We have now passed the boundary of the first century of our existence as an independent nation. We are as a people engaged in a confused struggle with the problem of our own national self-consciousness. We want to know what is the spirit that is in us as a nation. We must know this in order to be properly master of ourselves and of our destiny. We must know this in order to know our place in universal history.—George S. Morris.
ENGLAND AND ISLAM.
BY PRESIDENT D. H. WHEELER, D.D., LL.D.
Within two years there have been three prophets in Egypt. Arabi Pasha is in exile; Chinese Gordon is dead; El Mahdi, the mysterious voice in the Soudan wilderness, mutters his prayers in the mosque of Khartoum. England bombarded Alexandria; Arab loss in dead perhaps 5,000. Then England fought and conquered Arabi in the open field, captured him, and sent him into exile; Arab loss in dead perhaps 7,000. Next there is trouble on the Red Sea, and another English army killed perhaps 9,000 Arabs. And last a battle or series of battles in the heart of the Soudan; Arab loss in dead perhaps 12,000. Probably not less than 30,000 have been slaughtered by Englishmen in less than two years. English loss, a few hundreds. The butchers have been liberally rewarded; one soldier has become a “lord;” promotions and extra pay and pensions have fallen in a silvery shower on “our brave fellows” in Egypt. Only one Englishman got nothing. He disappeared one day in the desert, and his dromedary was said to carry the destiny of England; and perhaps it did. He was a soldier seeking peace at the meeting place of the Niles. Chinese Gordon entered Khartoum in triumph, and almost at once there rose a cry: “We must rescue Gordon.” Then came the long delayed march of an army in search of the English prophet at Khartoum; then the butcheries, called battles of Metemneh, and what not. And then in the last days of January there was a slaughter, not this time by Englishmen in person, and perhaps 5,000 more Moslems perish by Moslem steel in the sack of Khartoum. Then a wail rises on every breeze in Christendom; “Alas! alas! Gordon is dead!” The story of his death is a parable: “Stabbed in the back while leaving his house.” Make the “house” stand for England, and the knives that pierced him the indecisions, tergiversations, and infidelities of an English ministry with a great Christian statesman at its head. The world has supped full of the horrors of that kind of Christian statesmanship. We have believed in it; we have hoped that it meant something, even in those bloody Egyptian campaigns.
We are nearly at the end of our confidence. It is not merely the shade of Disraeli which calls mockingly for explanations; the world that believed in Gladstone when Disraeli was playing at fantastic military statesmanship, wants to know why Christian statesmanship in Egypt has, in a short time, spilt almost as much blood as was shed by one army in that American conflict which Mr. Gladstone thought so cruel and so useless. We can not even condone Mr. Gladstone’s offense against civilization by saying that it has been a less bloody assault on humanitarian ideas and plans than Disraeli’s was; for Gladstone has butchered twenty men to Disraeli’s one. There has, in fact, been nothing so bloody in this century—I mean no such large butchery by a small army. Ten years of such statesmanship would fill the Nile valley with human bones. It is high time to call for a full explanation. What does Mr. Gladstone mean? What does he expect to accomplish? If he has intended something exalted and noble, which we should wish to believe, it is time to say so with the breadth of statement and accuracy of detail by which he obtained renown. The personal question stands at the front, because England is governed by one man. It is a happiness of Englishmen that they are able to know whom to blame when things go wrong. Mr. Gladstone is the head of a government for whose acts and failures to act he is perfectly responsible. What England does in Egypt Gladstone does. It is the one governmental luxury of the English people—they know exactly who governs them. Mr. Gladstone has not been compelled to do this or that by parties or circumstances. If he turns butcher in the Delta, on the Nile, or on the Red Sea, he alone does it, and he does it because he chooses to do it. For, at any moment, he can shift disagreeable duties to another; three lines in the form of a resignation will relieve him of the burden of responsible government. So long as he remains at the head of the English ministry he is the man who shoots down Arabs by the thousand. In this country politicians have divided, dispersed and destroyed responsibility to such an extent that the people know not whom to blame for evil events. It is a devil’s art, from whose manipulations England has by some special favor of heaven escaped. There the ghosts of murdered men and things can “shake” their “gory locks” at the Prime Minister; and he may not reply:
“Thou canst not say I did it.”