The Rulers of the Mediterranean

by Richard Harding Davis

AN EGYPTIAN LANCER

But although this was the first important and most official recognition of the right of the stranger to dictate to Egypt, he had already obtained peculiar rights in Egypt through capitulations, or those privileges granted in the past to foreign residents in Turkey and its dependent state of Egypt. In the sixteenth century the foreigners who traded in these Oriental countries stood in actual need of protection from the natives. Because they were foreigners they were regarded with such lack of consideration that, in order to balance the disadvantages of having their shops destroyed and their throats cut, the Sultan gave them certain privileges—such as immunity from taxation, immunity from arrest, the inviolability of domicile, and the exemption from the jurisdiction of the local courts.

These privileges were unimportant when the foreign element in Constantinople was so little and so weak that the position of the Chinamen in San Francisco in '49 was that of a powerful aristocracy in comparison; but the snake warmed at the hearth-stone grew, and the Sultan's empire dwindled, and the privileges which were given to bribe the foreigner to come and to remain became a bane to Turkey and a curse to the weaker state of Egypt. The inviolability of domicile, for instance, is at this very day made use of by foreigners who are carrying on some wickedness or who have committed a crime for which they cannot be arrested by an Egyptian policeman unless he is accompanied by an official representative of the country to which the foreigner belongs. Let us suppose, for example, that the police of New York wished to raid a gambling-house. This, I know, is asking a good deal of the reader's intelligence, but we will suppose it to be a gambling-house which has not paid its assessment to the police regularly, and which should be given a lesson. All that the proprietor of the house would have to do, did capitulations extend in New York, would be to lease the house to an Italian, or to take out papers of naturalization from the British government. You can imagine the chagrin of an officer of the law who, when he goes to make an arrest, is confronted with a German who says he is an Englishman, and whose domicile is accordingly sacred. This, as you can imagine, would impede the wheels of justice.

When I was in Cairo a Greek, who had taken out papers as an American citizen, flaunted this fact in the faces of the native police whenever they came to arrest him for keeping a gambling-house. They applied to our consul-general, Mr. E. C. Little, of Abilene, Kansas, who so far differed from the etiquette observed by some other consuls-general in Cairo as not to delay and not to warn the criminal. He sent his soldiers to be present at the arrest. The offender met this by bringing forth another American citizen of Greek parentage, to whom he claimed to have leased the house, and whose family were inside. Mr. Little, feeling that the American flag did not look well as a cloak for gambling-houses, and being a young man who has assisted at county-seat fights and who can pitch three curves, said that if the roulette tables were not out of the house in twenty-four hours he would himself break them into kindling-wood with an axe. This incident shows how the capitulations of the sixteenth century are acting as stumbling-blocks to the Egyptian of to-day, even when the consuls-general are willing to assist the native government, which is seldom.

TIGRANE PASHA,
Minister of Foreign Affairs

This is not all. The immunity from full taxation, now that the foreigners are among the richest inhabitants of Cairo, is most manifestly unjust; and though the mixed courts of an international judiciary have done away with trial of the foreign resident, or lack of trial, in civil cases, by the several consuls-general, the abuses of the capitulations are still a grievous and most unjust imposition by the great powers, ourselves included, upon a weaker one. To return to the Dual Control and to the story of the growth of the foreigners' hold on Egypt. The Dual Control was unpopular; so was the foreigner and his capitulations, who, waxing fat on the weaknesses of the country after Ismail's debauchery of its strength, grew insolent—so insolent that the cry raised by a general in the Khedive's army of "Egypt for the Egyptians" was taken up, and found expression in the Arabist movement or rebellion. Its leader was Arabi Pasha. He wanted what the Know-Nothing party of America wanted—his country for his countrymen. What else he wanted for himself does not matter here. He was, in the eyes of the Khedive, a rebel. In the eyes of some of the people he was the would-be preserver of his country against the plague of the foreign invasion.

The trouble began at Alexandria, where the excited people attacked the foreign residents, killing some, and destroying valuable property. Men-of-war of the two powers represented in the Dual Control had already arrived to put down the rebellion. When the riot on shore was at its height, the English war-vessels bombarded the city. The bombarding of Alexandria was war, but it was not magnificent. There are certain things made to be bombarded—forts and ships of war—but cities are not built for that purpose or with that ultimate end in view. The English people, as a people, however, regret the bombardment of Alexandria as much as any one. The French war-vessels, for their part, refused to join the bombardment, and so were requested by the English admiral to sail away and give the other half of the Dual Control a clear field. Different people give you different reasons for the departure of the French fleet at this crisis. Some say that M. Clemenceau, who hated M. Freycinet and his policy, possibly raised the cry of the German wolf on the frontier, and pointed out the danger at home if the army and navy were engaged otherwise than in protecting the border. Others say that, like the good one of the two robbers in the Babes in the Wood, one of the Dual Control drew the line at murder or at the bombardment of a country she was supposed to protect. Plundering the Egyptians was possible, but not bombarding their city. They stopped at that. The English followed up the bombardment of Alexandria by the battle of Tel-el-Kebir, which ended the rebellion. The Citadel of Cairo surrendered at their approach, and the Khedive's rule was again undisturbed. The English remained, however, to "restore order," and to see to the "organization of proper means for the maintenance of the Khedive's authority." They have been doing that now for ten years, and it is interesting to note that they have made so little progress that the last "disorder" in Cairo was due to the action of the British consul-general himself in allowing the young Khedive just twenty-four hours in which to dismiss one of his cabinet. This can hardly be described as "maintaining the authority of the Khedive," which the English had promised to do.