FOURTH BOOK
THE COMING DAY
CHAPTER I
The Consul-General had taken a firm grasp of affairs. Every morning his Advisers and Under-Secretaries visited him, and it seemed as if they could not come too often or say too much. He who rules the machine of State becomes himself a machine, and it looked as if Lord Nuneham were ceasing to be a man.
Within a week after the day on which he received Helena's letter, he was sitting in his bleak library walled with Blue-Books, with the Minister of the Interior and the Adviser to the same department. The Minister was the sallow-faced Egyptian Pasha whom he had made Regent on the departure of the Khedive; the Adviser was a tall, young Englishman with bright red hair on which the red tarboosh sat strangely. They were discussing the "special weapon" which had been designed to meet special needs. The Consul-General's part of the discussion was to expound, the Adviser's was to applaud, the Minister's was to acquiesce.
The special weapon was a decree. It was to be known as the Law of Public Security, and it was intended to empower the authorities to establish a Special Tribunal to deal with all crimes, offences, and conspiracies committed or conceived by natives against the State. The Tribunal was to be set up at any time and at any place on the request of the Agent and Consul-General of Great Britain; its sentences, which were to be pronounced forthwith, were not to be subject to appeal; and it was to inflict such penalties as it might consider necessary, including the death penalty, without being bound by the provisions of the penal code.
"Drastic!" said the Pasha, with a sinister smile.
"Necessary," said the Consul-General, with a frown.
The Pasha became silent again while the virtual ruler of Egypt went on to say that the state of the country demanded that the Government should be armed with special powers to meet widespread fanaticism and secret conspiracy.
"No one deplores more than I do," he said, "that the existing law of the land is not sufficient to deal with the new perils by which we are threatened, but it is not, and therefore we must make it stronger."