In May of the next year, 1899, the one hundredth anniversary of the establishment of savings banks in Great Britain was celebrated. Near the closing year of the eighteenth century, 1799, Reverend Joseph Smith, Vicar of Wendover in Buckinghamshire, invited the laborers of his parish to deposit their savings with him on interest. "Upon the first day of the week," said he, quoting St. Paul's injuction, "let every one of you lay by him in store."[1] He offered to receive sums as small as twopence. Before the end of the year he had sixty depositors. Eventually the government took up the scheme and established the present system of national postal savings banks.
[1] The quotation is from I Corinthians xvi, 2.
They have done and are doing incalculable good. At present there are over eleven million depositors in the United Kingdom. Most of them belong to the wage-earning class, and they hold more than 212,000,000 pounds. In this case certainly the grain of mustard seed, sown a few generations ago, has produced a mighty harvest.
622. England in Egypt; Progress in Africa.
While busy at home, the English had been busy outside of their island. Five years after the opening of the Suez Canal (1869), Lord Beaconsfield, then the Conservative Prime Minister, bought nearly half of the canal property from the Governor of Egypt. Since then England has kept her hand on the country of the Pharaohs and the pyramids, and kept it there greatly to the advantage of the laboring class.
About ten years later (1881), Arabi Pasha, an ambitious colonel in the native army, raised the cry, "Down with all foreigners—Egypt for the Egyptians!" Lord Wolseley defeated Arabi's forces, and the colonel was banished from the country.
Two years afterwards (1883) a still more formidable rebellion broke out in the Sudan,—a province held by Egypt. (See map facing p. 428.) The leader of the insurrection styled himself the Mahdi, or great Mohammedan Prophet. Then (1884) Gladstone sent General Gordon to withdraw the Egyptian troops from Khartoum, the capital of the Sudan. The Mahdi's forces shut up the heroic soldier in that city, and before help could reach him, he and all his Egyptian troops were massacred. No braver or truer man ever died at the post of duty, for in him was fulfilled Wordsworth's eloquent tribute to the "Happy Warrior."[1]
[1] See Wordsworth's poems "The Happy Warrior."
Many years later, Lord Kitchener advanced against the new Mahdi, and at Omdurman his terrible machine guns scattered the fanatical Dervishes, or Mohammedan monks, like chaff before the whirlwind. The next autumn (1899) the British overtook the fugitive leader of the Dervishes and annihilated his army.
Since then British enterprise, British capital, and American inventive skill have transformed Egypt. The completion of the great dam across the Nile, at Assouan (1902), regulates the water supply for lower Egypt. The creation of this enormous reservoir promises to make the Nile valley one of the richest cotton-producing regions in the world.