Whether, indeed, dependencies pay or do not pay their actual cost, their retention stands on a wholly different footing from that of colonies. Were we to leave Australia or the Cape, we should continue to be the chief customers of those countries: were we to leave India or Ceylon, they would have no customers at all; for, falling into anarchy, they would cease at once to export their goods to us and to consume our manufactures. When a British Governor of New Zealand wrote that of every Maori who fell in war with us it might be said that, “from his ignorance, a man had been destroyed whom a few months’ enlightenment would have rendered a valuable consumer of British manufactured goods,” he only set forth with grotesque simplicity considerations which weigh with us all; but while the advance of trade may continue to be our chief excuse, it need not be our sole excuse for our Eastern dealings—even for use toward ourselves. Without repeating that which I have said with respect to India, we may especially bear in mind that, although the theory has suffered from exaggeration, our dependencies still form a nursery of statesmen and of warriors, and that we should irresistibly fall into national sluggishness of thought, were it not for the world-wide interests given us by the necessity of governing and educating the inhabitants of so vast an empire as our own.
One of the last of our annexations was close upon our bow as we passed on our way from Aden up the Red Sea. The French are always angry when we seize on places in the East, but it is hardly wonderful that they should have been perplexed about Perim. This island stands in the narrowest place in the sea, in the middle of the deep water, and the Suez Canal being a French work, and Egypt under French influence, our possession of Perim becomes especially unpleasant to our neighbors. Not only this, but the French had determined themselves to seize it, and their fleet, bound to Perim, put in to Aden to coal. The Governor had his suspicions, and, having asked the French admiral to dinner, gave him unexceptionable champagne. The old gentleman soon began to talk, and directly he mentioned Perim, the Governor sent a pencil-note to the harbor-master to delay the coaling of the ships, and one to the commander of a gunboat to embark as many artillerymen and guns as he could get on board in two hours, and sail for Perim. When the French reached the anchorage next day, they found the British flag flying, and a great show of guns in position. Whether they put into Aden on their way back to France, history does not say.
Perim is not the only island that lies directly in the shortest course for ships, nor are the rocks the only dangers of the Red Sea. One night about nine o‘clock, when we were off the port of Mecca, I was sitting on the fo‘castle, right forward, almost on the sprit, to catch what breeze we made, when I saw two country boats about 150 yards on the starboard bow. Our three lights were so bright that I thought we must be seen, but as the boats came on across our bows, I gave a shout, which was instantly followed by “hard a-port!” from the Chinaman on the bridge, and by a hundred yells from the suddenly awakened boatmen. Our helm luckily enough had no time to act upon the ship. I threw myself down under a stancheon, and the sail and yard of the leading boat fell on our deck close to my head, and the boats shot past us amid shouts of “fire,” caused by the ringing of the alarm-bell. When we had stopped the ship, the question came—had we sunk the boat? We at once piped away the gig, with a Malay crew, and sent it off to look for the poor wretches—but after half an hour, we found them ourselves, and found them safe except for their loss of canvas and their terrible fright. Our pilot questioned them in Arabic, and discovered that each boat had on board 100 pilgrims; but they excused themselves for not having a watch or light, by saying that they had not seen us! Between rocks and pilgrim-boats, Red Sea navigation is hard enough for steamers, and it is easy to see which way its difficulties will cause the scale to turn when the question lies between Euphrates Railway and Suez Canal.
CHAPTER XXII.
FRANCE IN THE EAST.
IT is no longer possible to see the Pyramids or even Heliopolis in the solitary and solemn fashion in which they should be approached. English “going out” and “coming home” are there at all days and hours, and the hundreds of Arabs selling German coins and mummies of English manufacture are terribly out of place upon the desert. I went alone to see the Sphinx, and, sitting down on the sand, tried my best to read the riddle of the face, and to look through the rude carving into the inner mystery; but it would not do, and I came away bitterly disappointed. In this modern democratic railway-girt world of ours, the ancient has no place; the huge Pyramids may remain forever, but we can no longer read them. A few months may see a café chantant at their base.
Cairo itself is no pleasant sight. An air of dirt and degradation hangs over the whole town, and clings to its people, from the donkey-boys and comfit-sellers to the pipe-smoking soldiers and the money-changers who squat behind their trays. The wretched fellaheen, or Egyptian peasantry, are apparently the most miserable of human beings, and their slouching shamble is a sad sight after the superb gait of the Hindoos. The slave-market of Cairo has done its work; indeed, it is astonishing that the English should content themselves with a treaty in which the abolition of slavery in Egypt is decreed, and not take a single step to secure its execution, while the slave-market in Cairo continues to be all-but open to the passer. That the Egyptian government could put down slavery if it had the will, cannot be doubted by those who have witnessed the rapidity with which its officers act in visiting doubtful crimes upon the wrong men. During my week‘s stay in Alexandria, two such cases came to my notice:—in the first, one of my fellow-passengers unwittingly insulted two of the Albanian police, and was shot at by one of them with a long pistol. A number of Englishmen, gathering from the public gaming-houses on the great square, rescued him, and beat off the cavasses, and the next morning marched down to their Consulate and demanded justice. Our acting Consul went straight to the head of the police, laid the case before him, and procured the condemnation of the man who shot to the galleys for ten years, while the policeman who had looked on was immediately bastinadoed in the presence of the passenger. The other case was one of robbery at a desert village, from the tent of an English traveler. When he complained to the sheik, the order was given to bastinado the head men and hold them responsible for the amount. The head men in turn gave the stick to the householders, and claimed the sum from them; while these bastinadoed the vagrants, and actually obtained from them the money. Every male inhabitant having thus received the stick, it is probable that the actual culprit was reached, if, indeed, he lived within the village. “Stick-backsheesh” is a great institution in Egypt, but the Turks are not far behind. When the British Consulate at Bussorah was attacked by thieves some years ago, our Consul telegraphed the fact to the Pacha of Bagdad. The answer came at once:—“Bastinado forty men”—and bastinadoed they were, as soon as they had been selected at random from the population.
Coming to Egypt from India, the Englishman is inclined to believe that, while our Indian government is an averagely successful despotism, Egypt is misgoverned in an extraordinary degree. As a matter of fact, however, it is not fair to the King of Egypt that we should compare his rule with ours in India, and it is probable that his government is not on the whole worse than Eastern despotisms always are. Setting up as a “civilized ruler,” the King of Egypt performs the duties of his position by buying guns which he uses in putting down insurrections which he has fomented, and yachts for which he has no use; and he appears to think that he has done all that Peter of Russia himself could have accomplished, when he sends a young Egyptian to Manchester to learn the cotton-trade, or to London to acquire the principles of foreign commerce, and, on his return to Alexandria, sets him to manage the soap-works or to conduct the viceregal band. The aping of the forms of “Western civilization,” which in Egypt means French vice, makes the Court of Alexandria look worse than it is:—we expect the slave-market and the harem in the East, but the King of Egypt superadds the Trianon, and a bad imitation of Mabile.
The Court influence shows itself in the action of the people, or rather the influence at work upon the Court is pressing also upon the people. For knavery, no place can touch the modern Alexandria. One word, however, is far from describing all the infamies of the city. It surpasses Cologne for smells, Benares for pests, Saratoga for gaming, Paris itself for vice. There is a layer of French “civilization” of the worst kind over the semi-barbarism of Cairo; but still the town is chiefly Oriental. Alexandria, on the other hand, is completely Europeanized, and has a white population of seventy or eighty thousand. The Arabs are kept in a huge village outside the fortifications, and French is the only language spoken in the shops and hotels. Alexandria is a French town.
It is evident enough that the Suez Canal scheme has been from the beginning a blind for the occupation of Egypt by France, and that, however interesting to the shareholders may be the question of its physical or commercial success, the probabilities of failure have had but little weight with the French government. The foundation of the Messagerie Company with national capital, to carry imaginary mails, secured the preponderance of French influence in the towns of Egypt, and it is not certain that we should not look upon the occupation of Saigon itself as a mere blind.
Of the temporary success of the French policy there can be no doubt; the English railway-guards have lately been dismissed from the government railway line, and a huge tricolor floats from the entrance to the new docks at Suez, while a still more gigantic one waves over the hotel; the King of Egypt, glad to find a third Power which he can play off, when necessary, against both England and Russia, takes shares in the canal. It is when we ask, “What is the end that the French have in view?” that we find it strangely small by the side of the means. The French of the present day appear to have no foreign policy, unless it is a sort of desire to extend the empire of their language, their dance-tunes, and their fashions; and the natural wish of their ruler to engage in no enterprise that will outlast his life prevents their having any such permanent policy as that of Russia or the United States. An Egyptian Pacha hardly put the truth too strongly when he said, “There is nothing permanent about France except Mabile.”