¬ 
 rated the various Serbian peoples. He maintained that from Vienna they 
 could be ruled far better than they ever could be ruled from Belgrade. 
 
 10 
 
He predicted what has happened, the arising of the peasant party under 
 Radich and the confusion that would result, and he said, “Is the world 
 going to be plunged into a war, swept away by cheap sentimentality or ideal¬ 
 ism on this false doctrine of self-determination?” and then he went and 
 pulled out of a pigeon-hole a series of papers in which he showed me the 
 tremendous benefits that had come to Bosnia and Herzegovina in over 
 thirty years of the rule of the Austrians. 
 
 They had built railways there. They had increased the deposits in the 
 savings banks exactly as the Germans had increased by 500 per cent in a 
 certain length of time the deposits in Posnania and also in Alsace-Lorraine; 
 and his argument was that these people had material blessings that were 
 bestowed upon them from the fact that they were being ruled by a superior 
 race, and, therefore, why should they worry? And he was very, very 
 sorry over the fact that this great crisis in world history had arisen 
 through the coffee-house agitation of certain “obtrusive” (I use the Gen¬ 
 eral’s adjective)—obtrusive politicians whom we have known here in this 
 country and whom we have honored in the course of the past fifteen years 
 as heroes—Pasitch, Benes, Masaryk—you know who I mean! 
 
 I want to say right here in the beginning, in reference to this Egyptian 
 situation, that I am on record in my books in full praise of the British 
 Administration in Egypt and in the Sudan and of the type of men who 
 have been responsible for the great material blessings that have come 
 to Egypt and the Sudan in the course of the British occupation. I think 
 from our Western, Occidental point of view, it has been a blessing to the 
 Egyptians and the Sudanese alike to have had this long period of British 
 rule. I believe that the men who have been responsible for the govern¬ 
 ment there, men like our speaker today, have sincerely invested their lives 
 in what was, from their point of view, a very great work for world civiliza¬ 
 tion and something that would help and strengthen also the British Empire 
 as an agency for civilization. And so there is nothing at all that is un¬ 
 friendly in what I have to say today concerning the British in Egypt. I 
 have broken bread with them, in Egypt and in the Sudan. Many of these 
 men are my personal friends. What I am saying today is something that 
 has a significance which is far beyond the acts of any one people like the 
 British whom we love so dearly, or any set of administrators such as those 
 who have so wisely and beneficently ruled over Egypt and the Sudan, and 
 who have given a great measure of prosperity to those countries. 
 
 In the course of the last fifteen years there have come into the world 
 new influences. There has come into the world a great yearning for world 
 peace. The League of Nations, the World Court and all these various 
 manifestations like the Geneva Protocol are proofs of our desire to at¬ 
 tain a world-wide status quo that will make us in the future not so much 
 fighting people as we have been in the past. 
 
 I firmly believe that the only way we can do this is to live and let live 
 and to consider that other peoples, no matter how illiterate they may be 
 and no matter how separated they may be from us in civilization and in 
 religion, are only different from us; because they are different from us, 
 they are not necessarily inferior to us. (Applause.) 
 
 I believe also that we have to realize, in connection with all the Asiatic 
 and African peoples, that they must have a full opportunity, no matter how 
 
 11 
 
badly they may fare themselves as a result of having had that opportunity, 
 to work out their own salvation toward self-government. 
 
 If men like General Hoskins have been able to accomplish so much in 
 Egypt and the Sudan, it is because they have behind them, as we in America 
 have, hundreds of years of political and social evolution. There was a time 
 when we were ninety per cent illiterate or more than that. There was a 
 time when we were fighting against one another in Wessex, and Sussex, and 
 Essex. There was a time when Scotland and England were going through 
 centuries of border raids. Out of all that confusion, out of all that 
 anarchy, through that period of testing that extended over hundreds of 
 years, came the ability to become self-governing peoples. 
 
 I think that it is not fair or just for us to be the ones to gauge the 
 arrival of the time for Oriental peoples to be fit for self-government, they 
 having had none of the opportunity that we have had of evolution. How 
 can they by some magic have arrived suddenly at a time when they can 
 create an atmosphere and the machinery of an Occidental civilization such 
 as we would approve of in their country, presto! with never a period of 
 experimenting, of testing, of making mistakes and learning to correct 
 them—as we had? 
 
 I have a son, and I know that I have been through certain experiences 
 in my life that would be very helpful for him if he would follow me and 
 allow me to direct him and guide him. I have been through the adolescent 
 period and storm. I have been through the experiences that a man has 
 at college. I have had difficulties of adjustment, even with the best of 
 women, in the earliest years of my married life. I once made a perfect 
 hash of my financial affairs, as almost every other young man has done. 
 I wasted years of my life in going from pillar to post and not accom¬ 
 plishing much, and how much I would have been saved if I had only 
 taken the guidance of my wise father during that period! 
 
 Of course, when my son goes out from the home, I could adopt the 
 argument that is adopted in regard to Egypt and all these peoples, and I 
 could say, “Now, my boy, I have experience.” (I wouldn’t tell him how I 
 had gained it. I would not take that into consideration.) “I know better 
 what is good for you than you know for yourself. I can run your financial 
 affairs. I can run the affairs of your heart with the various girls that 
 are going to make assaults upon you better than you can do yourself. I 
 can start you in business. I can give you all kinds of advice whether 
 you go into business or a profession. Look at me, with my white hair, 
 approaching the age, pretty soon, of fifty, with all of these years of ex¬ 
 periences I have had behind me. You follow me!” 
 
 I would maintain (and this is the argument and analogy I want to make 
 in regard to all these peoples, Egyptians and others) that that boy, if I 
 lived to be seventy-five and he attained the age of fifty, when he arrived 
 at fifty, under such a tutelage, wouldn’t be worth a tinker’s dam. He would 
 be worth no more than when he was twenty. 
 
 In regard to this whole Egyptian question, when it comes to this matter 
 of self-government, the right of self-determination, I believe that the Egyp¬ 
 tians, if left to themselves—and they are going to be left to themselves— 
 are going to make a hash of affairs for a long period of time. The Egyp¬ 
 tians are not supermen, as we think we ourselves are. But perhaps they 
 can become as we are, if they go through the same period of experimenting 
 
 12 
 
and have the same chance that we did of working out their own salvation—> 
 and I think that of every nation upon the face of the earth. Has not God 
 given us all immortal souls and has He not endowed others with faculties 
 and qualities like unto those that we have? Their handicap is not in an 
 essential inferiority to us, but only in that they have not had behind them 
 the same period of training and opportunity as European peoples. 
 
 Having disposed of that point, I will speak secondly of the question of 
 material blessing in Egypt. I do not believe that any one else can bestow 
 upon other people material blessings and guide them in those material bless¬ 
 ings and give them gifts and create among them a feeling and spirit of 
 happiness and well-being. No father was able to do that with his own 
 children. He couldn’t simply hand them out things. He couldn’t say, 
 “Now look here; let me run things and you are going to be better off,” 
 and expect to have those children of his leading happy lives. People have 
 pride. What we Occidentals don’t realize about the Orientals is that they 
 are just as proud as we are, perhaps even prouder. They have got to 
 have a chance to run things themselves, and above all, they have that in¬ 
 herent right. 
 
 That brings us to the point as to whether in this question of Egypt, and 
 the question of all these Oriental nations, we are going to continue to have 
 two moralities—one morality for Europe and America, and another moral¬ 
 ity for Africa and for Asia. This is one of those significant questions 
 where we have to make the choice. 
 
 Now I want to go back a little bit into the question of Egypt and to 
 develop it from another point of view, filling in some of the points that 
 have been left out in the two previous sketches of the situation that has 
 developed in Egypt. When the British went into Egypt, they declared 
 that they were only going in there temporarily. The situation ever since 
 that “temporary” entrance into Egypt reminds me of a friend of mine 
 whom I knew in Paris back in student days. He was an artist, and after 
 a great many years his father got tired of having him a remittance man 
 and wanted him to come home and show him some of the pictures he had 
 painted. When we heard about his leaving, as is always the case over 
 there, there were certain obligations and debts that hadn’t been acquitted 
 one with another in the Quarter, and one of my friends went to Bob and 
 said, “Bob, look here! I hate to speak to you about it” (he was very 
 much embarrassed—why is it we are always so embarrassed when we ask 
 people to return the money we have loaned them?) “I wish you would 
 return to me before you go home that little sum, don’t you know.” 
 
 Bob was very much impressed with the fact that his friend was em¬ 
 barrassed, and he put his hand on his shoulder to reassure him and said, 
 “Look here, old man, don’t you worry about that. Whenever you feel like 
 asking me for that money, you go ahead and do it.” (Laughter.) 
 
 It has been like that with British statesmen ever since their first entry 
 into Egypt. They made definite pledges not only to the Egyptian people 
 but to other nations that their entry into Egypt (a country that was not 
 a domestic concern of the British Empire alone but which is something 
 that affects the whole world’s prosperity and well-being) was only for a 
 brief period and they were going to get out. Gladstone said very, very 
 clearly, time and again (you can see it in the Hansard reports of Parlia¬ 
 mentary debates) that it would be a shame and a disgrace if Great Britain 
 
 13 
 
were to go back on her word and remain indefinitely in Egypt. Over and 
 over again that has been said. Yet during that time, because of Egypt’s 
 growing importance in the British Empire, it seemed a wise thing to con¬ 
 tinue to stay in Egypt and go back to the reconquest of the Sudan and to 
 the organization of those territories. It is the old policy of imperialism 
 that has been followed by so many nations, and excuses were found 
 always that, “Well, we will get out when they arrive at the period of 
 self-government.” 
 
 The General has said to us this afternoon that Great Britain is perfectly 
 willing to leave when the Egyptians arrive at that point—which, of course, 
 is never, never, never as long as conditions remain as they are now, or as 
 they have been ever since the British went into the occupation of Egypt. 
 It is a challenge to the British today, after having been in Egypt over 
 forty years, for one of the British administrators in that country to get 
 up and tell us that ninety per cent of the people are illiterate. (Applause.) 
 
 I hold no brief for ourselves in the Philippines. I will just relieve the 
 General’s mind at this time, and say that I think we ought to get out of 
 the Philippines. I am in favor of that. I am asking no other nation to 
 drink a dose of medicine that I am not willing for my own nation to drink, 
 and I think that the applications of these principles should be an applica¬ 
 tion that is world-wide. 
 
 In connection with Egypt, then, the British were planning not to get 
 out of Egypt, and the proof of it is to be found in the Anglo-French 
 agreement of 1904, which, when its terms became known, was the very 
 beginning of the Egyptian nationalist movement. One of the principal 
 points of the agreement of 1904 was that France was to have a free hand 
 in Morocco if she would call off her dogs that were barking at the British 
 in Egypt and allow the British to have a free hand there. It is written 
 right in the text of that agreement, and it really is one of the things at 
 the heart of that agreement and that prompted it. There was no intention 
 in 1904, and there has been no intention since, on tbe part of the British, 
 of ever getting out of Egypt. They wanted to stay there if they could. 
 
 Now during the period between 1904 and 1914, the situation in Egypt was 
 like the situation in other countries subject to alien rule. There was the 
 rise of a nationalist movement. Begin to educate the people, tell them 
 about the barons of Runnymede and how they forced the hand of their 
 sovereign. Tell them about Joan of Arc and how she rid her country of 
 the foreigners. Tell them about Hampden and the Stamp Act. Tell them 
 about George Washington and the period at Valley Forge. Tell them 
 about the men of the French revolution that fought the battle of Jemappes. 
 Tell them about the Italian Risorgimento movement—any history that we 
 study. How have we become great and strong—we Anglo-Saxons, we of 
 British blood and American blood? How have the French become a great 
 nation ? How have the Italians ? Because they have done in the past those 
 things that we tell these people that they are not to do and that they can¬ 
 not do; and if they attempt to follow the glorious example of our own 
 forefathers, we will call them obtrusive politicians. (Applause.) 
 
 I am going to say just a few words connected with the events which have 
 happened since 1914. In 1914 this Protectorate was proclaimed over 
 Egypt, a unilateral proclamation, not accepted by the Egyptian people. The 
 Egyptians fought by the side of the British during the World War. When 
 
 14 
 
I say fought, I use that word advisedly. The General himself has given 
 a very handsome tribute to the work that the Egyptians did during the 
 World War. He himself has said that he didn’t know how the British 
 would have gotten along in Palestine if it had not been for that help from 
 Egypt. In 1918, at the end of the World War, the Egyptians expected 
 the promises to be kept; and all the sad tragedies and troubles that have 
 occurred in Egypt since the end of the World War have been due to the 
 unsuccessful attempt of the British government to establish a permanent 
 Protectorate over Egypt. This was written into the Treaty of Versailles. 
 The delegates of Egypt came to Paris. They were not given a hearing, 
 because of official British opposition, although in 1915 I attended a press 
 luncheon in London given to the representatives of the then neutral press 
 at which Lord Grey (Sir Edward Grey, as he was at that time) spoke. 
 
 He said, “Tell your peoples throughout the world that this war is a 
 great moral issue. It is not for any material benefits of any kind. What 
 we want and the one thing that the British Empire wants alone, that which 
 we are fighting and giving our sons to die for, is that every people, great 
 and small, shall have the right and the privilege to work out its own 
 destinies in accordance with its own ideas after the World War is over.” 
 
 He didn’t limit his pledge merely to Europe. He was thinking also of 
 the whole world, or at least we were thinking that, we who heard his 
 words. Was Sir Edward indulging in hypocritical cant or was he voicing 
 an ideal? Did he mean simply to give the right of self-determination to 
 peoples wffio were subject to those whom we were fighting in the war, thus 
 weakening them, or was it the proclamation of a great principle that was to 
 rule the world in the future ? 
 
 Now since 1918 the policy of the British government in Egypt has been 
 the policy of “Schrecklichkeit,” of frightfulness, of intimidation, of re¬ 
 pression, in the eyes of the Egyptian people. I say this in all charity. We 
 Americans have adopted this policy, too. All nations that have imperial 
 tendencies have adopted it. and I suppose if I had been a British General in 
 Egypt and a British administrator there, common sense would have indi¬ 
 cated that I should have believed in and adopted such a policy myself. The 
 question is not what you do after you get into the galley, but, why did you 
 go into the galley? And there they were! If independence was granted, 
 as it was, it was not the result of the recommendation of the Milner Com¬ 
 mission, which had been ignored. Two years after the Milner Commission 
 had recommended it, the continued agitation of Zaghlul Pasha and his 
 partisans made the British—forced them to—proclaim the Free State. 
 
 I have an abhorrence of violence of any kind and I believe that the 
 Egyptians were getting into a very dangerous state. I thought that Zaghlul 
 Pasha (and I have told him this more than once) had gone too far, espec¬ 
 ially in the last year and a half; but viewing the circumstances as they ex¬ 
 isted at the time, there never would have been any Free State in 1922 in 
 Ireland or in Egypt if there hadn’t been that agitation and the insistent 
 determination to run their own affairs on the part of these people. It is 
 nonsense to speak of the granting of independence as “the gracious pleasure 
 of His Majesty.” 
 
 The present situation is not wholly the fault of the British government. 
 I believe that it is partially the fault also of the Egyptian people. The fault 
 is shared by both sides. But when we read of the recent events in Egypt 
 
 15 
 
and the type of ultimatum, with the demands presented to the Egyptian 
 people, in view of the fact that the fault was shared by both sides in the 
 past, a mistaken policy, a policy of blunders, a policy that was short-sighted, 
 a policy that was wholly and totally against the recommendations of the 
 Milner Commission—in view of the fact that it was a shared responsibility 
 (the regrettable assassination of this man who was my friend and in whose 
 home I have been a privileged guest), I say that when that thing occurred, 
 for the British government to write an ultimatum that smacked so much of 
 the Austrian ultimatum of 1914 to Serbia, with which it has points of 
 striking similarity, then I think that the time has come when public opinion 
 throughout the world should condemn that sort of a thing in the year 1924 
 after the adoption of the Geneva protocol. (Applause.) 
 
 Now in conclusion I will say this: the amount of the indemity demanded 
 was excessive; and knowing General Stack as I knew him, I believe that if 
 he were alive today to speak of this in connection with the assassination of 
 any other British General in Egypt, he would say the same thing. The 
 demand for the immediate withdrawal of the Egyptian troops from the 
 Sudan without any international treaty or agreement either between Egypt 
 and Great Britain, or between the two parties and the League, was taking 
 advantage of a situation that had arisen in the death of a great and hon¬ 
 ored man to settle the question for ulterior political purposes by sweeping 
 these people off their feet. In regard to the irrigation of the Nile, of the 
 Gezira region in the Sudan, the demands were totally unjustifiable as well 
 as irrelevant to the issue. 
 
 What we have here is a manifestation of the old-fashioned type of diplo¬ 
 macy, of the kind that the World War and all the new morality raised by 
 the World War has unqualifiedly condemned in our enemies, and there¬ 
 fore it should be unqualifiedly condemned when it manifests itself in our¬ 
 selves or in our friends. (Applause.) 
 
 The Chairman : Before we open the discussion to questions and ans¬ 
 wers, Sir Willoughby Dickinson has been kind enough to say that he would 
 open the discussion for us briefly. Sir Willoughby, as most of you know, 
 was a former delegate from Great Britain to the League of Nations As¬ 
 sembly, and Chairman of the Committee on Minorities of the League of 
 Nations Union. He is President, I think, of the World Alliance for Inter¬ 
 national Friendship Through the Churches, a distinguished British Liberal, 
 and we are very glad to have him open the discussion and give us another 
 British point of view. 
 
 SIR WILLOUGHBY H. DICKINSON 
 
 A/f R. CHAIRMAN, ladies and gentlemen: It is a great pleasure to 
 address this remarkable assembly, for two reasons especially. First 
 of all, because one has been led to believe that the Americans don’t care 
 about anything outside America, and, nevertheless, I see that you can 
 gather together so large and distinguished an assembly to discuss a 
 question of Egypt. Indeed I may add that since I have been in this 
 country it has been my experience that I find all through your popula¬ 
 tion an intense interest in the affairs of the rest of the world. 
 
 Secondly, I can’t help mentioning that I think some little bit of 
 responsibility for this trouble is due to America. (Applause.) A very 
 distinguished American laid down in very noble terms, with all of which 
 
 16 
 
I agree, that every nation should have the right of self-determination 
 over its own form of government. That is a magnificent theory, but 
 when you come to the application of it, it is a little more difficult, and 
 I only wish that your great nation were helping us to apply that principle 
 in many parts of Europe at the present day. (Applause.) It is a little 
 legacy you have left to us, and we are trying to apply it as best we can. 
 When the British troops were marching out of Dublin, when we evacuated 
 Ireland, an old Irish woman waved her shawl to them, and she said, 
 “Goodbye, me darlin’s, good luck to you! We will now be able to fight 
 in peace!” (Laughter.) 
 
 Now that is very much what is happening not only in Ireland and 
 in Egypt, but in several other parts of Europe, and somebody or another 
 will suffer for it unless wise action is taken very rapidly. I thought to 
 myself, you have a fine object lesson of the problem in Egypt in the two 
 magnificent speeches we have just listened to. We had the speech of the 
 experienced administrator in Egypt, which I am sure you have listened 
 to with the greatest interest. We have also had a very good representative 
 of that sort of feeling with which we all sympathize, but which we all 
 must realize the difficulty of giving effect to; that is the feeling that all 
 men are equal and all men must be treated exactly in the same way. 
 (Applause.) 
 
 Now I haven’t time to meet all the arguments that have just been 
 raised, but I think in one or two things Dr. Gibbons has been a little 
 bit unfair. As a matter of fact, Britain has always desired to leave 
 Egypt. It was announced by Mr. Gladstone when we won the war 
 there and conquered the Sudan. It was announced in 1887, in perfectly 
 specific words by Lord Salisbury, when he said, “It isn’t open to us to 
 assume the Protectorate of Egypt because His Majesty’s government 
 have over and over again pledged themselves that they would not do so.” 
 
 And now we have since 1922—I am quite ready to admit there was 
 a considerable amount of delay—definitely made this announcement: that 
 the British Protectorate over Egypt is terminated and Egypt is declared 
 to be an independent sovereign state. 
 
 It is quite true that in making that announcement we coupled with it 
 certain conditions to which we asked the sovereign state of Egypt, as 
 she will be, to agree to certain conditions that were in no way derogatory 
 to her sovereignity but were necessary not only for England but for 
 the rest of Egypt and also, as I think, for the rest of the world. That 
 policy has now been reaffirmed by a speech which I read the other 
 day made by our Prime Minister, in which he said the British government 
 had no intention of going back upon its decision of 1922. 
 
 Now, why is it that England has remained so long in Egypt? People 
 imagine that we have very sinister motives in doing so. I dare say some 
 people have made money there. I don’t know whether they have or 
 whether they haven’t, but I can assure you of this: the only reason which 
 has kept us in Egypt has been the profound belief, which I believe is 
 shared by almost all who know the circumstances, that the administration 
 of Britain in Egypt has resulted in good. It has been successful. (Ap¬ 
 plause.) It has produced peace out of war; order out of chaos; prosperity 
 from the most abject poverty; and it has not been harsh to the population. 
 Here again I think that our speaker was a bit unfair to General Hoskins. 
 
 17 
 
He charged the British nation with being a sort of superman, always 
 taking the position that we are superior to the colored races. That may 
 be true with a large number of Britishers. It is true, I regret to say, 
 with a considerable number of your own countrymen. (Applause.) 
 But from the point of view of the British government, I don’t believe 
 that accusation can be made good. All the great administrators of Egypt 
 have given their time and their labor for the benefit of the poorer portion 
 of those countries, and it is under the belief that we were doing good 
 that we remained in Egypt. 
 
 Now there have been certain conditions made. One of them is a 
 condition that under the future system of Egypt the rights of foreigners 
 should be especially respected. Please remember that Egypt is really not 
 a little country that the world can afford to leave alone to sow its wild 
 oats. That is what Dr. Gibbons said just now. He likened Egypt to 
 himself, I believe. (Laughter.) At any rate, to what he represented 
 himself to be, as a young man who would have been so magnificently 
 superior to what he is now, if he had only been left alone, or perhaps 
 it was vice versa, I don’t exactly remember. (Laughter.) But at any 
 rate his argument was: “Leave Egypt, leave Egyptians alone; let them 
 be as we were in Runnymede; let them be as in the time of Joan of Arc.” 
 I assure you, ladies and gentlemen, neither Europe nor the world can 
 afford to allow Egypt to go back to the ages of Joan of Arc or of 
 Runnymede. (Applause.) One of the remarkable features of Egypt is 
 this: that the population is largely European. Lord Milner’s report 
 stated that Egypt was rapidly becoming Europeanized. Almost all of 
 the nations of Europe have interests in Egypt. It wouldn’t be wise 
 to allow a new condition of affairs to spring up in Egypt in which Eg}^pt 
 might possibly go back to the condition in which it was prior to 1882. 
 
 I know that my time is very limited, and therefore I cannot make 
 the full defense I would like to make of the present attitude of the 
 British government. I am not a supporter, politically, of the British 
 government. I am a member of the Liberal party and have been, in 
 Parliament and elsewhere, always connected with the Liberal party, but 
 I must say this: I do not think that under the circumstances any govern¬ 
 ment could have acted otherwise than it did in relation to the assassination 
 of Sir Lee Stack. Mind you, we have not yet attained a position in which 
 we can absolutely disregard all resort to force. I am an ardent believer 
 in the League of Nations. I am working for the League of Nations. 
 Some day, perhaps, the League of Nations may be able to establish itself 
 as a police force for the whole of the world. That is possible in the far 
 distance. We have not arrived at that yet, and therefore there are 
 occasions when force must be exerted, and on this occasion it was clearly 
 necessary. There was a cruel assassination, not a merely isolated incident. 
 It was part and parcel of an agitation against the whole British, and 
 indeed I may say against the whole foreign community in Egypt. If it 
 had been allowed to go on, it would have spread with far more serious 
 results. The action of the British government has resulted in this: with¬ 
 out shedding a drop of blood, without wounding any one, without doing 
 any harm, we succeeded in changing the government of Egypt in such a 
 form that they are willing now to negotiate with us, ready for a permanent 
 settlement of the difficulties in Egypt. Therefore, in that respect, I 
 must say I believe the British government acted absolutely right. 
 
 18 
 
It is stated the action was so illegal that it ought to be referred to the 
 League of Nations. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a question one can’t 
 argue before a great meeting here, but I may say this, that in my opinion, 
 there is only one way in which it could come before the League of Nations 
 and that is if it were a war or threat of war, or if it threatened to disturb 
 international relations. 
 
 You cannot really say that an action on the part of the British govern¬ 
 ment that had actual rights in Egypt to restore order was either a war or 
 a threat of war. There might have been some circumstance which would 
 disturb international relationships, but then the League of Nations would 
 or would not take that into consideration as it might think well. And 
 in my opinion, I believe that the League of Nations should be very 
 cautious before it starts doing something which is really beyond the 
 immediate scope of its work (namely, to keep the peace between distinct 
 nations) by interfering in matters which are clearly of a domestic 
 concern. It is wiser for the League of Nations not to deal with this 
 matter. But at the same time, personally, I may give as my own 
 opinion this: I think the time has arrived when not only Great Britain 
 but all the nations of the world, should realize that in setting up an 
 institution like the League of Nations, they have established an organ 
 which has the right to be consulted in all these matters of international 
 concern, and therefore in a case such as this, when the permanent arrange¬ 
 ments between Egypt and England and, indeed, the rest of the world 
 have to be settled, I believe they can only be settled on a definite basis 
 by taking into consultation the League of Nations and the whole of the 
 world, or at any rate, the whole of those nations who form the members 
 of the League of Nations, and giving them an opportunity of discussing 
 and considering the matter. 
 
 I still hope that the British government may take this course. I see 
 nothing in their actions up to the present moment to preclude them from 
 doing so. If they do so, then I believe there will be an opportunity 
 of finding a permanent settlement, and the only thing in conclusion that 
 I will say is that if the League of Nations becomes, as I am sure it will 
 become, an organ for devising satisfactory arrangements for regulating 
 international relations, it is a thousand pities that among those who 
 will be able to give their counsel there is not the great American people 
 on this side of the water. (Applause.) 
 
 The Chairman: I am not going to give Dr. Gibbons a chance to 
 reply. I am afraid he would be almost too brilliant in his reply, but I 
 would like to have questions now addressed to any of the speakers, and 
 perhaps if you address one to Mr. Gibbons he may steal some time to 
 say a word or two in answer to Sir Willoughby. But I would rather have 
 questions; as you know we do, of course, have speeches occasionally from 
 the floor if they are especially good ones and especially brief ones. 
 
 Dr. Joseph Collins: Assuming that the Suez Canal is essential to 
 the life of the British Empire, would the British Empire be justified in 
 giving to the Egyptians the advice which Dr. Gibbons suggested that he 
 might give his son, knowing that perhaps that advice would not only 
 lead the son to destroy himself but even strangle the whole family? 
 
 Dr. Gibbons : In answer to that I would say simply this: in making 
 the statement that I made, I was arguing the whole general question. In 
 
 19 
 
a short speech of twenty-five minutes it is impossible for one to go into 
 all the details of a settlement that might be effected between Egypt and 
 Great Britain. 
 
 In the first place, I might say that we are unwarranted in supposing 
 that the granting of independence to Egypt would strangle the British 
 Empire. That has yet to be proven. 
 
 In the second place, all the schemes (even those of Zaghlul Pasha, 
 who did go, as I said, to extremes during the course of the last year 
 of his administration) have presupposed that Great Britain should have 
 the right to continue to guard the Suez Canal. There is a big difference 
 between the guarding of the Suez Canal—which wasn’t mentioned in the 
 ultimatum, as it was understood by the Egyptians as well as the English 
 —and the question of irrigation in the Gezira district of the Sudan. I 
 want to be perfectly clear here. I am afraid perhaps some of you may 
 have misunderstood my position. In the year 1916, when I had gone 
 to Egypt at the invitation of Sir John Maxwell who was Commander 
 of the British forces at that time, I worked very hard to get from the 
 Sultan of Egypt, and I did secure from him, an interview which was 
 of great usefulness in clearing up the situation at that time, in which 
 the Sultan said that it never had been in the minds of the Egyptian people 
 to contest the special position of Great Britain in Egypt. They don’t 
 contest it now, and they never would for one minute raise any obstacle, 
 and they have not raised any such obstacles, to Great Britain taking the 
 fullest measures possible for the protection of herself on the Suez Canal. 
 But it is a far cry from the Suez Canal and the protection of the Suez 
 Canal by a great power like Great Britain to the kind of a control that 
 Great Britain has exercised over Egypt in the past, and to the complete 
 fulfilment of all the demands that are made in the present ultimatum. 
 
 The Chairman: Both the question and the answer were the sort 
 I like—brief and to the point. 
 
 Mr. Bishara Nahas—Mr. Nahas is an Egyptian merchant. 
 
 Mr. Nahas : I asked to put a question. I know that usually ques¬ 
 tions are not answered in a debate, and I do not expect my questions 
 to be answered. I am going to take opportunity of what Mr. McDonald, 
 our Chairman, said, that we can have a short speech, if it is short. I 
 will try to make it very short. 
 
 When Sir Willoughby was speaking about the Irish woman who said, 
 “We can fight in peace,” it reminded me of an Arab proverb: “My 
 cousin and myself are enemies, but any enemy of my cousin is also 
 my enemy.” 
 
 That is a very old Arab proverb. 
 
 Adding to what Dr. Gibbons said about England saying that she has 
 always wanted to leave Egypt: I remember a few years ago I went 
 to see the barracks occupied by the English soldiers in Egypt near 
 Alexandria, and I was shown about by an English officer. I exclaimed, 
 “But there is no electric light here!” 
 
 With a twinkle in his eye he said, “You see we are here temporarily 
 and we intend to stay temporarily and miake no improvement in the 
 place.” 
 
 20 
 
That is how England is staying in Egypt. She is there temporarily 
 and does not intend to make any improvement. 
 
 My question is the following: What right has England to be in Egypt ? 
 We have to take always the principle of any question, not the facts 
 as they are forty or forty-two years after the occupation. Let’s go at 
 the bottom of it, at the beginning of it. What right today has England 
 to be in Egypt ? What right has any country to assume that another 
 country is totally unable to govern itself ? Is it for humanity’s sake 
 that Great Britain is in Egypt? For civilization’s sake? I say that 
 Egyptians are more civilized than any other country in the world, any 
 other nationality. They are a very old civilization, but as Dr. Gibbons 
 said, they are a different civilization, an Eastern civilization, which is 
 totally different from a Western civilization. 
 
 I contend also, is it unselfishness for England to remain there ? England 
 is not there unselfishly. No country goes into another country unselfishly. 
 Perhaps I might make an exception of what the United States has done 
 in Cuba. (Laughter.) I am not discussing that point now. The great 
 problem is the Suez Canal, which is the main link between England 
 and her colonies in India, as it was stated. 
 
 And then the second question: In whose name Lord Kitchener has 
 conquered the Sudan? When he went to the conquest of the Sudan in 
 1898, by whom was he appointed? By England? But whose governor 
 was he? Egypt’s. It was in the name of Egypt. We know that from 
 the declaration of Lord Kitchener himself; and the statements of Lord 
 Kimberly also later in the House of Parliament in London. They are 
 there to show us in whose name the Sudan was conquered, when the 
 English led the Egyptian troops to the conquest of the Sudan. Hicks 
 Pasha and Gordon Pasha failed first, but they were in the Sudan not 
 in the name of England, they were in the Sudan in the name of Egypt, 
 and they were paid by Egypt, too, adds Dr. Gibbons. 
 
 Therefore, my questions are twofold: First, by what right is England 
 in Egypt, and in whose name is England today in the Sudan ? (Applause.) 
 
 The Chairman: Well, this is a double-barreled question. I think 
 you all heard it. By what right is Britain in Egypt? In whose name 
 did Kitchener conquer the Sudan? 
 
 I was just discussing the answer with my friends to the right, and 
 I am going to ask Ambassador Morgenthau if he won’t answer a part 
 of this question, and if he doesn’t answer it adequately, perhaps one of 
 our British friends will complete the answer. 
 
 Honorable Henry Morgenthau : Ladies and gentlemen: I was 
 very much amused when I heard Professor Gibbons tell about his son. 
 The professor was kind enough to dedicate a book to me not long ago, 
 and in it he said he did so because he thought that through my experience 
 (I am not quoting the exact words) I was a little wiser than he. I have 
 a son and my son is benefiting by and adopting my experience. (Ap¬ 
 plause.) That is all I am going to say about this. You must draw the 
 inference. 
 
 Now, my friends, I have been in Egypt, and I found out, even as late 
 as 1914, that the aftermath of the methods and way Ismail lived and 
 conducted Egypt was still felt. He had put that country into bankruptcy. 
 The country, financially and economically was ruined by him. I met 
 
 21 
 
Abbas Hilmi, the Khedive of Egypt. I had a very interesting talk with 
 him in Cairo, and numerous talks with him when he afterwards occupied 
 his residence on the Bosphorus, which was directly opposite the American 
 summer embassy. All through those conversations, he never spoke with 
 any solicitude or consideration for his people. It was simply a selfish 
 attitude of the owner of a piece of property who wanted to know, and 
 calmly considered what would be to his personal advantage, whether to 
 continue to cooperate with the British or throw himself and his destinies 
 into the hands of the Turks. He decided cold-bloodedly that the Germans 
 were going to succeed in the war, and therefore he concluded to side 
 with the Turks and Germans. 
 
 Now, my friends, when we look at these people, we mustn’t think of 
 the few men who are at the head of the government. The Egyptian 
 people would not be benefited by having a monarch or a despot rule 
 over them. We want to look at the two lines of thougth at present 
 prevalent in this country. One of these is to hold aloof—remain isolated 
 —and the other that we should do as the British have done-—be the pilots, 
 the reorganizers of weak nations, help them. It is a wonderful oppor¬ 
 tunity. I have been fortunate enough to go to Greece, live there for a 
 while, and be able to help that historic country back to her feet. Mr. 
 Davis is sitting here in our midst. He went out and settled the Memel 
 dispute. We Americans ought to applaud and approve of Great Britain’s 
 attitude. We are not ready, nor is the League of Nations prepared, 
 to police the world, but Great Britain has gone into these various parts 
 of the globe and has spent her money and her men to bring about better 
 conditions. 
 
 Every one will admit that backward countries cannot have democracies 
 until they are trained to it. These men like Ismail Pasha or Abbas 
 Hilmi, or his brother, Mehemet Ali, whom I met, have no idea of giving 
 their people democracies. What is wanted in this great world is that 
 the intelligent peoples, the advanced countries, should help the others. 
 Now, it is all very nice to try and play upon that feeling that we all have, 
 that we should help the under-dog. You are not helping the under-dog 
 unless you really extricate him. (Applause.) Merely to say, “Let him 
 stay there; let him wallow in his own dirt; let him become diseased; 
 let him disappear” does not help him. I tell you that I know of my 
 personal knowledge that the British have helped Egypt and that the mass 
 of Egyptians who are not fanatically for self-determination are very 
 much in favor of having a protectorate, and I had the same experience 
 with the Turks. At one time the Turks wanted a protector. I was very 
 much astonished, though, when I asked them, “Suppose we don’t accept 
 a mandate, who would be your next choice?” I believe that there are not 
 ten people in this room who can guess their choice. They told me the 
 Japanese. I asked them why, and they said that they understood their 
 oriental thoughts and methods. 
 
 Now, my friends, all I want to say is that you may consider that 
 Great Britain may have made a mistake. She may have gone too far. 
 But I believe there are certain times when we must withhold our judg¬ 
 ment, when we don’t know all the facts. I think that Great Britain has 
 undertaken, as Kipling put it, “the white man’s burden,” and it doesn’t 
 behoove us Americans, as long as we are shirking doing our share, 
 to criticize Great Britain. (Applause.) 
 
 22 
 
The Chairman: Sir Willoughby said he would like to complete 
 Ambassador Morgenthau’s reply to those two questions which were 
 raised by our Egyptian friends, the one as to Britain’s right, and the 
 other as to in whose name Kitchener conquered the Sudan. 
 
 Sir Willoughby Dickinson: I think, Mr. Chairman, that people 
 really ought to understand quite clearly by what right Britain 
 is in Egypt and the Sudan. We are there by the right of agreement 
 with Egypt. Our officers, the British officers, are actually appointed by 
 the Egyptian government by agreement with the British. Sir Lee Stack 
 was appointed by the Egyptian government. General Hoskins was ap¬ 
 pointed by the Egyptian government. It has been hitherto an arrange¬ 
 ment for the benefit of both parties, accepted by both parties, and now 
 that it appears that the Egyptian nation is no longer in favor of that 
 agreement, the British government has, as I have pointed out to you, 
 announced its intention of handing over the independence to Egypt upon 
 certain definite conditions. Therefore that is the real answer with re¬ 
 gard to Egypt. With regard to the Sudan, as General Hoskins has said, 
 the Sudan was never under Egypt. It was conquered by the British 
 officers with the assistance of the Egyptian troops, and since that time, 
 it has been administered again in agreement with the Egyptian govern¬ 
 ment, under a process which is called the condominium. So that changes 
 the situation altogether, and although the situation may change at any 
 time, it hasn’t definitely changed, but may have to be changed, as I 
 have pointed out, with the joint consent of the Egyptians and the British 
 government. 
 
 Mr. V. Everit Macy: I understand that the question of the Sudan 
 is one of the important points dividing England and Egypt. I would 
 like to ask Professor Gibbons whether he thinks the Sudanese, who I 
 think number something over seven millions, and occupy a territory as 
 large as the United States east of the Mississippi, would be better under 
 the Egyptian government, with possibly some wild oats, or under the 
 English administration. I haven’t heard any discussion of the self-de¬ 
 termination of the Sudanese as yet. 
 
 Dr. Gibbons: In what I said I think I made very clear that I never 
 believed for one minute that the Egyptian government would immediately 
 or within a very short time—perhaps it might take a very long time— 
 rule themselves as well and as effectively as the British are able to rule 
 them with centuries behind them of training and education. I have been 
 in the Sudan, where I was the guest of Sir Reginald Wingate in Khartum, 
 and have gone over the whole situation with Sir Lee Stack, who at that 
 time was associated with Sir Reginald Wingate in the administration of 
 the Sudan. I have also had the very great privilege of going to Omdur- 
 man as one of thirty Europeans absolutely without arms on the night 
 of the birthday of the Prophet and being absolutely safe and feeling 
 safe there in old Omdurman where the Mahdi’s power had been broken. 
 I have always, in everything that I have written and everything that I 
 have said, paid the very fullest tribute to the British administration. 
 I have seen a great deal of it, I have lived under it, and have been with 
 these men, and have generally been their guests everywhere I have gone, 
 and I have the very fullest admiration for their administration. I 
 wouldn’t for one minute think that the Egyptians could administer the 
 
 23 
 
Sudan now better than the English. However, there is this to be said: 
 it is a thing to be remembered, and I think it is one of the things that 
 divides us in this question as a sort of unbridgeable gulf. (It is 
 manifest in what Mr. Morgenthau has said in his answer in regard 
 to the situation.) It is the old argument of racial superiority that has 
 been given here ever since the beginning of this talk, as to whether these 
 people would be better off and what kind of man their sovereign was 
 and all that sort of thing. I admit their radical difference from us— 
 and the difference between their civilization, their ideals, if you wish— 
 and ours. What I said is that these people have, as our Egyptian friend 
 has pointed out in what he has said, a civilization that is not necessarily 
 inferior to ours because it is different from ours . They may be happier 
 and more prosperous and like to live in their way better than in our way. 
 Now if we are going to make an Occidental country of the Sudan, by 
 all means if we are going to Occidentalize the world—Anglo-Saxonize 
 the world—let’s not only stay there, but increase our troops and increase 
 our personnel and run the country according to our western methods. 
 They have their eastern methods. They believe that they are civilized. 
 We don’t think that they are. After all, in the final analysis, the question 
 boils down to this—it isn’t our country, and it is their country. 
 
 Mr. Macy: I don’t think Professor Gibbons quite answered my ques¬ 
 tion. 
 
 My question was if the Sudanese are to be ruled by somebody (he 
 says they are to be ruled by Egypt) have they expressed their desire 
 to be ruled by Egypt, and does he think Egypt would rule them better 
 than England. That was my question which he has not answered yet. 
 
 The Chairman : Mr. Macy has an impression, justifiable or otherwise, 
 that Dr. Gibbons didn’t answer the Sudanese part of the question. 
 
 Dr. Gibbons: I shall be glad to answer that. We have to realize in 
 regard to these peoples out there that nationalism doesn’t mean the same 
 thing to them that it means to us. Remember that the people of Sudan 
 are people who have the same religion as the Egyptians. Wherever you 
 go in the East, if you see these people you are impressed with the fact 
 that their nationalist movement is at the same time a cultural movement, 
 as all nationalist movements have been. I would say without hesitation 
 that those who live in the Sudan who are educated, the educated men of 
 the Sudan, the heads of the tribes and all the people who are lettered, 
 their clergy and so on, do not desire the separation from Egypt. On the 
 contrary they have great dreams of what is going to happen to the future 
 of Islam culturally if the contact with Egypt is maintained. 
 
 I beg to submit that I did answer the part of Mr. Macy’s question about 
 whether they would be better governed by the English than by the 
 Egyptians. They would be better governed by the English than by the 
 Egyptians, most decidedly. A person who tried to answer that question 
 in any other way would be foolish. I have never inferred, in anything 
 I said this afternoon, that I thought they would be better off in a material 
 way under Egyptian than English rule. The point is that there is a 
 feeling of solidarity—a very strong feeling of solidarity—among the 
 Islamic peoples today. Are they going to be allowed an opportunity for 
 the development of their peculiar civilization and for the fitting of them¬ 
 selves into the scheme of things in the twentieth century world, or are 
 
 24 
 
they going to continue to be separated and governed and ruled by elder 
 brothers of Occidental civilization? If we adopt the latter scheme, 
 in a material way (as we understand material blessings) they may con¬ 
 tinue to be better off under British rule than under their own, but it 
 requires and will require as long as you and I are alive, large bodies of 
 troops and occasionally repressive measures, if we are going to check 
 their aspiration to rule themselves. 
 
 I think I have tried to answer this question clearly. The Sudan contains 
 tribes of various sorts and various kinds, but most of them do belong to 
 Islam, actually or potentially. They are Mohammedans, if only in the 
 making and their Islamic faith is the greatest thing in the world to them— 
 especially to the neophytes. They look upon the Egyptians as brothers 
 because the Egyptians are also of the Islamic faith and their nationalism 
 is more understandable to the Sudanese than our nationalism, or than our 
 political institutions and system of justice. In a large part as they 
 become educated they learn to speak the same language, and there is 
 a cultural basis for the nationalist movement among the Islamic peoples 
 that we would be very foolish to ignore when we consider the problem 
 of how we are going to deal with them in the future. (Applause.) 
 
 The Chairman: Now there is somebody in my immediate neigh¬ 
 borhood who said that most of the latter part of Dr. Gibbons’ talk 
 just now was inaccurate, and I am wondering whether she would agree 
 to say so publicly. 
 
 Mrs. Marguerite Harrison : I have just returned from a trip to 
 the East, and I have found everywhere that I have been in Turkey, 
 Persia and Arabia that Islamic solidarity no longer exists. Dr. Gibbons, 
 it is a myth, nationalism to a large extent has taken its place. Don’t 
 you believe that the antagonism between the Sudanese and the Egyptians 
 is such, racially and otherwise, that the Sudanese, who as you admit 
 will have to be ruled by somebody, would prefer to be ruled by Great 
 Britain rather than be ruled by the Egyptians? Personally I think 
 so. I would like to ask your opinion. I would also like to have 
 you state if you think there is any evidence of Islamic solidarity in the 
 action of Ib’n Saud, leader of the Wahabis, a Mohammedan sect, who 
 took Mecca recently and drove out Husein of Hedjaz, Khalif and Sherif 
 of Mecca. 
 
 The Chairman: Mrs. Marguerite Harrison whom many of us know, 
 and who has just returned from the Near East, asks Dr. Gibbons whether 
 he hasn’t overstressed the solidarity of Islam and whether nationalism is 
 not cutting across it, and whether therefore the national feeling of the 
 Sudanese and their hatred on various grounds of the Egyptians would 
 not be greater than their feeling of a common bond of religion. She 
 would like to have Dr. Gibbons’ opinion of that. 
 
 Dr. Gibbons: I have never believed in the solidarity of Islam in the 
 sense that it has been so often written of by a great many political 
 writers, that is, as a bugaboo for European diplomacy and extra-European 
 expansion. I have pointed that out clearly and frequently in all I have 
 written. The question I speak of is something different. Solidarity 
 in Islam, that Islamic peoples should consider one another as brothers, 
 is no more natural than that all the Christian peoples should consider 
 one another as brothers. There was no solidarity of Christendom when 
 
 25 
 
they said naughty things about the Germans and the Germans said just 
 as naughty things about us. There is no solidarity of Islam in that 
 sense, there couldn’t be, it isn’t in the nature of human relations. What 
 I say is simply this, that the cultural bonds that unite the Islamic peoples 
 today in their state of what I might call embryonic nationalism, because 
 it has hardly attained to more than that, is a factor that we have to 
 reckon with in regard to the future and it is also a fact that must be 
 reckoned with among peoples, a large majority of whom are unlettered. 
 The influence of their leaders is very strong upon them. 
 
 As to the illustration that Mrs. Harrison gives, the revolutions and 
 civil strife among these people, they do fight among themselves. All 
 races and creeds do. But let us remember this, that as we look at the 
 map of the world today, in all these nascent movements toward national¬ 
 ism in Islamic countries, there is a common bond that unites them. 
 Nationalism hasn’t cut across the great fact that they are all of them 
 under the control of, and they all of them believe that they are being 
 exploited by the nations of Europe. Whether they are or not, they 
 believe it and the thing a person thinks is the thing that really counts. 
 Occidental civilization, as expressed in the Near East and in Africa, by 
 holding these people in tutelage, is growing increasingly hateful. The 
 moment they try to break their bonds, there is a common solidarity 
 in the common struggle against European lordship and the pretension to 
 domination of so-called Christian civilization. 
 
 It is a solidarity not so much of Islam as the fact that all these Islamic 
 lands, one after another, side by side, are under the control of European 
 nations, and most of them under the control of Great Britain. Even 
 Saud in his present revolt, of which Mrs. Harrison spoke, contrary 
 to being an argument on her side is an argument just the opposite. It 
 is because the Sherif Husein of Mecca, elevated there as king by 
 European diplomacy, was thought to be a tool of the British Imperial 
 aims that the Wahabis took the action that they have against him. 
 Students of Islamic countries realize that. We can cite also the revolt 
 of the Sudanese battalion in the Sudan, which is symptomatic. I have 
 talked 'to a good many of these Sudanese. I would say this about the 
 people of Sudan, that they are near the possibility of rapprochement 
 with Egypt in the future—it won’t come right away. None of these 
 things come right away. We can’t expect these people to form a solid 
 nationality or to work out their destiny in the way that we would approve 
 in a few years, any more than we could have expected the English and 
 Scotch to get together in a few years. They, too, will have to have 
 centuries of border raids before they finally agree to come together and 
 to form a common nation. 
 
 This Sudanese battalion revolt is an illustration of the beginning of a 
 movement of solidarity among these people. I think that if you would 
 take the opinion of the Sudanese today, it would be against breaking the 
 present system that controls them, that is the condominium of England 
 and Egypt. They are not ready to fall on the necks of the Egyptians— 
 I wouldn’t say that—but at the same time they don’t want to be separated 
 completely from Egypt and have a border across which there can be no 
 communications, because if that were done, it would break one of the 
 great hopes that the Islamic peoples have today of arriving by cultural 
 
 26 
 
improvement at a future solidarity that perhaps might be called more 
 cultural than purely political. Of course they will continue to fight 
 among themselves, and I don’t believe in the Pan-Islamic movement and 
 never have, but I think that the seeds of nationalism there, viewing the 
 fact that the Sudan and Egypt are side by side, could possibly and might 
 in the course of a generation or two work out to the improvement and 
 betterment both of the Egyptian and Sudanese people. 
 
 In Czecho-Slovakia right today you have an illustration of what I 
 mean. Take the Slovaks at the Peace Conference. If the argument had 
 been brought up at that time, that the Slovaks should have a plebiscite 
 to decide whether they wanted to be ruled over by the Czechs, they 
 would have voted against it, a great many of them; but it is the hope 
 of the Czecho-Slovak state that these people will come together in the 
 course of time. 
 
 The Chairman: I am a little embarrassed. We have twelve minutes 
 more at the outside. I have a most interesting letter here from a very 
 distinguished scholar, who puts an interesting point of view, and I have 
 suggestions from two or three interesting persons who might speak for 
 a couple of minutes each. Perhaps I might read this letter first. 
 
 This is a letter—Dr. Gibbons told me to say that both he and General 
 Hoskins agree with this letter, and the General qualifies it a little by 
 saying in general he agrees with it—from Captain William Yale, who 
 was for six years in the Near East, and a special agent of the State 
 Department, was associated with the Near Eastern Division of the Peace 
 Conference, was two years in business in Cairo and at Port Said. He 
 says: 
 
 “Our topic for discussion this afternoon, British Policy in Egypt, 
 has been overshadowed by a greater and broader question, imperialism 
 versus nationalism. The British policy in Egypt past and present, is a 
 very definite and tangible subject, one which is well worth the careful 
 study of all of us who are interested in statecraft. It throws a searching 
 light on British ideals, British mentality and British policies, as well as 
 giving us a glimpse of oriental methods and ideas. But our discussion 
 of imperialism versus nationalism leads to little more than an occasion 
 for British repartee. 
 
 “The British Empire today like the rest of the political world is in a 
 state of flux. To such a degree is this true that it is difficult to say 
 whether or not the British policy in Egypt is or is not a manifestation 
 of imperialism'. Certainly the Egyptian problem is for Great Britain 
 an imperial problem and in consequence her policy in Egypt is of necessity 
 one which takes into consideration the problems of the Empire as a 
 whole. 
 
 “One of these considerations is the security of the Empire’s line of 
 communication. It is self-evident that the life of the British Empire 
 depends absolutely upon a secure control of the Straits of Gibraltar and 
 the Suez Canal, and it is perfectly clear that Great Britain will and 
 must follow a policy in Egypt calculated to give her this control until 
 such time as an international organization will develop with such supreme 
 powers as to adequately protect these lines of communication. Such a 
 time is in the far distance as long as Russia, Germany and the United 
 States remain outside the League of Nations. The existence of Egypt 
 
 27 
 
is one thing. The security of the British Empire is quite another. The 
 British Empire is a political factor of world-wide importance, and I 
 believe that there are few in this gathering who would care to see this 
 great world force for law and order jeopardized by the so-called national¬ 
 ism of 14,000,000 Egyptians. (Applause.) 
 
 “This so-called Egyptian nationalism, is it nationalism or is it something 
 else? Certainly the claim of the Egyptian nationalist to the Sudan has 
 as much relation to nationalism as would a demand by us to annex Canada. 
 It is stark imperialism, but why? There is beneath this demand of the 
 Egyptians for the Sudan something other than a fear lest the water of 
 the Nile be withheld from the fields of Egypt. This something else 
 is something of very great importance, it is nothing less than the struggle 
 for Africa. 
 
 “Ladies and gentlemen, there is a struggle going on in Africa today of 
 vast importance to us of the Western World. Its outcome we cannot 
 foresee, but its significance we should not fail to grasp. It is not so 
 much a territorial struggle to see who shall possess Africa, for the 
 Islamic and Oriental powers are far from strong enough to wage such 
 a struggle, but it is a struggle to determine whether Oriental or Western 
 culture shall predominate in Africa. Already in Kenia, British East 
 Africa, the Indians have made their demands of the British, while for 
 a number of years the inner councils of Islam have been pressing the 
 penetration of Central Africa. Encompassed by Christian powers, the 
 Moslems have realized sooner than we have that their only chance of 
 expansion lies among the blacks of Central Africa, and the key to Central 
 Africa is the Sudan. 
 
 “The Egyptian people were offered by the British declaration of 1922 
 a fairly liberal charter upon which to build an independent national state, 
 but the extremist leaders preferred to make their foundation on their 
 own form of religious imperialism, for the unfettered control of the 
 Sudan by the Egyptians would have given Islam a new and stronger 
 foothold in Africa. But then it must be remembered that in Egypt 
 nationalism is gauged by the forces of religious enthusiasm upon which 
 it depends. There is no distinctive Egyptian culture. The arts, the 
 language, the literature and the ideals are those of Islam, and so the 
 nationalism of Egypt is mostly the nationalism of Islam. Thus, the 
 struggle in Egypt is incorrectly described as a struggle between imperial¬ 
 ism and nationalism. It is rather a struggle between the cultural im¬ 
 perialism of Islam and the commercial and political imperialism of the 
 Western World.” (Applause.) 
 
 Now having read that, I am going to give two members of the Islam 
 world a chance with two minutes each to say what they think about it. 
 If Mr. Hossain will come up here and say in two minutes what he 
 thinks about the cultural imperialism of Islam, we will be glad to give 
 it to him. Mr. Hossain, many of you know, a scholar and a friend 
 from India whom we are always glad to welcome! (Applause.) 
 
 Mr. Syud Hossain : Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: In the 
 two minutes allotted to me, I should first like to occupy myself with an 
 affirmation of principle. It seems to me very important that in these 
 discussions too much detail and special pleading for or against any propo¬ 
 sition should not be allowed entirely to obscure the fundamental principles 
 
 28 
 
involved. I should like, as a representative of the East, to put before 
 you this simple affirmation. The points of view to which expression 
 have been given by three distinguished speakers to the right of the 
 Chairman are points of view, in so far as they apply to principles, which 
 are utterly repudiated by the East. 
 
 Mr. Morgenthau’s notion of the needs of the under-dog and the 
 paternal beneficence which the under-dog in the East has always had 
 at the hands of the paternal governments of the West, is a point of 
 view which perhaps will find very little endorsement from any under¬ 
 dogs anywhere. 
 
 The usefulness of these discussions for which the Foreign Policy 
 Association has earned a well-merited reputation, lies in the fact that 
 we are all of us today in the world groping in our respective ways for 
 peace. In this country more particularly one of the most universal and 
 one of the most laudable aspirations today is an aspiration to achieve 
 an enduring and just peace in the world. (Applause.) 
 
 It is precisely against this background of the need for world peace 
 that these questions have to be considered. You have got, ladies and 
 gentlemen, in this country, to realize that this whole assumption that the 
 West has any kind of a providential duty laid upon it to go and grab the 
 East and force its own ideas of life upon the East, is fundamentally 
 fallacious. It has already involved the world in colossal slaughter and 
 immeasurable suffering. According to the statistics issued by your State 
 Department in the last great war, 10,000,0(30 young men, belonging to 
 all the nations of the world, to your nation and my nation and other 
 nations, were offered up as a sacrifice at the altar of European imperial¬ 
 ism. Do you want that kind of thing to go on? Is the only possible 
 condition for us different nations and peoples in the world to live, that 
 we should periodically engage in fratricidal slaughter? The moral 
 foundation that the West has in the East is nil. The only basis for 
 domination of the East is that the West has been able to harness the 
 destructive powers of modern science to the business of imperialism. It 
 has no moral foundation. 
 
 I should just like to close with an attempt at an answer to the question 
 that was put from this table by Mr. Nahas, a question which, as Mr. 
 Nahas himself anticipated, was not answered. He asked what was the 
 justification of the British being in Egypt and he asked in whose name 
 they were in Egypt. I think the answer to that question, curiously enough, 
 may perhaps be best given in the words of an American. 
 
 It happened that Mark Twain was in England at the time of Queen 
 Victoria’s Jubilee when great celebrations were going on, great jollifica¬ 
 tion and all the rest. Mark Twain being a simple American democrat 
 was rather impressed and even puzzled by these demonstrations, so he 
 gave a little thought to the matter and in his journal he wrote. These 
 are the words taken from his journal: 
 
 “Victoria rules over one-fourth of the habitable area of the globe. 
 Victoria rules over one-fifth of the population of the world, which reminds 
 me that the British are mentioned in the Bible: ‘Blessed are the meek, 
 for they shall inherit the earth’.” 
 
 So the answer to Mr. Nahas is that it is this quality of invincible 
 meekness that has installed the British in Egypt. (Applause.) 
 
 29 
 
The Chairman: I think I have changed my mind. I won’t call 
 on the other Easterner. The time is up, except that I have told Sir 
 Willoughby or General Hoskins that I would be glad if either of them 
 would care to close the discussion, in a very few minutes, and when 
 I do this, I apologize to my other friend from the East and three or 
 four other people whom I would have asked to speak if we had had time. 
 
 (There were calls from the audience to hear the Easterner.) 
 
 The other Easterner that I was going to call on is an old friend 
 of ours, Mufty-Zade Iv. Zia Bey, a Turk who has spoken for us before 
 (Applause.) 
 
 Mufty-Zade K. Zia Bey: I don’t want to take even two minutes of 
 your valuable time. I am glad, however, of this opportunity to say a 
 few words, because I wouldn’t want to leave this meeting with the im¬ 
 pression that the majority of the Turks, or even any amount of Turks 
 that really would count, would ask or desire any control either by 
 Britain or Japan. There might have been, undoubtedly there were some 
 people who expressed that opinion to Mr. Morgenthau, but unfortunately 
 there might be traitors in any country, so those were counted amongst 
 them. The fact that the majority of Turks did not want any such control 
 has been best answered, I think, on the plains of Anatolia. 
 
 I want also just to put a question into your minds that I would like 
 you to study and give it an answer by yourselves. When we hear about 
 the white man’s burden, if we think of the situation, prosperity, education, 
 art, knowledge of science and so forth, of the East long before the 
 Westerners considered their burden to help the East, we probably would 
 start to wonder if really the Western man, the white man, has a burden, 
 or is a burden. (Laughter.) 
 
 The Chairman: As a Westerner, I am almost glad there aren’t any 
 more of these Easterners around. General Hoskins will close the discus¬ 
 sion in three or four minutes. 
 
 General Hoskins: I shan’t take up any time, ladies and gentlemen. 
 We have learned something from every speaker. From many of them 
 I have learned a great deal, things that we all should know, what are 
 in other people’s minds and they have been frank enough (laughter), but 
 what I would say, just by way of closing is, let us beware of theorizing. 
 Remember the man that has to do the job practically. Let us beware 
 of words like imperialism. There is good imperialism and there is bad. 
 All those sort of catch words and catch phrases can trip us up; we 
 have to get down really further than that sort of thing. I believe that 
 out of this is going to come in Egypt a moderate party, and that is the 
 great hope, and if that moderate party of nationalists comes, we shall 
 very soon arrive at a conclusion with them which will be the beginning 
 of England getting out of Egypt. As for the Sudan, we didn’t hear much 
 about the self-determination of the Sudanese. Just picture it and re¬ 
 member the Arabs would get the better of the Sudanese at once. We 
 should go back to the slave trade. Does America want that? (Applause.) 
 
 [The Meeting Adjourned at 4 o’clock] 
 
 30 
 
EGYPT AND THE SUDAN 
 
 From “Egypt, The Sudan and The Nile”, by Judge Pierre Crabites, in Foreign Affairs, 
 New York, December 15, 1924. 
 
 The AngloEgyptian Sudan with an area in round numbers of 
 950,000 square miles, is approximately as large as the United States 
 east of the Mississippi river. It equals the combined areas ot 
 
 France, the British Isles, Italy, Spain, Norway and Germany. 
 
 31 
 
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